Untitled and unfinished

A little bit of fiction

Whenever I decide I would like to write more, I know on some level that it will depend on how much the rest of life, good and bad, allows for it. Which is to say: I’ve not written anything in a while, because I’ve been busy.

One of the things I would have liked to write about though, was an event in Bristol I went to a month or so ago. A Disaster Relief Trial, which wraps up some real-world lessons on the usefulness of alternative transport in the aftermath of an emergency in a layer of friendly competition and fun. But then someone else who went wrote an article about it for The Radavist, so I was left thinking about how I might be able to still write about it, but without being a rehash of someone else’s work. So I’ve started doing a fictionalised version of the sort of emergency the event is based on, and that’s what this post is, the start of a story.

Truthfully, I’m more interested in writing fiction than I am anything else, but I also find it incredibly difficult. So this might be absolutely terrible. Or it might be bad, but salvageable with the benefit of feedback and further work. Or (haha) maybe it’s actually alright already? Let me know what you think of it if you read it.

Shall I write some more of it?

“I didn’t know BMW made boats”, Ned muttered, as the partially submerged 3-series drifts silently through the water forty feet below. The rain is still falling, slower now and without the violence it had arrived with four days earlier. He’s surrounded by the dripdripdrip of everything around him, infinite droplets gradually seeping out of the fabric of the city and being escorted by gravity to join their brothers and sisters in the new waterways coursing through the landscape they have quickly colonised. The car is simply along for the ride, driverless, but not in the way Silicon Valley’s techbros would like. Ned reaches for his phone instinctively, begins recording as the BMW’s journey comes to an end with a dull crunch, its invisible bumper making contact with an equally weightless Ford SUV. ‘Pointless’, he thinks, remembering that none of the mobile networks are working, ‘can’t even upload it’.

Finishing the sandwich he packed in a hurry this morning, soggy and misshapen from a morning of being trapped in his trouser pocket in its beeswax wrap cover, compressed by the motion of his legs and the sodden tightness of supposedly waterproof hiking trousers, he rolls his bike forward, kickstand springing back into place as his feet find the pedals and begin propelling him toward his next stop. It’s the fourth of the day already and only a few miles away, assuming there’s no new rivers to divert around. It was hard to comprehend how quickly everything had changed, that less than a week had passed since storm Sebastian changed course unexpectedly and traced the route of the Bristol Channel, battering coastal towns whose flood defences, where they existed at all, were quickly overwhelmed, before settling over Bristol itself and depositing more than a months’ worth of rain in just a few hours.

Ned had been working from home when it started, ninety minutes deep into a video call with colleagues from across the country, doing his best to focus on a presentation which would have been boring even without the distraction of weather unlike anything he’d ever seen before. Ferocious winds hurled each drop of rain into the double-layered glass so hard that it sounded as if the windows were being attacked with an endless supply of gravel. By the time the call finished, he had messages from teammates telling him to check the latest MET office warnings and another from his kids’ school letting all parents know that they were closing early to give staff the best chance of getting home safely. The roads still looked like roads then, but were already so choaked with cars that no-one was getting anywhere, the percussion of thousands of exhausts mixing with impatient horns to create a tuneless, citywide orchestra of motorist frustration. Cyclists filtered through the gaps and, throwing on his expensive, multi-layered waterproof he joined them. He was among the first to collect his children from the school, the teachers already seeming resigned to choosing between a night at school or a night spent in stationary traffic.

That evening, while the rain continued pounding relentlessly into the earth, he watched notifications of road closures, flooded homes and damaged infrastructure pour onto his phone’s screen. Long after he would normally have been asleep, a message appeared from a number he didn’t recognise: ‘Citizens of Bristol, this is the Council’s Civil Contingency Team. Forecasts suggest that the current weather event is likely to continue for at least the next 48 hours. Many areas of the city are already being impacted by severe flooding and the volume of both water and traffic have collapsed our road network. This is an appeal for volunteers to help the relief effort. We are specifically looking for people who have small boats to reach flooded areas and people who can use bikes to navigate the higher ground. If you can help, please come to City Hall at 9am tomorrow to be briefed.’