Water under the door

Text 1: Canal Street, by Samir Hadley

An original novel extract.

Hamid woke because his hand was wet. He had let it fall over the edge of the mattress in his sleep, and it was resting in water: cold, still water, the temperature of a puddle in March, lying on the floor of his bedroom where his carpet should have been.

For a moment he did not understand. He lay with his fingers trailing in it and thought, quite stupidly, that he must have knocked over his glass. Then he heard it. Under the rain, which had been drumming on the window for three days, there was another sound, a soft, continuous trickling, like a bath running in another flat. It was coming from the front door.

He swung his legs out of bed. The water came up over his ankles, so cold that his breath snagged in his throat. He found the light switch and pressed it and nothing happened. Of course nothing happened.

By the light of his phone he waded into the hall. The water was coming in under the front door in a smooth, glossy sheet, not rushing, not even hurrying, simply arriving, as if it had been invited and had every right to be there. His trainers floated past him like two small boats. The post he had not opened was drifting by the skirting board, the ink running off the envelopes in blue threads.

In the kitchen the fridge had begun to tilt. The cupboard under the sink had swung open and a bottle of washing-up liquid bobbed out, upright, green and cheerful, and turned in a slow circle. Somewhere the water found the plug sockets and there was a sharp crack and a smell of burning, and then a silence that was worse.

He had to get out. He knew that. But the door was where the water was coming from, and the window was barred, because this was a ground-floor flat on Canal Street and his landlord worried about burglars, not floods.

The water was at his knees now. It rose steadily, without fuss, the way a tide comes in, and with it came everything the street had held: a crisp packet, a child’s ball, leaves, a dark slick of oil that spread rainbows across the surface in the light of his phone.

Then, from upstairs, through the ceiling, came a banging, and a voice, Mrs Dearden’s voice, shouting his name. He looked up. He waded towards the sound.

Explore how Samir Hadley uses language and structure to present the flood and Hamid’s reactions to it.

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