Where the water would go

An original first-person fictional account of an invented flood-defence practice.

The river was two streets away and the sky was a hard, uninterrupted blue. Nevertheless, someone had drawn a wavering line across the community-centre car park and labelled it WATER. I stood on the dry side wearing gloves that reached beyond my fingertips.

We were practising how to build a temporary barrier. I had volunteered after seeing a notice asking for local people, imagining purposeful work and perhaps a photograph of us looking useful. Instead, we spent twenty minutes carrying identical grey sections from a van and placing them beside numbered pieces of tape. The instructor moved one section by the width of his boot and asked us to begin again.

My job was to fasten two sections together. The clip made a satisfying sound, so I raised my hand to show that I had finished. The instructor bent down, pulled once, and the sections separated. Nobody laughed, which was worse. I blamed the gloves, although the woman beside me was wearing the same kind and had already secured three joints.

We dismantled the barrier and rebuilt it. Each time, the car park seemed flatter, hotter and more ridiculous. Beyond the fence, a man walked past carrying an ice cream. He looked at our line of grey panels and then at the cloudless sky. I knew exactly what he was thinking.

At last, a hose was connected to a tank on the other side. Water spread slowly across the tarmac, too shallow to be frightening. It reached the barrier and paused. For several seconds, nothing happened. Then a narrow thread appeared beneath the joint I had fastened. It slipped towards the dry side, bright as wire in the sunlight.

I put my boot over it.

“Leave it visible,” the instructor said. He did not sound annoyed. “We need to know where it begins.”

The thread widened. It divided around my boot and continued towards a row of chalk rectangles marked FRONT DOORS. The rectangles were only chalk, but I stepped back as if I had allowed water into somebody's hall.

We emptied the tank and started again. This time, I did not wait for the cheerful click. I closed the clip, pulled it, opened it and tried once more. The woman beside me watched without offering to take over. When the joint held, she nodded and moved to the next section.

I began to notice what I had ignored before: the slight fall of the ground, the drain near the gate, the way one uneven edge could tilt the next three panels. The instructor's repeated checks no longer seemed fussy. Each one answered a question the water might ask later.

On the final test, the barrier held. People clapped, but I kept watching my joint until the tank was empty. Afterwards, while we loaded the panels into the van, a small cloud covered the sun. Three drops of rain darkened the tarmac beside the chalk line.

I knew they could not become a flood. Even so, I watched to see which way they moved.

How does the writer use the narrator's experience of the flood-defence practice to reveal changing thoughts and feelings? Support your answer with references to the passage. Develop two possible interpretations of the final paragraph and judge which is better supported by the passage.