Read After Me Comes the Flood for Free Online Page A

alone could coax the church’s piano into life. Her favourite hymn had a mournful lilting melody (found on a seashore by a Welsh vicar, she said, written on a scrap of paper and rolled into a bottle). The melancholy words would move the congregation to tears, and John remembered them now: how the love of God was vast, unmeasured, boundless, free, rolling like a mighty ocean in its fullness over me… As a boy he’d imagined grey folds of salt water closing over his head, and not fighting upwards for air and life but sinking instead with his hands folded in prayer. Twenty-five years later – his mother and the music she’d played too distant and vague to remember – he felt the old unease return.
    The older man was staring abstractedly at the paper-covered walls, preoccupied with the old song. ‘It’s all gone, you see – all gone. The rock under my feet turned out to be sand after all, and in the end the tide came in. Walker says I’m free, like a dog off its leash. Which is all very well, but what if I run into the road?’
    ‘We’ll show you where to cross,’ said Walker, smilingly. He looked at Elijah with more warmth and affection than John would have thought him capable of summoning, and began deftly shuffling the pack of cards. ‘Shall we try again, Preacher?’ he said. ‘Practice makes perfect, even with sin.’ He dealt them each a hand of three. Sitting with the other men around the table, the whisky bottle between them and the moon passing the open window, was curiously like being on board a half-empty ship, forced to find company in a stranger’s cabin. It reminded John of a pamphlet he’d once bought at auction, a coarse engraving of a ship under full sail printed on the cover. ‘I’ll tell you something interesting,’ he said rather eagerly, leaning forward. ‘Last year, or the year before, I bought a crateful of books that had been left to get damp in a garage somewhere. Most of them were ruined – one of the books even had a kind of fat blind maggot burrowed in its spine – but there were a few things worth having, and the best of them was a facsimile of a German poem – from the fifteenth century, I think, though I can’t remember who wrote it – called “The Ship of Fools”, about a boat put to sea full of madmen. No sane man or woman was allowed aboard, except the captain, I suppose, though surely he was mad to take such a crew? At sea of course they’d do as they please – there’s no law, and no-one watching; and if no-one’s watching, who’s to say what’s sane, and what isn’t? I didn’t read all of it, but I liked the idea, and ever since I’ve wondered if it ever really happened. Madmen turned out of towns and villages and sent to sea, and allowed to get on with being mad as hatters, without bothering anyone by it.’
    He paused, aware the other men were avoiding his eyes. Walker put out his cigarette half-smoked and shuffled intently through his hand of cards, and Alex began to gnaw at the scab between his knuckles. John felt something in the room shift and fracture; he said, ‘I expect I’ve got it wrong. I often do.’
    Beside him Alex set coins spinning on the table until a dozen of them reeled between the tobacco tin and the bottle of whisky, buzzing as they went. Walker laid down his cards in a tidy arc, then stood up and lightly touched Alex on the shoulder with a tentative gesture. ‘I’m off,’ he said. ‘It’s late – are you coming?’ The younger man stared miserably at the buzzing coins, which all at once ceased spinning and clattered to a halt. The painted eyes on his shirt blinked with undisguised malice, and he gave John a hostile and secretive look, as if he suspected him of having been spying for a weakness all along. It was so unlike the affectionate lad who’d threaded an arm through his and drawn him into their game that he flinched as if it had been a blow. Walker stood aside to let the boy pass into the dark hall, then with an ironic