Nine Days of Rain
Two brothers, one flooded valley, and a week that neither of them will ever describe the same way again.
It never rained hard. It just did not stop.
“Arden writes water better than anyone alive.”Times Literary Supplement
The book
The Aln rose eleven feet in eight hours. By the Thursday there were men in high-visibility jackets photographing a thing that had already happened.
Nine Days of Rain is the story of two brothers on the same flooded valley floor, and of the single fact — small, verifiable, never once mentioned between them — that ends forty years of being family.
The river came up on the Tuesday and my brother did not telephone.
I want to set that down plainly at the start, because everything that followed has since been explained to me in language designed to make it complicated, and it is not complicated. The Aln rose eleven feet between four in the afternoon and midnight. Callum was two miles upstream of me with a working telephone and a car. He did not ring.
By Wednesday the water was in the church and the parish council had opened the hall, and by Thursday there were men from the Environment Agency walking the flood bank in high-visibility jackets, taking photographs of a thing that had already happened.
I was in the hall on the Thursday, handing out blankets that smelled of a cupboard, when a woman I had known all my life came up to me and said: your brother has been marvellous.
I said: has he.
She said: he was out at three in the morning at the Hendersons', up to his chest.
The Hendersons live half a mile from me. To reach them from Callum's he would have had to drive past the end of my lane, twice, in a night when the only thing anybody in that valley was thinking about was who was low and who was high, and I am low, and he knows I am low, and he has known it since we were children and he stood on the bridge and told me so.
I put down the blanket I was holding. I remember thinking, with a clarity I have never managed since, that I had just been given a fact I would spend the rest of my life deciding what to do with.
Outside the hall it had started again. Not hard. That was the thing nobody who wasn't there ever believes. It never rained hard. It just did not stop.