Missing the Tide - Notes Taken After the Flood

About a fortnight after I confidently blogged about how literature fragments because the materials and language used break down over thousands of years, my home flooded. I mention this mainly to warn other authors of literary erotica that the universe takes an unreasonably dim view of parodic self-aggrandisement. 

But also, I mention it because a lot of my work operates around a nexus of control. Almost entirely, I write about women who revel (or at least, learn to revel) in control - often of a man's orgasm, of course, but even in my purely sapphic work like Her Ascendant Intern, control remains the locus of my fascination - merely seen through another lens as Hannah strives to make sense of how easily Beverley seems to be able to control her. 

In a flood, it turns out, control is not really a thing that you get to have. 

At the point when a neighbour rang me and told me to come home I had no idea what I would find, and faintly assumed I'd have an amusing anecdote to tell the next day. By the time I got there, it was to find the road closed, murky water rising, and firemen shouting and throwing sandbags around with deceptive ease, which somehow only added to the absolute unreality of what was happening. 

Later, having shoved anything that could be heaved up high as high as it could go, I found myself pretty much ordered out of the building - in sickeningly unsexy wellies I haven't worn for years - having armed myself with a few night's possessions in the tiny backpack I use for carry-on luggage, my handbag and laptop slung across each shoulder like a bandolier. With one hand I held an actual wooden pole the firemen gave me to balance myself against the current, and in my other hand I ludicrously clung to Mrs Adler, my stupidly heavy typewriter, who kept threatening to drag me down into the rising waters. I think I had some idea that, because all my power was off, my laptop wouldn't work if I ever got to my friend's house, and some part of me very much wanted to write, if only so I could get into a world where I felt like I had control again. 

This was actually pretty pointless: ordinarily I write like it's going out of fashion, but in the last few weeks I have really struggled to imagine anything except the extremely unwelcome sight of the water lapping higher and bursting over the top of the sandbags.

(Things, can I just say, should not burst, flow, jet, or spurt without my explicit say-so. I feel that's axiomatic.) 

So, despite my repeatedly promising Her Ascendant Intern would come out in February, it became a bit of a near-run thing: I'd have paused, but had already set it up as a pre-order, which meant the publishers were already poised to distribute whatever the most-recent version of my manuscript was, whether I cudgelled my brain into Final Edit Mode to polish it or not. (And, honestly, I wasn't sleeping anyway so I did my best to polish it and make some final tweaks while sofa-surfing. I'm glad: Hannah and Beverley deserve the best I can do for them, even mid-disaster.)

In due course, no doubt, I will get my impetus back; apart from anything else, my past catalogue suggests that it's almost impossible for me to read anything without instantly wanting to write a more femdom version of it just to see if I can, but in the meantime what I am left with is the cleanup. 

And the cleanup has been a little hard going. I've had a number of books (that is, books by other people, not only books by me) which got soaked, shoved on the top of the bookcase by the firemen, and which I only realised had got wet a week later, by which time they'd mostly started to dry, though some had begun to moulder. 

If you've never soaked a paperback - and why would you? - you might not appreciate the way they balloon when drying: every page wrinkles up into almost beautiful, intricate waves like those honeycomb Christmas decorations you used to be able to get. 

It wasn't a good discovery. But it did invite a slow and meticulous process I knew how to do, so I've been trying to dry them - it has to be done slowly, but quick enough to stop them mouldering - and now I am pressing them flat (also a slow process) in the hope they'll be readable again. They'll always have a wave in them, even the ones that recover - but my hope is they'll probably get down to the thickness of a chunky paperback, rather looking like paper breezeblocks.

But that's sort of my point: they were more or less ruined - if I hadn't, once, been given conservation training I wouldn't even be attempting to salvage things - but they are technically readable now. And I'm glad, because some of them mean a lot to me. 

And, in a strange way, I am also glad because what I thought when I found those ruined books was not - at least, mostly not - "oh my god I have lost all these books". 

It wasn't even "I wish I'd never shelved alphabetically," though I'm sad that T - Z took the brunt of it (and my poor copy of Vanity Fair I referred to when I was writing Edge Close was beyond saving). 

No - what I thought as I was carefully drying things out was I remember reading this for the first time. 

Even with the books themselves sodden and heavy, and warped, their traumatised pages suddenly clinging to each other for comfort, I found I wasn't able to try and save them without remembering how it felt to discover them. 

Trying to dry out Fingersmith completely broke me, and I am barely even ashamed to admit it - I think she'll make it though. Probably it says something deep that Thackeray never got a look in, but I can always buy another Vanity Fair. And I know I could always buy another copy of Fingersmith - but it wouldn't be my copy. Not in the same way. I'm not even certain to what extent that statement makes sense, but it matters to me. 

The only way I think I can illustrate it is with a different book - I hadn't even realised where it was until I found it: the battered paperback of Great Expectations that at some point managed to get itself lost under the sofa, which only appeared when I got the ruined furniture shifted. 

And unlike some of the others, I didn't feel a pang when I found it. It didn't speak to me, no memories sparked instantly: I was honestly going to throw it into the sad wet heap of things destined for a skip - except, having done the same for so many other wet books, I opened it up without really thinking. And I realised it was my copy from school: full of all my marginalia, classroom notes set down in hard pencil and cheap biro, and the occasional thin neon streak of washed-out highlighter. Page after page mapping out my younger thoughts and revision notes and slightly clumsy attempts at criticism. 

And in amongst it, an entire page, shotgun-blasted with scribble and underline and exclamation marks and - embarrassingly - a couple of little hearts with initials that I'm now not completely sure I can map to names. 

But I flicked through a bit more. And then, for a little while, I ended up stood still, with water trickling down the inside of my wrist, because I was staring at the crabbed little notes set down in a prototype of my own handwriting:

Calls him 'boy' = bullying. Mocks, makes him ashamed - He loves her more? 

? Pip not real name = Boy feels more real??? 

And then, a little later, the crucial word scored so deeply into the page that the force of the biro still dimples through another four pages after years, after the whole book was drowned in a flood:

→She likes that he cries for her. 

And when I read that, I had to stop and go find a cup of tea. Because I didn't remember writing that. I didn't even know I'd lost the book. I even recently wrote about the kinds of books I'd been reading around this time and Great Expectations didn't appear anywhere in my recollections. I'd forgotten even studying it. 

But I'd left a note for myself.

It probably meant almost nothing at the time - certainly it must have meant less to me than the mystery initials in the hearts, whoever's they were... 

But stood among the mud and the damp, looking back at what I'd scribbled long ago, I got chills. Because even if I didn't know it then, I recognised it now:

I was holding the seed of something.

And I've dried it slowly, and pressed it as best as I can, and I know that it'll always be obvious that it's a book that got ruined, that the pages will always show their corrugated kinks to anyone who looks: I don't care. 

And maybe I don't even care if my books make it to 4626: frankly, if floods like this keep happening, I'd almost settle for them making it to 2036.

But even without my writing fragmenting into the impossible future - god I hope someone, someday picks up a copy of one of my books that they read long ago and is able to think "Oh. Ohh wow - it started here".

Because if I ever have that much of an impact on a reader, it might even have been worth it to drag a typewriter through a flood.

Maybe. Floods are bloody awful.