Move the Car, Said the Dream

Our street has never flooded. I want that on record: not in the forty years my neighbour has lived here, not in our nine. There was no weather warning that evening beyond 'rain, heavy at times', which in autumn means Tuesday.

The dream was short and physical. Brown water shin-deep on our road, moving with intent, wheelie bins sailing past in a stately procession, and my own car — I could see the sticker in the back window — with water at its door seals, rocking slightly, wanting to go with them. The sound was the vivid part: not rushing, but a fizzing, gulping percolation, water finding every gap it had ever wanted. I woke at 2:04 with that sound still in my ears and my heart going like a fist on a door.

I lay there for ten minutes doing the sensible-adult accounting: no warning, never flooded, you are forty-six years old. Then I got up, put a coat over pyjamas, and moved the car three streets uphill outside the church, feeling precisely as ridiculous as you would expect at 2:15 in drizzle. My wife surfaced enough to ask; 'bad dream, humour me,' I said, and she did, because she is kind and because I have never once done anything like it before.

The cloudburst came at six. A culvert two fields up, blocked by a fallen willow as it turned out, sent its business down our road instead. By seven there was half a metre of brown water moving with intent past our gate, and I stood at the window watching our neighbours' bins process past in single file, and the sound through the glass was a fizzing, gulping percolation.

Four cars on our stretch were written off. Ours sat dry by the church, smug.

The insurance assessor, making conversation, asked how we had known to move it. 'Dreamed it,' I said, honestly. He wrote something that was not that. I understand him completely; I would not insure me either.