clairedavieswriter

From Henshaw Six: An anthology of winning short stories from the Henshaw Press Short Story Competition

Published October 2025

I could easily have missed the moment it all began. I had just slowed to a stop behind a Seat Alhambra with old Valencia plates. Beyond stretched a line of stationary traffic. ‘Looks like we’re not the only ones trying to get out of the city,’ I said, turning to Marta. It was as I reached over to squeeze her hand that I spotted movement in her wing mirror.

We shouldn’t even have been in the city that day. The forecast had been for heavy rain. Marta wanted to stay at home, but I persuaded her to drive to the beach, where it was meant to be fine. We’d only been there an hour or so. I had passed most of that time watching the young family next to us, each in their own separate world. The little boy, in blue shark motif trunks and a matching bucket hat, was intent on building a line of sandcastles, undeterred by the incoming tide. Every time the water washed a castle away, he would scoop up the lumpen remains in his pudgy hands and build another on the same spot. A few feet away, under a parasol, his mother lay on a sunbed, breastfeeding a baby, while at the water’s edge, out of earshot, his father paced up and down, phone clamped to his ear, presumably making business calls. 

When I wasn’t watching them, I’d been enjoying the sight of Marta stretched out on her back on a towel, one hand behind her head, the other holding a book. A pink floppy hat shielded her eyes from the glare.  Sweat and sunscreen glistened on the fine hairs around her belly button and her feet were crossed at the ankles, blood-red toenails peeking through a dusting of sand. Not for the first time, I was wondering what this gorgeous, funny, talented woman was doing with a boring skinny bloke from Middlesborough who couldn’t tan if he stood outside naked all summer. 

Glancing back at the shoreline, I noticed that the father had taken the phone away from his ear and was looking at the screen. He turned towards his wife, checked the screen once more, and started walking in her direction. I looked away as my own phone pinged.

At first, I thought it was a bad joke. 

‘Look at this Marta – apparently we’re all going to drown!’ 

She lowered her book. ‘What?’

Then I heard identical pings all around us. Saw others reaching for their phones. Frowning. Exchanging words with their companions and strangers. Testing the waters, so to speak. 

Barely half an hour later, we were in the traffic jam. Up ahead, on the balcony of an apartment block, a stout lady was pegging out her washing. Already, a pair of ample underpants were flapping in the sea breeze. I imagined her looking down and chuckling, ‘What idiots, stuck in traffic on a fine day like this.’   

Perhaps, from her vantage point, she saw the trickle of water at the same time I saw it in the wing mirror. Perhaps, like me, she didn’t think anything of it. It looked like someone further up the street had emptied a bucket. But in seconds, the trickle swelled to a rivulet. Within minutes, the rivulet had grown to a torrent, spilling out from the gutter, disappearing under the car, surging across the pavement. A woman walking past screamed and leapt into a doorway, trying to save her shoes. A man pushing a buggy began to run, leaving a frothing wake as the wheels churned the water.

‘Noah, look!’ Marta said, her voice thready with alarm. ‘What do we do?’

‘I don’t know!’

“WARNING – IMMINENT FLOODING” the text alert had said. “EVACUATE IMMEDIATELY.”

Later, at the public enquiry, questions would be asked about whether the alert was issued early enough, whether people received sufficient prior instruction about the emergency warning system, and to what extent a mistrust of messages from unknown sources played a part in the disaster.  All I know is that we were completely unprepared for what happened next.

It’s a very strange feeling, when your car starts to float. Cars are solid. Heavy. They’re meant to stay on the road. When your car breaks down, you need a whole gang of strong people to move it. A car is not supposed to pitch up and down like a boat. I gripped the steering wheel as though it might help me stay in control. The engine choked and died.

‘Noah! We’ve got to get out! Noah!

Marta grabbed my right arm with both hands and shook me so hard that the bones in my neck cracked. Letting go, she unclipped our seatbelts, reached for her door handle and shoved. Nothing happened.

‘Madre mía, no se abre! Noah! I can’t open it!’

‘The water must be too high – use the window!’ I stabbed at the button. ‘Jesus, the electrics have gone.’

We were now flotsam on the surging flood, pitching, bucking and twisting, grinding against cars that had been in front and behind us on the street. Freed from my seatbelt, I was thrown onto Marta. Grunting, she pushed me off. 

‘In the back!’ she shouted. ‘Windows!’

Brilliant, Marta, I thought, thank God for manual handles. I threw myself through the front seats and started winding down a rear window. It stopped about two thirds of the way down. I wrenched on the handle, but it wouldn’t budge. It would just have to be enough. And we would have to be quick. Coffee coloured water was slopping through the window, pouring through the door seals and swirling in the footwells. 

If I pause to analyse the next critical moment, I know that nobler men, more selfless men than I, would have pushed their partner through the window first. They would have got her to safety before braving the torrent again to rescue the child in the Seat Alhambra, who was beating his pudgy fists against the window as the flood waters rose to his chest, and a hat with a blue shark motif slipped over his tear-streaked face. 

But there was no nobility in me that day. I was reduced to pure animal instinct.

I squeezed through the window and crawled onto the roof, clinging to the edges like a starfish. Marta was right behind me. As she reached through the window, I grabbed her forearm, but before I could pull her out, the car pitched sideways, wrenching her from my grasp and hurling me into the raging waters. 

I learned later that, by some strange twist of fate, a wave carried me over the wall of a first floor balcony and deposited me on my back like a beached whale. When I opened my eyes, a stout woman was kneeling beside me, her face flanked by flapping underpants.

At the inquest, I would explain that a Ford Fiesta is a very small car. I would say that, while I am slim, I am also tall, and that once I had climbed into the back seat, there was no room for Marta until I had got out. I would hide my head in my hands and sob, ‘I had no choice. I had to leave first. I had no choice.’ 

But alone in our bed, in the dark hours of every endless night, I would taste the coffee coloured water in my throat. I would feel on my arm the scabbing hollows carved by Marta’s nails as she slipped from my grasp. And I would know the truth.