Road Sweeping Through the Floods on a Wave of Madness

The rain had been relentless but it had stopped. We had resumed our road sweeping duties. I was paired up with Jim. He was fragile. It was felt that he needed someone to work with because he was unstable. Jim had a mental condition. He was subject to psychotic episodes. For Jim reality was a very thin and highly transparent sheath; it kept breaking down. Jim’s whole life was a series of hospitalized episodes with spells in institutions. It was good that the council employed him. Jim was a pleasant, friendly, harmless soul who needed employment. Without it he would have vegetated.

We had both been on bin duties for a few days. The torrential rain had made sweeping roads extremely difficult. We’d largely confined our duties to emptying litter bins. Now it had turned fine and we were back clearing up the debris from the gutters and drains.

The area we were working in must have been low-lying. We were working our way steadily along when it happened.

There was a series of loud clangs.

I looked back down the road to where the noise had come from. The heavy cast-iron manhole covers for the sewers were exploding up into the air or pillars of water and clanging back to the ground. They were popping up all along the road and heading towards us. Each of the manholes was spouting a solid column of water four feet high.

I stood and watched with amazement. I had never seen anything like it. Fortunately there was no traffic or there could have been some serious accidents. Jim carried on regardless pretending that nothing extraordinary was happening.

The manhole covers near us shot up in the air on pillars of water. It was incredible. Those covers were solid cast-iron and weighed a lot. It took considerable force to lift them. They were popping up into the air like corks. The swollen river Mole had broken its banks. The water had gushed down the sewers and was erupting back out in the lower areas.

Within minutes the water was lapping up to the kerbs. Jim was continuing to sweep even though the water was flowing around his feet.

It was obvious to me that we had to move to higher ground quickly. The whole area was in the process of being flooded. I urged Jim to come out. He refused and was totally focused on sweeping, trying to ignore the water as if it was not happening.

I could see we had a problem. These strange events were outside the norm. Jim had learnt that things that happened outside the normal range of experience were usually figments of his imagination. They augured the start of a breakdown. Jim did not like that. It meant frightening periods of incarceration and treatment. All he wanted was normality.

Unlike me, who found the events of exploding manholes and fountains of water quite exciting, Jim found them terrifying. He was desperately trying to hold his world together. If he could just go on as normal it might all go away and he’d be alright. Exploding sewers were not part of the normal world.

Except it was real.

I coaxed Jim out of the water and got him t trundle his cart in front of mine up the rise away from the rapidly expanding lake of water. He was becoming more and more agitated as he tried to come to terms with what was happening.

At the top of the rise it was dry. A police car parked up and a policeman donned a white mac and took up post directing traffic away from the now deeply flooded road. He was standing at the edge of the water and waving cars away.

Jim took one look at him and thought that he’d been sent to pick him up. He lost it, ran across to the startled policeman and, in a highly agitated manner, started gibbering at him, clutching at him, and telling him that it was alright; he would go with him.

I managed to prise Jim off the bewildered man and lead him away. We went round a friend’s house. I made him a mug of tea and we played some Moody Blues. He liked classical music; that was the nearest we had. It soothed him and gradually he regained control of himself. It had frightened the wits out of him. We talked to him until he managed to grasp that it had been real and the river had merely overflowed and burst out of the sewers. It settled him.

There is a fine line between reality and the worlds inside the head. For some the fabric is exceedingly thin.