Bringar was cold, which was odd because it was a warm summer day. Even amongst the pigeon guano and moss atop Town Hill water tower nearly six hundred feet above Swansea Bay the sun bathed everything with its glow. But he felt cold with the chill of a life reaching its conclusion.
It had not been a good life, although he had lived it as well as circumstances allowed. In truth that amounted to keeping himself fit with night-time exercises in the privacy of his room, reading the newspapers he found in the bins, tending to the old man’s needs when called upon, and suffering the beatings his daily failings earned him.
He looked down at the city, its bustle not truly part of this life, for he rarely ventured far from the home they moved to some twenty years earlier. It looked so alive and he felt so dead.
He wondered if his father felt dead. Do the dead feel anything beyond that explosive moment when their biological functions were no long sustainable? He looked over at the still form of the young police officer lying face down on the roof of the tower.
“Where do you think you’re going?” he asked as he tried to pull Bringar off the ladder. “C’mon get down from there.”
The look on his face when he saw Bringar’s blood-soaked shirt was a picture, but it would be his last expression.
“I’m sorry, officer,” Bringar replied before swiping his forehead with the spanner he brought to break the lock on the tower’s access gate.
“Useful things, spanners,” Bringar said to himself as he pulled the constable to the top of the tower, a feat which taxed even Bringar’s strength and tenacity, but he made it, and no-one saw him. This, he mused, was a good thing: he was not making a statement, just a pact with himself to end this.
Killing himself was harder than he thought it would be and he stood at the edge for long minutes steeling himself for that plunge into eternity. He closed his eyes, listened to his breathing, the sounds of the wind and the birds. Then there was silence, save for the flutter of distant wings, a few at first then thousands of them as birds took flight. Then he heard a scream, horns honking and a rushing wind whipped his face. He opened his eyes and before him was a sight few live to relate. Towering above the bay, almost a mile wide and seventy to a hundred feet high, was a wave sweeping across the channel like some watery Malak al-Maut.
“Dear Lord,” he breathed as it tore into the bay, ships, boats and fish alike cast aside in its wake, washing up the long foreshore, drowning, smashing and seething along streets. Windows smashed, cars overturned, people swept like twigs before its foaming magnificence.
Bringar watched as the wave wiped the slate of Swansea clean. He watched as lights went out, as houses crumbled, as buses bobbed. He watched as it flowed into his road. He could see his house being crushed by the millions of tonnes of water smashing down.
The wave swept on, around his station, scouring the land and Bringar smiled. He looked down from his perch at the swirling, eddying current and at the broken branches, broken bodies, broken everything and decided to live.
He heaved the police officer over the edge into the shared watery grave, then squatted on the edge and waited for the sun to return. He was renewed.
Epilogue
Bringar sat in his cell writing limericks. He had been seen murdering PC Alan Singh through the binoculars of two bird watchers and although his father’s body had been battered by the sweeping tidal wave, he had eventually washed up, been identified and a post mortem examination established the pattern of his cranial injuries matched that of Bringar’s spanner. The judge sentenced him to a lifetime of penal servitude.
This is one of Bringar’s limericks:
They called it a swnami
It left me terrified
It wiped out the Jack army
Gone with this flooding tide
A flooding, blooding, breaking tide
Of foaming, dirty water
They called it a swnami
But twas Satan’s bloody daughter
