The Flood (12 page)

There was another long volley, then the silence returned, broken by the oars and a crescendo of bird-calls as startled water-birds fled up into the sky. Lottie realized how diminished the hum of traffic was, its volume a fraction of the usual low roar, as if the Gardens had sailed out into the country, as if the present, and the city, was dissolving, and then it hit her what else was gone. The Bridge of Flowers was on the flight path of the City Airport, and when she and Harold used to come here regularly, when Lola was little, and they brought picnics, every ten minutes or so a plane would roar over like a huge stiff bird coming in to land, and the visiting families would point and crane upwards. Today, however, the planes had vanished. She remembered, then, reading in the papers, a week or so ago, in disbelief, that soon civilian planes might be grounded, if the staff could no longer clear water from the runways.

It had happened, then, the unbelievable thing. No more planes coming into the city. The skies had gone back to clouds and birds. It didn’t feel good, though; it didn’t feel comfortable.

Then Lottie thought something even more disquieting. Perhaps no planes were leaving the city. Perhaps they were trapped, but that was impossible. Lottie would never let herself be trapped.

And then she thought: there’d be helicopters. She imagined her little family, jammed in.

Her foot sneaked across the bottom of the boat and found Harold’s Wellington boot, and pressed against it, and she wished it were leather, not cold rubber, she wanted the friendly warmth of his body. The wood underneath them felt thin and fragile, the ground swayed horribly from side to side, and below the boat there might be fathoms of black water.

Harold was nudging her, frowning slightly. ‘Have you got a headache, darling?’ he asked. ‘Would you like a mint, my sweet?’

She took it, gratefully, and smiled at him, and the world came back, in that moment of love. Of course the planes would soon be flying again. The army would certainly be working on the runways. The government was hopeless, but this was so basic. Lottie wished, as so often, that she was in charge; she had a brief flash of thousands of buckets, satisfyingly shiny, capacious buckets, with workers she could knock into shape. There was no excuse, at present, for any unemployment. These bracing thoughts made her happy again.

A little further on, an island of green was salted with pale wood anemones. The boat paused while they rested their eyes on the kindness of detail after so much blankness. Moles had survived, they had left black earth-works; primroses starred their wrinkled leaves. There were cream narcissi with ruched red centres, satiny tulips, gold and blue irises curled like delicate tips of tongues. The long grass whispered,
hope
,
beauty
.

They had swept around in a great wide arc and were returning, now, down the opposite wall of the Gardens, the side that was highest and furthest from the river, where the museum was, and the laboratories, the botanical gallery, the glass-houses. The buildings still stood square and grey though the water was lapping at their feet. Some of them were over two hundred years old, facing up stoically to the future.

‘Have you got room there to store threatened species?’ a studious-looking young woman asked, rolling up one brown plait as she spoke.

‘Should have,’ the grey-haired oarsman answered. ‘Though the politicians want to get their hands on it,’ he added, in a grumpy undertone that only Harold, who was squashed up against him, managed to make out, bending closer. Harold was about to question him when the sun made one last dying effort, sending long rays across the water.

Suddenly something spun into view like a red-gold Catherine wheel of fur, weaving, unweaving, three metres wide, hurling itself down the lawns near the buildings, flaring scarlet into the shallows which sent up a fountain of whirling spray, then spiralling on towards the boat, entirely puzzling, fluid, gorgeous, drawing the sun into itself, a careening planet of liquid copper, a flowing, plaited ring of red silk – and then suddenly broke into a family of foxes, who barked frantically for a second at the boat and then swam singly back towards the banks, where they ran dark and drenched up the green towards the buildings.

As they disappeared, the bright world turned brown, and in another second it began to rain. The little old man started talking again. ‘I’ve got a daughter, you know,’ he said. ‘A daughter,
and
a granddaughter.’

‘Miss,’ said Gerda, although she had been told many times not to call the teacher Miss. All the girls called their teacher Miss. ‘Why does it have to be wet play again? This morning it was fine, and we played outside.’

‘I can’t stop the rain,’ said Rhuksana Habib. She was only listening with half an ear. She was thinking about her sister-in-law, her husband Mohammed’s beloved Jamila, whose city Mr Bliss was attacking. Last week her water had been cut off. It was back on now, but her tree had suffered, which Jamila usually watered every day, the desert rose that grew in her courtyard: the first pink flowers had fallen off, leaving it ‘grey as an elephant’. ‘I hope it’s alive,’ she had written. ‘If only we could have some of your rain.’ Jamila wrote to them every week, and they looked forward passionately to her letters, though recent ones had been harrowing.

‘Can’t anyone in the world stop the rain?’ asked Gerda.

‘Don’t worry about the rain,’ said Rhuksana.

It wasn’t good enough, she knew. All the children were worried; so were their parents; everyone in the city was worried. Some schools were shut because buildings were flooded. All over the city, houses felt smaller, mothers were more desperate, more children got slapped, because the rain was closing schools.

Her husband, Mohammed, was worried too, because the floods threatened Headstone House, the publishing conglomerate where he worked. It was touching that he should care so much, when the country where both of them had been born, the country where many of their family still lived, was being reduced to rubble by bombing. But then, Mohammed had always loved learning.

‘God can stop the rain,’ Rhuksana tried, tentative. She could never remember which children were Christians.

‘Well can he do it now then?’ asked Gerda. ‘I don’t want to be the leader again.’

Wet play was a problem for the teachers, because the children stayed in the class-room. The teachers missed the break they usually got while the children roared around the playground outside. Most of them delegated power, for wet play. This resulted in various levels of mayhem. Gerda, being a precocious reader, and considered old for her age, was often left in charge of the reading corner.

‘The thick ones ask me to read to them,’ she said, frowning. ‘It isn’t fair. I want to read my book, but they won’t let me, so I have to read to them, but I don’t want to, and then Adil gets cross and hits me because he says I’m reading too fast.’

‘Sorry,’ said Rhuksana, but she wasn’t really listening. Gerda was not a child with problems. She was white, she was healthy, she was super-bright. Gerda Lamb would have to look after herself. Though the father was missing, and the mother was a pain, the grandparents were always around, and besotted.

‘I know,’ said Gerda, suddenly beaming. (She really was an enchanting child, and Rhuksana, who had come into this profession because she loved children, was caught by the sweetness of her gap-toothed smile, her wide blue eyes, her high clever forehead beneath its cap of burnished copper, the trust which Gerda placed in her, and she laid aside her marking and her prejudice, and listened.) ‘Can I read them my Hans Andersen, Miss?’

‘Do you think it might be a bit hard for them?’

Gerda’s shining face fell, and she looked at her feet, and shook her head, mute, stubborn. ‘It isn’t hard. It’s a fairytale. The boys should listen. Because they don’t like it.’

‘I see,’ said Rhuksana, and sighed. The boys needed football, and air, and fighting. (Once again she thought about Jamila in Loya. Loyan boys liked to play football on the streets; her husband, Mohammed, had once been a star goalie, captain of the Loyan Youth Eleven. At night the boys all spilled out on to the beaches and the car parks, wherever there was space, and electric light; but because of the war, now, they had to stay home. Cooped up inside, they were mutinous; Jamila’s nephews were driving her mad …)

A story could never be as good as football. But the rain rained, and the light was going, and the afternoon break began in one minute. ‘Oh well, try it,’ she said to Gerda, and gave the child a little hug, though a city protocol forbade hugging. ‘Try it, Gerda, my sweet. Why not?’

May was picking up the twins from nursery. She was near the gates, valiantly standing her ground in a surging scum of mothers, all of them fighting for their place in the shallows. In some parts the water was up to their ankles. No one would deliberately thrust her aside, but she had got so much smaller of late. It was that osteo-whatever the doctor talked about, her own bones shrinking, silently receding, as if her whole body was slowly being drawn through a tiny invisible gap in the world, through which she would slip, one day, entirely, and emerge whole on the other side.

But I have to stay here, I’m a grandmother.

The twins need me, Shirley needs me, she told herself, frustrated, squaring thin shoulders, trying to push like the others did.

The first line of children burst out into the daylight from the tall Victorian doors of the school. They had to go carefully, single file, negotiating a temporary walk-way. How tall they looked, the older ones. How quickly they grew, how bold, how loud, but still, one day they would shrink again.

There were Winston and Franklin, grappling, as usual, but then she saw they were helping each other, arms wound tenderly around each other, stopping each other from falling in the water. She thought, they will always have each other. Two was always so much better than one.

But I shall be just one for ever.

She shook off the thought, and shouted, joyful, ‘Winston! Franklin! I’m over here!’

‘Granny!’ called Winston, beaming to see her, since Granny brought sweets, and Mum did not, and throwing Franklin off him, so they almost fell over, raced his brother to get to her, his light golden eyes shining, shining. At that age happiness was total, like sorrow.

They walked down the road, each clinging to one arm, surprisingly strong, robust, demanding. I’m three, she thought. I’m not one at all. As long as they need me, I’m part of them.

And yet, she knew they would grow too heavy, or she would grow too light for them. Inside her body, she was still retreating.

One day soon she would know where she was going.

One day I shall see Alfred again.

It had not been a good day for the One Way Brotherhood. They had nearly been killed by the devil woman who drove them down near the Bridge of Flowers, leaving most of them piebald with mud; they had been told they needed a bath by jeering teenagers, later, underneath the Towers; the police moved them on in Victory Square.

Now the ‘home prayer’ session was not going well, in the disused church they had taken a lease on, its interior gutted, its windows boarded up except for the rose window at the top of the nave, where they were trying to restore the sanctuary, which had a central lozenge of the Holy Spirit, a halo of white around the head of the dove. This afternoon, it felt dark, and dead, though fluorescent lights blinked and nagged above them.

‘I think it’s when the sun shines,’ Kilda said. ‘People don’t take us seriously when the sun shines. When it’s, like, raining, the public gets down. And when they’re down, they listen to us.’

Moira glared at her, dismissive. ‘Why do you think,’ she snorted, ‘that the success of our mission depends on the sun? Don’t you believe we are in God’s hands, and that he will reward us according to our deserving? Perhaps some among our number have sinned.’

‘Well if you mean me, I haven’t,’ said Kilda, reddening. She couldn’t stand Moira; she was old and batty, with a frightening white face and pointy nose and a tail of grey hair like a pantomime horse. Besides, Kilda got too much hassle from her own mother to put up with any more snash from a stranger. And she hated Moira’s whining voice, thin, posh, ugly, screeching. Kilda knew she herself had a beautiful voice.

‘Hush, Sister Kilda,’ said Bruno Janes. Unusually, today, he had come among his people, partly because of his expertise with guns, which had come in useful when they were at the Gardens. Now his presence held them, magnetized. Without his pale-lidded, pale-eyed stare, without the white gleam of the fluorescent tubes making something inhuman of his polished scalp, Moira might have physically flown at the girl. (Kilda was young, and stupid, and bursting with hormones, and the Brothers loved Kilda more than her.)

Today had been particularly tormenting for Moira, because Kilda, quite by chance, had been hit by the car (probably, Moira thought, because she was slow-witted, while Moira, who was not, had got out of the way). The girl had been carried along on the bonnet, with all the Brothers and Sisters screaming, until the car swerved and threw her off. And then they were all round her, making a fuss of her, saying it was a miracle that her fall had been cushioned by a privet hedge, thanking God for her delivery. Throughout the whole process, Kilda was quite silent, after a vague moo-ing sound when it hit her, which the Brothers and Sisters thought showed her faith, but Moira knew just meant she was dim. Yet all day the wretched girl had kept this special lustre, the enviable glow of the delivered martyr.

Father Bruno was moving in Kilda’s direction with the curiously stiff, mechanical gait that reassured them he was more than human, and the room fell silent, in awe and dread, for there was something unearthly about their leader, something that chilled and tranquillized, something that said all things were possible; he must have the power to raise the dead. Now Bruno took Kilda’s head in his hands, her dark chestnut hair in his long white hands, with their big blue knuckles and perfect nails, and kneaded her scalp, with an odd expression that looked like a mixture of ecstasy and horror, and ran his white bony fingers through her hair, which after a few passes, stood out, electrified, an arm-wide halo of crackling current, a living force-field around her head. The room went quiet; everyone stared.