The Flood (17 page)

‘But children need a lot of looking after, surely?’ Nadia pursued, frowning.

‘I suppose some do, but we’re more like friends.’

Nadia frowned. The woman was a liar. Her sister had children. They did need looking after. ‘Is the child’s father around at all?’

‘Oh, yes,’ smiled Angela. ‘He’s very much involved …’ (with his Danian wife and family, she concluded, mentally).

Nadia stared at Angela, thwarted, and decided her profile would take no prisoners. ‘The Silence of the Lamb’ might be a good title.

‘So life is perfect?’ she inquired, cuttingly.

‘Let’s just say I’ve been very lucky.’

This morning, though, everything went wrong.

Angela woke earlier than usual, with a terrible wailing in her ear. Sirens, she thought, fuddled, anxious. It must be the floods. They’re ejaculating. (She hadn’t had sex for nearly six months.) No, that’s wrong, they’re evacuating us. The war, of course. I must save Gerda. She sat bolt up in bed, and switched her light on.

But she didn’t have her contact lenses in, and couldn’t make sense of what she saw.

A red drenched head, streaming with tears, features swollen beyond recognition, bulbs of cream snot pushing out of the nostrils, lay on her belly like a beaten dog, but all around there was screaming, yelling, and two desperate paws were scrabbling at the duvet, trying to touch her flesh underneath the covers, and then she realized that it was her daughter – Gerda, surely, but tortured, changed; and as she watched, the stubborn dog-like body was wrenched away, there was straining, heaving, and she saw, dimly, as she started to protest, started to reach out towards her child, that the grey-haired, purple-faced figure of her mother was pulling Gerda away by the feet, pulling her as if she were a heavy doll, and as Lorna fell backwards, clutching her grandchild, Gerda shot away towards the foot of the bed, still clinging on to her mother, still screaming, so the duvet and then the sheet went with her, and Angela felt the early morning chill hit her warm naked body like a shock of cold water, and the light was horrible, a flood of cold shame, for now Angela lay on the bed alone, Gerda was struggling in Lorna’s arms, and the old woman’s hand was across her mouth, her fingers had bandaged the child’s wild mouth, soft pleats of full lip pinched between old knuckles, and a furious voice hardly recognizable as Lorna’s was saying, ‘Wicked girl! What have you done to your mother, your poor mother who needs her sleep, I’m sorry, Angela, I couldn’t stop her,’ – and then the two of them were backing out through the door, though Gerda’s feet were still kicking, kicking, and she couldn’t talk, she was crying too hard, but her grieved blue eyes, drowned and swollen with tears, were fixed in terrible pleading on her mother, and Angela, left alone in her room, where each morning Lorna brought her breakfast like a child, looked down the grey planes of her naked body. She was no longer a baby; she was growing old. She lay there rigid, trying not to think. Her mouth tasted bitter; her teeth were bad. Angela was terrified of the dentist. Only when the front door slammed, and Gerda stopped screaming, did Angela’s panic begin to subside.

After about half an hour, there was a knock, and her father brought in tea and juice. She had curled up foetuslike under her duvet. ‘Sorry about all the screaming,’ he said. ‘We couldn’t seem to do a thing with her this morning. There’s better news though. The flood’s going down. The TV says the rains are over.’

Davey flexed his hands on the steering-wheel. A night at the telescope always left him deeply tired; strained eyes, pain-clamped shoulders. He would have liked to drop in on Delorice and soothe all his aches in the warmth of her bed, but Delorice was staying with Viola, her sister, in the drowned no-man’s land of the Towers.

He made a decision, and swung his car left. He would go for a swim in his local pool.

Outside the door, on the big bales of straw that had been packed together to make pontoons, a little girl was making a scene. She had dark red hair and a heart-shaped face, and was pushing, pushing, with all her might, at a protesting woman who might be her grandma. ‘By myself! You’re not coming in with me! I don’t like you! By myself!’

The old woman looked at Davey, apologetically, as he tried to get past their tussling bodies. ‘Little madam,’ she said, and tried to smile, though her cheeks were inflamed and her eyes exhausted. The girl took advantage of her looking away. Shouting, ‘I’m not a madam, I hate you,’ she gave her one last almighty shove, and before Davey realized what was going to happen the frail figure of the woman was swaying, toppling, her face a single black O of fear as she clutched at his coat, feebly, in passing and then fell backwards into the water, sending gouts of black mud all over Davey. Her head went right under; one leg waved, shocking, a weak white twig with the shoe kicking off, then her feet went down and her head came up, black, slimy, clotted, without a face.

The little girl bent over the water, frightened. ‘Grandma,’ she said. ‘Are you all right, Grandma?’

Davey was a good-natured man, and although he longed to sneak away for his swim he extended his hands to the gasping, sobbing statue of mud that weltered below him, up to her waist in dirty water. ‘There are germs,’ she was spluttering. ‘They say there are. Because of the floods. I’ve swallowed some. There are horrible germs – you wicked girl. BAD Gerda.’ She came lurching and churning back up on to the straw, gripping his hands with painful force, and stood there, shuddering, not letting him go, her back turned fiercely on the child.

‘Shall I help you inside?’ said Davey, politely, ignoring the mud on his arms and hands, the stains all over his new tan boots. Maybe he shouldn’t have kids after all. ‘Come along, dear,’ he said to the girl, who now looked very pale and docile. Inside the pool, he asked for Zoe, who ran the swimming classes there. He had known Zoe for three or four years; Viola was her partner in business; in fact, Davey thought they might be more than friends, but Delorice dismissed it: ‘Not my sister.’

When Zoe emerged from the staff-room, which had a big anti-war poster on the door, Gerda ran up to her smiling sweetly and put her arms around her, as if nothing had happened. Davey started to put Zoe in the picture, but Gerda kept interrupting him, patting at Zoe to get her attention. ‘It was a accident,’ she insisted.

‘She pushed me in,’ said Lorna. Mud dripped from her hair. Now minus her makeup, she looked like a mushroom. Black yeti footprints covered the floor.

‘Milly,’ called Zoe, and a young white woman came hurrying across, clucking her sympathy, brandishing a mop. ‘We’ve had a bit of an accident. Come and use the staff shower,’ said Zoe to Lorna, and then to Davey, urgently: ‘Have you seen Viola? She’s still not managing to get in in the mornings.’ To Gerda she said, ‘Don’t worry, darling, I’ve got some clothes I can lend your mother –’

And suddenly Gerda was angry again, all four foot of her aflame, indignant; ‘She’s not my mummy,’ she said, loudly. ‘You said she was my mummy last week, too. I wanted my mummy to come today, but she couldn’t come, because, because, she couldn’t come because –’

And here Lorna interjected, protective, ‘Because your mum was tired from working –’

But suddenly all the fight left Gerda. She sat on the floor, and her red head drooped, and tears ran slowly down her cheeks. ‘Because she never comes,’ she said. ‘Because she never, never does.’

‘It’s all right, deary, never mind,’ said Milly, who could never bear to see children cry, crouching down on the floor beside her and taking the little girl in her arms. (She and Samuel, once devoted One Way followers, were thinking of having a child of their own – a boy, they hoped, and they would call him Saul – and now she saw children everywhere, and it didn’t quite square with the end of the world. Jesus loved children, didn’t he? They were losing their belief in Father Bruno. God was love: that was the point.)

The little girl’s blouse was soaked with tears. She cried steadily, fluently, without words, like a tap welling up when the washer was gone. Milly held the child’s hot wet face to her own, and stroked her hair, and bore her sorrow.

Yet twenty minutes later Gerda was in the water, the clear blue water with its minnows of sunlight, warm as happiness, swimming, swimming, and Davey, on the other side of the pool, cleaved powerfully, blindly through his programme, and Lorna stood on the side and watched them, wishing that she had learned to swim, wishing that she were young again, understanding and forgiving Gerda, and all the knots of passion and pain were dissolved in the moment, and floated away.

But Zoe, on the pool-side, was not so happy. Too many things to fret about.

She was worried about the war: not just the innate loathsomeness of it, the way the rich were attacking the poor, the lies that Mr Bliss was telling – but also the effect on her social life (too many evenings at boring meetings, too few evenings spent with Viola) and on her e-mail inbox, which was swamped in gloom: half a dozen rants per day, with giant attachments, too many to open, so she started to dread them, and once or twice, guiltily, deleted them unread. Zoe marched, she protested, she always had, but she didn’t enjoy it, or entirely believe in it. It was anger that motivated her, not hope. War was such a stupid waste of human time and effort. War kept her and Viola apart.

Now Zoe was having to teach two different classes because Viola was late again. Why can’t she get a babysitter for that child and stay over with me? she thought, as so often. She quite liked Dwayne, but he complicated everything. If he weren’t there, anything might happen. Perhaps they would have a child together. She would make Viola pregnant, yes. Put a heavy child in that beautiful belly. She desired Viola fiercely, totally, missed and wanted her every night. Zoe had been pregnant when she was sixteen. She had run away from home, and had an abortion. She knew life owed her another baby. Why shouldn’t Viola give her one? They would be a family. For ever.

But her mind began to move in familiar grooves as she got her baby class to float under water, their necks relaxed, their hair streaming out. Six little bodies suspended in a line, plump, prosperous, well-fed bodies; well-dressed mothers looked on from the side; private swimming classes weren’t cheap. Briefly, Zoe remembered the past, when she was a water baby herself, when her mother watched, and shrieked encouragement.

It had put her off swimming for years and years. Maybe Gerda was lucky that her mother didn’t come. Zoe always suggested mothers keep praise for later. For half an hour, therefore, all the babies were hers. At first the underwater stuff seemed difficult, and the timid ones panicked and pushed their chins up, but in the end they had to trust the water; they would never swim well if they didn’t let go. ‘Well done,’ she called. ‘Now let’s try again.’

They up-ended like ducks, adorable. ‘Very good, Farouk. Lovely, Sejal. Now let’s stand by the side and do breaststroke arms. No, standing, Daniel. And you’re not a windmill. Please copy Ben, he’s doing it just right. All of you listen: copy Ben.’

Zoe left the babies for a moment and walked further up the pool to see how the Junior Dolphins were doing. There were some gifted little swimmers there. She would have merged the two classes, it would have been safer, but some of the older ones were really good. Gerda, for example, swam like a fish; she was already preparing for her lifesaver’s badge.

‘Staffing problems, these wretched floods,’ she apologized to Lorna as she padded past her. ‘I think you’re great,’ said Lorna, vaguely. ‘People of my age never learned to swim. Gerda’s been teaching the others to dive.’

‘What?’ said Zoe, anxious. ‘They can’t dive here,’ and she ran past Lorna to the middle of the pool, but there she found Gerda standing on the side, hair stuck to her scalp in a gleaming dark pelt, saying ‘One, two, three,
jump
! Go on, Dinesh. Copy me!’

They plunged in the safe way, splashing, feet first. Relieved, Zoe smiled at them. ‘Well done, kids. Thank you, Gerda. I did need another teacher.’

‘I always teach when the teacher’s not there,’ said Gerda, pulling herself up from the water, beaming, beaming, wanting to give pleasure. ‘At school I read them fairy-tales.’

‘Because you’re sensible,’ said Zoe.

Now they were all clustering round her, but Gerda was pulling at her hand, and her wide blue eyes weren’t happy any more. ‘I’m not sensible,’ she said. ‘Everyone says I’m sensible. I don’t want to be sensible. I want to be a baby.’

Zoe laughed and took it lightly. ‘You’re a water baby,’ she said. There was something needy about that child, but she couldn’t deal with it today. ‘Now back into the water, Dolphins! Three lengths of freestyle. I’m watching you! Ready, steady, go!’

There was hope, this morning, even in the Towers, where everyone lived who could do no better; the old, the mad, the poor, newcomers, and people like Faith, who cleaned the city. And rats, and mice, and bright mats of microbes. They liked the floods, and it was warming up, though to human beings, April still felt chilly. It didn’t matter; in the sun, people hoped. Hope was all they needed to go on living.

Delorice and Viola were drinking coffee and staring down out of Viola’s fifteenth-floor window, their ears cocked for the sound of engines. The two young women, one office-sharp in skyscraper pin-stripes and high waxed hair, the other cupped by a pale soft tracksuit clinging like peach-down to waist and breasts, sat waiting, princesses in chaos, at the breakfast bar of the ugly room. The radio was on.

‘Did you hear him?’ asked Viola, derisive. ‘He goes, “We’re going to do whatever it takes to get our people to the Gala.” So who is this “our people” they’re goin’ on about? Where are these fancy river-buses? I can’t even go to work on time, you get me, never mind some fancy Gala.’

‘I couldn’t care if I’m late to work,’ said Delorice. ‘I’ve started to think my job is rubbish. But I have got a meeting after lunch. And I do have to get to the Gala tonight.’

A look from Viola, half-glad, half-envious. She switched off the radio, trying not to get vexed. Delorice was always doing better than her –

What if she did? She was family. Family mattered, to the Edwardses.