The Flood (22 page)

Rhuksana smiled stiffly. ‘What nonsense,’ she said. ‘This government will try any lies.’ Suddenly she had had enough, after a day of keeping her temper with the children. ‘It’s they who are wrecking our cities, in Loya. Have you heard about the Loyan National Library? Looters have stolen what your bombs didn’t burn. And Mr Bliss’s troops stood by and did nothing. My husband –’ and here her voice became unsteady, but she forced the smile back on to her face. ‘My husband wept, when he heard the news, for the first time since we were married.’

The woman was clearly a bit of an extremist. ‘I’m not pro this war, you know,’ said Angela, quite truthfully, though she wasn’t really following it. ‘In any case,’ she said, not looking at Rhuksana. ‘Thank you for all you do for the children.’

Miss Habib had got very red in the face. Gerda pushed her mother. ‘Come
on,
Mummy.’

‘It’s my job,’ said Rhuksana. ‘I love it.’ Slamming the car door and driving away, she thought to herself, But I don’t love the parents. She wished she hadn’t mentioned Mohammed.

At a quarter to four, Harold was lying on the floor of the second-floor sitting room, listening to Wes Montgomery playing ‘Mr Walker’. He knew he should be getting ready for the Gala. Lottie was stomping about upstairs, issuing instructions at intervals, to do with his shirt, his hair, his tie. Harold listened to the music’s velvet depth, its wondrous blend of bounce and melancholy, jazz guitar like the padded feet of a panther prowling through a warm spring night, and wondered whether his book was true: was the moment really all that mattered? Listening now, time became the music, a place of endlessly repeated bliss where nothing counted, not success nor failure, only the perfectly rounded chord which held all the particles of life in its hand, for he’d loved this track since he was seventeen years old, before he met Lottie, when he was alone –

‘Harold!
Have you started to run that bath?’

– When he was young, when he was someone.

Lottie’s voice disappeared; he shut her out. He skipped back to Thelonius Monk. My man Thelonius. All my men … Women were obsessive about cleanliness. He didn’t really want to go, tonight.

But he knew, underneath it, that he was depressed. The book, which had taken up two decades of his life, had gone into silence and emptiness. No one had even acknowledged receipt. It was too late now. No one ever would. It was worse because for weeks he had been buoyed up with hope.

Perhaps the book was mad, in any case. He had become fascinated by simultaneity: at any one point in time, the thousand flowerings of event – the murders and weddings, mud-slides and military coups, the earthquakes, torture sessions, shy first kisses, the football matches, poems, invasions, dances, all of them gathered on the same string of time, all of them clustered together like a garland … Going on for ever, now, now, all across this planet, stretching out into space like a great rope of flowers, and who knew if it was entirely nonsense, this business of Davey’s about planets aligning – and even at this instant, as he lay on the floor, with the glory of the saxophone caressing him, great events were breaking, somewhere else, people were burning, people were laughing, soldiers were marching across the desert, little children were learning to swim, lives were being changed for ever – and then there were the ants, the bower-birds, the lizards, the intricate cross-hatchings of a thousand other species –

‘Harold, I’ll kill you if you don’t come at once!’

The phone rang, disrupting the long camber of his jazz. He picked it up, trying to sound terse and cool, for it was bound to be somebody selling insurance, the industry was desperate because of the floods –

‘Yes,’ he said, guardedly. ‘Yes, it is.’

And then, ‘Really? … Do you think so? … Thank you. No, I haven’t got an agent … Should I have? Next spring? Really? “Inspirational”, you say … So is that, really, um, “where it’s at”? No, I didn’t actually realize that … Oh yes, I’d love to meet you.’

He gets to his feet in a single fluid movement, switches off the music, stands, deep breathing, blood flooding his body, cheeks aching with joy. He jives round the room; he can’t keep still. He is the man, the man, the man. Now it is his turn to do some shouting. He’s pretty sure he can out-shout Lottie.

He bounds upstairs, but she’s locked her door, which can only mean that she’s shaving her legs.

‘LOTTIE!’ he yells through the bathroom door.

‘Bloody hell, Harold, why are you shouting?’

‘BECAUSE I’VE HEARD FROM A PUBLISHER!’

A pause. ‘Oh darling, I’m sorry, never mind. A lot of people get rejections, you know.’

‘No, Lottie, listen, open the door.’

She mutters, just audibly, but comes and opens, with a tiny trace of red on her shapely calf, and a little frown of tenderness; she really does love him. She doesn’t like him to be upset. Besides, it’s a bore, with the Gala coming. ‘Harold,’ she says, taking his hand, ‘we’ll go through this together, darling. Obviously they’re stupid, and you are clever, cleverer than most people, cleverer than me –’

‘I’m certainly clever, I’m a BLOODY GENIUS. Listen, Lottie, they’ve accepted it! They mean to pay me money! Rather a lot! They want it to be their spring lead, next year, which apparently is something really good!’

‘Harold!’ says Lottie, taking it in. ‘Harold.’ And Lottie is starting to smile. Her lovely soft mouth curls up and up; her tongue and her big white teeth are gleaming.
‘Harold.
But that’s, that’s wonderful … Come into my bath. Come here. Let me kiss you. Harold. Oh Harold. You are a success!’

‘We’re going to have a treat,’ Angela said, once Gerda was safely strapped into the back. Gerda didn’t answer.

‘Did you like my teacher?’ she asked.

‘No – I mean yes. Of course I did.’

‘Will you pick me up tomorrow?’

‘Maybe’.

‘Will you bring me to school? Please, Mummy.’

‘Maybe. But stop interrupting me. Tonight I’m taking you to a very big party.’

‘That isn’t a treat,’ said Gerda, frowning. ‘You always take me to parties. It’s boring.’

‘This one won’t be.’

‘Promise.’

‘I absolutely promise it won’t be boring! It’s the City Gala, the best party for years! The Rapsters will be there, and Lil Missy M, and Gail Hadrada, and the president –’

‘No. Promise you’ll bring me to school.’

‘Why are you going on about that?’

‘It’s
my
school. I want you to.’

‘OK, I promise,’ said Angela, annoyed. The child seemed completely unappreciative. It didn’t matter what you did for them.

‘And can we bring Winston home for tea?’ This was daring. Gerda never had children to tea, but other children did, and Gerda wanted to.

‘Who’s Winston?’ Angela asked, crossly.

‘I
told
you,’ Gerda said, reproachfully. ‘The boy who brings me snail-shells at break. He’s Franklin’s brother. They’re twins.’

‘It’s a bit awkward,’ said Angela, nervously. It didn’t sound so unreasonable. ‘I mean, we have a routine, at teatime. You have a routine, with your grandparents. I generally write, and so on.’

‘Stupid old routine,’ shouted Gerda. She had never shouted at her mother. ‘All the other children have people to tea. Why can’t I?’

Angela couldn’t answer. A tiny headache was beginning to grow.

‘It’s because you’re old,’ Gerda yelled, furious, saying the worst thing she could think of. ‘It’s because you’re too old to have children. I hate you!’

Angela found tears running down her cheeks. Her first reaction was to give in. Besides, she did want Gerda to come to the Gala. ‘I’m not old, I’m in my forties,’ she whispered. ‘You can have your stupid twins, if you want them.’

‘I only want Winston. I don’t love Franklin …’ Gerda peered forward; her mother was actually crying. This gave Gerda a pain in her belly. ‘I’m sorry, Mummy, you’re not really old. You’re not very wrinkly. You look nice in your makeup.’

Angela vowed not to speak to her again, and put the radio on loud, but the radio was talking about the Gala.

‘This is the party you don’t want to go to that they’re going on about,’ she said crossly over her shoulder. ‘They’re supposed to have spent millions of dollars on it. There are going to be tigers in cages, it says. And an ice-rink. And dancers dressed up as swans. And that person on the television that Grandma says you like so much, what is his name, Davey Duck –’

Gerda had suddenly burst out laughing. ‘Davey Duck! Davey Duck! Mummy you’re a Idiot!’

Angela’s headache got sharply worse. Angela didn’t like being laughed at. ‘What is the matter with you, Gerda?’ she said coldly. ‘Really, stop acting like a child. I don’t know why I bothered to pick you up.’

‘His nickname’s Davey
Luck!’
Gerda shouted. ‘He’s a Nastronomer! He’s totally famous!’

‘I didn’t happen to have heard of him. But I know you like him. I take an interest. Why is it so funny if I make a mistake?’

Gerda thought, in the back of the car. ‘It’s like, if they called you Angela Ham,’ she said, and started to giggle again. ‘Angela Ham! Angela Ham! I think I’m going to wet myself.’ It took several minutes for her to stop laughing. ‘I think I might marry Winston,’ she said, apropos of nothing, but her mother wasn’t listening.

‘They just mentioned me on the radio,’ Angela said, turning round in her seat and almost hitting a man on a bike. ‘If you weren’t laughing so much, you’d have heard it.’ But her voice had softened, her mood had improved. ‘They said, “famous writers like Angela Lamb and Farhad Ahmad are among those on the guest-list.” Admittedly Ahmad’s a bit of a fraud, but still it’s quite pleasant to be mentioned.’

‘Mummy,’ said Gerda, quietly. ‘Mummy, can I ask you something?’

‘Uh-huh.’ Angela was trying to park.

‘I don’t really want to go to the party. I want to stay at home and do a painting and watch TV and have a bath with you, and
you
be with me all the time, and
you
read me my bedtime story –’

‘It’s totally unreasonable, of course,’ said Angela, not letting her finish. ‘Most children would give their eye-teeth for this. Why can’t you just be normal, Gerda?’

‘What are I-teeth?’ asked Gerda, briefly distracted. They must be some kind of special bones, like the magic bones that they had in Australia, the ones that Miss had told them about, the ones that had your spirit in. ‘I wouldn’t give you my I-teeth, Mummy. In any case, you didn’t listen.’

‘I did listen. You’re not coming.’

‘I’ll come if Davey Luck is really coming. And if you take me to school tomorrow. And if Winston can come to tea.’

‘Deal,’ said Angela, relieved. ‘Now please get out of the car, darling.’

‘Promise?’ Gerda showed no sign of moving. She was staring her mother in the eye.

‘Promise.’ If I manage to wake up, Angela thought.

‘Promise that Davey Luck is coming? Hope to die?’

‘Hope to die.’

She thought, they have no idea how much we love them. Simultaneously she remembered there wasn’t any school tomorrow; it was a public holiday. She didn’t mention the fact to Gerda.

Gerda was looking up at the clouds, riveted by something her mother couldn’t see. Then she turned her face back to Angela, curious. ‘But do you
really
hope to die? I don’t ever want to die.’

The boy with his chestful of paper medals stopped singing ‘Happy Birthday’ in the middle of a note, pulled his hand from his mother’s (who was smiling at a stranger, her eyes intimating ‘Isn’t he great?’), with a sudden jerk, fun, easy, and ran across the road without a care, glimpsing a park on the other side, the tops of trees under a blue and rose sky; football, of course, after a gap of two months, the happy game from a lost green life – ‘Come on, Mummy,’ hope called, peremptory, over his shoulder, not missing a beat, and as time split, he skipped off the pavement – dodging and weaving between the traffic, which screamed to a halt, hooted, braked – his mother tried to run after him but the stream of cars as the sun went down was suddenly thicker, blinder, more pressing; crowds were driving in to watch the celebrities; they surged on, pitiless; she couldn’t see him, only the red-lit metal flanks of the cars, their lights flicking on as the pink sun set, so that everything became a confusion of signals – in the end, with a hopeless, nameless, terror, and because not to go was impossible, she threw herself out into the flashing river, suddenly skinless, a bag of wounds, was carried across by luck, and fear, telling herself, ‘They will not kill you, they will not kill you, you have to save him, then you can die’; all that she held in her mind was love, love and the horror of losing it, but that Silver thread pulled her through the maze; she saw him, suddenly, curled in a ball of blue coat and old shoes on the traffic island, shocked, stunned, a boy of stone, and as the cold draught from a speeding lorry pulled her up short just before it hit her, she plunged through a gap, she had him, her boy; love crushed his medals, she snatched, she held. ‘You could have been killed, you could have been killed.’ He clutched her, sobbing. He had not been killed.

The cars press on towards the Gala. Some stars are going early, to check sound and lights.

‘Did you see that?’ squeaks Lil Missy M, peering through the window of her limousine. ‘Crazy little kid ran right across the road.’

‘Kids are freakin’ crazy,’ says her bodyguard, swallowing a pill, then taking another. ‘Don’t worry, baby. Everything’s cool.’

In the rest of the city, life is nearly normal, in the afternoon, in the early evening, normal for a city recovering from chaos, a city eager to be normal again. The swimming-pool where Zoe and Viola work stays open till ten, six days a week. It is warm and bright: people feel happy. Milly feels good, washing and polishing. She’s talked to Samuel about Father Bruno. They will stay with the Brothers, because they are needed, stay and remind them that Jesus is love. Milly likes to clean, because it makes life better. She likes the children who come to the pool. She likes Zoe, who’s a good person; she’s seen her at the market, making a speech against the war; the mike didn’t work, and hardly anybody listened, but Zoe kept on talking, to the muddy water. Milly cleans Zoe’s office especially well, and sticks back the curling corners of her anti-war posters. Like Milly, Zoe always comes in early.