The Flood (26 page)

Gerda had darted off into the crowd. Peering, preening, Angela followed her.

Everyone was there.

The stars: Lil Missy M, Baby Nana, Woof Daddy Woof, Franky Malone, Desiree D, the Lites, the Three Bones, Cleft (minus their lead singer, stuck in the traffic coming in from the Towers, where she’s had a huge row with her boyfriend for letting her lucky stage-shoes get wrecked by the water); the great tenor, Vincenzo Da Vinci, whose luggage has been lost in the half-drowned airport, in a borrowed suit whose waist-band’s too tight, unable to resist the lobster creams, which he’s throwing down his throat in twos and threes; the young lions of the art scene – Shona Goff, who arrived so drunk she had to be helped up the steps by her dealer, one breast falling out on to her thousand-dollar shoulder-bag, which is a witty
trompe l’œil
of a hamburger; Terry Gribbin, Haroun Al Jezir, and their posse, and Walter the Wank, who is wearing a cod-piece from which there protrudes a shiny pink phallus, perhaps his own, but everyone hopes not; big-name journalists – Darren White (May White’s son, Dirk White’s brother, over from Hesperica for the Gala, fresh from his third divorce, the ‘famous brother’ who has always upstaged Dirk, making him feel smaller, stupider, meaner); he has written a daring attack on Bliss exposing his ‘sabotage’ claims as a fraud, to be published tomorrow in the
Daily Mire;
Darren can’t wait, but this evening he’s talking with great animation to Bliss’s press secretary, Anwar Topping, and anyone would think that they were best mates (Darren’s hedging his bets, for if Bliss should survive, he may swallow his medicine and court Darren again, for how many ‘radical’ journalists are there who went to the same college as him? Darren White has his eye on an honour); Paula Timms, Gracie’s journalist mother, who has always thought Darren a total chancer because he earns more money than her, is boring two dancers in skin-tight red latex who unwisely sat down within range for a rest, as she explains how the floods have been unfair to women; Petronella Bella, the gossip columnist, furiously clicking names into her palm-top while throwing tiny yellow pills into her mouth; Amina Patel in an exquisite sky-blue sari, wishing she had never come to this city, wondering how soon she can slip away and help her teenage son with his homework; a yapping kennel of tabloid hacks, tanking up fast on Gala champagne, eager for titbits, sniffing the air, talking to each other till they find someone better, staring shamelessly over their shoulders; the PR people, pushing forward their clients, smiling and oiling at the journalists; a scattering of prostitutes, still young and immaculate, still hoping to alchemize into wives or actresses, still half-believing they are escorts, starlets; and, occasionally cocking an eyebrow at the prostitutes, here are the generals, admirals and air vice-marshals, enjoying the chance to wear all their medals but playing their other cards close to their chests (they are a little abstracted, they have something on their minds, you catch them in pairs, shaking their heads, in corners); and the city’s cash-cows, the arms manufacturers, sweating, in mohair suits, and smoking; but why are they so happy? Smiling, high-fiving.

And here are some old stars: Lily de la Lilo, in a metre of cracked makeup and crooked dark glasses, on the arm of Freddy Flatter in his corset and wig, with an emerald silk suit and built-up shoes, both of them baring bleached tusks for the lenses; they try to edge close to some younger stars, in the hope that a little silver youth-dust will blow off, in the hope of being photographed with movers and shakers. Here are some new stars – some very new stars, for Bliss’s people, desperate to attract the youth vote, have cast their nets wide: look, Kilda is there!

Yes, ‘Madam Kilda the Clairvoyant’! In the first week of her first real job! Introduced to the
Daily Atom
by Davey, amazed, last month, when he was at his mother’s, to have his whole past revealed to him by Kilda, who read it from his hand, in a matter-of-fact way, though she did get very weird about his future, where she saw him with a girl in the top of a tree … Kilda is there, very shy, but radiant, waiting to do a gig in a semi-transparent ‘boutique tent’ in the Upper Gallery, its gauze-grey chrysalis enamelled with stars; a very camp young man is sitting taking bookings, and the list is already surprisingly long for a gathering of people scornful of horoscopes; many of them are politicians’ wives, and indeed, Berta Bliss herself has signed up, no longer able to predict her husband, who has grown increasingly strange and distant.

(On her way in, Kilda was shocked to see the howling crowd of One Way protesters, stretching clawed hands towards the cars. It felt as if they hated her. They didn’t, of course – they couldn’t recognize her, behind the smoked glass of the limo, could they? And yet there had been a bad, gut-wrenching moment when the protesters pressed right up against the car and she found herself staring at a thin grey face, twisted with anger: surely Dirk White, and he looked straight at her. But Dirk and she always got on well; he must have thought she was someone else, someone lucky and wealthy who deserved to be hated. What did it mean to be hated so much? Was hatred really in the One Book? She herself only hates her mother. But she loves her mother, deeply, as well.)

As Kilda waits for her gig, she is protected from lechers by the
Atom’s
tiny entertainment editor, Arnie Pippin, who’s looking, when she isn’t, down her white calm cleavage, and then around the room, with enormous complacency, telling Kilda that ‘absolutely everyone is here’. Even
he
has made it: little Arnie Pippin. Arnie Pippin, with the best view of all.

(‘Would you really say I’ve, you know, made it, Lottie?’ Harold asks Lottie, tongue loosened by champagne. ‘If Headstone really want to publish it, and if they like it as much as they say – will you, you know, be proud of me?’ ‘Harold! I have always been proud of you.’)

‘But nobody is here,’ Ian mutters to himself, looking round the room and then down at his paper, where he’s sketching a mob of starving hyenas, jaws splayed wide for wine and food. So many of the city’s people weren’t there.

The builders’ labourers, the rat-catchers (though the rats are there, just beneath the floor, in the U-bends of the staff lavatories, and round by the bins, in a frenzy of activity, sniffing and whiffling at the wonderful plenty, the prawn heads, the chicken skins, the lambs’ feet, the creamy shell of cooling fat skimmed off the gravy); the door-to-door vendors of dish-cloths and oven gloves; the sanitary engineers, the plumbers; the bus conductors with their ticket-machines; the lice inspectors with their nit-combs; the primary schoolteachers (no one wants to be told things); the hospital auxiliaries, the midwives.

The babies: the future hasn’t come to the party.

The past isn’t here: the old, the dying.

The bin-men with their grinding lorries, unable to service their normal districts, the rubbish-bags bobbing away on the water, splitting and rotting into the future.

The illegal immigrants aren’t here, with their stuttering vehicles and singsong accents, their second-hand clothes, their makeshift lives.

The mini-cab drivers, with their long sad stories of study and exile, their cigs and their prayer-beads, their hopes for a future unutterably different in a decent country with jobs and money, their humbling knowledge that none of their passengers ever remembers their names or faces, their cab-drivers’ destiny of driving the ignorant to places beyond the ends of the earth – the mini-cab drivers were left at the door.

The cleaners, getting up every morning at four, to be at work at six, with their roughened hands; no one invited them to bring their knee-pads, no one wants to see their broken shoes; no one wants the cleaners to arrive till tomorrow, when the dregs of the party are vomited out.

The young offenders, hiding drugs in their anuses and crying at night because they miss their mothers, packed in four to a cell since the flood-waters entered the lower floors of the city prison – the young offenders haven’t been invited, though those wretched kids would like nothing more than a glimpse of Lil Missy M’s big mouth and booty; her picture is stuck to the walls of their cells, but no one has heard of them, nobody likes them, nobody wants them, none of them is here (but the drugs are at the Gala, in a thousand different stashes, in pockets, in cummerbunds, in bras, in purses, being sniffed and injected in the elegant toilets).

The has-beens aren’t here; the entertainers who would have been here a decade ago: the former beauties, the stand-up comedians now wobbling badly in the provinces, the It girls who lost whatever It was, the actors who never made it in Hesperica, the PR moguls who drank it away, the writers who didn’t win the Iceland Prize, the politicians who were voted out and ended up selling crooked time-shares –

Oh, and by the way, Mr Bliss isn’t here. The president! He hasn’t arrived yet; he is too important. He has orders to give to the military; decisions to make about what to tell the country. Bliss has equal billing at tonight’s Gala with Trinny the Tranny, the most famous female impersonator in the world! Yet Mrs Bliss waits for him anxiously: what Madam Kilda told her was most alarming, though some of the details are blurred with champagne – but Mr Bliss still isn’t here.

Actually, most of the world isn’t here.

May isn’t there. May has never been asked to balls or galas, nor expected to be.

She was thrilled, though, when Shirley and Elroy were invited. As May carries on her interminable voyage back from the Towers to the land of the living, she imagines her daughter, in the warm, in the light, dressed to the nines, with Elroy, and smiles: Shirley should have the good things of life. That’s how it is, for the young generation. Life must be better, warmer, brighter. The knowledge fortifies May against the night.

But Dirk – she thinks, with a sinking heart.

Dirk White could never get in to the Gala, though if he had, it might have satisfied something, a long ago need for fun and lightness, the years of hopeless birthday parties – (‘When you’ve got more friends, we’ll have more of a do.’) Dirk is outside on the street with his placard. Dirk is having a not-bad time, prophesying against the godless, shouting and screaming and blowing a whistle. But something, a small sharp painful something, is nipping at him, underneath all the noise, and the nips get ever sharper, more spiteful. It was Kilda he’d seen, he knows it was, driving up in a dirty great white limousine and poncing up the steps with an ugly little midget, all tarted up, not looking at him. Kilda, who’d once acted like she liked him. Kilda, who’d made out that she was his friend. A great fury picks Dirk up and lifts him; they always disappoint him; they always let him down; there is nothing worth having in life except anger.

He will tell Bruno. Kilda will be finished. Crushed, humbled.
Vengeance is mine.

(And why should she get in, a mere girl, a mere woman – a bit of a loony, who thinks she sees the future – while Dirk is left outside on his own?)

And Davey isn’t at the Gala either; ‘Mr Star-Lite’ isn’t there. Famous Davey, beautiful Davey, billed to introduce the stars; Davey Lucas, nicknamed ‘Luck’, just as his lucky mother once was. On every invitation his name is engraved, as large as the names of the stars, in gold. (When she saw the stiff card with its bevelled edges, Lottie shrieked ‘HAROLD! Davey’s really made it!’ and Harold smiled, he has a soft spot for Davey, but for a few hours he was a little low.)

Something’s up with Davey. He is ultra-reliable; that was one of the reasons for inviting him, because Davey claims to be a Straight Edger; Davey, in theory, doesn’t drink, or take drugs; such a great role model for all his young fans; yet Davey has cancelled. Davey isn’t here. Hundreds of young women will be disappointed.

Kylie Spheare is listening to her messages. ‘Fucking Straight Edgers,’ she snarls, furious. ‘Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck f-u-u-u-ck! I mean, fuck. Fucking,
fucking
astrologer …’ But she has other things to think about; the amplifiers have been giving problems; Vincenzo Da Vinci has been sick; there is total confusion among Bliss’s advisers as to whether or not he is going to make it. She runs her eye briefly down the guest-list. ‘Find Freddy Flatter, he’ll jump at it. He’s an old ham, he can do it standing on his head –’

‘Hope not,’ someone says, ‘his wig’ll fall off.’

‘Somebody should tell that little cunt Lucas he’s not as hot shit as he thinks,’ Kylie spits.

Shirley isn’t here, though May believes she is. Shirley has fallen asleep, accidentally, the thermometer still clutched in her hand, wearing a sick-stained dressing-gown, on the floor of Winston and Franklin’s bedroom. Her last thought is, ‘It’s much too high,’ before sleep comes to dissolve her worry.

The Gala speeds along its programmed groove. The crowd feels good; the crowd feels great. The rains are over; the flood’s going down; the city is back under control again. Spring has sprung, and they long to be happy. Hundreds of faces flush with alcohol; drink trickles through into their brains, their spines, at first a stimulus, later a quietus; thousands of blood-vessels circulate the alcohol that livers are too overloaded to deal with; dozens of brains start a pleasant short-circuit; laughs get louder, gestures wilder; on the fourth or fifth drink, speech slurs, eyes blur, but the drinkers are still feeling pretty terrific. Dozens of endangered species are eaten, flown in for the occasion from all round the world, plucked or skinned, pulped or tenderized, smoked or grilled, glazed or in paté, marinated, macerated, boned,
done,
their animal nature vaporized. Several hundred cards with contact details are whisked by slick digits from pocket to pocket; unmeant promises to call are lavished; married couples meet up and quarrel, because one of them has had too much fun; sexual assignations are requested, and granted; a couple has sex in a cupboard on a landing at the back of the tent where Madam Kilda is performing; a lot of white powder has drifted like fine silver snow on to the plains of polished parquet, but more has slip-slithered through mucous membranes; pupils are dilating, heart rhythms jitterbugging, coke-heads are pelting like anorexic greyhounds round silver race-tracks of lucid psychosis, higher, faster, now spinning off skywards … A fight has begun between the entourages of Woof Daddy Woof and the Three Bones; security’s summoned to the dressing-rooms, and Lil Missy M has a hissy fit, saying she won’t perform without her boyfriend, the road manager for Woof Daddy Woof; the police appear to reinforce security, thus missing messier things elsewhere – two journalists break each other’s noses in a brawl over a woman uninterested in either; three security guards rape a prostitute who had climbed on to the roof to look at the view (lucky for her she is a prostitute, because if she were not, they would have to push her off; as it is they know she won’t dare complain).