The Flood (27 page)

Elroy has come to the Gala alone, finding every one of his girlfriends was out. He feels virtuous that he didn’t bring a woman. He stands by a window where the crowd is thinner to telephone Shirley and tell her he loves her; but he looks a little pensive when he flips off the phone. Biting his lip, he stares out into the darkness, where part of him registers a woman is screaming, an unearthly sound blowing down from the roof-top which must be part of the entertainment … Shirley said Winston was fine, but was she just being noble? And she sounded sleepy; he’d woken her up. Elroy wishes he hadn’t phoned. For a second he wonders if he should go home, but it’s not even twelve, the night is young, and the Bengal tigers will soon be performing. Shirley wouldn’t want him to miss the tigers. Elroy can’t hear the screams any more. He beckons a waiter: more champagne.

Rhuksana and Mohammed aren’t at the party. Mohammed wasn’t at work today. Helena Harp had rung; he had missed a big meeting; he would not talk to her; he did not care.

Now Rhuksana is taking a phone-call from Loya. She stands there shaking with the phone in her hand, looking through the doorway into their bedroom. She cannot breathe, she cannot think. Her ears are ringing; the world has turned red. Perhaps this is what dying is. Mohammed is praying, as he has been for days, since the news came through about the burning of the library. His dear dark head is prone on the floor. Such pain as this she cannot bear to give him, for it is his mother on the phone, sobbing, ringing to tell them his sister’s been shot through the head in a ricochet from a soldier’s bullet, walking through the streets in search of bread, his beloved sister, the pearl of his heart, and everything precious dissolves in blood.

The One Way protesters outside Government Palace have sloshed the front steps with scarlet paint while the guards were distracted, peering in through the doors at Lola and Gracie, half-naked and gorgeous, skanking to the music of Baby Nana, surrounded by an ice-storm of flashing paparazzi (Lottie and Harold look across with a smile and say doesn’t that girl remind them of Lola? – though thank God she’d never wear
quite
so little); Gerda is sitting on Angela’s lap, watching the beautiful big girls dancing while her mother spoon-feeds her wild-raspberry ice-cream; they are both, for once, completely happy. The kitchen staff are still working full tilt, their arms and hands flying like demented knitters as they try to keep pace with the mouths of the guests, their appetites doubled by drugs and alcohol; the party-goers want to keep on climbing, they want to be bigger, higher,
more,
they need the pleasure rush to come faster…

But quite soon, most of the dancers will tire. Most of them start to feel gravity tugging, a twinge of fatigue, a sour dottle of glut, their eyelids beginning to granulate in the yellowing stare of the chandeliers; their cheek-muscles drag, their jaw-bones sag …

The night can’t be over, at only half-past midnight. Where is the president, Mr Bliss?

You must understand, he’s been awfully busy.

There’s a fuss going on, by the main doors. People in dark coats; the night has swirled in, surrounded by police, lights, cameras. Ah. At last, Mr Bliss is here! (‘Keep Berta away from him,’ the word goes out. Berta Bliss, his wife, has spent more than half an hour in the tent of Kilda the Clairvoyant; and emerged very tired and emotional, clutching an empty bottle of fizz.)

He’s a little late for people’s full attention. People are slumped together on the dance-floor; sitting in corners, wound around each other; crouched in toilets, reviving themselves. Freddy Flatter is both drunk and nervous; he had let himself relax, at the end of his gig, and the quiff of his toupee has slumped on to his forehead; he tries to hold it up with his limp left hand as he introduces Bliss with his be-jewelled right; he hopes that this looks more coquettish than desperate, but as he leaves the stage, with a debonaire snicker, he trips on the mike wire, and the thing falls off, lying on the floor like a lost bit of wild-life.

Mr Bliss doesn’t notice the thinness of his audience. He’s used, after all, to performing to parliament. And he is surrounded by his own people, his gleaming place-men, smiling and nodding. They are salt of the earth; they understand him. He begins quite blandly; he celebrates ‘our history’ (meaning twenty-five years of the tourist industry); he says how successful the city is, how people flock here from all over the world (he’s referring to tourists, not refugees); and then he moves on to the momentous present. History, he says, is in the making. Mr Bliss’s lieutenants clap and whistle when he talks of ‘deep conviction’, of ‘decisive moments’, of ‘necessary resolve’. ‘No precipitate action’ (they exchange veiled glances), but ‘we shall prevail’ because ‘our cause is just’.

He comes to a climax, and looks down, modestly. He’s done his best, as he always does. Now he waits for the guaranteed tide of applause. He doesn’t hear it, but he still looks up with the engaging grin that says he is pleased, the reward he habitually gives his audience, telling them he likes them all,
personally.
It is true, alas. Bliss loves and needs them. ‘Look, guys, I’m happy to answer questions.’ He knows the answers to the ones that are coming.

But he isn’t prepared for the red-headed child who suddenly rushes down the room towards him, evading his bodyguards, escaping her mother, so he has to smile sweetly and answer her question, though kids are always unpredictable: ‘I’m Gerda,’ she says, as clear as a bell, into the microphone a reporter has given her. ‘Mr Bliss, why have you got your clothes on?’

He laughs, as amiably as he can, a politician enjoying children. His red shirt had been carefully chosen. ‘Wouldn’t I look funny if I came to a party without any clothes on? You’ve got a very pretty dress, Gerda.’

He grins at the cameras, ready to move on. But then, to his horror, the wretched child, who must have been put up to it by one of his enemies, informs the room, ‘My friend Ian is a famous painter. He says you’re the Emperor with No Clothes.’

Her red hair glints as the room sniffs blood.

At four a.m., when all the humans have gone, the last waft of pink boa and flicker of snakeskin, and the last of the kitchen-staff, trying to close the bins, which bulge open, gleaming, in the stormy moonlight – at four a.m., before the cleaners arrive, before the sun comes up, though the sky has begun to have a pinkish tinge, an uneasy, flesh-coloured, nauseous underbelly – there is a sudden wave of smell on the air: an acrid, musky, urinous smell, a smell like a swipe from the rough paw of a bear.

And then they arrive, sprinting through the water, seen only by terrified, fleeing rodents, twenty, thirty, a hundred foxes, a tide of muscle and bone and bite, shoulder to shoulder, brush to brush, a brazen army of invading red dogs, snapping and sniffing and straddling the dustbins with their strenuous paws and strong narrow bodies, rooting up the lids, the moonlight catching the coarse silver hairs on their strong hind-quarters and the smudge of dark fur down their whipcord spines. Their nostrils flare at the scent of meat, fat and roast skin and split marrow-bone, all the glorious detritus of the human banquet; and out in the open, as the moon starts to fade and the sun heaves up behind dreary cloud, the foxes drip spittle and truffle and gorge, and, sated, spat and gavotte with each other, nip each other’s necks, bare teeth in greeting. Time for the foxes to have their Gala.

Then they melt sinuously away. Most of the foxes are leaving the city.

Professor Sharp has tried all the official channels, but Mr Bliss doesn’t want the population alarmed. He has serious issues for them to think about: national security: patriotic duty; protecting freedom; pre-empting the enemy. A meteoroid would upstage him totally. The government refuses to issue any warnings. If there’s to be alarm, Mr Bliss means to cause it. And the media are surfeited with cosmic disasters; the weekend newspapers have all run ‘exclusives’ about tomorrow’s
End of the World Spectacular
: radio and TV news already have Davey Lucas booked for the morning. When Professor Sharp, not half so well known (though infinitely better qualified) with a boring voice and a skin problem, rings up and says there is an cometoid coming, they say they will ring him back, and laugh.

Now Sharp and his colleagues think laterally.

When the first news about the cometoid reached him from the Observatory – Professor Sharp himself, ringing urgently – Davey was cockahoop to be called by the man who so recently dismissed him as a charlatan, in the thick of the outcry at the weekend. He didn’t really listen to the content of the call. Obviously Sharp wanted to get himself on TV. Davey cut in and said he was too busy to talk, he would try to get back to the professor tomorrow.

He was, in fact, busy; he was choosing shirts; the blue was his favourite, but poor for TV; he had been warned that Bliss would be wearing red, to project a positive, optimistic image, and most colours seemed to clash with it. He was starting to think he would fall back on white: white, white, white delight: he had taken just a little of his white powder, just enough to keep dancing above the gulf that very occasionally opened beneath him, way beneath him, he was rising, rising … The performer’s adrenalin is already in him, a net of wired nerves winding slowly higher, he has left the foothills, he will soon be flying –

Then Sharp’s voice came again from far below. It was faint, pointless. Sharp understood nothing, or else he, Davey, understood nothing.

Besides, the drugs are dancing today. Davey has also taken one more valium than he usually uses before his show. (Delorice didn’t like it, but she was at the office. He wished she were here to hear his speech. He wished the Observatory would stop ringing.)

Davey took another valium, and lay on the bed, and tried to think what his life was about. Nothing at all came; just blankness. He thought, my parents. Lola. Delorice. But they had no faces, they were just a list. They seemed to come, though, with a weight of pain, as if they were slipping away into the dark, as if something very heavy might fall on them, soundlessly, slowly, from very far away. Usually the valium made him numb. He took another tablet, irritably; thought, with sudden clarity, about his step-grandmother, Sylvia, Harold’s mother, the sense of white nothingness after her heart attack, the nagging question, where could she have gone? Where do we go, he thought, mind slurring, why are we going, going, gone … The drugs were failing to keep their promise, to hold him tight in their sealed white moment; terror and loss were leaking in.

He woke at six p.m.; the phone was ringing, but he rushed to the bathroom, and vomited. His whole being was pulled out of his throat, surge after surge of wracking retching. After he was finished, he washed his face, brushed his teeth, felt suddenly sober. His head was clear. The fog was gone.

Davey goes and listens to his messages to see if he has dreamed it all, but the professor’s messages all say the same thing, and he understands that the drugs were the dream, the drugs and the shirts and the money and the palace, his weekly programmes, his teenage fans, the scripts he reads that someone else has written, the nonsense about the alignments of the planets on which he has wasted so much spacetime, the second-rate telescopes he advertises, the makeup girls who fake-tan his skin.

There is a noise at the back of the house, and he turns to look out of the basement window, hoping Delorice has changed her mind and come home, though she’s due to meet him at the Gala. He has to talk to her, to tell her everything. He loves her completely; he needs her to love him, but first she has to know the whole truth about him. He thinks he can trust her to go on loving him.

Something else is standing on the wall in the light. The fox, his fox, alert, intent, red as the earth, its breath steaming. Davey looks out, and the fox looks in.

A moment later, Davey picks up his mobile and calls Kylie Spheare to apologize.

Davey rings round the taxi firms so he can work on the journey to the Observatory; he doesn’t want Professor Sharp to think him a fool, though he’s uneasily aware that he
has
been a fool: the floods of letters, phone-calls, e-mails challenging last weekend’s saturation publicity for his
Planets Line-Up!
programme has taught him he is a bit of a fool, though the TV station was sanguine – (‘It’s a
response,
Davey, it’s great, it shows the whole world is going to watch us’). He calls Delorice, again and again, but her phone battery’s flat, though she doesn’t know it, the thing lies dead in the bottom of her handbag, she is walking round the Gala looking for him, and the tender electric artery between them is broken.

The cab carries Davey on the motorway through the flooded land on the way to the Observatory. The orange sky over the city gradually gives way to silvered darkness. Looking up, as he does, every now and then, from the rough calculations on his palm-top, he glimpses the constellations and shivers. They look white, distant, as they always do. Tonight’s starlight set off towards him thousands and thousands of years ago. But the planets, thinks Davey, looking at the moon, which is bright, today, on this cold clear night, the planets are a thousand times nearer. Usually the planets lie well-spaced; they are plot-able, predictable, as novels. The asteroids and cometoids are wilder, more eccentric, shooting far out in space, far beyond our own galaxy, then plunging back steeply in to the centre, nearer than the planets, crossing and re-crossing them. Each time the orbits are a little different, and each changed orbit changes other orbits, though most of the time, in a short human lifetime, they all whiz safely round the asteroid belt.

But every so often, the pattern fractures. Maybe the galaxy is bored with balance. Maybe it gets tired of a life-form’s persistence. Perhaps it wants to make room for something different, something less myopic than the city-dwellers …

Not so very rarely in a human lifetime, many times in a hundred years, a near-earth object careens towards us. The tiny ones flare into golden dust, but sometimes a large one keeps right on going.