The Flood (28 page)

Then senior professors call TV astronomers.

Then stories enter a phase of chaos.

Moira is awake an hour before usual. She claws her light on, the bedside light which is the one luxury she has kept (for her books are work, the works of the Lamb – she longs to lose them, but not yet, not yet) and reads her daily pages of the Bible. Her dog cocks an ear, moans, turns over and runs in his sleep as she intones: ‘Let the waters teem with countless living creatures … sea-monsters, and every kind of bird’.

Moira feels unaccustomed happiness. This morning, at last, she has her mission. Moira is needed; she has been called. There is thunder below, as there often is, as if someone were battering up at her floorboards, but this time she has an official message. Yesterday a servant had come to her door, a fat scratching woman with a piece of paper: ‘It’s the, you know, radio. They want you to ring them.’

She had wondered, at first, if it was a trap, but if it was, she had to endure it. The man she got through to sounded hectically keen; they’d managed to trace her through the Institute. ‘We want a nice little item about the Gala. If you happened to have any thoughts about that, you’re a cultural critic, I believe, you might want to put the case against, a lot of people feel it wasn’t, let’s say, appropriate –’

‘It’s sinful,’ Moira had told him, firmly.

‘Oh good,’ he said, ‘I hoped it would be simple, I’m sure you’ve done this kind of thing before, nothing too heavy, there’s a three-minute slot, and we’re hoping to find at least one more speaker –’

(He didn’t add, as he might have done, ‘But we can’t find anyone, they’re all at the Gala, all the halfway decent speakers have their voicemail on.’)

A car would arrive for her at seven. So Moira had become important again. Life pushed anew through her poor shrivelled fingers, her dry veiny legs, her stiffened bones. ‘Let the waters teem with countless living creatures …’ She contained multitudes; sea-birds fluttered under the pale freckled skin of her breast; her hollow belly held sea-monsters; she is distended, she is pregnant.

‘Flood sickness.’ All over the city, people woke up, stretched out, half asleep, to the radio or their TV remotes, and heard the phrase; it didn’t mean much. It was just something new, in the bones of their heads, a new little swimmer, dim and featureless, struggling, quietly, to make some headway against their conviction the floods were over.

Party-goers woke who had hardly slept, tossing and turning through the short chilly hours when the highs drain away and the headaches begin; when the brilliant conversations they thought they were having start to snag, and convulse, and torment the speakers; everything false, stupid, dead; they remember they loved the things they betrayed, the wife, the children, the faith, the party; shame abrades them like sandpaper. There is no escape. They twitch with horror. They remember the laughter, the howling faces, the cards scattered and already forgotten, dropped in a taxi like dirty snow, the principles they did not stand up for because so many people were laughing, the shallow promises they’ll never keep: ‘Stay in touch’: ‘You must come to dinner’: ‘I’ll send you a postcard’: ‘Let’s have lunch’. The bed is rigid, comfortless, wrinkled. They are very cold, and very hot. Nothing can calm their restless limbs. They are longing to sink down deep, deep into the dark place where it can all be forgotten, but light has imprinted itself like a migraine; they see it again, hear it again; the Gala will go on happening for ever, a fluorescent stage where they gibber like monkeys, bare-arsed, helpless, and everyone sneers.

Hands reach out and click the switch on. ‘Flood sickness …’, they hear. ‘Flood sickness.’

May woke at six, looked at her watch, and tried to go back to sleep again. She had planned to have a lie-in, this morning, after the awfulness of last night, to fortify herself for her return, but instead she lies wakeful, tossing and turning.

May believed in goodness, and trying to be kind. She hoped she had passed that on to her kids, though she wasn’t what anyone would call religious. Yet all her kids had turned into believers. Shirley was always in church with the kids, Darren had his Marxism, which was like religion, because he held on to it no matter what, even though he was so wealthy, and never seemed to share it; and now Dirk, who she thought could never be religious, because things like that were beyond his ken, had turned into a pillar of this One Way lot. Who weren’t properly Christians, nor Muslims, nor Jews. They just wanted to be better than anyone else, more this, more that, more pure, less worldly – yes, that was the word, ‘fundamentalist’. A world that had no light and shade.

Did it come from Alfred? Perhaps it did. Alfred believed in things like Justice, with a capital ‘J’, and Standards, with a capital ‘S’. May had more sense, because she was a woman …

As May lay there, sleepless, trying to understand, Dirk became more than ever like Alfred, a solitary figure who needed comfort. Something stirred, something new she had never felt for Dirk, something tender started to grow inside her, something warmer than duty, stronger than guilt.

She was over seventy, yes, but she wasn’t useless. She fell asleep with hope in her heart.

But she woke again still tired from her journey, knowing she had to go back again, to the chilly world of stairwells and water and crying children and needle-marked arms, of coloured people and blood-red writing. She flicked on the radio; her arm was aching. ‘Flood sickness,’ she heard. ‘Flood sickness.’

She turned over on to her good shoulder and drifted off, briefly, over the water, in a safe warm ship, with Alfred as pilot …

The radio suddenly screamed in her ear. It wasn’t a dream; it was an old woman, screaming. ‘These are the LAST DAYS! It has all been written! There is One Way, One Path, One Truth … There is rushing water and the deep roar of thunder … the Lamb is standing on Mount Zion already, and with him are a hundred and forty-four thousand people with his name and the name of the Father on their foreheads … They alone from the whole world will be ransomed! No lie will be found on my lips; I am faultless … but those who have worshipped the beast and its image, they shall drink the wine of God’s wrath … they shall be tormented in sulphurous flames …’

‘Thank you very much,’ the presenter was saying, having vainly tried to interrupt the woman every other scream or so, ‘Thank you very much, Dr Moira Penny. I’m afraid we have to leave it there. Our next item is about the kind of boots people are wearing to beat the floods …’

Religion, May thought. It could turn your brain. She imagined a giant lamb on a mountain, surrounded by thousands of normal-sized people. You couldn’t take it seriously, could you? Though she’d have to be careful not to laugh at Dirk. It wasn’t a good idea to laugh at men.

She got up, sighing, pulled her dressing-gown on, resigning herself. Let the day begin.

Moira is hustled away to the front door of the radio station by youthful minions who try not to look at her, though she notes the glances of wild amusement they shoot sideways under their brows at each other. She doesn’t care; she rises above them; she flays, with her eyes, the pasty young faces; God has prepared the lake of fire and sulphur. She clings to the door frame, suddenly tired. Recently she has not been eating.

‘Aren’t you going home?’ the girl asks her, rudely.

But the boy touches her arm. ‘She isn’t well. We’ll get you a taxi, Mrs …’He consults his notes. ‘Mrs Lamb.’

And then the madwoman is screaming again. ‘Angela Lamb? Angela Lamb? How dare you call me Angela Lamb?’

He hurriedly looks at his notes again. ‘Sorry, sorry. Dr Penny.’ ‘Moira Penny’ had been pencilled in after the Lamb woman cancelled at the last moment. Extraordinary reason, for such a well-known writer, who you would expect to be well-organized; she said she had to look after her daughter.

Angela Lamb’s got parent trouble. Her parents have always got up early in the morning; something to do with the jobs they once did, when they always had to be up by six. They have read the paper; they have heard the news, while most of the city is still sleeping.

Angela has always had trouble with her parents, since she was a child, long ago, and Henry drank, and fought with Lorna, though he hasn’t drunk for thirty years. She has always been dragging them, shyly, unwillingly, into the present, into the future. They hadn’t really wanted to come back to the city; they had managed to buy their flat by the sea, in the sleepy old town with beach-huts and donkeys, but they gave up their safe quiet life, and came. And now perhaps they must lose it again.

‘You leave, if you want to,’ Angela said, furious. ‘You go and fight your way on to the buses. It’s not going to happen. It never does. I used to get so scared in the eighties, I used to believe every scare meant war. This is just the ridiculous Mr Bliss. And this other thing you’re talking about, this TV astrologer, whoever he is, probably the one that Gerda is in love with’ (unlike her parents, she hasn’t heard the news, she’s done nothing of late but look after Gerda, who hasn’t let her mother out of her sight since that terrible morning of begging and weeping; but the Gala – so decadent, so theatrical! – has given her lots of ideas for a novel, and now that she’s absolutely raring to go, her parents are asking her to leave the city!) ‘We aren’t going to take any notice of
him.
I mean, really. An asteroid! It’s a cliché from a Hesperican movie.’

Her daughter’s scorn was always unpleasant, but this time Lorna decided to withstand it. ‘What if it happens?’ she said. ‘What if it actually happens, Ange? Gerda’s just a child. She hasn’t had her life. This man was just saying we should move inland.’

‘STOP TRYING TO MAKE ME FEEL GUILTY,’ screams Angela, agonized, turning away. ‘I have important work to do. She’s my daughter. I can look after her.’ (This statement is manifestly untrue; other people have looked after Gerda for years.)

Lorna goes very red in the face. She will not let Angela make her cry. She loves her granddaughter. She’s going to say it. ‘Don’t you love her, Angela? – Don’t you love Gerda more than your work?’

As she asks the question, Gerda walks through the door. She looks rather fancy, for an ordinary day, in the red satin dress that she wore to the Gala, which has dark sorbet stains across the front, but she has decided to wear it again. After all, it was the dress she wore to see all the famous people, and finally, to meet an emperor, though her grandma wouldn’t believe it when she told her.

Gerda hears the question Grandma asked her mother. Her mouth drops open with pity and horror. How can people say such things, and not die? Her mother has her hands over her face, and is crying big splashy interesting tears that burst through the gaps between her fingers. ‘Naughty Grandma,’ Gerda says. ‘Of course Mum loves me. You made her cry.’

‘I do love you,’ sobs Angela. ‘And I love Granny. I love her too.’

The three women sit there, hugging and weeping.

‘Isn’t it time to go and pick up Winston?’

On good behaviour, trying to be Mummy, Angela wipes her eyes and agrees.

The taxi-driver has his radio on. Moira knows she has to suffer it, it is all foretold, the tittering youngsters, the blaring voices, the hot rough car that shakes her exposed bones painfully against the seat. But then something catches her ear, and she finds that God has been good to her, yes, his mercy, yes, it is infinite, towards all those on the One True Path.

He is using a young astronomer, whose name is Davey, which means: David, beloved of God. He is talking of stars and portents. His tired young voice – for they are all tired, all God’s true prophets are tired by their work, though they take it up gladly, the cross of endeavour, but mercy, mercy, show me mercy, show me a sign oh Lord, she weeps, for her ribs are painful, and her crumbling backbone – explains that the planets are lining up. Mercury, Mars, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, Uranus … For a minute she thinks he says it isn’t important, that there is something else he wants to tell us, but she knows her ears can sometimes deceive her; besides, she is counting, feverishly. Seven. And even seventy times seven …

‘To the angel of the church of Ephesus write: “These are the words of the One who holds the seven stars in his right hand … From the throne went out flashes of lightning and peals of thunder. Burning before the throne were seven flaming torches, the seven spirits of God, and in front of it stretched what seemed a sea of glass, like a sheet of ice.”’

Her eyes stare out across the empty water, her fingertips wander across the car-window, its shining, blank, inhuman surface, wanting to touch something, to grasp, to feel.

Shirley opens her door, bleary-eyed, half-dressed, expecting to see their familiar postman, but instead she is faced by a smartly dressed woman, smiling a bright, rather tense, smile; but her eyes look red, as if from weeping.

‘How do you do,’ the woman says. ‘I’m Angela Lamb. And this is Gerda.’

Peering round from behind her is a laughing little girl.

‘Say hello, Gerda,’ the woman instructs her. ‘We are so looking forward to our time with Winston.’

The girl ignores her mother. ‘Where’s Winston?’ she asks.

Shirley stands looking at them blankly. ‘Sorry, I’ve overslept, Franklin’s not well …’

‘When I phoned last night you said Winston was better?’ the woman inquires, with the hint of a frown.

‘Yes, Winston’s fine, he’s up watching TV –’

‘I’ll go and find him.’ Gerda darts inside.

‘I’m just not sure –’ Shirley rubs her eyes. ‘Franklin wasn’t well last night.’ She hasn’t even had a cup of tea this morning; she slept with the boys; she hasn’t seen Elroy; she doesn’t quite know what day it is.

Angela’s first impressions are poor. This woman is hopelessly disorganized. But she makes an effort, and smiles once more. ‘Shall I wait in the car while you, er, get ready?’

‘I’m just not sure –’ Shirley mumbles. ‘I don’t know whether it’s infectious.’

‘Oh, Gerda’s terribly healthy,’ says Angela. She still sees doubt in the woman’s eyes. ‘I’m going to take them to the Western Gardens. I’ve planned it all. I can’t disappoint her.’