The Flood (31 page)

Perhaps there is room for one other passenger, as long as they will come without cargo. Isaac thinks about his sister Susy, whom he loves, though they quarrelled years ago, when he drove the One Way-ers out of the house … Susy. A little pain in his chest. He dials her number; it rings once, twice. Then he imagines what will happen; if she comes with him, she’ll never come alone; ever since she was little she’s adopted things, birds, puppies, human wreckage; he imagines them, scrabbling at the helicopter, helpless, dirty, hysterical … Four rings, then he puts it down. He sits there thinking, his packages all round him, his best leather overcoat tightly buttoned, the water and heating already turned off, the flood- and bomb-proof storeroom sealed. After a while he dials another number.

Angela has struggled, sopping wet, furious, into the hulk of the drowned glass-house. She feels ancient, and stupid, and very tired. She left her new shoes in the boat with the gardener (she wore them in case Winston’s mother was smart; but Winston’s mother had not been smart). What if the young man abandons them?

She is too old for the thing she is doing, inching along the branch of a tree, scratching her feet every step of the way, the leaves whipping and scratching at her cheeks, but she hears the children up in the echoing roof, and there’s no other way to reach the white staircase.

‘Gerda!’ she calls. ‘Win-ston!’ No answer. She listens a moment. They are quarrelling. ‘Gerda,’ she shouts. ‘Come down this instant!’ She peers awkwardly up through the tangle of branches, but as she does so, something falls straight past her, something wet and black, which splashes her cheek, and suddenly both the children are screaming.

Swinging over the void, she reaches the white handrail, grips it, pulls herself across, clings, for a second to catch her breath, then finds herself slapping up the steep narrow staircase, wet feet slithering perilously. She tries to shout, but her ribs are hurting. She reaches the top gasping like a grampus. Gerda, she thinks, you’ll suffer for this.

But just as she gets there, she sees them below her, they have both run down the opposite staircase, and crouch side by side on its bottom rung.

They seem to be fighting. Gerda’s clutching Winston.

Aching, shivering, Angela follows them, crossing the walkway, descending the staircase, holding on tight because the view makes her dizzy, the enormous trees, tiny heads of the children, the dirty water stretching out all round them. Now there’s no way that they can escape her. She slips, nearly falls, tells herself
take care.

Twenty metres below her – fifteen – four –

There’s a splash like the sound of a world exploding. One of the children has fallen in the water.

She can’t lose Gerda – her life – her daughter –

But straining round the ironwork, she sees it’s Winston.

Gerda is shouting: ‘Don’t! Come back!’

Ian, Gerda’s ‘painter man’, picks up his phone, and finds it is Isaac. The two of them are old – not friends, but acquaintances. Isaac would say ‘friend’, Ian ‘acquaintance’. Ian is one of Isaac’s few straight friends. Isaac’s always considered him phenomenally talented, though Ian would never listen to advice. Isaac represented him for years and set up some absolutely key commissions, but Ian frequently didn’t play ball – Ian only wanted to work for himself, and at first that sometimes included portraits, which Isaac sold for a lot of money, but then something odd started happening, the portraits slipped towards caricature, so some clients laughed, and some were offended; then they slipped a little further, a little broader, and the point of the caricature became clear: Ian saw people as animals, jackals, hyenas, wild-cats, snakes. Isaac admired them, but couldn’t sell them, though later, after the two of them had parted, the great museums started buying them, and Ian became one of the world’s most successful artists, though almost nothing was known about him. On one of the rare occasions they had met, after their business partnership had broken down, Isaac congratulated Ian on his marketing tactics. ‘Absolutely brilliant! The Beckett touch! You have created such mystique!’ But Ian just laughed, and turned away, and started sketching something on the back of a napkin.

Isaac no longer knows Ian’s number by heart, but he flicks through his palm-top and swiftly finds it. Only ten minutes till he has to leave. They’re picking up from the pad in the north-west of the city. Shall he phone, or not? The power of life and death …

A silverfish flicks across Isaac’s desk.

He squashes the silverfish, but rings Ian’s number.

The question he puts is a little self-conscious, aware of his beneficence, almost shy.

But the answer is succinct. Ian isn’t coming. ‘I can’t do it. Got to go to the zoo. OK then, mate. I hope you make it.’

May finds her son as the second wave of helicopters starts to rumble over the city. The Towers are decked with feeble yellow bunting where occasional leaflets have stuck to windows, caught on mouldings, blown like leaves on to balconies. The flood waters have a freight of dirty yellow paper. The Tower-dwellers carry its stain in their hearts, a grim leakage of fear down the edge of the day. They veer between terror and forgetfulness. They cannot accept it, because they don’t have an enemy; nobody, surely, could hate them so much as to want to bomb them, poison them, gas them, any of the fates the leaflets threaten … Any of the things that Bliss may have done, in other words, to the other country, their new, faceless, invisible enemy. But now, slowly, under the surface, in the depths of their hearts where there is no argument, where knowledge never reaches, beyond logic, they start to hate, because they start to fear. The yellow leaflets are the first poison.

May, however, has lived through the war. May doesn’t take a lot of notice. It’s just that smarmy Mr Bliss, trying to get his face on everything. She feels sorry for the child in the photograph, though. She dimly remembers the mask she wore as a teenager for gas-mask drills. It was hot, and heavy, and suffocating, like a dream from which you could not wake up, and she briefly wonders, as she searches the Towers, as she goes up yet another flight of empty, inhuman stairs, panting, resting, aware of a nagging pain in her foot, as she knocks on yet another peep-holed door, no longer afraid of what she will find because she has already seen it all – the enormously fat man propped up against a packing-case, dressed in a parka and underpants, his legs stretching out like two alien life-forms behind the skeleton who cared for him, his starved yellow daughter with her withered skin; the old black woman who came to the door clutching the shoulder of her crawling son, dragging himself intently along, but he could see, his eyes yearning upwards, while his mother’s are milky, lightless, blind; the crack dens, where young people twitched and dozed and a skinny dog wolfed the forgotten hamburgers spilled like excrement across the floor – she briefly wonders, as she knocks on a door, this tenth, or twentieth, or thirtieth door since she started searching, today, yesterday – if her life since the death of her dear Alfred has been just such a dream, heavy, comfortless, a dream where everything is seen through pain – so she might still wake and turn and find him, not dark and cold as he was last night, but somewhere where they could be in colour, his dear red face and funny mouth, the pale blue eyes that always softened to see her; and the door opens, this thirtieth door, this door no more hopeful than any other, and suddenly she sees him, at the back of a crowd, that face and body she’d forgotten to love, that form so familiar she could close her eyes and still see him there, against that bleak window, Alfred’s narrow shoulders, his wiry arms …

But the angry crest of fair hair is Dirk’s.

‘I’m his mother,’ she says to the young white woman who opens the door, pointing at Dirk, and the woman frowns, uncertain for a moment, then suddenly beckons her in.

‘Dirk?’ May says, a little bit shy, for everyone’s turned to look at her. Perhaps fifty people are packed in this room. The fluorescent light is bright, after the dim cold landing. Dirk looks at her with his mouth open, and she wants to tell him to shut it again, for it isn’t an expression that makes him look intelligent.

There is a weird-looking man like a priest, at the front, in a kind of long white dress, with a scarf, and his eyes are strange, dark-ringed, scary, as if he hasn’t slept for months, but the iris is paler even than Dirk’s. Eyes as white as glass or ice, fixing on her like a bird of prey’s. Now he’s talking to Dirk, who he calls ‘Brother Dirk’, and motioning him to deal with her. May starts to feel she is intruding on something. There is an atmosphere, tense, electric, not just to do with her bursting in.

Dirk looks older, thinner, than she remembers. He too has a garment like a priest’s surplice, but shorter than the other man’s. It is a physical shock when he comes near. She remembers this; once he was hers. She finds herself thinking, but he’s half my Alfred. She catches her breath; she wants to cry. Something is coming to a close at last, something is happening that had to happen.

Angela clutches at her daughter, but Gerda shakes off her mother’s arm. She is crouching on the bottom step, looking down. Her cheeks are bright red; she’s just starting to cry.

‘Winston jumped in, I told him not to –’

Angela sees the boy, swimming about, a plucky, not very fluent dog-paddle: the hanging branches and leaves look threatening, arms of things that want to trap him.

Anger comes to suppress her fear. ‘What on earth does that boy think he’s doing?’

‘He dropped Bendy Rabbit. But he can’t dive.
Winston!
Come back, Mum will get your rabbit – you will, won’t you, Mum, say that you will –’

‘But Gerda, we’ll never find it in here. We’ll have to buy him another one –’

‘Stupid Mummy! You don’t understand!’

‘What are you doing?’ Dirk says, grumpy. Suddenly it’s all very ordinary, for how often has May heard him sounding like this. ‘I don’t know why you’ve bothered to come. Matter of fact, I’m very busy.’

She was going to embrace him – all kids loved hugs, but Dirk, as a boy, had been hard to hug – but, hearing his sulky voice, stepped back.

‘I read in the papers you were out of prison,’ she says, very quietly, mouthing the last bit with meaningful gestures of her eyebrows, for no one need know he had been to prison.

‘Fat lot you care,’ he said, and suddenly looked young, he looked like the skinny blond boy she remembered, imagining the other two were loved more than him.

‘I didn’t think you liked it when I visited,’ she said, simply, but she did feel guilty, she was in the wrong, she couldn’t explain why she had just given up on him. (She had got so tired, it was her age, perhaps, but she knew that Alfred would never have allowed it, if he’d been alive they would have gone to see him, no matter what the boy had done.) ‘Your poor nails, Dirk,’ she said suddenly, reaching out and taking his hand, for the quick of the nail was raw and bleeding and the skin on the knuckles was flaky and pale. He snatched it away, with a harsh little breath, then looked at the floor for a second, hunched, then with a violent, unreadable convulsion of emotion, tried to put it back again. She took it, she held it. It felt like wood; wounded, awkward. A limb re-attached after a terrible accident.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know anything. I never did.’ It was there again, that sinking feeling. Her whole life as a mother, her whole life as a wife, she had never known anything, she’d just reacted, just done the next thing as the next day came, and mostly it was wrong. Her whole hurrying life. It was only afterwards you understood things.

(But maybe it had been like that for Dirk. Was it possible? She stared at him. Perhaps it was even like that with …
a murder.
Perhaps a great bird snatched you up in its claws, perhaps you were muffled in the dark smelly feathers, perhaps the thing happened in blind, deaf panic, and then the cruel feet dropped you again. And then, in the light, you saw you had done it, and everyone was standing staring at you. For a second May felt as if she had murdered. Perhaps she and Dirk had done it together.)

‘Brother
Dirk!
’ a frightening voice shouted now. May blinked, and returned to the crowded room. Everyone was silent. The light was too bright. Everyone stood there staring at them. May felt very shy. She held Dirk’s hand tighter. The voice was the voice of the priest at the front.

‘We are in process of judgement on Sister Kilda. We require your attention, Brother Dirk.’

‘It’s just my mother,’ Dirk mumbled, looking down (she had tried to teach him not to mumble; had constantly told him to stand up straight, and she nudged him, with her elbow, as she had done so often, but he twitched away as if she had kicked him, and his head went forward, as it often did, into what May used to think of as Dirk’s head-butt position).

‘The court will continue,’ the priest announced. ‘Brother Dirk, you have promised to forsake all others. Is this woman to stay, or go?’

Dirk looked confused. ‘It’s not a woman, Father Bruno,’ he muttered. ‘It’s, you know, my mother. She’s only just got here. I can’t chuck her out, like,
straight away
.’

For a moment Father Bruno’s face became completely blank, a queer shivering contortion that left it like a mirror, and what May saw in the glass was so frightening that she looked away, for she saw her own death, but it was only a moment, then the image was gone, and the man waved the two of them forward together.

‘Gerda, I never learned to dive.’ Angela is trying not to cry herself. She ought to be able to sort this out, if she were better, if she were stronger. Winston is not responding to her shouts.

‘Zoe taught me, in the diving pool. Because she said I was the best at swimming.’

‘You’re not going!’ Angela shrieks. She manages to scrabble a hold on Gerda’s dress.

Gerda watches Winston splashing about. He keeps pushing his little face down into the water, and comes up choking and coughing out slime.

How long, thinks Angela, can he keep this up? The water on her body feels cold as death.