Submersion (19 page)

Whilst I continued with my extended leave from work, Tristan’s road back to normality took a very different route – he threw himself wholeheartedly into the hard labour opportunities offered by our good friend, Jessie. We spoke less and less about it – the mix of oddity and humour that we associated with the blindfold and handcuffs business soon losing its novelty. And the thick, grimy crust that Tristan left around the bathtub after a long soak was a long-suffered consequence of living with this hard-grafting man.
I’ll clean it up,
he always promised, and he always did. Eventually.

I did my best to fill the large echo of my days with other voices. Reuben became a regular, weekly fixture at my kitchen table. Yet, I instructed him to be discreet and ensured that all trace of him was gone by the time Tristan returned. Initially, I just didn’t want to explain his visits
. Then the thrill of keeping him secret kicked-in, part habit, part pleasure, and I just didn’t want to stop playing it that way. At least, that’s what I told myself.

Aunt Penny popped by regularly, too, but following the failed suggestion of a memorial service for Elinor, she had been a little distant towards me. Frosty and offended, or a little embarrassed; it was hard to be certain. Whatever, her visits became shorter and there was always something vague but urgent she had to dash off to.

One person I began to spend more time with was our hermit neighbour, Papa Harold. Visiting his house was a good excuse to get out of mine, without the drama and effort of a long row. Plus, if I felt my coping mechanisms failing me, I didn’t have far to return to the safe womb of my home and its familiarity.

‘Coffee?’ Papa H offered me, every morning, as I entered his home.

We kept a key at our house, to save his old legs the job of descending to his water-logged lower quarters. Hearing me creak the first few boards of the staircase always prompted this salutation.

‘If you’ve got it,’ I’d reply, a tradition and comfort as old as I could remember. ‘Jessie keeping you in good supply?’
              That question – answered with no more than a twinkle in his eye – was another repeated ritual. A few words that had so much unspoken in them; a history hidden between the vowels and consonants.

‘I’ll pour you a cup,’ was the final line in our short play, delivered, as I turned the corner into his kitchen.

Jessie was everyone’s unspoken supplier of illicit goods. Coffee, chocolate, cola – these three C’s were his mainstay, but if you had enough money, he could seek you out rarer items from his black market buddies – nuts, pineapple, cherries, chillies, bath salts, perfume. He dealt in meat as well, but that was rarer still and you had to be careful – people were funny about meat, suspicious about animals being farmed. Rumours about what kind of creatures were being farmed – and how - made people anxious, made them snitch. Coffee seemed to be in rich supply at present: everyone had a jar or packet stored away at the back of their top cupboard.

Bl
ack market goods aside, our food supplies came from the authorities, who controlled the price and household quota. Had done, even years before the landscape had been flooded.

What don’t they control?
Tristan liked to say, especially in front of Aunt Penny, who didn’t like such anti-government talk.
You’re right, they’ve probably got us bugged,
he’d tease in response.

His aura of repressed rebel did appeal to me, but I did warn him not to provoke her too much.

Pick your fights carefully,
I told him,
or you’ll be battling all day long with my aunt.

Wednesday was the food pick up day for our area. Supplies were collected from a huge warehouse on the industrial south side of the city. Tristan would go with Jessie in his speedboat, or row out if our friend was not available, and fill up with a week’s supply. We had a government issued ration book, which was officially
checked and stamped to ensure you didn’t exceed your weekly allotment or try to claim someone else’s. The office I worked in administered this, so I was entitled to some additional items – extra butter and sugar, and eggs, if they were available. Eggs aroused both envy and fear – the last emotion due to the farming aspect – but as the food I made with them never ventured far from our house, I rarely encountered these reactions.

The question of
how
and
where
this food was produced remained unanswered. Given the extensive flooding of our land, it could no longer be the natural way. Laboratories, that’s what we all suspected – secret labs, out of sight, but not out of mind. All our food, no matter who supplied it or what it was - vegetables, fruit, grains and livestock, all coming out of laboratories. But there was no way to actually know, not for certain. Even my privileged work position didn’t give up any clues, and I’d done my very best to find out, but the information just wasn’t forthcoming.

It’s imported,
was the clearest answer Jerry, my boss, ever gave me.
Nothing to get concerned about.

‘We can worry about it,’
Ronan had said to me, on a few occasions,
‘or we can just eat it.’

On the whole, we chose the latter.

In the past, Tristan had taken Papa H’s ration book along and collected his goods for him, but a change in policy – due to a break-in at the office where the books were printed – meant that food could not be picked-up by non-family members. Officially, Papa Harold was not family, although our families were connected like rivers. Yet, his agoraphobia meant he was afforded a luxury more envious than eggs or anything Jessie could get us on the sly – delivery direct to his door.

‘Could you be here when they come?’ he’d asked me, when he’d first discovered this change in arrangements. ‘I’m not good with strangers, and they might expect me to come to the door, come out into the street. Not done that in daylight since, well…’ He paused. ‘Not done that in daylight,’ he concluded, realising his sentence was already complete.

‘Of course,’ I promised.

This new arrangement commenced a fortnight after Reuben’s first visit. I ensured I was at Papa Harold’s in good time, with protective gear in place, should I need to step out onto the street. However, the delivery team were efficient and, once I had unlocked the front door and showed them Papa H’s ration book, they were happy to bring his supplies up to the first floor. So I retreated to his kitchen space and helped him unpack the goods as they arrived. Within ten minutes, the transaction was complete for the week.

Apart from sipping black market coffee or unpacking the deliveries, Papa H and I talked. Hours and hours. We didn’t talk about the obvious – we didn’t talk about Elinor – and I certainly didn’t mention Reuben or venture into Xavier territory. But we did talk about Billy and his discoveries.

‘What do you make of it, Agnes?’ he asked one afternoon, almost three months into my daughter’s disappearance.

We were in his kitchen, sat on sturdy wooden chairs that had the look and feel of something handed down over the years. The question and the thought of his ancestry reminded me just how closely affected Papa Harold had been by the dogs. For many of us, they were a plague from the past, a now extinct threat to our lives; at worse, their jaws and claws may have skimmed our skin, their hot, fowl breath growled in our ears. We had lived in fear, yes, but the effect had dissipated in the years following their demise. For Harold, the impact was emotional and physical. Whilst he did not recall his mother’s scream as a pack of three dragged her from his childhood home, he knew the outcome of that incident: the discovery of her faceless body some hours later on nearby woodland.

‘I don’t know what to think, H. I just hope it hasn’t started up again.’

‘That body was a puppy, Agnes. A puppy, and you know what that suggests? Breeding. Suggests that they are breeding. That someone is breeding them.’

‘Someone? Why would someone do that?’

‘Why would someone think keeping the streets flooded a good idea?’ he asked in response.

‘To stop the dogs,’ I answered, automatically.

He smiled, coughed a small laugh from his throat.

‘And since when did dogs learn not to swim?’

‘They put something in…’

‘In the water?’ He finished m
y sentence for me. ‘But, as you, I, your sister, Tristan, and no doubt young Billy also know there is nothing in the water, Agnes. There wasn’t so much as a blemish on them, was there? And Tristan was in the water some while, was he not? I had the body in here, Agnes – on this very table till the authorities took it away. Touched it with my own hands, got the water on me. Nothing, Agnes. Bet if we tested it, there’d be nothing in it.’

His talk was frightening me
a little now. Whilst Tristan and I had veered onto this subject, it had been pillow talk. Something between us. Hearing it outside of that realm made it something else – made the possibility stronger. Created an implication that we should do something, retaliate to the fact that something was possibly being done to us.

‘I’m just an old man talking,’ he said, reading my face, attempting to retreat. But we had ventured too far to simply turn back, so I pursued with a question.

‘If there’s nothing in the water, what killed the dogs?’

He shrugged, a reluctance to advance setting in.

‘Harold? Come on, you started this. I know you have a theory.’

He nodded, a silent agreement to commence.

‘Who says they were killed?’ he said, plainly, holding my eyes in his. ‘Maybe, like us, they are just being controlled? Maybe one got loose – the one Billy found in the water. And don’t forget that rat he found – it didn’t die from poisoning. Its head had been bitten off. Or maybe they
did
put something in the water, back then. But, like everything else, they’ve run out of supplies.’

We were both silent for a while, soaking up the possibilities that floated around our heads, our houses and beyond. Then, to my relief, Papa H broke our sinister contemplation with triviality.

‘Would you like some tea?’ he said, a smile breaching the serious barrier of his face. ‘My supplier has acquired some
Earl Grey
for me.’

‘
Earl Grey?
Your supplier is indeed a clever chap,’ I responded, a smile naturally appearing in reaction to his, my shoulders relaxing with evident relief that we were moving on from this shadowy territory. ‘I’d love some.’

I continued to intersperse my time at my house and Papa Harold’s - receiving Reuben in secret at mine one or two days a week, and receiving tea and wisdom at Papa H’s on the others, as well as groceries on a Wednesday. For all my instinctive trusting of my missionary friend, I didn’t broach the subjects I discussed with Harold. We all knew the authorities had a firm grip on what we did. To speak out against them to anyone – in particular someone you had only known a matter of weeks – was a huge risk.

Instead, Reuben and I talked about the one thing I avoided with everyone else, aside from Tristan: my daughter.

Yet, just two days after Papa Harold and I had discussed his anti-authority theories, something happened that brought this subject back to my table.

It was a Friday. I know that for certain, because the day that Papa H and I shared that comforting pot of Earl Grey was also the day his
permitted food supplies were delivered - a Wednesday.

Reuben was with me, too. At my kitchen table, encouraging me to talk, encouraging me, I realise looking back, to take action. Encouraging me to go and look for Elinor, if I was so convinced she was simply missing, hidden away. At the time, I’d just assumed he was persuading me to search for his god, with his references to
hope
and
the truth.

Tristan came home early, nearly splitting the wood of my front door as he entered, fierce and fast.

‘Agnes! Agnes!’ he cried, pounding up the stairs, the dampened boards creaking faintly, despite his tread. ‘Agnes, are you here?’

‘Yes!’ I answered, hoping the sense of alarm that pulsed through my veins wasn’t evident in my voice.

Reuben was sat opposite me across the kitchen table, my alarm reflected in his pale facade. The urgency in Tristan’s voice and the whitening of Reuben’s face suggested this wasn’t the right time to explain my secret association.

In there,
I mouthed, indicating the walk-in, under-the-stairs cupboard in the corner.

‘What is it?’ I asked, composing myself just in time, managing to focus enough to respond naturally to Tristan’s excited return.

On entering the room and seeing me, relief appeared to flood his senses and, taking a chair, he rapidly calmed.

‘Needed to see you,’ he offered, a little short of breath, indicating he had hurried
home, not an easy task in a small rowing boat.

I smiled, flatly, a little unsure. Tristan wasn’t
un
romantic – but on the whole he was realistic with his affections and not prone to spontaneity. So, this sentimental explanation for his hurried entrance raised instant suspicions.

Sat opposite him, I
said nothing, allowing him to quickly realise I wasn’t convinced.