The Flood (2 page)

‘Cha! Are you takin’ dem rubbish ting wid you?’ she calls after him, picking up the dressings he has discarded, but he doesn’t understand foreign languages, foreign people, old women, he keeps on walking into the future.

Back in the car, the Book lies open, the only book Bruno needs to read, the only pages of the only book, though that’s not what he says to Jews and Muslims.

St John is writing to the seven churches. The hour of fulfilment is coming nearer. These are the words of the One who holds the seven spirits of God, the seven stars … The scroll is still fastened with seven seals, but soon all secrets will be revealed, soon his justice will come upon them. ‘How long, sovereign Lord, holy and true, must it be before thou wilt vindicate us and avenge our blood on the inhabitants of the earth?’

The great day of vengeance was at hand, and who would be able to stand before God?

Bruno knows that the end will come.

‘Then the seven angels that held the seven trumpets prepared to blow them.’

Winston and Franklin, May’s grandchildren, sons of Shirley and Elroy Edwards, can’t go to nursery school today, because it is closed for teacher training. Usually Shirley, who is doing a degree with a view to becoming a teacher herself, would leave the boys with their grandmother, but May has just had her house treated for woodworm, and Shirley fears it’s toxic.

And so the boys fight each other, soundless, possessed, within the box of steel that drives them to the Towers.

They love each other as twins do; adore each other with wordless belonging. They hate each other like a blade and a cut. They somehow need to be one, not two, and they maul each other to make it happen. The boys need exercise, air and sunlight, but days of rain have hemmed them in.

As Shirley drove towards the east of the city, the streets outside grew smaller, dingier, jammed with battered vehicles because there were no garages. Franklin had his finger up Winston’s nose: Winston was biting hard on something pink and chunky; yes, the thumb-pad of Franklin’s hand. ‘You hurt Bendy Rabbit,’ he shouts at Franklin. Bendy Rabbit is sacrosanct. Oddly, Franklin doesn’t have a favourite animal. Winston is his favourite animal.

Shirley frowned forward into the traffic. She was late. Doubly late, for the sitter, Kilda, aged fifteen, and her Accessing Culture class back in the centre. And she worried. Kilda was too flighty to mind two four-year-olds alone all day, but Shirley couldn’t miss another class. Kilda was a sniffing, nasal redhead at the sullen epicentre of her teens, who had come to Shirley through her mother Faith, Shirley’s former cleaner.

(Shirley was fond of Faith in a way. Fat little Faith, bucketing onwards, who helped her out before her first husband died. But Faith’s daughter Kilda was an unknown quantity; Kilda was an accident, Faith had once confided. Kilda was beautiful, sweaty, and silent, statuesque where her mother was short. She had huge grey eyes that to Shirley seemed blank, though Elroy said they were beautiful.)

Now she frowned and drove, drove on the brakes and the accelerator, not swearing through recourse to her religious faith. ‘Sugar. Sugar, sugar. Shoot, shoot …’ The streets were slippery and parts of them were flooded; her tyres were soft; the car handled badly. She wanted to be somewhere else, another person, in another life, a slimmer, younger, childless person. She blinked with shock at her disloyalty, she who had longed all her life for children –

In the split second when Shirley’s eyes were closed, a dented yellow rust-bucket, blinded by the sun blazing down the road, suddenly pulled out from the kerb, straight across her, making her swerve.

‘Shoot … oh
shoot
…’

Franklin’s finger slipped out of Winston’s nose and jabbed, quite by accident, into his eye, a good result for Franklin, till Winston, roaring with surprise and pain, crushed his elbow into Franklin’s genitals. Both of them bellowed like startled bulls. Shirley span the wheel hard and the crucifix hanging in the front of the car swung wildly and hit the roof.

‘Oh shoot…
Shit…
oh FUCK.’

She had hit something, something not very hard, low to the ground, something living. The boys stopped yelling to turn round in their seats and pick out in the dazzle a dark awful shape outlined in gold dragging itself across the road between the cars. It was a mangled tabby cat. Something dying.

‘You hit a pussy!’

‘Stop, stop!’

‘It’s all bleeding.’

‘It’s fell over!
Mum
! Mum!’

The two boys put their arms round each other and hugged tightly, with big grave eyes. Their tiny digits played light rapid grace-notes in their opposite’s skin, till the fluttering calmed them. On two different notes, they began to hum. Being two was easier when they were one.

Gripping the wheel with big white knuckles, Shirley roared on towards the Towers.

They loomed towards her out of the haze, standing up like guns, identical, as if the architect had only one idea, which had replicated, blindly, where people were poor. They rose above the earth like a forest of dead trees, their tips in sunlight, their root-balls dark.

Dirk has been out of prison three months. He still doesn’t quite believe he is free when he wakes from sleep, shaking and terrified.

Dirk was in prison long enough for the bolts and bars to grow inside him. His original sentence was considered light, insultingly so by the victim’s family. The barrister got the charge reduced to manslaughter, claiming the victim had made a sexual suggestion, which had naturally horrified his client in his state of distress over his dying father.

Dirk felt quite hard done by, hearing this speech. That Winston geezer was a fucking pervert!

Though he got full remission for good behaviour, and some extra wangled by the prison chaplain, who was always happy when the men found God, prison seemed to Dirk like the unending hell he has teetered on the edge of all his life.

Why has no one helped him to make a life? It can’t be too late. He is only in his twenties.

Other white prisoners liked him at first, since the man he killed was black, and also a poofter. ‘One less of them does no harm,’ someone hissed. He came in with a rep for having bottle.

But quite soon the others turned against him. They said he smelled bad. They called him Banana-Face; he looked in the mirror and saw it was true, prison had made him look yellow and crooked. And his hair was thinning, which made him wretched. Like he had to grow old before he’d had any chances.

And the cell had been small. Small and stinking. There was trouble with the drains, with all the rain. Some days the sun never seemed to shine. Life had got smaller, uglier. Smaller and darker. If possible. Life with May and Alfred had been small enough. Dirk got the crap bedroom, because he was the youngest. He had the crap job, in a newsagent.

There’d been poofters in prison, wherever you looked. Nowhere you could go to escape them. There were things that had happened at night, sometimes, which made him twitch with disgust the next day. In there it had been a jungle, or a pigsty. In there he had had to let standards slip. For a few minutes life flashed red and alive, but afterwards shame made it worse. There was no … no … Whatever it was that his cow of a mother hadn’t given him wasn’t here either. People did it to each other out of hatred, and they hated Dirk, of course, and he hated them, but still he had to do it. And live with it, half-closing his eyes. Swearing never again – never again. Knowing it would always happen again.

But now he’s found something he thinks is his own. Dirk has his own vision of heaven, a mount of blood and gold and glory, a place where his enemies will burn like straw, all the people who picked on him.

One day some priests had come to visit. All the lads volunteered to go, to wind them up. Dirk had looked at the slip of paper. He didn’t read as fast as some.
‘The Brothers and Sisters of the Last Days’.
(Sisters and brothers. What good were they? Dirk’s sister Shirley had married a darkie, and his big brother Darren had fucked off abroad.)

Dirk read it, very slowly and effortfully, because he was bored, because he wanted something, he wanted anything, he needed, he needed – it was like hunger, pressing him on.

‘We believe in saving souls,’ he made out. ‘Anyone can be saved. Come home to the One Who is All.’ (At first he read it as ‘the One Who is Ali,’ and thought, disgusted, they must be Muslims.) ‘One Way, One Truth, One Path. Open your hearts, and come home.’

Something like a pain, like indigestion, had risen up towards his throat, and an odd hot feeling scratched at his eyes. When he’d read it again, for the meaning, the pain got clearer, catching him out, sneaking up on him. He had crumpled the paper into a ball, flung it into his chamber-pot, watched it go yellow, then dark, then sink into the foul depths…

Mum had come to see him a few times in prison, and told him some lies, but quite soon, she stopped. Even when she came, she had never stayed long. Then she started writing letters, but they made him depressed, going on about Shirley having babies and Darren getting divorced again, all the normal achievements that seemed beyond him.

In fact, his mother hated him.

She always had done. (There was nothing, no one.)

So did Shirley, his sister, who had once seemed to love him. That was over for ever, since Dirk had killed Winston. The pansy fucking brother of Shirley’s black boyfriend.

(It was the one moment in Dirk’s life to date when he had felt like himself, or at least like
someone.
They were in the park, where his father was God, but Dad was in hospital, on his last legs, and the coloureds took advantage, they were everywhere, laughing, and this one had lured Dirk into the toilets, and Dirk went in after him to do Dad’s work, to protect the park, to stand up for justice, but then the man played with himself, in the dark, and Dirk had to kill him to save himself from the raw red hunger that came upon him. For once he had power over another body. But the blood was soon everywhere, the mess, the terror, and he had been left as before, alone, creeping back like a rat before his mother could see him.)

But Mum must have noticed. Must have gone to the police. She tried to blame Dad, when she first came to visit, but Dirk knew Dad would never have told of him. They all said it, though, even the police, and Shirley, the one time his sister came to see him, they all pretended Dad had grassed him up. But Dad had been fond of him. Hadn’t he? Dad had tried to teach him football, in the park, for weeks, and only gave up because Dirk was hopeless.

Now Dad was dead, the only one who’d loved him.

They had sent Dirk to Gallwood, the city prison, which was only a bus ride from where Mum lived, but she didn’t bother. She’d forgotten him.

So he hadn’t told her he was out of prison. She wouldn’t be glad. She wouldn’t want to know. He didn’t need Mum, or Darren, or Shirley.

It didn’t matter now, because he had a new family. Now Dirk had Brothers and Sisters again, the Brothers and Sisters of the Last Days. He was accepted at last. He was one of them.

He was, wasn’t he? He went to the meetings. No one had actually turned him away.

‘Open your hearts, and come home.’

‘Oh
here
you are dear,’ said Faith (insincerely, for when the women she worked for weren’t around she sometimes called them ‘that cow’ or ‘that bitch’) as she finally opened the door to Shirley. ‘I hope you haven’t had to wait.’

It had seemed an age to Shirley, who was horribly late, who had climbed the stairs, because the lift was broken, who felt she’d stood for ever on the bleak, echoing landing above the narrow, precipitous stairwell, clutching the hands of the twins, afraid; they were trying to wrest away from her. It felt dizzily far above the dank basement. She clutched the boys tighter, though they yelled louder, and tried not to hear what Faith was saying, what she had somehow known she would say – ‘I did say eight thirty and I don’t want to, you know, make a big thing of it but we are trying to, you know, help you out, I should have been in the centre by nine because Mrs Segall’s kid can’t really be trusted to go to school even though Lola is sixteen now –’

She broke off briefly and at last let Shirley and the twins in through the door to the welcome fug of warmth with its undernote of damp, but as Shirley let go the little hands at last Faith’s small eyes glittered and she pounced again. ‘– But then, the mother’s got more money than sense. You car-drivers,’ she said, with a meaningful look, ‘whizzing round polluting everything, no offence, but do a good turn when you can, is what I say, it’s very central, it’s on your way –’

‘But Faith, you don’t know where I’m going –’

‘– I don’t suppose you know Mrs Segall, Lottie? Used to be a looker, now she’s getting on a bit, just drop me off there and then we’ll all be happy.’

‘I thought you were going to be here with Kilda?’ Shirley asked blankly. But the large determined bottom had barrelled away. ‘Where
is
Kilda?’ Shirley asked the wall.

‘Mummy kills cats!’ shouted Franklin triumphantly, hugging Winston, who hugged him back. The two boys began kissing each other’s faces like cats licking each other, making little breathy noises of happiness. Franklin broke off first. ‘Mummy drives on top of cats! The cat got dead!’

‘That cat got dead. Poor cat,’ said Winston, and suddenly began to cry, big tender tears in which, as Shirley stooped to wipe them, she briefly saw a perfect miniature ribbon-crossed parcel of light, the reflection of the four-paned kitchen window; a black cross on a white background. There had been a large cross just inside the front door. Perhaps Faith or Kilda had become religious. Shirley felt glad; it would keep her sons safe. But the tears kept welling from Winston’s eyes.

Faith reappeared in a blue velvet coat with frogging, which Shirley guessed had once belonged to an employer. It gaped over Faith’s big reddened chest. ‘I can’t hang about,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry about the kiddies, Shirley.’

‘Where is Kilda exactly?’ Shirley inquired, finding herself hustled out of the door, as the boys began to understand she was leaving and set up a desolate caterwaul.