The Flood (30 page)

Angela screamed, ‘What are you doing?’

Clutching Bendy Rabbit, Gerda followed him.

Elroy has always been good in the mornings. Elroy has sometimes been bad at night, but Elroy is excellent in the mornings.

Most days Elroy gets up first, pads through the flat, puts the kettle on for a cup of tea for Shirley, quietly enjoys the peace of his home, the little cave with its breathing humans, its cleanliness, its warmth, its goodness. This morning, though, he’s had four hours’ sleep, and wakes up very late, with his heart beating wildly. Shirley is not in the bed beside him. Now he lies there anxious, trying to remember why he’s woken with a weight of fear on his chest.

He’d been called by Shirley at the end of the Gala to say Franklin’s temperature has gone through the roof. ‘Liquid paracetamol,’ he told her. He didn’t want to know about Franklin’s temperature, when he was at the Gala, enjoying himself, when he couldn’t do anything except worry. And it wasn’t fair: only hours before, when he’d rung up to check how his family were, she had reassured him, more or less: Winston was cooler, both boys were sleeping …

Then Elroy’s worry becomes specific.

Elroy remembers what happened next. An epidemiologist he knew slightly from another hospital came across and chatted. There was a solidarity between successful black men in the Health Service. They had a smoke together, decided that they liked each other, arranged to meet for a game of squash. As the man turned to leave, he paused for a moment, and said, in a low, conspiratorial tone, ‘We’ve been told to keep it quiet by the government, but there’s something big in the pipe-line … We’ve got eight cases of flood sickness. The thing they had in Makaria.’

What’s the matter with me? Elroy asked himself. Am I deaf, or insane?

It hadn’t occurred to him that the boys –

But now he is running down the corridor, clumsy, heart pumping, mouth dry with fear. He looks in through the door of the twins’ room; Shirley is lying on the floor, covered by a duvet; but the boys must be up; their beds are empty. A wash of relief. They must be watching television.

Then he spots the bulge of a boy’s body and tight-curled head under Shirley’s duvet. Sleeping, Shirley looks utterly at peace, creamy, flushed, beautiful. But the first brief glance at the boy’s exposed cheek shows the strange red buboes he had so dreaded, the sharp stigmata of flood sickness.

By lunch-time on the day after the Gala, Davey, who did not sleep last night, is utterly exhausted. Davey’s warnings have not been heard; he has been treated as a showman by the ‘experts’, which means those astronomers who aren’t up to speed on what is happening at the moment; he has been ridiculed as a TV lightweight, an accusation that cuts him to the bone; he has been comprehensively mocked and doubted. It was only a couple of days ago that the papers were full of the planetary line-up – and now before his programme has even gone out, Davey’s telling them the problem is a runaway comet. Most of the people who interviewed him insisted on talking about the planets, because that’s what it said in their briefing notes; when Davey told them it was a red herring, they asked him why he’d made a programme about it; there was no answer, except the money. ‘The point is,’ Davey says, hearing his voice grate and break, not his usual pleasant, humorous voice, the one they like and pay him for, ‘the point is, if this object hits, it may be two thousand kilometres away, but there will be massive tsunamis – tidal waves, to most of us – ironically, just as our programme predicts. But this time it’s real. It’s serious. Thousands of people will die on the coasts. Lives can be saved if people move inland.’

Not a single interviewer seems to believe it. And half of Davey can’t believe it either. It is not a certainty, just possible, according to the measurements Sharp’s team is taking – with every second, becoming more likely, as the course of the comet narrows towards them – depending on the balance of delicate forces, the movements of other astral bodies whose movements may vary minutely, vitally. No one is willing to credit that there is a fifty, fifty-five per cent chance of this happening.

In a way, Davey agrees with the dissenters. There is never a fifty per cent chance of anything. Merely two worlds: one where it happens, where everything returns to nothing, and one where all of life goes on. Time splits, and splits, and splits again: what matters is being in the lucky fraction. Now he must find his sister, his mother, now he must make his way to Delorice – Davey will not be leaving the city, although Professor Sharp has gone already.

Davey has never been a praying man, but Davey finds that he is praying. For all the people he knows and loves, for all the people of the city. Davey, after all, is not really scientist. He puts himself in the hands of the gods.

All those who slept little, or not at all, have a day of dread, after the Gala. Lottie, Ian, Elroy, Lola, Gracie, Isaac, Freddy …

And although it’s a public holiday, quite a few people are feeling gloomy. The sun, which has shone for three whole days, has vanished behind a thin veil of cloud. People start to realize the flood-waters have hardly receded, despite yesterday’s official claims; they just looked better with the sunlight on them. Perhaps they went down a metre, if that.

Now some people say they are rising again. The swimming-pools are closed, and the tap-water tastes funny, as if it has been doused with chemicals.

Yesterday they knew they had turned the corner. Today, outside the centre, the smell is still there, and the dirty, irregular water-buses, and the little bodies, of drowned rats and mice, and the bin-bags, festering, decomposing.

The hissing whisper is ‘flood sickness’. No one is worried about astral bodies.

On the long strings of space-time, events are gathering.

Mr Bliss is upset. The papers have shown themselves, as usual, utterly base and trivial apropos of his glittering Gala performance. ‘Look, guys, I’m happy to answer questions,’ he’d told his audience, frankly, freely, awaiting the questions he’d pre-arranged. Mr Bliss takes risks! He meets the people! But instead of the photo-opportunities he’d planned, all the papers have photos of the horrid little girl, even the centre-centre
Daily Bread,
and some have photos of a dancing teenager, with ‘BLISS IS A ARSE’ on her tiny pants.

‘You are the Emperor with No Clothes!’

There had been howls, gales, roars of laughter. He had shrugged, likeably, grinned, grinned, held the expression till his cheek muscles ached, said, ‘Thank you, guys! I think that’s enough questions!’ though Anwar was gesturing strictly from the rostrum; he fled down the long bright room feeling sick, knowing everyone was whispering and pointing at him: ‘There goes the Emperor with No Clothes’.

Life was real, life was earnest, but no one would listen. The indignation burned a hole in his chest.

Today he had caught Anwar Topping laughing at a particularly hurtful cartoon. His wife had also been unpleasant to him; instead of praising his handling of the flood situation, she’d poured out a tide of nonsense she’d got from some clairvoyant (every week, she found a new one) predicting plague and tidal waves. Meanwhile, the
Daily Mire
had rubbished his very good dossier on sabotage, which some of his people had spent hours compiling. (Darren White, of course, was always a loose cannon: he’d been footsying with Anwar about an honour, while secretly writing this sabotage piece.) And now there were more cases of flood sickness, and accusations of a cover-up … Granted, the first cases were weeks ago, but the government’s job was to prevent a panic. And then on top of it, this TV astronomer was screaming about the end of the world!

As the day went on, his mood worsened. A chap did his best, but people were ungrateful.

At eleven a.m., Berta called him. ‘It’s all very well, what you say about the floods, but there’s still loads of stinking black sludge in our garage. Come straight home and clean it out.’

He was somebody, wasn’t he? He was the Leader! Now he would make his wife realize that.

The children have disappeared into the Palm House. Angela stands in the boat, screaming. She can see them, quite clearly, through the gap in the glass, black shapes crawling down the branch of a tree, ending up clinging to the white spiral staircase that leads up into the upper gallery.

‘Gerda!’ she yells. ‘Come back at once!’

‘We’re OK, Mummy,’ Gerda calls.

At least, in chaos, they have something to cling on to. The white curved iron is like a helix. They are scurrying upwards. They are out of sight.

‘Do something,’ Angela shouts at the young gardener, who is sitting open-mouthed, looking after them.

‘You’ll have to go, missis,’ he grunts. ‘They’re your kids. And besides, I can’t swim.’

Angela kicks off her shoes and jumps in. It’s a very long time since she has been swimming. The dirty water closes over her head. It feels like death; she knows she is dying.

That afternoon, all over the city, in the newly cleaned centre and on Two Zoo Hill, in the drowned parks and the beleaguered libraries, around the grey Towers with their tide of debris, rocket-sticks, defunct Roman candles, helicopters begin to hover. The residents hardly notice; they are used to the drone of helicopters, chasing burglars, monitoring demonstrations, keeping an eye on the city’s pleasures, making sure nothing gets out of hand. It’s a public holiday, and people have hangovers, so most of the city stays in their houses, watching TV, catching up with the papers. But when a few people put their boots on and step outside for a breath of air, they find the city has been covered with leaflets, bright yellow, slim, ubiquitous leaflets. On the front is a picture of Mr Bliss, but his face is half-obscured by a gas mask, and he is holding out another one to a child, who is looking up at him adoringly. ‘PROTECT AND SURVIVE’, the yellow chits shout. Unbelieving, reluctant, gingerly holding the flimsy pamphlet with Bliss’s masked face, the people of the city begin to read.

The city has launched a pre-emptive strike on the hostile power which caused the floods. It’s been done to make the city safer; we could not do nothing in the face of aggression. As always, Bliss thought of our children’s future (as he OK’d the draft, he thought briefly, sourly of the red-headed child with her unfair question. He wasn’t committed to that child’s future).

But in the short term, there might be reprisals. The enemy were ruthless, and would stop at nothing. The people of the city should be vigilant. If an incident occurred, they should stay at home, and switch their TVs and radios on. The government would keep them fully informed, and explain the safest course of action. At the last minute, Mr Bliss had decided to cut the last passage, which asked people not to stockpile food, and told them not to try to leave the city. Of course, the awkward squad would do precisely that.

The leaflet ended opaquely; ‘Home is the safest place,’ it said. But it didn’t explain how they were to get home, if the boatmen themselves had all gone home, and all the people who should save or help them, the police, the firemen, the doctors, the nurses; or how they should deal with the heavy knot of terror that clenches as they read this pamphlet.

Gerda, however, is perfectly happy. The helicopters haven’t reached the west. The Gardens is one of her favourite places. The top of the Palm House feels almost normal, with its narrow iron walkway running round under the roof so the children look down on the crowns of the palm trees, like huge green stars or octopuses, though there’s only water below and between them, where usually she can peek through the gaps and see people’s heads bobbing like toadstools. There’s an ‘up’ spiral staircase and a ‘down’ spiral staircase, but today, she thinks, there won’t be any rules.

She chases Winston round the walkway. Gerda’s fast for a girl, and Winston gives up. Being chased in this empty place is too frightening. When he looks at Gerda close-up, she looks funny: her dress has gone brown, and there’s weed on her neck. Then he sees, in her hand, his Bendy Rabbit. Bendy Rabbit looks changed, all skinny and black. It scares him to see Bendy Rabbit look different. It scares him that he forgot his rabbit. It scares him that he’s forgotten Franklin. How can Franklin be managing without him? Does he still exist without Winston there? Is his life going on at the same time? A frightening void opens up before Winston, where everything keeps happening, squillions of things, not knowing about him, not caring about him, and he can’t control it, or keep anyone safe.

‘You changed Bendy Rabbit,’ he says to Gerda.

‘I saved it,’ she says. ‘You forgot to bring it.’

‘It isn’t a it, it’s a he,’ he shouts. He punches her, and snatches the rabbit.

Isaac decides to get out. There are too many straws in the wind, today; Isaac isn’t ready to die just yet. The pamphlet lies stupidly yellow on his desk. He picks up the directory of luxury services, and starts looking for helicopters. It isn’t easy; firm after firm has had its fuel requisitioned by the government. When he finally finds an outfit with fuel, all three machines have been booked today, but Isaac stays on the line, wheedling, cajoling, doubling his offer, trebling … In the end he offers the price of his house; what good is a house in a wrecked city? And, after some weaselling, they agree.

Then other decisions have to be made. The helicopter seats four to six. Isaac no longer has a lover. Caz, whom he loved so very recently, left in a way that gave him pain; Isaac, who bears Caz no ill feeling, nevertheless decides not to save him. The gift of life! It is too rare, too precious! How can he spare some for a man who spurned him?

Besides, there aren’t really five spare seats. Isaac must take some pictures along, and some little comforts that make life worth living if you don’t have a lover, a father, a mother. He needs his two-thousand-dollar bottles of wine, the ones he has been saving for happiness; he must have his jazz and opera CDs; his small bronzes, including the one-off Paolozzi, cast just for him; his smokey, Goya-esque Paula Regos with their children larger and freer than their parents; his Michael Andrews; his Cornell box, a world under glass, blown sand, torn paper; his tiny Freud, with the feet to die for, the exquisite red-silver-cream-blue flesh; his haunted Auerbach drawing of a head; he is shocked to find how heavy they are, and to see that some of his favourites are dusty – how have they got dusty, if he loves them so?