The Flood (32 page)

Outside the glass, there is a deafening droning; it must have been growing louder for ages, but Angela, preoccupied, has hardly heard it. But now she does, and thinks ‘motor-boat’, and she starts to shake, with joy, with relief, for the Gardens staff must have come to save them.

But in another moment she sees she is wrong, it is helicopters, swooping low above them. A yellow drizzle seems to be falling, in the old world, the world they have left.

May gets to the front of the packed gathering and sees a strange woman sitting on an armchair she somehow manages to make like a throne. Facing the crowd as Father Bruno was.

Then May thinks again. Big, but not a woman. She is beautiful. She is just a child. She sits there, tall, grave, heavy, wearing a pale blue dress like a night-gown (and then May realizes, it
is
a night-gown) and bare feet, and dishevelled red hair, but her face is beautiful, the kind of high forehead that in May’s youth would have been called ‘noble’, her eyes are large, grey, steady, her skin gleams with health and youth; she looks as if she’s fed on milk and apples; she could be a queen, in her long loose dress, a country queen, or Persephone; she has a look of the young Shirley.

But there’s something wrong, May sees at once, for her mouth is swollen, drooping, sulky, almost as if someone has hit her, and her body (with her big legs wound round each other, her heavy arms folded across her chest) says, ‘Do not touch me: do not hurt me.’

‘Who’s that?’ May hisses to her son, but he shakes his head, impatient, shushing her. In any case, May soon finds out, because Father Bruno turns and addresses the girl.

‘And so, Sister Kilda, these are the charges.’

‘I still don’t get it,’ Kilda says.

‘SILENCE!’ Bruno yells, in a wire-taut scream that cuts the air and leaves them all still. Only Kilda stays human, stirring, shuffling, but her face quivers, for a second, with fear, and her mouth stays immobile, slightly open.

‘You have left the true path, the One Way. You have prophesied in your own selfish voice, without consulting the One True Book. You were tempted away by money, and frivolity. You were seen at the Gala, consorting with sinners. You tempted others, you led them away, offering them visions of worldly things. This is your crime, your sin of sins. You have defied your Father’s instructions. You have tempted Adam as Eve once did. Sister Kilda, you have abused our trust, you have tried to undermine the One True Faith. Because we are just, infinitely just, you shall have a chance to acknowledge your guilt, to renounce your sin, to come back to us. Acknowledge the Book, and you will be forgiven. God is an angry God, his wrath is infinite, he takes you up and he casts you down, but if you humble yourself, he can also have mercy. Repent, Sister Kilda. Accept the Book.’ He paused, leaning forward towards her like a vulture, his arms extended, casting sharp shadows, strong, wiry arms that could kill or bless.

Gerda is calling across the water. ‘Please, Winston, you’re making me scared. We got to go back now and find Franklin.’

But Winston doesn’t take any notice. He is tiring now. His body is drifting.

Kilda rises to her feet, ungracefully. Standing in the light, she looks more beautiful but no older than she did before. To May, a mother, she is just a child; she looks at her and again sees Shirley, before she was comfortable in her skin, trying to live in her new adult body.

Kilda doesn’t talk at all like the priest. ‘Thing is,’ she says ‘I haven’t done nothing. I hear the voices, I see what I see. It wasn’t my fault that, like, the papers got on to me. First of all, you all, like, go mad about my visions, you’re all, like, “Kilda, this is amazing, oh Kilda tell your visions to me.”’ (There is a flash of mockery as she says this, a flash of the teenager, suddenly, and May feels afraid; she sees Bruno is dangerous; but as quickly as it came, it fades away, and Kilda is just sad and slightly sulky.) ‘Then suddenly it’s all, like, “They’re not the right visions”. But I do see it, now, I see a big wall of water. I do see, like, the end of the world, the thing you’re always going on about. What you don’t get is, there’s lots of different endings. It isn’t, like, One Way, not at all. There are worlds that are all bright, like worlds of light, and a world of darkness, but it all, like, splits, it goes on and on, so there’s lots of worlds, and the pieces get shuffled … It’s doing it now. Every day, every moment. And now you’re all, like, trying to keep me locked up. Like I’m the devil. But I’m not. I’m like you. And my mum will be worried if I’m not home soon.’

Then she turns to Dirk, who is staring at the floor, his head and shoulder twisted slant-wise, crab-like, a creature protecting itself from hurt. ‘And you,’ she complains, ‘what’s up with you? I thought you were, like, a mate of mine. I never did anything against you, Dirk.’ (It may be the first time she’s said his name; actually said his personal name, which his mother chose, and he never liked, but which somehow slipped under his skin, and became him.)

Kilda’s speech, which sounds touching, and truthful, to May, makes that curious blank shiver come over Bruno’s face. ‘She condemns herself,’ he hisses, sudden as a snake, his small head darting from side to side, and all around May, the faces work and shudder. ‘SHE CONDEMNS HERSELF! She is without faith! She has rejected the peoples of the Book! She has rejected the faiths of the Book! This woman is damned for rejecting the Book!’

The hubbub which broke out is stilled again, as his furious mouth issues the condemnation. But Kilda, who at first slumped to her seat as if exhausted by the strain of speaking, is standing again, talking again. ‘It’s not my fault,’ she cries passionately. ‘It’s not my fault. I can’t even read. I can’t read the Book. I CAN’T fucking read it, I can’t, I can’t. It takes me too long. The letters go crooked. And it’s not just me. Loads of you can’t.’

And then they are all howling, mad with anger. May realizes that they will kill her.

Then she looks at Dirk. He has covered his eyes. His fingers, clamped into yellow claws, are kneading, pawing his cheeks and forehead as if he wants to re-make himself. His poor pocked skin looks wet and greasy.

But it can’t be true. Dirk can’t be in tears.

Gerda can’t bear to watch any more. Angela thinks she has a hold on the child, a miser’s grip on her soaked red satin, but suddenly, everything flicks upside down; with a fluid movement like a fish escaping Gerda twists away, stays for one instant poised on the narrow white iron of the step, staring at her mother, is comforted as she looks in her pupils and sees, in their circle, for one split second her own small image, safe in its robe of scarlet satin, queen of the world, but then she dives.

They are fleeing, fleeing; they are falling over; they are dragging trunks and boxes of paper; they are telephoning taxis, airports, heliports, rushing the banks, rifling their storerooms. The rich are trying to leave the city. The rich believe they can always leave, that money will always get them away; but most of the phones aren’t answering, most of the taxis have already gone, and the helicopters hang there, sky-born, swinging dark bellies over the city, droning, droning, deafening.

Frightening the people who do not leave. The poor believe they can never leave. There is no escape; life simply happens, the wheels roll forward, crushing them or sparing them. The helicopters hang there above them.

Gerda and Winston are swimming, swimming.

The rich have choices. What will they save? Jewellery, art, their Slim Jim Shoos, those silvery slender kid-glove stilettos that will surely dance to dry land again, the gliding wheels of their Rollon watches, their Verso shirts, their Parade purses …

Suddenly Lottie changes her mind. She tosses the whole lot on to the floor, runs up to their bedroom, and raids a cupboard. When she toils down the stairs again, her arms are full of photograph albums; pieces of light, pieces of life, Lola and Davey when they were babies, Harold laughing on a sun-blanked beach, Lottie, so young, in a room full of roses. She stands for an endless moment and stares: the past, unshadowed by this future, and yet it was always waiting for her, and then thought fails, because time runs out, Harold is shouting, pleading, desperate, if they don’t leave now they will lose their chance, and she slams the case shut and totters downstairs, toes crammed, at the last, into her Slim Jim Shoos.

Moira Penny is getting ready. She is not in the Towers, with the Sisters and Brothers (though had she but known that today was the day they were going to try Kilda, she would never have missed it). But love; Moira Penny was looking for love; it has never come from her colleagues, or students, and now she has missed it, too, with the Brothers. Father Bruno hurts her with his many favourites, the young, like Kilda, with her empty faith, her Bog Irish ignorance, her brazen beauty, the way she rubs her big breasts in your face.

He has not praised Moira for her radio triumph: the way she brought the One Word to the people. He forgets to consult her about the Book, although he must know she is a doctor, an expert. She has always known about books, always; has spent her life reading, studying, lifting the pages one after another, abstracting the truths, weighing, measuring, telling the less lettered what the books contain, wicker-works of text, immurements of meaning. She has not cheated. She has suffered it all. The aching eyes; the wasted muscles; the long evenings in yellowing libraries; the lunatic strait-jacket of language, crushing her arms against her ribs.

But they don’t value her. They don’t love her. She savours the bitter taste of the truth, the thing they have tried to conceal from her with faint, false fibs of brotherhood: Moira Penny will never be loved. The terrible engines and propellers of judgement that droned above her all afternoon have made her certain it is over for her. She has glimpsed a pale arm, waving goodbye.

Moira has given up almost everything, her teaching position, her salary, her warm office, the respectable house where her dog could play outside in the garden, where Fool and she were almost happy: but till now she could never give up her books; her books and her paper were the things she most needed. At last she sees there is no more need.

She collects them together. From all the thousands she once possessed, using up air and space and life, a mere hundred or so remain, and she makes great towers of them near her window, her attic window, her view of the world, extending over the empty roof-tops, the flooded playgrounds, the useless spires, the tree-tops ringing what was once a park, where she glimpses the movement of an empty boat, and beyond the motorways, more roof-tops, empty, empty, emptiness … But perhaps, and she cranes, she peers through the window, she has opened it to let the cold air in, perhaps in the last dim glimmer of the distance she sees something other, outside the city, something surviving, a blueness, a greenness. Perhaps there is grace, though Fool is desperate, she hears him barking in the kitchen below where she has wedged the door shut with yellow pamphlets, she has to teach him, for he won’t be quiet … Eyes on the hills, Moira Penny waits.

Elroy and Shirley will wait for ever. At half-past three, in intensive care, where they are living a life quite insulated from the world where the city dreads and waits, after everything possible has been done, their beloved Franklin slips down into a coma.

And now something happens that no one’s expecting except Professor Sharp and his colleagues, but they have all gone away inland.

With an unearthly roar, with a schlooping sound as if giant dinosaurs are sucking the drains, with a rushing of wind and a shiver of motion that suddenly grips the whole city, the water-levels plummet, the floods sink down, the dirty water pours back into the sea, moiling and boiling blackly downwards, shooting boats and buses along like matchwood, baring dark grass and sodden brickwork, dragging along sheds and lawn-mowers and cars on their backs like drowned beetles – and inside the buildings, and on high ground, everyone stops what they’re doing and listens: something very big is breathing above them; after months of wishing, praying, cursing, it retreats in minutes, the flood is gone.

Gerda and Winston are suddenly pulled down, kicking and struggling, deep, deeper, down between the silver-slimed trunks and stems, down through the boggy roots and suckers, down past the water-fleas and half-grown frogs and blushing sticklebacks and spinning toadlets, and whorls of rotting, forgotten objects, shoes and handbags and hoses and nozzles, thrashing like snakes in the force of the water – and Winston spots it, his Bendy Rabbit, stuck in the angle of a black drowned branch, and grabs it to him as he hurtles past – but Gerda knows they cannot fight it, their only hope is to ride the tide-race, and as it sweeps them down deep underground, into a labyrinth of drainage channels, she kicks her strong feet, and holds on to Winston, and breathing the air bubbles in her red hair (but it suddenly loses its red and goes dark, the colour shuts down, it’s a black and white world) the two children shoot along the grey chill tunnel which leads on for ever, and only gets colder.

There is a long pause, in the sucked-out city.

And then it comes, the white line of water, moving in from very far away, and at first, to Moira, it seems to come slowly, but she crawls out, shivering, on to her balcony, into the light where she can see at last, and she stands, staring, transfixed by joy

but duty, duty, the drumstick of duty, taps her shoulder, peremptory, and she blunders back through to rescue her books, strains her arms as she tries to embrace them, sharpspined, heavy, why always so heavy

The Brothers and Sisters are all looking inwards, watching the infinitely interesting thing, the prospect of seeing justice done; this is the beginning of Judgement Day. Bruno Janes has Sister Kilda by the hair, and then by the neck underneath her hair, and is shaking her, slightly, as a dog would a rat, and she is too terrified to resist; limp, eyes glazed, head lolling forwards, a useless bud on a broken stalk. She is finished, thinks May, he will finish her off, and she tries to force herself to her feet, but the old fear crouches like smog on her chest, crushing her lungs, thickening her tongue, freezing her body on its chair – No, she can’t bear it. No, not possible. ‘Dirk,’ she whispers. ‘Dirk. This is mad.’