The Flood (8 page)

Perhaps in future she’d go straight home.

Some time after sunset, the rain began. It beat against the window as Shirley cooked tea. We had the best of the day, she thought.

She got the boys into their bath. They were nearly too big to take it together, but they loved bath-times; with their clothes shucked off in a heap on the floor, they turned into one bucking and dipping body, giggling, slippery, deeply intertwined, spouting and gargling for happiness when they weren’t fighting for space or soap. She left them to it, usually, after standing and watching for a bit.

Sometimes a question came into her head unbidden as she watched her two naked babes at play.

They were very alike, but they weren’t identical.

Franklin was heavier and lighter-skinned, in company the shyer of the two: Winston was slighter, more imaginative, with light brown eyes like his murdered uncle; he made up stories; he was sociable.

Shirley had slept with another man around the time the twins were conceived. She had confessed to Elroy, but in general terms, not making a point of the dates or times, and he had been too upset to ask. They had never mentioned her confession again. But in her head, the questions whispered. The man had been white, but Mediterranean-looking, with olive skin and dark curly hair. Sometimes when she looked at Franklin, his powerful body reminded her of Thomas … but these were thoughts that she had to suppress before they leaked through and infected Elroy.

Today she was too tired to watch the bath. As she was washing up the tea-things, Elroy came home. He took off his jacket, called ‘Hello’, and stood in the doorway to the kitchen. ‘Kiss,’ he said. ‘I need a kiss.’

She pecked his cheek and asked, ‘How was your day?’

‘Oh, usual problems. There’s water in the basement. It might affect the electrical systems. I’m dealing with it.’ He was faintly dismissive. These days he didn’t bring his problems home. ‘Where are the boys?’ he asked, more warmly.

‘They’re in the bath.’

‘They’re early, then.’

‘Yes, there wasn’t any school today. I took them to the zoo.’ She didn’t add, ‘I went to college, and left the boys with Kilda in the Towers, and she may have taken them God knows where.’

He nodded, approving of her as a mother, which made Shirley feel fraudulent. ‘What’s for dinner?’ he asked, commandeering the paper she’d meant to read after washing up.

‘I didn’t know you were coming home. I ate with the boys. But I’ll fix you something.’ Shirley was tired, and her voice was reluctant, though she loved Elroy, and the wifely part of her thought her husband deserved a hot supper after working all day in the hospital. Why couldn’t he ring, though, and give her some warning?

‘It’s OK,’ said Elroy, picking up her tone, turning away abruptly and making for the hall. ‘I might ring Colin. We’ll pick up some food.’

Which meant they would stay out till midnight.

He didn’t sound annoyed, just resigned; she was often tired when he came home.

Too tired to talk, or make him supper, but not too tired to study, she thought. She heard him talking on the phone. Then he dipped back into the kitchen, and smiled. ‘I’m going to go say hello to the boys. I’ll get them into their pyjamas.’

‘Take Winston Bendy Rabbit, will you?’ Winston adored his Bendy Rabbit. Much of life consisted in re-uniting them. Elroy took it through, waggling its ears at her.

She was left by the draining-board feeling guilty. Her mum had always cooked tea for her dad; it would be waiting when he came in from the park, and they ate together, at the little table; the children were fed earlier and shooed out of the way, for it was understood that Dad came home exhausted. And afterwards he always said ‘Thank you, May,’ and sank into his armchair for a read of the paper. And then she would wash up, and come and join him. They sat there, silent, in a circle of light. Somewhere, surely, they must still be sitting there, lit by the table lamp, stooped companionably …

Where? She would never go home again.

And it wasn’t perfect – Dad could be a bastard, and look at Mum now, so slight, so tiny, as if she only half exists, without him.

Shirley wasn’t May, and Elroy wasn’t Alfred, and twins were tiring, and so was study.

Mum never managed to do a degree. I do my best, Shirley thought, as so often. She wiped the surfaces, washed the cloth, and went into the sitting-room to read her textbook, thinking, if I keep quiet, Elroy might do the boys’ bed-time.

Slowly the domestic fog slipped away and her mind began to tune into pleasure. Culture, to Shirley, still meant the far continent, the world away from this flooded city. Elegant voices, silver architecture, long straight roads, a world of luxury –

Though Shirley and Elroy were far from poor. She was a wealthy widow when she married him; Elroy, who had then been younger, less established, had a new job now, more money, more status, high up in hospital management. Both of them had grown busier, older. The relationship had changed, but then, Mum said that children always changed a relationship. ‘One day they’ll be gone, and then you’ll miss them.’

Briefly, Shirley thanked God for the boys.

Then she sighed, and lost herself in her assignment.

About half an hour later, Elroy came through. He looked harassed; his voice was accusing. ‘Winston’s crying. He wants his mother.’

‘I’m a little bit busy … Could you do it, Elroy?’

‘Thing is, I don’t know what’s up with him. He’s talking about you killing a cat, and a man shouting, and lots of people, and everyone will die, and I told him it must be something he’s seen on TV, it isn’t real, nothing’s going to happen, but it seems this Kilda girl has told him it’s true. Why she been looking after my boys? You tell me you take them to the zoo, Shirley.’

They were always
his
boys when he disapproved, though Shirley knew that the truth was more complex, he’d never be sure if the boys were his, because she, Shirley, was a wicked woman. She could never tell him. Her sin lay between them. One day, surely, he would pay her back. Or had he already? How could she blame him? Yet he was a doting, passionate father.

Later she was thoughtful as she lay in bed. Winston and Franklin had been hard to comfort. Perhaps the boys had seen some frightening news; most TV news was frightening, at the moment. Mr Bliss was banging the war drum again. We must have war, or there would never be peace. There was a lot of footage of troops moving, and reports of ‘liberated’ cities far away. Dark-eyed, frightened, liberated people stared back as reporters waved microphones under their noses and asked if they would like to thank Mr Bliss. Ragged, uncomprehending clapping.

Or maybe they’d heard something about the rains. The rising tide of water was scary for everyone. Or Kilda might have been talking wildly. To Shirley she seemed shy, but people were mysterious. Kilda hadn’t told her where she had taken the boys.

Guilt pushed up again, black, powerful. She should never have dumped the boys on Kilda. If she hadn’t done that, the boys would be sleeping. And that poor cat would still be alive. She had driven straight on; that really
was
wicked. She winced at the memory of its small squashed body. Somewhere an owner might be weeping.

One of the boys started crying again, and the rain hammered hard against the window.

Shirley prayed for the everlasting arms to bear her up, but it was one of those times when Jesus seemed distant, and all that came back was her own small voice, and the empty wind, and the night was black, wet, endless.

May sat in her kitchen trying to read, with darkness pressing against the pane. She loved poetry, and myths, and novels, but she didn’t really have an education. (Shirley was getting an education.) May didn’t understand about wood-boring insects, she didn’t know history, or geography. Maybe she had married Alfred too young, and too many things had been left to him. How old had she been when they took up together?

A kid, really. A chit of a girl …

She’d been driven to the kitchen by the throat-searing smell of the chemicals the woodworm men had used. Her kitchen still kept its old tiled floor; having no wood, it had not been treated. But there wasn’t any heating, and the air was chill.

Feeling slightly wicked, she had switched on the oven, and sat by its warmth, clutching her book, unable to rid herself of the worry that Alfred would tell her off for extravagance.

And yet, she thought, if he did, oh if he did, if I heard his feet coming down from upstairs and his voice, slightly gruff, calling my name, if his dear red face should appear at the door…

Unpredictable, familiar, the tears welled up, and the grief came back, the old hopeless stone, to press on her chest, crushing, stupid. How could anyone so real and particular – angular, awkward, his look, his smell, the little phrases only Alfred used, Alfred, love, my dear, my duck – how could
Alfred
disappear for ever?

Where had he gone? Alfred, Alfred.

‘Stay with me, dear,’ she whispered to him. ‘You’ll never be dead while I am alive.’

Why had she never understood? She hadn’t realized that anyone died.

‘This won’t do,’ she heard Alfred say. ‘Pull yourself together, May. Make an effort.’

She put down the book, went to the cupboard and took out some flour to make a cake. When you lived alone, you could do what you liked; it didn’t matter what time it was. Since she had the oven on, she might as well use it, though Shirley was funny about her cooking. None of May’s children would eat her cakes, but as Shirley said, ‘The twins will eat anything.’

Alfred actually liked my cakes.

She suddenly knew he was sitting next door, in his old chair, waiting for his bedtime cocoa. She could open the door and slip through to join him, in another world, where they would sit together, where everything that had been, still was, just a little way off, slightly blurred, faded.

The hairs on her arms stood on end. The light on the dresser made them burn pale gold, as if she were still that sunlit girl…

He was waiting for her, and she should go, but the doorway to the next room looked dark.

She turned her back on it, and sifted the flour, and the beauty of its slow white fall softened the moment, fell across the slope where she struggled alone through the watches of the night with the endless question, where do we go?

Lights had come on all over the city. Signs flashed, gorgeous, over Victory Square, indigo, purple, silver, gold, striped and eyed, zigzagged, pulsing; selling Hesperican sugars, fats, drugs, shows, sex, hopes, holidays. Headlights queued in rows on the motorways, workers trying to escape the city, their exits slowed by the many detours put into place where roads were flooded. Water on roads, walls, bridges, washed the lights into long slurs of colour, peacock-eyed where the traffic lights stared. Trapped motorists listened to their radios; more rains predicted; demonstrations in the south and east, where the populace claimed they were being neglected, their basements left flooded, their drains left blocked. Business as usual. They sighed and switched off.

Davey, Lottie Segall-Lucas’s elder child, woke up ridiculously late, as usual, the day after doing his
Star-Lite Show.
Creeping back to bed with a cappuccino, he skip-read an extraordinary brief for a programme in the pipeline for April, a two-hour special being billed as
The End of the World Spectacular.
Target audience: treble their usual. Lots of publicity was promised. The planets were due to line up in the heavens: great excitement at CTV House. They were working on computer simulations: the repercussions could be cataclysmic. The footage, his producer promised, would be stunning. ‘Hope you’re as excited about this as we are.’

Davey did feel excited, briefly, about the possible jump in viewing figures, but there was something flakey, flakier than usual, about the concept of the show, a worm of doubt that gnawed at him, briefly. Would the planets really line up in the skies, or was it as unreal as an eclipse? Was it just an earth’s eye optical illusion?

No point asking, he told himself. Davey had never forgotten the shaming moment when, early in his days in children’s TV, he had questioned the validity of a bit of science, and the producer took him aside and said, his face briefly contorted with malice, ‘Look Lucas, we know you’re a clever little cunt but that’s not why we’re employing you, right?’

He tried to forget the end of the world as he ate his breakfast in the evening.

It was a strange life Davey had ended up living; not quite the life he had meant to have. A cartoon version of the life he once wanted. He had only ever managed to explain this to Delorice. Although she was young, or because she was young, she understood dreams, and the pain of surrendering them, here in the city that gorged on dreams.

No one on the show seemed to care what was true. Whereas Davey, in some humble, deeply buried part of him, believed in truth, and accuracy. But he lived in a world that preferred entertainment, and he did embarrassingly well in it. ‘Davey you are my success story’ his mother would shriek when he went to visit. ‘Lola is ditsy and Harold is feeble, but
you
, darling … – Oh, hello there, Harold.’

When Davey was a boy he had loved the night skies, watching them almost every night from his room with its skylight on to the roof. He had a gift for maths, might have done astrophysics and fulfilled his dream of becoming an astronomer, but chance had deflected his path from the stars. His progressive school, St Herod’s, was weak on science; his mother assumed that he would choose arts, and Davey did love books, and plays; then Lola was born when he was doing his A-levels, so his mother was too busy to stop him spliffing up; his results were a crushing disappointment, and the better universities were closed to him. He’d done a degree in Theatre Studies, followed, after a few dismal years of finding he was never going to be an actor, by a one-year diploma in Earth Sciences with a half-baked, one-term astronomy option (for how could Davey be a perpetual student when his mother already had one on her hands? His step-father, Harold, spent all his time reading for the great book he had been writing for decades. Harold was clever, and Davey loved him, but he wasn’t practical, he wasn’t worldly, and why should poor Mum have two hopeless men?)