Wading as much as walking, she completed the half circuit of the moor marked out by Greg’s pencil, and looked down one evening across the valley on its western side. On the map, the river there was a tidy blue ribbon. What she saw instead was a great brown smear, churning and frothing at its nearer edge, dull and deceptively tranquil beyond that, making islands out of trees and houses and hedges. The flooded ground stretched all the way north to the sea.
It took her all the next day before she found a place to cross. Downstream of a half-submerged hamlet a huge tree had toppled over and jammed itself against shallow banks on either side of the current. She picked her way along its trunk. The flood looked murky and sluggish from above but turned out to be savage at close quarters. While she stood clinging to a branch to catch her breath, she watched flotsam spinning past. It was as though the sea had opened its throat to swallow the world, piece by piece.
She had to wade waist deep along the drowned lane beyond the river channel before it rose at last out of the floodplain into modest hills. After she’d reassembled the clothes she could still use, mopped out the inside of her boots as best she could, and set off again, she discovered an astonishing change. The snow was all but gone; the floods cut her off from any risk of encountering anyone else; for the first time in weeks, she could go fast. Miles suddenly began to disappear behind her. She felt as light and swift as thought. She walked all day without noticing it. The drizzle cleared eastward as the evening came on, the cloud cover frayed thin, and an intermittent moonlight appeared around her; she kept on walking. After the punishing weeks of trudging through snow, it was like a dream of motion. Halfway through that night she realized she was in ecstasy. The punishment was over: it was all easy now and she was almost there, ridiculously close. She thought she heard whispers echoing her footsteps, as if she were being shepherded along by good angels.
She slept the next day in a roadside bus shelter in the middle of nowhere and set off again as a damp dusk fell. Only the smallest traces of moonlight filtered through the clouds, but that was as much as she needed. She came that night to the road she’d been so afraid to cross, the single main road running down the spine of Cornwall, linking this wasteland to the unimaginable rest of the world. Greg had warned her it would be patrolled and constantly traveled, and marked out one of the rare places where it was narrow enough that ordinary country lanes still fed in and out of it, but at three o’clock in the morning it was nothing, just another trickle of debris-spackled grey, though miles off to the west she caught a glimpse of the flare and sweep of headlights. When dawn began to break she unfolded the map and looked in giddy astonishment at the ground she’d covered. She’d come so far in one night, she thought she must have made a mistake. There were perhaps fifteen miles to go.
As she rested the next day, holed up in what remained of someone’s bungalow on the edge of a peculiarly dismal village, she heard an engine go by. The sound plunged her into an instant panic. She’d forgotten that the retreating winter had cleared the roads for other people as well as her. The thought of being stopped now was so hideous it made her take the penknife out of the pack and zip it in her jacket, right beside Iggy’s acorn, so that she’d be ready to cut her own throat rather than be forced to turn back. She couldn’t sleep. She kept trying to imagine herself walking into the house where Gwen lived, seeing her sister and her son there, right in front of her. She remembered that they almost certainly wouldn’t be there, they’d have had to leave like everyone else; then she remembered that Gavin—no, Gawain, she should give him his own name now—wasn’t like anyone else. She couldn’t think at all. She wanted to start walking but she knew she had to force herself to wait for darkness, full night, when no one could possibly see her. She passed the time memorizing every branching and turning of her route so she wouldn’t even have to get the flashlight out to check the map.
Her food had run out so she ditched the pack, taking nothing but map and flashlight and knife and the clothes she walked in. It never occurred to her to wonder what she’d do the next night. If she’d reached her journey’s end by then, she’d be all right, nothing else would matter; if she hadn’t she’d be dead. One way or another this was her last day.
As she crept out of the bungalow late that evening and set off southward, she heard the bells of Truro cathedral ringing to her left, and saw the clouds above the distant city lit up with reflected firelight. Two helicopters buzzed, harsh lights probing like malevolent antennae. It all felt entirely disconnected from her. A few times she heard the angry buzz of a car struggling up the clogged and slippery lanes, but never coming her way. She stole along as quiet and invisible as any nocturnal animal. There were wide muddy streams and fallen branches and sinkholes and puddles deeper than her boots, but she was carrying nothing at all now, and after everything she’d been through it was easy, easy. She thought she could smell the belated spring coming, nettles and ivy and brambles uncurling again after crushing months.
As first light came she passed a gap in a wildly overgrown hedge and saw the land steeple down suddenly beyond it, dropping to a smooth darkness below: the estuary.
It was all she could do not to break into a run. Where that same water she was looking at widened and approached the sea, there was a house on the opposite bank: Pendurra. She’d stared at the map for hours and hours. The precise contours of that river were etched on her heart. Down there, out of sight toward the sunrise, perhaps at that very moment, her boy was waking up. She remembered what he looked like asleep, on school mornings, in the precious moments before she sat down on the edge of his bed to coax him awake.
It took a painful effort to make herself concentrate on solving the last few miles between here and there. She muttered aloud to herself, talking it through. Getting to the other side of the estuary, that was the main thing. Which meant going in the wrong direction, away from the sea, looking for a place where the valley became narrow. It would be flooded, but that was all right. She’d find a way. Glints of hesitant light were appearing in the crack of the horizon between the drowned land and the clouds. She had all day.
She kept to high narrow lanes, skirting the village where the first bridge had been. The line penciled on her map took a wide turn around it, avoiding its prominent cluster of houses, but when she looked down the valley side she saw there was nothing to fear there. The village’s position at the head of the estuary had been its ruin. The stream funneled down into it from the hills, and like all the other streams, it had turned violent. The village was a tumbled silted wreck, waist deep in water and choked with the carnage of houses torn open by the floods. No one could be living there.
Surveying the muddy destruction from her vantage point on a hillside above the village, her eye was drawn to what had once been a boatyard on its downstream side. Yachts were upended and tangled together as carelessly as toys, most of them three-quarters sunk. The thing that had caught her attention was a knot of dinghies, wedged between houses in what must once have been a pleasant creekside lane.
She spent a long time looking at the map, and looking at the abandoned boats, and thinking.
Eventually she made her decision and climbed into a field to walk down to the village. Every heartbeat felt like it might shake her apart. She wasn’t sure exactly how fast the current pouring down the valley into the estuary would carry her, but she knew it would be quick, much quicker than trying to find a crossing place farther west and then turning and walking all the way back on the other side of the river. It might be an hour, or less. She might be minutes away.
She waded down the submerged street. She didn’t care even slightly about keeping dry anymore. She came to the group of three weed-streaked dinghies. They’d been lashed together; the ropes were now tangled around a bent lamppost. Their hulls bumped against the walls of a house. They were carrying inches of fouled rainwater but that didn’t matter either. A length of broken rotten wood bobbed inside one of them. It would do for
a paddle. She clambered in beside it, kneeling in bilge. She looked at the way the current pushed around her and worked out which lines to free. The knots were too wet and tight to undo but that was okay, she had the penknife, though sawing through the rope was harder than she expected. Her hands were aching and blistering by the time she got herself adrift.
After that she needed to do nothing but sit and watch.
23
Trees that had once overlooked the mudflats of a tidal creek now stood atop their own reflections, mirrored in a sheet of shallow water. She floated past them. This was the right way to finish, she thought. The journey that had been growing easier and easier as the snow melted and her pack lightened was now utterly effortless. The seaward current was its last benediction. She was, finally, forgiven. There were birds everywhere, egrets and cormorants and moorhens and swans, all untroubled by her passage. She was silent and full of grace, like them. The water became clearer. She was pulled around a crook of the estuary, a few dips of her makeshift oar enough to keep her in the current. The river met a tributary creek and widened. Though the sea was out of sight still, she smelled it, felt it.
Looking that way, she saw what she at first thought were other boats drifting ahead of hers like a ghostly escort. They weren’t moving, though. As she slid into the wider reaches of the estuary, she realized they were all wrecks.
Masts speared up from the surface at bizarre angles, some trailing bunches of sagging sail. She saw cabins of motor launches sunk halfway to their roofs, and rudders rusting on upended sterns. In the shallower water by the banks, sailing yachts lay on their sides, exposing barnacled bellies. Her dinghy gathered speed as the creeks she passed fed the river current, pulling her into the graveyard. She leaned over the side with her rotten paddle and deflected her course a little toward the southern shore.
Eyeing the scattered wrecks ahead, looking for a clear course between them, she saw a body.
All that was visible of the boat was the flat top of what had once been its cabin. A bleached and naked corpse lay along it, half covered in feathery green seaweed. Iz felt a peculiar chill. She dug the paddle in to give the corpse a wide berth. As if the river had grown hands, it seemed to seize hold of the length of wood, tugging it down. She dropped it in surprise, looked ahead again, and saw the white body move.
What she had taken for seaweed was hair, vivid green hair. It framed a colorless face. That face was staring at her, watching her come closer. Her dinghy wasn’t drifting with the current anymore. It was being directed.
The body shifted, propping itself up on smooth white arms.
Iz pushed wet hair out of her face. Cloudy eyes met hers.
—Mum?
—What is it?
—That girl hasn’t got any clothes on.
—Where?
—Over there. In the pond.
—Oh. There. Hasn’t she? Maybe she’s going for a swim. Don’t start asking if you can too, real people aren’t allowed to.
—Can we walk round the other way?
—What?
—I don’t like the way she’s looking at us.
The naked white creature rose to her knees. The tips of her hair trailed over her hands into the water, fanning out in the current.
Iz thought: How beautiful Gavin’s world must have been. Gawain’s. Close up, the sea-woman was as lithe and silky as an otter, effortless as rain. Her lips, when they opened to speak, might have been carved from the inside of a shell.
“We should drown you with these others,” they said, in a voice that seemed soft and hard together, like wet stone. “Weren’t you afraid to cross my river? You’ve come far. I smell the dust of your journey on you.”
Abruptly, as if it had been something she’d been trying not to think about, Iz remembered how frightened Gav had often been too. Clutching her arm with his little hand, pulling her across to the other side of the road. Clinging to her in his bed, begging her to leave the light on.
“And grief,” the mermaid said. “You reek of it. Did you come here to end your own journey? Is it that you want to drown?”
The bliss Iz had been floating on was draining away around her feet. She felt how cold she was, and how wet. A little puddle of misery began gathering beneath her.
“No,” she said. It was like trying to talk to Miss Grey. She felt ashamed to be speaking. “Yes. I mean, yes, this is the end. No, I don’t want to drown. Not now. I’m so nearly there.”
“None of these wanted to die either.” The head turned slowly, side to side. “But here they lie, beneath us. People shun the water.”
“I didn’t know,” Iz said. The mermaid’s eyes were so terribly blank. “I’m sorry.”
“You belong far from here.”
“I just,” she said, swallowing back a lump of desperation, “want to go a little farther. Just to that shore.” She motioned toward the wood-fringed southern bank, no more than thirty feet away.
“You are the image of a woman I knew. What are you doing here? You’ve already seen death. You’re half-empty inside.”
“All I want,” Iz said, her voice beginning to tremble, “is to find my son.”
Still kneeling, the mermaid swayed backward, baring bone-white teeth in a sudden angry hiss. She raised a glistening arm and pointed accusingly. “You have no son.”
“My boy.” Iz was out of the habit of crying. Her eyes began to sting. “My child.” This was his world, beautiful and terrible; these were the creatures he lived with. She’d denied their existence for so long, but surely she’d suffered enough to make amends, surely. “You can tell me about him, can’t you? Please? You must know where he is.”
The white body rocked from side to side. “Don’t mock me with the shadow of a mother’s grief. I have lost my own child, woman.” Her arms folded to cradle her belly. “All these people drowned to feed my grief and it’s still not enough. How dare you plead with me? I bore a daughter bloody and screaming. I suckled her. You have no child.”
“All right, then.” Iz felt her whole body shaking. The depth beneath her wasn’t the mud-bottomed fathom of the river in flood anymore. It was the yawning blackness she’d tried for so long to keep skating over, on the thinnest of ice. No forgiveness lurked in it. “I raised him from a baby but I’m not his mother and he hates me. All right. Drown me. Go on. Pull me under. And if you see him, tell him I came all this way to say sorry. Isn’t this grief ?” She couldn’t stop her hands quivering, but she thrust them into the slopping filth in the bottom of the hull and threw muddy water over her face. “Really? Isn’t it? Just kill me, then.” She reached out to the gunwale and began hauling herself over.
“Get back!” The hiss was so angry it made Iz lose her grip. She slipped and dropped in a wet heap into the bottom of the dinghy. The mermaid rose quickly to her feet and stepped lightly across, straddling the bow, standing over the wretched woman like a statue of victory. “I have enough despair of my own to fill these waters. I won’t have them polluted with yours. Go and die ashore. It was the once-boy you hoped to find, wasn’t it? You’re the picture of his aunt. Listen to me, then. His aunt is worse than dead, and he himself is gone. He sailed months ago on a stolen boat, alone. However far you’ve come to look for him, every step was wasted. He saved my child so I let him go, but now her heart is broken. I ought to have drowned him like all the rest. He’s an ocean and more gone from here, woman. You’ll never find him. We give our children our hearts and they tear them in pieces for us. Was that what you came all this way to learn? Consider yourself well taught. Now go and die on land, where I can’t see you.”
• • •
Iz saw nothing of the mermaid’s dive, nothing of the dinghy’s sudden carom across the current into the marshy notch of land. She lay in the ankle-depth of putrid water like a twitching corpse. When her windpipe opened enough to make a sound she let out what was meant to be a howl, but even
that was crushed almost to nothing and came out instead as a sniveling whine. She tipped herself out of the boat, expecting water, and found herself on saturated mud. Her hands were trembling fists; they punched convulsively at her own arms as if she could break herself. She fumbled at her chest for the pocket with the penknife but her jacket had fallen off somewhere. She crawled away from the river, afraid it would spit her out if she tried to drown. She lurched and stumbled through weeds until she chanced on a line of trees and a mud-choked lane leading under them, dark, shaded, out of all sight. A tree, she thought. No—she remembered a stinking body dangling from knotted sheets—a building. Any building. She dragged herself uphill along a narrow, hedge-lined, overgrown country road, a miniature of her whole dreadful pointless journey, mocking her with everything she’d suffered for no reason at all. The truth was terribly simple and terribly obvious. Gawain had always hated her, he’d left her, and he was never coming back. So straightforward, so clear, and so agonizing, so intolerable. She scratched her cheeks, trying to fend off the truth. The lane twisted up away from the river and branched. Along a side track littered with wet leaves and broken wood and glass, she saw the outlines of a roof beyond trees. She hurried that way.
Buildings, walls, and windows, empty, shattered, desolate; places like this had housed her for weeks and now this one could house her for good. She knew the routine. She trod through ruin, looking for a broken door. There it was, in a long single-story building with cheap windows and broken outside pipes and a whole sea of detritus washed up outside it. She went in and looked around, saw roof beams over a dingy corridor to one side. She had to concentrate now, which was appalling because it felt like more steps in her journey and all she wanted was to get it over with as quickly as possible, for good. She started hearing Nigel’s voice in her head. You haven’t actually thought about this, have you? Did it ever occur to you it might not be straightforward? Hmm? It used to take professionals to do this properly, you know. Shut up. Shut up. Only one way to shut him up. Sheets, she thought, remembering the dangling body. But whatever this place was, it hadn’t been a dwelling. It had shattered counters and stacked tables. She couldn’t see very well because of the stinging in her eyes but she stumbled around and came across frayed and moldering things that might have been tablecloths, it didn’t matter. They were good enough to knot together. She yanked the knots hard.
Anarchy Page 31