“None of this seems real.” It was true: the helicopter, the battered cathedral, the leaden sky, were all like elements of the hallucinations she had suffered when in solitary.
“I knew John, you know.” Camden smiled. His teeth were clean, cleaner than Lily’s had been for five years. “I still can’t believe we came so close to saving him, after all this time. If he was standing here he’d be complaining about the rain.”
“That was John,” she conceded. “But it’s been raining a long time. We heard it in our last holding cell, out in the suburbs somewhere. I don’t remember this kind of weather in Barcelona.”
“Things have changed in the five years you’ve been gone, Captain Brooke.” There was distant gunfire, a hollow crump. Camden listened to something, though he wore no earpiece. “I think we’re set to get out of here.” He walked toward the chopper.
Just for a moment, the four of them were left alone again.
“I guess this is it,” Gary said certainly. “After all the months and years.”
Lily looked at them, hopeful young Gary, bruised mother Helen, brittle Piers. “We shared something, didn’t we?”
“That we did,” Helen said. “Which nobody else is ever going to understand.”
And now here they were released into a world evidently transformed. Lily said impulsively, “Listen. Let’s make a vow. We’ll stay in contact, the four of us. We’ll look out for each other. If one’s in trouble, the others come looking. That includes Grace, by the way.”
Gary nodded. “If something good comes out of this shit, I’m in.” He held out his hand, palm up. Lily put her hand in his. Then Helen laid hers on top of Lily’s. Even Piers reached out blindly. Lily had to help him take hold of the others’ hands.
“For life,” Lily said. “And for Grace.”
“For life,” Helen and Gary murmured.
George Camden came bustling back. “Let’s go. We’ve a C-130 waiting at the airport.”
They hurried after him.
They clambered aboard the chopper and strapped into canvas bucket seats. Even here Piers kept the towel over his face. Helen wasn’t allowed to hold her baby, though Grace was only a couple of meters away, strapped into a bucket seat in a cradle beside the medic.
The chopper lifted with a surge. Lily, professionally, thought the pilot’s handling was a little rough.
The bird rose up past the face of the cathedral. Sprawling and shapeless, it was more like a natural sandstone outcropping than anything man-made. Lily could see the scars of war, shell pocks and shattered spires and gaping holes in a burned-out roof.
Then she was lifted higher, and she peered out curiously at the cityscape. In the five years she had been cooped up she had seen little but the inside of suburban cellars and warehouses. Barcelona was a blanket of development bounded by the Mediterranean coast to the southeast and mountains to the northwest, and on either flank by rivers, the Llobregat to the south and the Besos to the north. Neighborhoods clustered around low hills. The newer districts inland were a neat quilt of rectangular blocks, and glass-needle skyscrapers studded the business district and the coast.
There were obvious signs of the conflict, the burned-out buildings and rubble-strewn streets where only armored vehicles moved, a glass tower block with a blown-in frontage, one district burning apparently uncontrolled. But amid the damage there were signs of prosperity, whole suburbs walled off and made green and white by lawns and golf courses and bright new buildings. Even from the air you could see that Barcelona, distorted by violence and the invasion of international agencies, had become a city of fortresslike gated suburbs for the rich, surrounded by older neighborhoods that were crumbling into shantytowns.
And water lay everywhere. It pooled in the streets, lay at the feet of the tall buildings in the business district, glimmered on the flat roofs of the houses and in gullies and drains, mirrored surfaces reflecting the gray sky like pools of melted glass. Those bounding rivers seemed to have spread over their flood plains. She had thought Spain was supposed to be drying out. That was why Gary had been here in the first place: to map a climate evolving toward aridity.
To the southeast a surging Mediterranean broke against sea walls, with no sign of the sandy stretches she remembered. She tapped Camden on the shoulder. “Where’s the beach?”
He grinned at her. “I told you,” he shouted back. “Things have changed. Just as well for you, actually. All this flooding has been driving the extremist types out of their cellars like rats out of drains. They had nowhere left to hold you. As to the rest—well, you’ll see.”
The chopper surged and swept away, heading inland. Lily felt dizzy, her empty stomach growling.
3
When they walked out of the Savoy, Lily and Gary had to negotiate a chest-high maze of sandbags that blocked off the short access road to the Strand, where their car was to meet them. A uniformed footman showed them the way through. He carried a big monogrammed umbrella that kept off most of the steady, hissing rain, and he wore Wellington boots that shone as if polished.
Gary pointed at the sandbags, which were made of some silky-looking fabric and marked with the hotel’s logo. “They even do their sandbags in style. You Brits are amazing.”
“Thanks.”
Out in the street, waiting for the car, Lily was in the open, if only for a few seconds. After days of choppers and planes and cars and trucks, military bases and embassies and hotels, she still felt as if she hadn’t yet been released from her confinement. But the sky was all cloud, and the London air, though it tasted cleaner than she remembered, was hot and wet.
She glanced along the length of the Strand, at the shop fronts and the grand hotel entrances. So much was the same, so much had changed. London buses were now long snaking vehicles like trains, their carriages bright red, hissing through the sheets of water on the road when they got a chance to move forward in the jams. Every surface, including the taxi doors and bus panels, was covered with animated commercials for West End shows and TV events and Coke and Pepsi, and ads for “AxysCorp durables” like clothes and white goods, and for various competing brands of electronic gadgets whose nature she didn’t even recognize: what was an “Angel?” Football was bigger business than ever, judging by the ads for the FA Cup Final, moved from May to July and to be played between Liverpool and Newcastle United in Mumbai. And everywhere she saw slogans for the World Cup: “England 2018—Two Years To Go.” All this animation was a shimmering layer spray-painted over the world, reflected in the oily sheets of water on the road.
And yet the people hurrying by seemed oblivious to the shifting light, the unending dull roar of the traffic. Many of them had a dreamy look on their faces, some of them talking into the air, laughing, gesturing, unperturbed when they clattered into each other. Lily had grown up in Fulham, an inner suburb—she was on the way to her mother’s home there today—and she had never felt at home here in the heart of the city. Now, while she had been away, a whole new generation of confident, blank-eyed young people had grown up, believing that London and all its marvels had only been invented yesterday, and that this, their own moment in the urban light, would last forever.
The car drew up to the curb, gleaming silver, big articulated wipers keeping back the rain. It was a Ford but Lily didn’t recognize the model. Gary pointed out that it didn’t have an exhaust. There was a US Embassy pass tucked behind the windscreen, and a soggy Stars and Stripes hung limply from a half-meter pole. The footman opened the doors for them, still expertly handling his umbrella. Lily and Gary scrambled into the back. The interior was plush and clean and smelled of new carpets.
The car pulled out, forcing its way into the stop-start stream of traffic. The driver said the direct route was pretty much impassable. So he turned off the Strand as soon as he could, heading into the maze of side streets. Here they were able to make a bit more progress, before coming to a halt at a queue before a burst drain.
The driver glanced in the mirror and grinned at
them. He was maybe thirty-five, with a mass of tightly curled blond hair. “You’re the hostages, aren’t you? My dispatcher said something about it.” Sahm-fing a-baht it. He had the kind of accent that used to be called estuary, when Lily had been taken.
“We were hostages,” Gary corrected him mildly. “We’re us now.”
“Yeah. Fair enough. Good for you. You both American, are you?”
“Not me,” Lily said. “Half-English, half-American. Born and raised in Fulham.”
“OK. Well, do you mind if I do this?” He pressed a button. The little Stars and Stripes furled itself around the flagpole, which slid into the hull of the car and out of sight. “Most of the work we get is for the Embassy. But we don’t like to tell ’em that their flag attracts potshots.”
Gary shrugged. “Fine by me.”
The jam lurched forward another couple of meters, and the driver took the opportunity to nip up another side road. They got to the end of this before hitting the next queue.
“So they let you out into the wild, did they? Must be a relief.”
“I’ll say,” Gary said.
It was, Lily thought. They still had some engagements, notably a reception by Nathan Lammockson, owner and chief exec of AxysCorp, the company which had prized them loose from the grip of the Fathers of the Elect. And then Lily would have to attend a briefing with senior USAF officers at Mildenhall in Suffolk to see if there was still a career for her in the Air Force. But in the meantime they were both glad to be free of the medics and counselors—and in Lily’s case some emergency dental work—and a little freedom was welcome.
The driver shook his head. “Five years chained to a radiator. Can’t imagine what it was like. Amazing you didn’t kill each other. Or yourselves. Although I’ve been stuck in this car for four years, sometimes it feels like that. And married for six, and that’s the same, hah!” He glanced at Lily. “So, a London girl. Nothing’s changed much since you’ve been gone, has it? Nothing changes much, not really.”
“I don’t remember it being so damn wet. It was wet in Spain too. You know, where we were kept.”
The driver pulled a face. “Nah. Just funny weather. Mind you they couldn’t complete the regular league season this year. I mean the football. First time since 1939, too many matches washed out. And Wimbledon hasn’t finished in its two weeks for the last three years. There’s a bloke down the cab shelter who reckons it’s all down to the Chinese.”
Gary asked, “What is?”
“The rain, the floods. China’s drying out, isn’t it? Stands to reason they’d want more rain, and hang the rest of us.”
Lily couldn’t tell if he was being serious or not.
Again the traffic lurched forward, again the car shot through another gap and turned off. Lily tried to follow the journey. They headed roughly west and south, pushing through the maze of Mayfair streets north of Green Park. Then they turned down through Knightsbridge, heading for the Brompton Road.
The driver saw her peering at streets signs. “Don’t worry, love, I’ll get you there.” He sounded defensive.
“I don’t doubt it,” she said.
“Used to be a cabbie—a black cab. This pays better. But I took the Knowledge. Of course a lot of the regular routes don’t work anymore what with the road closures and the floods. You just do your best. Half the punters don’t see that, they think you’re ripping them off.” He put on a vaguely Middle Eastern accent. “ ‘Are you sure this is the correct route, Mister Driver?’ That’s why I packed it in. The agency work is less stressful. Oh, you fucking arse—”
He pulled his wheel violently to the right, to avoid an expensive-looking car that aquaplaned in a slick of filthy water and ran into a wall. They avoided a collision, but endured another five minutes of motionlessness before the police cleared the crash.
A bit further on and some major building work was obstructing the carriageway. The driver said a lot of London’s older buildings were being made flood-resilient—having their foundations reinforced, their lower floors lined with sandbags. They didn’t get much further on past that before they ran into a crowd of angry-looking business types and shoppers and school parties, spilling onto the roads. The driver flicked on his radio. A Flying Eye report said that the Knightsbridge tube station had had to be evacuated because of flooding. The report went on to talk about a gathering North Sea storm that was expected to bring problems to the east coast.
The driver turned the radio off, and they waited for the blockage to clear. Lily peered out at the lines of traffic, the stalled cars and blocked roads, the miserable, sodden people splashing along the pavements, everybody trying to pursue their business. Their own fractious, short-tempered journey seemed a lot longer than just a few kilometers.
It was a relief to reach her mother’s home, and get out of the car. Lily wasn’t sure whether to tip the driver, or how much; there seemed to have been a pulse of inflation while she’d been away. She handed him twenty pounds. He looked neither disappointed nor surprised, and drove away.
Lily took a breath, and got her bearings. They were in Fulham, in Arneson Road, a kilometer or so north of the river. The house was one of a row of late-Victorian terraces, all heavily renovated and plastered with satellite dishes. Sandbags slumped in the small front garden, and the cellar, which had a window half-hidden by the pavement, was boarded up, evidently abandoned. Lily felt odd to be back here, after so long away. Everything seemed smaller than she remembered. She felt peculiarly glad she’d thought to bring Gary with her today, a kind of emblem of her other life.
Gary peered up doubtfully at the house’s three floors, the PVC frames that had replaced the original sash windows. “Kind of a skinny house,” he said.
“Skinny but deep,” Lily replied, trying to be bright. “More room than you’d think. Come on.” They walked through a low gate. A path had been cleared through sticky mud that smelled faintly of sewage. “Anyhow my mother makes the best chocolate cake in west London.”
But it wasn’t Lily’s mother who opened the door, but her sister Amanda. And Lily learned her mother was dead.
4
Amanda walked them through the house to the kitchen. It was open-plan from the front door, and had been that way since the internal walls had been knocked down in a 1970s conversion.
Lily glanced curiously around at the living space. Her mother’s books were gone, her slumped antique furniture vanished. The tattered old carpet Lily remembered from her childhood had been lifted too, to be replaced by cheap-looking ceramic tiles. The lower walls were bare of paint or paper, and Lily could see channels crudely cut in the plasterwork where power points had been raised to a meter or so off the ground. The fireplace, which had been blocked off in the seventies renovation, was now open again, and blackened by soot, evidently recently used.
The small kitchen had been much less modified than the living room, and was just as cluttered as Lily remembered, though now with Amanda’s characteristic kipple, principally masses of spice bottles and jars to support her passion for Indian cooking. Amanda sat the two of them on high stools, and handed them mugs of hot chamomile tea. On a shelf over the table stood a row of photographs, of Lily’s mother, Amanda’s kids, and one big portrait of Lily herself, her official USAF image, a younger self smart in a crisp uniform. Lily was touched to see it there.
Lily tried to take in the fact that everything about her life had changed while she had been absent from it—that her mother had died a whole two years before, that her sister had moved from her old flat in Hammersmith into what had been the family home. Maybe she had been detached for too long. She just felt numb.
And she could tell that Gary, who she’d only brought home on a whim, felt awkward to have walked in on a family tragedy.
Gary knew all about Lily’s family from their endless conversations in Barcelona. Lily’s mum had been a GI bride, of sorts, who had met and married a USAF airman stationed in Suffolk. He had given her two daughters before being killed in a friend
ly-fire incident while working on logistical support during the first Gulf war. Lily had never lived in the States, but she had dual citizenship. With her dad dead when she was fourteen, Lily’s mother had been her anchor.
Amanda said, “I didn’t want to tell you on the phone, when you called ahead earlier about visiting.” She was edgy.
Lily said, “I appreciate that.”
At thirty-five Amanda was five years younger than Lily. She was, in fact, about the age Lily had been when she was taken. Always taller and thinner than Lily, she had her black hair pulled back into a knot behind her head, and she wore a black dress that looked practical, if maybe a size too small for her. Though there was no evidence of smoking in the house, Lily thought she saw traces of the old habit about Amanda, a cigarette-shaped hole in the way she held the fingers of her right hand. “What gets me is why the government didn’t tell you. You’ve been out of Spain for five days already.”
“I think they’re treating us as possible trauma cases.” That was because of Piers Michaelmas, who had been so obviously damaged by his captivity. “They’ve been feeding us news bit by bit. Selectively.”
Looking around, Gary said, “Looks like you’ve had a trauma here of your own.”
“Well, we got flooded out in the spring. It’s all been so bloody complicated, you wouldn’t believe it. The insurance, you know. You have to wait an age for a loss adjuster to come out, and in the meantime you’re not supposed to touch anything. Not even clear the mud out. It stank, Lily, you wouldn’t believe it, street muck and sewage all over the floor. Carpets ruined, of course. No electric or water or gas, buckled floorboards, the water stink seeping out of the plaster for weeks afterward—it was just a nightmare. We were lucky we didn’t get any of the toxic fungi growing out of the walls. Old Mrs. Lucas got some of that—do you remember her? And even when the adjuster has been, you only get a payout if you commit to climate-proofing. Mind you I do admit I much prefer floor tiles to carpet, don’t you? So much easier to keep clean. Of course we were lucky, you know, Lily. Some of the properties around here were condemned altogether.”
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