But they didn’t.
Eventually, she calmed. She blinked again and wondered if she was breathing. Could she breathe under water? How could she even still be alive? Above, the conquered land would be chaos; a nightmare cacophony of buildings breaking and wails of loss and pain, but down here there was only silence. Maybe this wasn’t happening at all. Maybe she was dead. Or dreaming. None of it rang true. The water was the only truth.
Ahead was as black as space. She thought about the cave in her dream and the open abyss. This was the opposite. Despite her grief, she felt no fear of the water and its enormity. She was home.
Shapes passed lazily by, some drifting over her head in the grip of the swell. Cars, people, tables; all thrown and destroyed. Her mouth formed an O as the little girl laughing on the beach only minutes before floated by, her small body bent and twisted. Her tongue stuck out slightly as if she were playing. Lucy closed her eyes and willed the water away.
When it was all over, she was still standing on what was left of the beach. As the water receded almost as quickly as it came, the shore was left silent and shocked. Lucy sank to the wet sand, and with her knees deep in the damp earth, she cried for a while before the cries of others around her became too much to ignore.
* * *
Afterwards, when she could think about it without trembling and fighting for breath, Lucy could only describe that day as time standing still. Boxing Day 2004, was endless. Maybe in the rest of the world the sun rose and fell, but not in Phuket.
For some in the tropical paradise the dark night claimed them early, and for those that were left behind the morning stretched on for eternity. Much later, when they first locked her in the white room, she’d often replay it in her head over and over again. Hundreds of thousand people dead. And all her fault. It seemed unreal. But she knew it was otherwise. She'd learned by then.
* * *
There was no space for thought in that morning. Maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing. As she shuffled up the beach, she ignored the damp sand that tried to lure her back to the water’s edge. Splintered wood and smashed glass dug into her feet. She didn’t flinch, instead savouring the pain. Inside the cloud of her mind, she wanted it. It was what she deserved.
For the first time in months she felt blissfully whole, strong and healthy. The thirst had gone but she could feel every drop of liquid beating around her slim frame. The wave had come and saved her. She’d made it come. It was crazy but it was the truth. How else had she survived as it swallowed her up? The wave was crazy and she was crazy and her need for the water had come at a terrible price. Ahead something glinted in the bright glare of the sun. She looked up.
With one foot raised mid-step, she paused and stared at the devastation. Her mouth fell in a wide O. Hell had come to earth. Hotels were crumbled like washed-away sandcastles, their walls destroyed by the force of the waves that sent people’s belongings fluttering to the ground below. Some buildings were cut in two, opened up like dolls houses; the beds and furnishings inside like giants’ playthings.
Boats and cars had smashed together, and cafes’ tables and chairs were strewn through the wet streets. For a while Lucy’s eyes protected her as walked further into the chaos, but eventually she couldn’t ignore the bodies. They were everywhere - broken, bleeding and dismembered. She stopped where the entrance to her hotel had been. Amid the rubble a man lay trapped beneath a refrigerator. He was almost dissected, his insides escaping from the waistband of his trousers and trailing a little way into the road. Her heart thumped inside her chest, the pounding knell all she could feel. Eventually, she sighed and left the man and his death behind. It was time to get her hands dirty.
She moved like a zombie as the relief trucks and aid agencies sped into Phuket, buzzing down in helicopters and planes, fighting with the flies to get to the needy. Lucy silently did as she was directed by the Thai Red Cross representative who spoke slowly to her in broken English. She helped with the living and the dead, but mainly the dead. There were so many more of them. Many survivors rushed here and there crying and tiredly calling out the names of missing loved ones. The hope in their voices weakened as the endless day stretched on.
Lucy worked silently. There was no point in her calling out. The ocean had taken Michael. The hours passed in sweat and mud and aching limbs. Stumbling, she almost dropped her end of the stretcher. She nodded to the Australian man at the other end that she was fine. She didn’t know his name. He’d told her, but she’d let the information slide. She didn’t want to know names, she didn’t want to think, and she definitely didn’t want to think about the water taking Michael. She needed to work. To exhaust herself. To pay some kind of penance. She and the Australian took the body to the pile that was growing in the middle of the road.
She worked for hours without stopping. She didn’t pause to eat or drink. She was no longer thirsty. The sun slowly started to set, and she wandered down to the water’s edge. It lapped the shore calmly and eventually she dipped her toe in it warmth.
Feel my pain, she thought, knowing that it was insane. The tears came. Share my pain. She bit her lip angrily. Where did these words inside her come from? Who was the person inside her? One minute sane, the next insane. Was that who she was? She wished the water didn’t feel so good. She wished it didn’t soothe her. She gazed at the rippling surface. It wasn’t the water to blame.
She crouched and dipped her fingers under the surface. It felt good. It felt like a terrible peace. Lost in the tranquility she didn’t notice the body drifting towards her until the wet black hair tangled up with her fingers. She gasped. The ocean had given her something back. She grabbed it.
With her clothes sodden wet, the little girl was surprisingly heavy, but grunting and swearing under her breath, Lucy eventually managed to haul the small body into her arms. She would not give up. She could do this. Her muscles screamed at her for rest, but she stumbled back up through the falling gloom to the sombre activity in the beach resort's damaged streets.
She held up the body as if it were a trophy, and as they saw her, the exhausted workers parted and made a path as if this one child represented all the loss and suffering of the hundreds of thousands that day. They held their lamps and torches high as she walked between them. She placed the little girl carefully down at the end of the long row and looked at her. The surprised look that been her face when she’d floated by in the water was gone. Her eyes and mouth were shut now. Had the ocean done that to ease Lucy’s pain? She didn’t deserve it.
Someone covered the girl with a shirt and after a moment, the small crowd returned to their quiet work. Lucy joined them. There was so much to do.
* * *
Michael’s body didn’t wash up until four days later, and it was only by chance that Lucy saw someone bringing him up from the beach. Her eyes were heavy and gritty from lack of sleep and her brain so tired she was no longer able to form complete sentences even if she had the inclination to do so. She moved in a haze. But when she saw the bare soles of his feet, she knew it was him. Funny the things you can recognise someone by.
All his bones were broken and his body was bloated from their time in the water. She knelt by him for a long while. She didn’t want to remember him like this. She didn’t really want to remember anything at all.
She didn’t cry though. She didn’t do that until someone finally got their passports out of what was left of their hotel room. And then, staring at his awkwardly serious photo, her tears came. They flooded in waves down her cheeks. When she couldn’t bear the pain anymore she went back out to help clear up. Anything was better than thinking.
When she was eventually forced to stop her brain was exhausted and a cloud of confusion filled every corner of her consciousness. She showered and gathered her few things together as various Embassy officials and doctors and aid workers and fellow survivors told her how very lucky she was to be alive. It was a miracle she’d survived, that’s what they all said. Eventually she slept for twenty-four stra
ight hours. There were no dreams, and no thirst, and no little girls with red fingernails. There was just glorious oblivion.
It was possible that everyone was right, she decided while sitting on the plane, feeling the engines roaring into life underneath her, and trying not to think of the chilled box carrying Michael’s earthly remains that sat in the hold. Maybe she had blacked out. There was no way she could have survived standing in the heart of the wave. It was impossible. She hadn’t been thirsty since Boxing Day and the dreams had stopped. She watched as Thailand and the ocean grew smaller beneath her. She would try to believe that, she decided. It would be so good if it were true. A blackout. A delusion. It would be so much easier to live with than remembering that it was she that brought them here, she that took him to the beach, and she that somehow willed the waves to rise. She closed her eyes to sleep. Whichever, it was done now. It was over.
Chapter 6
‘Are you sure you don’t want to stay over?’ Michael’s dad kissed Lucy’s dry cheek. ‘It’s been a long day.’
Lucy shook her head. Every day had been a very long day in the two weeks since the wave. There were dark circles under Michael’s dad’s eyes and he looked so very much older than she remembered him. The long days had come for them all with the water.
‘I just want to get back home,’ she said.
They’d buried Michael in the local church that afternoon. It had been overcast all morning but as the coffin was lowered into the ground, the heavens had opened. Lucy tried not to read anything into that. She hadn’t caused the wave. She hadn’t stood in the middle of it. It had been a hallucination.
Still, she’d let the sky do her crying for her as she stood quietly alongside his family and their friends; a gathering of stylish London black. It didn’t feel as if she were saying goodbye. Whether it had been real or not, she’d done that when he’d been ripped away from her by the water.
The wake was a sombre and contained affair, pretty much as Lucy had expected from her husband’s family. His mother’s eyes were red, but she hadn’t cried either, unless the tears had slipped unnoticed behind her veil.
‘Good-bye, Sylvia,’ Lucy said softly, raising a hand toward the older woman who sat with her daughter, sipping tea.
She nodded back. ‘Stay in touch. Michael would have wanted that.’
‘Of course I will.’ The words were empty. Lucy doubted she’d hear from them again. They had never been close and despite her being so much younger than Michael she had yet to want to produce the desired grandchild, and now they would never have that pleasure.
Lucy smiled wistfully at Michael’s father for a moment before stepping outside. Just before the door closed, Sylvia’s voice carried a little too loudly on the breeze. ‘I’ll never know why he wanted to go to Thailand in the first place. We always have Christmas as a family. Always.’
Lucy flinched. The blame was clear in the sentence. She had taken their precious son to the other side of the world, he had died there and she hadn’t even had the good grace to die with him. She walked briskly in the rain, heading towards the small train station. Their feelings didn’t make her feel angry. Their need to blame someone was understandable, but it wasn’t her fault, and their coolness just served to make her feel even more isolated. She was alone in the world. A widow at twenty-five.
When she dozed on the rattling old carriage, she saw flashes of women’s hair and the pounding of feet. Water enveloped her, salty in her mouth. She woke with a gasp, forcing the dream away before it could take hold. Staring out the window, blinking away the bleariness, she chewed her bottom lip. It hadn’t been real. None of it. No one could cause a thing like that. She had enough shit to deal with without dwelling on the wave and the dreams. She’d had some kind of minor breakdown and now it was over. Simple as that.
She concentrated on staring at the newspaper on her lap and pretending to read it. The words stared back at her and she couldn’t help wishing that Michael’s body had stayed in the warmth of the ocean instead of being put into the cold, dark earth. She pushed that thought away too. She was getting very good at shutting her thoughts up, she decided. Somewhere in her head was a box of dark things that was getting very full. Maybe another breakdown waiting to happen. She almost smiled at that.
* * *
The first month in the flat alone was the hardest and it passed in a haze. She thought about selling and finding somewhere new, somewhere to ‘end her grieving process and start her new life’ as all the well-wishers at work kept insisting would be a good idea. In the end though, after all Michael’s clothes and personal items were boxed up and placed in the attic, she’d decided that this was the best place for her grieving process and she just wasn’t ready to start her new life just yet. On top of that, she was just too damned tired to even think about moving.
Every morning she put on her make-up and dressed in clothes that had got slightly too big for her and in her head she’d see Michael shaking his head at the loss of her curves, and then she’d push that aside and lose herself in work for a few hours. Jimmy wasn’t overloading her but giving her enough to keep her mind occupied and active, and they’d gone for drinks and food after the office was closed once or twice, but he had his own life and wife, and as it was she never seemed to be much in the mood for company. She couldn’t talk about the wave and the devastation. There weren’t the words in the world to explain it.
‘You should maybe hook up with a support group. Other people that went through it. It might be cathartic to let it all out,’ he’d said once as he put a glass of Sauvignon Blanc in front of her. She’d smiled and nearly thrown it all over his shirt. Support groups weren’t for her.
At night, she’d lie awake in her too-big bed and listen to Michael's belongings calling to her from above her head and she’d cry big salty tears into her pillow in the hope of silencing them. She lay there and wondered if it would be better if she took them down and touched them. But she couldn’t. It would break her.
Eventually, after that first month was past, there came a day when she got dressed and didn’t see Michael shaking his head at her. And when she got home it seemed that his possessions had finally fallen asleep and that she could too. The healing process had begun.
* * *
She poured a healthy capful of bubbles under the water that gushed hot and steamy from the bath taps and waiting longingly for the tub to fill. She’d been caught in a downpour between the Tube and the flat and was still shivering, even though she’d stripped off her wet clothes and stuck them straight in the washer. Typical bloody March weather. A gorgeous warm morning followed by a freezing, wet afternoon. She perched on the edge of the bath. How the hell was a girl supposed to dress for that?
She watched the foam rise, coating the surface of the water. A hot bath and a nice chilled glass of wine and then maybe she’d call out for pizza or just eat the Ben and Jerry’s ice cream that was untouched in the freezer. Her clothes weren’t so baggy on her any more and she’d even made it to the gym once that week. Michael would be proud of her. The thought paused her heart for a moment but the ache of grief was now familiar and accepting. The rage and knives of the early days had gone.
Unable to wait any longer, she stepped over the side and into the bath with the taps still running. The water was just a little bit too hot, just the way she liked it. She slid backward and lay resting her head against the edge, not caring if her hair got wet. Her muscles sighed as they relaxed. Nothing de-stressed her better than a long soak in the tub. With her eyes shut, she reached down and picked up her wine glass and took a long sip.
She mulled over the designs she had in mind for the new make-up brand she was creating the launch campaign for. She had a meeting with the client tomorrow and he was just going to love it. She was pretty sure about that and so was Jimmy. At some point over the past couple of weeks she’d started to love her work again, and although that was a long way from starting to love another person again, she figured it was a pretty good start.
‘No, Daddy, no!’
Lucy sat up fast, her eyes wide open. Where the hell had that come from? Leaning forwards, she turned the taps off. Outside, maybe? She looked up but the small bathroom window was securely shut. She listened again. The voice had sounded like a child of no more than three or four. Had new neighbours moved in?
‘No Daddy, please!’
The three words came again, loud and terrified and it seemed to Lucy that the water trembling around her. She stared at the taps. The words had come from them. Could the child’s words be travelling through the pipes somehow? Was that possible?
All thoughts of relaxation gone, Lucy twisted herself round so that she was kneeling at the tap end and pressed her face so close that her skin was almost touching the metal faucets. There was nothing but an empty echo. Beside the bath water dripped against the basin of the sink where she hadn’t closed the cold off completely. She could hear her own breathing and she could hear the slight fizz of the bubbles slowly dying around her, but she couldn’t hear the little boy.
Just as she began to slowly let out her breath, the sink shook with a series of thuds and slaps as if it were being beaten from the inside. She jumped, flinching as her cheek scraped sharply against the tap. Shit. What was that? Leaning against the back wall of the bath, she pulled her knees up under her chin as the sink groaned and thudded. Somewhere under the noise of the punches, she could hear small yelps that seemed to come in time with each tiny drip of the tap.
‘SHUUUT UUUPPP!’
The man’s angry scream made the whole unit rumble with rage and Lucy covered her ears, before eventually her bathroom fell silent. Her heart thumped hard in her chest for the first time since Boxing Day. She stared at the sink for a very long time before reaching for her wine and sipping it slowly as the bath cooled around her.
Apocalypse- Year Zero Page 9