When I tell the children their town was once a busy river port, with a naval base and a canning factory, they gape at that, too.
“I FEEL SORRY for the children,” Noemi says.
“The schoolkids?”
“No, they’ll be all right. I mean the kids who died in the wave. I hate the parents though, every one of them. They made it happen.”
“The volcano did that.”
“Not really. They knew the way the world was going and they did nothing. They killed their children with their own hands, or they might as well have done.”
“Things were more complicated than that. Harder.”
“OK, so I’m hard in return.”
I have a clockwork radio. It was given to me by the man I called my uncle, Lindsay Ballantine, who had the radio sent to me for my tenth birthday. It is small and light, and I keep it with me always. I hope you enjoy this, my uncle wrote in the card that came with it. The radio works by converting your body’s energy into electricity. You don’t need wires or batteries. Good for when there’s a power cut! There was something about my uncle’s messages that always made me think of secret codes. He was telling me the radio might be useful to me some day.
No matter what else I’ve had to leave behind, I’ve held on to the radio.
I scroll through the dial at least once a day, searching for news channels. Sometimes there’s music. Once I found a station that was playing old recordings of classical music. I was able to listen to Tchaikovsky’s violin concerto all the way to the end, although I had to wind the handle twice to keep the radio going.
The announcer said the soloist was Mehmet Khan. I told Noemi about what I’d heard, just to tell someone. I expected her to give me one of her blank looks. I was surprised when she told me that Khan had been her father’s favourite musician.
There was silence between us after she said that, a juddery, hostile substance I didn’t dare disturb. Noemi had never mentioned her father before, not even once. Now I know he used to like violin music. Details like this keep people alive, even when they’re gone.
“It doesn’t matter though, does it?” Noemi said after a while. “Whether you hear something like that again, or not. None of it is relevant. The music, the art, all that stuff—it describes a world that doesn’t exist, not any more. Hockney and Van Gogh, all those guys—they might as well have been painting an alien planet. Look at the funny aliens, shopping for clothes and listening to music. Walking around with their umbrellas. It’s all gone, it’s like it never was. We’re dinosaurs.”
WE NEED A new language to describe our world, a new set of symbols. In time, they will cease to be new. They will become our common tongue, the present tense, the known. We need new music and new art—Noemi is right. Most of all we need new maps, to see where we are.
A HUNDRED YEARS from now, will someone jerry-rig an old CD player, put on a disc of Tchaikovsky and think: how sad?
I remember our history teacher showing us a film about the Minoans, whose civilisation was overthrown by the Mycenaeans in the wake of a devastating volcanic eruption. I gazed at the image on the screen, a bulbous water jug, painted all over with a swirling blue octopus. How beautiful, I thought, and how sad. Now they’re all gone.
I think of the Minoans at night, when the tide comes in. The old motorway flyover stands out sharply against the moonlight, an enormous scaffold, driving into nowhere. I’ve seen people diving from the snapped-off end, kids mainly, though there’s nothing much down there to find except more car corpses.
NOEMI SLEEPS ON the boat most nights, though I’ve told her that once the weather starts getting dangerous she should come to the bungalow. I keep the camp bed made up for her, just in case. One day a couple of weeks ago I came back from the town and found her here, not sleeping in the camp bed but sitting on the floor beside it. She looked like she’d been crying. The backs of her hands were grazed, from grappling with something in the water, probably, though I don’t think that’s why she was upset. She once sliced her thigh wide open on a submerged stanchion and was back in diving less than a week later.
THE OCEANS ARE changing. There are more sharks off our coast for a start, not just the usual basking sharks and short-fin mako but warm-water species such as the tiger shark and the bull shark, impossibilities that have nonetheless become possible, easing into reality like the morphed, reformed topography that has become the normal landscape of our daily lives. It is my job to monitor such anomalies, to record any inconsistencies and from them make a reasoned conjecture about what kind of impossibilities might happen next.
Unlike many, I am still being paid. In an isolated community like this one, having a job that is about more than survival feels like an indulgence, a hangover from before, although ICTHA do their best with propaganda. The public rationale is that we’re monitoring fish stocks. Sustainable food sources, is the preferred term. The people of Helston call us the boffins on the hill. Mostly they leave us alone, as they did with my uncle. I sometimes think I’m more grateful for that than I am for my salary, although I’m probably kidding myself. A salary means I can do more than just eat. I can buy paper for this diary, unused clothing, other rationed items. I can sometimes buy coffee, which is variable in quality but still coffee.
Coffee always reminds me of my mother.
NOEMI STOWED AWAY on a cargo vessel, a rusty leviathan out of Athens or Istanbul under a private flag. A pirate ship, in other words. The living conditions on board such vessels are known to be desperate, but when I express surprise that the so-called captains are able to find people willing to crew for them, Noemi shrugs off my question as if it were of no account or interest whatsoever.
“At least it’s work,” she says. “Work, and a place to be. Better than starving on the street. People will kill for less. I’ve seen it happen.”
She tells me that if her hiding place had been discovered she’d have been dumped overboard immediately, no questions asked. I have no doubt she’s telling the truth—such stories are commonplace. Before the cargo ship, Noemi lived on one of the floating islands: sprawling, miles-long settlements of wood and steel tethered to what remains of the mainland all along the eastern Mediterranean. Patchwork places—half-ship, half-city—that started out as refugee camps but degenerated rapidly into slave economies as soon as the aid budgets dried up.
NOEMI WAS BORN in a small town in the mountains of Ararat, not far from the city of Van in eastern Turkey. I try to imagine her as a young woman, setting out from her home to study at the University of Ankara. It is like trying to see into another universe.
WHAT I REMEMBER mostly about this place from before is how hot it was. We drove out here one day—Mum, Dad and I—to see my uncle, Lindsay Ballantine. I’d never met him before but from the way my mother behaved in the days leading up to our visit I had already worked out that he wasn’t in favour. Helston was landlocked then—the estuary had dried up twenty years before—and the reservoir just beyond the motorway junction had become a lake of nettles and brambles and giant hogweed. My uncle’s bungalow was pretty much the same as it is now, except for the vegetable garden.
Uncle Lindsay let me look through his microscope. He brought me lemonade, and was kind to me in a way that surprised me, given that he could barely have known I existed before that day. I understand now that this was because of my Aunt Chantal. I looked very like her as a child, less so now. Lindsay Ballantine had been having an affair with my aunt, which was, as I realised later, the main reason my mother was so against him.
Chantal was very ill for a while, though whether this was directly to do with Lindsay Ballantine I never found out. Chantal moved to Florida when I was ten, on a post-doctoral fellowship. She died in the La Palma tsunami. My mother blamed herself for her sister’s death, as she did for everything. She said if she hadn’t been so set against Lindsay Ballantine, Chantal might never have gone to America in the first place. Dad said there was no point in thinking like that, we couldn’t predict the future, we we
ren’t magicians.
That isn’t entirely true though, is it? La Palma was predicted for decades before it happened. And even though the volcanic eruption that sent one side of the island sliding into the ocean was simply the most dramatic among a series of precursors, the changes in weather patterns that led to the remapping had been predicted as long ago as the nineteen-sixties.
The problem is that no one gives much of a shit about the future until it actually happens. In the fable of the grasshopper and the ant, human beings are the most frivolous breed of grasshopper that ever was.
THE REMAPPING IS what they started to call it, on the news and on the forums, back when there were still public forums on the internet, when there was still an internet that wasn’t protected by government blocking signals. They preferred to use the word protected, they said, so as not to spread hysteria about censorship, just as they referred to the inundation of one-fifth of the planet’s land surface as the remapping.
At least no one insisted we spell it with a capital ‘r’.
I have access to a limited-view version of the internet through the ICTHA password, but I don’t spend much time on it. It doesn’t tell me much that I don’t already know.
MY UNCLE, LINDSAY Ballantine, was arrested in 2093, just three months before my sixteenth birthday and a year before La Palma. My mother sent me the news, by email, one of the last I had from her.
When I asked her what he’d done, she said she didn’t know.
No one will tell us, she wrote. She said she still hadn’t told Chantal because she didn’t want to worry her. I didn’t know what to say. I was still living with the Severins, in Strasbourg, still trying to pretend that Sara and I were still best friends, although Sara had given up on the self-deception months before.
There was no one thing that broke us apart, unless you count what happened in Aachen, but as La Palma was just one small part of the remapping, so Aachen was just a symptom of what was happening anyway between Sara and me. Friends do grow apart, I understand that. But I never imagined that this could happen with Sara and it broke my heart.
People say that love transcends everything but it doesn’t. Not always anyway, not even usually. If the end of our world has taught us anything it is that love is a luxury.
IT WAS MY uncle who made me want to be a marine biologist. That day with the microscope changed me because it made me interested in something outside myself. Not just interested, but obsessed. Glimpsing the single-celled organisms through the magnifying lens made me realise how vast the world was, and how little I knew of it.
My uncle spoke of the paramecia as monsters—perhaps he thought the image would be appealing to a child—but what fascinated me more than anything, even then, was the idea that the world the creatures lived in was different from my world, even though they occupied the same space. How a difference in perspective could transform everything.
It is convenient for us to believe we are the superior animal, the top predator, but it is a fiction. Already there are creatures—whole orders of organisms—more suited for survival in this new environment than we are.
“Killing things does not mean we win,” Noemi says. Why is this such a difficult lesson for us to learn?
Noemi won’t stay out of the water, even when I tell her the numbers of tiger sharks are increasing to dangerous levels.
“Sharks won’t attack you unless you’re bleeding,” she says. “I would have thought you would know that.”
She’s right, of course, but I can’t help worrying. Noemi seems to have no concept of risk.
THE MAKO SHARK is allergic to captivity. When placed in an aquarium, it becomes disorientated, loses its appetite, and dies within days.
MY UNCLE’S BUNGALOW was uninhabitable when I first arrived here. There was a large hole in the roof, and the kitchen and bathroom had been ripped out, presumably for scrap. I didn’t mind that—I can use the municipal—but the state of the place was depressing because of the trash. Someone at the market—a local chicken farmer—told me the bungalow had become an unofficial rubbish dump for the people who lived nearby, which explained the sacks of refuse that were piled almost to the ceiling in two of the three rooms, but did not make it any easier to dispose of them. It took me three months just to get the place clean, all while I was settling into my job with ICTHA and living in the municipal dormitory. The dorms are fine for a while but I knew I needed my own place or I’d go crazy.
The whitewash for the interior walls cost me most of my first pay cheque but I found this was an indulgence I could not forgo, no matter how foolish it seemed.
The wood stove was still in working order, thank goodness, and there was plenty of driftwood. With the walls painted and a fire burning, I had a home.
There were still some things of my uncle’s in the bungalow—some dusty crockery in the kitchen pantry and a few pieces of furniture the salvagers had either ignored or else not noticed amidst the trash: two ladder-backed chairs, a metal filing cabinet, a bedside table. Both the filing cabinet and the drawer of the bedside table were locked, but with patience and a bent nail I managed to get them open without inflicting too much damage. The filing cabinet was crammed with papers, so many of them and in no discernible order. It was difficult to know where to start. The bedside cabinet proved less of a challenge. The drawer contained some photographs—a family group including a boy I thought was probably my uncle as a child, one of Chantal, standing outside the bungalow with her hair blowing loose in the wind, another of Chantal with my mother, similar to one of the photos I’d seen amongst my mother’s possessions and clearly taken at the same time—and a small pile of letters. I recognised my aunt’s writing immediately, from the birthday and Christmas cards that had come to the house during the Florida years.
There was a part of me that insisted that they were private and that I shouldn’t touch them. My resolve lasted all of five minutes. What is it about human beings, and their endless hunger for knowledge at any price?
THERE IS A capsized tugboat lodged beneath the motorway bridge, below the tide line, a piece of flotsam wrenched from the harbour by the tsunami’s backwash before being swept back upstream by the returning tide. Much of the debris was cleared, after the first incursion anyway, but once the water levels began to rise permanently the cleanups became more sporadic and eventually stopped. Noemi has commandeered the sunken tugboat as her mission control. She has siphoned out the floodwater, constructed some kind of rudimentary airlock so the cabin stays dry, but even so, I can only imagine the interior as depressingly cramped and damp. Dungeon-like. How Noemi manages to sleep there I do not know.
“It must be so dark,” I say to her.
“I have a torch,” she says. She appears unconcerned. “I found it in the old lifeboat station.” Some days later she shows it to me, a solar-powered model and fairly powerful, though I know from experience that they can lose charge suddenly, shut down without warning.
The thought of being trapped underwater without light makes me queasy with nerves. There is so much hardware down there, so many obstructions.
Noemi is counting fish for me. The boat is her hide.
There has been a significant increase in numbers, these past two years especially, not just of the schooling varieties but across the board.
The sunken motorway intersection is gradually being colonised. Even with the toxic release from the concrete, there is evidence that the natural filtration systems provided by algae and plankton have already begun the process of purification.
Many species are adapting successfully. In time there will be local variants, and ultimately new species.
THE LETTERS FROM the bedside drawer cover a period of about five years, from the time my uncle first moved to the bungalow until Chantal was offered the job in Florida. Whether there were more letters—written before my uncle came to Cornwall or after Chantal flew to America—I do not know. I doubt it, somehow. There are gaps in the correspondence, opening up the possibility that some of
the letters may have been destroyed, although again I doubt it. My uncle clearly never intended showing them to anyone, so what would be the point?
I didn’t know my aunt very well. She always seemed shy to me, prickly and standoffish and difficult to talk to, though her letters to Lindsay Ballantine reveal an entirely different person: confident, outspoken and directed. I expected the correspondence to be about herself and Ballantine—love letters—but in fact what Chantal mostly wrote about was work. I already knew that my uncle’s decision to come to Cornwall was the result of a disagreement with his head of department at the time, a man named Vinson Peshwar. I was surprised to find Peshwar’s name cropping up again and again in my aunt’s letters. I even wondered if it was a different person, though I soon realised it wasn’t.
Peshwar never knew about us, my aunt writes at one point. I couldn’t bear to be around him if he did. He insists it’s all in the past, what happened with you two, but I know him well enough to be sure he’d find a way of using you against me, if he found out, which is the last thing I need. He makes life here difficult enough as it is.
Vinson Peshwar was leading a program of advanced research into cloud seeding. The technology was highly controversial, even then. From what I can make out, Chantal started out siding with Ballantine but later switched her allegiance to Peshwar. It is difficult to imagine she was in love with him: the letters near the end of the sequence express much of the same irritation at Peshwar’s arrogance—what Chantal refers to repeatedly as his complete lack of hubris—as those at the start. But she did come to believe in the Rainmaker Program, and it was this change of heart that seems to mark the end of her relationship with my uncle.
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