by Maggie Gee
‘No,’ said Kilda. ‘I don’t want to. Perhaps it’s unlucky, I don’t know –’ She paused, and seemed to be thinking, for a moment, then frowned, and rubbed her forehead. ‘Can’t see anything for you, either. I can just see, you know, night, and, like, floods. And you’re in the Towers, I think, with Father Bruno. There’s someone else there who’s been very wicked but – I’ve got a headache, I can’t see her face. Then someone turns up who really upsets you. Then –’ She clutched at her chest as if in pain.
The bus came along at that moment. Listing heavily, packed to the gills, wallowing and splashing through the water, its headlights briefly illuminated them, the tall beautiful girl with her clumsy, heavy body, the grim little man with his twisted face, the two of them trapped in a circle of light where the lines of rain were like golden wire, a moment’s cage they might never escape, with the cold and dark of the flood all round them.
‘I expect I’ll be famous though,’ she said, as they fought their way through to a space at the back.
She’s really up herself, Dirk thought. But then she said something he would never forget. Just as he was starting to hate her, she stopped him. ‘You will be too. We’ll both be saints.’
Kilda included him, she let him in.
When Rhuksana came back at the end of break, the level of noise in the class-room was normal, and two of the boys were climbing up the window-bars, with others watching and urging them on, so at first she didn’t notice the little vortex of quiet around the reading corner. Half a dozen children sat on the felt mat, and a dozen more stood near, leaning inwards, and the centre of the stillness was Gerda’s voice.
‘That child is amazing,’ she told Mohammed later, as they sat eating the Chinese takeaway he had picked up to save her cooking. They had married for love, with their parents’ blessing, though Mohammed’s mother would have liked him to pick a wife from Loya: foreign Muslim women could be very independent. ‘She was reading them The Snow Queen, it’s a Hans Andersen story which has her name in, and you wouldn’t believe some of the ones who were listening, Darren, for example, who can never sit still.’
‘The power of imagination,’ said Mohammed. He had been brought up for the first sixteen years of his life in Loya, so he had missed a lot of books, though his nurse had told him, every night, magical stories about the village. He didn’t know Hans Andersen, or Grimm, or Laing. When he was sent abroad, to go to school in the city, he started to read: Dickens, Melville, Austen, Flaubert, Tolstoy. Mohammed had three degrees in literature. ‘They don’t value imagination, at Headstone.’
Headstone had wanted a Muslim on their staff. They hoped to start an Islamic list, which would surely save them from terrorist attacks, though Mohammed laughed and said no one would attack them. (A few of them were clearly afraid of him, particularly after the bomb on the subway supposed to have been planted by Loyan activists. The morning after, no one would look at him. He wanted to say, ‘I detest violence’; he wanted to say, ‘This is un-Islamic’; he wanted to say, ‘Perhaps it was planted by someone wanting to make everyone hate us’; he wanted to say, ‘Sometimes they come to the Mosque, people like this, and everyone avoids them, because it’s like a virus, and we don’t want to catch it’; he wanted to shout at their averted faces, ‘Of course it’s appalling to anyone intelligent, but my country is being bombed every night. Why doesn’t everyone think that’s appalling?’ He said none of these things, it was too embarrassing. Saying nothing, he suffered acutely.)
He didn’t much want to do an Islamic list, since so many of his favourite authors were western. He asked if he could try to revitalize the backlist, which had some classic writers from the days when the publisher was Head & Stone, Limited. With marketing, he thought they could sell well again. But no one listened, he was just Mohammed, a new acquisition they were rather proud of whose presence took care of ‘the Islamic issue’. They didn’t know how much they shocked him with their trivial banter, their callowness, the way they thought of authors as disposable cash-cows.
He tried to explain some of this to Rhuksana, who thought he must be exaggerating. ‘Some of them must love books,’ she said. ‘If they saw the way my children love books … They’re hungry for books, but the school can’t afford them.’
Now there were fresh problems at Headstone. The archives were kept in the basement. The files went back for a hundred and fifty years, to the days when they’d been a great publisher, with some of the best writers in the world on their list. One night last week for the first time the waters had risen above the doorstep. Letters and papers had got wet; boxes of documents were actually afloat, bobbing round the staff, who went in barefoot, trousers rolled up, fretful, ignorant, snatching things up and dropping them.
‘They haven’t a clue what’s there,’ he explained. ‘It’s just a great muddle of loss and forgetting. Now they’re talking about what ought to be done, but half of them are already bored with the problem. They’ve lost so many sales because of these rains that some people say we can’t afford to do anything, not even get in an archivist. “It’s just the past,” is what Patricia said. “It’s all very well, but we can’t live on it. If the rains continue, we won’t have a future.”’
‘Don’t they believe in memory?’ asked Rhuksana.
‘No, just money,’ Mohammed said. ‘But one good thing happened. Or might happen. I got given an amazing manuscript to read, by someone I’ve never heard of. H. I. – or H. J.? H. Something Segall. It’s about – well, everything, really. This fellow has spent twenty years writing it. It’s about time, and simultaneity. The way everyone’s moment happens at once, wherever they are, however different, and every atom is interconnected. It’s full of the most amazing stuff. For example: did you know that Napoleon lost the battle of Waterloo because of a volcano erupting that spring? There were massive floods, and he couldn’t move his armaments. A lot of huge changes come to pass because two or three unconnected things coincide … Are you listening, Rhuksana?’
‘Yes … sorry. I agree. I was thinking about one of the parents at school. He lost his job, his mother died, then his leg was crushed by a runaway lorry … It all happened in a matter of weeks … That must be what it’s like in Loya. Darling, have you read the letter from Jamila?’
Mohammed’s young sister had been trying for a year to get an exit visa from Loya. Rhuksana knew how much Mohammed loved her. They had both been hoping she would come and live with them and study at the City Institute; and maybe, with Jamila around to help them, Rhuksana would be able to have a baby. She wanted one badly, she ached for one. But Jamila was trapped, as the troops marched nearer the outskirts of the distant city where both their families had lived for centuries. The night sky was red with explosions, there were constant power cuts, the mosque had been hit. Sometimes the letters were unbearable. Too much was happening; too many things at once.
‘I’ll wait till I’ve recovered from my journey.’
Coming home was a nightmare every day, as he waited for non-existent transport, taking a more and more roundabout route as the network of viable streets shrank further. The corpse of a rat had washed up, gleaming, on to the platform of the bus that evening. The conductor kicked it off, cursing. Rhuksana had found a drowned fox in the garden that ran from the flats down to the canal. Its eyes were open. She was very upset.
There was a pause while they ate their Chinese Chicken, listening to the whisper of the rain on the window. Lots of the takeaway menu had been crossed out; ‘suppry plobrems’, the man explained. No sweetcorn, no Chinese Leaves, no carrots; everything came with water chestnuts. Mohammed wondered if the chicken was fresh.
‘In any case,’ said Rhuksana, brightening, ‘there was little Gerda, reading her story, and some of the naughtiest kids in the class just sat at her feet, enthralled. A story like The Snow Queen never dates. Poor Mohammed, I suppose you didn’t read it. It’s about a young girl who has to cross the world to find a little boy, her playmate. He’s been lured away by the wicked S
now Queen, who put a sliver of ice in his heart. When the girl finally finds him in the Snow Queen’s palace, he seems to have forgotten her, but she kisses him, the chip of ice melts, and they run away, hand in hand, and there, outside the palace, it’s summer, “full glorious summer”, and they have grown up. So the story has everything kids like – courage, love, a happy ending. Hans Andersen will never die.’
‘Unless all the readers do,’ said Mohammed.
‘Art will never die,’ declared Lottie, lofty, in the taxi, to Harold, on the way to the opera. She was Accessing Culture; her course tutor would be pleased.
The Gardens had left her unusually thoughtful. She needed something to cheer her up; spending money nearly always helped. She needed crowds of well-dressed people, flamboyant music, heat, light; she needed red plush and heroic emotion, perfume, alcohol, her flame-red dress. She needed to make love; they had done it again (in that respect, happily, Harold was unbeatable). Christian had designed her a one-off evening number, something she had never worn till today, a full-length column of liquid scarlet with a built-in corset and a plunging neckline, engineered to flatter her every curve, making her breasts rise creamy and delectable out of the tightly-whorled rosebud of a bodice.
She had smoothed the shiny cups up over her nipples, examining herself in the bedroom mirror, starting to feel better, starting to feel good. This morning in the Gardens, life had felt empty, the ground she walked on was suddenly thin, as if they were floating on a sheet of paper – nothing happier or safer than a sheet of paper – with the flood-water already darkening the corner, preparing to pull them all down into nothingness, her luck, her marriage, her house, her money, the people of the city, their hopes, their stories (she had warmed at the last to the little old man with glasses, when he started telling her about his granddaughter, a child called Gerda, who loved the zoo, and came to feed the birds in the Gardens. His wife had made Gerda a red satin dress; the detail instantly made Lottie like him; she had seen the girl in her mind’s eye – a patch of red satin, a sun-blanked face – on her grandfather’s lap in the cruising boat, in that fragile company, so small, on the waters, all of them together, chattering, nervous, linked by a sudden fear of the future).
Which was ridiculous, of course. As if it could just vanish, the whole glittering city. When she, Lottie, was afraid of nothing.
But money had always been her shield. And she liked to think she was creative with it. First she had rung the Opera House: yes, they had four premium tickets. In fact, they had dozens of premium tickets. ‘People just aren’t going out, madam.’ ‘How feeble of them,’ said Lottie. Then she rang Davey, in invincible mode. He was to get himself to the Opera House, by any means possible, with a ‘nice date’ – ‘Mum, I have a girlfriend, as you know, I don’t do dates’ – ‘Exactly, Davey. I remember her. And her name was – ?’ ‘Delorice.’ ‘Delorice, quite. A very nice girl, frightfully brainy, I approve, darling. Do you think she has got a decent frock?’ ‘Several, Mother. But she may be busy.’ ‘Davey, this is the Opera House.’ She needed her family around her – not Lola, of course, who only liked hip-hop.
Now Lottie paused, as she dressed for the opera, and stared at the woman in her wonderful Hopper, Morning Sun: Soleil du Matin. So solidly grounded on that gleaming bed, bending forward, eagerly, into the morning, the living, rinsed-gold light of morning which poured full-tilt through the open window. In that perfect world it would never rain.
Perhaps the woman had the wrong lover, for the other half of the bed was vacant, perhaps she was even a prostitute, for she’d woken wearing a scanty pink dress; maybe her face had a clownish look, daubed, it appeared, with last night’s makeup, a slash of red on her lips and cheeks, the head-on light making her skin a mask (here Lottie broke off to complete her makeup). But however Lottie read it, however long she looked – and this picture had survived a lifetime of looking; the family had owned it since she was six – the painted woman was part of her, a woman four-square in the blaze of morning, leaning towards the empty, beautiful, sun-kissed city outside her window, the warm red brick of the eternal street.
Touching palms with twenty years of affection, Lottie and Harold let themselves out.
‘Art will never die,’ Lottie repeated, more urgently, plucking at Harold’s cashmere coat, for her husband was staring out at people wading with bags and brief-cases on their heads, lit up wherever the lights were still working, oddly medieval, lurching, struggling, as the grumpy taxi-driver wove through the streets, swearing to himself at every diversion; the journey was taking three times longer than usual.
‘I hope you’re right,’ said Harold, laughing, surprised by her intensity. That kind of statement was not like Lottie, but hearing the hunger in her voice, the way she needed to believe it, he tried again: ‘Of course you’re right.’
‘And we’re all happy, except for the floods. You managed to get to the end of the book. Lola has got that nice little friend, who I hope is a good influence. And Davey’s doing so well at the moment.’
‘Yes, Lottie darling. I’m proud of him.’
‘He says he’s made a programme about the end of the world. I mean, he does take on the big subjects.’
‘Yes, Lottie. Marvellous.’
‘But Harold, it isn’t really so marvellous. I think it’s scheduled for the day after the Gala.’
‘The end of the world, you mean?’ said Harold, and laughed uproariously.
‘Yes, actually, Harold. Don’t laugh, dear. That, and the programme. Both of them. It’s very scientific. To do with the planets. But Davey doesn’t seem to take it seriously.’
‘Then we shan’t either – all right, darling? Let’s just enjoy the opera.’
Forty minutes later, Lola rushed in from drama rehearsals at her school, which had had to be stopped when part of the drama studio’s roof collapsed under the weight of water. They had all had a fright; no one had been hurt, but there were several minutes of tears, and screams, and the Ramada twins fainted and were taken to hospital. Lola was still shaking with excitement, and ate: two packets of prawn cocktail crisps; a bowl of sweet cereal with two spoons of honey; a bar and a half of organic chocolate flavoured with organic coffee-beans; three meringues, which she filled with jam; then three different vitamin pills for her health. She longed for her parents; she’d almost died, and they ought to be here, to sympathize. She found their note, and felt cross with them; they were far too old to need to go out; nicked one of Harold’s cigarettes, to spite them; coughed horribly; painted her nails; hated the colour, and cleaned it off again; changed into a wonderbra and micro-mini; remembered she had lots of homework to do; phoned a friend, Rosa, to talk about it; Rosa hadn’t done it, but was sure it would be easy; arranged to meet Rosa at Sweaty Feet; jammed on her earphones to listen to Coldplay; pulled the front door to, as she rushed out, swearing as she plunged her new shoes into a puddle; failed to hear that the lock hadn’t caught.
Two hours later, Dirk arrived. He wasn’t imaginative, he knew this area; he had done very nicely here before. But even Dirk was pleasantly surprised to find Lottie’s front door wide open again. The One God was really providing for them. This time Dirk had brought a van.
Davey and Delorice were both on edge as they journeyed towards the Opera House. Delorice and Lottie had met twice before, but Lottie had been vague about her on the phone. And it was Delorice’s first time at the opera. The Opera House seemed ordinary to Davey; he’d been going to the opera since he was a kid, ‘and people don’t dress up as much as they did’, he told Delorice, trying to help; he only dressed up to please his mother. But what he said emphasized the differences between them; he was a decade older than Delorice; paler, richer, more blasé. Some things he did still shocked her; the church had made her strongly opposed to drugs, so he rarely used when he was with her … Maybe this relationship was never going to work.
They had allowed three hours to get there, but the journey deteriorated into farce as they traipsed, dressed in evening
gear and giant galoshes, through a makeshift patchwork of buses and water-buses. Waiting was muddy and nerve-wracking.
But the trip ended with a brilliant flourish. For the last stretch, across the flooded square, the Opera House had acquired gilded gondolas, lit at prow and stern by blazing flambeaux, ferrying latecomers in silk and velvet over the black waters around the white mansion, light flickering across pale arms and blonde hair, and flaring and guttering on Delorice’s skin, which glinted in the dark like rare black satin. By then she was terrified, chattering wildly, but the boat glided on, full of beauty and money, bearing them up over the surface of the night.
Lottie spotted them across the foyer, debouched, with ten others, from the gondola, tugging off their boots, tussling with their evening shoes. She sailed across, a golden figurehead breasting the tide in ruby red, all delighted laughter, big arms out-stretched, and embraced them both to her creamy bosom, Delorice just as warmly as Davey. Harold hovered, smiling benignly.
‘How do you do, Mr Lucas, Mrs Lucas,’ said Delorice, sounding like a virtuous schoolgirl.
‘Harold and Lottie, please,’ said Lottie. ‘Don’t fuss about your boots, my darling children. Just leave them there.’
‘Mum, we can’t. We’re going to need them afterwards.’
‘Lottie –’ Harold tried to restrain her, but Lottie waved him impatiently away.
‘Of course you won’t. I’ll get you a taxi. The gondolas take you to the taxi rank. And I’ll buy you both some more boots tomorrow. You don’t want to lump those things about with you.’
‘Sorry to be late, Mum, darling. I wasn’t expecting to need so many boats.’
‘But didn’t you adore those gorgeous gondolas!’
Lottie pulled them by the hands across the crimson foyer. Dark stains on the carpet where the flood had leaked in. ‘It’s Madama Butterfly of course, which I love, though Butterfly’s hardly a role model, is she? I’m quite a feminist, Delorice, in my way. Did Davey force you to come tonight? He always says I’m frightfully bossy …’