by Maggie Gee
‘Bliss go on with me?’ Davey interrupted, trying not to sound too excited.
‘Yeah, well I know he’s a bore,’ Kylie said, ‘but we have to have the politicians on. But you, Davey, you’re gorgeous, and you’re, like, serious. The city is willing to pay for the best. Tell me you’re not going to turn me down.’ Her voice had become very low and sexy. Naturally Davey had to say ‘Yes’, though part of him was panicking. Why was all this happening to him? Had he ever asked for any of it?
Still, Davey had never been a purist. Lottie had taught him to enjoy what came.
Listening to the good news about the floods, Davey started to feel positively cheerful. Even the radio presenter, a sceptical countryman who usually savaged politicians from the city, sounded more optimistic today.
(However, CTV had really blown it, since the Star-Lite End of the World Spectacular was scheduled for the evening after the Gala. They’d had lots of tabloid coverage at the weekend, with everyone in apocalyptic mood, but now the sun was shining, people had lost interest. The floods were going down; of course the world couldn’t end!)
Besides, for the first time in what seemed like months, there had been a completely clear night sky. Davey had OD-ed on the telescope, playing with some of his ideas for Star Trips. He wanted to explore, for teenagers, some of the wider questions in astronomy: one expanding universe, or many? Plural universes linked by worm-holes? One amazing structure, an infinite foam? Would the universe expand for ever, swimming endlessly outwards into the dark until its messages grew faint and were lost, or was there enough concealed matter to make it, at the last, turn back towards home? White distant swimmers, at the last, homing … When he was a boy, he had loved that idea, that the universe was cyclical, expanding and contracting like a heart. The idea of perpetual repetition soothed him. At last, one day, the cards would fall out right. Davey could be the man he longed to be; the swimmer would home at the perfect angle.
How strange it was, how beautiful. One day he’d bring Delorice along to see. They would climb up into the sky hand in hand, and look together at the ends of time. Go on a trip across the wide star-fields, the hidden galaxies above the black waters –
– Which had started to smell, in recent days, as the city began to warm up into spring. Davey pressed a button, and rolled up the window. He reminded himself that nothing lasted. The floods had been bad, but they too would pass.
Moira rose to her feet, sighing, bleeding, and picked up her Bible, and found peace. Morning had come, a third day. Maybe her Master was in his morning. Maybe she was not unvisited.
God said, ‘Let there be lights in the vault of heaven to separate day from night, and let them serve as signs for both festivals and years.’ God put these lights in the vault of heaven to give light on earth, to govern day and night, and to separate light from darkness … Evening came, and morning came. God saw that it was good.
She looked down for a second from the page of her Bible where the sunlight lay across her knee, the blue and yellow of her bruised knee, and Fool sat against it, his head on her flesh, she could feel the quick faint beat of his heart, the bridge of bone as light as egg-shell, and the sun painted a patch of his fur, lit part of it to such unbearable richness, such red fierce warmth, such a glow of red love, that her tears sprang towards it, the one good thing, of which Moira could never have enough.
May woke up from a dream of Alfred. He lay beside her: they were together; they were old, but they were curled like spoons, his dear hands joined beneath her bosoms, and he was whispering, ‘I love you, May. I’ll always love you, you know that May.’ She woke on a crest of unbelieving joy that only slowly ebbed away.
She knew he was there; they had been together. Somewhere, not far, he must still be with her. (She wished so fiercely that he could see the children; when she’d left them yesterday, they’d hugged her to death, and Franklin had so much a look of Alfred, his Roman nose, and his grandpa’s spirit; he was shy, like Alfred, but stubborn as a mule; and Winston had told her a fairy-tale, a rather muddled version of The Snow Queen.)
On the bedside table she kept her Tennyson, her other Alfred, who had not died. She picked it up and read, shortsightedly, drifting through the house to her little kitchen. She tripped on the carpet, and nearly fell. She heard him, impatient: ‘What are you playing at? For heaven’s sake, woman, look where you’re going!’
She read ‘Mariana’ as the kettle boiled. May had always enjoyed her mornings.
‘All day within the dreamy house,/ The doors upon their hinges creaked;/ The blue fly sung in the pane; the mouse/ Behind the mouldering wainscot shrieked,/ Or from the crevice peered about, …/ Old voices called her from without./ She only said, “My life is dreary, He cometh not,” she said;/ She said, “I am aweary, aweary, I would that I were dead!”’
May liked the idea of the bluebottle singing. She’d always thought they were lovely things, with their hard, bright, blue-green, petrol-y sheen.
But all that ‘weary, dreary’ business …
If you were loved enough, it lasted.
I miss him, but I don’t want to be dead.
‘She’s not at her best in the morning,’ Lorna muttered to Henry, in the secretive, hissing tone she habitually used when talking of their daughter, who had sharp ears and a habit of silently appearing, barefoot, and getting annoyed.
Angela certainly wasn’t at her best. Angela didn’t need to be. Her mother and father got Gerda up, took her to school, then made breakfast for Angela, and brought it in, with the mail, on a tray. They were proud of their daughter, the famous author. Naturally she had to work late at night; naturally she couldn’t get up in the morning. Since the two boys died, there had only been Angela.
After the sorrow of George’s death, they had moved away to a flat on the coast, a new beginning, away from disaster. When Angela gave birth to their first grandchild, the baby became the apple of their eye, and they came up to the city whenever they could. But the father of the baby didn’t want to know, and Angela started sounding down all the time, so they started to phone her every day. In the end there was only one decision they could make, though part of them wanted to be young again, get up without worries, walk on the beach …
Now they lived with her, and she paid for everything.
A world away from their life before, when treats were few, and they had to be careful. Now they could take mini-cabs if they went out; they didn’t need to cook, they got takeaways; they never bought clothes from charity shops. Angela had money for everything, since she had won the Iceland Prize. But sometimes they wondered if they’d done the right thing. Angela had meant them to be glorified housekeepers, running the household while she cared for Gerda and wrote her novels as before. Quite soon, though, it had somehow come about that Lorna and Henry took charge of Gerda.
Sometimes Gerda would peek in on her mother in the morning to say goodbye before she left, but Angela was usually half asleep. ‘Mummy’s tired,’ Angela would whisper, eyes still closed. ‘Kiss me, darling, then off you go. Mummy was working late last night.’ Sometimes this was true, sometimes not.
An hour or so later, Lorna would bring her her mail. There were armfuls of it, since she had won the Iceland. Angela would scan it, and make two piles, one for her secretary to deal with, one for her to linger over: fan letters, free books, invitations. Not everyone admired her novels, but most of the dissenters were mentally ill, making critical remarks about her style or carping obsessively about small errors; after reading a few sentences, she would discard them. Then she’d leave her bedroom, so her mother could clean and take the breakfast tray away, and go up to her office at the top of the house, which had a whole wall of books by Angela, all six of them, in fifty-seven languages. Sometimes, when Angela was very bored, she would read a few pages of her books aloud in languages she didn’t know. She sounded good in Finnish; more obscure in Basque. She wished she had a new book to read from.
In theory, Angela was spending her days writing her
new novel, a follow-up to her Iceland winner, eagerly awaited by her publishers. Actually Angela was stuck, and spent most of her time reading old letters, and making, then forgetting, cups of herbal tea, which slowly cooled around her study, until her mother took them away. Sometimes she would pick up proofs publishers had sent, asking her for a quote for the jacket, but the writers were never as good as she was, so she tended to fling them down unfinished.
Still she believed she was busy, or ought to be busy, and when Gerda came home (picked up by Lorna or Henry) she knew she mustn’t disturb her mummy till the latter stopped work, between six and seven. Then Angela might read Gerda a book, or briefly look at what her daughter called homework, though it didn’t seem to be quite as advanced as what Angela herself was doing at that age. She might even put her daughter to bed, but Lorna or Henry usually did that. Gerda was so attached to them, and Angela was naturally tired by bedtime.
Gerda was a credit to Angela, though. Angela sometimes ignored Gerda’s bedtime so she could take her to literary parties, beautifully dressed, with shining hair. Gerda would walk about, staring at people, and didn’t interrupt her mother’s grown-up conversations, though occasionally she would run up to Angela and hang, touchingly, upon her hand. Everyone asked about the striking child, and Angela modestly said, ‘She’s my daughter.’ The last time this happened hadn’t quite worked out – a literary editor with kids at the same school had asked, en passant, the name of Gerda’s teacher, and Angela’s mind had gone blank. He looked at her a trifle oddly.
Thanks to the live-in grandparents, it hadn’t been onerous, having a child. Interviewers always raised the motherhood question, and Angela always had an up-beat answer.
‘Don’t you find having a child has slowed you up?’ Nadia Samuels had asked, only last week. She herself was nearly forty, and anxious about not having one. The rumours in the book trade were that Angela was blocked. Some wanted her punished for winning the Iceland. ‘People might ask you, well – five years have gone past; where is your follow-up novel?’
‘I’m writing it,’ Angela smiled, annoyingly. ‘I think it will be worth the wait.’
‘Are you putting motherhood before your career?’
‘Some people make a great fuss about motherhood. I tend to take it in my stride. Of course I’m fortunate, Gerda’s very bright. Precocious is the word the teachers use. And yet she’s easy. She has a sweet nature.’
‘But children need a lot of looking after, surely?’ Nadia pursued, frowning.
‘I suppose some do, but we’re more like friends.’
Nadia frowned. The woman was a liar. Her sister had children. They did need looking after. ‘Is the child’s father around at all?’
‘Oh, yes,’ smiled Angela. ‘He’s very much involved …’ (with his Danian wife and family, she concluded, mentally).
Nadia stared at Angela, thwarted, and decided her profile would take no prisoners. ‘The Silence of the Lamb’ might be a good title.
‘So life is perfect?’ she inquired, cuttingly.
‘Let’s just say I’ve been very lucky.’
This morning, though, everything went wrong.
Angela woke earlier than usual, with a terrible wailing in her ear. Sirens, she thought, fuddled, anxious. It must be the floods. They’re ejaculating. (She hadn’t had sex for nearly six months.) No, that’s wrong, they’re evacuating us. The war, of course. I must save Gerda. She sat bolt up in bed, and switched her light on.
But she didn’t have her contact lenses in, and couldn’t make sense of what she saw.
A red drenched head, streaming with tears, features swollen beyond recognition, bulbs of cream snot pushing out of the nostrils, lay on her belly like a beaten dog, but all around there was screaming, yelling, and two desperate paws were scrabbling at the duvet, trying to touch her flesh underneath the covers, and then she realized that it was her daughter – Gerda, surely, but tortured, changed; and as she watched, the stubborn dog-like body was wrenched away, there was straining, heaving, and she saw, dimly, as she started to protest, started to reach out towards her child, that the grey-haired, purple-faced figure of her mother was pulling Gerda away by the feet, pulling her as if she were a heavy doll, and as Lorna fell backwards, clutching her grandchild, Gerda shot away towards the foot of the bed, still clinging on to her mother, still screaming, so the duvet and then the sheet went with her, and Angela felt the early morning chill hit her warm naked body like a shock of cold water, and the light was horrible, a flood of cold shame, for now Angela lay on the bed alone, Gerda was struggling in Lorna’s arms, and the old woman’s hand was across her mouth, her fingers had bandaged the child’s wild mouth, soft pleats of full lip pinched between old knuckles, and a furious voice hardly recognizable as Lorna’s was saying, ‘Wicked girl! What have you done to your mother, your poor mother who needs her sleep, I’m sorry, Angela, I couldn’t stop her,’ – and then the two of them were backing out through the door, though Gerda’s feet were still kicking, kicking, and she couldn’t talk, she was crying too hard, but her grieved blue eyes, drowned and swollen with tears, were fixed in terrible pleading on her mother, and Angela, left alone in her room, where each morning Lorna brought her breakfast like a child, looked down the grey planes of her naked body. She was no longer a baby; she was growing old. She lay there rigid, trying not to think. Her mouth tasted bitter; her teeth were bad. Angela was terrified of the dentist. Only when the front door slammed, and Gerda stopped screaming, did Angela’s panic begin to subside.
After about half an hour, there was a knock, and her father brought in tea and juice. She had curled up foetuslike under her duvet. ‘Sorry about all the screaming,’ he said. ‘We couldn’t seem to do a thing with her this morning. There’s better news though. The flood’s going down. The TV says the rains are over.’
Davey flexed his hands on the steering-wheel. A night at the telescope always left him deeply tired; strained eyes, pain-clamped shoulders. He would have liked to drop in on Delorice and soothe all his aches in the warmth of her bed, but Delorice was staying with Viola, her sister, in the drowned no-man’s land of the Towers.
He made a decision, and swung his car left. He would go for a swim in his local pool.
Outside the door, on the big bales of straw that had been packed together to make pontoons, a little girl was making a scene. She had dark red hair and a heart-shaped face, and was pushing, pushing, with all her might, at a protesting woman who might be her grandma. ‘By myself! You’re not coming in with me! I don’t like you! By myself!’
The old woman looked at Davey, apologetically, as he tried to get past their tussling bodies. ‘Little madam,’ she said, and tried to smile, though her cheeks were inflamed and her eyes exhausted. The girl took advantage of her looking away. Shouting, ‘I’m not a madam, I hate you,’ she gave her one last almighty shove, and before Davey realized what was going to happen the frail figure of the woman was swaying, toppling, her face a single black O of fear as she clutched at his coat, feebly, in passing and then fell backwards into the water, sending gouts of black mud all over Davey. Her head went right under; one leg waved, shocking, a weak white twig with the shoe kicking off, then her feet went down and her head came up, black, slimy, clotted, without a face.
The little girl bent over the water, frightened. ‘Grandma,’ she said. ‘Are you all right, Grandma?’
Davey was a good-natured man, and although he longed to sneak away for his swim he extended his hands to the gasping, sobbing statue of mud that weltered below him, up to her waist in dirty water. ‘There are germs,’ she was spluttering. ‘They say there are. Because of the floods. I’ve swallowed some. There are horrible germs – you wicked girl. BAD Gerda.’ She came lurching and churning back up on to the straw, gripping his hands with painful force, and stood there, shuddering, not letting him go, her back turned fiercely on the child.
‘Shall I help you inside?’ said Davey, politely, ignoring the mud on his arms and hands, the stains all over h
is new tan boots. Maybe he shouldn’t have kids after all. ‘Come along, dear,’ he said to the girl, who now looked very pale and docile. Inside the pool, he asked for Zoe, who ran the swimming classes there. He had known Zoe for three or four years; Viola was her partner in business; in fact, Davey thought they might be more than friends, but Delorice dismissed it: ‘Not my sister.’
When Zoe emerged from the staff-room, which had a big anti-war poster on the door, Gerda ran up to her smiling sweetly and put her arms around her, as if nothing had happened. Davey started to put Zoe in the picture, but Gerda kept interrupting him, patting at Zoe to get her attention. ‘It was a accident,’ she insisted.
‘She pushed me in,’ said Lorna. Mud dripped from her hair. Now minus her makeup, she looked like a mushroom. Black yeti footprints covered the floor.
‘Milly,’ called Zoe, and a young white woman came hurrying across, clucking her sympathy, brandishing a mop. ‘We’ve had a bit of an accident. Come and use the staff shower,’ said Zoe to Lorna, and then to Davey, urgently: ‘Have you seen Viola? She’s still not managing to get in in the mornings.’ To Gerda she said, ‘Don’t worry, darling, I’ve got some clothes I can lend your mother –’
And suddenly Gerda was angry again, all four foot of her aflame, indignant; ‘She’s not my mummy,’ she said, loudly. ‘You said she was my mummy last week, too. I wanted my mummy to come today, but she couldn’t come, because, because, she couldn’t come because –’
And here Lorna interjected, protective, ‘Because your mum was tired from working –’
But suddenly all the fight left Gerda. She sat on the floor, and her red head drooped, and tears ran slowly down her cheeks. ‘Because she never comes,’ she said. ‘Because she never, never does.’
‘It’s all right, deary, never mind,’ said Milly, who could never bear to see children cry, crouching down on the floor beside her and taking the little girl in her arms. (She and Samuel, once devoted One Way followers, were thinking of having a child of their own – a boy, they hoped, and they would call him Saul – and now she saw children everywhere, and it didn’t quite square with the end of the world. Jesus loved children, didn’t he? They were losing their belief in Father Bruno. God was love: that was the point.)