The Flood

by Maggie Gee

  But she had forgotten some courtesy, some essential stage in the dance of compliments, and now the good will was cooling, dying. She had got it wrong as she often did. Her friend was staring at the floor again, eyes darting up briefly to hers, then away. His parting, from above, looked very straight, and very white. Without meaning to, she had rejected him. Now he had some moral high ground to reclaim.

  ‘My religion very strict,’ he said, sullenly. ‘All bad thing banneded, very banneded. I am always good Muslim, Mary.’

  ‘May. I hope I haven’t made you go against your religion.’

  He bowed, stiffly, ignoring her hand.

  Eleven

  The sun kept shining all that day. It was only April; clocks had not gone forward; but this was the third day in succession the light had managed to survive the morning. People who were living provisionally, waiting for the world to heal itself, came out and dared to stand on the pavement. The centre, where flooding had only been minor, had for some time been grey and ghostly, since the outlying population had lost faith in public transport. Probably not much was different today, except for the sun and the government statement. But that was all they needed: hope.

  Today was the Gala. Miraculously. Four days ago, people had been sneering at the thought of the city celebrating its history. Now they stretched and sniffed the air. The damp squares and the flowerless gardens soon became thronged with noisy people, smiling at strangers, almost skittish, not worrying how they were going to get home, enjoying air, movement, colour, the queer kiss of daylight on their skin. Blades of grass, sodden with water, shook off the drops, sprang up again. Birds sang deafeningly of spring. Beggars came out from their soaked smelly shelters: ‘Lovely day, miss, sir’ they said, and dared to smile into people’s faces as they stretched out their caps and boxes towards them, feeling, for once, they were part of the others, all of them sharing the same good news. People were generous, because they were happy.

  The clean-up campaign was really getting going. Soldiers had been working for seventy-two hours and the worst of the mud had been jetted off the buildings, scrubbed off the kerbs, washed into the drains. The big hotels sported notices, ‘Open For Business As Usual’. Some had imported flowers for their window-boxes; looked at closely, they were spread thin, but passers-by exclaimed with delight to see red tulips and peonies waving, frail as butterflies, silk-skinned and fragile, warm small flames to burn away darkness. The commissionaires, who had slumped into depression, unable to show their caps and gold braid, burst like kings on to the drying sidewalk, blinking at the daylight they had almost forgotten, their drink-pinked cheeks like old rose-petals, shining and wrinkling in the sun, proud of their pitches, at ease, benign, doffing their caps to pretty women and customers, puffing their chests like turkey-cocks, booming their wares with baritone abandon, rib-cages straining at golden frogging: ‘Taxi, madam? Righty-ho’, tossing tips in the air before pocketing them, white in the light on their long spin down. ‘Lovely day, madam. Lovely day.’

  They were starting to believe they had turned the corner. The way things had been going, the hotel trade was finished – no one would ever take holidays in a city sliding under the sea. Now suddenly they were going to have a good night. The most distant city airport, on higher ground than the others, had been re-opened, by government decree. The rumour was, plane-loads of celebrities were coming, attracted to the city by giant bribes. The heart of the Gala was a smart fancy-dress party, invitation only, at Government Palace, with fireworks in Victory Square at midnight. (There would be another, smaller display of fireworks just after sunset for the Towers; the government had to do something for these people, but the Gala brochures were slightly vague; the Towers were not on the Central Map.) Highlights of the evening would be shown on giant screens that were being erected all over the country. After months of staying in, the crowds streamed out: ‘Lovely day, madam, lovely day.’

  Street sellers were out with trays, even a stall or two had been set up, selling flags and badges saying ‘CITY GALA’, and people bought them, and stuck them on their jackets.

  One little boy had six on his coat, run across his front like medals. His young mother led him proudly along by the hand, enjoying the way people smiled at him. Joe walked with his head up, swinging his arms, solid, sturdy, the hope of the city, his ginger hair fire-red in the sun. He began to sing, loudly, ‘Happy Birthday’; his mum had said it was the city’s birthday. Torn between joy and embarrassment, she walked without looking at him, grinning at strangers, miming ‘Isn’t he a show-off?’, but knowing show was what they needed.

  ‘I came because it’s such a lovely day,’ said Angela, lying, as Gerda ran towards her from the gates of the school and into her arms, splashing her horribly, shouting ‘Mum! Mum! What are you doing here?’

  ‘Don’t look so surprised,’ Angela said, sotto voce. ‘Anyone would think I never come to meet you.’ People, she thought, were looking at her; they recognized her, doubtless; she felt ashamed.

  ‘Well, you don’t ever come to meet me,’ Gerda said, factually, then with the acute sensitivity of the child who has to worry if Mummy is happy, ‘It doesn’t matter, Mummy, don’t be sad.’

  She clutched her mother’s hand very tightly. ‘This is my mummy,’ she announced, proudly, to anyone they met, as they walked to the car. ‘I was good at swimming,’ she told her. ‘I taught the others to jump in.’

  Her mother liked it when she did well. Gerda tried to think of good things to tell her. Mum was looking pretty, in her fluffy pink coat, with nice lipstick and shiny yellow hair, so different from Grandma, all pleated and old, with funny damp skin and always worrying. She loved her grandma, but she was embarrassing.

  Gerda spotted Miss Habib with a box of playdough. ‘Oh Mummy, please, that’s my teacher, she knows you’re a writer, she’s dying to meet you –’ (Miss Habib had never said any such thing, but Gerda so wanted to show off her mother.)

  ‘Do we have to?’ asked Angela, but then she looked down and saw an expression of such disappointment that she said, ‘Of course. It’s just, you know, I want to take you into town.’

  ‘Miss, Miss, this is my mother.’

  Rhuksana was putting the playdough in her boot; her head was inside, so she couldn’t at first tell whose mother she was meant to meet. Though she longed to get home to hear the news about Loya, she came up smiling, ready to please, but when she saw it was Gerda’s mother, whom she’d never met, who never even came to parents’ evening, the famous author, the Iceland winner – sleek and shiny, smelling of money, her lipstick mark clear as a wound on Gerda’s cheek – she couldn’t help stiffening nervously, and her smile wavered, till she hauled it back up again.

  ‘Rhuksana Habib. Delighted to meet you.’

  ‘Lovely to meet you,’ Angela deferred, though she’d noticed that moment of instinctive dislike. She was a novelist; she noticed. ‘I hear such wonderful things about you.’

  ‘Thank you.’ There was an uncertain pause. Seeing Gerda’s upturned, eager face, Rhuksana made an effort.

  ‘She’s a delightful child. Of course, very bright.’

  Angela nodded, modestly. Of course Gerda was bright; it was hereditary. ‘Is she a good girl, most of the time?’ she asked, remembering the scene that morning. ‘I know they can all be terrors, sometimes.’

  Gerda looked up at her, indignant. ‘She’s a pleasure to teach,’ said Rhuksana, coolly.

  ‘Bit wilful, sometimes,’ Angela smiled, trying to indicate she knew her daughter. ‘Bit of a bossy-boots, like me.’ Trying to disarm her, to win her over, but Gerda said, ‘I’m not bossy.’

  Rhuksana’s smile faded. ‘Not at all, Mrs Lamb. She’s very sensible, in school.’

  ‘I’m not sensible,’ Gerda remarked, very definitely, with a stubborn face. ‘Grown-ups have to be sensible. I’m not a grown-up. My mummy is a writer,’ she added, proudly. ‘She’s a famous writer. Have you read her books?’

  ‘I wish I had,’ Rhuksana lied. ‘But I kn
ow she’s famous. Everyone does. My husband’s in publishing, actually,’ she added.

  ‘Oh really?’ asked Angela, and then, for Gerda, the conversation became infinitely tedious, the kind of conversation that grown-ups had, all names and places she knew nothing about.

  ‘…but very commercial,’ her mother was saying. ‘Their books do sell, that’s the main thing. I’m sure he’ll be very happy there.’

  ‘He doesn’t like it there, in fact,’ Rhuksana said. She wasn’t going to be patronized. Mohammed got patronized every single day. ‘He thinks they’re, well, a bit patronizing.’

  There was a silence. Angela blushed. Had she been patronizing? Surely not. But Asian people were hypersensitive.

  ‘In any case, he’s trying to change their image. He’s found at least one remarkable book –’ Rhuksana continued, and then broke off. She would never convince this woman of anything.

  ‘What’s “patronizing”?’ Gerda asked, and then, not waiting for an answer, tugged sharply at Angela’s hand. ‘Why can’t we go?’ she said. She thought, with a small growing nugget of unhappiness, perhaps my teacher doesn’t like my mother.

  The two women began to edge away from each other, making small, ineffectual gestures of appeasement.

  ‘Such a beautiful day,’ Rhuksana tried.

  ‘Gorgeous,’ Angela agreed, heartily. ‘Did you hear the news?’ she added, shading her eyes against the light. ‘The government says the worst is definitely over. Oh, and they think the flood defences were sabotaged.’ She suddenly remembered this wasn’t tactful; sabotage was usually blamed on the Muslims.

  Rhuksana smiled stiffly. ‘What nonsense,’ she said. ‘This government will try any lies.’ Suddenly she had had enough, after a day of keeping her temper with the children. ‘It’s they who are wrecking our cities, in Loya. Have you heard about the Loyan National Library? Looters have stolen what your bombs didn’t burn. And Mr Bliss’s troops stood by and did nothing. My husband –’ and here her voice became unsteady, but she forced the smile back on to her face. ‘My husband wept, when he heard the news, for the first time since we were married.’

  The woman was clearly a bit of an extremist. ‘I’m not pro this war, you know,’ said Angela, quite truthfully, though she wasn’t really following it. ‘In any case,’ she said, not looking at Rhuksana. ‘Thank you for all you do for the children.’

  Miss Habib had got very red in the face. Gerda pushed her mother. ‘Come on, Mummy.’

  ‘It’s my job,’ said Rhuksana. ‘I love it.’ Slamming the car door and driving away, she thought to herself, But I don’t love the parents. She wished she hadn’t mentioned Mohammed.

  At a quarter to four, Harold was lying on the floor of the second-floor sitting room, listening to Wes Montgomery playing ‘Mr Walker’. He knew he should be getting ready for the Gala. Lottie was stomping about upstairs, issuing instructions at intervals, to do with his shirt, his hair, his tie. Harold listened to the music’s velvet depth, its wondrous blend of bounce and melancholy, jazz guitar like the padded feet of a panther prowling through a warm spring night, and wondered whether his book was true: was the moment really all that mattered? Listening now, time became the music, a place of endlessly repeated bliss where nothing counted, not success nor failure, only the perfectly rounded chord which held all the particles of life in its hand, for he’d loved this track since he was seventeen years old, before he met Lottie, when he was alone –

  ‘Harold! Have you started to run that bath?’

  – When he was young, when he was someone.

  Lottie’s voice disappeared; he shut her out. He skipped back to Thelonius Monk. My man Thelonius. All my men … Women were obsessive about cleanliness. He didn’t really want to go, tonight.

  But he knew, underneath it, that he was depressed. The book, which had taken up two decades of his life, had gone into silence and emptiness. No one had even acknowledged receipt. It was too late now. No one ever would. It was worse because for weeks he had been buoyed up with hope.

  Perhaps the book was mad, in any case. He had become fascinated by simultaneity: at any one point in time, the thousand flowerings of event – the murders and weddings, mud-slides and military coups, the earthquakes, torture sessions, shy first kisses, the football matches, poems, invasions, dances, all of them gathered on the same string of time, all of them clustered together like a garland … Going on for ever, now, now, all across this planet, stretching out into space like a great rope of flowers, and who knew if it was entirely nonsense, this business of Davey’s about planets aligning – and even at this instant, as he lay on the floor, with the glory of the saxophone caressing him, great events were breaking, somewhere else, people were burning, people were laughing, soldiers were marching across the desert, little children were learning to swim, lives were being changed for ever – and then there were the ants, the bower-birds, the lizards, the intricate cross-hatchings of a thousand other species –

  ‘Harold, I’ll kill you if you don’t come at once!’

  The phone rang, disrupting the long camber of his jazz. He picked it up, trying to sound terse and cool, for it was bound to be somebody selling insurance, the industry was desperate because of the floods –

  ‘Yes,’ he said, guardedly. ‘Yes, it is.’

  And then, ‘Really? … Do you think so? … Thank you. No, I haven’t got an agent … Should I have? Next spring? Really? “Inspirational”, you say … So is that, really, um, “where it’s at”? No, I didn’t actually realize that … Oh yes, I’d love to meet you.’

  He gets to his feet in a single fluid movement, switches off the music, stands, deep breathing, blood flooding his body, cheeks aching with joy. He jives round the room; he can’t keep still. He is the man, the man, the man. Now it is his turn to do some shouting. He’s pretty sure he can out-shout Lottie.

  He bounds upstairs, but she’s locked her door, which can only mean that she’s shaving her legs.

  ‘LOTTIE!’ he yells through the bathroom door.

  ‘Bloody hell, Harold, why are you shouting?’

  ‘BECAUSE I’VE HEARD FROM A PUBLISHER!’

  A pause. ‘Oh darling, I’m sorry, never mind. A lot of people get rejections, you know.’

  ‘No, Lottie, listen, open the door.’

  She mutters, just audibly, but comes and opens, with a tiny trace of red on her shapely calf, and a little frown of tenderness; she really does love him. She doesn’t like him to be upset. Besides, it’s a bore, with the Gala coming. ‘Harold,’ she says, taking his hand, ‘we’ll go through this together, darling. Obviously they’re stupid, and you are clever, cleverer than most people, cleverer than me –’

  ‘I’m certainly clever, I’m a BLOODY GENIUS. Listen, Lottie, they’ve accepted it! They mean to pay me money! Rather a lot! They want it to be their spring lead, next year, which apparently is something really good!’

  ‘Harold!’ says Lottie, taking it in. ‘Harold.’ And Lottie is starting to smile. Her lovely soft mouth curls up and up; her tongue and her big white teeth are gleaming. ‘Harold. But that’s, that’s wonderful … Come into my bath. Come here. Let me kiss you. Harold. Oh Harold. You are a success!’

  ‘We’re going to have a treat,’ Angela said, once Gerda was safely strapped into the back. Gerda didn’t answer.

  ‘Did you like my teacher?’ she asked.

  ‘No – I mean yes. Of course I did.’

  ‘Will you pick me up tomorrow?’

  ‘Maybe’.

  ‘Will you bring me to school? Please, Mummy.’

  ‘Maybe. But stop interrupting me. Tonight I’m taking you to a very big party.’

  ‘That isn’t a treat,’ said Gerda, frowning. ‘You always take me to parties. It’s boring.’

  ‘This one won’t be.’

  ‘Promise.’

  ‘I absolutely promise it won’t be boring! It’s the City Gala, the best party for years! The Rapsters will be there, and Lil Missy M, and Gail Hadrada, and the preside
nt –’

  ‘No. Promise you’ll bring me to school.’

  ‘Why are you going on about that?’

  ‘It’s my school. I want you to.’

  ‘OK, I promise,’ said Angela, annoyed. The child seemed completely unappreciative. It didn’t matter what you did for them.

  ‘And can we bring Winston home for tea?’ This was daring. Gerda never had children to tea, but other children did, and Gerda wanted to.

  ‘Who’s Winston?’ Angela asked, crossly.

  ‘I told you,’ Gerda said, reproachfully. ‘The boy who brings me snail-shells at break. He’s Franklin’s brother. They’re twins.’

  ‘It’s a bit awkward,’ said Angela, nervously. It didn’t sound so unreasonable. ‘I mean, we have a routine, at teatime. You have a routine, with your grandparents. I generally write, and so on.’

  ‘Stupid old routine,’ shouted Gerda. She had never shouted at her mother. ‘All the other children have people to tea. Why can’t I?’

  Angela couldn’t answer. A tiny headache was beginning to grow.

  ‘It’s because you’re old,’ Gerda yelled, furious, saying the worst thing she could think of. ‘It’s because you’re too old to have children. I hate you!’

  Angela found tears running down her cheeks. Her first reaction was to give in. Besides, she did want Gerda to come to the Gala. ‘I’m not old, I’m in my forties,’ she whispered. ‘You can have your stupid twins, if you want them.’

  ‘I only want Winston. I don’t love Franklin …’ Gerda peered forward; her mother was actually crying. This gave Gerda a pain in her belly. ‘I’m sorry, Mummy, you’re not really old. You’re not very wrinkly. You look nice in your makeup.’

  Angela vowed not to speak to her again, and put the radio on loud, but the radio was talking about the Gala.

  ‘This is the party you don’t want to go to that they’re going on about,’ she said crossly over her shoulder. ‘They’re supposed to have spent millions of dollars on it. There are going to be tigers in cages, it says. And an ice-rink. And dancers dressed up as swans. And that person on the television that Grandma says you like so much, what is his name, Davey Duck –’