The Flood

by Maggie Gee

  All the protesters have come tonight. The anti-war lot are out in force, with whistles and hooters and drums and megaphones, furious, howling with their longing for justice, trying to deafen Mr Bliss into peacefulness. ‘BLISS OUT!’ say dozens of rainbow banners of the blissed-out anti-drug-law protesters. A long-haired boy waves ‘GALA IS LA-LA’. ‘WHY DO YOU NEED TWO SKINS?’ scream the placards of the anti-fur protesters. ‘DISS THE BLISS!’ shout the teen-friendly slogans of the anti-government campaign. ‘BLISS A DEAD LOSS’ shouts a hand-lettered poster. ‘PISS OFF BLISS’ says a turquoise banner. (President Bliss has made further allegations, that afternoon, about sabotage, which he claims ‘has endangered the safety of our nation, and is a clear and present danger’: the airforce, already flying nightly missions, is promising ‘swift, resolute action’; tonight, it is confidently expected, an escalation of the war will be announced, though luckily, it’s happening a long way off; nothing to depress the mood of the Gala.)

  The politicians who stream to the party in official cars and gleaming suits are feeling liberated from the floods; they sink their rears into the soft leather, they snicker and wisecrack on their phones, they give salty quotes to the newspapers, they wave and give thumbs-up signs to each other. Not many believe in Mr Bliss’s war. Now the worst of the flooding is officially over, Bliss’s own party can turn on him. Life is going to be fun again.

  There are other, quieter protests, held by still figures standing at the back of the crowd packed in round Government Palace. ‘WAR REFUGEES’ one banner says, and dozens of Loyans stand stiffly beside it, carrying big photos of their ruined homeland, carrying placards with the names of the dead. ‘NO HOME, NO MONEY, NO HOPE’ a thin-faced woman has written in crooked black letters on a piece of card. It hurts her to see so many happy people, it hurts her to know they don’t see her. She thinks that the people invited to the Gala must all have nice homes, and hope, and money, she believes they are smiling, not just for the cameras, which go off round the foyer of Government Palace like a lightning storm against the indigo sky, but at themselves, in invisible mirrors that whisper to them what their lives amount to; theirs are enormous, hers is nothing.

  Only the crème de la crème have been chosen, the people the city defines itself by, the rich, the celebrities, the people who count, the styles and the faces that are known and copied, stars, actors, leaders, beauties, all the names baptized in the tabloids, famous chefs and fashionistas, ballet-dancers and fancy hairdressers, horoscope-writers and football-players, game-show hosts and TV presenters, all the showmen who make people happy, plus a salting of ‘real people’ like Elroy, people who have climbed to the top of something worthy, firemen, ambulancemen, doctors, police, who are glad and embarrassed to see the celebrities, staring at them hungrily, sharply assessing, wanting to laugh, to sneer, to wave, sharing space-time with them at last, the dream-figures, the screen-figures … And yet, they are proud the celebs are here. All the guests have a glow, as they mount the stairs, their shoe-soles massaged by the rouge-red carpet, and caressive little thoughts flit around like bluebirds – ‘everyone who’s anyone is here, my dear’ – and they are here, thank God they have made it; the bluebirds of happiness perch on their shoulders; against long odds, home safe, home free; anyone who’s anyone, my dear, is here.

  ‘Have you got a permit to do that, sir?’ A uniformed man asked Ian McGregor, who has set up an easel near the parapet of the gallery overlooking the stairs, commanding a perfect view of new arrivals.

  ‘Absolutely.’

  He looked hard at Ian: decent dinner-jacket. But reddened cheeks, as if he lives outside, and something not right about the mouth. ‘Could I see your invitation, sir?’

  Ian produced it, left-handed, yawning, without pausing in the sketch he was doing. ‘Friend of Mr Bliss’s, in fact,’ he drawled, his eyes never lifting from the line which unscrolled with complete assurance from the point of his pencil.

  His lack of concern convinced the flunkey. ‘Right, sir. Sorry, just doing my job,’ the man apologized, and turned away. ‘Perhaps I can bring you a drink, sir?’

  ‘Well, I’m working – just a glass of water.’

  ‘Thought we’d all had enough water, sir.’

  Ian chuckled, obediently, and went on drawing.

  As soon as the man was gone, Ian’s head swivelled. He resumed watching, with amused interest, something odd going on at a nearby window. A dark-haired, wild-eyed, female figure was hauling itself up outside the glass; first the head, staring through and then disappearing, rising and falling like a cuckoo in a clock; then slender shoulders and golden arms, ringed like a pigeon in thick silver bangles; then finally a curvaceous torso, but it was immediately apparent to Ian that the girl was stuck; she couldn’t open the window.

  There weren’t many people in the gallery. Soon the meeting and greeting would be over and the mass of the crowd would push up the stairs. With a quick glance around, Ian strolled across, saw the eyes out in the night open wide with fear, a convulsive attempt to get away, but he pushed up the window, swiftly but gently, saw there were two of them, tall, pretty, young girls staring and shivering with terror as they tried to cling on to the window-sill. Raising his eyebrows, he pulled them inside.

  They fell in, gracelessly, giggling with fear. They were half-naked, in party-clothes. He helped them up; their hands were very cold.

  ‘Are you going to chuck us out?’ Lola asked, recovering her confidence (which never took long, for she had drunk it in with her mother’s breast-milk). Hearing Lola’s bold voice, Gracie stopped shivering.

  ‘Why should I do that?’ Ian asked, coolly. ‘I’m sure you both have invitations.’

  ‘Are you a proper guest?’ Gracie asked him, peering.

  ‘What a rude question,’ he said to her. Just at that moment the flunkey arrived in his immaculate jacket, bearing the water on a silver tray with a snow-white napkin. ‘Could you bring my two friends champagne?’ Ian asked him. ‘Come and see my pictures, girls,’ he said.

  Lola had fallen in love on the spot, but Gracie wasn’t quite on Ian’s wave-length. He seemed to be taking them too much for granted.

  ‘We haven’t really got invitations,’ she said.

  ‘Shocking,’ he said, waving his finger at her.

  ‘We’re anti-capitalist protesters.’ It sounded rather silly, said like that.

  ‘Prove it,’ he said, and to Lola, showing her the sketch on top of his sheaf of paper, ‘What do you think of that?’

  It was a picture of a troupe of monkeys, capering across a stage, grinning.

  Gracie was tugging at Ian’s arm. ‘Look,’ she said, rather sulkily, and pulled her teensy silk jacket apart to reveal a tinier, tighter top, and conical breasts, lettered in red: ‘GLOBAL CAPITAL IS BUST’. ‘Do you think it’s witty?’ she asked, anxious.

  ‘You look very nice. And … You, um, make your point,’ he said gravely. ‘But better do it up. People might look.’

  ‘My pants say ‘BLISS IS A ARSE’, said Lola.

  ‘AN arse,’ he said. ‘You don’t have to show me.’ But he smiled at her as if he liked her.

  ‘Aren’t you going to draw the people here?’ she asked him, looking at his sketches of monkeys.

  ‘Oh, I did that this evening, from life,’ said Ian. ‘I’m doing a sequence, actually. I’m calling it “Party Animals”. What are you girls? Mountain goats?’

  ‘My mother’s here somewhere,’ said Lola, anxious.

  ‘So’s mine,’ said Gracie, clutching her. ‘We’ll both get in terrible trouble if they see us. But everyone who’s anyone is here.’

  Ian gazed at her quizzically. ‘So they tell me. But I’m sure there must be other people somewhere.’

  He turned back to his easel and started work, frowning down into the crowded foyer.

  ‘I think you girls should go and look around. Lil Missy M is here.’

  People were beginning to come upstairs. In the soft bright light from the high chandeliers, under the
opalescent glaze of good makeup, everyone looked like film stars; the women had shining, perfect skin, set off by thick milky swags of pearls or dewy filigree wreaths of diamonds, borrowed stones, spectacularly bright; no one was grey, or dusty; the colours of the clothes were luminous, brilliant, the colours of flowers against a summer sky, honeysuckle, morning glory, bougainvillaea, the best dyes on the best fabrics, wool, cashmere, satin, silk, the clear, confident colours of money. Their hair was set like sculpted glass; their nails smooth as bevelled gem-stones. Lola and Gracie watched, impressed, before they remembered they were here to protest.

  Everyone was slightly larger than life, laughing more loudly, smiling more radiantly, turning their heads every second or so, so they didn’t miss a celebrity. Whispers ran across the shining heads like winds in a field of summer corn. Whole golden rows trembled and quivered. Lola and Gracie darted out like butterflies, following the rumours, skimming the breeze (and older women tracked the two girls with their eyes, envying the silvery youthful something which makeup artists could never copy).

  ‘There’s Angela Lamb,’ somebody hissed, and the name repeated like a water-mark, ‘Angela Lamb’, ‘Angela Lamb’. ‘And that must be her little girl.’

  But something wasn’t going quite right. ‘Gerda,’ called a woman’s voice, polite, at first, then louder, ‘Gerda’, then almost screaming, ‘Gerda, will you come back here!’

  Some puppyish thing was charging through the flowers, an unseen whirlwind, a little sprinter, half-knocking people over as it ran.

  ‘It’s the painter man, Mummy,’ Gerda was shouting. ‘Look, look, it’s the painter man!’

  Angela blundered after her, apologizing as she went, suddenly afraid of losing her daughter; there were too many people; too few children, something she had never noticed before when she’d taken Gerda to grown-up parties, but this was a new Gerda, today, a six-year-old tyrant, an adolescent.

  Gerda dived for Ian’s knees. He looked up, startled, from the pen-and-ink sketch he was doing of a group of vicious penguins. She smiled up at him, confident, but for an instant he didn’t know her, used as he was to seeing her windswept and scruffy at the zoo, tugging along her grandparents; he looked down at her shining red hair, her little dress of scarlet satin, her wide blue eyes, staring up at him, and suddenly had it: ‘Hello, Gerda … I’m glad to see you. Have you brought your grandparents?’

  ‘This is my mummy, Angela.’

  A blonde woman shot through the crowd, flushed, ruffled, in brilliant pink, her matching boa sliding off one shoulder. ‘Gerda, don’t run away like that!’

  ‘Mum, it’s the painter man from the zoo.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ panted Angela to Ian, registering a handsome man, smiling rather artificially as she tried to conspire with him against her daughter: ‘she seems to think she knows you.’

  ‘Oh, I know Gerda,’ he said, coolly, and looked Angela up and down, not entirely agreeably, then went back to sketching, with fluid movements, men in dinner-jackets, human penguins, waddling self-importantly across a ballroom.

  Gerda watched, intent, as the drawing took shape.

  ‘Do you mind us watching?’ Angela asked, in a vain attempt to make him look at her. ‘I’m Angela Lamb, the writer, by the way.’ His gaze at the paper didn’t even flicker, and his expression seemed to say, ‘Never heard of her.’ She drew her boa around her, nervous; the soft feathers didn’t comfort her.

  ‘Please yourself,’ he said, but he winked at Gerda.

  Angela stared rather hard at Ian, and decided he looked like an ex-alcoholic, with his flushed complexion and mobile mouth, though some people might have thought him attractive. ‘How do you know my daughter?’ she asked, haughtily, patting her hair, which had been cut and streaked very expensively that day, before she picked up Gilda. It was maddening that he didn’t notice her. The pink was skintight, and flattered her figure. She ran her fingers across her hip-bone and crossed one ankle over the other, which she’d read somewhere in a magazine made your legs look longer and slimmer. It seemed a lifetime since she’d had a man.

  ‘Menguins,’ Gerda suddenly said, then exploding with pleasure, ‘They’re menguins, aren’t they?’ Ian pointed his pen at her in tribute; the two of them fell about with laughter.

  Angela stood there, upstaged by her daughter. The pink feathers were perhaps too youthful. Suddenly she felt very exposed.

  Perhaps she would never have a man again.

  In two more minutes, though, Gerda was bored. ‘I want to find Davey Luck now,’ she said.

  ‘They can’t concentrate, can they?’ asked Angela, one final try at getting Ian to like her, but he had embarked on another picture, a disquieting sketch of a large pink flamingo, its legs entwined without elegance, lost in the middle of a sheet of black water.

  Gerda had darted off into the crowd. Peering, preening, Angela followed her.

  Everyone was there.

  The stars: Lil Missy M, Baby Nana, Woof Daddy Woof, Franky Malone, Desiree D, the Lites, the Three Bones, Cleft (minus their lead singer, stuck in the traffic coming in from the Towers, where she’s had a huge row with her boyfriend for letting her lucky stage-shoes get wrecked by the water); the great tenor, Vincenzo Da Vinci, whose luggage has been lost in the half-drowned airport, in a borrowed suit whose waist-band’s too tight, unable to resist the lobster creams, which he’s throwing down his throat in twos and threes; the young lions of the art scene – Shona Goff, who arrived so drunk she had to be helped up the steps by her dealer, one breast falling out on to her thousand-dollar shoulder-bag, which is a witty trompe l’œil of a hamburger; Terry Gribbin, Haroun Al Jezir, and their posse, and Walter the Wank, who is wearing a cod-piece from which there protrudes a shiny pink phallus, perhaps his own, but everyone hopes not; big-name journalists – Darren White (May White’s son, Dirk White’s brother, over from Hesperica for the Gala, fresh from his third divorce, the ‘famous brother’ who has always upstaged Dirk, making him feel smaller, stupider, meaner); he has written a daring attack on Bliss exposing his ‘sabotage’ claims as a fraud, to be published tomorrow in the Daily Mire; Darren can’t wait, but this evening he’s talking with great animation to Bliss’s press secretary, Anwar Topping, and anyone would think that they were best mates (Darren’s hedging his bets, for if Bliss should survive, he may swallow his medicine and court Darren again, for how many ‘radical’ journalists are there who went to the same college as him? Darren White has his eye on an honour); Paula Timms, Gracie’s journalist mother, who has always thought Darren a total chancer because he earns more money than her, is boring two dancers in skin-tight red latex who unwisely sat down within range for a rest, as she explains how the floods have been unfair to women; Petronella Bella, the gossip columnist, furiously clicking names into her palm-top while throwing tiny yellow pills into her mouth; Amina Patel in an exquisite sky-blue sari, wishing she had never come to this city, wondering how soon she can slip away and help her teenage son with his homework; a yapping kennel of tabloid hacks, tanking up fast on Gala champagne, eager for titbits, sniffing the air, talking to each other till they find someone better, staring shamelessly over their shoulders; the PR people, pushing forward their clients, smiling and oiling at the journalists; a scattering of prostitutes, still young and immaculate, still hoping to alchemize into wives or actresses, still half-believing they are escorts, starlets; and, occasionally cocking an eyebrow at the prostitutes, here are the generals, admirals and air vice-marshals, enjoying the chance to wear all their medals but playing their other cards close to their chests (they are a little abstracted, they have something on their minds, you catch them in pairs, shaking their heads, in corners); and the city’s cash-cows, the arms manufacturers, sweating, in mohair suits, and smoking; but why are they so happy? Smiling, high-fiving.

  And here are some old stars: Lily de la Lilo, in a metre of cracked makeup and crooked dark glasses, on the arm of Freddy Flatter in his corset and wig, with an emerald silk suit and built-up shoes, bot
h of them baring bleached tusks for the lenses; they try to edge close to some younger stars, in the hope that a little silver youth-dust will blow off, in the hope of being photographed with movers and shakers. Here are some new stars – some very new stars, for Bliss’s people, desperate to attract the youth vote, have cast their nets wide: look, Kilda is there!

  Yes, ‘Madam Kilda the Clairvoyant’! In the first week of her first real job! Introduced to the Daily Atom by Davey, amazed, last month, when he was at his mother’s, to have his whole past revealed to him by Kilda, who read it from his hand, in a matter-of-fact way, though she did get very weird about his future, where she saw him with a girl in the top of a tree … Kilda is there, very shy, but radiant, waiting to do a gig in a semi-transparent ‘boutique tent’ in the Upper Gallery, its gauze-grey chrysalis enamelled with stars; a very camp young man is sitting taking bookings, and the list is already surprisingly long for a gathering of people scornful of horoscopes; many of them are politicians’ wives, and indeed, Berta Bliss herself has signed up, no longer able to predict her husband, who has grown increasingly strange and distant.

  (On her way in, Kilda was shocked to see the howling crowd of One Way protesters, stretching clawed hands towards the cars. It felt as if they hated her. They didn’t, of course – they couldn’t recognize her, behind the smoked glass of the limo, could they? And yet there had been a bad, gut-wrenching moment when the protesters pressed right up against the car and she found herself staring at a thin grey face, twisted with anger: surely Dirk White, and he looked straight at her. But Dirk and she always got on well; he must have thought she was someone else, someone lucky and wealthy who deserved to be hated. What did it mean to be hated so much? Was hatred really in the One Book? She herself only hates her mother. But she loves her mother, deeply, as well.)

  As Kilda waits for her gig, she is protected from lechers by the Atom’s tiny entertainment editor, Arnie Pippin, who’s looking, when she isn’t, down her white calm cleavage, and then around the room, with enormous complacency, telling Kilda that ‘absolutely everyone is here’. Even he has made it: little Arnie Pippin. Arnie Pippin, with the best view of all.