The Flood

by Maggie Gee

  The girl ignores her mother. ‘Where’s Winston?’ she asks.

  Shirley stands looking at them blankly. ‘Sorry, I’ve overslept, Franklin’s not well …’

  ‘When I phoned last night you said Winston was better?’ the woman inquires, with the hint of a frown.

  ‘Yes, Winston’s fine, he’s up watching TV –’

  ‘I’ll go and find him.’ Gerda darts inside.

  ‘I’m just not sure –’ Shirley rubs her eyes. ‘Franklin wasn’t well last night.’ She hasn’t even had a cup of tea this morning; she slept with the boys; she hasn’t seen Elroy; she doesn’t quite know what day it is.

  Angela’s first impressions are poor. This woman is hopelessly disorganized. But she makes an effort, and smiles once more. ‘Shall I wait in the car while you, er, get ready?’

  ‘I’m just not sure –’ Shirley mumbles. ‘I don’t know whether it’s infectious.’

  ‘Oh, Gerda’s terribly healthy,’ says Angela. She still sees doubt in the woman’s eyes. ‘I’m going to take them to the Western Gardens. I’ve planned it all. I can’t disappoint her.’

  Afterwards, the visit is dream-like, to Shirley. Gerda ran around like a little whirlwind, fetching Winston’s coat, getting his trousers on, making sure he has his Bendy Rabbit, which she evidently knows he won’t move without. Winston’s so excited he tears from the house without saying goodbye to anyone, and to Shirley’s surprise, the woman drives off without any further attempt to make contact. It’s almost like a kidnapping.

  Shirley stands in the hall; she has no shoes on; her lids are heavy; Winston has gone.

  She checks that Elroy’s asleep in their bedroom. Then she slips back in to have a look at Franklin. He has his back to her. He is sleeping. Shirley lies down on the fluffy rug, just for a moment, beside his bed, pulls the duvet over her, just for five minutes, and then falls deeply asleep until ten. She is half-aware that Franklin has joined her.

  Faith wakes up in a steaming temper. In fifteen years, she has been late once. Now thanks to her lump of a girl, it has happened again. Switching off the alarm, she’s slept stubbornly on to the hour when normal people get up, people who don’t clean, lazy buggers. Civilians, she thinks, for she is a soldier. But soldiers are never allowed to be late. She rolls out of bed in a single movement. No holidays for people like Faith. If she had a holiday, what would Lottie do? (And yet part of Faith would love to stop, just once, to lie in and dream or watch the world go by … but today is the opposite of a holiday.)

  Kilda had come in at half-past four, stinking of drink, and with money in her handbag, which Faith searched when her daughter collapsed on the floor, just in case the great lummox had been taking drugs. There were hundreds of dollars, in crisp new notes, and the girl was slurring about telling fortunes, and a luxury tent, and her own show. She was drunk as a lord and babbling rubbish. Faith shouted at her, and when Kilda ignored her, the two of them had a fight on the stairs.

  Faith snatches up her mobile as she runs to clean her teeth. No one answers at the Segall-Lucas household. The machine is on, so she makes her excuses. Kilda is ill – and she will feel ill, Faith assures herself, grimly, banging the bathroom door, wrenching the taps on with special violence. Then she makes herself coffee and a doughnut with jam, and puts on the TV as loud as she can, hoping to give her daughter a headache.

  Kilda’s sleeping with people for money, Faith knows, though she has only the vaguest idea what that means, for Faith has only ever slept with one man in her life, and that was Kilda’s father. She didn’t much enjoy it; it was quick, and furtive, but it wasn’t hard work, and Kilda is lazy … Besides, the girl has no other talents.

  My daughter is a prostitute. Faith starts planning how to deal with it. The magazines sometimes have articles about them, the ones Mrs Segali passes on to her from the tottering piles by Lola’s bedside. They look a lot better turned out than her daughter.

  She will lock her in, for a start, Faith thinks. She will beat her, though when Faith tries to imagine it, she remembers Kilda’s much bigger than her. A slap is different to a good beating.

  Jam spurts from the doughnut, all over her shirt. Faith sponges it, disconsolate. ‘Jesus Mary and Joseph,’ she says.

  Her best efforts, and it all goes wrong. Kilda had been such a lovely baby.

  Mrs Segall’s boy, Davey, is on the TV. Doing very well for himself, that one. Usually she never watches his show. She wishes that Kilda had a boyfriend like that. But when she starts listening to what he’s got to say, she finds Davey is talking about planets, and comets, and Faith remembers the stupid piece in last weekend’s paper, the Sunday Atom, warning about all sorts of disasters. So is he an astrologer, a horoscope man? Does Kilda get her daft ideas from him?

  Faith switches it off in disgust. ‘Kilda!’ she yells. ‘Get your arse out of bed.’

  Kilda doesn’t get her arse out of bed. Since she was just a mite she liked lying in bed. From Kilda’s room, only heavy silence.

  Faith calls twice more, with ascending volume. Her throat starts to hurt. Her temper worsens. In a moment, she snaps. Though for many weeks Kilda’s not let anyone in to her bedroom, Faith hammers on the door, and then bursts in.

  She expects to see mess, slathers of clothes, dirty plates, and some evidence of prostitution: whips? High heels? Do they wear fur coats? Her imagination won’t go any further.

  But what she sees is a tidy room, tidier than she ever remembers, and Kilda peering from under her duvet, but the room has changed, has it grown extra windows? She stands on the threshold, taking it in.

  There are two pictures. Faith knows those pictures. The great big yellow one lights up the room. The room feels airy, bigger than before, as if it opens on to other worlds. A woman sits staring through a sunlit window.

  Kilda has got Mrs Segall’s pictures.

  It’s theft she’s into, then, not prostitution. A wave of emotion lifts Faith: relief. And she’s never seen Kilda’s room so nice.

  ‘Mu-um. Please. I’m no good in the morning.’

  ‘Will I make you some coffee?’ Faith inquires.

  The two women have a long, noisy hug, with lots of small kisses like hungry birds. The bed sags badly beneath their weight. The pictures glow on the walls above them. They move apart a bit and look at them.

  ‘I like the yellow one best,’ says Faith. ‘That woman feels like a friend of mine. I saw her more or less every day. I always thought, she knows about cleaning. She’s got a bit of muscle, like me. As if just this one morning, she’s on holiday. And she sits there thinking, “This is my moment” … I never did like the little blue one.’

  ‘I like the blue one,’ Kilda says. ‘Bedrooms make me feel, you know, happy. I like those people going to bed. I get, like, visions when I lie in bed. I think both pictures are beautiful … You were horrible, Mum. I’ve got a headache. Get me some coffee. It was true what I told you.’ She sees from Faith’s face that she does believe her. She’ll never say it, but her mother is sorry. ‘A milky coffee. And some biscuits.’

  ‘I’m just out of milk,’ says Faith. ‘I’ll pop and get some. Viola, Dwayne’s aunt, might let me have some.’

  So Faith isn’t there, and Kilda is dozing, still in her pale blue cotton night-gown, when half a dozen of the One Way Brotherhood, led by Dirk to the right front door, which Faith has left on the snib for the moment, burst in, rudely, and enter Kilda’s bedroom.

  ‘Dirk?’ says Kilda, not understanding. Dirk is her friend. He gave her the pictures. ‘What have you come here for?’ Dirk can’t answer.

  They lay hands on Kilda, and take her away.

  ‘So is your father actually a doctor?’ Angela asked Winston, as she drove along.

  ‘Shut up, Mummy,’ Gerda instructed. Her mother was asking too many questions, and trying too hard to be a hostess. ‘He wants to talk to me, not you.’

  ‘Look, don’t be rude to me in front of other people!’ Angela said, exasperated.

  ‘So can I
be rude to you at home?’

  For the rest of the journey, Angela was silent. In the back, the two children giggled and farted. Gerda was more sensible when she was alone.

  Still Angela decided she rather liked it, all that laughter, all that silliness. They were listing the things they would do in the Gardens; there were no floods, in the world of wishes. It helped her to suppress the worm-like worry her mother and father’s words had started. Of course she was a responsible mother.

  Still the day did have a peculiar feeling. There was almost no one else on the road.

  As she drove over the Bridge of Flowers, where the river marked the boundary of the city, the sky got lighter, the air freshened, and Angela thought, I’m a lucky woman. I can finish my book, I know I can.

  The car skidded, the steering-wheel spun, and she had to turn all her attention, briefly, to staying alive, and saving the children.

  Almost no one was parked on the street around Flowers Green, which was normally a rectangle of glass and metal, but Angela drove on through the dirty water towards the car park, on higher ground. That must be where all the cars had gone. But no one at all was in the car park.

  They walked to the gates. Winston went very slowly, because he kept making essential detours, to pick up a frog, or a Wellington boot, though Angela drew the line at poo. (Was Gerda like this, a year ago? Angela didn’t think she was. But then, how often had she taken her out?)

  The man on the gate seemed cheered to see them. ‘I thought the whole world was staying in bed,’ he said. ‘Nice to see the children.’

  For a while, the two of them played near the gates, where there were some sheltered islands of land, and flowers blooming in great stone horse-troughs, irises, ranunculi, small mauve pansies. Gerda had brought along the tiny optical kaleidoscope her grandfather had given her, and was trying to make Winston look through it.

  At first he trained it on a large snail. ‘Snail,’ he remarked. ‘It goes curly whirly.’

  ‘Now it’s lots of snails,’ said Gerda, moving it for him. ‘See? If you turn it, it’s more and more snails. Millions of snails. It would go on for ever.’

  Winston pulled it away and used it as a gun. ‘Duh-duh-duh-duh! I can shoot your mummy!’

  ‘Don’t,’ said Gerda. ‘She’s a nice mummy.’

  They didn’t know she was listening. Angela’s cheeks flushed with pleasure: a nice mummy. She heard it again, she would always hear it, however many times Gerda criticized her.

  Now Gerda had got the little instrument and turned it on the ranunculi.

  ‘They’re like roses,’ she said. ‘Lots and lots of petals. Mum, look at this. It turns into millions of roses.’

  Angela tried, but at first she couldn’t see it. Then she found the flower. It was red, so red, on a frame of green grass. Despite the rains, its form was perfect. She pulled back a little, and it multiplied. The beauty repeated again and again, became a green lawn with dozens of blossoms, each one perfect, in a perfect garden, an Alice in Wonderland rose garden; it all depended on how you framed it. ‘It’s amazing, darling. It’s wonderful. The longer you look, the better it gets.’

  ‘Winston is bored,’ Gerda interrupted. ‘Winston wants to see the glass-houses.’

  But the boats for the visitors weren’t running. This was a shock, since most of the Gardens were still under water. A few staff were buzzing around in motor-boats, abstracted, carrying plants in pots and boxes.

  ‘Mummy, we have to go in the boats,’ said Gerda, pulling at Angela’s hand. ‘Winston wants to go in a boat.’

  ‘I’m going,’ said Winston, and splashed across the path, sending up great arcs of water, and threw himself head-first into a boat, his small bum in the air, his kicking feet following. He disappeared completely, then popped up, grinning.

  ‘Come back, please,’ called Angela. ‘You can’t go in a boat without grown-ups.’

  ‘You’re a grown-up,’ said Gerda strictly. ‘You could drive a motorboat.’

  Angela couldn’t, to Gerda’s scorn. (‘Any of the other mothers could do it.’) But as a novelist, she could lie. Who was to say what was truth, what was fiction?

  A very young gardener stood staring out at nothing with a look she read as frozen sadness; no time to speculate about the cause. The children, behind her, were getting restive. This was a definite motherhood test.

  Making sure that neither of the children could hear her, she touched his arm, and looked into his eyes. ‘This boy,’ she said, ‘has been seriously ill. His twin brother is still in danger. It is his first outing for many months. He wants so very badly to sail in a boat and see the rest of your delightful gardens’ (out of the corner of her eye, she could see Winston pulling the heads off the ranunculi; Gerda was weaving them into her hair).

  ‘I’ll take you,’ the young man suddenly decided. He was pallid; she realized he looked afraid – that was the expression she had read as sadness. ‘They can run around like ants,’ (gesturing towards his colleagues, scurrying insect-like in the distance) ‘but it’s not going to make a dime’s worth of difference.’

  But his frown relaxed as the four of them sailed in the puttering boat under a thin skin of cloud; the grey, blue and cream was reflected in the water; there was an operatic, multi-layered chorus of bird-song; small birds were everywhere, singing, waiting, their existence more vivid in the silence of the humans; the birds had become the voice of the Gardens. Even Winston and Gerda grew quieter, more reflective, dwarfed by the great shining sheet of pearl-grey, so still it was like ice, like peace. They drifted together; for a while they were tranquil. It was half-past ten; it was nearly eleven.

  Winston scooped water-beetles up with his hand, and began to play kicking feet with Gerda, until she got cross and kicked him hard. Then she remembered that he was her friend.

  ‘Winston and me want to see the big glass-house,’ Gerda said to her mother, pulling at her dress. (Her mother had silly high-heeled shoes on. How could she play catch in shoes like that?)

  The young boatman changed course towards the Palm House. From far off it looked as magnificent as ever, a series of domes and arcs of bright glass, but close up you saw that its crystal cliffs rose straight out of the plain of grey water.

  ‘Course, you can’t go inside,’ he said, over his shoulder. ‘The heating’s broke down. It’s a bit of a mess. We managed to move quite a lot of the stuff, but some of the palms is bloody enormous, you’d have to demolish the whole bloody house.’

  The boat bobbed along by the big fogged panes. Giant green palm fronds pressed up against them; some of them looked brown; some must be dead. Some of the tropical plants looked huge and powerful, leaves like great bears’ feet walking on the glass, vast hairy limbs like swimming mammoths, scaly grey trunks like dinosaurs. Winston spotted a section where the glass had been removed, perhaps when they were trying to get the plants out, leaving a perfect, iron-framed, way in. The inside of the Palm House looked tremendously exciting.

  Briefly, fiercely, for the first time today, he wished that Franklin were here with him. Together they could do anything. But Gerda, though a girl, was very good at swimming. Without another thought, Winston jumped in, and dog-paddled the metre or two to the opening.

  Angela screamed, ‘What are you doing?’

  Clutching Bendy Rabbit, Gerda followed him.

  Elroy has always been good in the mornings. Elroy has sometimes been bad at night, but Elroy is excellent in the mornings.

  Most days Elroy gets up first, pads through the flat, puts the kettle on for a cup of tea for Shirley, quietly enjoys the peace of his home, the little cave with its breathing humans, its cleanliness, its warmth, its goodness. This morning, though, he’s had four hours’ sleep, and wakes up very late, with his heart beating wildly. Shirley is not in the bed beside him. Now he lies there anxious, trying to remember why he’s woken with a weight of fear on his chest.

  He’d been called by Shirley at the end of the Gala to say Franklin’s temperature has gone
through the roof. ‘Liquid paracetamol,’ he told her. He didn’t want to know about Franklin’s temperature, when he was at the Gala, enjoying himself, when he couldn’t do anything except worry. And it wasn’t fair: only hours before, when he’d rung up to check how his family were, she had reassured him, more or less: Winston was cooler, both boys were sleeping …

  Then Elroy’s worry becomes specific.

  Elroy remembers what happened next. An epidemiologist he knew slightly from another hospital came across and chatted. There was a solidarity between successful black men in the Health Service. They had a smoke together, decided that they liked each other, arranged to meet for a game of squash. As the man turned to leave, he paused for a moment, and said, in a low, conspiratorial tone, ‘We’ve been told to keep it quiet by the government, but there’s something big in the pipe-line … We’ve got eight cases of flood sickness. The thing they had in Makaria.’

  What’s the matter with me? Elroy asked himself. Am I deaf, or insane?

  It hadn’t occurred to him that the boys –

  But now he is running down the corridor, clumsy, heart pumping, mouth dry with fear. He looks in through the door of the twins’ room; Shirley is lying on the floor, covered by a duvet; but the boys must be up; their beds are empty. A wash of relief. They must be watching television.

  Then he spots the bulge of a boy’s body and tight-curled head under Shirley’s duvet. Sleeping, Shirley looks utterly at peace, creamy, flushed, beautiful. But the first brief glance at the boy’s exposed cheek shows the strange red buboes he had so dreaded, the sharp stigmata of flood sickness.

  Sixteen

  By lunch-time on the day after the Gala, Davey, who did not sleep last night, is utterly exhausted. Davey’s warnings have not been heard; he has been treated as a showman by the ‘experts’, which means those astronomers who aren’t up to speed on what is happening at the moment; he has been ridiculed as a TV lightweight, an accusation that cuts him to the bone; he has been comprehensively mocked and doubted. It was only a couple of days ago that the papers were full of the planetary line-up – and now before his programme has even gone out, Davey’s telling them the problem is a runaway comet. Most of the people who interviewed him insisted on talking about the planets, because that’s what it said in their briefing notes; when Davey told them it was a red herring, they asked him why he’d made a programme about it; there was no answer, except the money. ‘The point is,’ Davey says, hearing his voice grate and break, not his usual pleasant, humorous voice, the one they like and pay him for, ‘the point is, if this object hits, it may be two thousand kilometres away, but there will be massive tsunamis – tidal waves, to most of us – ironically, just as our programme predicts. But this time it’s real. It’s serious. Thousands of people will die on the coasts. Lives can be saved if people move inland.’