by Maggie Gee
Not a single interviewer seems to believe it. And half of Davey can’t believe it either. It is not a certainty, just possible, according to the measurements Sharp’s team is taking – with every second, becoming more likely, as the course of the comet narrows towards them – depending on the balance of delicate forces, the movements of other astral bodies whose movements may vary minutely, vitally. No one is willing to credit that there is a fifty, fifty-five per cent chance of this happening.
In a way, Davey agrees with the dissenters. There is never a fifty per cent chance of anything. Merely two worlds: one where it happens, where everything returns to nothing, and one where all of life goes on. Time splits, and splits, and splits again: what matters is being in the lucky fraction. Now he must find his sister, his mother, now he must make his way to Delorice – Davey will not be leaving the city, although Professor Sharp has gone already.
Davey has never been a praying man, but Davey finds that he is praying. For all the people he knows and loves, for all the people of the city. Davey, after all, is not really scientist. He puts himself in the hands of the gods.
All those who slept little, or not at all, have a day of dread, after the Gala. Lottie, Ian, Elroy, Lola, Gracie, Isaac, Freddy …
And although it’s a public holiday, quite a few people are feeling gloomy. The sun, which has shone for three whole days, has vanished behind a thin veil of cloud. People start to realize the flood-waters have hardly receded, despite yesterday’s official claims; they just looked better with the sunlight on them. Perhaps they went down a metre, if that.
Now some people say they are rising again. The swimming-pools are closed, and the tap-water tastes funny, as if it has been doused with chemicals.
Yesterday they knew they had turned the corner. Today, outside the centre, the smell is still there, and the dirty, irregular water-buses, and the little bodies, of drowned rats and mice, and the bin-bags, festering, decomposing.
The hissing whisper is ‘flood sickness’. No one is worried about astral bodies.
On the long strings of space-time, events are gathering.
Mr Bliss is upset. The papers have shown themselves, as usual, utterly base and trivial apropos of his glittering Gala performance. ‘Look, guys, I’m happy to answer questions,’ he’d told his audience, frankly, freely, awaiting the questions he’d pre-arranged. Mr Bliss takes risks! He meets the people! But instead of the photo-opportunities he’d planned, all the papers have photos of the horrid little girl, even the centre-centre Daily Bread, and some have photos of a dancing teenager, with ‘BLISS IS A ARSE’ on her tiny pants.
‘You are the Emperor with No Clothes!’
There had been howls, gales, roars of laughter. He had shrugged, likeably, grinned, grinned, held the expression till his cheek muscles ached, said, ‘Thank you, guys! I think that’s enough questions!’ though Anwar was gesturing strictly from the rostrum; he fled down the long bright room feeling sick, knowing everyone was whispering and pointing at him: ‘There goes the Emperor with No Clothes’.
Life was real, life was earnest, but no one would listen. The indignation burned a hole in his chest.
Today he had caught Anwar Topping laughing at a particularly hurtful cartoon. His wife had also been unpleasant to him; instead of praising his handling of the flood situation, she’d poured out a tide of nonsense she’d got from some clairvoyant (every week, she found a new one) predicting plague and tidal waves. Meanwhile, the Daily Mire had rubbished his very good dossier on sabotage, which some of his people had spent hours compiling. (Darren White, of course, was always a loose cannon: he’d been footsying with Anwar about an honour, while secretly writing this sabotage piece.) And now there were more cases of flood sickness, and accusations of a cover-up … Granted, the first cases were weeks ago, but the government’s job was to prevent a panic. And then on top of it, this TV astronomer was screaming about the end of the world!
As the day went on, his mood worsened. A chap did his best, but people were ungrateful.
At eleven a.m., Berta called him. ‘It’s all very well, what you say about the floods, but there’s still loads of stinking black sludge in our garage. Come straight home and clean it out.’
He was somebody, wasn’t he? He was the Leader! Now he would make his wife realize that.
The children have disappeared into the Palm House. Angela stands in the boat, screaming. She can see them, quite clearly, through the gap in the glass, black shapes crawling down the branch of a tree, ending up clinging to the white spiral staircase that leads up into the upper gallery.
‘Gerda!’ she yells. ‘Come back at once!’
‘We’re OK, Mummy,’ Gerda calls.
At least, in chaos, they have something to cling on to. The white curved iron is like a helix. They are scurrying upwards. They are out of sight.
‘Do something,’ Angela shouts at the young gardener, who is sitting open-mouthed, looking after them.
‘You’ll have to go, missis,’ he grunts. ‘They’re your kids. And besides, I can’t swim.’
Angela kicks off her shoes and jumps in. It’s a very long time since she has been swimming. The dirty water closes over her head. It feels like death; she knows she is dying.
That afternoon, all over the city, in the newly cleaned centre and on Two Zoo Hill, in the drowned parks and the beleaguered libraries, around the grey Towers with their tide of debris, rocket-sticks, defunct Roman candles, helicopters begin to hover. The residents hardly notice; they are used to the drone of helicopters, chasing burglars, monitoring demonstrations, keeping an eye on the city’s pleasures, making sure nothing gets out of hand. It’s a public holiday, and people have hangovers, so most of the city stays in their houses, watching TV, catching up with the papers. But when a few people put their boots on and step outside for a breath of air, they find the city has been covered with leaflets, bright yellow, slim, ubiquitous leaflets. On the front is a picture of Mr Bliss, but his face is half-obscured by a gas mask, and he is holding out another one to a child, who is looking up at him adoringly. ‘PROTECT AND SURVIVE’, the yellow chits shout. Unbelieving, reluctant, gingerly holding the flimsy pamphlet with Bliss’s masked face, the people of the city begin to read.
The city has launched a pre-emptive strike on the hostile power which caused the floods. It’s been done to make the city safer; we could not do nothing in the face of aggression. As always, Bliss thought of our children’s future (as he OK’d the draft, he thought briefly, sourly of the red-headed child with her unfair question. He wasn’t committed to that child’s future).
But in the short term, there might be reprisals. The enemy were ruthless, and would stop at nothing. The people of the city should be vigilant. If an incident occurred, they should stay at home, and switch their TVs and radios on. The government would keep them fully informed, and explain the safest course of action. At the last minute, Mr Bliss had decided to cut the last passage, which asked people not to stockpile food, and told them not to try to leave the city. Of course, the awkward squad would do precisely that.
The leaflet ended opaquely; ‘Home is the safest place,’ it said. But it didn’t explain how they were to get home, if the boatmen themselves had all gone home, and all the people who should save or help them, the police, the firemen, the doctors, the nurses; or how they should deal with the heavy knot of terror that clenches as they read this pamphlet.
Gerda, however, is perfectly happy. The helicopters haven’t reached the west. The Gardens is one of her favourite places. The top of the Palm House feels almost normal, with its narrow iron walkway running round under the roof so the children look down on the crowns of the palm trees, like huge green stars or octopuses, though there’s only water below and between them, where usually she can peek through the gaps and see people’s heads bobbing like toadstools. There’s an ‘up’ spiral staircase and a ‘down’ spiral staircase, but today, she thinks, there won’t be any rules.
She chases Winston round the wa
lkway. Gerda’s fast for a girl, and Winston gives up. Being chased in this empty place is too frightening. When he looks at Gerda close-up, she looks funny: her dress has gone brown, and there’s weed on her neck. Then he sees, in her hand, his Bendy Rabbit. Bendy Rabbit looks changed, all skinny and black. It scares him to see Bendy Rabbit look different. It scares him that he forgot his rabbit. It scares him that he’s forgotten Franklin. How can Franklin be managing without him? Does he still exist without Winston there? Is his life going on at the same time? A frightening void opens up before Winston, where everything keeps happening, squillions of things, not knowing about him, not caring about him, and he can’t control it, or keep anyone safe.
‘You changed Bendy Rabbit,’ he says to Gerda.
‘I saved it,’ she says. ‘You forgot to bring it.’
‘It isn’t a it, it’s a he,’ he shouts. He punches her, and snatches the rabbit.
Isaac decides to get out. There are too many straws in the wind, today; Isaac isn’t ready to die just yet. The pamphlet lies stupidly yellow on his desk. He picks up the directory of luxury services, and starts looking for helicopters. It isn’t easy; firm after firm has had its fuel requisitioned by the government. When he finally finds an outfit with fuel, all three machines have been booked today, but Isaac stays on the line, wheedling, cajoling, doubling his offer, trebling … In the end he offers the price of his house; what good is a house in a wrecked city? And, after some weaselling, they agree.
Then other decisions have to be made. The helicopter seats four to six. Isaac no longer has a lover. Caz, whom he loved so very recently, left in a way that gave him pain; Isaac, who bears Caz no ill feeling, nevertheless decides not to save him. The gift of life! It is too rare, too precious! How can he spare some for a man who spurned him?
Besides, there aren’t really five spare seats. Isaac must take some pictures along, and some little comforts that make life worth living if you don’t have a lover, a father, a mother. He needs his two-thousand-dollar bottles of wine, the ones he has been saving for happiness; he must have his jazz and opera CDs; his small bronzes, including the one-off Paolozzi, cast just for him; his smokey, Goya-esque Paula Regos with their children larger and freer than their parents; his Michael Andrews; his Cornell box, a world under glass, blown sand, torn paper; his tiny Freud, with the feet to die for, the exquisite red-silver-cream-blue flesh; his haunted Auerbach drawing of a head; he is shocked to find how heavy they are, and to see that some of his favourites are dusty – how have they got dusty, if he loves them so?
Perhaps there is room for one other passenger, as long as they will come without cargo. Isaac thinks about his sister Susy, whom he loves, though they quarrelled years ago, when he drove the One Way-ers out of the house … Susy. A little pain in his chest. He dials her number; it rings once, twice. Then he imagines what will happen; if she comes with him, she’ll never come alone; ever since she was little she’s adopted things, birds, puppies, human wreckage; he imagines them, scrabbling at the helicopter, helpless, dirty, hysterical … Four rings, then he puts it down. He sits there thinking, his packages all round him, his best leather overcoat tightly buttoned, the water and heating already turned off, the flood- and bomb-proof storeroom sealed. After a while he dials another number.
Angela has struggled, sopping wet, furious, into the hulk of the drowned glass-house. She feels ancient, and stupid, and very tired. She left her new shoes in the boat with the gardener (she wore them in case Winston’s mother was smart; but Winston’s mother had not been smart). What if the young man abandons them?
She is too old for the thing she is doing, inching along the branch of a tree, scratching her feet every step of the way, the leaves whipping and scratching at her cheeks, but she hears the children up in the echoing roof, and there’s no other way to reach the white staircase.
‘Gerda!’ she calls. ‘Win-ston!’ No answer. She listens a moment. They are quarrelling. ‘Gerda,’ she shouts. ‘Come down this instant!’ She peers awkwardly up through the tangle of branches, but as she does so, something falls straight past her, something wet and black, which splashes her cheek, and suddenly both the children are screaming.
Swinging over the void, she reaches the white handrail, grips it, pulls herself across, clings, for a second to catch her breath, then finds herself slapping up the steep narrow staircase, wet feet slithering perilously. She tries to shout, but her ribs are hurting. She reaches the top gasping like a grampus. Gerda, she thinks, you’ll suffer for this.
But just as she gets there, she sees them below her, they have both run down the opposite staircase, and crouch side by side on its bottom rung.
They seem to be fighting. Gerda’s clutching Winston.
Aching, shivering, Angela follows them, crossing the walkway, descending the staircase, holding on tight because the view makes her dizzy, the enormous trees, tiny heads of the children, the dirty water stretching out all round them. Now there’s no way that they can escape her. She slips, nearly falls, tells herself take care.
Twenty metres below her – fifteen – four –
There’s a splash like the sound of a world exploding. One of the children has fallen in the water.
She can’t lose Gerda – her life – her daughter –
But straining round the ironwork, she sees it’s Winston.
Gerda is shouting: ‘Don’t! Come back!’
Ian, Gerda’s ‘painter man’, picks up his phone, and finds it is Isaac. The two of them are old – not friends, but acquaintances. Isaac would say ‘friend’, Ian ‘acquaintance’. Ian is one of Isaac’s few straight friends. Isaac’s always considered him phenomenally talented, though Ian would never listen to advice. Isaac represented him for years and set up some absolutely key commissions, but Ian frequently didn’t play ball – Ian only wanted to work for himself, and at first that sometimes included portraits, which Isaac sold for a lot of money, but then something odd started happening, the portraits slipped towards caricature, so some clients laughed, and some were offended; then they slipped a little further, a little broader, and the point of the caricature became clear: Ian saw people as animals, jackals, hyenas, wild-cats, snakes. Isaac admired them, but couldn’t sell them, though later, after the two of them had parted, the great museums started buying them, and Ian became one of the world’s most successful artists, though almost nothing was known about him. On one of the rare occasions they had met, after their business partnership had broken down, Isaac congratulated Ian on his marketing tactics. ‘Absolutely brilliant! The Beckett touch! You have created such mystique!’ But Ian just laughed, and turned away, and started sketching something on the back of a napkin.
Isaac no longer knows Ian’s number by heart, but he flicks through his palm-top and swiftly finds it. Only ten minutes till he has to leave. They’re picking up from the pad in the north-west of the city. Shall he phone, or not? The power of life and death …
A silverfish flicks across Isaac’s desk.
He squashes the silverfish, but rings Ian’s number.
The question he puts is a little self-conscious, aware of his beneficence, almost shy.
But the answer is succinct. Ian isn’t coming. ‘I can’t do it. Got to go to the zoo. OK then, mate. I hope you make it.’
Seventeen
May finds her son as the second wave of helicopters starts to rumble over the city. The Towers are decked with feeble yellow bunting where occasional leaflets have stuck to windows, caught on mouldings, blown like leaves on to balconies. The flood waters have a freight of dirty yellow paper. The Tower-dwellers carry its stain in their hearts, a grim leakage of fear down the edge of the day. They veer between terror and forgetfulness. They cannot accept it, because they don’t have an enemy; nobody, surely, could hate them so much as to want to bomb them, poison them, gas them, any of the fates the leaflets threaten … Any of the things that Bliss may have done, in other words, to the other country, their new, faceless, invisible enemy. But now, slowly, unde
r the surface, in the depths of their hearts where there is no argument, where knowledge never reaches, beyond logic, they start to hate, because they start to fear. The yellow leaflets are the first poison.
May, however, has lived through the war. May doesn’t take a lot of notice. It’s just that smarmy Mr Bliss, trying to get his face on everything. She feels sorry for the child in the photograph, though. She dimly remembers the mask she wore as a teenager for gas-mask drills. It was hot, and heavy, and suffocating, like a dream from which you could not wake up, and she briefly wonders, as she searches the Towers, as she goes up yet another flight of empty, inhuman stairs, panting, resting, aware of a nagging pain in her foot, as she knocks on yet another peep-holed door, no longer afraid of what she will find because she has already seen it all – the enormously fat man propped up against a packing-case, dressed in a parka and underpants, his legs stretching out like two alien life-forms behind the skeleton who cared for him, his starved yellow daughter with her withered skin; the old black woman who came to the door clutching the shoulder of her crawling son, dragging himself intently along, but he could see, his eyes yearning upwards, while his mother’s are milky, lightless, blind; the crack dens, where young people twitched and dozed and a skinny dog wolfed the forgotten hamburgers spilled like excrement across the floor – she briefly wonders, as she knocks on a door, this tenth, or twentieth, or thirtieth door since she started searching, today, yesterday – if her life since the death of her dear Alfred has been just such a dream, heavy, comfortless, a dream where everything is seen through pain – so she might still wake and turn and find him, not dark and cold as he was last night, but somewhere where they could be in colour, his dear red face and funny mouth, the pale blue eyes that always softened to see her; and the door opens, this thirtieth door, this door no more hopeful than any other, and suddenly she sees him, at the back of a crowd, that face and body she’d forgotten to love, that form so familiar she could close her eyes and still see him there, against that bleak window, Alfred’s narrow shoulders, his wiry arms …