Meera laughs. ‘No wonder his wife left him.’
Summer shifts a little, aware of Meera’s body against hers.
‘You think that was why?’
Meera’s breath is warm against Summer’s neck. ‘Try opening the bedroom system.’
Pulling up the link, Summer activates it. Suddenly she is looking at herself and Meera seated on the bed.
‘There’s a camera!’
‘There are four,’ Meera says, and as she speaks Summer realises there are, each showing the bed from a different angle.
‘Now look at the recordings.’
Returning to the playlist, Summer opens the first file and the room around her fills with holos of men gripping and coupling. For fifteen, maybe twenty seconds she watches the bodies move against each other, then she takes the lenses off.
Meera is regarding her with amusement. ‘Well?’ she asks.
Summer shakes her head. A few seconds ago she wanted to tell Meera how close she’d felt to Dan out on the balcony. But now all she can see is the pleasure Meera is taking in this evidence of a secret life, and in Summer’s discomfort with it. ‘We shouldn’t be doing this,’ she says.
‘Why not? He won’t know.’
‘That doesn’t matter,’ she says, pressing the lenses back into Meera’s hand. ‘It’s still private.’
Meera laughs. ‘When did you get so uptight?’
‘I’m not uptight, I just think this is wrong.’ She stands.
Meera is still smiling but her eyes are cold.
‘If you want to keep looking, feel free.’
Dan is nowhere to be seen when she gets back to the living room, so pushing her way past the dancers she goes through to the kitchen. In here it is bright, the lights forming pools upon the gleaming bench tops. In the corner one of the boys is seated next to the sink with his back against the splashback, the drummer leaning into him, their eyes closed and mouths pressed together, both so lost in the moment they do not register her presence.
She should leave, take her bag and walk out into the night, but she is not quite ready for that yet, not quite ready to let go. Picking up a bottle of beer she raises it to her lips, the sharp taste of it filling her mouth as the cool liquid runs down her throat.
Before she met Meera she and her friends were always involved in whatever cause was most urgent. Along with Sophie she helped raise money for refugees, joined the marches and occupations, even spent some time on one of the coalmine blockades. But Meera and Dan don’t care about politics: Meera in particular goes out of her way to show her contempt for people who make the mistake of caring, her disdain so keen Summer sometimes wonders how much of it is directed at her. Looking at the scene around her, she remembers that other version of herself, the thought of what she has become making her feel ill, a revulsion so overwhelming she can barely keep it in.
In the next room somebody is playing a song from the summer before, a shrieking, whirling shiver of a tune. Setting her bottle down she heads back through, closing her eyes as she steps into the beat, letting it lift her, carry her, losing herself amongst the bodies of the others.
When the song ends it is replaced by another, and then another, each one leading her on into the next, until at last she turns to see Dan standing by the door, Meera beside him. They are talking, their arms wound around each other, Dan explaining something with the intentness that she loves. Without thinking she stops moving, her arms falling to her side, and as she does Meera looks around, her eyes meeting Summer’s. For a split second Meera seems caught off guard but then she smiles, and Summer is reminded of the look on her face that first night in Anouk’s mother’s bedroom as she went through the woman’s things, the way she revelled in that power. Pushing her way past the others she walks back to the balcony, steps out into the warm dark. Gripping the rail she looks northward towards the glow of the fires, closes her eyes, breathes in the smoky air.
‘Home?’ the woman beside Adam asks as the plane banks towards its final approach.
Looking across, he shakes his head. ‘No,’ he says. ‘Just visiting.’
The woman smiles. She has spent most of the flight asleep or with lenses on. She is younger than he is, neatly blonde with the look of the professional business traveller.
‘Work or family?’ she asks, and now Adam can hear that she is not Australian or English, but South African.
‘Work. A conference,’ he says, unwilling to go into more detail.
Whatever she is about to say next is cut off by the steward telling them they have landed. Adam straightens, happy to break off the conversation.
In the terminal it is busy. All week the Met Office and NASA have been tracking a tropical hurricane in the Atlantic, a monster called Medea, as it moves eastwards and north, sending fronts ahead of itself. Tropical storms have struck England more than once in recent years, yet if the simulations are correct Medea will be bigger than anything that has struck before, and there are reports of impending airport closures, a constant press of travellers eager to get out while they can. On the concourse crowds wait, families of Indians and Pakistanis surrounded by small mountains of hand luggage, lone travellers slumped half asleep, couples and families absorbed in their screens and overlays, lost in some shared solitude. Near the escalators to the baggage claim Adam passes a harried-looking mother with three small children dragging behind her and another in her arms, registers the look of exhaustion in her eyes.
When he eventually finds his way to the station under the terminal, the platform is packed, and the train, when it arrives, crowded and slow, its journey interrupted by a series of unexplained delays, long periods of idling in stations and tunnels. Despite the forecast the morning is clear, but as he emerges from the Tube it is difficult to believe things are as they should be. Although it is barely eight the morning already shimmers with heat, and there is a foulness in the air, a stink of drains and humidity he more readily associates with the tropics than with England’s south-east.
In his hotel room he drops his bags and slumps down on the bed. Dislocated by the movement across time zones his body is heavy with exhaustion yet restless and unsettled, and as he lies back he feels the contradictory pull of the desire to sleep and a nervous, unnatural wakefulness; rousing himself, he turns on the shower and steps under the water, his skin crawling as if with fever.
As he dresses he flicks through the conference information in his overlays. Amidst it he notices the advice to wear insect repellent at dusk and dawn in order to stave off the possibility of drug-resistant malaria; wondering how real the risk is, he makes a mental note to read the figures.
Once he is done he turns his overlays off and begins to transfer the things he will need from his suitcase to his backpack. He has plans for the two days between now and the opening address, plans of a more personal nature. Yet now that the time has come for them he is afraid, not of what he will find but of what might follow.
It was her friend Sophie who gave him the address. When they spoke she was evasive, leaving him uncertain whether she was in contact with Summer or not. Back in Sydney he’d called up a satellite image of the house, which was outside a small town in Norfolk, realising as it appeared on his screen that he was trembling, the possibility that he might glimpse her in it almost overwhelming, a sensation that was replaced by emptiness when all he saw was a stone cottage, broken plastic toys scattered in front of it.
Heading out into the street he feels a shadow of that feeling return, but as he turns towards Kings Cross he does his best to put it aside, to concentrate instead on his determination to find her.
In the time he has been inside the air has grown even hotter, although the blue sky is now marked by ribs of cloud feeding in from the southwest. Yet the weather is less striking than the changes to the city in the decade since he was last here – the closed shops, the beggars sleeping on footpaths, the cracks in the asphalt, the groups of young people congregated on corners. The police vans with blackened windows parked ever
y block or two.
On the train he takes a seat by the window. The timetable says the trip should take slightly over an hour and a half, but even before they reach the edge of the city it is clear they will be late. Ordinarily this would be a source of frustration, but today he finds he is grateful for the chance to lose himself in observation of the passing countryside, struck all over again by the sheer bounty of the English summer, the pressing green and life, so unexpected in the midst of so much change.
In Cambridge he collects a car and settles back as it winds its way towards the city’s fringes. In the lanes heading west, cars are queued in long lines. Some of the waiting vehicles seem to be ordinary traffic, but many are packed with bags and children, or are pulling trailers, the effect more reminiscent of the first day of holidays than the evacuation it clearly is. Yet while the traffic heading west is heavy, for the most part the road to the east is clear, and as he leaves the city behind he allows the car to accelerate into the countryside.
As a student he spent a summer living in England, and travelled this way more than once. Back then the flat fields and rows of hedges and houses always seemed like a reminder of another age, unaltered by the passage of time. Even now much is the same, yet it is difficult to ignore the stands of genetically engineered trees that line the edges of fields, unnaturally tall against the remaining clumps of oak and pine. The most visible of the various organisms developed in the last decade or so to consume and store carbon dioxide, they have come to be known as triffids, a name that captures the unsettlingly alien blurring of plant and flesh suggested by their thick boles and distorted dimensions. But to Adam’s eyes what their smooth, slightly bulbous trunks and inverted canopies most resemble is the great baobabs that once grew in Madagascar.
When they were first developed many assumed the motivation was financial rather than ecological, citing as evidence the decision of the companies that created them to patent their genomes instead of making them available for free. Environmental groups fought their introduction hard, poisoning fields earmarked for their planting and burning plantations, but governments here and elsewhere held firm, arguing that the importance of capturing carbon dioxide far outweighed the risk of further contamination of the ecosystem.
Unsurprisingly these assurances soon proved incorrect. Only months after the first plantations were established, triffids had begun to turn up along waterways and in forests across England and Scotland, a process that was repeated in other countries, one more factor in the ongoing transformation of the world’s ecosystems.
When he was younger he would have been on the side of the protesters, would have regarded the intrusion of these unnatural tropical creations into this landscape as a catastrophe. But looking at them now he finds himself wondering if they are not simply the latest stage in a process that goes back millennia. After all, these fields were once wetlands, a vast interconnected maze of low pools and streams and marshes stretching from Cambridge to the sea. Then, two hundred years ago, humans drained the land, constructing embankments and pumping the water out to sea to create space for farms and roads and forests. With the water gone the land changed. Fishing and fowling gave way to farming, farms to factories. Even the birds that congregated here began to disappear, some dying, others finding new breeding grounds, altering their migratory routes. And in their place the land itself took on new shapes.
Some of those shapes can still be seen, records of the area’s long occupation, as are the birds that move overhead, or stand in the pools and streams beside the road.
Now, though, the sea is returning. In recent years these fields and towns have flooded more than once, and although the windmills that drive the drainage systems testify to people’s determination to keep the water at bay, it is really only a way of delaying the inevitable.
Those who live here know this, of course. Hence the signs of preparation, the rowboats on trailers in driveways and on lawns, the canoes and kayaks propped against walls.
There was a time when people talked about boiling the frog, arguing that the warming of the planet was too gradual to galvanise effective action, and although in recent years that has changed, delay having been replaced by panic, resistance by calls for more effective solutions, Adam still suspects that at some level people do not understand the scale of the transformation that is overtaking them. Even if it hasn’t happened yet, the reality is that this place is already lost, that some time soon the ocean will have it back, the planet will overwhelm it.
Half an hour outside Cambridge the car interrupts to alert him to the turn-off, its driving system steering smoothly to the right. The wheels crunch as they hit gravel and then bump onto dirt.
The drive is long and narrow, a straight muddy track fenced in on both sides by low hedges. At its end an ancient yew tree stands, its spreading canopy shading an old gate held in place by pillars of stone. Directing the car to park, Adam opens the door and steps out into the glare of the heat.
Beyond the gate the path continues past a disused well to an old farmhouse. Georgian, he thinks, looking up at the high windows and steep roof. Once it would have been the only building, now other structures rise behind it: a barn, two small wind turbines, and further off to the north what looks to be some kind of accommodation block built out of second-hand bricks and metal cladding.
At the front door he rings the bell. On the step a child’s tri-cycle lies overturned, a half-deflated ball beside it; from within he can hear children’s voices. After a few moments a woman opens the door and peers at him with thinly disguised hostility. A few years younger than Adam, she wears a shapeless, dowdy dress, her hair pulled back unflatteringly from her broad face.
Smiling hopefully he tells her he is looking for Summer.
‘Summer who?’ she asks suspiciously.
‘Summer Leith.’
‘And you are?’
‘Adam Leith. Her father.’
Somewhere behind her a child cries out, but she does not turn around.
‘Where did you get this address?’
‘From a friend of Summer’s back in Australia. She doesn’t know I’m coming.’
The screaming has grown louder. The woman glances over her shoulder, then turns back to him. ‘Wait here,’ she says.
He stands on the doorstep listening to her separating the children, her voice raised in a high, falsely cheery tone at odds with her manner a moment before. Once order has been restored there is a silence, then her voice again, lower and more cautious this time, the tone and the gaps between speech telling him she is on the phone. Quite suddenly he feels himself begin to tremble, all the nervousness of recent days descending upon him.
Then she reappears in the narrow hall. He tries to look casual as she fixes him with a cold stare.
‘She said you should go up.’
The woman directs him to a track he had not noticed before. Like the drive he came in on, it is bordered by low stone walls built centuries before, and runs off across the fields. A kilometre or so further on it terminates near a clump of trees and another house.
‘I can drive?’
She glances at his car with distaste. ‘I suppose,’ she says.
Although the track is bad the drive takes only a few minutes. Near the house he sees a figure standing in the doorway and knows immediately it is her. Unsure now of how to proceed he pulls the car in, gets out.
It is close to a decade since she left for England, and almost as long since he saw her in person, but from a distance she looks little different, the way she stands, arms folded, head cocked to one side, immediately, achingly familiar.
She does not speak as he approaches. The yard is a ruin, the grass flattened and muddy. He stops a little way in front of her.
‘Summer.’ After so long it is all he can manage.
‘Dad.’
‘I’m sorry to just appear like this.’
‘Is something wrong? Is Mum . . .?’
‘No, no, nothing like that.’
He wa
nts to step forward, take her in his arms, but he is afraid she will push him away.
Finally she steps aside. ‘Would you like to come in?’ she says.
The house is cluttered and dirty and smells of mildew. Although somebody has made an attempt to brighten the place by spreading coloured cloths over the sofas and positioning rag rugs in the doorways, these decorations cannot disguise the fact that the furniture is cheap and broken, or distract from the tide mark that runs along the walls at chest height.
At the end of the hall she ushers him into the kitchen, where a man is seated at the table, a screen in front of him. He is thirtyish, dark-haired with a wispy beard, and as they enter he looks up, nods without warmth. Glancing at Summer, Adam waits for her to introduce him but she does not. Instead she studiously ignores the man’s presence.
‘Would you like a drink?’
‘That would be lovely,’ he says.
While she pours him a glass of water he studies the room, taking in the chipped plates on the draining board, the cluttered benches. The man at the table continues to study his screen as if Adam and Summer are not there, the effect disconcerting in such a small space. Only as they are leaving does he look up again, his eyes settling coldly on Adam.
Outside Summer motions to him to sit, then perches on a broken chair opposite. The air swells with the sound of insects, the massing shapes of gnats and dragonflies. On the far side of the yard a rusted trampoline hangs twisted in the boughs of a tree.
Catching him looking at it she says, ‘Last summer.’
‘Did you lose much?’
‘Stuff? Some. But people died, Dad. A lot of them. Or had you forgotten that?’
‘Of course not.’
She seems to be considering whether to push the point. But then, for whatever reason, she relaxes.
‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘I’m just worried about the storm.’
‘Everybody is.’
‘Is that why you’re here?’
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