by Leyland, L J
‘She had started to share some of what she had recorded with my mother in their weekly sessions. My mother was starting to get suspicious and told my grandparents about it. But one day, before they could view the tapes themselves, Iris suddenly stopped filming. Harpick had caught her. He had realized she was filming him, and was starting to share what she had recorded, and so confiscated her camera. Actually he did more than that but I don’t need to go into the details of what followed. You’ve seen enough of him to know what he’s capable of. Her sanity quickly deteriorated after that. She started seeing more visions, increasingly violent ones, catastrophic ones where she would convince herself of natural disasters.
‘During one visit from my parents, she tried to drown herself in the pond in the garden as she said it would be quicker to drown now rather than die in the tidal wave she saw coming. My grandfather hauled her out but she had to be physically restrained for hours to stop her throwing herself back in the water. When I asked my grandparents about it, they said that the most striking thing about the incident was how livid Harpick was. He was completely deranged, threatening to drown her himself if she wasn’t quiet. But Iris kept on talking of tidal waves, tsunamis, floods until she was imprisoned back in her room and banned from seeing her family …’ Noah looked at me meaningfully. ‘This was a week before the polar ice caps melted and the Flood happened.’
A tinkle of glass shattered the tense silence. I looked at Matthias and saw that he was holding out his hands, now covered in blood. His gin glass was broken into large shards. ‘I squeezed too hard,’ he said.
I handed him my handkerchief and took a sip of my drink, deep in thought.
‘Do you believe in precognition?’ asked Noah. ‘Telling the future? Making prophecies?’
‘No,’ I replied.
‘No, of course you don’t. You’re too rational for that. So let me ask you this: how did my aunt foresee an event, a catastrophic natural disaster, days before it actually happened?’
I hesitated to think. ‘Well, she couldn’t have done. It just must have been a lucky guess, coincidental you know. Hallucinating about floods the month of the Flood …’ I tailed off, knowing that my argument was unconvincing.
Matthias raised a sceptical eyebrow at me.
‘Well, Mr-Know-It-All, what’s your explanation then?’ I asked.
‘Maida, you know me. I’m rational, I believe that things can always be explained by real causes and actions, not magic. But in this case … in this case, I don’t know what to believe. I find it very hard to swallow that anything is ever that coincidental – are you really suggesting that Iris talked of tidal waves, floods, utter devastation, completely coincidentally on the eve of the most catastrophic natural disaster to ever hit our planet? It just seems too fluky.’
‘And are you really suggesting that she can see into the future? Come on, I thought you said you were “rational”.’
‘Don’t speak to me like that. You’re always so dismissive of things you don’t understand. What other explanation is there? How do you know there aren’t forces out there that we don’t know about? How do you know that her madness wasn’t some of channel for it?’
‘Because that sort of thinking is for superstitious morons,’ I said.
‘I’m a moron now, am I?’
Red-hot anger was rising in his cheeks, but I suspected that it wasn’t just that I was disagreeing with him, but that I insulted him in front of Noah. ‘If you believe in magic, yes. Oh, and by the way, I don’t think you actually believe she predicted the future, I think you’re just being deliberately awkward to score a point against me.’
The atmosphere was suddenly brittle. Noah looked from one to the other and back again. He raised his eyebrows, obviously surprised and maybe even a little pleased about this sudden show of bitter fracture in our relationship. I wondered what he thought of Matthias and whether he was secretly satisfied at our disagreement … and if so, why? Either way, Matthias and I needed to get back on the same side.
‘Sorry,’ I said awkwardly.
Matthias gave me a close-lipped smile and reached for my drink. I let him take it and gulp it back. The fumes from the alcohol were potent.
‘Do you know how big the polar ice caps were before the Flood?’ Noah asked, changing tack.
I shook my head. ‘Geography isn’t my strong point.’
‘What is?’ whispered Matthias sarcastically, eliciting a punch to his arm from me.
Noah looked down, embarrassed, then carried on. ‘During the winter months, they stretched for nearly seven million square miles. Seven million. And it only took a few months to melt. Does that strike you as odd?’
I couldn’t quite catch his implication. ‘Odd? What do you mean, odd? They had been warning us for decades, you know: global warming, ice caps melting, rising sea levels. We knew it was coming, our ancestors had abused the land too much, the weather had already changed from what it used to be,’ I said.
‘Yes, we knew it was coming but all other predictions had indicated that it would happen slowly, incrementally, they said. Slow rises in sea levels over decades. Who knew that seven million square miles of ice could melt within the space of a few quick months …?’
He was staring at me intently. I knew he was urging me to catch his drift, to let me figure out the conclusion for myself but I just couldn’t grasp what he was getting at. Besides, I was feeling vaguely irritated that he was trying to make me think in a certain way. So much for being independent-minded. ‘The predictions were wrong then. Obviously the scientists made a mistake. I mean, it isn’t unlikely. A natural disaster as big as this has never happened before, no-one can predict nature; the scientists got it badly wrong.’
‘Hmm …’ Noah trailed off and looked slightly disappointed. Disappointed in me, perhaps. Oh well. I’d prefer if he just came out and said it rather than play guessing games. He turned to Matthias and said, ‘And you? What do you think?’
Matthias had a strange look on his face, like a man electrified and wide-eyed. He placed my glass on the table and I noticed his hand was shaking slightly.
‘Matthias, what is it? What’s wrong?’
‘No. It just happened naturally. No-one can control nature. Natural disasters happen all the time,’ he mumbled to himself.
Noah’s face stretched into a grim smile, pleased that one of his students had finally started to follow the thread. ‘Go on,’ he urged.
‘They couldn’t have done. How? Why? It’s not even possible. It’s completely impossible. Oh God, all those people. Drowned. Dead. I don’t … I can’t believe this, no …’
‘Then explain to me how she knew it was coming?’ said Noah.
Matthias stood up abruptly and ran for the door, shoving other customers out of the way, leaving a trail of drunks sprawling on the floor.
I screeched my chair back and ran after him, Noah close behind.
Matthias was sprinting for the shoreline. Where the hell was he running to? I suddenly realised why he was running when he keeled over at the edge of the water and began to vomit.
‘Oh, God,’ I said, looking at Noah, ‘I’m so sorry, it’s the gin.’
‘No,’ he replied calmly, ‘I don’t think it is.’
We stood, side-by-side, watching, not touching, in the cold night air for two minutes while Matthias finished his business. The moon was crescent shaped and bright; a manic grin leering down at me. When he had stopped gagging, Matthias leaned back on the coarse sandy pebbles, stretching out on his back with his hands over his face. I knew he was covering his eyes to prevent us from seeing their redness and I could hear his uneven, ragged breathing. It was strangely unsettling.
The tide was coming in. It rushed in on a sudden swell and touched his trousers. As the cold water grabbed him at his ankles, Matthias cried out and scuttled backwards.
‘Don’t touch me,’ he yelled at the water, ‘just don’t touch me.’
I’d never seen him so disturbed before. I ran to him and
kneeled by his side. Arm around him, comforting. For just that moment, I forgot about why we were there; I just wanted to calm him and make him be the person I was familiar with – unshakable, stable, strong Matthias. This new character made me anxious. I looked back at Noah and saw him wistfully gazing at us. The luminous moon was reflected in his eyes, small crescents that framed his pupils, cat-like and mysterious.
‘Matthias.’ I grabbed his chin and forced him to look at me. ‘This isn’t us. We don’t do this. Whatever it is, we’ve faced worse.’
He nodded and began taking his sodden boots and socks off, burying his toes into the pebbles.
‘Now, tell me what it is.’
I turned to Noah and motioned for him to sit next to us.
‘What do you both know that I don’t? Just out with it.’
‘Maida …’ Matthias began but then gave up with a sigh. ‘I can’t even …You go,’ he said to Noah.
Noah lowered his body next to mine, shoulder to shoulder. His eyes were suddenly full of concern, as though he was worried what he was about to tell me would send me loopy too.
‘I have a theory,’ he began. ‘I’ve been thinking about it for a while.’ He took a deep breath, pausing, considering how to frame the sentence. ‘I don’t think the Flood was natural. I don’t think it was an unavoidable climatic event that melted the caps. I don’t think it was unplanned.’
‘Unplanned? Well of course it was unplanned, nature can’t be planned, it just happens. That’s how nature works.’
‘But I don’t think this was nature. I think it was manmade. This Flood was planned. Planned by men. Planned by the Metropole. And planned by the Mayor.’
Like rays of bright, penetrating sunshine evaporating mist, I saw clearly for the first time that night. I had been constrained by what I thought was possible, probable, natural, moral. But now Noah had broken the barriers of possibility for me, it made so much sense. The Flood had been planned and carried out by the Metropole. It was not natural. It was manmade. Made by men with an agenda. Made by men with no moral compass. Made by men with a desire to proclaim themselves masters of nature, masters of us, masters of the world. All those people. The victims of power-hungry men, lying at the bottom of the artificial sea. It made me feel ill. I suddenly understood Matthias’ reaction when the water touched him. That water caused the death of his parents. If the men hadn’t made the Flood, hadn’t melted the caps, his parents wouldn’t have had to stand up to the Mayor.
‘How? Why? When did you find out?’ So many questions.
‘We learnt geography in school.’ So they did go to school. ‘It was my favourite subject so I decided to read a bit more. My grandfather had some geography books in the library at our mansion from before the Flood. They were really old but very interesting. They said that climate, weather, all the natural stuff happened slowly, evolving over time. It just seemed odd that all that ice could melt into nothing in a few months. I asked my parents about it. They didn’t seem to care about the strange circumstances of the melt, all they cared about was that they managed to get all our antiques out of their old manor on the coast and into our new house on higher ground before the Flood hit. Millions of commoners didn’t manage that. Didn’t manage to get to higher ground. Do you know how my parents and all the other nobles managed it? They were warned.’
‘What?’ shouted Matthias, suddenly roused from his stupor.
‘Not explicitly. But the Mayor sent a quiet note to all the important people in the area telling them that they might want to move to higher ground. He didn’t say why but my parents, knowing the contacts he had, knowing how powerful he was, obeyed him. He probably wanted to save the people with money to establish his new regime. But even though they were warned, my family didn’t know anything about the Flood until it hit,’ Noah added, looking worried at Matthias’s murderous expression.
Matthias looked faintly green. ‘And none of them, none of those families, none of the Bluebloods, thought to let the townsfolk know. None of them deigned to trouble themselves to save our worthless lives.’
‘Matt,’ I said in a warning voice, ‘you’ll make yourself ill again.’
‘I feel sick as it is,’ he replied.
Noah looked ashamed and uncomfortable. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said simply. ‘It’s unforgiveable. The only excuse I can give is that they, the nobles, didn’t know how bad it was going to be. They didn’t know that the Metropole would melt the caps and they didn’t know how many would die.’
‘You don’t have to apologise for them,’ I said, ‘you weren’t there.’
‘Still …’ he replied. I felt sorry for him, he shouldn’t have to apologise for his background any more than I should – we couldn’t help being who we were. The fact he was telling us now was redemptive in itself.
A thought came to me. ‘Those men with accents Iris filmed. They were from the Metropole? The Mayor was having meetings with Metropole officials about this before it happened. He planned it with them?’
‘Yes. I can’t be sure about this but what I guess is that the officials of the Metropole wanted to gain more power. With so few natural resources left, the Metropole was under a lot of pressure, fighting with the Americas and Asia for any scrap of oil or coal. So they came up with a plan. A plan that would allow them to access the last reserve of inaccessible oil hidden under the Arctic, a plan that would drown large parts of its enemies’ territories and a plan that would allow them to establish an Empire to gain more resources. It was a plan that would kill four birds with one stone. The Metropole became the Imperial Empire of the Metropole, gained all our land and resources, drowned large parts of Asia and the Americas, and gained the last reserve of oil on the planet.’
The scale of the plan was simply inconceivable, mind-blowing. The Metropole had sacrificed millions of people, whole countries and continents, the entire future of our world, for oil and power.
‘They couldn’t have done it without some co-operation from insiders. Ones who were prepared to betray their people in return for power in the new order. Ones who would ensure the submission of the survivors. Ones who would make sure the Metropole had a firm grip on the outer edges of their Empire.’
‘Harpick. He knew millions would die and he did nothing. He as good as murdered them with his own hands,’ I finished.
Matthias sighed. ‘And there’s not a thing we can do. Who would believe this? And even if people did believe us, we wouldn’t last five minutes until the Mayor found out and had us conveniently involved in an accident. There’s nothing we can do.’
‘Well, I don’t know …’ Noah said, with a hint of slyness in his voice. ‘Why do you think I told you about Iris and the video camera? No. I think we have proof.’
‘The tapes!’ I cried. ‘She filmed them talking about it?’ But then my heart quickly sank. I remembered Noah had said Harpick had confiscated the camera after he had discovered her filming his meetings with the Metropolites.
‘The tapes are gone, aren’t they?’ I asked Noah.
‘After the Flood, Iris was kept in a secure room, basically a cell, in the Mayoral Complex. She languished there for years. But five years after the Flood, Harpick and Iris had a child, Flora.
‘My family were utterly surprised. Perhaps the Mayor was starting to think of his succession, keep power in the family, that sort of thing but he was obviously disappointed. Flora turned out as mad as her mother. But having a child seemed to renew a fighting spirit in Iris, she finally had something to live for. And she became troublesome, attempting to escape. Knives were found hidden in Flora’s cot – probably to be used against the Mayor. But the thing that sealed her fate was that she began talking about tapes, about secrets she knew, about how she would prove he was evil if he didn’t let her and Flora go.
‘This frightened the Mayor more than the knives did. He had ordered one of his guards to confiscate all the tapes Iris had ever made when he confiscated the camera, but the guard obviously didn’t do a very good job. Iris h
ad hidden the most incriminating ones away. And now she was threatening to use them against him. He couldn’t kill her or else my grandparents would raise the other nobles against him. So he did the only thing he could – banished her to the most remote place he could think of and use Flora as a bargaining chip to secure her and my family’s compliance. When the Mayor finally decided to get rid of her and banish her to the Highlands, my family were allowed one last goodbye with her. Her parting words were “they’re hidden where the earth splits”.’
‘Where the earth splits? Where’s that? Do you think they’re still hidden in the Complex?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know. But I’m going to find them and play them for all the townsfolk to see. That’s why I had to stay last night. I’ve been looking for clues about where they are. That’s why I have to carry on being the Mayor’s assistant until I find them, until I find where the earth splits. Only I’m all out of ideas. I can’t find them. I’m not sure that they’re even in the Complex anymore.’
‘Then, what are you going to do?’ Matthias asked.
‘I’m going to go to the Highlands and bring Iris back. With Flora dead, she can finally return and challenge him without fear of repercussions. She can tell us where she’s hidden the tapes. But I don’t have much time. There’s something else you should know. This might come as a shock but the Imperial Monarch has been dead for a year now.’
‘What?’ I cried. ‘He can’t be – he’s on all the posters, his face is stamped onto the bread.’
‘I know, but trust me, he has been dead a year. All the Parrots, nobles, and the Mayor know. That’s what the feast was about – discussing succession plans. The Metropole doesn’t really need him in person, they only need the idea of him to keep control.’
‘Why hasn’t his son come to the throne?’ asked Matthias.
