The Flood

by Maggie Gee

  Patricia forged onwards. ‘The bottom line is, Emma Dale makes a lot of money for us.’

  Sid, the sales manager, was frowning slightly. ‘Well, the figures for Lover in Clover weren’t brilliant –’

  Patricia interrupted. ‘Thirty thousand hardbacks of Farmyard Matters plus three hundred thousand paperback!’

  Delorice tried again, more determinedly. ‘Look, it’s hard to make sex and cancer boring, but this book does. Have you read it, Patricia?’

  ‘Of course.’ The older woman glared back. Delorice knew at once that she hadn’t.

  ‘Point is,’ Brian said, rushing in to mollify, anxious at the turn the conversation was taking, for if people started asking if publishers read books, the game would be up for all of them – ‘I reckon we could shift half a mill of this one, if it’s as raunchy as Farmyard Matters:

  ‘But,’ Delorice tried, one last time, ‘the public is going to see it’s rubbish.’

  ‘Writers can’t all be Farhad Ahmad,’ hissed Patricia, rearing up like a snake, the white cords in her long neck standing out sharply. (She never could pronounce his name; Farhad Ahmad had been discovered by Delorice, and gone on to win the Iceland Prize, the most prestigious of the book prizes.) ‘Emma Dale is not trying to be Angela Lamb.’ (Another winner of the Iceland Prize.) ‘And we aren’t Third Dimension, Delorice.’

  Now everyone sniggered except Delorice, and Mohammed, who didn’t get the reference. Everyone at Headstone hated Third Dimension. This was why they’d been so glad to woo Delorice away from their younger, hipper, rivals. Delorice’s protégé Farhad Ahmad was beautiful, young, foreign, sexy, and mega-selling, after winning the prize. Headstone had assumed he would come with Delorice, but instead he’d done a massive deal with Dingleberry.

  ‘It’s nothing to do with Farhad or Angela,’ Delorice protested, feeling hot again. ‘I just think, it’s like, a real pity if we print all these copies of something that’s bullshit.’

  A barrage of voices broke out around the table.

  ‘We’d get coverage on the sex-and-cancer angle.’

  ‘I can see it in the Post’s “Good Health” pages.’

  ‘The book clubs are bound to come on board.’

  ‘Patsy Rowan will give a good quote. They’re mates.’

  ‘And Bea Browning will give a quote for anything.’

  ‘Rocco could do the cover. Sort of “Tasteful Tits” –’

  ‘Would the tits be a reference to the breast cancer?’ Delorice interrupted, brutally. Everyone looked politely away. Of course, she had a chip on her shoulder.

  Their target sales were half a million copies.

  Delorice decided to go home early.

  Afterwards she wandered through Victory Square. A crowd straggled over the Monument steps. It was raining, lightly, in little gusts. The centre of the square was submerged in water, but the sun was burning through the clouds. Somewhere, she thought, there would be a rainbow.

  The crowd was carrying banners and placards; there were crackling speeches; someone shouted ‘Amen’. It was that strange new religious cult, she realized, the One Way Brothers, the ‘People of the Book’, who claimed to unite Jews and Christians and Muslims because they all shared the same sacred texts. (She’d heard that the Christians and Muslims in One Way were already worshipping in different places, however. And that not a single Jew had joined. They were doing very well, though, where people were poor.) It was queer that ‘the Book’ should be so honoured – not what she was used to, in publishing.

  She wondered, grimly, what they’d think of Emma Dale. If all those copies of A Breast in Winter were spread out across the square, they would cover it completely. Half a million copies would spill over the side-streets, infect the libraries, infest the bookshops. The city published thousands of books every year, spewing them out then pulping them.

  And yet, she was somewhere on top of this heap, and part of Delorice was still pleased to be there. Another part wondered how on earth she’d done it. It was dream-like, uneasy. It all seemed random.

  The defining moment was her brother’s death. She would never escape it: it had turned her life around. While Winston was alive, he had been the clever one. Delorice could hide and dream in his shadow, read novels during lessons, drift into motherhood. Her gain had been built on that terrible loss.

  Sometimes she saw Winston, walking down the street, slim and rangy, reading a book. Once she had even called out his name; it was another young man, with another book. Chance made those spectres cross her path. And yet she believed her brother was somewhere. His long, dancing limbs, his golden eyes. He would be walking along, talking to himself, quoting Baldwin, discussing, laughing. Winston had always talked to himself. It was part of what made him special, different. And he had high standards; he believed in things. She wished she could embrace his long, wiry body, press her cheek against his rougher one.

  They had never thought they could lose Winston. That he could be murdered by a stupid racist. Chance, blind chance, for despite the rumours she knew that her brother had been no battyman.

  Perhaps everything in life was nothing but chance. At her feet, two pigeon-feathers skimmed across a puddle; wind shook the banners of the crowd across the way.

  It was chance, too, meeting Farhad Ahmad at college, when he hadn’t long arrived in the city. He was two-thirds of the way through writing a novel, but it was already eight hundred pages long. Reading it, she knew at once what to do. The delicious certainty of the editor’s itch. After they became lovers, she cut and rewrote, and the three-hundred page result was snapped up by Third Dimension, who asked her to start a list of young black writers. Then she broke up with Farhad, who was eager to forget her once he got the big prize and the ecstatic reviews.

  And now she was here, and still wondering why. Sometimes she felt dizzy at her lack of experience, the terrifying speed of her ascent. Every morning Delorice felt that fear again in Headstone’s superfast lift with its see-through floor, which made her hover and swoop over nothing. Would she ever believe in anything they published? Sometimes her job seemed like a kind of germ warfare.

  But then there was love, small and real. What she felt for Leah, Davey, her sister – Viola had always been there for her.

  As Delorice dipped down into Victory Metro Station, she looked back for a second across the square. The rain had stopped. The black water glittered. The sun lit up faces, blank and identical, all turned submissively in one direction.

  ‘Look, we have to be prepared for germ warfare,’ Mr Bliss said eagerly, raising his eyebrows, to a roomful of grumpy ministers. They stared at the president, dully, and said nothing. Perhaps he was on speed. He seemed horribly young. Yet his floss of pale curls had begun to recede.

  ‘Is there any evidence they’ve got biologicals?’ someone grunted, at length, from beyond Bliss’s eye-line. Far down the table, he would soon go further.

  ‘Intelligence is preparing a dossier.’ Mr Bliss tried to ignore a deep suppressed titter that broke from the bottom of the room. He was a sensitive man; disbelief stung him. ‘But that’s not the point. We have to be pro-active. We think they’ve got nuclear as well.’ His candid eyes sought those of his colleagues. Why were they looking away from him?

  ‘I’ll brief the press,’ said Anwar Topping, his closest friend, the government’s spokesman. ‘But the public is going to demand protection.’

  ‘Attack,’ said Bliss, ‘is the best form of defence.’ He hoped his voice didn’t sound excited. He sat more erect and straightened his jacket. ‘It’s unpalatable, guys, but we have to face it.’

  There was silence, for a second, in the rich, dark room. Everyone wondered, briefly, how they’d come to this moment.

  ‘But we have attacked them,’ said the same dissenting voice. (Bliss knew who it was; it was Darius Blow. He’d been given a job, which they’d hoped would enlighten him. It hadn’t worked, so he would soon lose it.) ‘We’ve been bombing them for years,’ Darius went on, coarsely. �
�It hasn’t made them any nicer.’

  ‘But now you’re talking something of a different order,’ said Anwar to Bliss, drawing him out, crossing and re-crossing small plump knees. His little eyes were bright, pleased. Something enormous was going to happen.

  ‘We have to be realistic, guys,’ said Bliss, spreading out soft pink hands and smiling. He knew he was right, but he wanted them with him. He frowned, for a change, to be statesman-like. ‘I sense a new mood among our people. There is a historic opportunity here. We have to be big enough to seize it.’

  The dissenters sulked, and slouched in their chairs.

  Jenner Footle, one of the inner circle, came in on a pragmatic note. ‘If the rains continue, we have to do something. The people are restless around the Towers. A common enemy will unite us –’

  ‘Not that that’s the point, of course,’ said Bliss.

  ‘What time-scale are we thinking of?’ prompted Anwar Topping.

  ‘We have to get men and weapons in place. And then there will be national security issues.’

  ‘Mass vaccinations?’ probed Hogben, from Health. ‘There’s nothing very plausible around for anthrax. Or most of the nasties they could throw at us. Do we have any detailed information –’

  ‘Look, guys, what they have is academic,’ said President Bliss, with an engaging grin. ‘We’re not going to give them the chance to use it.’

  ‘March?’ suggested Anwar Topping. ‘What is the thinking in Hesperica?’

  ‘Mr Bare’s very much onside,’ said Mr Bliss. ‘We’re thinking May. Provisionally. But if things worsen, we could go in April.’

  There was a small, collective, exhalation. The thing was spoken; a date had been named. Fear, still tiny, but sharp and cold, skated into the room. The president shivered.

  In Victory Square, the crowd had trebled. The sun was steadying, almost hot. A beautiful girl, very tall and pale, hove gracelessly through the ranks of gawkers. She tugged two little boys by the hand, pulling them through by main force, ignoring their wails and squawks of protest. ‘Come on, Winston. Get a move on, Franklin. Have they prophesied yet?’ she called to Moira. As the crowd yelled and the microphone howled, volleys of banned pigeons took fright and wheeled skywards, their dark wings flaring into fans of bright silk when they hit the buffeting wind and white sunlight.

  The man who was watching from his car across the square anxiously reached for his sunglasses, rubbing a damp finger across dry lips. He made a gun with his fingers, pow-pow-pow, but there were too many of them, too dirty, too free, and the light on their wings was a pain in his forehead, and there wasn’t enough air, with the windows closed, but he was afraid to open them.

  Sanctity, for Bruno, remained indoors; outdoors, life was multiple, uncontrollable; he kept himself pure, while the others went out and did God’s work in the market place. But he found, to his horror, he was sweating in here. He tried to remove from his mind the suspicion that a piece of old food was mouldering somewhere.

  The crowd was doing well. Gathering, breeding. From this distance, they all looked alike, turned towards the placards with their letters of blood. It would do for a start. Bruno nodded, gratified, but somewhere a buzzing scratched at his brain.

  Something disgusting was in his car. Something had hatched, or squeezed through the crack that he always left open in case of suffocation. The bluebottle hung there, low and sleepy, as if the sun had just poked it awake. A fat black body trailing fat black legs that might have dragged through unspeakable fluids, women’s nastiness, excrement, wings that had circled the stinking city, tainted with blood and sour money. Now it was here, corrupting his air.

  Bruno carefully took aim with his newspaper, then trapped the fatness against the window, feeling its juiciness under his thumb. He held it there, trembling, feeling his power, though the moment of joy was lost as he squashed it. He flicked the thing, horrified, out of the car.

  They were all the same, but now there was one less.

  And out in the square, goodness was growing. Calm spread through him as he watched the crowd, more stick figures drawn in to join the others, moving slowly together, unstoppable. It reminded him of something they had once done at school, an experiment with magnets and iron filings. Twenty years later he had understood. Though the other boys elbowed him out of the way, he had glimpsed over their shoulders a great … Becoming. The tiny ants shuddered and shot into line. The will of the One: the One who was All. When the One was with Bruno, he was not alone. He was quiet, and good, and contained great multitudes, swollen with infinite power and love. Bruno picked up the Book, on the seat beside him, and read the future of the world: ‘The first angel blew his trumpet. And there came hail and fire mixed with blood, and this was hurled upon the earth. A third of the earth was burnt, a third of the trees were burnt, and all the green grass withered.’

  Three

  When Shirley picked up the boys from the Towers, she was surprised to find them in their overcoats. ‘We just got back,’ Kilda said, brightly. ‘I thought they needed a bit of air.’

  ‘Brilliant,’ said Shirley. ‘I hope they aren’t tired, though. I thought I would take them to the zoo.’ It was what mothers should do, take children to zoos, mothers who were proper mothers, that is, mothers who were younger than Shirley was, mothers who weren’t struggling to do a degree and dumping their kids with fifteen-year-olds. ‘You like animals, don’t you, boys?’

  ‘I liked the pussy,’ said Winston, thoughtfully.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Shirley. ‘Oh by the way, Kilda, your mother said I should give the money to her. She’s going to pass it straight on, she said.’

  Kilda’s grey beautiful eyes widened, then narrowed, and she whispered something under her breath.

  ‘Have you got their books?’ Shirley was distracted, trying to get all their belongings together.

  ‘Mrs Edwards, Mum won’t give it me.’

  ‘What do you mean? I’m sure she will.’

  ‘She’s always, like, I owe her money. Like, just by breathing I owe her money. She never gives me pocket money, because she never got pocket money, but that was back in the, you know, Ark.’

  ‘Sorry, Kilda. I didn’t know …’

  ‘Kilda lost it,’ Franklin said.

  ‘Lost what, Franklin?’

  ‘She lost my book.’

  ‘I’m sure she didn’t.’

  ‘And my book, too,’ Winston competed.

  ‘I’m sure you didn’t, did you, Kilda?’

  ‘It wasn’t my fault,’ Kilda began.

  ‘Sorry, Kilda, we have to go. I know you’ll get them back again. They are library books, you see. The boys like them.’

  ‘I, you know, left them on the underground,’ said Kilda. ‘Because there was a bomb scare. It wasn’t my fault. You could get them back from the Lost Property, maybe.’

  So it wasn’t Kilda’s job to get them back.

  Sighing, Shirley drove towards the zoo, which was on the hill in the centre of the city. Elroy was cynical about the bomb scares; he thought they came from the government. She liked the zoo, although it was expensive, and closed quite early in February. The boys snored and farted in the back of the car. They had obviously been eating horrible things. Perhaps she should just have taken them home.

  But once she reached the zoo, and had woken the boys, and stopped them crying, and wooed them through the gates, and made them go carefully, for the paths were a mud-slide, the three of them walked into happiness: the top of the hill was alive with late sunlight, the mountain goats leaped on their artificial mountain, the water-birds thronged above the lake, their wings washed with gold as they prepared for sunset, the tigers, usually sleepy, were awake, and the silverback gorilla strolled up to inspect them, a burly, aristocratic grey figure with muscular buttocks and a shiny black naked weight-lifter’s chest, staring opaquely out at the boys from under his massive, stony brow-ridge, playing with something whitish in its wrinkled, delicate fingers.

  ‘Look at the lovely
gorilla,’ Shirley said.

  ‘Lovely grilla,’ Winston nodded, staring. ‘It’s eating its poo. Can I eat poo?’

  ‘You did eat poo, Mum told me,’ said Franklin. ‘You are a baby. You eat poo!’

  They started fighting. Shirley looked away. An elderly couple with a little red-haired girl perhaps a year or two older than the twins were standing not far away by the rails, and they looked at Shirley as if she should stop the violence, but Shirley knew it would only last a moment. She gave them a smile. They were grandparents looking after a child, and she thought of her mother, patient May, who often struggled to the zoo with the boys, though she got fed-up if they hit one another.

  Why did males fight? she wondered. Mr Bliss seemed very keen on war. The older male apes could not be kept together. Her father used to lose his temper at home. But then there was Faith, always shouting at her daughter. And Shirley hadn’t always got on with her mother. At the back of the cage, two female gorillas, smaller, lighter versions of the male, sat companionably picking fleas off one another, gazing at the products on their long ridged nails.

  The little girl watched the twins fight, transfixed. She had wide blue eyes clouded with grey and chestnut hair that suddenly burned red when something caught her attention and she climbed up the fence and into the sunlight. For a moment Shirley thought she looked familiar. Her face was memorable, a broad pale heart, full lips, smiling, a small fierce chin. Yes, she had surely seen her before. ‘There’s a butterfly,’ the girl said, frowning, peering. ‘It thinks it’s summer.’

  ‘Get down, Gerda, please,’ the old woman said. ‘That’s dangerous, you know. Your mummy will worry.’

  The red and brown butterfly had marks like eyes, big sad eyes, on its scalloped wings, either side of its furry body. It crawled on the glass, just above the fence. ‘She won’t,’ said Gerda, not getting down.

  ‘She has a point,’ the man muttered, with a smile to his wife, but to the child he said firmly ‘Now get down for Grandpa. See, there’s a notice: “Stay away from the fence.”’