by Maggie Gee
‘I try to remember if Davey was like that,’ Lottie said. ‘It was years ago, of course. But I think he wasn’t. He always seemed quite grown up. I think he used to tell me off about things.’
‘Boys are different,’ said Harold, absently. ‘I don’t really know any, but I was one once. There weren’t any teenagers then, of course. Now they’re a tribe, especially the girls.’
‘Oh God,’ said Lottie, ‘there aren’t any trains.’
The track was flooded between Central and Gardens.
They decided to drive. The route was circuitous, bringing them round to the Bridge of Flowers through parts of the city they didn’t know. The water did not come above their axles, and Lottie drove as fast as she could; there wasn’t much traffic, considering. She had never been a patient driver, and she wanted to get there while the sun lasted. More rain was forecast for later that day.
The diversion led through a council estate. In the distance, though, they caught a glimpse of the river; it was one of the parts of the city where rich and poor lived packed together. Lottie came slightly too fast round a corner and found herself braking furiously, surrounded by a mob of yelling people, frightened faces, placards, banners, waving hands, black open mouths, all of them spattered with the spray of muddy water that Lottie’s speeding tyres had thrown up. Their shouts were loud enough to pierce the car windows.
‘Stop,’ said Harold.
‘Are you kidding?’ asked Lottie, thrusting the bonnet of the car forwards in a series of furious, powerful jerks. Now there was someone on the bonnet. A large pale face briefly stared through the window, tipped sideways, clutching at the glass with big hands, but Lottie, dauntless, accelerated. The figure clung on briefly, then slid to the ground; the voices grew louder and then died away as Lottie roared, aqua-planing, down to the bridge.
‘For God’s sake, Lottie, you can’t do that.’
‘Shut up, Harold. If I’d stopped, they’d have killed me. They were just a rabble. A mob of thieves.’ Lottie was still driving much too fast, but a glance at her white face told him she’d been frightened.
‘But it was a girl. Maybe younger than Lola.’
‘Fuck off, Harold, or I’ll drive into the river.’
Outside the window, the water extended, gleaming metal, over half the landscape. The bridge just skimmed the top of the flood. Near the edges of the new, powerful river were shallow-looking houses, a row of roofs, only their top storeys clearing the water, the windows like eyes above a shining scarf that had suddenly engulfed their past. Most of them must have been abandoned, Harold thought. And this wasn’t the Towers, where things always went wrong, where people expected things to break down. The Bridge of Flowers was a showpiece area. Rich people lived here, especially politicians, because fast river launches could whip them down to Government Palace, bypassing the subway and the morning traffic.
So now even politicians couldn’t protect themselves.
‘It was some kind of religious group, in point of fact,’ Harold resumed, still disapproving. Lottie was a force of nature, but sometimes you had to stand up to nature. ‘What if you’ve hurt her, Lottie, honestly?’
‘Why aren’t you on my side, Harold? It wasn’t my fault. They were all over the road. I wasn’t to know they were religious. I don’t expect they were. I expect they were rioters. They would have taken everything we had.’
‘You splashed them,’ he said. ‘They got angry. They were carrying placards about the Last Days. I think they must have been that One Way lot who have been all over the papers recently. All over the walls as well. Copies of their posters seem to be everywhere.’
Lottie saw a parking space on slightly higher ground. She screeched to a halt and sat there for a moment clutching the wheel before she relaxed. There was a film of sweat on her small, neat features. That girl on the bonnet had reminded her of someone.
‘Harold. Cuddle me. I’m upset. I should have gone to college. This is meant to be fun. It was you who suggested we came here in the first place.’
Harold had a choice; yield, or suffer. Were there any choices, really, in life? He put his arm around her. After all, he loved her. There was only one Lottie. Yielding, he suffered.
The Gardens, thought Harold, would cheer them up. They had hills, and temples, and landscaped walks which at this time of year should be lighting up with colour. But at the gates, where they showed their card, the uniformed man said, ‘You’ll be needing a boat.’ Both of them laughed, automatically. For months all the jokes had been about flooding.
‘We do have boats,’ the man repeated, unsmiling. ‘Just wait where it’s dry. They’ll be along in a minute. Here are some headphones. We’re asking our visitors to listen to the commentary.’
He gave them leaflets headed ‘PLEASE GIVE GENEROUSLY’. Harold read it; Lottie ignored it (it was dreadful the way people picked on the rich, always expecting her to give money, even if she’d been burgled, or had a bad day. They couldn’t have a clue what Lola cost her. Or Harold. He was the costliest of all, if you added on what he wasn’t earning, what she might once have reasonably expected him to earn. Or Faith, who cost thousands of dollars per year).
Lottie suddenly remembered the big white face of the girl who had fallen off the bonnet of her car. Kilda, Faith’s daughter. That was who she looked like. But of course it couldn’t possibly be her.
A group of people were waiting for the boat, standing in a row whose straightness was explained when Harold and Lottie waded across and found they were all standing on a low brick wall. The two newcomers inspected them, subdued and nervous. Things seemed to have gone further than they’d realized.
Later, as they were rowed through the drowned kingdom, they saw the beauty and the havoc. The river stretched out like a golden flood-plain. Only a scattering of birds traced lines on its surface. Where a great throng of specimen oaks once stood, every one of them different, from all over the world – Turko, Malai, Anaturia – the water now shone, inscrutable. Not a twig, not an acorn, waved above. A magpie flared across the bronze. ‘One for sorrow,’ said a small man with glasses, winking at Lottie in a way she disliked. The water was dazzling, but desolate.
While they stared at nothingness, two magnificent swans came powering across and led them on. It was like following a cloud, Lottie thought; a full-blown, snow-white, cumulus of feathers. Above the water, above the boat, some wisps of real cloud were thickening, greying, but rain shouldn’t come till the afternoon.
She looked to her left, and life came back. A hill of daffodils rose out of the dark waters, brilliant, saturated with sun, joyfully yellow, glorious. On top was the white shape of the small temple of remembrance where Lottie and Harold once had lunch, over a year ago when the Gardens were green. Names of the gardeners who had died in the wars were engraved in gilt inside the portico; she remembered Harold reading some aloud.
‘Timeless, isn’t it?’ asked the man with glasses who, like Lottie, wasn’t listening to the audio commentary. Lottie didn’t want to study on her day out, and in any case, she would look awful in earphones. The little man kept staring at her. He was thin, quite old, not a suitable admirer, and didn’t seem to realize that she was with Harold. ‘Sort of keeping all the memories safe,’ he continued. ‘My son’s name’s written there, you know. He died in Germania. My son George. Did a year here as a trainee gardener, and I’m happy to say they honoured his memory. If only he’d stayed, but he had to join the army … My name’s Henry. How do you do?’
He’s trying to make me unhappy, thought Lottie, nodding repressively, and pointedly not extending her hand to shake his thin veined one. As if I hadn’t got enough on my plate. (She couldn’t bear to think of Davey dying in a war, but the government were talking about conscription. Just after he had met this nice girl, when she’d started to think about grandchildren …) Besides, the old creep was being smug about the temple. ‘I’m afraid it was full of graffiti last year,’ she said, rudely, turning up her coat collar. ‘And if the floods g
et worse, it could be swept away. Nothing’s safe. Not me, not you.’
That ‘you’ sounded distinctly personal. Henry looked down at his boots, offended.
For some reason, Lottie’s thoughts turned to college and her essay on conservation. The Institute was on high ground, like the zoo. But what if the waters kept coming? What if they overwhelmed the flood defences, so that instead of being diverted to outlying regions, as at present, the waters swept into the centre? What if the flood breached the library?
Lottie had the neophyte’s reverence for books (it didn’t extend to her husband’s, of course, because it wasn’t an object with a jacket, just a sprouting, burgeoning forest of paper). She had actually taken some home, and read them. She was careful not to spill her wine on the pages, or else wiped it off almost straightaway. Harold teased her, of course, because he’d always been a reader. She looked at his face now, grave and absorbed, listening to his headphones as they swept along, with some black and white coots bobbing beside them, their feet a frantic blur of orange on the dark as they tried to keep up with the big wooden boat.
The bespectacled man chucked a white bread sandwich. ‘No feeding, sir,’ said the oarsman sharply. ‘Your commentary will help you with the regulations.’
But what if the whole Institute were flooded? There would surely have to be a plan to save things. Rare things, precious things, her tutor would know. Paul had once been a head teacher, so he must be practical. If he could deal with kids like Lola, he’d certainly know about disaster management. Lottie had just handed in her first two assignments. It would be a real tragedy if those got wet.
Harold had taken off his headphones. ‘Look,’ he said, smiling, touching her knee. ‘Look over there. Isn’t that fantastic?’
Though clouds had covered half of the sky already, creeping back, thickening, towards the sun, it still blazed down on a stand of black monkey-puzzle trees which stuck up proudly, cartoon-like, surreal, their broad up-curved fingers as simplified as cactus, and then she saw what Harold was pointing at, for the half-drowned trees seemed to bend and shift, every sturdy black branch was swelling and shrinking, and then she realized they were covered with crows, a crawling black congregation of crows, hopping over each other, jostling, cawing, a deafening chorus of harsh raw sound. Some of them flew up like a storm of black ash and hovered, squawking, above the boat. They looked large, and old. They had heads like hammers.
‘Scary,’ she said, shivering. ‘I think I need a coffee, Harold.’
But the cafés were closed, submerged, gone. A white painted sign was afloat on its back; ‘Open For Lunch’, it told the sky. ‘Lunch’ had been crossed out and replaced by ‘Tea’. As Lottie read it out, and the passengers laughed, a gun-shot sounded, and the sun went in.
‘Er, was that a shot?’ Harold asked their oarsman.
‘Sounded like it.’ His face was expressionless.
‘Are they shooting at us?’ A big red-faced woman panicked. ‘Is it rioters?’
‘I doubt it, madam.’ He decided to explain, as the muttering spread the length of the boat. ‘It’s the birds, you see. Sitting ducks, so to speak. There are more of them than usual because of all the water. So a small minority of troublemakers come and shoot stuff for their dinners. We simply haven’t got the manpower to catch them.’
There was another long volley, then the silence returned, broken by the oars and a crescendo of bird-calls as startled water-birds fled up into the sky. Lottie realized how diminished the hum of traffic was, its volume a fraction of the usual low roar, as if the Gardens had sailed out into the country, as if the present, and the city, was dissolving, and then it hit her what else was gone. The Bridge of Flowers was on the flight path of the City Airport, and when she and Harold used to come here regularly, when Lola was little, and they brought picnics, every ten minutes or so a plane would roar over like a huge stiff bird coming in to land, and the visiting families would point and crane upwards. Today, however, the planes had vanished. She remembered, then, reading in the papers, a week or so ago, in disbelief, that soon civilian planes might be grounded, if the staff could no longer clear water from the runways.
It had happened, then, the unbelievable thing. No more planes coming into the city. The skies had gone back to clouds and birds. It didn’t feel good, though; it didn’t feel comfortable.
Then Lottie thought something even more disquieting. Perhaps no planes were leaving the city. Perhaps they were trapped, but that was impossible. Lottie would never let herself be trapped.
And then she thought: there’d be helicopters. She imagined her little family, jammed in.
Her foot sneaked across the bottom of the boat and found Harold’s Wellington boot, and pressed against it, and she wished it were leather, not cold rubber, she wanted the friendly warmth of his body. The wood underneath them felt thin and fragile, the ground swayed horribly from side to side, and below the boat there might be fathoms of black water.
Harold was nudging her, frowning slightly. ‘Have you got a headache, darling?’ he asked. ‘Would you like a mint, my sweet?’
She took it, gratefully, and smiled at him, and the world came back, in that moment of love. Of course the planes would soon be flying again. The army would certainly be working on the runways. The government was hopeless, but this was so basic. Lottie wished, as so often, that she was in charge; she had a brief flash of thousands of buckets, satisfyingly shiny, capacious buckets, with workers she could knock into shape. There was no excuse, at present, for any unemployment. These bracing thoughts made her happy again.
A little further on, an island of green was salted with pale wood anemones. The boat paused while they rested their eyes on the kindness of detail after so much blankness. Moles had survived, they had left black earth-works; primroses starred their wrinkled leaves. There were cream narcissi with ruched red centres, satiny tulips, gold and blue irises curled like delicate tips of tongues. The long grass whispered, hope, beauty.
They had swept around in a great wide arc and were returning, now, down the opposite wall of the Gardens, the side that was highest and furthest from the river, where the museum was, and the laboratories, the botanical gallery, the glass-houses. The buildings still stood square and grey though the water was lapping at their feet. Some of them were over two hundred years old, facing up stoically to the future.
‘Have you got room there to store threatened species?’ a studious-looking young woman asked, rolling up one brown plait as she spoke.
‘Should have,’ the grey-haired oarsman answered. ‘Though the politicians want to get their hands on it,’ he added, in a grumpy undertone that only Harold, who was squashed up against him, managed to make out, bending closer. Harold was about to question him when the sun made one last dying effort, sending long rays across the water.
Suddenly something spun into view like a red-gold Catherine wheel of fur, weaving, unweaving, three metres wide, hurling itself down the lawns near the buildings, flaring scarlet into the shallows which sent up a fountain of whirling spray, then spiralling on towards the boat, entirely puzzling, fluid, gorgeous, drawing the sun into itself, a careening planet of liquid copper, a flowing, plaited ring of red silk – and then suddenly broke into a family of foxes, who barked frantically for a second at the boat and then swam singly back towards the banks, where they ran dark and drenched up the green towards the buildings.
As they disappeared, the bright world turned brown, and in another second it began to rain. The little old man started talking again. ‘I’ve got a daughter, you know,’ he said. ‘A daughter, and a granddaughter.’
‘Miss,’ said Gerda, although she had been told many times not to call the teacher Miss. All the girls called their teacher Miss. ‘Why does it have to be wet play again? This morning it was fine, and we played outside.’
‘I can’t stop the rain,’ said Rhuksana Habib. She was only listening with half an ear. She was thinking about her sister-in-law, her husband Mohammed’s beloved Jamila, who
se city Mr Bliss was attacking. Last week her water had been cut off. It was back on now, but her tree had suffered, which Jamila usually watered every day, the desert rose that grew in her courtyard: the first pink flowers had fallen off, leaving it ‘grey as an elephant’. ‘I hope it’s alive,’ she had written. ‘If only we could have some of your rain.’ Jamila wrote to them every week, and they looked forward passionately to her letters, though recent ones had been harrowing.
‘Can’t anyone in the world stop the rain?’ asked Gerda.
‘Don’t worry about the rain,’ said Rhuksana.
It wasn’t good enough, she knew. All the children were worried; so were their parents; everyone in the city was worried. Some schools were shut because buildings were flooded. All over the city, houses felt smaller, mothers were more desperate, more children got slapped, because the rain was closing schools.
Her husband, Mohammed, was worried too, because the floods threatened Headstone House, the publishing conglomerate where he worked. It was touching that he should care so much, when the country where both of them had been born, the country where many of their family still lived, was being reduced to rubble by bombing. But then, Mohammed had always loved learning.
‘God can stop the rain,’ Rhuksana tried, tentative. She could never remember which children were Christians.
‘Well can he do it now then?’ asked Gerda. ‘I don’t want to be the leader again.’
Wet play was a problem for the teachers, because the children stayed in the class-room. The teachers missed the break they usually got while the children roared around the playground outside. Most of them delegated power, for wet play. This resulted in various levels of mayhem. Gerda, being a precocious reader, and considered old for her age, was often left in charge of the reading corner.
