Maleeka opened the back door of their bungalow to discover that their water butt had vanished. The vegetable patch was still there. The electricity generator and greenhouse, too – just about – but where the butt had been was now thin air. Carefully, she dropped to her knees and crawled to the cliff edge. On the shore, thirty metres below, the big green container poked from a pile of rubble, topped with bits of lawn. It was getting dark. Dirty clouds amassed over an English Channel that was rising quickly, drowning rocks and turning the sandstone blood-red. Tonight’s full moon meant the tide would be extra high. After a week of heavy rain, who knew what else they might lose before the morning? 24
She returned to the kitchen to tell Rizzie. At the news, Rizzie suddenly looked much older than her sixty-seven years. ‘Have we any water bottles left?’
‘I filled one earlier,’ said Maleeka.
‘Then we can have a cuppa, at least.’ Rizzie opened the cupboard above the kettle and stared into it for a while. Finally, she said, ‘Where’s the tea?’
‘I think we finished it.’
Rizzie sighed. ‘Then there’s nothing to be done. Nothing.’
‘You should have said.’
‘It’s always me, ain’t it? I should have said, I should have said. What about you? What should you have said? You always wait till the last moment, right until the point when things run out. Then suddenly you pipe up. You’re a late piper, that’s what you are.’
‘That’s not true.’
‘When I think of all these years you’ve been living here…’
There was a knock at the door.
‘Shit on a stick, this is all we need,’ said Rizzie, hobbling arthritically into the living room. ‘If that’s Brian – and I can’t think who else it could possibly be – then let’s kill him and steal his tea. We’ve sod all to lose.’
* * *
Rizzie’s parents named her Elizabeth, which she hated, but rarely heard it said from their lips. Her mum was an addict who bed-hopped through the back streets of Brighton, while dad was nothing more than a series of letters sent from oil rigs where he worked before he started a new family somewhere in Scotland. She was brought up in Hastings by 25Granny Stamford, or Peg as she insisted on being called. Peg was a fiercely funny armchair raconteur surrounded by books on almost every subject, from mechanical engineering and black magic to medieval poetry and archaeology. She told Rizzie that thirteen thousand years ago, long before the pyramids, there was a matriarchal moon-worshipping civilisation with an intricate knowledge of the stars, electricity and engineering. It thrived until a comet hit the Earth, melting the North American ice sheet and causing a great flood that destroyed almost every trace of that civilisation. Men had since thrived on our amnesia.
Peg’s feminist pseudohistories pleased Rizzie as a goth teenager in the late eighties, skinning up for the skinny lads beneath the pier, which is how she earned her nickname. As soon as she was able, she left for London to seek emancipation. By 1993 she lived in a Leyton squat, protesting the M11 link road, a monstrous tarmac river spilling through the middle of an East London community, demolishing everything in its path. Claremont Road was the last bastion of defence, a Victorian street blocking the capitalist highway. They offered tenants cash incentives for abandoning their properties. Then they sent in bailiffs, riot cops and dogs to force out the rest. She lived for months under siege, behind boarded doors, sun slanting through the gaps, listening to protestors and police bark at each other through megaphones. The pigs won, of course, as they always did. The walls torn away even as they huddled within. Houses pulled down, the new road built, and cars whizzing through the ghost of a community as if nothing had happened.
Things were never the same after that. Rizzie endured a succession of clerical office jobs that paid for enough cider at 26the weekend to stay hungover from Monday to Friday, when she could do it all over again. A decade passed like this before she returned to Hastings, where she tried to avoid her youthful haunts and bad-penny lovers who turned up on her doorstep. Fortunately, her dad died just after her thirty-sixth birthday and left her nineteen grand in his will. Guilt money, she presumed. It was enough to get a bungalow in Fairlight a few streets back from the cliff edge, where she could see the sea from the garden if she stood on a bucket and peered through a gap in the houses on Sea Road. On the first day, a stray cat wandered into the house and curled up on the rug. In that instant, Rizzie knew she would never call another place home.
That was almost thirty years and god knows how many cats ago. Rizzie was now the age Granny Stamford was when she died. Sea Road had since dropped into the sea, leaving her bungalow with a front row seat. She could open the door and look out over the English Channel with its storm clouds and container ships, and see the helicopters buzz to Dungeness or industrial rescue vessels pump showers of rock onto the shingle around the troubled power station. Some days, hot sun beat on her greenhouse full of organic vegetables and marijuana plants. But more often, monsoon rains nourished her potatoes and leeks. On balmy evenings she sat with her cats, listening to the hum of the generator, blowing smoke rings and drinking tea, a pleasure now lost because half her garden was at the bottom of the cliff along with a week’s worth of collected rain water, and the bloody Syrian had forgotten to get teabags.
To make things worse, here was Brian on the doorstep. Busybody twat-in-a-mac Brian with a bundle of papers in 27his hands. Behind him the first dots of rain fell on cracked pavements broken by buddleia and thistle. He didn’t wait for Rizzie’s invitation and shuffled into the living room where Maleeka was lighting candles. Rizzie was certain that Maleeka was the sole reason he remained in Fairlight. The rest of the village had taken the compensation money and run – ‘managed retreat’, the government called it. Bloody sell-outs. Rizzie believed it was immoral to take money for abandoning the home she loved. She’d been through this before in Leyton in ’94. They’d said she was a fool, but if you don’t live by your principles, you might as well throw yourself into the ocean anyway.
‘I brought something for ya to look at.’ Brian thudded the papers on the coffee table, frightening a cat from under it. ‘I know you ladies have something against the internet… and TVs… and phones… so I took the liberty…’
‘Ha! That’s bang on,’ snapped Rizzie, closing the door. ‘Liberties, Brian. We all got ’em, but some people want to take ’em from us. Ain’t that right, Leeka?’
‘Very good,’ said Brian. ‘Thing is, see, Maleeka, I wanted to show you the latest predictions. These are fresh from the government website… coastal management 2037… moving forward to 2047.’ He held up a piece of paper with map of Fairlight on it. ‘We are standing, right now, all of us, above what is going to be a bay in less than a year… a bay, do you hear? The cliff won’t hold. You can’t stop the water.’
‘Why do you assume I think water can be stopped?’ said Maleeka. ‘You think I don’t know about water?’
‘Well, y’know…’ Brian blushed and looked down at his feet. ‘I’m sorry, Maleeka.’ 28
Maleeka’s two children floating face down in the Aegean beside an upturned boat. That’s what all three of them saw that moment, as hard rain began to fall, hammering the roof. Rizzie had found Maleeka on the streets of Hastings a year after she made it to Britain from Syria, shivering with cold. She gave her sanctuary in Fairlight where she taught her to tend the vegetable garden, feed chickens, fix the generator, swear like a trooper, and live a life off-grid. No governments, no pesticides, no fluoride, no internet, no television, and no need for men. They got everything they could want from a marriage – all the collaboration, company and bickering – without the sex and physical combat. This was what made Brian so irritating, lingering in their living room with his dyed comb-over and meaty odour.
‘I want to help,’ he said, reaching for Maleeka’s hand. She didn’t take it. ‘You don’t understand the danger. Come to my place, stay a while and we’ll make a plan.’ He turned to Rizzie, his smile crooked. ‘Of course, I – I – I mean the both of you.’
‘We have five cats,’ said Rizzie. ‘They’ll tell us when we need to move out. They can sense danger, cats. Famous for it.’
‘When you see what I printed out, you’ll change your tune. Just give me a chance.’ Brian pointed to the hallway. ‘But first can I use yer loo?’ He shambled down the hall and shut the toilet door with a soft click.
‘What if he’s right, Rizzie?’ whispered Maleeka.
‘Don’t start.’
‘Maybe it’s inevitable.’
‘We got years left, years I tell ya. They’re all scaremongers.’
‘But when it comes…’
‘If it comes.’ 29
‘Sorry, Rizzie, but I believe that what’s happening is the will of—’
‘Don’t say it, Leeka. Don’t invoke his name. He who does not exist.’
Maleeka didn’t know much about what was happening to the ice caps and the weather but she had never lost her faith, despite all she had suffered. It was every good Muslim’s duty to nurture the earth, and she had done so to the best of her ability. But perhaps the time had come to leave their garden. Long ago, the Arabian Peninsula had been a verdant meadowland. It was narrated in a hadith that the Messenger of Allah declared ‘the Hour will not begin until the land of the Arabs once again becomes meadows and rivers’. Now the rains were returning like the prophesy said. England’s suffering was not her homeland’s. It might be that this was the will of Allah. Perhaps the return of the meadows would bring peace to the Middle East and she could return home from exile, taking Rizzie with her.
‘You’re as bad as those wizards,’ said Rizzie, settling into her armchair, kicking Brian’s papers onto the floor so she could rest her feet on the table.
‘This is different.’
‘No it ain’t, you all think something better’s coming and you wanna cheer it on, waving your little flags.’
Maleeka remembered the wizards well enough. Not long after Sea Road collapsed and the government announced the coastal roll-back, men in black robes and tall black hats began to appear on the shore. Sharing a joint in their deck chairs at the edge of the garden, Maleeka and Rizzie watched in amusement as the men arranged coloured stones in circles and danced around fires, flicking water from buckets. A few 30weeks later a different group appeared, this time men in white robes and white hats. They set up further along the shore, using a similar combination of fire, water and stone. Every so often, a white-robed man in a pointed hat went to the water’s edge and flung forward his arms as if to hurl them at the horizon. At this, a member of the black-robed group went over to remonstrate, jabbing a finger angrily at the man in the white pointed hat. The man in the white pointed hat jabbed back. At which point the black-hatted man knocked the white-hatted man’s hat right off. A scuffle broke out, punches flying, men chasing each other up and down the foreshore, pulling each other’s cowls over their heads and throwing stones. It seemed to go on for hours. The next afternoon, a group of black-robed men knocked at the door and explained that they were from an organisation called the OTO – the Ordo Templi Orientis.
‘I know very well who you lot are,’ Rizzie said. ‘Crowley’s black magic lot. My grandmother met your most famous member over in Hastings almost a century ago. He was a right cunt, apparently.’
‘My apologies,’ said a man with a black eye and a torn black hat under his arm. ‘But Aleister Crowley was the gatekeeper of the apocalypse and finally the Aeon of Horus is upon us. Our work is urgent. I wonder if we might use your garden for a ceremony, free from disturbance by… certain undesirables.’
Rizzie’s heart swelled with Granny Stamford’s spirit. She couldn’t stop herself. She just let fly.
‘What is it about you men and the apocalypse? Does it get you hard or something? Hell’s bloody bells! There is no apocalypse, there’s only things growing and things dying and 31things growing again. It’s how it was before us and how it’ll be after we’re gone. If you ever stopped to smell the fucking flowers, you’d understand. Now jog on.’ She slammed the door.
After a few months, the beach became too dangerous for ceremonies, and the wizards went elsewhere. The last of Fairlight’s residents packed their bags and left too. Nobody had been to their door in years. Except for Brian, of course. There was always Brian.
‘What the hell is he doing in there anyway?’ said Rizzie staring angrily towards the toilet. ‘He’s been an age.’
They sat for a while, listening to the cacophony of rain and wind. Candle flames guttered as waves crashed against the cliff. A rumble of thunder, like nothing they’d ever heard before, shook the house, smashed the glasses in their cupboards and sent trinkets flying from shelves. The women jumped from their chairs in fright. What a racket! Their frantic cats paced the room, mewing loudly. Yet still no Brian.
Tentatively, Maleeka went into the hall and called out, ‘Brian? Are you alright in there, Brian? …Brian?’
No reply.
‘Call him “lover” or “darling”,’ said Rizzie, ‘that’ll do it. He’ll come leaping out. You watch. Leaping out like the pranny he is.’
Maleeka giggled. ‘Brian, darling!’
Another rumble of thunder.
‘Oh for pity’s sake.’ Rizzie hobbled past Maleeka and shook the handle, but the door was locked. She rapped on the wood. ‘Open up, Brian! Open up, you swine!’
‘There must be something wrong,’ said Maleeka. ‘I’ll give it a kick.’
‘You what?’ 32
‘Like this.’ Maleeka raised a foot and slammed it hard into the door. It swung open to reveal a universe in collapse. A mass of sulphurous cloud swirled towards the moon in a roar of noise, as if the world was being sucked through a vent in space. The English Channel was a seething tumult, the waves an infinity of shark fins racing inland. With a cry, they held onto each other tight, bracing themselves in the doorway to oblivion. At their feet was a sheer drop to a sea fizzing with acid rain. The entire back wall and floor of the toilet were gone. Only the side walls remained, jutting out over the cliff. The toilet roll, still in its holder, was unspooled all the way down, a ribbon of white paper dangling into the blackness like the world’s worst bungee cord. Brian was about to wipe when the floor gave way, and held on to the paper until the very end. Below them, water exploded against rock. Chunks of wood and plaster spun in phosphorescent foam. But no sign of Brian. He was gone.
‘Well, that’s the end of that,’ muttered Rizzie. She felt nothing but a hole where her heart had been.
‘Brian!’ Maleeka cried into the rain. ‘Brian, I’m sorry!’ Twenty years fell away and an ocean of pain rushed in. ‘My children, my children, my children…’
For a moment, they stared into the sea which had taken their generator, their greenhouse, their toilet, their neighbour, and turned them to flotsam. Then they fled to the living room, where their terrified cats scratched at the porch door. They grabbed their coats. There was no need for keys. Not any more. It was time to go. Rizzie knew that now. You can ignore the prophets, the politicians and all the Brians. But when nature calls, everyone must run.