The summer saved us in the end. The warm, fetid water. They wrapped us in those silver blankets when they had pulled us to the barge, but they were quite unnecessary in that punishing heat. They sprayed us down with disinfectant and there was time to wonder, as the barge passed beneath the bridge, if they would afford the same courtesy to the ones being bruised and broken above us.
Sarah was waiting on the jetty. She almost crushed her daughter in her arms, burying her face into the crinkled silver.
I saw her, Mummy, she said.
Please, love, please.
She’s down there and she doesn’t want us to go.
Dear Jesus.
It’s OK, I told her, it’s OK.
No it’s not OK, she said. It will be OK when we get out of here.
An ambulance took us home, one more siren to add to the general wail.
You two have to go, I whispered. Let me follow on later.
Why? she asked.
And she said nothing, so I assumed she did.
And when the taxi came to take them off it was night again, and raining, one of those tropical summer downpours. I used that silver heat blanket as a kind of covering tent when I carried their bags out to the car. Sarah lifted Jenny to my face to give me a goodbye kiss and she asked for it seemed the hundredth time why I couldn’t come. Because he has to settle things up, her mother told her, he has to pack the rest of our belongings.
The rain was coursing through the porch roof in continuous drips and she raised her face to it to say goodbye to all of her non-existent friends. And to one in particular that she assumed was crying.
She doesn’t want us to go, she told her mother, and Sarah replied that the friend had me to keep company with.
What do you mean, Jenny asked, isn’t he coming soon?
Yes, but not now.
Why not now? she asked again, and Sarah had to lift her, almost drag her to the car, saying, because he’s tainted, that’s why, because he’s haunted.
It was an odd word, I thought, watching the car vanish into that silvery downpour. It was they who were like ghosts, slipping quietly into another world. I was stuck here, in the real world, with the rain falling and the sun coming up tomorrow in that house through which the water coursed now, like a miniature river. The imagination was my element and I would live in it now, until they were safe and well out of this slippery morass. But I stood there for a long time under the dripping porch and watched the laurel and linden trees create their own umbrella’d waterfalls. The road outside turned into a small river and whatever cars made their way down it threw up solid walls of spray. Then even the cars stopped and there was just the continuing rain.
After an hour or so I walked inside, where the water was covering the carpet. I could have closed every door but I didn’t, I couldn’t be bothered, because part of me welcomed this biblical flood. I turned on the television that had been hidden all this time, tucked beside the fridge, and sat on a wooden chair and propped my feet against the kitchen table. The news flickered away there, mutely, and from what I could gather the riots had flared up spontaneously, savagely, and were on the cusp of general anarchy when the rains took over. A revolution cannot compete with a downpour. On the news station anyway, as the handheld footage of youths in hoods and balaclavas being beaten by black truncheons gradually gave way to flooded vistas, the river spilling its banks, poplar trees looming like pencils out of mirrored fields, cars turning sideways as the floods engulfed them.
They were well out of it, I thought again and began to wonder about the dimensions an aeroplane occupies, how it collapses space and time and makes nonsense of the weather. They would be sitting now, one head resting on the other’s shoulder, in a turbulent tube at thirty thousand feet. How real could that be? I wondered, yet real it absolutely was, as real as the mice struggling through the water beneath me, their underground tunnels flooded, their homes a watery grave. Were they mice, even? They could have been voles, if voles ever made their homes beneath the floorboards. And I must have sloshed across the kitchen floor to grab the one remaining whisky bottle, because it sat beside me on the table now, together with a glass, no ice. And I wondered how those chimney turrets were doing in the downpour; would the Tyrolean roof survive? it seemed designed to withstand storms of snow, not rain. And after a while the footage of the floods exhausted even the television screen, because it reduced itself to a small white dot, and then a half-grey, flickering haze.
I walked into the bedroom and found it had fared better than the kitchen and the hallway. The French windows were closed and all I could see through them was the haze caused by the never-ending rain. And I fell asleep to the sound of it and it must have been comforting enough, because the sleep was comparatively dreamless.
I spent four or five days in that house. It would have been impossible to leave, even if I’d wanted to. When the electricity failed, I played the Casals CDs on Jenny’s coloured little boombox. So I had a cello to go with the sound of falling water. And when the dampened batteries on that gave out, I imagined the sound. I imagined a cello I could crawl into; it sat in the hallway like an enormous, malignant cat. The S-shaped curve beneath the strings allowed me in and I curled up there, on the sofa, and the strings vibrated with the magnificent sound, but there was too much vibrato, too much emotion in the playing. There was a coloured canvas shoe to distract me from it, and the instep of the foot beneath it and the whisper of released clothing and the breath of the refrigerated tray with the stiff body on it and the frozen eyelashes and the birthmark on the underside of the knee, like an unde, a dove, that flew away across the biblical flood.
I imagined the dove flying high above the city, the city sinking into the river until the river became a lake, and the lake and the sky above became one. And all that was left were those cello suites, a blur of blue, a blur of grey and a thin indeterminate line in between. And the rains must have stopped then, because I was in the kitchen, eating the peas from a once-frozen bag, when I heard a sound behind me. The sound of feet, wading through the stilled pond beneath the porch.
This is a mess, she said.
I turned, and saw that it was Gertrude, dressed in a light rain mac and a pair of wellington boots. She was perfectly reflected in the water beneath her.
I would say so, I replied.
You live in a pond. No one can live in a pond.
Doesn’t the whole city now? Live in a pond of sorts?
Most of us have ways of coping. Sandbags, rescue services, water pumps. But you, Jonathan, have become . . . how do you say . . . a spermatozoa . . .
In the amniotic fluid of something or other.
Doesn’t matter, Jo-na-than. You are not a newt or a water creature. You are a detective, of sorts.
I was, indeed I was.
You want your life back?
I looked at her and smiled, and shrugged. She looked absurd, in that rain mac and those wellington boots. She needed another context. Not this watery one.
I had a thought, she said. You stopped on that bridge to talk to her.
Is the bridge still there?
Of course the bridge is still there. Whole city is still there. It will recover.
That’s good.
But my point is, Jonathan, anyone else could have done the same.
She took her hand out of her pocket, and I saw the pearls. The black ones. She stood by the submerged kitchen lintel and held them out so they were reflected in the kitchen floor.
You could pass her on, she said.
To whom? I asked.
To another. This attachment. Could replicate itself. Is – how you say it? – a pathology anyway . . . that you must be rid of . . .
And how would I achieve that?
If you know someone who deserves it. You effect some introduction. In the old-fashioned way.