Moira knelt, by her dog, who twitched, and licked her, under the window of her attic room at the top of the student building she had moved to since she had been expelled by the City Institute. The hypocrites had told her they were not sacking her; they pretended they wanted her to get better, though Moira had never felt better or clearer. The pain of rejection had nearly killed her, but she knew it was all part of what was written; she must be cast out for her Master’s sake. She corrected herself – she was going astray; Father Bruno was not her Master, but he was so strong, so masterful.
Moira had resigned from the wicked Institute, to show her colleagues they could not hurt her, or weaken her spirit, but they were cunning, and refused to accept it, saying they felt she needed time to consider. Now Moira had outwitted them; they kept paying money into her account, their dirty payments sneaking in like lizards, flickering up under her skirts like snakes, but she took the reptiles by their throats, turned them away from her, cast them out, gave all the money to the One Way Mission.
Now she was here. Now she was safe; she had humbled herself, she had left her house with its sinful weight of books and papers, its television, its tormenting music, Debussy and Ravel who seduced and sorcered, tempting her to think that life should be beautiful, tempting her to be broken-hearted. Now she was alone, unaccommodated, kneeling on the boards beside Fool, her dog, in the cold, in the dark, preparing for light, though part of her hoped day would never break, for the time drew nearer when God would dissolve the painful borders between day and night, when God would ease those exhausting crossings; the time drew near, and Moira was ready.
This morning, for once, the house was quiet. The glass of the window, which whispered and chattered, had become silent now the rain had stopped. It was the third morning of perfect silence. She prayed, humbly, that now she might hear him, Jesus, the still small voice of calm, gentling the terror of her racing heart. Stroking the dog’s silk neck, she listened; then she pressed herself further down on the floor-boards, rasping her face against the hurtful grain; the Labrador cross watched her, trembling; Moira waited, trustful, but no voice came. She found she was shouting: ‘Master, come! Come, Master! Your servant is ready!’; she prayed for herself in the singular, for the others were surely not humble enough, they preened themselves, they boasted, like Kilda, they drew attention to their petty triumphs.
‘Come, Master! Master, come!’ Moira screamed, and beat her hands upon the floor-boards. Dark, so dark, and no sign of dawn. Hungry, helpless, she began to moan and thrust her body against the harsh planks, licking up dust, gnawing at splinters, catching the edge of her tooth on a nail, pressing her tongue on the sour stub of metal, knowing this suffering came from God, lifting it up to him with sore, scraped hands …
Whining, crying, Fool ran to the door, and then Moira’s ears were blessed with thunder, a great roaring, a great shouting, and ‘Yes, Lord, yes,’ Moira called once more before the red dog’s whimpers destroyed her epiphany, keening and quivering as he pawed at the handle, and she realized someone human was out there.
‘Will you shut the fuck up?’ a male voice demanded.
She was still lying there, twitching and whispering, her fingers bloodied, as the sun came up, prostrate, torn between hell and heaven.
The sun came up; beauty, beauty.
‘The Gala,’ Davey heard, as he tuned his car radio, catching it, missing it, ‘the Gala … expectations … critics …’
Davey was cruising back into the watery city as the sun’s first rays hit the tops of the Towers, having spent the night at the Observatory. He registered another cloudless sky. That he was driving into light, without the faint fretting of windscreen wipers in his vision. That the surface of the motorway was almost dry. And last night the dark had been teeming with stars.
Perhaps it was over. Could it be over? Could they get on with their lives again?
His mind was racing, though his body was chilled: sometimes he thought they were no longer connected. He needed to be in bed with Delorice. She put him back together again.
And now his mother had fallen for her. The visit to the opera had been a success, as much of a success as it could possibly have been – except for the burglary, of course. Davey didn’t find out about it till next day.
But his mother seemed curiously unfazed, this time. ‘Fortunately, darling, I had all my jewels on.’ Once again lots of Lola’s gadgets had gone, ‘but I can’t say I mind a bit about that, she’ll just have to learn to manage without them. She’s losing her allowance for the next ten years. Of course I’ll have to replace her television, and she can’t do homework without a mobile phone –’ The worst loss was Lottie’s favourite picture, the beautiful Hopper he had known since childhood. Even here she almost managed to be philosophical. ‘It’s not the value, Davey, as you know. I wasn’t ever going to sell it. The worst thing is, it might disappear completely. What if no one ever sees it again? What if whoever’s got it doesn’t even like it? It would be nice to think someone’s looking at it … Hmm. With luck God will strike them blind.’
For Lottie, amazingly, the burglary was almost overshadowed by her revived enthusiasm for Delorice. ‘Did you notice, darling, she was just like me? We kept on having the same opinions. I suppose it’s natural, since you love your mother. Davey, Harold and I both think she’s a catch. Not all pallid and snooty like your last one, not anorexic, not a sneerer’ (Lottie had suspected Davey’s last girlfriend of laughing at her, not without reason). ‘You mustn’t let this one get away.’
He smiled to himself. And Delorice liked Lottie. His life felt good, in the early morning sunshine. He cruised along thinking about his girlfriend: her finely cut, laughing, cushiony lips which opened, with love, like a sea-anemone, the way her fingers smoothed his back, the way she laughed at him, her truthfulness, the way she kept his feet on the ground. And Delorice did something in the world (although she always deprecated it). Unlike him, she had a proper job. It was one of the things that most impressed him.
And now she wanted to edit Davey! The woman who’d edited Farhad Ahmad, the youngest-ever winner of the Iceland Prize! Davey’s agent was setting up a deal with Headstone for him to write a series of guided trips around the universe. The first idea Headstone came up with had made him shudder – Star-Lite Trips, ‘journeys round the universe done in the style of a “sixties acid trip”’ – but Delorice explained it had come from Marketing. ‘You do see, Delorice, this must be educational,’ he’d told her, ‘if you’re doing it for teenagers like my sister Lola. They know nothing – less than nothing.’ ‘Of course,’ said Delorice, though she looked a little anxious. ‘Don’t worry, Davey.’ He trusted her. They had settled on Star Trips, a more neutral name.
On the radio now, a government spokesman was saying the worst of the floods was over. A full inquiry had been launched into apparent failures of emergency planning, with particular reference to the ‘alleged’ lack of pumps and boats around the Towers in the east. The government was ‘unable to substantiate’ rumours that sabotage had been involved. ‘Links to a foreign power’ should be ‘treated with caution’. (The government habitually denied its own rumours, so the item must be a government leak. The ‘foreign power’ would obviously be the one they were at war with.) But ‘the rioters’ voices would be fully heard’; the government was meeting their leaders today. ‘Full and constructive’ discussions were expected.
There had been no rain now for forty-eight hours, the longest intermission for over two months. Government meteorological experts ‘confidently expected’ drier weather to continue. ‘The message is, we are on top of things.’ Long-term restoration works would soon be underway, and the clean-up campaign had already started. ‘It’s very good news,’ said a government spokesman. ‘Especially today, with the City Gala.’
This Gala had been planned for a decade. It marked the twenty-fifth year since the city’s docks had been turned into a pleasure zone for international tourists (and the twenty-fifth anniversary of the dockers’ riots, in which ten people had been killed, though no one was keen to remember that). In the drubbing rain, rumours had redoubled that the government meant to call the Gala off: the rioters had demanded it, celebrities swore they would not attend, firemen and ambulancemen threatened a boycott, media pundits said it was tasteless with war boiling up in the lands around Loya, safety experts said it was pointless, the city was sinking into the flood.
But underneath it all, the city had been hoping that the giant party would go on. They had been oppressed, by the rains, by the shortages, the winter that seemed to have eaten the spring. Almost no one had been going out, as the buses and subways grew erratic and lawless; a bus had been swept away down river, fifty-three passengers had been drowned, the taxi drivers were demanding double money … Now suddenly the worst was over, and at once, the city needed its Gala. The government would take charge of things. They were drafting an edict capping taxi rates, they were clearing debris from roads in the centre, they promised to lay on ‘special river-buses’, ‘whatever it takes to get our people to their Gala’ – though most of ‘their people’ weren’t invited, of course.
The Gala was of pressing concern to Davey, since he was one of its star presenters. The biggest event of a quarter century, televised all over the world. Lottie and Lola were fizzing with pride, and even Delorice got quite excited, Delorice whose head wasn’t easily turned and who was so rude about television. Delorice would be there, looking beautiful. Once his stint was over, they could dance all night, and then stay in bed and make love all morning, since the day after the Gala was a public holiday.
Suddenly now he heard his own name, and flushed with pleasure – ‘Davey Lucas’ – instantly followed by a shiver of shame as the voice continued ‘the well-known astrologer’. He would be derided throughout the profession! But part of him knew he deserved to be. Part of him knew he was over-promoted, and some of the hype was his own fault. When TV had dubbed him ‘Mr Astronomy’, he’d asked them not to, but half-heartedly, and unsurprisingly, the name had stuck.
He suspected that the savagery of the response from within the academic establishment on his ‘planetary lineup’ spectacular partly derived from spleen at his title. Professor Sharp, for example, had called him ‘a childishly unsophisticated thinker’, though most of the thinking hadn’t been Davey’s. Sharp was almost certainly jealous.
And how could Davey help being flattered when Kylie Spheare, of Extreme Events, who was at every party, with her tiger-striped hair, called him and purred, into his surprised silence, ‘Davey Lucas, you’re the man we need. Frankly, at the moment, only you could do it. The kids love you, but you’re, like, an intellectual, so you’ll be able to remember all those foreign names. Bliss will be delighted to go on with you, it will help him, like, get cred with the youth –’
‘Bliss go on with me?’ Davey interrupted, trying not to sound too excited.
‘Yeah, well I know he’s a bore,’ Kylie said, ‘but we have to have the politicians on. But you, Davey, you’re gorgeous, and you’re, like, serious. The city is willing to pay for the best. Tell me you’re not going to turn me down.’ Her voice had become very low and sexy. Naturally Davey had to say ‘Yes’, though part of him was panicking. Why was all this happening to him? Had he ever asked for any of it?
Still, Davey had never been a purist. Lottie had taught him to enjoy what came.
Listening to the good news about the floods, Davey started to feel positively cheerful. Even the radio presenter, a sceptical countryman who usually savaged politicians from the city, sounded more optimistic today.
(However, CTV had really blown it, since the Star-Lite End of the World Spectacular was scheduled for the evening after the Gala. They’d had lots of tabloid coverage at the weekend, with everyone in apocalyptic mood, but now the sun was shining, people had lost interest. The floods were going down; of course the world couldn’t end!)
Besides, for the first time in what seemed like months, there had been a completely clear night sky. Davey had OD-ed on the telescope, playing with some of his ideas for Star Trips. He wanted to explore, for teenagers, some of the wider questions in astronomy: one expanding universe, or many? Plural universes linked by worm-holes? One amazing structure, an infinite foam? Would the universe expand for ever, swimming endlessly outwards into the dark until its messages grew faint and were lost, or was there enough concealed matter to make it, at the last, turn back towards home? White distant swimmers, at the last, homing … When he was a boy, he had loved that idea, that the universe was cyclical, expanding and contracting like a heart. The idea of perpetual repetition soothed him. At last, one day, the cards would fall out right. Davey could be the man he longed to be; the swimmer would home at the perfect angle.
How strange it was, how beautiful. One day he’d bring Delorice along to see. They would climb up into the sky hand in hand, and look together at the ends of time. Go on a trip across the wide star-fields, the hidden galaxies above the black waters –
– Which had started to smell, in recent days, as the city began to warm up into spring. Davey pressed a button, and rolled up the window. He reminded himself that nothing lasted. The floods had been bad, but they too would pass.
Moira rose to her feet, sighing, bleeding, and picked up her Bible, and found peace. Morning had come, a third day. Maybe her Master was in his morning. Maybe she was not unvisited.
God said, ‘Let there be lights in the vault of heaven to separate day from night, and let them serve as signs for both festivals and years.’ God put these lights in the vault of heaven to give light on earth, to govern day and night, and to separate light from darkness … Evening came, and morning came. God saw that it was good.
She looked down for a second from the page of her Bible where the sunlight lay across her knee, the blue and yellow of her bruised knee, and Fool sat against it, his head on her flesh, she could feel the quick faint beat of his heart, the bridge of bone as light as egg-shell, and the sun painted a patch of his fur, lit part of it to such unbearable richness, such red fierce warmth, such a glow of red love, that her tears sprang towards it, the one good thing, of which Moira could never have enough.
May woke up from a dream of Alfred. He lay beside her: they were together; they were old, but they were curled like spoons, his dear hands joined beneath her bosoms, and he was whispering, ‘I love you, May. I’ll always love you, you know that May.’ She woke on a crest of unbelieving joy that only slowly ebbed away.
She knew he was there; they had been together. Somewhere, not far, he must still be with her. (She wished so fiercely that he could see the children; when she’d left them yesterday, they’d hugged her to death, and Franklin had so much a look of Alfred, his Roman nose, and his grandpa’s spirit; he was shy, like Alfred, but stubborn as a mule; and Winston had told her a fairy-tale, a rather muddled version of The Snow Queen.)
On the bedside table she kept her Tennyson, her other Alfred, who had not died. She picked it up and read, shortsightedly, drifting through the house to her little kitchen. She tripped on the carpet, and nearly fell. She heard him, impatient: ‘What are you playing at? For heaven’s sake, woman, look where you’re going!’
She read ‘Mariana’ as the kettle boiled. May had always enjoyed her mornings.
‘All day within the dreamy house,/ The doors upon their hinges creaked;/ The blue fly sung in the pane; the mouse/ Behind the mouldering wainscot shrieked,/ Or from the crevice peered about, …/ Old voices called her from without./ She only said, “My life is dreary, He cometh not,” she said;/ She said, “I am aweary, aweary, I would that I were dead!”’
May liked the idea of the bluebottle singing. She’d always thought they were lovely things, with their hard, bright, blue-green, petrol-y sheen.
But all that ‘weary, dreary’ business …
If you were loved enough, it lasted.
I miss him, but I don’t want to be dead.
‘She’s not at her best in the morning,’ Lorna muttered to Henry, in the secretive, hissing tone she habitually used when talking of their daughter, who had sharp ears and a habit of silently appearing, barefoot, and getting annoyed.
Angela certainly wasn’t at her best. Angela didn’t need to be. Her mother and father got Gerda up, took her to school, then made breakfast for Angela, and brought it in, with the mail, on a tray. They were proud of their daughter, the famous author. Naturally she had to work late at night; naturally she couldn’t get up in the morning. Since the two boys died, there had only been Angela.
After the sorrow of George’s death, they had moved away to a flat on the coast, a new beginning, away from disaster. When Angela gave birth to their first grandchild, the baby became the apple of their eye, and they came up to the city whenever they could. But the father of the baby didn’t want to know, and Angela started sounding down all the time, so they started to phone her every day. In the end there was only one decision they could make, though part of them wanted to be young again, get up without worries, walk on the beach …
Now they lived with her, and she paid for everything.
A world away from their life before, when treats were few, and they had to be careful. Now they could take mini-cabs if they went out; they didn’t need to cook, they got takeaways; they never bought clothes from charity shops. Angela had money for everything, since she had won the Iceland Prize. But sometimes they wondered if they’d done the right thing. Angela had meant them to be glorified housekeepers, running the household while she cared for Gerda and wrote her novels as before. Quite soon, though, it had somehow come about that Lorna and Henry took charge of Gerda.
Sometimes Gerda would peek in on her mother in the morning to say goodbye before she left, but Angela was usually half asleep. ‘Mummy’s tired,’ Angela would whisper, eyes still closed. ‘Kiss me, darling, then off you go. Mummy was working late last night.’ Sometimes this was true, sometimes not.
An hour or so later, Lorna would bring her her mail. There were armfuls of it, since she had won the Iceland. Angela would scan it, and make two piles, one for her secretary to deal with, one for her to linger over: fan letters, free books, invitations. Not everyone admired her novels, but most of the dissenters were mentally ill, making critical remarks about her style or carping obsessively about small errors; after reading a few sentences, she would discard them. Then she’d leave her bedroom, so her mother could clean and take the breakfast tray away, and go up to her office at the top of the house, which had a whole wall of books by Angela, all six of them, in fifty-seven languages. Sometimes, when Angela was very bored, she would read a few pages of her books aloud in languages she didn’t know. She sounded good in Finnish; more obscure in Basque. She wished she had a new book to read from.
In theory, Angela was spending her days writing her new novel, a follow-up to her Iceland winner, eagerly awaited by her publishers. Actually Angela was stuck, and spent most of her time reading old letters, and making, then forgetting, cups of herbal tea, which slowly cooled around her study, until her mother took them away. Sometimes she would pick up proofs publishers had sent, asking her for a quote for the jacket, but the writers were never as good as she was, so she tended to fling them down unfinished.
Still she believed she was busy, or ought to be busy, and when Gerda came home (picked up by Lorna or Henry) she knew she mustn’t disturb her mummy till the latter stopped work, between six and seven. Then Angela might read Gerda a book, or briefly look at what her daughter called homework, though it didn’t seem to be quite as advanced as what Angela herself was doing at that age. She might even put her daughter to bed, but Lorna or Henry usually did that. Gerda was so attached to them, and Angela was naturally tired by bedtime.
Gerda was a credit to Angela, though. Angela sometimes ignored Gerda’s bedtime so she could take her to literary parties, beautifully dressed, with shining hair. Gerda would walk about, staring at people, and didn’t interrupt her mother’s grown-up conversations, though occasionally she would run up to Angela and hang, touchingly, upon her hand. Everyone asked about the striking child, and Angela modestly said, ‘She’s my daughter.’ The last time this happened hadn’t quite worked out – a literary editor with kids at the same school had asked, en passant, the name of Gerda’s teacher, and Angela’s mind had gone blank. He looked at her a trifle oddly.
Thanks to the live-in grandparents, it hadn’t been onerous, having a child. Interviewers always raised the motherhood question, and Angela always had an up-beat answer.
‘Don’t you find having a child has slowed you up?’ Nadia Samuels had asked, only last week. She herself was nearly forty, and anxious about not having one. The rumours in the book trade were that Angela was blocked. Some wanted her punished for winning the Iceland. ‘People might ask you, well – five years have gone past; where is your follow-up novel?’
‘I’m writing it,’ Angela smiled, annoyingly. ‘I think it will be worth the wait.’
‘Are you putting motherhood before your career?’
‘Some people make a great fuss about motherhood. I tend to take it in my stride. Of course I’m fortunate, Gerda’s very bright. Precocious is the word the teachers use. And yet she’s easy. She has a sweet nature.’
‘But children need a lot of looking after, surely?’ Nadia pursued, frowning.
‘I suppose some do, but we’re more like friends.’
Nadia frowned. The woman was a liar. Her sister had children. They did need looking after. ‘Is the child’s father around at all?’
‘Oh, yes,’ smiled Angela. ‘He’s very much involved …’ (with his Danian wife and family, she concluded, mentally).
Nadia stared at Angela, thwarted, and decided her profile would take no prisoners. ‘The Silence of the Lamb’ might be a good title.
‘So life is perfect?’ she inquired, cuttingly.
‘Let’s just say I’ve been very lucky.’
This morning, though, everything went wrong.
Angela woke earlier than usual, with a terrible wailing in her ear. Sirens, she thought, fuddled, anxious. It must be the floods. They’re ejaculating. (She hadn’t had sex for nearly six months.) No, that’s wrong, they’re evacuating us. The war, of course. I must save Gerda. She sat bolt up in bed, and switched her light on.
But she didn’t have her contact lenses in, and couldn’t make sense of what she saw.
A red drenched head, streaming with tears, features swollen beyond recognition, bulbs of cream snot pushing out of the nostrils, lay on her belly like a beaten dog, but all around there was screaming, yelling, and two desperate paws were scrabbling at the duvet, trying to touch her flesh underneath the covers, and then she realized that it was her daughter – Gerda, surely, but tortured, changed; and as she watched, the stubborn dog-like body was wrenched away, there was straining, heaving, and she saw, dimly, as she started to protest, started to reach out towards her child, that the grey-haired, purple-faced figure of her mother was pulling Gerda away by the feet, pulling her as if she were a heavy doll, and as Lorna fell backwards, clutching her grandchild, Gerda shot away towards the foot of the bed, still clinging on to her mother, still screaming, so the duvet and then the sheet went with her, and Angela felt the early morning chill hit her warm naked body like a shock of cold water, and the light was horrible, a flood of cold shame, for now Angela lay on the bed alone, Gerda was struggling in Lorna’s arms, and the old woman’s hand was across her mouth, her fingers had bandaged the child’s wild mouth, soft pleats of full lip pinched between old knuckles, and a furious voice hardly recognizable as Lorna’s was saying, ‘Wicked girl! What have you done to your mother, your poor mother who needs her sleep, I’m sorry, Angela, I couldn’t stop her,’ – and then the two of them were backing out through the door, though Gerda’s feet were still kicking, kicking, and she couldn’t talk, she was crying too hard, but her grieved blue eyes, drowned and swollen with tears, were fixed in terrible pleading on her mother, and Angela, left alone in her room, where each morning Lorna brought her breakfast like a child, looked down the grey planes of her naked body. She was no longer a baby; she was growing old. She lay there rigid, trying not to think. Her mouth tasted bitter; her teeth were bad. Angela was terrified of the dentist. Only when the front door slammed, and Gerda stopped screaming, did Angela’s panic begin to subside.
After about half an hour, there was a knock, and her father brought in tea and juice. She had curled up foetuslike under her duvet. ‘Sorry about all the screaming,’ he said. ‘We couldn’t seem to do a thing with her this morning. There’s better news though. The flood’s going down. The TV says the rains are over.’
Davey flexed his hands on the steering-wheel. A night at the telescope always left him deeply tired; strained eyes, pain-clamped shoulders. He would have liked to drop in on Delorice and soothe all his aches in the warmth of her bed, but Delorice was staying with Viola, her sister, in the drowned no-man’s land of the Towers.
He made a decision, and swung his car left. He would go for a swim in his local pool.
Outside the door, on the big bales of straw that had been packed together to make pontoons, a little girl was making a scene. She had dark red hair and a heart-shaped face, and was pushing, pushing, with all her might, at a protesting woman who might be her grandma. ‘By myself! You’re not coming in with me! I don’t like you! By myself!’
The old woman looked at Davey, apologetically, as he tried to get past their tussling bodies. ‘Little madam,’ she said, and tried to smile, though her cheeks were inflamed and her eyes exhausted. The girl took advantage of her looking away. Shouting, ‘I’m not a madam, I hate you,’ she gave her one last almighty shove, and before Davey realized what was going to happen the frail figure of the woman was swaying, toppling, her face a single black O of fear as she clutched at his coat, feebly, in passing and then fell backwards into the water, sending gouts of black mud all over Davey. Her head went right under; one leg waved, shocking, a weak white twig with the shoe kicking off, then her feet went down and her head came up, black, slimy, clotted, without a face.
The little girl bent over the water, frightened. ‘Grandma,’ she said. ‘Are you all right, Grandma?’
Davey was a good-natured man, and although he longed to sneak away for his swim he extended his hands to the gasping, sobbing statue of mud that weltered below him, up to her waist in dirty water. ‘There are germs,’ she was spluttering. ‘They say there are. Because of the floods. I’ve swallowed some. There are horrible germs – you wicked girl. BAD Gerda.’ She came lurching and churning back up on to the straw, gripping his hands with painful force, and stood there, shuddering, not letting him go, her back turned fiercely on the child.
‘Shall I help you inside?’ said Davey, politely, ignoring the mud on his arms and hands, the stains all over his new tan boots. Maybe he shouldn’t have kids after all. ‘Come along, dear,’ he said to the girl, who now looked very pale and docile. Inside the pool, he asked for Zoe, who ran the swimming classes there. He had known Zoe for three or four years; Viola was her partner in business; in fact, Davey thought they might be more than friends, but Delorice dismissed it: ‘Not my sister.’
When Zoe emerged from the staff-room, which had a big anti-war poster on the door, Gerda ran up to her smiling sweetly and put her arms around her, as if nothing had happened. Davey started to put Zoe in the picture, but Gerda kept interrupting him, patting at Zoe to get her attention. ‘It was a accident,’ she insisted.
‘She pushed me in,’ said Lorna. Mud dripped from her hair. Now minus her makeup, she looked like a mushroom. Black yeti footprints covered the floor.
‘Milly,’ called Zoe, and a young white woman came hurrying across, clucking her sympathy, brandishing a mop. ‘We’ve had a bit of an accident. Come and use the staff shower,’ said Zoe to Lorna, and then to Davey, urgently: ‘Have you seen Viola? She’s still not managing to get in in the mornings.’ To Gerda she said, ‘Don’t worry, darling, I’ve got some clothes I can lend your mother –’
And suddenly Gerda was angry again, all four foot of her aflame, indignant; ‘She’s not my mummy,’ she said, loudly. ‘You said she was my mummy last week, too. I wanted my mummy to come today, but she couldn’t come, because, because, she couldn’t come because –’
And here Lorna interjected, protective, ‘Because your mum was tired from working –’
But suddenly all the fight left Gerda. She sat on the floor, and her red head drooped, and tears ran slowly down her cheeks. ‘Because she never comes,’ she said. ‘Because she never, never does.’
‘It’s all right, deary, never mind,’ said Milly, who could never bear to see children cry, crouching down on the floor beside her and taking the little girl in her arms. (She and Samuel, once devoted One Way followers, were thinking of having a child of their own – a boy, they hoped, and they would call him Saul – and now she saw children everywhere, and it didn’t quite square with the end of the world. Jesus loved children, didn’t he? They were losing their belief in Father Bruno. God was love: that was the point.)
The little girl’s blouse was soaked with tears. She cried steadily, fluently, without words, like a tap welling up when the washer was gone. Milly held the child’s hot wet face to her own, and stroked her hair, and bore her sorrow.
Yet twenty minutes later Gerda was in the water, the clear blue water with its minnows of sunlight, warm as happiness, swimming, swimming, and Davey, on the other side of the pool, cleaved powerfully, blindly through his programme, and Lorna stood on the side and watched them, wishing that she had learned to swim, wishing that she were young again, understanding and forgiving Gerda, and all the knots of passion and pain were dissolved in the moment, and floated away.
But Zoe, on the pool-side, was not so happy. Too many things to fret about.
She was worried about the war: not just the innate loathsomeness of it, the way the rich were attacking the poor, the lies that Mr Bliss was telling – but also the effect on her social life (too many evenings at boring meetings, too few evenings spent with Viola) and on her e-mail inbox, which was swamped in gloom: half a dozen rants per day, with giant attachments, too many to open, so she started to dread them, and once or twice, guiltily, deleted them unread. Zoe marched, she protested, she always had, but she didn’t enjoy it, or entirely believe in it. It was anger that motivated her, not hope. War was such a stupid waste of human time and effort. War kept her and Viola apart.
Now Zoe was having to teach two different classes because Viola was late again. Why can’t she get a babysitter for that child and stay over with me? she thought, as so often. She quite liked Dwayne, but he complicated everything. If he weren’t there, anything might happen. Perhaps they would have a child together. She would make Viola pregnant, yes. Put a heavy child in that beautiful belly. She desired Viola fiercely, totally, missed and wanted her every night. Zoe had been pregnant when she was sixteen. She had run away from home, and had an abortion. She knew life owed her another baby. Why shouldn’t Viola give her one? They would be a family. For ever.
But her mind began to move in familiar grooves as she got her baby class to float under water, their necks relaxed, their hair streaming out. Six little bodies suspended in a line, plump, prosperous, well-fed bodies; well-dressed mothers looked on from the side; private swimming classes weren’t cheap. Briefly, Zoe remembered the past, when she was a water baby herself, when her mother watched, and shrieked encouragement.
It had put her off swimming for years and years. Maybe Gerda was lucky that her mother didn’t come. Zoe always suggested mothers keep praise for later. For half an hour, therefore, all the babies were hers. At first the underwater stuff seemed difficult, and the timid ones panicked and pushed their chins up, but in the end they had to trust the water; they would never swim well if they didn’t let go. ‘Well done,’ she called. ‘Now let’s try again.’
They up-ended like ducks, adorable. ‘Very good, Farouk. Lovely, Sejal. Now let’s stand by the side and do breaststroke arms. No, standing, Daniel. And you’re not a windmill. Please copy Ben, he’s doing it just right. All of you listen: copy Ben.’
Zoe left the babies for a moment and walked further up the pool to see how the Junior Dolphins were doing. There were some gifted little swimmers there. She would have merged the two classes, it would have been safer, but some of the older ones were really good. Gerda, for example, swam like a fish; she was already preparing for her lifesaver’s badge.
‘Staffing problems, these wretched floods,’ she apologized to Lorna as she padded past her. ‘I think you’re great,’ said Lorna, vaguely. ‘People of my age never learned to swim. Gerda’s been teaching the others to dive.’
‘What?’ said Zoe, anxious. ‘They can’t dive here,’ and she ran past Lorna to the middle of the pool, but there she found Gerda standing on the side, hair stuck to her scalp in a gleaming dark pelt, saying ‘One, two, three, jump! Go on, Dinesh. Copy me!’
They plunged in the safe way, splashing, feet first. Relieved, Zoe smiled at them. ‘Well done, kids. Thank you, Gerda. I did need another teacher.’
‘I always teach when the teacher’s not there,’ said Gerda, pulling herself up from the water, beaming, beaming, wanting to give pleasure. ‘At school I read them fairy-tales.’
‘Because you’re sensible,’ said Zoe.
Now they were all clustering round her, but Gerda was pulling at her hand, and her wide blue eyes weren’t happy any more. ‘I’m not sensible,’ she said. ‘Everyone says I’m sensible. I don’t want to be sensible. I want to be a baby.’
Zoe laughed and took it lightly. ‘You’re a water baby,’ she said. There was something needy about that child, but she couldn’t deal with it today. ‘Now back into the water, Dolphins! Three lengths of freestyle. I’m watching you! Ready, steady, go!’
There was hope, this morning, even in the Towers, where everyone lived who could do no better; the old, the mad, the poor, newcomers, and people like Faith, who cleaned the city. And rats, and mice, and bright mats of microbes. They liked the floods, and it was warming up, though to human beings, April still felt chilly. It didn’t matter; in the sun, people hoped. Hope was all they needed to go on living.
Delorice and Viola were drinking coffee and staring down out of Viola’s fifteenth-floor window, their ears cocked for the sound of engines. The two young women, one office-sharp in skyscraper pin-stripes and high waxed hair, the other cupped by a pale soft tracksuit clinging like peach-down to waist and breasts, sat waiting, princesses in chaos, at the breakfast bar of the ugly room. The radio was on.
‘Did you hear him?’ asked Viola, derisive. ‘He goes, “We’re going to do whatever it takes to get our people to the Gala.” So who is this “our people” they’re goin’ on about? Where are these fancy river-buses? I can’t even go to work on time, you get me, never mind some fancy Gala.’
‘I couldn’t care if I’m late to work,’ said Delorice. ‘I’ve started to think my job is rubbish. But I have got a meeting after lunch. And I do have to get to the Gala tonight.’
A look from Viola, half-glad, half-envious. She switched off the radio, trying not to get vexed. Delorice was always doing better than her –
What if she did? She was family. Family mattered, to the Edwardses.
There were only eighteen months between the two sisters. Viola, the elder, had always been the boss. They had gone to the same comprehensive school; shared lipstick, tights, shoe-sizes, been mistaken for each other any number of times, though Delorice was taller, and lighter-skinned – which Viola sometimes thought, in cynical moments, might be why she’d ended up doing better.
Viola’s high-concept exercise machines shone out against damp, peeling walls. She noticed the stains more when she had company. How often had Viola asked the council to fix it? But nothing ever got done around here. Viola had the sense it was somehow her fault, the hopeless transport, the stains on the wall. Was her little sister judging her?
Viola remembered the end of the world.
‘Delorice,’ said Viola. ‘It’s not that I believe it. Not that I’m worried, or anything. But I saw all that stuff at the weekend in the papers, about this programme Davey’s making. Saying that the world’s going to end tomorrow. I mean, it is bullshit, isn’t it?’
‘Davey is not a bullshitter,’ said Delorice. ‘But most of those programmes aren’t his idea. He doesn’t seem bothered himself, Viola.’
‘It frightens the kids though, dunnit?’ said Viola. ‘Dwayne was really scared, when he read that.’
‘Don’t stress, Viola,’ Delorice said, with one of her high-cheek-boned, half-moon smiles. ‘You know kids. They enjoy being worried.’ (But under the smile, she worried too: could she really trust Davey, however much she loved him? The stupid white powder, like frost, like snow.)
‘I think it’s, like, irresponsible,’ Viola said, suddenly vehement. Viola was the responsible one. She had taken in Elroy’s boy Dwayne, now eleven, when his mother died in the same year as Winston … It was down to Viola to hold the family together through all that horror and mess and grief. Everyone had to be looked after. Whereas Delorice couldn’t even care for her own daughter.
‘Do you mind if I read?’ Delorice asked. She had something in her bag to read for Headstone, a vast new manuscript called Living in Time by someone whose name was completely unfamiliar, H. I. Segall. At first she had thought it wasn’t a good sign that Headstone were giving her stuff from the slush pile, then she saw it came with a passionate recommendation from Mohammed Habib, their new editor, and was to be discussed at today’s meeting, as a possible non-fiction lead for next spring. The note asked her to read a specimen chapter. She had started on one called ‘The Unending Moment’.
‘Don’t ask,’ said Viola. ‘You was always reading.’
It was true, and Viola had never minded, but a new self-consciousness had come upon them. At school, where it wasn’t cool to be a boffin, Delorice had read novels under the desk. Now she read for a moment, then stopped. ‘It’s unbelievable,’ she said, looking out of the window at the blank bright water. The water-bus was two hours late. ‘I don’t know how you put up with it.’
‘I told you, didn’t I?’ said Viola. ‘It’s been like this for effing weeks. The effing council have stopped answering the phones. Nothing here works except my exercise machines.’
She had taken up sport in a serious way after Winston died, going to college to do sports science. While Delorice had totally fallen apart. Then suddenly she was at college too, doing English, hooking up with Farhad Ahmad, getting herself a First, for Christ’s sake, a first class degree and a posh job in publishing.
And Delorice wasn’t shy any more. None of that staring at her knees, and whispering. ‘I liked it, you know,’ she had said to Viola, ‘going to the opera with the Lucases. In one way it wasn’t me at all, I mean gondolas and dinner-jackets and “sir” and “madam” and all that shit, but in another way, it just felt great. I was there, with Davey, and his mum and dad liked me, and I loved the music, and the food, and everything. I was telling myself, I could get used to this.’
Viola was watchful around this new little sister, with her new way of talking and new white friends. She sat there now, with her perfectly waxed parting and her high-powered suit, reading an impressively thick pile of paper. What was the word? She looked … classy. Viola found it all a bit hard to take.
‘How’s Leah?’ she asked, not quite innocently. ‘Did you go last weekend? Is her cough better?’
‘Went over to Mum’s for lunch,’ said Delorice, without looking up from the page she was reading. ‘I didn’t notice Leah having no cough. Having a cough,’ she corrected herself. When she was with Viola, the old phrases slipped out. She went back to her book; it was surprisingly good.
No, you wouldn’t notice, thought Viola. Like you haven’t noticed me and Zoe. No one in the family wanted to know.
Part of Viola longed to tell Delorice. But she imagined with horror what her sister might do: burst out laughing, refuse to believe her. Worst of all, pull a disgusted face like the one she had made, vexed, disbelieving, when their mother told them, wracked with sobs, that the police were saying Winston hadn’t been normal.
Delorice was looking at her watch again. ‘Sorry, Vi, it’s just a habit.’
‘You thought I was just bunking off from the pool till you came here and saw for yourself what it’s like.’
‘I knew there was something I meant to tell you. Last time Davey and me went swimming, Zoe was really missing you. She said you’re the brains of the outfit,’ said Delorice. Viola rewarded her with a smile. She was good at business, she always had been. Zoe would have worked for nothing for ever; only the actual swimming mattered to her. But Viola made sure that they made good money.
It paid for Dwayne’s expensive day-care, though he hadn’t been able to get there for weeks. For now, she was sending him five floors up to a young white girl who did child-minding, Kilda – which struck Viola as a sick kind of name, but it would do for the moment, till the floods went down. She was desperate to move before Dwayne hit his teens.
‘It’s been horrible here,’ she told her sister. ‘We couldn’t get milk, or papers, or nothing. We, you know, bartered, some days, for food. That wasn’t in the papers, was it? The government did fuck all for us. And then they’re surprised when there’s a little bit of trouble. It’s like, “Violent Riots”, and “Towers Mob Rule”. In any case, let’s hope it’s over. I’d started to think it would rain for ever.’
The sun poured in through the bird-spattered glass, they were glad to be together, the news was good.
‘You could have left for a bit, I suppose,’ said Delorice. ‘Some people did, didn’t they?’
Delorice made everything sound like her fault. ‘Why should I, like, leave my stuff behind?’ Viola asked, reaching for a cigarette, half-breaking the box in her sudden longing.
‘You’re smoking again,’ Delorice remarked.
‘Want one?’ The question had a touch of aggression.
‘Bet Zoe doesn’t like it,’ Delorice said. ‘It can’t be good for your swimming, girl.’
‘Zoe doesn’t know,’ said Viola, looking out over the shining water meadow that had replaced the usual sheets of concrete. The view from the Towers had got better since the floods. Were the waters going down? She squinted, minutely. Yes, on the facing tower, a band of dark wall showed where the flood had already receded. Maybe a metre in a couple of days. But the feeling of relief was mingled with anger; how would they ever clear up the mess? ‘You don’t understand. ’Ear me now. Your life is soft, girl. The people who left, all their stuff’s got tiefed, and like nutters and weirdos have gone in and lived there. Singing and chanting and sticking up weird posters. I don’t think the toilets are working or nothing. They’re probably doing their business on the floor. It’s just the way things are around here. It’s just the way things have always been. At home we were poor but it wasn’t like this. I smoke because it helps me get by.’ She drew in deeply, fiercely, looked hard at Delorice, blew smoke across her.
‘Well you could have moved in with me, for a bit,’ said Delorice. But she knew her flat was too small for two. Something stopped her at the last moment from saying, ‘You could have moved in with Zoe’.
Then Viola, still annoyed with her sister, said the thing she didn’t usually say, sounding tight and nervous, not looking at Delorice. ‘I could have moved in with Zoe, of course. She’s practically begging me to live with her.’
Delorice said nothing, then, awkwardly, ‘Right.’
Viola, with the nicotine powering through her, suddenly knew she had to say more. There were pictures of Zoe all over the house, and one or two snaps of them both together, laughing in the water, their arms round each other. ‘You don’t like Zoe, do you?’ she asked. Both knew the question meant more than that.
‘Stop being so feisty,’ Delorice said. ‘Cha! I’m not going to quarrel with you, Viola. I trekked over here to see you, right? And now I’m so late for work it’s ridiculous. Zoe’s going to sack you if you’re always this late.’
One look at Viola said she’d got it wrong. Her sister stood up and blocked out the window. She was toned and muscled; she looked frighteningly fit. Delorice knew Viola could lay a man out; she had done it last year, after a man in the lift had touched her booty and whispered ‘Black bitch’. ‘Her not going to sack me, we’re partners, get it. You don’t get me, do you, Delorice? Don’t you forget I’m your big sister –’
‘I was only, like, having a laugh’, said Delorice.
‘I mean, we’re partners. I mean, she loves me. You not the only one who got a lover. Smug little Delorice with her rich baby white boy.’
Delorice let the insult pass. She felt winded, thrown, but she clutched at straws. ‘You don’t love her, though. You can’t. You’re normal. You’ve had more men than I have, girl.’
‘It’s not about normal. It’s not about men. She’s, like, just, you know, the person I love.’ Viola sat down, her anger going, but she looked at the floor, at the window-frame. Her voice was different when she spoke again. ‘Swear on the Bible not to tell Mum.’
A long silence, then the sound of a motor, a diesel engine, coming slowly closer. ‘Are you telling me something?’ Delorice asked, then, answering herself, ‘You’re telling me something.’ She broke off, suddenly. ‘I have to get my stuff,’ as she saw the boat, an aged-looking thing with yellow paint and ‘City Wonderama’ on the side, creep slowly into view underneath their window. The same boat had brought her here yesterday. There were others, apparently, but nowhere near enough. They smelled of fumes; they were slow; they were packed. The yellow boat was already overloaded, heavy, sluggish, riding low in the water.
Both of them ran around finding things. They left, silent, abstracted with hurry, not looking each other in the eyes. Delorice was abstracted, her thoughts in turmoil. Maybe it was true about Winston, too. Maybe she had known about him, all along, but refused to accept it because of the shame. Maybe their mother had known, deep down. It was Mum who had accepted it, in the end, bringing down the fury of the family.
Viola slammed her door, then padlocked it. ‘I got this yesterday,’ she muttered, manoeuvring the metal hasp into the slot. ‘Take a look at the posters on the way down. I’m not letting those bastards get in here with their creepy religious shit … Zoe asked me to put up some anti-war posters. I goes, “Do you think we need any more of dem tings?”’
The lift was shut because of the floods; they hardly noticed, it was usually broken. They clattered down a stairwell wall-papered with posters. There were smells of seaweed, urine, mould. The notices were thickly bordered with black, printed in crude letters the colour of blood, with a picture of the Towers half-submerged in water, rising out of a crimson flood. ‘THESE ARE THE LAST DAYS,’ the posters shouted. ‘Sisters and Brothers, come and join us. We are here to save, we are here among you. Open your hearts, and come home.’
‘They’re not coming in my effing home,’ said Viola. ‘They’ve wormed their way into all the empty flats though. This place is, like, crawling with them. There are Muslims as well, with their funny writing. The same posters, just different writing. They thump around the stairs. They preach. They sing. It’s all doom and gloom and Last Days shit. They’ll look right tits when the water goes down.’
‘Viola,’ said Delorice, a moment later, touching her shoulder as they reached water-level, one floor below the one they had expected, because the floods were draining away, because sun and wind were working their magic; pushed aside the wide drenched sheet of plywood that blocked the shattered landing window, climbed out on to the slimy window-ledge from which the boat would have to pick up, and were dwarfed by the dazzle, the cutting wind-chill, deafened by the engines slogging closer, their throats roughened by the smell of fuel – suddenly the world was all around them, raw, bright-edged, uncontrollable; two seagulls screamed and wheeled above them, their yellow beaks with a hungry look, and all that mattered was survival. ‘Viola!’ Delorice found herself shouting to make herself heard above the din: out here in the emptiness, what did they count for, the little hurts, the embarrassment? Suddenly she was fifteen again. ‘Wait a second. Give us a hug. You’re my sister, innit. We lost our brother. We lost Winston, we can’t lose each other. Maybe – I dunno – you should tell Mum. You’ll always be my sister, Viola –’ They were hugging, kissing, both of them in tears, swaying together on the narrow window-ledge the boat was struggling to come alongside. ‘Nothing is ever going to change that, right?’
‘Right,’ said Viola. ‘Right. Safe.’
Some mornings, the water-buses looked like floating hospitals. Grey-faced people, packed together, slumped by pathetic small hills of possessions (there were regulations about how much they could bring, though the boatmen never seemed to know what they were). But the City Wonderama looked different, this morning. The passengers were smiling, and making jokes; hope had restored their sense of adventure; they could almost enjoy this, since it wasn’t for ever. It would go down in history, the time of the flood, the time when the Tower-dwellers all stood together. They were coalescing, the myths of comfort.
The engine died, and the boatman pulled the women, one by one, across into the boat. Without the engine, the deck lunged, then plummeted, and each time a little sigh of fear and excitement rose from the packed bodies on the chilly deck as the swell left each sister in turn clinging on, a small living thing above empty air. Briefly, death caught at their chests again, and then as the strong arm of the boatman landed them, there was a communal ripple of relieved laughter.
‘Safe,’ said Delorice, touching fists. ‘Safe.’