Flood (4 page)

But it wasn’t Lily’s mother who opened the door, but her sister Amanda. And Lily learned her mother was dead.

4

A
manda walked them through the house to the kitchen. It was open-plan from the front door, and had been that way since the internal walls had been knocked down in a 1970s conversion.

Lily glanced curiously around at the living space. Her mother’s books were gone, her slumped antique furniture vanished. The tattered old carpet Lily remembered from her childhood had been lifted too, to be replaced by cheap-looking ceramic tiles. The lower walls were bare of paint or paper, and Lily could see channels crudely cut in the plasterwork where power points had been raised to a meter or so off the ground. The fireplace, which had been blocked off in the seventies renovation, was now open again, and blackened by soot, evidently recently used.

The small kitchen had been much less modified than the living room, and was just as cluttered as Lily remembered, though now with Amanda’s characteristic kipple, principally masses of spice bottles and jars to support her passion for Indian cooking. Amanda sat the two of them on high stools, and handed them mugs of hot chamomile tea. On a shelf over the table stood a row of photographs, of Lily’s mother, Amanda’s kids, and one big portrait of Lily herself, her official USAF image, a younger self smart in a crisp uniform. Lily was touched to see it there.

Lily tried to take in the fact that everything about her life had changed while she had been absent from it—that her mother had died a whole two years before, that her sister had moved from her old flat in Hammersmith into what had been the family home. Maybe she had been detached for too long. She just felt numb.

And she could tell that Gary, who she’d only brought home on a whim, felt awkward to have walked in on a family tragedy.

Gary knew all about Lily’s family from their endless conversations in Barcelona. Lily’s mum had been a GI bride, of sorts, who had met and married a USAF airman stationed in Suffolk. He had given her two daughters before being killed in a friendly-fire incident while working on logistical support during the first Gulf war. Lily had never lived in the States, but she had dual citizenship. With her dad dead when she was fourteen, Lily’s mother had been her anchor.

Amanda said, “I didn’t want to tell you on the phone, when you called ahead earlier about visiting.” She was edgy.

Lily said, “I appreciate that.”

At thirty-five Amanda was five years younger than Lily. She was, in fact, about the age Lily had been when she was taken. Always taller and thinner than Lily, she had her black hair pulled back into a knot behind her head, and she wore a black dress that looked practical, if maybe a size too small for her. Though there was no evidence of smoking in the house, Lily thought she saw traces of the old habit about Amanda, a cigarette-shaped hole in the way she held the fingers of her right hand. “What gets me is why the government didn’t tell you. You’ve been out of Spain for five days already.”

“I think they’re treating us as possible trauma cases.” That was because of Piers Michaelmas, who had been so obviously damaged by his captivity. “They’ve been feeding us news bit by bit. Selectively.”

Looking around, Gary said, “Looks like you’ve had a trauma here of your own.”

“Well, we got flooded out in the spring. It’s all been so bloody complicated, you wouldn’t believe it. The insurance, you know. You have to wait an age for a loss adjuster to come out, and in the meantime you’re not supposed to touch anything. Not even clear the mud out. It stank, Lily, you wouldn’t believe it, street muck and sewage all over the floor. Carpets ruined, of course. No electric or water or gas, buckled floorboards, the water stink seeping out of the plaster for weeks afterward—it was just a nightmare. We were lucky we didn’t get any of the toxic fungi growing out of the walls. Old Mrs. Lucas got some of that—do you remember her? And even when the adjuster has been, you only get a payout if you commit to climate-proofing. Mind you I do admit I much prefer floor tiles to carpet, don’t you? So much easier to keep clean. Of course we were lucky, you know, Lily. Some of the properties around here were condemned altogether.”

Gary said,“I guess these old barns weren’t built to withstand a flooding. What happened? River burst its banks?”

“No. A flash flood . . .”

A sudden deluge had followed days of steady rain that had left Victorian-age drains and sewers choked. With nowhere to go, sheets of water ran over the ground, seeking a way down to the river, pouring through streets and into houses and schools.

“The kids got home just before the level started rising in the street; we were lucky about that. It poured in under the door. We went upstairs and just huddled. We saw a car get washed away, washed down the street, can you believe it? Then it started pouring up from the sink and even out of the toilet, black mud that stank of sewage. That freaked out the kids, I can tell you. It’s just as well Mum didn’t live to see it.”

Lily said, “It’s hard to believe, all this happened to you and I didn’t even know about it.”

“Or about your mom,” Gary said.“I’m glad I spoke to my own family, my mother. I’m looking forward to seeing her real soon.”

Amanda poured him more tea. “When will they be sending you home?”

“A couple more days. I hear flights out of the civilian airports are problematic.”

“Tell me about it. Heathrow is nothing but flooded runways and power-outs.”

“I’m pretty sure I’ll blag a seat on a military flight soon enough.”

“You’re not in the military, though?”

“No, but I do a lot of work with them. I’m a climate scientist.” When he was taken he had been fresh out of a NASA institution called the Goddard Institute for Space Studies. “That’s why I was in Spain. It’s a climate-change hot spot. The interior is desiccating, turning into kind of like North Africa—or it was. All that rain wasn’t in the old models and I’ve not caught up with the latest data. I was on my way to run some ground-truth studies of geosat observations on sand-dune formations outside Madrid, when, wham, a car pulled off the road in front of me.”

“I can’t imagine how that must have felt.”

Gary said, “The first thing I thought was, how am I going to finish my job?”

Lily remembered she had felt much the same about her own abduction. It wasn’t fear that struck her at first, more irritation at being plucked out of her life, her own concerns—that and some residual shock from the Chinook crash, even though she, the crew and the passengers had all walked away from it. At first she had been sure she would be released in two weeks, or three, or four. It was some time after that that the long reality of her imprisonment had cut into her consciousness, and other, stronger reactions had started to take over. Looking back, she wondered if she would have stayed sane if she had known from the start it was going to be all of five years before she was free again.

Amanda was watching her silently.

“Sorry,” Lily said. “Woolgathering.”

“There’s things we need to talk about, Lil,” Amanda said awkwardly. “The will, for one thing.”

“Oh.” Lily hadn’t got that far, in the rather shocked half-hour since they’d arrived.

Gary stood, setting down his cup. “You know, you two need time.”

“You don’t have to go.”

He smiled. He had a broad face that could be prone to fat, a mouth that smiled easily, a freckled forehead under a receding tangle of red-brown hair. Now he covered Lily’s hand with his. “Babe, you just had some seriously bad news. Look, I’ll be fine, I’ll take a walk. It’s for the best.”

Amanda also stood. “It’s good of you, though I feel like a dreadful hostess. If you want to walk, just head down to the Fulham Road—that way.” She pointed. “You’ll reach the High Street and then the river, near Putney Bridge. There are parks, a riverside path.”

“Sounds good to me. I’ll feed the ducks. And I’ll be back here in, what, a couple of hours?”

“You’ll get soaked,” Lily said.

“Not if the pubs are open. Um, can you loan me an umbrella?”

Amanda showed him out.

The sisters sat on the tall kitchen stools, sharing a box of tissues, talking of their mother, the house, Amanda’s kids, and how Amanda hadn’t been able to get her mother buried close by; in London even the cemeteries were overcrowded.

“Mum left everything to the two of us equally. After she died it was all held up for a year; there was no news if you were alive or dead. Eventually the lawyers agreed to execute the will and release Mum’s estate. We got the keys and sold up and moved in. I mean, if we hadn’t I couldn’t have afforded to pay for the upkeep of this place, the recovery after the flood damage and whatnot. That bastard Jerry is still paying maintenance for the kids, but the bare minimum, it wouldn’t have helped with this . . .” Lily saw how distressed she was becoming, how guilty she felt. “Lil, I’m sorry. I thought you were dead. I had to sort things out.”

Lily put a hand on her sister’s arm. “Don’t. You did what had to be done.”

“You can move in here with us. Or we can sell the house and split the money, whatever you want. Although house prices have been flatlining in Fulham since the flooding.”

“We don’t have to decide that today.”

They had got some of it out of their systems by the time the front door opened and the kids came barreling in.

5

L
ily hadn’t seen her nephew and niece for a year or more before her abduction, a gap she had had five years to regret. Now here they were, grown like sunflowers, and let out of school early to see their aunt.

Kristie was still young enough to give her long-lost aunt a hug as instructed. Suddenly eleven years old, she grinned at Lily with a mouthful of steel brace. “You missed the Olympics,” she said.

Benj, thirteen, with Day-Glo yellow hair, was more diffident, and he had a dreamy expression on his face, as if he didn’t quite see what was going on around him. They both wore brilliantly colored clothes. Kristie had a bright pink backpack on her back, and chunky amber beads around her neck. The children looked like exotic birds, Lily thought, fragile creatures that didn’t belong in the grimy adult world of flood damage and rain.

“You’re home early from school,” she said. So they were; it wasn’t yet three o’clock.

Kristie shrugged. “Wet play.”

Amanda raised an eyebrow. “It’s the rain, the floods. They don’t let them out at break times, or for games. They come home fizzing with energy. Pain in the bum.”

“The Olympics, though,” Kristie said. “The Olympics were right here in London and you were stuck in Spain! Did you see it?”

“Well, no,” Lily admitted. Although the captives had thought about the London games. They marked the passing of time by such milestones, grand dates they remembered from the outside world—
this
must be happening about now, in some other place. “We didn’t have TV. Was it good?”

“I was there every day of the last week,” Kristie said proudly.

“That must have cost a lot.”

“Not really,” said Amanda. “It didn’t go too well. The weather, the drug scandals, the terrorists. In the end they were giving the tickets away to kids and OAPs, anything to fill the stadia. After all these kids will be paying for it for the rest of their lives.”

Lily asked, “So did you go, Benj?”

Benj shrugged. “For a couple of days. Wasn’t much. It was
years
ago.”

Amanda glared at him. “Are you on that damn Angel? What have I told you about using that thing when we have guests?”

“Oh, Mum—”

“I’ve heard of these things,” Lily said. “Why don’t you show me, Benj?”

He fished in his jacket pocket and produced a gadget as slim as a cigarette. It was heavy in her hand, seamless, warm from his body heat. Benj set it with unconscious skill, Lily couldn’t follow what he did, and a bright, brassy pop tune erupted inside her head: “I love you more than my phone / You’re my Angel, you’re my TV / I love you more than my phone / Put you in my pocket and you sing to me . . .” The Angel beamed its music directly into her sensorium, somehow stimulating the hearing centers remotely, without the need for wires and earpieces.

“Cor.”

“That’s ‘Phone,’” Benj said. “This year’s big hit.”

“I never heard it. Well, I wouldn’t have.”

Amanda said, “Of course everybody
has
to have one of these things. It’s a fashion statement, you know? And it’s a pain to be zapped in the street by some kid who thinks you need a headful of drums and bass.”

Benj nodded wisely. “That’s why they get taken off you at school.”

“They’re working on a video version. Imagine that!”

Lily said, “It’s amazing how much is new since I’ve been away.”

“Nothing useful,” Amanda said. “Not really. Just distractions. What we need is big engineering to keep the flood waters out. The Thames Barrier ought to have been just the start. But that’s not the fashion nowadays.”

“We did the floods at school,” Kristie said. She dumped her plastic backpack on the table and began rummaging in it. “Green studies. Like how the Fens are below sea level. When it floods there the water
ponds
. They used to pump it away or drain it, but it’s harder now the sea level has risen by a meter.”

“A meter? Really?”

Kristie looked vaguely offended, as if Lily didn’t believe her.“We did it at school,” she repeated. “They told us we should keep a scrapbook of all the changes.”

“What sort of changes?”

“Funny things that happen with the floods. Look.” She dug a handheld out of her backpack, set it on the table and tabbed through entries. Lily peered to see the tiny font.

The first entry was a short video clip about an old man who had been to every Crystal Palace away game for sixty years, he claimed.“Man and boy, rain and shine, I support the Palace.” His accent was broad, old-fashioned south London. “Rain and shine since I was ten year old, but I’d have had to swim to get to Peterborough this week. Never missed a game before, not one, what’s it coming to . . .” As a contrast Kristie had added a clip about the Cup Final being played in Mumbai; the football was either a world away, or if you followed a local team you couldn’t even get to it anymore.