Submersion (11 page)

But it didn’t last. Eventually, something happened and Albert moved on, usually leaving me behind. This time, however, Albert had less of a say in the matter.

There’s a reason I recalled him when Jessie and I visited the remains of the Atrium complex. It wasn’t just a memory triggered by its skeletal, steel remains. There was another connection, a connection with Elinor – they were both missing.

Just like my missing twelve year-old, one day Albert was there – selling movie memorabilia and inviting his selected clique to watch art-house golden oldies in his tiny theatre, and the next he was gone, supposedly swept away in a freak accident.

Supposedly drowned.

‘Everything alright?’ Jessie asked, breaking into my thoughts.

‘Fine,’ I told him, and tipped my head at the exit from the Atrium’s remains. I didn’t tell him anything else about the old man – not that time. Maybe another, though, when the time was right. ‘Shall we keep going? I don’t think we’ll find anything else here today.’

We travelled west for another hour or so, but there was little left to explore there. The area was pretty much uninhabited. The further out we went, the worst the long-term impact of the flooding. Beyond the town and its surrounding residential area, there were few buildings remaining; many of these hadn’t been converted or protected after the flooding, and the onslaught of the salty water had led to severe decay, bricks and mortar simply crumbled away. We cautiously checked out a few of the houses that had managed to survive, mooring nearby, treading carefully on their fragile foundations. But we had little hope there. If somehow Elinor had survived and made it this far, there was little to sustain that existence. We had, effectively, sailed into wilderness.

‘Time to go back, start again tomorrow?’ Jessie suggested, as we unmoored his speed boat again. Ahead, there was horizon and more decay, and the sky was darkening. ‘She won’t be expecting anything, you know. Agnes. She’s not expecting us to bring her back.’

‘What was she expecting then?’ I asked, suddenly feeling the weight of hopelessness our task was carrying.

‘That we look,’ he told me, starting up the engine.

The following day, we went south.

South, where the remains of local industry was located. Where the Great Drowning started. Where the mighty wave that doused landscape came crashing in.

It began about a mile from Cedar Street, once the residential hub had petered away and, like the city centre of the west, it was an echo of former glories. Not the museum piece the Atrium appears to be, the obliterated south had been completely re-built after the flood. In the past, the area was a dense forest of manufacturing outfits, the landscape populated by factory after factory, engineering plant after engineering plant. Beyond the immediate area was the Black Sea and, in years gone, a rich source of oil was discovered and a rig constructed, bringing further wealth and employment to the city. However, like all natural sources, the supply eventually ran out, a long time before the flooding, I’m led to believe. So, the rig became our first artefact, you might say; the first dinosaur for our museum, a glimpse of the future. The factories and industrial buildings had also diminished in the years prior to the floods, competition from other cities or countries putting many out of business and the wave of destruction that came with the flood was simply seen as the final clean-up job – a washing away of the remaining debris.

But a city can’t survive without some kind of industry. People need food, clothing, supplies to live and build with. So, aside from our boats, masks and protective clothing, this was where the authorities put their real effort and money. Not all of it was government owned or funded. The few business people who had kept going also bought units out there to continue with their ventures. Jessie and I had been involved in some of the construction work. And, as we sped past the streets of houses and broke through to the industrial side, we came closer to that part. I’m not sure either of us felt pride in what we were part of, but there was a sense of helping to stabilise the city.

‘There it is,’ Jessie announced, seeing the rebuilt manufacturing horizon ahead. ‘Think we’ll have more luck looking here?’

I didn’t answer, just stared ahead at the grey, functional skyline before me.

It was no work of architectural beauty; it was one hundred percent purpose and zero percent art.
Colossal, dense slabs of grey concrete appeared to float on the water, but in fact were held in place by steel columns that were drilled deep beneath the water, stabilising the foundations. Built upon these slabs were a series of warehouses, build with corrosion-resistant materials, and inside these our revamped local industry had been reborn.

‘We could poke around, ask a few questions?’ Jessie suggested, but we both knew we had to be careful. The police supposedly had this in hand; if there was a crime to examine, they would indeed investigate it. If, in turn, we were seen to cover their territory, to question their integrity, that was a whole different wave of trouble.

‘It’s one thing to look around abandoned buildings,’ I reminded Jessie.

‘But another to ask questions?’ he completed.

I nodded a
yes.

‘Especially on government owned property. If they’ve got her here-.’

‘If-.’

‘Okay,
if,
but if they do, they aren’t going to hand her over. I don’t think she’s here, anyway.’

‘What
do
you think, Tris?’

We’d stopped the boats, just where the floating, industrial warehouses came to an end. Beyond, there was a blurred, grey horizon – water and sky washing into each other. Should we go any further, I asked myself? The terrain ahead was vast, bleak and unchartered, to most. That she might have got this far, that Elinor – for reasons I couldn’t comprehend – brought herself this far, sailed into that opaque horizon and beyond; it was unthinkable.

‘What do you think, Tris?’ Jessie’s repeated question drew me back.

‘I think we’re wasting our time here,’ I answered, composing myself, banishing my fears short term. ‘There’s nothing to see and any questions we have can’t be asked, or won’t be answered. And there’s Agnes to think of.’

The government office Agnes worked in was amongst these floating buildings, at the edge of the water - the Black Sea, as it was known locally. I thought about what Agnes had said to me, about the people who put their lives in danger there, catching seafood there, scratching at a living. I knew she’d been asking questions, questioning their safety, suggesting the authorities intervene. She’d wanted me to get involved, too. But you had to choose your fights; you had to know when to keep your head down and when to put it above the parapet.  Agnes’ choices were not always the wisest. I thought of what she’d said about the school:
I complained about the testing and now she’s gone, Tristan.
I tried to dismiss the link; tried not to embrace the possibility that Agnes had a direct hand in Elinor’s fate.

‘I don’t want to put her job in jeopardy, not unnecessarily,’ I eventually said, plainly, to my companion. ‘It’s too high a risk, and I don’t think Elinor is here. It’s not logical.’

Yet, none of it was logical.

‘Home then?’ Jessie suggested, and re-started the speedboat’s engine without further response.

Day three took us in another direction and brought with it a discovery at home.

We went north. North was home to junk – a general dumping ground, where the water becomes shallower, a mere splash on the landscape compared to the depths of Cedar Street, although nowhere was completely dry. And when I say dumping ground, it is no underestimation – mile upon mile of discarded items, rotting and rusting away. Years of waste have accumulated there. In part, this was household waste – mountains and mountains of the stuff. Once a month, the authorities sent round tugboats to collect our garbage, dragging black bags that bob along the river-roads from our streets to the dumping ground. But, like the hollowed out Atrium in the west, this was also an echo of diminished affluence, a place where wrecks of the past hung out and sulked with loss and rust.

This was where the train graveyard was, a favourite haunt of Elinor and Billy’s. We knew they went there, even though it was strictly forbidden by their mothers. Situated about half a mile into the landfill site, the graveyard was home not only to abandoned train carriages and torn up rail track, it was also the resting place of other, no-longer-functioning vehicles: buses, coaches, bicycles, and car after car after car. Upon arrival, you instantly sensed why it had appealed to the kids, why they had been drawn to this particular junk yard, and I instantly shared the anticipation of adventure they too would have sensed, that urge to leap in, to run, hide, explore.

As I stood before it, about to enter and explore myself – for clues of Elinor’s existence, in hope of finding her in a hidey-hole, with a clear reason for running away – I questioned why I hadn’t come here first. It seemed the obvious – most ideal – place for her to come.

The layout of the graveyard, the way the different vehicles had been set out, suggested order in an otherwise stretch of chaos. On the outskirts, there wasn’t much organisation to comprehend; vehicles were dumped at random, bikes adjacent to old skateboards, a car without its wheels crushed into the back end of a discoloured, white van, all resting in a shallow soup of putrid water. Engine parts, rusting exhaust pipes, doors, wheels, headlight fixtures, old batteries – initially, the vehicle debris was scattered randomly. But, towards the centre, someone had created a sense of symmetry. Cars of a similar make were stacked together, three-high, in rows of six, with a pathway of space in between each block, allowing you to walk around the stacks. There was order to the abandoned buses too, with a whole waterlogged field dedicated to housing these. They were parked back-to-back, side-to-side, as if someone had simply driven them in there and packed them in as tightly as possible.

The old, derailed trains had an altogether different arrangement, but the effect was just as impressive, if not more so. If an accident, involving multiple trains, coming from multiple angles, had been set up to look like a work of art – that was how the central part of the vehicle graveyard appeared. Convoys of carriages were crashed into each other, crawling over or under, like monstrous, metallic snakes, twisting round, some exposing their bellies, revealing the mechanisms attached to their undercarriages, others remained upright, pompous survivors, triumphing over anything that got in their way.

‘She could easily be here,’ I told Jessie, when we drew up at the dump.

‘This is too close to home though,’ Jessie reasoned, cutting the engine. ‘She’d have made it home, Tris. She wouldn’t need to hide out, not this close to us.’

‘But we don’t know what happened to her – what
really
happened. If we chose to distrust everything we’ve been told so far,
anything
could have happened. The school might be using the collapsed platform as a cover for their naturally assumed guilt, the authorities, the police, they might have another reason for lying. What if Elinor is missing for a completely different reason – not related to anything we suspect so far? What if it’s closer to home, trouble with a friend or with family?’

‘One of us?’

It’s only as I said it aloud that I realised I’d been thinking this way at all.

‘You’re saying one of us might have a hand in this?’ Jessie repeated, his voice breaking with some disbelief. ‘Who, Tris? Who? Not me or you – we were with each other at the point she went missing. Agnes – if you’re looking at everyone – was at work. The rest of the family, well, they’ll have alibis.’

‘We weren’t.’

‘Sorry?’

‘We weren’t together. I dropped her off, then I made it to yours. There’s a gap when we can’t give each other alibis.’

Jessie sighed, deeply, exhaling something between a laugh and cross grunt.

‘Assuming that you’ve confirmed your own innocence, are you accusing me?’

I shrugged, suddenly doubting my every word.

‘It’s just that I don’t know and I don’t understand. Nothing is adding up, Jessie. Nothing that we’ve heard or seen – it doesn’t add up at all. What if it is all unrelated? What if this is something domestic and we simply can’t see it? Not everything has to be sinister and underhand, does it? Not everything has to have a conspiracy attached?’

‘Are you asking or telling me, Tris? You see, if my memory serves me correctly, you’re the man with the sinister stories, you’re the man whose head is full of conspiracy theories. You’re the man who has been there – Agnes, Esther and I, we were the lucky ones. So, Tris, when it comes to this stuff, I take my lead entirely from you.’

This wasn’t strictly true – Jessie wasn’t entirely undamaged by his past and he did have some direct insight into the atrocities that lurked in the past. But, like me, he chose not to entertain them.

He stayed with the boat, whilst I’d waddled through the dump towards the train graveyard on my own, hampered by the clumsy outdoor gear I was wearing. But it did me good to slow down; it gave me a chance to reflect on my ranting, to give it some perspective.

Even with the gas mask shielding my face, muffling my vision a little, there was no protecting one of my senses: smell. The stench of decay – rotting food and other waste – was overwhelming there; bad as it was everywhere else, here it was worse. Here it hit you physically, like a dense, intoxicating punch at the senses. As I splashed through the shallow waters, I wondered how the likes of Elinor and Billy had made it through the opening of the landfill area; the rancid odour would have been sufficient to end the escapades of the hardiest children. Yet, once I ventured further, reaching the start of the train graveyard section, the sovereignty of adventure overruled any other sensation.