The Flood (13 page)

It was a metre across, a burning bush, a wheel of glory where the soul could be wracked. ‘A sign, a sign,’ voices whispered. Bruno, in a convulsive gesture, suddenly wrenched his hands away and wiped them, frantic as crabs, on his vestments, clawing the fabric up towards him, but Kilda’s halo still burned dark red.

‘Testify,’ Milly and Samuel were urging. ‘Now you must testify, Sister Kilda.’

Moira sat furious, gnawed by envy, tearing fragments off a piece of lined paper.

Kilda looked surprised, and faintly embarrassed, but everyone was staring, which she quite liked. She’d felt like dropping it all today, with the mud, and the rain, and those fit boys jeering – boys never usually jeered at Kilda – and no lunch to speak of, and the sick-making dead birds they were supposed to hump back to the Towers with them, and that silly old woman on her case, though the Brothers and Sisters had been especially nice to her.

‘I could, like, tell you what’s going to happen,’ she said. ‘To each of you, I mean. I can do that. I can see the future. My mother was the seventh of a seventh of a seventh –’

‘Come with me, Sister Kilda,’ Bruno Janes said, his pale eyes fixing her into silence, his pale claw lighting on her shoulder, and she got up, hypnotized, and followed him through to the sanctuary under the stained-glass dove.

Milly and Samuel led praises for the others while Bruno and Kilda stood apart, in the shadows.
Special
,
chosen
, the words flayed Moira, who was agonized with jealousy; they pretended to be holy, but really they were sexual. She was sitting with her back to the sanctuary, but she kept craning over her shoulder to watch them, pulling at her hair, which was tied into a rope, a dusty rope of dying matter. Once she had had shining red hair like Kilda. All she could hear was the young woman muttering – almost chattering, her tone matter of fact – in a virtually constant stream of sound. Then it stopped, and Bruno turned towards them.

Silence fell. ‘Praise the Lord,’ he said.

‘Praise him,’ they chorused, in ragged passion.

‘He has seen fit to grant Sister Kilda a vision. In his goodness he has comforted us; he has given a sign to his people. As it says in the One Book, Brothers and Sisters: God blessed Noah and his sons and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase, and fill the earth. The fear and dread of you shall fall upon all wild animals on earth, on all birds of heaven, on everything that moves upon the ground and all fish in the sea; they are given into your hands. Every creature that lives and moves shall be food for you; I give you them all, as once I gave you all green plants …” And so you see, my Brothers, that on a day when some of you doubted the fitness of my teaching, that we should go to the Gardens and kill and eat, for some of our number were hungry, God has reminded us, through Sister Kilda, that every creature that lives shall be food for us. Even as I said, even as I taught you.’

‘Amen,’ Milly called, and ‘Yea, Father,’ Samuel roared.

‘And this is for a purpose, God’s great purpose,’ Bruno continued. ‘For when cities fall, and dominions and palaces come to nothing, our day will come, we shall fill God’s earth. You must be fruitful and increase, swarm throughout the earth and rule over it.’

Now Samuel and Milly’s alleluias crescendo-ed, and even Moira found herself shouting ‘Glory, glory, praise his name,’ and the hot tears ran down her dry cheeks.

It was Moira who had questioned Father Bruno’s instructions about killing the creatures of God in the Gardens. But now she bowed and yielded to him, for she was no longer lost and lonely, she was no longer demeaned, ignored, she was flying with them, God’s chosen people, and all things good would be granted her: greenness and fruitfulness; the kind light of heaven in which her wasted life would be washed, in which all her hurts could be known and forgiven; the birds in the air and the beasts of the field; she would have dominion over warm living things, they would come to shelter against her wracked body, she would feel their soft coats and their small hearts pulsing. Now her barren womb is become a garden; she will be fruitful and increase; it is not too late, for the Great Day is coming; ‘Amen,’ she calls, stroking her belly and weeping, ‘amen, Brothers, amen, amen.’

Kilda sat down looking pleased at first, and joining eagerly in the acclaim, but then, as she realized Bruno had finished, as he started his parting benediction, she briefly looked aggrieved, or puzzled. She almost looked as if she might get up and say something, but there was no room for her to say anything; when Bruno was there, his spiritual power lay over them like a net of white ice, leaving his disciples locked, synchronized, lost in the steely perfection of grace.

As they shut the big wooden door behind them, and moved away in ones and twos into the drenching rain and the fading daylight, Kilda caught up with Brother Dirk. Some of the Brothers and Sisters were afraid of Dirk, with his twisted mouth and shadowy past, though Father Bruno told them God had brought Brother Dirk to the fold. Still, their fear judged; he had been in prison. But Kilda, who had grown up in the Towers and gone to school with the sons of thieves and killers, just saw a white bloke, poor, like her, not black, not posh, not foreign, not educated – more like her, in fact, than most of the rest.

‘Dirk,’ she said, ‘That was weird. It wasn’t, you know, what I told Bruno.’

‘What wasn’t?’ said Dirk, only half-listening because he was trying to gauge the depth of the puddles.

‘That stuff he said about us increasing, and filling the earth, and like ruling all the animals. He got all that from the Bible. It wasn’t what I actually said to him.’

‘What did you say to him, then?’

Kilda was trailing her long velvet scarf in the water. A long time ago, in another life, it had belonged to Mrs Segall’s posh bitch daughter. Sometimes Mum got nice stuff from there. ‘I just said all the things I knew about people. I’m, like, a fortune-teller. I’ve got the sight.’

‘You’re winding me up,’ said Dirk, flatly.

‘I’m not.’ Kilda felt happy, suddenly. This was something that she could really do, unlike the subjects they had taught at school, though her mother thought she just made things up. Things she was good at made her feel better. ‘Have a polo,’ she said, on a generous impulse.

Dirk stared at her transfixed. Was she having a laugh? But the mints still hung from her hand in front of him.

‘All right,’ he said, feeling suddenly shy. The peppermint was making his eyes go prickly. He stuffed three polos into his mouth and choked them down before she changed her mind.

‘Go on then,’ she said, grinning at him. ‘Ask me something. I’m good at this.’

‘Go on then, tell me something about – I dunno. Can you do the past, as well? Cos if you do the past, I’ll know if you’re right. You could say complete bollocks about the future. Not being funny,’ he added, to be nice, with something he hoped was a friendly smile, because he had noticed they did it a lot: the Brothers and Sisters always smiled at people.

‘Are you all right?’ Kilda asked him, alarmed. ‘Your face went really weird, for a moment.’ But she wanted to get on with her fortune-telling. ‘Say who you want me to tell you about. Past, future, I can do both.’

Dirk thought of himself, naturally. But his past was something to avoid with people. The Brothers and Sisters had a policy: ‘Total Truth and Total Forgiveness’. It couldn’t actually apply to him, though. Some of them knew what he had done, in outline – that he had been forced to defend himself – but they didn’t seem to want him to go into detail, and that, of course, was fine by him. They all held hands and confessed their sins, all except Father Bruno, naturally, but Dirk’s sins seemed to be off the scale – there wasn’t a single murderer among the lot of them, which was disappointing, given the numbers.

The future was a problem, too. He’d never been able to imagine his future, which was why the Last Days provided the answer. This was the way it was going to end, for him and God and everyone else. That was where all his enemies were headed, the immigrants, the coloureds, the filth-bags in prison who had made him do things he could never forget, his sister’s husband, his brother, his sister. His fucking awful mother, who never really loved him. When they got to God’s Kingdom, so Bruno said, it would all be made up to them, everything bad, all the unfairnesses, the hurts, the insults. And the wicked would be scourged, which meant whipped till they bled, then tipped into the burning lake. (Dirk loved the idea of a lake, burning, black with his enemies, trying to get out. What a laugh he’d have, looking down from heaven!) Though Bruno wouldn’t promise how soon it would be. The important thing was to be ready, and Dirk was ready, now he was a Brother, and had, at long last, a proper family. Kilda wasn’t bad: he didn’t mind her. She didn’t seem to hate him, like his real sister.

But now Dirk began to feel a bit unhappy that Kilda had her own ideas about the future. Which made you think it was a long way off, the things he was looking forward to, the flaying and scourging, the milk and honey, though he personally meant to stay off the milk, which had made him throw up ever since he was a baby, when Mum didn’t breastfeed him, so she said, because all her milk had gone to the two others, and so he just got silver top, which nearly killed him. That was May for you; she was a crap mother.

He thought of someone at random to ask about. ‘Thingy,’ he said. ‘You know. That white woman who goes around with the big ugly coloured bloke. African, I think he is.’

‘Milly?’ Kilda said. ‘She’s with Samuel right? Samuel’s quite fit, as a matter of fact. Well she’s going to marry him, isn’t she? I can see that.’ She thought for a while; she appeared to be listening, and every so often nodding and smiling, or having a little chat to herself. (Dirk thought, she’s got to be a bit mental. But Father Bruno seemed to think she was holy.)

Kilda continued, full of confidence. ‘They’re going to have a little boy, called Saul. And a grandson called Luke, I can only see one, but then he has, like, a whole tribe of children.’ She was off, then, chattering, smiling away, going on and on like she had in church, ‘… and it all, like, happens, a long way away,’ she finished triumphantly. Her cheeks were all pink, like she’d been really clever.

‘Well done,’ said Dirk, after a short pause. He had learned people liked it when you praised them. He couldn’t give a monkey’s about Milly and Samuel. ‘So how about you?’ he said. ‘If you’re so clever – I mean, being so clever – can’t you tell what’s going to happen to yourself?’

‘No,’ said Kilda. ‘I don’t want to. Perhaps it’s unlucky, I don’t know –’ She paused, and seemed to be thinking, for a moment, then frowned, and rubbed her forehead. ‘Can’t see anything for you, either. I can just see, you know, night, and, like, floods. And you’re in the Towers, I think, with Father Bruno. There’s someone else there who’s been very wicked but – I’ve got a headache, I can’t see her face. Then someone turns up who really upsets you. Then –’ She clutched at her chest as if in pain.

The bus came along at that moment. Listing heavily, packed to the gills, wallowing and splashing through the water, its headlights briefly illuminated them, the tall beautiful girl with her clumsy, heavy body, the grim little man with his twisted face, the two of them trapped in a circle of light where the lines of rain were like golden wire, a moment’s cage they might never escape, with the cold and dark of the flood all round them.

‘I expect I’ll be famous though,’ she said, as they fought their way through to a space at the back.

She’s really up herself, Dirk thought. But then she said something he would never forget. Just as he was starting to hate her, she stopped him. ‘You will be too. We’ll both be saints.’

Kilda included him, she let him in.

When Rhuksana came back at the end of break, the level of noise in the class-room was normal, and two of the boys were climbing up the window-bars, with others watching and urging them on, so at first she didn’t notice the little vortex of quiet around the reading corner. Half a dozen children sat on the felt mat, and a dozen more stood near, leaning inwards, and the centre of the stillness was Gerda’s voice.

‘That child is amazing,’ she told Mohammed later, as they sat eating the Chinese takeaway he had picked up to save her cooking. They had married for love, with their parents’ blessing, though Mohammed’s mother would have liked him to pick a wife from Loya: foreign Muslim women could be very independent. ‘She was reading them
The Snow Queen
, it’s a Hans Andersen story which has her name in, and you wouldn’t believe some of the ones who were listening, Darren, for example, who can never sit still.’

‘The power of imagination,’ said Mohammed. He had been brought up for the first sixteen years of his life in Loya, so he had missed a lot of books, though his nurse had told him, every night, magical stories about the village. He didn’t know Hans Andersen, or Grimm, or Laing. When he was sent abroad, to go to school in the city, he started to read: Dickens, Melville, Austen, Flaubert, Tolstoy. Mohammed had three degrees in literature. ‘They don’t value imagination, at Headstone.’

Headstone had wanted a Muslim on their staff. They hoped to start an Islamic list, which would surely save them from terrorist attacks, though Mohammed laughed and said no one would attack them. (A few of them were clearly afraid of him, particularly after the bomb on the subway supposed to have been planted by Loyan activists. The morning after, no one would look at him. He wanted to say, ‘I detest violence’; he wanted to say, ‘This is un-Islamic’; he wanted to say, ‘Perhaps it was planted by someone wanting to make everyone hate us’; he wanted to say, ‘Sometimes they come to the Mosque, people like this, and everyone avoids them, because it’s like a virus, and we don’t want to catch it’; he wanted to shout at their averted faces, ‘Of course it’s appalling to anyone intelligent, but my country is being bombed every night. Why doesn’t everyone think
that
’s appalling?’ He said none of these things, it was too embarrassing. Saying nothing, he suffered acutely.)

He didn’t much want to do an Islamic list, since so many of his favourite authors were western. He asked if he could try to revitalize the backlist, which had some classic writers from the days when the publisher was Head & Stone, Limited. With marketing, he thought they could sell well again. But no one listened, he was just Mohammed, a new acquisition they were rather proud of whose presence took care of ‘the Islamic issue’. They didn’t know how much they shocked him with their trivial banter, their callowness, the way they thought of authors as disposable cash-cows.