The Flood (23 page)

Viola manages to come in around lunch-time; Zoe sulks for a bit, and then forgives her; it’s just that she can’t get enough of Viola.

The swimming-pool has its familiar rhythms, rhythms they like to think of as natural, forgetting order is rare and exquisite, forgetting life is rich and brief.

There are the tiny private classes before school which bring in more money than the rest of the day, then therapy sessions for the local hospital – Zoe does the therapy groups for free, because the hospital has no money – while large school groups use the rest of the pool: then at lunch-time, the club swimmers arrive, hard and lean and slathered with cream, robot beings with goggles and swim-hats and sharp black insect-clips on their noses; they power mechanically down the lanes, smooth as salmon or bucketing like speedboats as they break into glistening butterfly stroke. Then comes the sleepy afternoon, when more teachers bring classes of school-kids; Zoe and Viola can doze in their office, if they are abreast of the paperwork; they kiss or gossip, or make each other laugh, usually about the quirks of the parents. (Milly is cleaning the toilets again, singing ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’.)

It is sweet, sweet, this life together. This afternoon, because they’ve missed each other, because they quarrelled, slightly, at lunch-time, they lock their door and make tender love; small animal purrs and gasps of contentment are heard by people in the corridor: ‘Did she bring her cat in to work?’ wonders the eighteen-year-old receptionist. At four, life starts to rev up again; more private classes, more kids, more clubs, more bossy parents, cheques, enrolments. Life goes on, banal, beautiful; the swimming-pool breathes in and out; the life it supports takes its rhythms for granted; everyday, peaceful, miraculous life in a city reclaimed from the edge of disaster.

At four o’clock, May has got nowhere, back out on her own in the deathly cold stairwell. She feels she has come to the end of time. A place she never expected to go, when she had her children and lived with Alfred. She’d thought they would always be safe together. Alfred, she thinks, where are you, love? I need you now. You have to help me.

But Jehangir’s words still ring in her ears; there are thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of this cult; how to find Dirk among so many?

Should she try the higher floors? But it is too alarming, pressing on upwards, going ever further from her line of escape. On her way downstairs, she hears something shuffling below her, and slows her step, and the other feet slow, and she is afraid, but she thinks of Alfred, and, as Alfred would have done, she walks on.

What she finds, hunched against a cold damp wall, is a thin yellow girl with marks on her arm who offers to take her to the nearest two towers, saying ‘I’m the local taxi. Don’t laugh!’ The amount she mentions is pitiable. Her boat is tiny and ramshackle; there is a silt of dirty water in the bottom; the girl looks too skinny and weak to row, but she manages it, pulling with animal ferocity, the muscles in her arms long pallid cords.

May knows she is stepping off the edge of the world, lost with this child, riding low in the water, while the sun sinks down in the April sky, swooping red and large between the lines of buildings as the boat traces long unsteady arcs.

Each tower, from a distance, looks blank and menacing, but once she is inside, they are just cold, and poor, and full of posters, but her son is not there, though more than one of the pale, frowning people whose doors she knocks on claim to know him. In the end a short, tough-looking, busty Irish woman smoking a fag takes pity on her. ‘My daughter Kilda’s got in with ’em,’ she said. ‘They’re all mad as knives though, if you ask me. My daughter’s got it into her head she sees the future … You’re not going to have much luck today. There were special boats took ’em all off this morning, all wearing their robes and carrying their placards, Prods, Pakis, the whole blooming lot of them. They’ve all gone off to the Gala together. Come back tomorrow, love. You might find him. If he’s not too busy with the world ending.’

Out on the balcony above the black water the pink sunlight poured down on May. She felt terribly alone, despite her Tennyson – the last reader, at the end of the world. She had gone to the bottom of the tower and waited, after the yellow girl abandoned her. The wind licked sharply at the dazzling pink pages: a gang of young boys skimmed stones across the swell at the crimson disk of the setting sun; every so often, May had to duck, but she was afraid to tell them off. After what seemed like hours of waiting she heard the tired chug of a City Wonderama bus.

The boatman was black, and very thin, cadaverous, almost, hollow-voiced, barking with some kind of irritable infection. Round dark glasses concealed his eyes. His jacket was rusty, soiled with age. ‘’Ear me now, missis, get in,’ he coughed, but the gap between the balcony and the boat looked too wide and frightening for May to attempt, the sides rushing apart and briefly together, and she said, ‘Can’t you help me?’ but he didn’t hear, so she shouted, ‘Oi! Give us a hand!’

Cold as death, his hand gripped her like iron and pulled her across into swaying limbo. Close up, white bristles prickled out from his chin. The boat behind him was frighteningly empty; this skull-like man was her only hope.

He was waiting for something, fixed, blind-eyed, his engine stalled as the boat swung dizzily. ‘Oh – my fare,’ she realized, and reached in the pocket of her coat for money. He took it from her, without a word, and the boat set off jerkily into the beyond.

‘Me don’t nar – ma – lly answer to “Oi”,’ he said, over his shoulder, in his mournful voice, after they had travelled for a few minutes.

‘Sorry,’ said May, meekly. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Wrong,’ he hacked, fighting for breath.

‘I didn’t say anything.’ May was affronted. He didn’t have to be quarrelsome.

‘Cha!’ he sucked his teeth at her in irritation. ‘R-O-N, woman. Me nyame is
Ron.’

‘Hello, Ron. My name is May.’ Perhaps another man was going to chat her up, though he didn’t strike her as the talkative sort. She patted her coat pocket, feeling for her mirror; she would tidy her hair, while she had a minute, while the boatman had his back to her, while there was still a little light from the sun.

At six p.m., the end would begin.

Shirley said, ‘You go, honestly. I’m not quite happy about Winston.’

The sun was going down, having shone all day, waking up the sparrows on the patio. The bird-table had grown tall again, as the level of the water sank earthwards. Shirley had donned her Wellingtons and put out some crumbs from the breakfast table; birds skipped about, gilded, gladdened. She dipped through
Study Skills: Achieving Concentration,
turning her head when the blackbirds sang or the breeze blew in from the window. A day at home; a beautiful day. Time had passed slowly, gold drops dropping.

Elroy had had a good day at the hospital, a sheet of sunlight glossing his desk. They had both felt blessed; the world had got lighter.

Now suddenly the boy was ill. Elroy stood in the kitchen, undecided. He had come home early to dress for the Gala. ‘If you’re worried about him, I should stay home.’

‘I’m not sure, really … his forehead is hot. It could just be this stupid thing at school.’

‘We should have put our foot down,’ said Elroy, meaning ‘You should have put your foot down, Shirley’. Elroy’s sphere was earning the money; home and the boys were down to Shirley. Elroy was trying to be patient, but he wanted to go to the Gala with Shirley.

‘You could get a baby-sitter,’ he said. ‘What about this Kilda girl?’ But Shirley had waited so long for these children that she rarely let them out of her sight when they were poorly. She could have left the twins with his sisters if their whole relationship wasn’t so vexed. They were a close family, full of passionate loyalty, but ravaged by the past, and the deeper past, by the shadows of the shadows of unspeakable crimes. Why had his own father deserted his family? He, Elroy, would never do that. And yet his son, Dwayne, lived alone with Viola, and she made it hard for the two of them to meet.

‘Don’t want to go on my own,’ Elroy said, and was suddenly a boy, his handsome head drooping. ‘Felt good today, with the floods going down, and hearing the Gala was going ahead, and seems like we won’t have to evacuate the hospital … Forget it, I ain’t going, either. I’ll get some food in. We’ll all stay home.’

But she knew Elroy. He liked to have fun, he liked to dress up and see and be seen. She didn’t want to stop him, or cramp his style. ‘Go,’ she said. ‘Go, really. Come back and tell me all the news. Everything, mind. I want to hear what Lil Missy M was wearing. And you’re to get autographs for the boys. It’ll be fun, Elroy. It’ll be great.’

‘You really think Winston will be all right?’ When the boys were poorly Elroy veered between complacency and terror. Part of Shirley’s job was to even things out.

But today she herself was at a loss. It could all be to do with the problems at school. A teacher had decided to split the boys up. For the first time, they were in different classes. Perhaps it was her fault for not resisting.

Then just by coincidence a mother from school, Angela Lamb, rather plummy voice, had rung out of the blue and asked if Winston could come and play with her daughter Gerda. The name was definitely familiar – yes, that strange young girl at the zoo, out with her doting grandparents. Pretty little thing, red hair, precocious. Not both the boys, as usual, just Winston. ‘He’s my daughter’s special friend,’ the woman explained. ‘I suppose so,’ Shirley had answered, surprised. They fixed for tomorrow, the Gala holiday. When she told the boys, Winston was wildly excited and Franklin had cried and thrown his drink on the floor.

Shirley sighed, and tried to sound reasonable. ‘Yes. Like you say, it could be this school thing. In any case, the funny thing is, Franklin cried all day because he couldn’t be with Winston, wouldn’t eat his lunch and so on, then after they got together this evening they fought worse then they ever did in their lives. Then Winston was sick and fell asleep, and I slipped him into bed, but Franklin seems fine …’

‘If you’re sure, I’ll go.’

She hadn’t said she was sure. Why did Winston have a temperature?

‘You’re a good mother. I love you, Shirley,’ Elroy said, putting his arms round her soft thick waist, feeling her silky blonde curls against his cheek.

‘Kiss me,’ he says, and kisses her, passionately. ‘Nothing could ever pull us apart. It’s you and me for ever, Shirley. You and me. It’s all going to go right.’

(But she has a slightly absent air, she is in a different world, of maternal worry.)

Viola, Zoe notices, with dread, has the absent air she knows so well, sitting by the side of the swimming-pool not quite watching as the Junior Dolphins swim. Viola, she sees, has started to worry. And Zoe is worried; there is something in the air.

‘Zoe,’ says Viola, as Zoe knows she will. ‘I’m starting to worry about Dwayne.’

‘Why?’

‘I hardly saw him this morning. Delorice was there, he went off upstairs to be minded by this Kilda girl. She had to go out this evening.’

‘So? She must have made arrangements for the kids.’ Zoe can feel herself losing her temper, and starts breathing deeply, breathing like a swimmer; relax in the water; let it come easy.

‘She’s got a mother. A fat woman called Faith. I’m not crazy about her.’

‘Right. You had better ring her, then.’ Zoe knows quite well Viola doesn’t want to ring her. She knows Viola wants to go home.

‘I just don’t like her. She shouts at her daughter.’

‘Well, you shout at Dwayne sometimes.’

‘I want to go home,’ says Viola. Her beautiful dark eyes are fixed on the slippery glaze of the grey tiles beside the swimming-pool.

‘You didn’t get in till lunch-time, Viola.’

‘I want to go home.’ Viola never really argues, just says what she wants, with increasing conviction.

‘It’s, like – I feel – you’re letting me down.’ There; it is out; Zoe has said it. Fortunately they have a few minutes between sessions, while the old classes shower and the new ones get changed. ‘We’re in this together. It’s
our
business.’ Zoe catches her hand; holds it, hard, her white fingers trying to enlace with Viola’s dark ones, but Viola’s are still slippery from the pool.

‘Something’s spooking me,’ Viola says. ‘I can’t explain it. I’m, like, edgy.’

‘What about?’ asks Zoe, still breathing deeply, but Viola can’t answer.

‘It’s, like, instinct.’

‘Please
go and phone up.’

Yet she wants to tell Viola, I’m frightened too. It’s the way Bliss has been talking on television, the evangelist’s air of a man who believes, whose mission to convince himself has been too successful. A man like that could do anything.

And if we’re frightened, we should be together. But Viola doesn’t want us to be together. Viola only cares about Dwayne.

The first girl comes out, shivering, skinny, in a yellow bikini she’s far too young for. The parents have no sense, thinks Zoe, remembering how little sense her own mother had, how the nagging nearly put her off swimming for life, and then her mind returns to Viola, her pointless worrying. No fucking sense.

Life starts to crack open; nothing makes sense. Zoe knows she is starting to lose her temper; if she loses her temper she will shout and scream and Viola will never love her again; if she loses her temper the world might end.

She sees there is no point arguing, no point persuading, nothing to say; but just as Zoe decides to give up, a voice comes struggling up from her chest, from the place of deep breaths, the helpless place where her feelings are too raw to be silent: ‘Why do you always put Dwayne before me?’

Viola looks at her, silenced, stricken. More of the children are emerging from the changing rooms, pushing, giggling, expectant. ‘I love Dwayne,’ she says, simply.

Zoe wants to sob, to howl, to hit her. ‘You’d better go,’ she says, and turns away.

She teaches the next lesson in a fugue state, closing her mind to the pain in her body, grinning and encouraging on automatic pilot, wishing them away, wishing it over, her eyes darting constantly up to the clock-face. At half-past five she has a twenty-minute break. At half-past five she can slip away and weep.