The Flood (25 page)

Here’s Lottie, on cue, arriving with Harold, in a pale velvet coat like frosted cream, her cheeks plumped out with designer hormones, her curls a crisp cap of sculpted gold, smiling, smiling for the cameras as she glides up the steps on Harold’s arm; smiling for the unexpected joy of today, smiling with happiness for Harold; smiling for the sex that they had in the bath; smiling as if she had never been hurt, never lost her youth or Hopper’s sunlit morning; and that shining smile on a face that can’t see them (but Lottie truly can’t see the protesters, she’s blinded by the flashes of megawatt lights) drives them to a frenzy of righteous hatred. They scream ‘One Way! One Way!’ and she flinches: is she driving up a one-way street again? Ah well, it has never stopped her before. Lottie will go wherever she wants to. And Harold is looking particularly handsome; usually melancholy and distinguished, tonight he looks rubicund and rich; onlookers guess that he’s a lawyer or banker, when he is just flushed with happiness; Harold’s had his phone-call from the publisher; Harold bounds up the steps a success.

Bruno is glad to examine the guilty before they are flung into the fiery pit, though Samuel and Milly, who have recently been quieter, hanging back from Bruno, unsure about Dirk, are trying to restrain the Brothers and Sisters: ‘“Judgement is mine,” saith the Lord,’ cries Samuel. ‘The Lord will judge in his own good time.’

All the protesters have come tonight. The anti-war lot are out in force, with whistles and hooters and drums and megaphones, furious, howling with their longing for justice, trying to deafen Mr Bliss into peacefulness. ‘BLISS OUT!’ say dozens of rainbow banners of the blissed-out anti-drug-law protesters. A long-haired boy waves ‘GALA IS LA-LA’. ‘WHY DO YOU NEED TWO SKINS?’ scream the placards of the anti-fur protesters. ‘DISS THE BLISS!’ shout the teen-friendly slogans of the anti-government campaign. ‘BLISS A DEAD LOSS’ shouts a hand-lettered poster. ‘PISS OFF BLISS’ says a turquoise banner. (President Bliss has made further allegations, that afternoon, about sabotage, which he claims ‘has endangered the safety of our nation, and is a clear and present danger’: the airforce, already flying nightly missions, is promising ‘swift, resolute action’; tonight, it is confidently expected, an escalation of the war will be announced, though luckily, it’s happening a long way off; nothing to depress the mood of the Gala.)

The politicians who stream to the party in official cars and gleaming suits are feeling liberated from the floods; they sink their rears into the soft leather, they snicker and wisecrack on their phones, they give salty quotes to the newspapers, they wave and give thumbs-up signs to each other. Not many believe in Mr Bliss’s war. Now the worst of the flooding is officially over, Bliss’s own party can turn on him. Life is going to be fun again.

There are other, quieter protests, held by still figures standing at the back of the crowd packed in round Government Palace. ‘WAR REFUGEES’ one banner says, and dozens of Loyans stand stiffly beside it, carrying big photos of their ruined homeland, carrying placards with the names of the dead. ‘NO HOME, NO MONEY, NO HOPE’ a thin-faced woman has written in crooked black letters on a piece of card. It hurts her to see so many happy people, it hurts her to know they don’t see her. She thinks that the people invited to the Gala must all have nice homes, and hope, and money, she believes they are smiling, not just for the cameras, which go off round the foyer of Government Palace like a lightning storm against the indigo sky, but at themselves, in invisible mirrors that whisper to them what their lives amount to; theirs are enormous, hers is nothing.

Only the
crème de la crème
have been chosen, the people the city defines itself by, the rich, the celebrities, the people who count, the styles and the faces that are known and copied, stars, actors, leaders, beauties, all the names baptized in the tabloids, famous chefs and fashionistas, ballet-dancers and fancy hairdressers, horoscope-writers and football-players, game-show hosts and TV presenters, all the showmen who make people happy, plus a salting of ‘real people’ like Elroy, people who have climbed to the top of something worthy, firemen, ambulancemen, doctors, police, who are glad and embarrassed to see the celebrities, staring at them hungrily, sharply assessing, wanting to laugh, to sneer, to wave, sharing space-time with them at last, the dream-figures, the screen-figures … And yet, they are proud the celebs are here. All the guests have a glow, as they mount the stairs, their shoe-soles massaged by the rouge-red carpet, and caressive little thoughts flit around like bluebirds – ‘everyone who’s anyone is here, my dear’ – and
they
are here, thank God they have made it; the bluebirds of happiness perch on their shoulders; against long odds, home safe, home free; anyone who’s anyone, my dear, is here.

‘Have you got a permit to do that, sir?’ A uniformed man asked Ian McGregor, who has set up an easel near the parapet of the gallery overlooking the stairs, commanding a perfect view of new arrivals.

‘Absolutely.’

He looked hard at Ian: decent dinner-jacket. But reddened cheeks, as if he lives outside, and something not right about the mouth. ‘Could I see your invitation, sir?’

Ian produced it, left-handed, yawning, without pausing in the sketch he was doing. ‘Friend of Mr Bliss’s, in fact,’ he drawled, his eyes never lifting from the line which unscrolled with complete assurance from the point of his pencil.

His lack of concern convinced the flunkey. ‘Right, sir. Sorry, just doing my job,’ the man apologized, and turned away. ‘Perhaps I can bring you a drink, sir?’

‘Well, I’m working – just a glass of water.’

‘Thought we’d all had enough water, sir.’

Ian chuckled, obediently, and went on drawing.

As soon as the man was gone, Ian’s head swivelled. He resumed watching, with amused interest, something odd going on at a nearby window. A dark-haired, wild-eyed, female figure was hauling itself up outside the glass; first the head, staring through and then disappearing, rising and falling like a cuckoo in a clock; then slender shoulders and golden arms, ringed like a pigeon in thick silver bangles; then finally a curvaceous torso, but it was immediately apparent to Ian that the girl was stuck; she couldn’t open the window.

There weren’t many people in the gallery. Soon the meeting and greeting would be over and the mass of the crowd would push up the stairs. With a quick glance around, Ian strolled across, saw the eyes out in the night open wide with fear, a convulsive attempt to get away, but he pushed up the window, swiftly but gently, saw there were two of them, tall, pretty, young girls staring and shivering with terror as they tried to cling on to the window-sill. Raising his eyebrows, he pulled them inside.

They fell in, gracelessly, giggling with fear. They were half-naked, in party-clothes. He helped them up; their hands were very cold.

‘Are you going to chuck us out?’ Lola asked, recovering her confidence (which never took long, for she had drunk it in with her mother’s breast-milk). Hearing Lola’s bold voice, Gracie stopped shivering.

‘Why should I do that?’ Ian asked, coolly. ‘I’m sure you both have invitations.’

‘Are you a proper guest?’ Gracie asked him, peering.

‘What a rude question,’ he said to her. Just at that moment the flunkey arrived in his immaculate jacket, bearing the water on a silver tray with a snow-white napkin. ‘Could you bring my two friends champagne?’ Ian asked him. ‘Come and see my pictures, girls,’ he said.

Lola had fallen in love on the spot, but Gracie wasn’t quite on Ian’s wave-length. He seemed to be taking them too much for granted.

‘We haven’t really got invitations,’ she said.

‘Shocking,’ he said, waving his finger at her.

‘We’re anti-capitalist protesters.’ It sounded rather silly, said like that.

‘Prove it,’ he said, and to Lola, showing her the sketch on top of his sheaf of paper, ‘What do you think of that?’

It was a picture of a troupe of monkeys, capering across a stage, grinning.

Gracie was tugging at Ian’s arm. ‘Look,’ she said, rather sulkily, and pulled her teensy silk jacket apart to reveal a tinier, tighter top, and conical breasts, lettered in red: ‘GLOBAL CAPITAL IS BUST’. ‘Do you think it’s witty?’ she asked, anxious.

‘You look very nice. And … You, um, make your point,’ he said gravely. ‘But better do it up. People might look.’

‘My pants say ‘BLISS IS A ARSE’, said Lola.

‘
AN
arse,’ he said. ‘You don’t have to show me.’ But he smiled at her as if he liked her.

‘Aren’t you going to draw the people here?’ she asked him, looking at his sketches of monkeys.

‘Oh, I did that this evening, from life,’ said Ian. ‘I’m doing a sequence, actually. I’m calling it “Party Animals”. What are you girls? Mountain goats?’

‘My mother’s here somewhere,’ said Lola, anxious.

‘So’s mine,’ said Gracie, clutching her. ‘We’ll both get in terrible trouble if they see us. But everyone who’s anyone is here.’

Ian gazed at her quizzically. ‘So they tell me. But I’m sure there must be other people somewhere.’

He turned back to his easel and started work, frowning down into the crowded foyer.

‘I think you girls should go and look around. Lil Missy M is here.’

People were beginning to come upstairs. In the soft bright light from the high chandeliers, under the opalescent glaze of good makeup, everyone looked like film stars; the women had shining, perfect skin, set off by thick milky swags of pearls or dewy filigree wreaths of diamonds, borrowed stones, spectacularly bright; no one was grey, or dusty; the colours of the clothes were luminous, brilliant, the colours of flowers against a summer sky, honeysuckle, morning glory, bougainvillaea, the best dyes on the best fabrics, wool, cashmere, satin, silk, the clear, confident colours of money. Their hair was set like sculpted glass; their nails smooth as bevelled gem-stones. Lola and Gracie watched, impressed, before they remembered they were here to protest.

Everyone was slightly larger than life, laughing more loudly, smiling more radiantly, turning their heads every second or so, so they didn’t miss a celebrity. Whispers ran across the shining heads like winds in a field of summer corn. Whole golden rows trembled and quivered. Lola and Gracie darted out like butterflies, following the rumours, skimming the breeze (and older women tracked the two girls with their eyes, envying the silvery youthful something which makeup artists could never copy).

‘There’s Angela Lamb,’ somebody hissed, and the name repeated like a water-mark, ‘Angela Lamb’, ‘Angela Lamb’. ‘And that must be her little girl.’

But something wasn’t going quite right. ‘Gerda,’ called a woman’s voice, polite, at first, then louder, ‘Gerda’, then almost screaming,
‘Gerda, will you come back here!’

Some puppyish thing was charging through the flowers, an unseen whirlwind, a little sprinter, half-knocking people over as it ran.

‘It’s the painter man, Mummy,’ Gerda was shouting. ‘Look, look, it’s the painter man!’

Angela blundered after her, apologizing as she went, suddenly afraid of losing her daughter; there were too many people; too few children, something she had never noticed before when she’d taken Gerda to grown-up parties, but this was a new Gerda, today, a six-year-old tyrant, an adolescent.

Gerda dived for Ian’s knees. He looked up, startled, from the pen-and-ink sketch he was doing of a group of vicious penguins. She smiled up at him, confident, but for an instant he didn’t know her, used as he was to seeing her windswept and scruffy at the zoo, tugging along her grandparents; he looked down at her shining red hair, her little dress of scarlet satin, her wide blue eyes, staring up at him, and suddenly had it: ‘Hello, Gerda … I’m glad to see
you.
Have you brought your grandparents?’

‘This is my mummy, Angela.’

A blonde woman shot through the crowd, flushed, ruffled, in brilliant pink, her matching boa sliding off one shoulder. ‘Gerda, don’t run away like that!’

‘Mum, it’s the painter man from the zoo.’

‘I’m sorry,’ panted Angela to Ian, registering a handsome man, smiling rather artificially as she tried to conspire with him against her daughter: ‘she seems to think she knows you.’

‘Oh, I know Gerda,’ he said, coolly, and looked Angela up and down, not entirely agreeably, then went back to sketching, with fluid movements, men in dinner-jackets, human penguins, waddling self-importantly across a ballroom.

Gerda watched, intent, as the drawing took shape.

‘Do you mind us watching?’ Angela asked, in a vain attempt to make him look at her. ‘I’m Angela Lamb, the writer, by the way.’ His gaze at the paper didn’t even flicker, and his expression seemed to say, ‘Never heard of her.’ She drew her boa around her, nervous; the soft feathers didn’t comfort her.

‘Please yourself,’ he said, but he winked at Gerda.

Angela stared rather hard at Ian, and decided he looked like an ex-alcoholic, with his flushed complexion and mobile mouth, though some people might have thought him attractive. ‘How do you know my daughter?’ she asked, haughtily, patting her hair, which had been cut and streaked very expensively that day, before she picked up Gilda. It was maddening that he didn’t notice her. The pink was skintight, and flattered her figure. She ran her fingers across her hip-bone and crossed one ankle over the other, which she’d read somewhere in a magazine made your legs look longer and slimmer. It seemed a lifetime since she’d had a man.

‘Menguins,’ Gerda suddenly said, then exploding with pleasure, ‘They’re
menguins,
aren’t they?’ Ian pointed his pen at her in tribute; the two of them fell about with laughter.

Angela stood there, upstaged by her daughter. The pink feathers were perhaps too youthful. Suddenly she felt very exposed.

Perhaps she would never have a man again.

In two more minutes, though, Gerda was bored. ‘I want to find Davey Luck now,’ she said.

‘They can’t concentrate, can they?’ asked Angela, one final try at getting Ian to like her, but he had embarked on another picture, a disquieting sketch of a large pink flamingo, its legs entwined without elegance, lost in the middle of a sheet of black water.