The Flood (7 page)

Angela brought two slices of cream-spliced carrot cake back to the table where Moira sat.

‘Would you like one?’ Angela asked. ‘They look frightfully healthy.’

‘Why do you assume that I need health food?’ Moira asked, on a rising note.

‘That’s OK, I’ll eat them both.’

But Moira watched her eat the cake resentfully, hungrily. Angela saw she was much too thin. That white bent wrist, with the knobbed bones showing, those skeletal fingers, plucking at crumbs.

‘Are you sure you don’t want some?’

‘Do you think I want your food? Do you think I eat leftovers?’

‘Of course not, Moira. But it’s, you know, delicious. Don’t worry, I’m really enjoying it.’

Though by now there was only a morsel or so left, Moira suddenly plunged on it like a heron, stabbing the cube off Angela’s plate and snapping it down, her throat briefly bulging.

This was something new in the scale of hostility.

Angela began to feel annoyed, but she tried again. ‘Those students,’ she said. ‘I’m so grateful to you, really. You actually seem to have made them like me. You must be a terrific teacher.’ Somewhere Angela had read this advice: to win over any human being in the world, try a smile, money, or flattery.

But something had gone extremely wrong. Moira suddenly flushed red, from pale.

‘Why do you assume,’ she was nearly shouting, ‘that I am the person teaching your work?’

‘Well, I’m sorry, it did seem likely – Aren’t you?’

That expression appeared, the contemptuous camel, the mouth curling, the eyes half-closed, and Angela remembered that camels could spit. And kick, surely. Her chair inched backwards.

‘The department in its wisdom has given other, junior staff my graduate teaching.’

Angela looked at her narrowly. Moira’s face was working wildly. There was something furious yet absent in her mouth, her eyes, her twitching fingers.

‘Is something wrong?’ Angela asked.

‘I have been ill,’ Moira announced. ‘You never asked if I was ill. It never seems to have occurred to you.’

This was so unfair that Angela fell silent. Moira always put her on the defensive. Around them the café was emptying. In the latticed window the sky burned scarlet, then crimson, magenta, preparing for dark. The red reflected on Moira’s face, flared in her iris: mayhem, fury. There was another world outside the window. Angela longed sharply for escape. Somehow she had to calm Moira down.

‘I was busy,’ said Angela. ‘I had my daughter –’

‘Why do you think I want to know about
her
?’

This time the words were ejected with such venom that Angela actually flinched, and moved back. She looked at her hands, and tried again. ‘Well if you’re doing a biography, I think that Gerda might have to come in. They change your view of the world, you know.’

‘
My
view of the world?
My
view of the world? What do you know about my view of the world? What do you know about my book? Why do you think I wanted children?’ Moira had stood up, and was shouting loudly. People in the café were turning to look.

(Lottie stared from her adjacent table. One of those women looked vaguely famous, and the other one absolutely barking. If you were too clever, you clearly went mad. Still, cleverness was not Lottie’s problem.)

Angela Lamb was far from unselfish, but she saw a person in awful distress, a person who was surely damaging herself, losing her temper here in the café in front of students, in front of colleagues. She got up too, put her hand on Moira’s shoulder, and said, quite gently, ‘I don’t mean to upset you, Moira. I think you’re very unhappy about something. Why don’t we go outside for a walk. We don’t have to talk about the book today.’

‘The book is rubbish,’ Moira said, quieter, but still with terrible intensity. ‘The book doesn’t matter any more. I have been given a sign, today. Father Bruno has spoken. All the books will drown. Even your books, Angela. Your books which follow me and contradict me. Except the One Book, the One True Book. “God said to Noah, ‘I intend to bring the waters of the flood over the earth to destroy every human being under heaven that has the spirit of life; everything on earth shall perish …’ The second angel blew his trumpet, and what looked like a great blazing mountain was hurled into the sea. A third of the sea was turned to blood, A THIRD OF THE LIVING CREATURES IN IT DIED, AND A THIRD OF THE SHIPS ON IT FOUNDERED …”’

By the time she finished Moira was shrieking, a long metal ribbon of screaming sound, one arm lifted to the fluorescent ceiling, the other gesturing towards the red window, and all the faces, the eager, the indolent, city-worn faces, tired clever faces, innocent, ardent faces of the young, were fixed, startled, on the old woman prophesying.

Lottie decided it was time to leave the café. As she did so, somebody touched her shoulder. ‘Well that was quite something,’ said Paul Bennett. ‘I need a stiff drink, after that. Coming?’

At half-past six, Lottie still wasn’t home. Lola began to feel cross with her. She ought to come home every day at five so she could make Lola and her friends some tea. Lola was sixteen, but that wasn’t the point. She had homework to do, and so did Gracie. They might do it and they might not, but they shouldn’t have to waste time on housework. Her mother had been less reliable lately, since she’d started doing this Art History.

(They had found a cold chicken in the fridge, true, but it wasn’t Lola’s normal favourite kind. Faith didn’t understand how to shop. It was wrapped in bacon, with chestnut stuffing. They had flipped off the bacon, desultorily – ‘I’m a vegetarian, I don’t eat bacon’ – eaten some breast, got bored and abandoned it, on the kitchen floor where they happened to be sitting. ‘Is it free range?’ Gracie had asked, sternly, her mouth full of meat, eyes suddenly horrified. Lola had checked on the label. It wasn’t. ‘We usually only buy organic,’ she said, but both of them at once stopped eating.)

Mum at the City Institute! It didn’t make sense. She would never stick it.

Lola had spoken to her seriously. ‘Mum, you don’t have to do this, you know. We love you as you are. You don’t have to be clever.’

‘Thank you, darling. I’m not trying to be clever. I just thought I’d like to learn something new. I mean I do have quite a good eye for pictures. And I did, you know, get quite a few from Grandpa.’

‘But honestly, Mum. You will be home most nights?’

‘I can’t promise,’ Lottie said. ‘I’ll try of course. But I might make new friends. Even mothers do that. I might use the library. I might have classes. Faith will put food in the fridge, darling. I could even get her to come back in the evenings. I’m not quite sure about her cooking, though. And you two haven’t been getting on well.’ (Faith had been with the family ever since she came to the city, young and desperate, with a tiny baby. Yet Lola and she had never bonded. Faith, who was passionately partisan, tended to quote Kilda against her – ‘My Kilda always cleans her room’ – ‘My Kilda hems her trousers’ – though Kilda was nearly a year younger than Lola. The recent row, awesome, total, was because Faith had disposed of two of Lola’s toy animals, a huge golden lion and a metre-high bear, which Lola happened to have left on the floor.

For a year or so, admittedly.

‘She stole them,’ Lola had sobbed, broken-hearted. ‘She always does it. She takes my things.’ ‘Don’t be silly, Lola. She threw them away.’ ‘They were like my most favourite possessions, Mum.’ ‘Funny I never saw you with them.’ ‘I loved Leo Lion with my
whole heart.’
‘You still should not have called her a thief.’ This was the only insult that Lola had confessed to, but Faith insisted, ‘she used language, Mrs Segall. Awful. Terrible. Effing and blinding. The worst I’ve heard.’ In any case, Faith had demanded a large bonus before she continued working for them. Now she and Lola had a state of armed truce.)

‘No please, Mum, don’t, I’ll manage,’ Lola had said, hastily. Anything would be better than evenings with Faith. Still, Lola felt aggrieved. Her mum had always been there. What always had been, always should be.

Besides, Lola felt protective of her. Mum knew practically nothing of any use, except about paintings, and clothes, and money. She would surely fail, and be disappointed, and then she’d take it out on Dad. In the meanwhile, who would look after Lola?

‘I’m starving,’ Gracie said at seven o’clock.

‘Let’s go and get chips,’ Lola said. It didn’t seem much fun, on a February day. She cast about for something to cheer them both up. ‘And let’s do, you know, an action somewhere. A protest thing. Our first protest.’ (That would show her mother for not feeding her, and punish her weedy father, too, for skulking uselessly in his study.)

‘Oh cool, cool, that’s a great idea.’ Gracie thought for a moment. ‘What, though?’

‘We ought to, like, hit at commerce,’ said Lola, parroting the phrases she had read on the net.

‘What’s commerce exactly?’ Gracie asked.

‘Banks. Shops.’

‘But Lol, we like shops.’

‘Advertising, I suppose,’ said Lola. ‘It’s “The Great Evil”, like the web-site says. It sells powdered milk to Africa.’

‘Does it?’ This didn’t seem quite right to Gracie. Surely the powdered milk was something different. ‘So have they all got TVs in Africa?’

‘Yes.’ Lola didn’t believe in backing down. ‘If we were there, we could smash their TVs.’ Actions would be easier, if they were in Africa. Here things seemed more complicated. After all, she got her allowance from a bank. If they hit banks too hard, she might lose her money, just when she was planning on going to the sales.

But Gracie had an idea at last. ‘Well didn’t you say that woman was in advertising, that one who yelled at you for having the party, who came in here and snatched the plug from the wall? And your mum called her a silly old fool?’

‘Oh, Gloria. Yes. Our next-door neighbour. They made friends after that. Mum said we had to. She sent her about a thousand dollars’ worth of flowers. But Gloria still moans if I play loud music.’

‘So why don’t we go and like do her over?’

‘Cool,’ said Lola. ‘Yeah, cool.’ But she didn’t move. She knew Gloria. Gloria had sponsored her on charity walks. Knowing her made her seem somehow less capitalist. Most anti-capitalist actions seemed to involve paint, or posters, or flour. She imagined flour all over Gloria’s sofa. And the indigo stair carpet, crusted with paint. Poor Gloria had only decorated last year. Couldn’t they find some capitalists who weren’t their friends?

‘You’re scared,’ said Gracie. ‘Anyway, I’m starving. Let’s go for the chips and like see how we feel.’

‘Let’s take off our uniforms and put dark clothes on.’

Giggling, looking at themselves in the mirror, jumping on each other to make themselves scream, they both dressed up in head-to-toe black, tights, roll-necks, gloves and hoodies. The gloves were cashmere, lined in silk; Lottie had two dozen pairs like that, in shades from black to ice-cream pink.

‘We look like cats.’

‘We look like burglars.’

‘We could be anyone, dressed like this.’

Suddenly they felt they could do it. If they weren’t themselves, they could do anything. Two panthers prowled into the darkening city. They left the lights on, and both doors open.

Ten minutes later, Dirk strolled through, after a cursory ring on the front doorbell. He had found something he was good at, at last. It no longer mattered if Dirk was wanted; he got in anywhere, and took what he liked, remembering tips he had picked up in prison and learning quickly as he went along, for his brain had always been good at some things, though life had never given him the chances. Small, wiry people were good at burgling. It wasn’t really burgling, since it was for God. Father Bruno had explained all that. They needed funds for their posters and leaflets, their fares and food, and the leaders’ salaries. In any case, Dirk only burgled rich ponces who didn’t deserve nice things in the first place. Now he had a profession, and a cause to believe in, the One Way, which made all things right, and a couple of knapsacks, which were filling up nicely.

Half an hour later, a fox arrived. He shouldered his way through the fuchsia hedge and splashed through the garden, angled, eager. He had woken up hungry, earlier than usual after mating vigorously last night. His eyes were a good deal sharper than Dirk’s, with an extra layer of light-reflecting cells which made his amber irises glow green in car headlights. He had eaten, to date: three worms, two of which he pounced on from more than two metres away, a thin mouse, and a schoolchild’s discarded packet of raisins. The raisins were his favourite, delicious, but it wasn’t sufficient for a rutting dog-fox. Nearer the house it smelled horribly of humans, but the door to the kitchen swung wide open, the electric human light glared out. On the floor, within view, a plump gold-pink chicken blushed beside broken rashers of bacon. Spittle dripped on to the polished tiles as his jaws snapped shut and crushed the carcass.

Lottie Segall-Lucas was not in her element: a golden Koi carp in ditch-water. On their way into the bar, which was more bar than wine-bar, slopping out cloudy pints of beer to scruffy students shouting at each other, Paul was hailed by a large, softish-looking man who introduced himself to Lottie as Thomas. For a micro-second he looked interesting – curly dark hair, olive skin – but he turned out to be a special sort of librarian who worked out theories of librarianship. Lottie thought, I bet you make them up, and this government gives you money for it. Besides, he was poor; he was drinking shandy. The two men discussed a forthcoming conference whose finer details escaped Lottie. She perked up a bit when the talk became personal. Thomas had evidently been let down by some pretty young woman who found him dull. Lottie chipped in with some words of comfort – ‘But that’s what today’s young women are like! My daughter and her friends are shockingly shallow. If you’ve got no money or looks, you’re a zero. I’m afraid you’ll have to get used to it.’ Oddly, the man didn’t seem cheered up. In fact, he had looked distinctly sulky. ‘Don’t worry’ she added, ‘you’ll be over her in weeks.’ ‘But Melissa left me a year ago.’ And Paul didn’t flirt with her at all (of course she would have discouraged it, if he had been man enough to do it, but still Lottie felt a bit disappointed). The young woman sticking up the silly posters in the café turned out to have been Paul’s daughter Zoe. ‘My daughter isn’t at all shallow. Rather too earnest, if you ask me.’ So was Lola’s shallowness Lottie’s fault?