Flood (13 page)

And now the river reached a new height and poured over the river wall in a torrent. The cars jostled forward, like boulders in a fast-flowing stream. People screamed for help.

Helen and Thurley made it to Horseguards. There was no respite here; the black, muddy, oil-streaked water surged after them as they struggled through the crowd. Helen was tiring by the time they reached Whitehall, and Thurley was wheezing, out of condition, exhausted.

But Whitehall itself was already flooded. They stared at another river that gushed down the street toward them, immersing people up to their thighs, pouring away from the higher ground to the north. It ran down past the pale sandstone frontages of the grand government buildings and flooded eagerly into roadwork trenches.

Thurley looked south, the way the water was running.“Look at that.” He pointed at a rubber police launch fighting its way against the current. “That’s Downing Street. They’re evacuating.”

“Yeah.” She turned and looked north. She could see Trafalgar Square at the end of the street, the steps and pillars of the National Gallery rising like a cliff.“We can get out that way. But we have to fight the current . . .”

They started to slog upstream. All around them a crowd of people had the same idea. They pushed up the street, or climbed along rows of railings. But the current was growing more powerful.

Thurley slipped. Grabbing for him, Helen fell herself, face down. She felt the turbid stuff pushing into her hood, soaking her hair, and seeping inside her coverall. She kept her mouth closed, remembering the water that had come bubbling out of the sewers. She nearly made it up, but then somebody fell into her and pushed her down again, and she couldn’t get her feet underneath herself. She felt herself slide backward, along the tarmac of Whitehall. She panicked, she wouldn’t be able to get up, she would drown in a meter of dirty water.

But then a strong hand grabbed her by the scruff of her neck and hauled her to her feet. She stood there dripping before a mountain of a man,T-shirt and shorts and tattooed arms, like a rugby player gone to seed. Soaked to the skin, he actually had a can of lager in his left hand. He leered at her, and with his right hand he squeezed her breast through the coverall’s soaked fabric. She recoiled, disgusted, and he laughed and stomped away.

Here was Thurley, drenched. “Not much of a hero,” he shouted.

“Prick,” she snarled. “Hope he drowns on his own vomit. Come on, let’s get out of here.”

They pushed on. She was soaked now, her face and hair wet, river water inside her suit, and it was much harder going.

But they reached Trafalgar Square. On the north side the National Gallery and the old church of Saint Martin in the Fields were above the water, and people stood or sat on the gallery’s steps. But in the square itself the gushing river water was forming a lake, lapping around the famous old fountains. There had to be thousands of people in this view alone, swarming around the square and climbing the gallery steps. She saw no sign of police, no evidence of attempts at orderly evacuation. She glanced up at the column on which Nelson stood, imperturbably surveying the latest shocks to be inflicted on his city.

Thurley touched her shoulder.“Look up there.” He was pointing to the roof of the National Gallery, which was carpeted by gray. Pigeons, thousands upon thousands of them.“You mentioned the Strand, Ms. Gray.”

“Yes.”

He pointed right. “Thataway.”

They splashed through the deepening water, staggering across a road, past dead traffic lights and cars like boulders in a stream, and people everywhere, struggling to get to safety.

18

A
nother descent for the chopper dipping down toward the carcass of London, another rescue routinely handled by the AxysCorp crew, this time of a mother, child and grandmother stranded in Wapping, an area of old dockland converted to river-view flats. Lily helped strap the refugees into their bucket seats.

The rotors growled as they bit into the air, and the chopper pushed on further upstream to her next job. The bird was already nearly full of old folk and women and kids wrapped in silvery emergency blankets, but she was going to keep flying until she ran out of fuel or reached her capacity; she could hold as many as a hundred refugees packed in tightly.

Glancing through the open door, Lily saw water black as oil soaking down the streets of London, and across the squares and parks, the river exploring the contours of the flood plain that had long been denied it. Choppers flew everywhere like busy insects, both yellow search-and-rescue vehicles and military machines—even Sikorskys that must have been flying out of American bases. Boats of all kinds, small private powerboats and inflatables and police launches and lifeboats, buzzed around houses and office blocks where blankets dangled limply from upper windows. Away from the central flooded areas Lily could see thin lines of traffic barely moving on the blocked arterial roads, and emergency vehicles moving against the flow in toward the disaster area, blue lights flashing. It was a July evening and still bright, but you could see the areas where the power had failed where streetlights failed to shine, and ad hoardings stood mute and blank. She had an AxysCorp handheld, and the little screen showed her frantic images of soldiers racing to save key installations, Royal Engineers and the Royal Logistical Corps building levees and laboring with pumps to try to keep the water out of substations and water-treatment plants. London’s flood plain was crowded not just with office blocks, shops and houses, but with the city’s core infrastructure, even hospitals and police stations.

The handheld bleeped, flashing a headline from outside London. The news was from Sydney. There the flooding had struck deep into the heart of the city. The state government was trying to organize a managed evacuation west along the route of Highway Four, toward the higher ground beyond the Nepean River some thirty kilometers west of the city. Reception centers were being set up further west yet, in the higher ground of the Blue Mountains. The Aussie government was struggling, the commentators opined. The country had never been hit by such a calamity. Floods in Sydney and in London, Lily thought, floods on both sides of the world. How strange.

The pilot murmured, “Wow, look at that.” The chopper banked again.

Lily put down the handheld and looked out.

They flew past the Eye, a circular necklace of glass beads, stationary now, its base in the water. People were clearly visible, trapped in the cars, tiny stick figures like flies in amber. And on the far side of the water Lily saw boats crowding around the Palace of Westminster, like explorers cautiously approaching sandstone cliffs.

Suddenly Lily was overwhelmed by the sheer scale of it all. She looked away and wiped her face with a gloved hand, pressed her eyes.

The old lady she’d just strapped in reached over to pat her hand. “There, ducks. It’ll sort itself out, you see.”

The chopper surged and banked again, buffeted by the continuing storm.

19

F
rom Kristie Caistor’s scrapbook:

Three days after the flooding hit, Kristie snipped a report from BBC News about the efforts in flooded London to rescue thousands of people who had been trapped for days by power failures in electronically locked hotel rooms. This in itself would have been a major incident at any other time. It struck Kristie as funny.

20

August 2016

K
ristie was on spotter duty that morning. “There’s the waterman!” She came bundling down the stairs, her wooden-soled clogs noisy on the bare floorboards. It was not quite seven in the morning.

Amanda was just about ready for work, in a crumpled suit that could have done with a dry-clean. She wore sturdy walking boots and waterproof gaiters, and had work shoes shoved into her backpack handbag. She clutched a coffee in one hand, the last dregs of last night’s thermos. She winced as Kristie came flying downstairs.“God, Kris, do you have to make so much
noise
?”

Kristie, eleven years old, was too full of life to care. She rummaged through the heap of buckets and plastic bottles they kept by the door. “Come on, Auntie Lily, it’s you and me again.”

Lily shoved a last bit of bread into her mouth and got up from the table, making for the door. Her bare feet felt cold on the swollen floorboards. She kicked her feet into her slip-on rubber boots, and began to collect bottles for the string bags. Kristie was fixing their improvised yoke over her shoulders, a broomhandle padded with an old blanket and bearing two plastic buckets. Lily said,“I thought it was Benj’s turn this morning.”

Amanda snorted, primping at her hair, using the TV’s blank screen as a mirror. The power was off, as usual.“That slug’s still in his bed. I swear he’d spend the whole school holiday in that pit if I didn’t kick him out of it.”

Lily ruffled Kristie’s tight mop of curls. “Oh, it’s just his age. Just as well you’ve got a willing worker in this one.”

Amanda, stressed as ever, softened a bit. “Well, I know that. And I’m glad you’re here, Lil. I don’t know how we’d be coping if not. God knows how we’ll get on if things are in the same sort of mess when the schools go back.”

“Just earning my keep.” She grabbed Amanda’s gardening gloves. “Come on, then, kid, let’s get this over.” Kristie opened the front door.

Amanda called, “I’ll be gone when you get back. I’ll get Benj out of bed to open the door—”

“I’ve got my key,” Kristie called back. “See you tonight, Mum, love you lots.”

“Lots. Bye!”

Kristie let Lily pull the door closed. It had swollen in the flood four weeks ago, and had never quite fit into its frame again. They plodded down the short front garden path, lined with grimy sandbags, and set off along the street.

They walked roughly southwest, away from the low morning sun, heading toward the river. They mostly stuck to the pavement, but there were places where the water had lifted flagstones and you had to step aside. The roads themselves had generally been cleared, but there were still a few abandoned cars lying around, shoved roughly off the road, their interiors ruined, their windows smashed, their hub caps and wheels generally stripped, their petrol siphoned off. Water stood everywhere, in the gutters and parks and gardens, and on the flat roofs of the petrol stations. But everybody knew not to drink it, not even if you managed to filter and boil it; the standing water was full of the filth of a city whose water-treatment works and sewage plants had been comprehensively drowned.

As it had been for days the sky was without a shred of cloud, and though there was the usual rising scent of mud and sewage from the water, a deep freshness in the air told of a hot English summer’s day to come. The air was cleaner than it used to be, actually, since there was so little traffic on the roads.

Kristie said nothing as they walked. She put on a pensive sort of expression, as if she was trying to be moody, to look older. But in the sunlight she skipped, and splashed in the grimy puddles. Eleven was a complicated age, Lily thought.

They came to the bowser. Lily and Kristie weren’t the first here; they never were. A patient line had formed, residents with buckets and bottles and plastic bowls, watched over by a young, bored-looking auxiliary copper. The bowser was a big blue plastic tank with an inlet valve and a single brass tap, dumped unceremoniously at the corner of the street. It was supposed to be filled by the big army tankers several times a day, but the residents had learned the hard way that you could only rely on morning and evening deliveries, and even they came at random times.

So they joined the line. Save for the bright primary colors of the plastic buckets this was a medieval scene, Lily sometimes thought, grimy people in shabby clothes queuing at the well. But at least the disorderliness and panic of the early days had gone. A rough-and-ready rule had grown up, that each household was allowed as much water as two people could carry away. The neighbors had quickly learned who to make exceptions for, and who needed help.

Lily had even got to know the faces in the queues, though she knew few of their names. Here were the Nurses, two retired ladies in their sixties or early seventies, perhaps lovers grown old. Here was Single Dad, thin, careworn, heavily tattooed, no more than twenty-five, with the battered Tesco trolley full of Coke bottles he filled up for his three toddlers. Here were the Yuppies, a stressed-looking young couple with hollow eyes who had seen their City jobs vanish, and had been reduced from their high-flying, caffeine-fueled lifestyle to soggy handout lines like this. This morning they were moaning about the difficulty of obtaining money, with ATMs down most of the time and credit card terminals rarely working in any of the shops and stores.

Nobody looked down the street. Nobody paid any attention to the lake that glimmered there, wide and placid, even though, Lily thought, it was a sight that would have astonished them a few weeks ago. This wasn’t the river; it was technically the “Hammersmith embayment,” a wide area of lowland where the flood water had been trapped behind a higher bank. At its edge the road surface just slid into the water, the pavement and road signs and traffic lights submerging, and small waves lapped against the front doors of abandoned houses and shops.

The line moved painfully slowly. It always did; that single tap was niggardly. It struck Lily that it was remarkable how much
time
you spent on the basics of life now, on hauling water home or queuing at Tesco for whatever food was available that day, or walking to work as Amanda did every morning, making a journey that had once taken minutes and could now stretch to hours.

But Lily was able to endure it. She seemed to have evolved a mental discipline during those long empty days in Barcelona, especially the times she had been held in solitary. She was able to wait through emptiness, through hours, whole days, with the constructive sections of her mind shut down—she could close down her flight reflex, one post-release psychologist had said to her.