Flood (5 page)

Another piece was from America. A black woman was describing how she had had to abandon her home in Bay St Louis, east of New Orleans. The Army Corps of Engineers had run a vast project of relocation back from the Gulf coast, abandoning swaths of shoreline to wetlands as a natural barrier against post-Katrina storms. This woman had had her old home bought out by the federal government, and was relocated. But she had then been forced out of her new inland home in turn by the threat of a fresh, even more drastic flooding event. “I never wanted come here, the Bay my home, my momma’s home, but Governor says, woman, you gotta go. So I pack up my kids and my dog and I go. And now look, the damn sea’s in my parlor again, and what I want to know is, what’s the point of moving if that ol’ sea he just follow you anyhow? . . .”

A snip from a children’s news program outlined the effects of the flooding on the wildlife in your garden. There were striking images of river weed stuck in the branches of trees. The rain washed insect eggs off the leaves where they had been laid, so later there was no food for the birds in their breeding seasons. In Kristie’s garden, and across England, there had been a crash in the populations of blue tits.

“These pieces are good,” Lily said to Kristie. “I mean, well selected. You have an eye. Maybe you should be a journalist.”

“I want to be a writer,” Kristie said.“Stories instead of news though.”

“The floods ruin the farmland.” Benj muscled in, evidently not getting enough attention. “That’s what we learned about, what’s going on in Yorkshire. You get salt water on the grass so the cows won’t eat it, and the leaves on the trees shrivel, and hawthorns turn black, and that. It’s causing a crisis in the agri-insurance industry.”

Amanda snapped,“Never mind the crisis in the agri-insurance industry. Go and have a wash before you eat anything.”

There was a shrill beeping. Lily produced the phone that the Embassy had given her. It was another flat, sleek product, like a pebble, smooth to the touch. She raised the phone to her ear. It was Helen Gray, angry and distressed.

6

L
ily had no idea how to use this new-fangled phone to contact Gary Boyle. Indeed, she didn’t even know his number. So she took herself off out of the house to find him, huddled up in a heavy waterproof coat she borrowed from Amanda.

Dodging the spray from the cars, she found her way down to the Fulham Road, well remembered from her childhood, but much altered, change upon change, much of it very recent. The grand old villas had mostly been converted to flats, or demolished altogether to be replaced by shops and restaurants and gas stations and estate agents. And you could see the scars of flooding everywhere, tide marks on low walls, slick mud in front gardens, a lingering scent of sewage. Many of the properties were boarded up, in fact, condemned because of flood damage.

She cut down Fulham High Street, heading for Putney Bridge Road. A ticket outlet advertised discounted seats at all the West End shows. Amanda had told her it was so difficult traveling now that it was easy to get tickets for the opera, the shows, even the big football matches. Always free tables in the restaurants too, but the menus were restricted because the international food distribution business was so badly hit.

Before she reached the river she cut down some steps to reach Bishop’s Park, a leafy garden over which the slim tower of Fulham Palace thrust to the sky. The rain, not too heavy, hissed from the thick summer leaves of very old trees. The lawns were flooded, and ducks and moorhens swam complacently on ponds that bristled with long grass and stranded trees.

She found Gary sitting on a bench on the footpath by the riverbank, before a green railing from which hung an orange lifebelt. Lily sat down with him. Gary was humming softly, and tapping his feet. Evidently he’d discovered Angels. He had always talked about how he missed music, down in the cellars; Lily guessed he was catching up.

The Thames was high and fast-moving, it seemed to her, an angry gray beast that forced its way under the pale sandstone arches of Putney Bridge. On the far bank boathouses glistened in the rain; nobody was out rowing today.

Gary said, “I counted seven joggers since I’ve been sitting here. And four people with dogs.”

“Somewhere in this park,” Lily said, “is a memorial to the International Brigade. Who fought for the republic in the Spanish Civil War.”

“Small world,” he said. “Your sister’s hospitable. Made me welcome.”

“Well, that’s her job, sort of. She’s an events coordinator. She’s been having time off since she found out I was released. She says she’s taking the kids out of school and to the Dome in Greenwich tomorrow, end-of-term educational treat stuff . . .”

“That river looks high to me.”

“And to me.”

“Is it still tidal, as far as this?”

“I think so.”

“Look at this.” He produced a handheld, a gift from AxysCorp, on which he’d been watching news and recording clips; he shielded it from the rain with his hand.

It wasn’t just London. Much of the country was in the grip of chronic flooding, which seemed to have become a regular event. Britain’s great rivers were all swollen, all had broken their banks somewhere, and there were refugee camps, parks of caravans and tents, on higher ground near the Trent, the Clyde, the Severn as far as Shrewsbury. There was a particular crisis unfolding this summer in Liverpool. Lily was shocked by a satellite image of East Anglia. The sea had pushed deeply beyond its old bounds across the Fens, lapping toward Wisbech and Spalding, and there were free-standing lakes everywhere, dark blue in the processed image.

The images seemed unreal. Lily was surprised everybody wasn’t talking constantly about what seemed to her an immense transformation. But she supposed that over the years you got used to it. It was just that she had been fast-forwarded to an unfamiliar future.

Gary said, “Some of these incidents are fluvial—exceptional rain, flooding rivers. The coastal events come from the sea, obviously . . . I guess you got the call from Helen.”

“Yes. I never knew that bastard Said was the son of a Saudi prince. We were privileged to be abused by him.”

“Yeah, so we were,” he said sourly.

Most of their guards had been Spanish. But when they were in the hands of Muslim factions some had come from further afield. Some Muslim radicals dreamed of retaking every piece of Waqf, the territory claimed under the first eighth-century Islamic expansion, from Spain to Iraq. And so combatants were drawn to the conflict in Spain from other parts of the Islamic world.

The prisoners had cared nothing, really, about their guards’ provenance. All that mattered about the guards was how they behaved. Christian and Muslim alike, they were almost all very young men, almost all radicalized by the fiery words of preachers—almost all poorly educated, and obsessed with sex. Some were stable, almost normal-seeming; they could be friendly with their captives, and some even seemed to crave their captives’ affection.

But some guards harmed them, even though the prisoners were supposed to have value as hostages. There could be punishment beatings, belt-whippings. Usually there was at least some such excuse for the violence, for instance when Lily had gone on a hunger strike. But some had gone further than any possible justification. These were mixed-up young men taking out their own frustration and confusion; it didn’t really matter who you were or what you had done. Lily’s own worst experience had been an amateurish
bastinado
: to be trussed up, hands behind her back and shackled to her own ankles while the souls of her feet were beaten with an iron rod, an unbelievably painful experience. That had not been Said but a man like him.

She had come to believe that part of the motive for such assaults was always sexual, even if the attack itself wasn’t sexual in nature. You could feel the excitement in the man standing over you, smell the salty spice of his breath at your neck, hear the rapid pumping of his lungs.

As for sex itself, Lily had been groped and pummeled by foolish boys, but she seemed to have had a manner that embarrassed rather than excited them. Helen Gray, fifteen years younger, hadn’t been so lucky. After two rapes by Said, or three—Helen had been taken away each time and wouldn’t talk about her experiences, though the blood and bruising made it obvious—the other guards had put a stop to it. After a time Said went away, perhaps posted to some other front of the great battlefield.

But not before he left Helen with his child. Her pregnancy in captivity, aided by her fellow captives with their bits of first aid and field medicine, and then a delivery by a scared drafted-in medical student, had been terrifying. But at the end of it there was a baby, Grace, whom Helen had loved immediately, and cherished every day of her imprisonment.

“And Helen never knew she’d given birth to a Saudi royal,” said Gary. “A princess!”

Helen had become convinced this was why her baby hadn’t been returned to her, since the first moment of their rescue five days ago under La Seu. The baby must be at the center of some enormous diplomatic row.

Gary said, “So you think that’s why Helen called us, why she’s so adamant we should go to the AxysCorp reception?”

“I guess so. If Lammockson can get us out of Barcelona, maybe he can get the baby back from Riyadh, or wherever the hell she is. So we go, I guess.”

“Sure,” Gary said. “We said we’d stick by each other, didn’t we, the four of us? But, Lily, your mom—”

“There’s nothing I can do for Mum,” Lily said firmly,“but Helen and the baby I can help. In the meantime we’re going to my sister’s for dinner. You’ll love the kids. Come on.”

They set off back, plodding out of the park and over sodden pavements.

At the roundabout where the High Street joined the Fulham Road a drain had blocked, and a lake had formed. The cars were pushing through it, raising great rooster-tails of water, and Lily and Gary had to detour. By the time they made it to the Fulham Road they both had wet feet. This was life in London now, it seemed, rain and wet shoes and road blockages.

But by now the schools were emptying, and the roads filled up with yellow school buses, American style, another innovation since Lily had been away. On the Fulham Road they merged into a growing crowd of parents and children, noisy, laughing, hurrying along the pavement between gushing gutters and lines of sandbags. Lily wondered how many of the world’s nations were represented in the exhilarating rainbow of faces around her. This was an old village long overwhelmed by the growth of London, a place you just drove through, but people still lived here just as they had when Lily was a kid, still worked and went shopping and took their kids to school, still were born and grew old and died in this place.

And then the rain lightened, and a shaft of sunlight broke through the scattering clouds and glimmered from the water that stood on the roads and in the gutters, on lawns and playgrounds. Unaccountably, on this day she had learned her mother had died, Lily felt optimistic. She was free, and here was the sun trying to shine. On impulse she grabbed Gary’s hand, and he squeezed back.

7

T
he next day George Camden phoned Lily early at her hotel. Camden was the smooth ex-military oppo who had retrieved them from Barcelona. Camden said that the summons to lunch with Nathan Lammockson that day was confirmed. Lammockson’s “hydrometropole,” as Camden put it, was in Southend, some fifty kilometers east of central London at the mouth of the Thames Estuary. A chopper would pick up Lily and Gary from London City Airport at eleven that morning.

Gary met Lily outside the hotel, in the rain. He was gazing into his handheld.“You followed the news? Remember that North Sea storm on the car radio? Well, it’s on its way south.”

The rain was already lashing down, and now a storm was on the way. “Great.”

“Overnight flooding all down the east coast . . .”

He showed her the handheld. The BBC news was all about the weather, with images of the Tyne breaking its banks and forcing its way into the fancy restaurants along Newcastle’s Quayside. The island of Lindisfarne, only ever connected to the mainland by a tidal causeway, was cut off, stranding pissed-off holidaymakers. Beaches in Lincolnshire had been damaged. There were flood alerts out for East Anglia, for Boston and King’s Lynn, where the sea was challenging new flood barriers around the Wash. And so on. The weather girl’s animated map showed the storm as a milky swirl of cloud that was still heading south.

Lily asked,“Is this unusually bad? If it keeps coming south, is London threatened?”

“They haven’t said so. I don’t think this is even a particularly powerful storm. If it combines with all the fluvial runoff or a high tide it could become a difficult event. But I don’t know. Things seem to have changed.”

“Kristie, my niece, you know, said sea levels have risen by a meter.”

His eyebrows rose. “A
meter
? Where the hell did that come from? A meter rise wasn’t in the old climate-change forecast models until the end of the century, even in the worst case.”

“I wouldn’t believe everything Kristie says. She’s quite liable to have mixed up her meters with her centimeters.”

“Well, if she’s right it would make a mess of everything . . . I just don’t know, Lily. I’m three years out of the loop, and Britain’s not my area anyhow.” He glanced at her. “Kind of stressy, your sis.”

“Always was. She’s not dumb, though. She took a law degree. But she ended up in events, handling people rather than dealing with cases. She has that kind of personality, I guess. Bright, bubbly, engaging. A bit fragile. But on the other hand, neither you or I are raising two kids.”

“That’s true enough,” he conceded.

After their years together he knew the rest: that Lily had never married, and it was many years since she had had a relationship that lasted much beyond six months. At one point she had sworn off men entirely. A base commander had hit on her, and when she didn’t come over he threatened to put her on sentry duty: a pilot qualified on three different birds, stuck on the wire. The guy was later drummed out of the service for “command rape,” in the jargon. But the damage to Lily’s capacity for relationships was permanent. She’d never
meant
to end up alone at age forty, but that was the way it worked out.