Paradigm (9781909490406) (5 page)

I
n the cupboard
under the stairs Alice found a claw hammer, an unopened packet of nails and an axe that was covered in tiny flecks of cobalt-blue paint. It was the same colour her father had painted the bathroom in their house back in the country. Alice realised that she couldn't even remember what his voice sounded like. She didn't even have any pictures.

She started with the table. She wasn't exactly sure why she was doing what she was doing, but it was something she had seen on television months before about preparing for a hurricane. There had been a lot of those programmes in the last year. Her mother had always turned the channel over.

‘You don't want to watch things like that,' she said. ‘This rubbish is too depressing.' And then, ‘Get me a can of lager out of the fridge before the soaps start.'

When it came to Storms, it was all, apparently, about the preparation.

‘
B
oard down the windows
, close all the hatches,' Alice said to herself as she smacked the blade against the table. The axe wasn't heavy, but it was difficult to control. The first splinters of wood she managed to hack off the edges were as thin and useless as her arms felt.

Her cheeks turned crimson at the effort as she shaved sticks into small piles that grew slightly larger with practice. Next she moved on to the sideboard and then a desk until she had enough pieces of thin wood to board over the window in her mother's bedroom as well as the glass door that looked out onto the balcony. It took her until nightfall to cover over both, but it was the satisfying sound of the rain on wood that soothed her as she sucked on some biscuits and fell asleep in the sunken arms of the sofa.

The next morning, the rain had stilled to a thin mist. Alice thought it had stopped altogether until she got to the window. She pulled back the curtains, damp with water that had blown in through the cracked window and onto the wood. Fine droplets steamed downwards in filmy white sheets; but at least the wind was still. Alice crept out onto the balcony. The skies were the colour of weathered slate and slithered with showering rain that came from all directions.

Looking across the city, there was smoke—a lot of it—from small fires that burned in the upper floors of some of the higher buildings further out of town. Alice counted at least fifteen fires and two smaller buildings collapsed at their knees, exhausted, as she stood there. It felt unreal, like television. The London Eye stood like a stopped clock in the distance, bent and broken.

The river that snaked through the centre of the city had burst its banks, flooding the streets with rancid, stinking tidewater that swirled over parked cars and street lights and around trees and houses. It was deep now and the water had risen well above the windows of some of the houses opposite. The sharp summits of buildings stuck out like exclamation marks and others created even tables that protruded in miniature from the deep, swirling mass. Alice couldn't work out how deep the water was, but on the higher ground she could see the very tops of traffic lights and the shiny cabs of trucks. There were lines of cars reflected in the depths of the water where the pavements used to be. She edged out closer to the balcony rail. In the pools, she could see things floating. Different-coloured things of different shapes and sizes. It didn't take her long to work out that they were the empty bodies of animals and people.

Through the tick-tick of the rain, there were other sounds, strange noises that didn't feel like they belonged in the city. There was a creak and then a bang as the red-brick railway arch collapsed. A boom that came from the far edges of the town shook the roots of the block, and the last of the faithful gulls, most of which had long left, skimmed over the winds peppered with leaves, and away towards the sea. Their departure seemed almost final and Alice waved sadly with both hands across the balcony.

Then, on the other side of the street, someone waved back. There was a man standing on the roof of one of the low-slung buildings. He shook a hand towards her and shouted something but she couldn't exactly hear what it was. He waved again and this time, he called.

‘I can't hear you,' said Alice. ‘I really can't.' She lifted her hand to the man and shook it slowly back and forth. The man called again. One of his arms was bleeding and, as he waved the other, she could see a pool of blood gathering around his feet. He kept talking, kept shouting, but Alice wasn't even sure he was calling out to her at all. His words, picked up by the wind, were blown across the city like shrapnel as he whirled around in a circle.

‘Hello,' she called in a brittle, still voice, but the stick-like figure didn't even turn to face her.

She watched the man as he paced in lines on the very edge of the roof, sometimes gesturing and then other times veering in the wind as the lean of the breeze took him. And then, suddenly, his legs slipped from under him and he tipped awkwardly out into the water. For a while he floated around, catching the lower half of his body on the tops of trees and shop awnings that were hidden underneath the water. Then, as quickly as he had fallen, he stopped moving and slid downwards in a graceful swirl under the water. There was the glug-glug of a plug being pulled out and then he was gone.

‘Now you see it,' said Alice. ‘Now you don't.'

A
fter a lunch
of cold soup and the rest of the apple juice, she lined up what food she had left. There were still two packets of biscuits, four cans of soup and some bananas, but Alice wasn't hungry. She was thirsty—thirsty for something that wasn't thick and gloopy.

‘Water, water everywhere,' she said to herself and supped on a can of super-value chicken-and-lentil broth to quench the dryness. It was thick and messy and the bits of chicken kept getting stuck between her teeth. She spat out the lentils one by one until there was a line of them across the carpet. She thought about the man who'd been standing on the roof of the building and the blood dripping from his hand around his feet. She thought about the way he had stamped about in the puddles of rainwater that had gathered on the sticky waterproof tar. It was then that Alice got the idea.

S
he went
to the kitchen and grabbed two saucepans by their worn handles then headed out of the front door and turned right towards the ladder to the roof with its spine-like black rungs that spiralled around and around towards the top. Before she climbed, Alice looked across at the other side of the city and breathed in the air. Acrid black smoke danced across the surface of the water and, like the balcony facing the opposite direction, there were buildings on fire in the distance. Apart from the calling of a pair of gulls, the scene was eerily silent. All the people had gone.

One of the birds twisted on the wind and dived headlong into the water below and then pulled back up again, coasting the currents of air. There were all kinds of rubbish floating along the surface, gathering around the edges where the buildings and roofs met the water, swirling around like flies. She saw a pram, empty and turned on its side, being carried along through what used to be the streets with a white-and-brown cat clinging to the edges. In the distance, Alice thought she heard it meow. It held its head back, contorted against the water and dug its claws deep into the fabric as it sailed through the city.

‘Hold on,' she whispered and a trickle of tears dribbled from her eyes. She bit her lip hard and headed along the balcony towards the staircase before she had to watch the kitten slipping below into the darkness as its exhausted paws gave up hope.

T
he cold metal
bit through her fingers as she clung to the railing of the stairs to the roof. It was dripping with water and she sucked on the cold iron, dragging as much water as she could with her tongue.

Water, water, everywhere.

Savouring the wetness, she moved her feet slowly, one over the other, listening to the dull clanking of her feet against the metal. She'd never been afraid of heights before, but there was something in the cold slap of the wind and the smell of the air that made her not want to look down.

When she got to the roof, the small paved area was empty, but she could feel the ugliness of the place, clammy on her skin. Empty cans of lager littered the floor, along with general drug paraphernalia and junk. There was a small patio area with some bolted-down tables and chairs and a row of plastic bins around the outside. Plastic bins that were full of water.

Alice hauled herself up the last few steps and skidded across the lawn of plastic turf towards the bins. Her feet gave way under the slippery surface and she lost herself in the softness, grazing her knee on the coarse grass. She lay there for a second looking up at the inky grey sky that looked ready to explode its contents over her until her thirst picked her back up.

She checked the bins quickly and chose the one that looked the cleanest. She hesitated for a second and then plunged her head into the ice-cold water. It made the inside of her head tingle and her eyes hurt. At the bottom she could just make out blurred shapes: food cartons, cans and cigarette butts that had been ground into the bottom. Alice pulled her head out quickly and then set down the saucepans that she had brought with her.

‘Rain, rain, go away; come back another day,' she said quietly.

L
ooking
across the roof at the drowned city below, the tops of buildings stuck out like rotting teeth from the gums of a bad mouth. The hollow sun was paper yellow through the stringy clouds, dim light casting shadows onto the murky water. To Alice, it didn't seem like any particular time of day. It could have been dawn or dusk or both.

From the roof she had an almost panoramic view of the city, stretching out in an endless expanse of water punctuated only by the higher buildings and the tops of trees. The more that she looked at the water, the more she could see. Giant blue gunmetal shapes that twisted and formed into monsters and creatures that she couldn't quite describe. When she looked away, they disappeared and then reformed with long necks, huge snaking limbs and torsos of brick and steel like the fragments of a bad dream.

Slowly, she walked around the edge, breathing in hungry gulps of an air that smelled of firework nights and the rotting decay of autumn. Across to the north another explosion sounded and she watched as a tower building melted downwards, taking the next one with it like balsa wood dominos. Then she left, sneaking down the stairs like a thief—a feeling with which she was not unfamiliar.

A
s the late
afternoon crested into evening and Alice was drifting off to sleep, there was a sharp knocking on the front door. The sound of the banging caused her to jump off the sofa in fright and she landed on a glass that smashed into her knee. A triangular shard of clear glass stuck out sideways like the fin of a shark, reflecting the white light from the window. As she sat there, transfixed by the drips of blood that pooled in the carpet, there was another crash at the door, this time accompanied by a voice. The pain in her knee hadn't quite registered.

‘Is there anyone in there? Mrs Davenport, is that you? I know there's someone in there. You must help me. I'm starving. Please.'

Alice stared at the blood running down her leg and then out past the kitchen towards the hallway. The thumping on the door boomed across the floor and pounded into her knee. She wasn't sure if it was the banging or just the pain from the glass isosceles in her leg.

‘Mrs Davenport,
please
.' The voice sounded desperate this time, whining almost. Alice bit down on her bottom lip and used two hands to pull the triangle out of her leg. Immediately, a red river gushed down her shin and, at the sight of the blood, she let out a scream.

‘I can hear you,' said the voice at the door that had changed from desperate to pleading whimper. ‘I know you're there. I heard you going up onto the roof. You have to help me, Mrs Davenport. I'm an old man. I have a heart condition. Please. I know you're a good woman underneath; I don't care what you are.'

Alice dragged herself to the kitchen using her hands, sliding on her backside, and grabbed a tea towel hanging on a nail near the sink. It had a few coffee stains on it but was almost clean. She tied it tightly around her knee until the fibres locked into the wound, stemming the flow of blood. The sweet, metallic taste lingered on her tongue and the inside of her mouth was tender to the touch—in steeling herself strong, Alice had taken a chunk out of the inside of her cheek.

‘Keep your temper,' she said, but the banging continued.

‘I don't want to break the door down, but I will,' came the cry from outside the front door. ‘I have a hammer. I'll use it. I just want to talk. Just a conversation. Please.'

Alice steadied herself up against the counter. The voice sounded just like Mr Hutchinson. Exactly like Mr Hutchinson. She hobbled to the door, dragging her cut leg behind her, leaning against the walls for support. When she got to the door, she looked through the spyhole.

‘Mr Hutchinson?' she said. ‘Is that you?' Outside there was silence for a second and then the voice again.

‘Let me in, kid. I need to talk to your mother.'

‘She's not here,' said Alice. ‘It's just me.'

‘Who's looking after you?'

‘No one,' said Alice. ‘I'm looking after myself.' The blood-damp tea towel loosened around her leg and dropped to the linoleum. A squirt of red leaked onto the wall. She bent down to pick it up and wrapped it around again. The bandage wet-slapped against her leg.

‘Open the door, please,' said Mr Hutchinson. ‘We need to talk. Now.'

Alice sat on the sofa and watched as Mr Hutchinson gulped greedy mouthfuls from a can of soup like a baby bird gobbling worms. When he had finished, he opened and closed his mouth. He rested back in the chair he had claimed as his own and rubbed his stomach. The chair used to belong to Alice's father.