The Flood (3 page)

‘Well she has to wash her hair, obviously,’ Faith said.

‘But the boys –’ said Shirley, more insistently.

With a martyred air, Faith screamed like a banshee: ‘KILDA! GET YOUR ARSE IN HERE AT ONCE OR I’LL KILL YOU!’ To Shirley she said calmly, ‘She loves her bed. Sleep is very good for them, at that age.’

Kilda came stomping through from the bathroom. Red eyes, pale face, Medusa rats’ tails of dark red hair, a strong jaw in a jut of temper. She said loudly right in her mother’s face: ‘Do you mind, Mum? I was washing my hair.’ But she winced swiftly away when her mother yelled back at full volume: ‘WELL YOU’VE DONE IT NOW HAVEN’T YOU YOU LAZY COW?’ And then continued in a normal voice, quite as if nothing had gone amiss, ‘Mrs Edwards wants to see you having a nice play with the boys.’

A frown creased Kilda’s forehead over wet-pearled eyebrows. Then her face relaxed, and you saw her gleaming beauty: her waxen skin, cream-pale, unmarked; her cheek like the curve of an altar-candle: the serene, full symmetry of her lips.

Youth, thought Shirley, was beauty. In that second Kilda was as lovely as a saint glowing in a window, looking down from the glory of her height, for Shirley wasn’t small, but the girl was much taller. ‘Shall I put a video on?’ the vision inquired. Her voice was low and musical. ‘No, don’t worry’ Shirley said hastily. ‘But you can’t really leave them on their own, you know, Kilda, they’re, you know, always on the move –’

‘Well they are a bit difficult,’ said Kilda with a queenly condescension she had learned from her mother. ‘But they’re all right with me. I don’t mind kids. I think we’ve got
Ram Raiders Three
somewhere.’

‘Good,’ said Shirley uncertainly, scouring her memory. ‘Oh yes,
Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Lovely.’

‘Later on I might take them out.’

Shirley decided not to ask more. ‘I’ll pick them up at two and take them to the zoo.’

‘Kilda’s lazy,’ said Faith loudly, to Shirley, but speaking entirely for Kilda’s benefit. ‘She never gets off her arse, you know –’ She suddenly seemed to remember that this person was the one she was recommending to Shirley.

Was this the best Shirley could manage? Yes, she told herself silently as she trotted after Faith down the endless steps back to the drenched car park.

‘If the rains keep on, we’ll be in boats,’ said Faith, with a kind of perverse satisfaction. ‘They say they are diverting the floods from the centre. No one cares about people round here.’

‘That can’t be true,’ said Shirley, desperately, partly because her boys were there. ‘In any case, it’ll soon dry out. If the sun holds up. Which I expect it will.’

By the time she reached the Institute it was gone eleven. The sun had disappeared. It was raining again. She was red in the face with shame and frustration.

As Shirley parked, badly, and ran towards the door, a large blonde woman in a sleek grey fake fur was just flinging some money at a taxi driver. ‘If you’d listened to me,’ she was shouting, loudly, ‘we’d have got here much sooner, and I wouldn’t be late.’

Shirley recognized her suddenly: someone from her Accessing Culture class which all first year students had to go to, a chic woman, fortyish, who came irregularly. Close-up, she saw the fur was probably real. What was her name? Lottie Something. That was a coincidence. ‘You’re for Paul Bennett’s class, aren’t you?’ Shirley panted in passing, and at once Lottie turned away from her fight with the driver and her face lit up in a beatific smile. She had blonde springy curls, seeded with rain-drops. In fact, she might well be older than forty, but she had a perfect, polished look, as if every curve of her skin was buffed and burnished.

Shirley wished her own hair looked like that. Lottie’s lipstick was glossy, she smelled exquisite, her shoes and bag looked impossibly groomed. Before Shirley had children, she too looked like that. This woman probably didn’t have children.

‘Oh how wonderful. Someone else is late. Come along,’ said Lottie, pushing Shirley forward, a surprisingly strong hand in the small of her back. ‘I’m Lottie by the way. Lottie Segall-Lucas. You’re Sheilah, aren’t you? Haven’t you got two little boys? I saw you with them, gorgeous, I could have eaten them. I always think half-castes are so attractive! My son Davey’s got a lovely black girlfriend, frightfully brainy, not that I’m a judge…’

‘God said to Noah, “The loathsomeness of all mankind has become plain to me, for through them the earth is full of violence. I intend to destroy them, and the earth with them.” The Lord said, “Make yourself an ark with ribs of cypress …”’ In Victory Square, there was a wide raft of people round a placard like a mast, painted in red. The letters dripped and ran down like blood. ‘LAST DAYS’, it proclaimed. ‘ONE WAY OUT.’ ‘Awake,’ roared the man, addressing the crowd. ‘Awake and look around you! What do you see? Filth! Corruption! In God’s sight the world has become corrupted, for all men are living corrupt lives on earth.’ The rest was inaudible, but every so often, ‘Awake’ surged up again, like an island in the flood.

Around the preacher stood a little knot of the faithful, facing outward, like soldiers, towards the crowd, clutching hundreds of pamphlets of cheap thin paper. The face of a young black man gleamed with faith: Samuel believed that the good would be saved. Next to him, his white wife Milly pulled back her shoulders and threw up a ‘Praise him’. She felt happy; she began a new job tomorrow, cleaning at the City Swimming Pool. Next again, a middle-aged white woman with a thin pinched face sighed and yearned, eyes turned ecstatically up to heaven. ‘Amen,’ Moira called, ‘Amen, Brother.’ As she spoke, one bony hand ruffled, then smoothed the coat of an enormous red-brown mongrel with the longing eyes of a labrador. She dropped a few pamphlets and began to panic, hissing explanations as she crouched to pick them up. ‘They’re wet,’ she lamented. ‘Everywhere’s wet.’ As she spoke, it started to rain again. ‘Be still now, Moira,’ said Samuel, kindly. ‘We’ve thousands of copies of the thing.’

In a twenty-storey tower two blocks away, people who made books were arguing.

‘Thing is,’ said Delorice Edwards firmly, ‘it isn’t original.’ She was talking about Emma Dale’s new book, provisionally titled
A Breast in Winter
, an ‘upbeat rural cancer saga’, as the marketing department’s notes informed them. Delorice hadn’t meant to say this – wrong time, wrong place – but the constant rain made her feel depressed. There was a nagging sense that her years of study, the way she had turned her life around, her amazing coup with Farhad Ahmad, had not finally brought her the thing she wanted; just a room of polished surfaces and blank whiteness.

Ten faces swung towards her round the oval table. In the centre, a glinting hi-tech tin of waxen lilies, rather larger than life, stuck up boldly, redolent of incense, interrupting their eye-lines. The expressions she could see ranged from annoyed to amused. Mohammed, who was newer than her, looked interested.

Briefly Delorice flunked the challenge. She gazed out of the window: two pigeons swooped past, dive-bombing downwards through the sunlit rain. Somewhere desolate, sirens wailed. A plane engine gnawed like a distant headache.

She had had a major breakdown when her brother was murdered. Brilliant Winston, who had always been their pride. Delorice’s mother had to care for little Leah; now her daughter was five and still living with her grandmother. They had all come back from the edge of despair (and she herself from the edge of madness) through Delorice becoming what Winston had been, the straight-A student, the hope of the family.

Now she pulled herself back into the lily-drugged room, and made herself smile sweetly as she said, ‘This book is naff and sentimental and dated.’

Helena Harp, Headstone’s editorial director, felt a sudden twinge of hatred for the girl she had hired, who sat before them, smiling, all glossy with newness. Delorice must have thought she had it all: that lacquered black hair, pulled back from a face with high cheek-bones and dark clever eyes; a reputation as the brightest new kid on the block; the glozing trade profiles, which never failed to mention the tragedy of the murdered brother; that whiff of grief and integrity.

Ignorant, she thought. And arrogant.

‘You don’t think it’s original?’ she said, and smiled. Then the smile snapped to nothing, like a rubber band. ‘It is a mistake,’ she enunciated, slowly, ‘to think our job’s about looking for genius.’

‘Course, I didn’t mean –’ Delorice flushed with embarrassment.

Then, just as swiftly, she was furious. At college she had proved to be brilliant at English, since she’d always been a reader, in every spare moment: in bed; in the bath; when she breast-fed Leah. Her shyness, too, had quickly vanished as she learned to use the language of her lecturers. Delorice was afraid of nobody, now.

Patricia forged onwards. ‘The bottom line is, Emma Dale makes a lot of money for us.’

Sid, the sales manager, was frowning slightly. ‘Well, the figures for
Lover in Clover
weren’t brilliant –’

Patricia interrupted. ‘Thirty thousand hardbacks of
Farmyard Matters
plus three hundred thousand paperback!’

Delorice tried again, more determinedly. ‘Look, it’s hard to make sex and cancer boring, but this book does. Have you read it, Patricia?’

‘Of course.’ The older woman glared back. Delorice knew at once that she hadn’t.

‘Point is,’ Brian said, rushing in to mollify, anxious at the turn the conversation was taking, for if people started asking if publishers read books, the game would be up for all of them – ‘I reckon we could shift half a mill of this one, if it’s as raunchy as
Farmyard Matters:

‘But,’ Delorice tried, one last time, ‘the public is going to see it’s rubbish.’

‘Writers can’t all be Farhad Ahmad,’ hissed Patricia, rearing up like a snake, the white cords in her long neck standing out sharply. (She never could pronounce his name; Farhad Ahmad had been discovered by Delorice, and gone on to win the Iceland Prize, the most prestigious of the book prizes.) ‘Emma Dale is not trying to be Angela Lamb.’ (Another winner of the Iceland Prize.) ‘And we aren’t Third Dimension, Delorice.’

Now everyone sniggered except Delorice, and Mohammed, who didn’t get the reference. Everyone at Headstone hated Third Dimension. This was why they’d been so glad to woo Delorice away from their younger, hipper, rivals. Delorice’s protégé Farhad Ahmad was beautiful, young, foreign, sexy, and mega-selling, after winning the prize. Headstone had assumed he would come with Delorice, but instead he’d done a massive deal with Dingleberry.

‘It’s nothing to do with Farhad or Angela,’ Delorice protested, feeling hot again. ‘I just think, it’s like, a real pity if we print all these copies of something that’s bullshit.’

A barrage of voices broke out around the table.

‘We’d get coverage on the sex-and-cancer angle.’

‘I can see it in the
Post’s
“Good Health” pages.’

‘The book clubs are bound to come on board.’

‘Patsy Rowan will give a good quote. They’re mates.’

‘And Bea Browning will give a quote for anything.’

‘Rocco could do the cover. Sort of “Tasteful Tits” –’

‘Would the tits be a reference to the breast cancer?’ Delorice interrupted, brutally. Everyone looked politely away. Of course, she had a chip on her shoulder.

Their target sales were half a million copies.

Delorice decided to go home early.

Afterwards she wandered through Victory Square. A crowd straggled over the Monument steps. It was raining, lightly, in little gusts. The centre of the square was submerged in water, but the sun was burning through the clouds. Somewhere, she thought, there would be a rainbow.

The crowd was carrying banners and placards; there were crackling speeches; someone shouted ‘Amen’. It was that strange new religious cult, she realized, the One Way Brothers, the ‘People of the Book’, who claimed to unite Jews and Christians and Muslims because they all shared the same sacred texts. (She’d heard that the Christians and Muslims in One Way were already worshipping in different places, however. And that not a single Jew had joined. They were doing very well, though, where people were poor.) It was queer that ‘the Book’ should be so honoured – not what she was used to, in publishing.

She wondered, grimly, what they’d think of Emma Dale. If all those copies of
A Breast in Winter
were spread out across the square, they would cover it completely. Half a million copies would spill over the side-streets, infect the libraries, infest the bookshops. The city published thousands of books every year, spewing them out then pulping them.

And yet, she was somewhere on top of this heap, and part of Delorice was still pleased to be there. Another part wondered how on earth she’d done it. It was dream-like, uneasy. It all seemed random.

The defining moment was her brother’s death. She would never escape it: it had turned her life around. While Winston was alive, he had been the clever one. Delorice could hide and dream in his shadow, read novels during lessons, drift into motherhood. Her gain had been built on that terrible loss.

Sometimes she saw Winston, walking down the street, slim and rangy, reading a book. Once she had even called out his name; it was another young man, with another book. Chance made those spectres cross her path. And yet she believed her brother was somewhere. His long, dancing limbs, his golden eyes. He would be walking along, talking to himself, quoting Baldwin, discussing, laughing. Winston had always talked to himself. It was part of what made him special, different. And he had high standards; he believed in things. She wished she could embrace his long, wiry body, press her cheek against his rougher one.

They had never thought they could lose Winston. That he could be murdered by a stupid racist. Chance, blind chance, for despite the rumours she knew that her brother had been no battyman.

Perhaps everything in life was nothing but chance. At her feet, two pigeon-feathers skimmed across a puddle; wind shook the banners of the crowd across the way.

It was chance, too, meeting Farhad Ahmad at college, when he hadn’t long arrived in the city. He was two-thirds of the way through writing a novel, but it was already eight hundred pages long. Reading it, she knew at once what to do. The delicious certainty of the editor’s itch. After they became lovers, she cut and rewrote, and the three-hundred page result was snapped up by Third Dimension, who asked her to start a list of young black writers. Then she broke up with Farhad, who was eager to forget her once he got the big prize and the ecstatic reviews.