The Future's Mine (10 page)

I cast my eyes down and fiddled with my nails petulantly. I remembered Matthias’s advice about learning to understand others and being sympathetic to those who don’t always share my views. Perhaps I was being too harsh; I didn’t know the rules of their world or what sort of unspoken laws they were bound by. I reminded myself that Noah had nothing to do with Iris’s imprisonment – he wasn’t even born then. That thought soothed me a little.

‘My grandfather decided that Iris couldn’t stay in the house but neither could she marry a noble. She would have to be married off to a poor man, a commoner.’

‘But why?’ I asked. ‘Why couldn’t she live by herself? Or stay at home?’

‘It’s not our way,’ replied Noah. ‘Our women are not like you. They don’t live alone. It would bring disgrace on my family if she were unmarried. She’d already been introduced into noble society at the age of sixteen. The nobles knew she was of marriageable age. My grandmother could never live with the shame if she was unmarried. So they had to find someone for her.  Someone who would relish the thought of marrying into an ancient family, but someone who carried no sway with the nobles. Someone who would keep her madness a secret in return for money from our family. Someone greedy, hungry for promotion, a social climber but also deceitful – willing to lie for us. My grandfather watched the local political scene with a wary eye. He was always on the lookout for jumped-up commoners who were getting too big for their boots, so he could slap them down or strip them of their position. He particularly enjoyed that.’

Noah grimaced at this point, obviously ashamed of his family’s abuse. ‘However, there was one man that caught his eye. This man was very deferential towards my grandfather, which, of course, he loved. He loved it when the commoners knew their rightful place, under the boots of their superiors. He loved it when the commoners were willing to lick those boots and then say thank you. That was what this man did. My grandfather decided he was the perfect jailor for my aunt. Deferential enough to keep her madness a secret, ambitious enough to feel grateful for attention from us nobles, and greedy enough to want to reap the rewards for jailing my aunt. I’ll give you one guess as to who this man was,’ said Noah.

‘The Mayor,’ Matthias and I said in unison, not even pausing to think. Why did it always come back to that man? Puppeteer. Manipulator.

‘Correct,’ Noah said ruefully. ‘But back then, before the Flood, he didn’t have half the powers he has now. Before the Flood, the Town Mayor of Brigadus was a ceremonial position. The Council of Nobles had ultimate say over how everything was run, but they allowed the Town Mayor to put forward motions; little things, of course, nothing important.  A little bill about fishing rights here, another about housing standards there. A concession to the commoners, the nobles thought: give them a Mayor and it will keep them quiet. Richard Harpick was therefore the go-between for the townsfolk and the Council of Nobles. ’

‘Then that makes Flora your cousin,’ I said. ‘Your aunt Iris was Flora’s mum. Iris became the Mayor’s wife and they had Flora.’ It suddenly made sense why he was helping her in the Complex. Noah nodded and closed his eyes briefly. ‘Noah, I’m sorry. I didn’t know you were related.’

He nodded again.

‘So, Iris, your aunt, was married off to the Mayor in return for money from your family?’ clarified Matthias. ‘And that’s why the marriage was kept secret? Because she was mad and they didn’t want the scandal when everyone found out that your family had basically sold one of their daughters to a madman to save face?’ asked Matthias, with a hint of malice.

Noah flinched at this. ‘My grandfather didn’t know what Harpick was like then. No-one did. It was the worst mistake my family ever made, but ironically it is one that could change everything. It is one that could save us and put an end to his rule.’

‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

‘It has given us an advantage.’

There must have been a look of puzzlement on my face because Noah looked me directly in the eye and said, ‘Let me explain. Soon after they were married, Harpick used the money he had gained from my family to buy favours, bribe nobles, and, rumour has it, buy the deaths of those who stood in his way. After they had been married two years, the Mayor was the most powerful commoner in the north west of Britannia, let alone Brigadus. He owned as much land as we did.  No-one had ever seen a commoner rise to such heights. The only thing that stopped him from gaining ultimate control was the Council of Nobles and, oh, how he hated us for it. But being the snake that he is, he managed to disguise this long enough for my grandparents to trust him. Long enough for his plan to form.

‘Harpick was a very efficient jailor. He wasted no time in hiring guards to watch my aunt day and night. She ate alone, slept alone, read alone. Always alone. No contact with anyone. It would have been enough to drive a sane person mad but for a woman whose mind was already broken, it only accelerated her decline. My grandparents, hearing of her deterioration, insisted he let her out of her room to see them for an hour or so three times a week. He refused at first. My grandparents were suspicious as to why she was being kept from them.

‘They confronted him. There was a huge argument. He almost had them thrown from his house, until he quickly realised who he was talking to and had to backtrack. He may have been important but not as important as us nobles. Not yet anyway. He eventually agreed that they could see her but he warned that her ramblings were just delusions and that they should not pay any attention to them. It seemed a strange thing to say, as they never paid attention to her ramblings anyway, but my grandparents agreed.

‘As she was to be hidden from the world, Harpick stated that she would not be allowed out of the grounds but could sit in the garden with her parents and my mother watching her. She was not allowed to talk to anyone apart from her immediate family. She would pick the flowers or make daisy chains with my mother. But as the months continued, her condition worsened. My family tried to think of new ways to help her regain her senses.

‘So, my mother gave Iris a present of a video recorder. She thought that it would help her remember who she was when she saw herself on screen, doing normal things like talking to her family, or sitting in the garden. Give her a reference point as to what was real, so she could tell what was a delusion and what was really happening in her life. Iris loved it. And the more she recorded, the saner she started to become. My mother was allowed to watch the tapes back with her every week, sort of a therapy session where they would talk about things that had happened that week.

‘After a few weeks with the camera, my mother noticed that Iris had shifted focus in her filming. She was no longer filming herself, but had turned the camera on other people. She was secretly filming the goings-on in Harpick’s house; the chef who spat in Harpick’s gravy, the young servers who were having an affair, the butler who tried on Harpick’s top hat and paraded around in it. Harmless stuff initially that finally allowed Iris to laugh again. It gave her something to focus her mind on – sort of like she was a detective, finding things out and analysing them.

‘But after a while, my mother noticed that Harpick himself was increasingly the star of the show. Iris had begun sneaking after him around the house and gardens; the camera became her weapon. She filmed meetings between the Mayor and strange men in suits with even stranger accents. Her surveillance increased and she recorded snatches of overheard conversations through closed doors – talks of plans and money. She sneaked into Harpick’s office and videoed some papers in his filing cabinet – ones that talked of “the right time” and other things written in a strange language. She played back his telephone messages on camera, which included messages from the foreign-accented men asking if Harpick had kept his end of the bargain.

‘She had started to share some of what she had recorded with my mother in their weekly sessions. My mother was starting to get suspicious and told my grandparents about it. But one day, before they could view the tapes themselves, Iris suddenly stopped filming. Harpick had caught her. He had realized she was filming him, and was starting to share what she had recorded, and so confiscated her camera. Actually he did more than that but I don’t need to go into the details of what followed. You’ve seen enough of him to know what he’s capable of. Her sanity quickly deteriorated after that. She started seeing more visions, increasingly violent ones, catastrophic ones where she would convince herself of natural disasters.

‘During one visit from my parents, she tried to drown herself in the pond in the garden as she said it would be quicker to drown now rather than die in the tidal wave she saw coming. My grandfather hauled her out but she had to be physically restrained for hours to stop her throwing herself back in the water. When I asked my grandparents about it, they said that the most striking thing about the incident was how livid Harpick was. He was completely deranged, threatening to drown her himself if she wasn’t quiet. But Iris kept on talking of tidal waves, tsunamis, floods until she was imprisoned back in her room and banned from seeing her family …’ Noah looked at me meaningfully. ‘This was a week before the polar ice caps melted and the Flood happened.’

A tinkle of glass shattered the tense silence. I looked at Matthias and saw that he was holding out his hands, now covered in blood. His gin glass was broken into large shards. ‘I squeezed too hard,’ he said.

I handed him my handkerchief and took a sip of my drink, deep in thought.

‘Do you believe in precognition?’ asked Noah. ‘Telling the future? Making prophecies?’

‘No,’ I replied.

‘No, of course you don’t. You’re too rational for that. So let me ask you this: how did my aunt foresee an event, a
catastrophic natural disaster
, days before it actually happened?’

I hesitated to think. ‘Well, she couldn’t have done. It just must have been a lucky guess, coincidental you know. Hallucinating about floods the month of the Flood …’ I tailed off, knowing that my argument was unconvincing.

Matthias raised a sceptical eyebrow at me.

‘Well, Mr-Know-It-All, what’s your explanation then?’ I asked.

‘Maida, you know me. I’m rational, I believe that things can always be explained by real causes and actions, not magic. But in this case … in this case, I don’t know what to believe. I find it very hard to swallow that anything is ever that coincidental – are you really suggesting that Iris talked of tidal waves, floods, utter devastation, completely coincidentally on the eve of the most catastrophic natural disaster to ever hit our planet? It just seems too fluky.’

‘And are you really suggesting that she can see into the future? Come on, I thought you said you were “rational”.’

‘Don’t speak to me like that. You’re always so dismissive of things you don’t understand. What other explanation is there? How do you know there aren’t forces out there that we don’t know about? How do you know that her madness wasn’t some of channel for it?’

‘Because that sort of thinking is for superstitious morons,’ I said.

‘I’m a moron now, am I?’

Red-hot anger was rising in his cheeks, but I suspected that it wasn’t just that I was disagreeing with him, but that I insulted him in front of Noah. ‘If you believe in magic, yes. Oh, and by the way, I don’t think you actually believe she predicted the future, I think you’re just being deliberately awkward to score a point against me.’

The atmosphere was suddenly brittle. Noah looked from one to the other and back again. He raised his eyebrows, obviously surprised and maybe even a little pleased about this sudden show of bitter fracture in our relationship. I wondered what he thought of Matthias and whether he was secretly satisfied at our disagreement … and if so, why?  Either way, Matthias and I needed to get back on the same side.

‘Sorry,’ I said awkwardly.

Matthias gave me a close-lipped smile and reached for my drink. I let him take it and gulp it back. The fumes from the alcohol were potent.

‘Do you know how big the polar ice caps were before the Flood?’ Noah asked, changing tack.

 I shook my head. ‘Geography isn’t my strong point.’

‘What is?’ whispered Matthias sarcastically, eliciting a punch to his arm from me.

Noah looked down, embarrassed, then carried on. ‘During the winter months, they stretched for nearly seven million square miles.
Seven million.
And it only took a few months to melt. Does that strike you as odd?’

I couldn’t quite catch his implication. ‘Odd? What do you mean, odd? They had been warning us for decades, you know: global warming, ice caps melting, rising sea levels. We knew it was coming, our ancestors had abused the land too much, the weather had already changed from what it used to be,’ I said.

‘Yes, we knew it was coming but all other predictions had indicated that it would happen slowly, incrementally, they said. Slow rises in sea levels over decades. Who knew that seven million square miles of ice could melt within the space of a few quick months …?’

He was staring at me intently. I knew he was urging me to catch his drift, to let me figure out the conclusion for myself but I just couldn’t grasp what he was getting at. Besides, I was feeling vaguely irritated that he was trying to make me think in a certain way. So much for being independent-minded. ‘The predictions were wrong then. Obviously the scientists made a mistake. I mean, it isn’t unlikely. A natural disaster as big as this has never happened before, no-one can predict nature; the scientists got it badly wrong.’

‘Hmm …’ Noah trailed off and looked slightly disappointed. Disappointed in me, perhaps. Oh well. I’d prefer if he just came out and said it rather than play guessing games. He turned to Matthias and said, ‘And you? What do you think?’

Matthias had a strange look on his face, like a man electrified and wide-eyed. He placed my glass on the table and I noticed his hand was shaking slightly.

‘Matthias, what is it? What’s wrong?’

‘No. It just happened naturally. No-one can control nature. Natural disasters happen all the time,’ he mumbled to himself.