Flood

20

August 2016

Kristie 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.

Anyhow today wasn’t so bad. It was remarkable how much more cheerful everybody felt when the sun shone. The Londoners queuing in this English street, grimy and stolid, were jolly enough. Many of them looked hopefully at mobile phones that still remained without a signal for most of each day. But some whistled or chatted, others gazed around vacantly as their Angels whispered in their heads, and around them the red tiles of the roofs of their crammed-in suburban houses shone in the sunlight.

Kristie hummed to herself, and adopted the glazed expression of an Angel-user-even though it was fake, for Lily happened to know her Angel wasn’t working this morning; she’d forgotten to plug it into its charger when the power came up last night. Lily felt a stab of affection. Kristie was of a generation that was having to learn to live a life reduced to basics, a generation for whom words like “bowser” and “sewage” and “triage” were becoming far more important than “email” and “phone” and “Angel.” The flood and all its implications had inundated a myriad lives like Kristie’s, she thought, a cosmic intervention into the already tangled stories of parents and children, lovers and enemies. Just as, she supposed, her own sudden resurrection from limbo had dumped her into the lap of Amanda and her kids. Lily considered ruffling Kristie’s hair again, then rejected it as too childish.

At last they reached the head of the queue, and bent to fill up their bottles and buckets. When they were done they plodded back home. Water was always unreasonably heavy, but they had worked out their system, with the yoke to spread the weight over shoulders and the gardening gloves to protect hands that held the string bags, and they toiled up the slight rise.

A light plane buzzed over. They both stopped and looked up. It was a novelty, you usually heard helicopters. The plane’s chassis was bright red, a jewellike toy in the blue morning sky, and it trailed a ragged banner.

“It’s a Flying Eye,” said Kristie.

Maybe. But it wasn’t here to spot traffic. Squinting, Lily could just make out the words on the banner: WATCH THE COCKNEYS SWIM DOT COM. Lily had heard of this, a band of provincial London-haters who hacked into CCTV and phone footage of the ongoing disaster, and rebroadcast choice selections.

Kristie didn’t react, and Lily hoped she hadn’t been able to read the message.

When they got back to the locked-up house it turned out, entirely predictably, that Kristie didn’t have her door key after all. That was eleven-year-olds for you. Kristie hammered on the door, yelling for Benj. Lily was relieved when it only took a few minutes for Benj to shamble down from his room.

“Telly’s on,” he said without preamble. Kristie dumped her water and hurried in.

Lily shoved the water inside so she could shut the door, and put down her own yoke. In the house, the big screen was illuminated, the sound turned up high. It sounded like a news channel.

So the TV was on. More to the point, that must mean the power was on-unusual, for an early morning. Lily made for the kitchen. She filled the kettle and turned it on, and began opening cans and hunting for the rice in its plastic packet. With luck she could get lunch cooked before the power failed again.

From here she could just make out the screen. The news was local, with more details from the flooding. The effects on wildlife were being shown, with burrowing creatures like moles and voles forced up from the saturated soil, and ground-nesting birds like sand martins and oyster catchers driven off. A groundsman was shown scooping fish from a lake on the flooded Oval cricket ground; it was thought they had been put in there as a prank.

And then the story changed, and the image flicked over to an aerial view of a flooded landscape. This was the Bay of Bengal, the captions said, the coast of Bangladesh, a complex delta where the Brahmaputra and Ganges rivers reached the sea, and most of the population of a poor country scraped for a living on the coast or offshore islands. Little of this landscape was more than two meters above sea level. Now flooding had come, and whole islands were submerged. Lily saw before-and-after images, lagoons with shrimp pools and coconut palms transformed to drowned places where a few survivors clung to trees and the roofs of ruined mud-and-thatch houses.

A camera viewpoint pulled back to reveal long lines of refugees, their clothes the color of mud, plodding through knee-high water in search of dry land. There were enormous numbers of them, adults and children, in this one shaky shot. More advanced areas were not spared: a failed embankment had turned an airport into a lake, with helicopters and military aircraft piled on top of each other. Lily couldn’t tell from the commentary if some kind of storm had hit, a typhoon; it sounded as if the sea had simply risen, relentlessly, to do this damage.

And now, as if the viewpoint pulled back further still, the news program switched to a summary map of the world that showed the shapes of the continents outlined in bright blue, all around the shorelines and in the major river estuaries. The blue was a graphic showing how flooding emergencies were cropping up everywhere, in the Americas, north and south Europe, India, Asia, Africa, Australia. Whole low-lying regions were threatened too, like Bangladesh, Florida, Louisiana, the Netherlands, and river deltas, many densely populated. In great cities like New York, Vancouver, Tokyo and Shanghai, populations who had watched the travails of London and Sydney now made frantic preparations of their own.

Ten percent of humanity lived within ten meters of sea level, hundreds of millions of people. Now the risen sea, or the fear of it, was driving them away from their homes, a tremendous flight of population gathering all over the planet. But the images blurred after a time, one desolate stream of rain-soaked refugees looking much like another.

A tagline reported the plight of the Newcastle football team, trapped in Mumbai after losing the Cup Final. And the news flicked out as Benj cycled through the channels. At last he settled on a kids’ channel, showing a gory cartoon.

Lily had just got the rice boiled when the power failed again. Both the kids groaned in frustration as the TV died. Lily hastily poured the last of the boiling water into another thermos, and shoveled in instant coffee after it.