Flood

37

May 2019

“You have to leave Postbridge, Amanda. You and the kids. ow.”

Amanda stared at her sister. Lily stood in the door of the caravan, her rucksack at her feet, wearing a scuffed blue coverall stitched with AxysCorp logos. Lily was deeply tanned, her graying hair shaved short. She looked fit, lean and intent.

Wayne sat at the caravan’s single table, shaping a bit of leather for a harness. At thirty-one he was younger than either of the women. Amanda was aware of the way he appraised Lily’s body, the curves flattened and hidden by the coverall. He was like that with every woman he met, even those close to him-including, uncomfortably, fourteen-year-old Kristie. It was a habit Amanda had learned to ignore.

Lily ignored him too. She kept her gaze fixed on Amanda’s face. Amanda said,“How long is it since I’ve seen you? More than a year.. Where did you say you’ve been working?”

“Peru. A big AxysCorp project there.”

“Peru? South America? I thought Nathan was going to hole up on Iceland.”

“Change of plan.”

“Peru, though, Jesus! Well, it’s doing you good.”

“You have to leave,” Lily said again.

“Why?”

“I can’t tell you,” said Lily, strained. “Come with me to London. There’s transport out of the country arranged from there. I’ve got a car. It got stopped by the roadblocks and I had to walk, but it will pick us up at Cheriton Bishop.” That was on the A30, the main trunk road east out of Dartmoor.

“London’s drowned,” Wayne scoffed at Lily. His own London accent came out strongly. Drah-ned.

Lily said patiently to Amanda, “There’s a boat at Marlow. Then, further downstream, a helicopter.”

Amanda asked, “Why can’t the helicopter just come here?”

“It’s not safe.”

Amanda knew what she meant. Everybody was a bit insular up here on Dartmoor, hostile to the Londoners and the Brummies who still came pouring from their flooded suburbs across Salisbury Plain or the Cotswolds. The roadblocks were one thing, but there had been a rumor that somebody had taken out a police chopper with a surface-to-air missile, like some terrorist in Beirut.

Lily said, “AxysCorp says-”

“AxysCorp this, AxysCorp that,” Wayne said. “Big corporations. Journeys across the country. You’re like a relic from the past, from the last century, you’re irrelevant.”

“She’s my sister,” Amanda said, keeping her voice level, trying not to provoke him.“And she’s come all this way to talk to me. I ought to listen at least-”

“Bollocks.” Wayne dumped the leather pieces on the table, tucked his knife into his belt and stood. He was a big-framed man, muscular, tanned after the outdoor work, though some of his “London fat,” as he called it, still clung to his frame, even after eight or nine months up here on the moor. You’d call him handsome, Amanda thought, seeing him through Lily’s eyes. His best features were his blue eyes. But those eyes were cold as he stared down at Lily, and his expression was blank.

“You’re family,” he said to Lily. “You can have bed and board for a night. Beyond that, if you want to stay here, you have to work. Everybody has to work. That’s the way of things now. We don’t have room for dossers.”

“My business is with my sister,” Lily said quietly.

He stepped closer and shouted down at her,“We’re together now, me and Amanda and the kids. So it is my business, got that?”

Lily stood utterly still, her slight form dwarfed by his. She had changed so much, Amanda thought. She had noticed that habit of stillness about Lily after her captivity. She was also, of course, a USAF veteran. Amanda had no doubt that if Wayne kept on threatening her he would end up on his back with a broken arm.

She stepped between the two of them and took Lily’s hand. “Look, we’ll talk this over. That can’t do any harm, can it?”

Wayne snorted, his eyes still fixed on Lily’s face. But he backed off. He sat down again, pulled out his knife and went back to shaping the leather with hard, firm gestures.

“Come on,” Amanda said to Lily. “Let’s sit down and have a cup of tea.”

“You still have tea?”

“Well, no,” Amanda said ruefully.“Used up the last of my stash months ago. But you can make a reasonable brew out of nettles-”

“Can we walk?” Lily asked sharply.

Wayne looked up. “I’m not too subtle, me, darling. If you’ve got a problem with me then say it plain.”

“I’ve nothing to say to you,” Lily said.

There was no contempt in her voice, but Amanda knew that was the kind of remark likely to inflame Wayne, who didn’t like to be disregarded. She grabbed her jacket from a hook behind the door and pushed her feet into her boots. “We’ll walk,” she said firmly. “I’ll show you around…”

Lily picked up her pack and slung it over her shoulders, as if she had no intention of returning.

They walked through Postbridge, not speaking. Amanda sensed they needed time to let the tension from the scene in the caravan drain out.

Postbridge was a pretty little village, right in the middle of Dartmoor, not much more than a scattering of farms, an inn and a chapel. A stone bridge crossed the East Dart River, a medieval construction Amanda had learned to call a clapper bridge. The sun was low. It was a bright spring day. This was a characteristically English postcard scene, though studded with modernity, telephone poles and power pylons and a mobile-phone mast.

You’d never have known anything had changed, Amanda thought suddenly. They were a long way from the coast here. You’d never know that an immense flooding had disrupted the whole world and drowned Britain to thirty meters or more, turning much of southern England into an archipelago. What was different? Kids out playing on a school day, maybe, or even working in the fields like her own two; the village school was reporting only fifty percent attendance. The utter lack of traffic, though she could hear the throaty roar of farm vehicles working the fields. No newspapers in the little post office; the Daily Mail board stood empty, blank and weathered. The English flags that fluttered from every rooftop and out of every window, even from the aerials of the stationary cars, the cross of Saint George everywhere. And there was the warmth, of course, the unseasonable warmth that had persisted all winter, and had got the grumbling farmers out working their fields earlier than they had been used to. But this had suddenly become a desirable place, as you could tell from the caravans and mobile homes and tents clustered around the old core of the village, including Amanda’s own caravan, for Postbridge was more than three hundred meters above the old sea level. This was the heart of Dartmoor, the highest location in southern England.

She glanced down at herself, in a battered quilt jacket, worn jeans, heavy walking boots. She looked like a farmer’s wife-which, effectively, she was, though she and Wayne hadn’t married. The Amanda of 2015 wouldn’t have recognized what she had become.

Lily took in the sights of the village curiously. “In the States you see the flag everywhere, the Stars and Stripes, and yellow ribbons tied to the trees for the lost. But I don’t remember all these flags in England. Except when the World Cup was on.”

That made Amanda smile.“Actually they’re still playing football, a lot of the big stadiums in the north stayed open. A kind of cut-down league based on who can turn up. Wayne follows it on the radio. Bradford City are the league champions, imagine that. At least they’ve given up staging big matches abroad. Pity about the World Cup though..”

The sisters passed out of the village and followed a footpath south.

They didn’t get far before they came to the village’s barbed-wire perimeter. The path was blocked by a rough barrier of a cut-down telephone pole, manned today by Bill Pulford, son of a local farmer. He nodded at Amanda and let them through.

Amanda tried to break the ice. “We’re not far from Bellever Tor.” The tors, massive granite outcrops pushing out of peat moorland, were Dartmoor’s most famous feature, back in the days when it was a magnet for tourism. “There’s a wood. Only conifers, but you get a lot of bird life now. They’ve come up from the flooded valleys, I guess. And some archeology, hut circles-”

“Where are the kids?”

“Working,” Amanda said, pointing.“A couple of kilometers that way. The new fields have been laid out but they need clearing; the farmers always need muscle for that. I’d rather they were at school, but what can you do? Benj is sixteen now, and Kristie fourteen, they make their own minds up. Anyhow the outdoor work is good for them, and they get paid.”

“With what?”

“The local scrip.” She dug in her pocket and showed Lily a handful of money. It was old sterling or euro notes and coins, marked or clipped to reflect a local barter rate. “We do get stuff from outside, of course, but-”

“Can you call the kids? Do you have mobiles?”

“Of course we have mobiles.” Reflexively Amanda took her phone out of her jacket pocket. It was four years old, elderly by former standards; it had actually come through the flooding of London with her.

“Call them,” Lily urged her.“Right now. Get them to come meet us. Maybe at the tor you mentioned? Would they know how to get to it?”

Amanda weighed the phone in her hand, frowning. “I don’t know if I should.”

“Please, Amanda. I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important.”

“And then what?”

“I told you. We get out, the four of us, to the car at Cheriton Bishop.”

“It must be twenty kilometers. More.”

Lily glanced at the sun. “It’s not late. I walked here yesterday and this morning. I stayed over in a pub. Four, five hours should do it. The car will wait until the sun goes down, later if I call.”

“And then we all just drive off, is that the idea?” Anger flared in Amanda.“You know, you’ve got a nerve, Lily. Without any warning you parachute back into the middle of my life. My life, the life I’ve been building for myself here, me and the kids. It hasn’t been easy, you know.”

“I don’t mean to mess things up for you.” Lily sounded strained, tired; she seemed drained behind her South American tan.

“You’re doing your best to come between me and Wayne, aren’t you?”

“I don’t mean to do that either. Look, please, Amanda-you have to trust me.”

“Why?”

“I promised I wouldn’t say.”

“Promised who? AxysCorp, the great Nathan Lammockson? Why won’t you say?”

“Because it would cause panic.”

That made Amanda pause. Panic? Amanda had seen panic, a frantic sort in Greenwich on the day the Thames Barrier fell, and later a more long-drawn-out miserable sort of panic when the river started rising again and west London had to be evacuated. But here she was in Dartmoor, far above any flooding. What could there possibly be to panic about? She felt resistant, angry, unwilling.

Lily saw this in her face. “Please, Amanda, the kids.”

Amanda had to trust her; this was her sister. And besides she could always come back when the fuss was over, whatever it was. She hefted her phone. “Shall I have them call at the caravan first, pick up their stuff-”

“No,” Lily said. “Forget the caravan, forget packing. Just get them to meet us.”

“Wayne won’t take kindly if he finds out you’re having us sneak off, if that’s the idea.”

“So don’t tell him.” Lily closed her eyes, and a muscle in her cheek worked. “Look, I’ll make a deal. Once I have you and the kids in the AxysCorp car you can call Wayne, or whoever you like. My priority isn’t Wayne. It’s not even your feelings. My priority is only you and the kids. Your safety.”

“You’re scaring me,” said Amanda, though she was still more angry than frightened.

“Good,” Lily said bluntly. “Make your calls. Please, Amanda.”

So Amanda pressed the fast-key numbers, and called.