Flood

3

When they walked out of the Savoy, Lily and Gary had to negotiate a chest-high maze of sandbags that blocked off the short access road to the Strand, where their car was to meet them. A uniformed footman showed them the way through. He carried a big monogrammed umbrella that kept off most of the steady, hissing rain, and he wore Wellington boots that shone as if polished.

Gary pointed at the sandbags, which were made of some silky-looking fabric and marked with the hotel’s logo.“They even do their sandbags in style. You Brits are amazing.”

“Thanks.”

Out in the street, waiting for the car, Lily was in the open, if only for a few seconds. After days of choppers and planes and cars and trucks, military bases and embassies and hotels, she still felt as if she hadn’t yet been released from her confinement. But the sky was all cloud, and the London air, though it tasted cleaner than she remembered, was hot and wet.

She glanced along the length of the Strand, at the shop fronts and the grand hotel entrances. So much was the same, so much had changed. London buses were now long snaking vehicles like trains, their carriages bright red, hissing through the sheets of water on the road when they got a chance to move forward in the jams. Every surface, including the taxi doors and bus panels, was covered with animated commercials for West End shows and TV events and Coke and Pepsi, and ads for “AxysCorp durables” like clothes and white goods, and for various competing brands of electronic gadgets whose nature she didn’t even recognize: what was an “Angel?” Football was bigger business than ever, judging by the ads for the FA Cup Final, moved from May to July and to be played between Liverpool and Newcastle United in Mumbai. And everywhere she saw slogans for the World Cup: “England 2018-Two Years To Go.” All this animation was a shimmering layer spray-painted over the world, reflected in the oily sheets of water on the road.

And yet the people hurrying by seemed oblivious to the shifting light, the unending dull roar of the traffic. Many of them had a dreamy look on their faces, some of them talking into the air, laughing, gesturing, unperturbed when they clattered into each other. Lily had grown up in Fulham, an inner suburb-she was on the way to her mother’s home there today-and she had never felt at home here in the heart of the city. Now, while she had been away, a whole new generation of confident, blank-eyed young people had grown up, believing that London and all its marvels had only been invented yesterday, and that this, their own moment in the urban light, would last forever.

The car drew up to the curb, gleaming silver, big articulated wipers keeping back the rain. It was a Ford but Lily didn’t recognize the model. Gary pointed out that it didn’t have an exhaust. There was a US Embassy pass tucked behind the windscreen, and a soggy Stars and Stripes hung limply from a half-meter pole. The footman opened the doors for them, still expertly handling his umbrella. Lily and Gary scrambled into the back. The interior was plush and clean and smelled of new carpets.

The car pulled out, forcing its way into the stop-start stream of traffic. The driver said the direct route was pretty much impassable. So he turned off the Strand as soon as he could, heading into the maze of side streets. Here they were able to make a bit more progress, before coming to a halt at a queue before a burst drain.

The driver glanced in the mirror and grinned at them. He was maybe thirty-five, with a mass of tightly curled blond hair.“You’re the hostages, aren’t you? My dispatcher said something about it.” Sahm-fing a-baht it. He had the kind of accent that used to be called estuary, when Lily had been taken.

“We were hostages,” Gary corrected him mildly. “We’re us now.”

“Yeah. Fair enough. Good for you. You both American, are you?”

“Not me,” Lily said. “Half-English, half-American. Born and raised in Fulham.”

“OK. Well, do you mind if I do this?” He pressed a button. The little Stars and Stripes furled itself around the flagpole, which slid into the hull of the car and out of sight. “Most of the work we get is for the Embassy. But we don’t like to tell ’em that their flag attracts potshots.”

Gary shrugged. “Fine by me.”

The jam lurched forward another couple of meters, and the driver took the opportunity to nip up another side road. They got to the end of this before hitting the next queue.

“So they let you out into the wild, did they? Must be a relief.”

“I’ll say,” Gary said.

It was, Lily thought. They still had some engagements, notably a reception by Nathan Lammockson, owner and chief exec of AxysCorp, the company which had prized them loose from the grip of the Fathers of the Elect. And then Lily would have to attend a briefing with senior USAF officers at Mildenhall in Suffolk to see if there was still a career for her in the Air Force. But in the meantime they were both glad to be free of the medics and counselors-and in Lily’s case some emergency dental work-and a little freedom was welcome.

The driver shook his head. “Five years chained to a radiator. Can’t imagine what it was like. Amazing you didn’t kill each other. Or yourselves. Although I’ve been stuck in this car for four years, sometimes it feels like that. And married for six, and that’s the same, hah!” He glanced at Lily. “So, a London girl. Nothing’s changed much since you’ve been gone, has it? Nothing changes much, not really.”

“I don’t remember it being so damn wet. It was wet in Spain too. You know, where we were kept.”

The driver pulled a face. “Nah. Just funny weather. Mind you they couldn’t complete the regular league season this year. I mean the football. First time since 1939, too many matches washed out. And Wimbledon hasn’t finished in its two weeks for the last three years. There’s a bloke down the cab shelter who reckons it’s all down to the Chinese.”

Gary asked, “What is?”

“The rain, the floods. China’s drying out, isn’t it? Stands to reason they’d want more rain, and hang the rest of us.”

Lily couldn’t tell if he was being serious or not.

Again the traffic lurched forward, again the car shot through another gap and turned off. Lily tried to follow the journey. They headed roughly west and south, pushing through the maze of Mayfair streets north of Green Park. Then they turned down through Knightsbridge, heading for the Brompton Road.

The driver saw her peering at streets signs.“Don’t worry, love, I’ll get you there.” He sounded defensive.

“I don’t doubt it,” she said.

“Used to be a cabbie-a black cab. This pays better. But I took the Knowledge. Of course a lot of the regular routes don’t work anymore what with the road closures and the floods. You just do your best. Half the punters don’t see that, they think you’re ripping them off.” He put on a vaguely Middle Eastern accent. “ ‘Are you sure this is the correct route, Mister Driver?’ That’s why I packed it in. The agency work is less stressful. Oh, you fucking arse-”

He pulled his wheel violently to the right, to avoid an expensive-looking car that aquaplaned in a slick of filthy water and ran into a wall. They avoided a collision, but endured another five minutes of motionlessness before the police cleared the crash.

A bit further on and some major building work was obstructing the carriageway. The driver said a lot of London’s older buildings were being made flood-resilient-having their foundations reinforced, their lower floors lined with sandbags. They didn’t get much further on past that before they ran into a crowd of angry-looking business types and shoppers and school parties, spilling onto the roads. The driver flicked on his radio. A Flying Eye report said that the Knightsbridge tube station had had to be evacuated because of flooding. The report went on to talk about a gathering North Sea storm that was expected to bring problems to the east coast.

The driver turned the radio off, and they waited for the blockage to clear. Lily peered out at the lines of traffic, the stalled cars and blocked roads, the miserable, sodden people splashing along the pavements, everybody trying to pursue their business. Their own fractious, short-tempered journey seemed a lot longer than just a few kilometers.

It was a relief to reach her mother’s home, and get out of the car. Lily wasn’t sure whether to tip the driver, or how much; there seemed to have been a pulse of inflation while she’d been away. She handed him twenty pounds. He looked neither disappointed nor surprised, and drove away.

Lily took a breath, and got her bearings. They were in Fulham, in Arneson Road, a kilometer or so north of the river. The house was one of a row of late-Victorian terraces, all heavily renovated and plastered with satellite dishes. Sandbags slumped in the small front garden, and the cellar, which had a window half-hidden by the pavement, was boarded up, evidently abandoned. Lily felt odd to be back here, after so long away. Everything seemed smaller than she remembered. She felt peculiarly glad she’d thought to bring Gary with her today, a kind of emblem of her other life.

Gary peered up doubtfully at the house’s three floors, the PVC frames that had replaced the original sash windows. “Kind of a skinny house,” he said.

“Skinny but deep,” Lily replied, trying to be bright.“More room than you’d think. Come on.” They walked through a low gate. A path had been cleared through sticky mud that smelled faintly of sewage. “Anyhow my mother makes the best chocolate cake in west London.”

But it wasn’t Lily’s mother who opened the door, but her sister Amanda. And Lily learned her mother was dead.