Flood

38

It would take a while for the kids to catch up with them. Lily and Amanda walked slowly to the tor.

A farm vehicle buzzed in a field. “More fields being broken,” Lily said.

“Yes. They’re growing crops up here now, instead of raising sheep and cattle. You can thank the warmer weather for that. There are problems, though. Like bluetongue, and African horse sickness. New kinds of viruses nobody’s dealt with here before. The government vets still come around sometimes.” It was another result of the flood-induced warming, a spreading out of the old hot regions of diseases of animals and of humans, like chikungunya and Rift Valley fever.

Lily asked, “Where do you get your fuel from?”

“There’s a tanker port at Taunton.” The lowland of Somerset was all but drowned, but harbors and port facilities had hastily been improvised close to what had been an inland town. “It’s rationed, of course; it’s really just for the farm vehicles and the power stations. We use the cars for emergencies. We’ve a few bikes too, Wayne has one. They’ve had to rebuild the port once already, when the sea kept rising.”

“It’s the same story all over.”

“Nobody seems to know how long the tankers will keep calling.”

“Who controls the rationing?”

Amanda looked at her. “Well, the police. Who do you think?”

“It’s just that you’re kind of remote up here. All that barbed wire. The SAM missiles,” Lily said frankly. “Is it true the locals ‘nationalized’ the Tesco’s in Taunton?”

“Sort of,” Amanda said. “There was a lot of objection to the profits they were taking out of the area.”

“That wouldn’t have happened in the old days, would it? A lot of England is disconnected from the center nowadays.”

“Well, the government is hundreds of kilometers away, in Leeds. They don’t worry about us. Wayne says we could be self-sufficient here on Dartmoor, if we don’t get swamped.”

“ ‘Swamped’?”

Amanda ignored that. “The climate’s better than it used to be. It’s because of the sea level. It’s as if we’ve sunk by thirty meters, so what was highland becomes lowland. Wayne takes samples of the changing populations of flowers, the moths and butterflies and birds. He’s keeping a kind of log on his laptop.”

“So this toyboy of yours is some kind of biologist, is he?”

“Toyboy, oh shut up. He’s a marine biologist. He’s from London. But he worked at the Dove Marine Laboratory in Northumberland before the floods.”

“You never told me much about him, in your mails. What did you do, glom onto the first strong man you could find?”

Amanda flared again. “Speak to me like that again and you can walk to bloody Cheriton Bishop by yourself.”

“All right. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it.”

“You fucking did.” But Amanda walked on. “Look, Lil, he’s not perfect, but he’s a decent enough man. He’s got a PhD. He specialized in coastal life, but now the coasts are gone. Sometimes we travel, you know, even as far as the Solent, just to see how the flooding’s progressing. Wayne says it’s a sort of extinction event. It will take a million years for nature to make a proper coast again, the rock pools and sea caves and mud flats with their plovers and their whooper swans. Even the sand dunes are drowned. It’s all gone now, and we won’t see the like again in our lifetimes. Isn’t that sad?”

“So he has a soul,” Lily said. “Go on, then. Tell me how you met him.”

They had met in the holding camp at Aylesbury, in a queue for a water bowser.

When the flooding had started, Wayne had decamped down from Northumberland to Charlton in south London, to be with his family. They had managed to get out, and joined the flow to Aylesbury. After their chance meeting Wayne and Amanda had become close, sort of, spending time together in the refugee camp’s “pubs,” marquees stocked with beer salvaged from the abandoned suburbs.

But the flooding continued. The sea had pushed far into the great river estuaries. The Thames was now an inland sea as far as Buckinghamshire. The Severn had intruded through the Vale of Evesham as far as Warwick, and with Liverpool Bay extending inland as far as Chester, it looked as if Wales was becoming detached from England altogether-just as the estuaries of the Forth and the Clyde, drowning much of Edinburgh and Glasgow, were cutting Scotland adrift. And the Cornish peninsula, dominated by the great upland masses of Exmoor and Dartmoor, looked as if it too was soon to be severed from the mainland by tongues of the sea. As for the rest of England, you could draw a line south from Middlesborough down as far as Cambridge, to the east of which there was only a ragged peninsula formed by scraps of high land like the Yorkshire Moors. In the southeast the sea had pushed far into the vales of Kent and Sussex, leaving the bands of higher ground, the North and South Downs and the Weald, protruding like the fingers of a rocky hand.

In the camps in the Chilterns, among the London evacuees, it had been a scary time. Everyone knew that the rising flood was pushing more waves of people inland from the valleys of the Severn and the Trent and the Humber and all the sea coasts, some of them driven on from camps to which they’d already been evacuated once, millions on the move.

At last, under pressure to accommodate still more refugees from the Thames valley, the authorities had started to break up the Aylesbury camp and move people westward. Wayne had invited Amanda and the kids to throw in their lot with him, and come to a community he knew of being established on Dartmoor. Amanda hadn’t been sure of Wayne, if she was honest. But she couldn’t see she had much of an option.

“So how did he know about this place?”

Amanda took a breath. “OK. Here’s the part Mum wouldn’t have approved of. When he was a kid, Wayne used to run with a gang of Charlton fans. The football, you know? I won’t pretend I like it. I mean, it was just lads being lads, but they were rough. Wayne grew out of it. But he kept in touch with the lads in his gang. And some of them, in later life, formed links with, well, fringe groups.”

Lily nodded. “Hence the flags. The far right. Like the British National Party.”

“Not the BNP… Similar, I suppose. Look, Wayne isn’t a thug or a neo-Nazi. But he says he found ideas being floated among these people that he wasn’t hearing discussed anywhere else.”

“Such as?”

“Such as, how would the world cope when the oil ran out? I suppose it’s all moot now, we have other problems, but back then people feared anarchy. There was talk of bolt-holes. Wayne says one group looked at locations in places like Croatia, close to the coast, where you could use local rivers for fresh water and live off solar energy. Some of them started planning seriously. Making caches of stuff.”

“Survivalists with swastikas.”

“If you like,” Amanda snapped. “Anyhow when the flooding came they dug up all those old plans. Wayne got in with a group that had considered setting themselves up closer to home.”

“Dartmoor.”

“Yes. Devon and Cornwall were a peninsula even before the flooding; I think there were vague plans to block the main roads and cut it off. It was more pub talk than anything else. But they had the location in mind. So when we got moved on from Aylesbury, at least we had a place to go. Wayne got hold of a Land Rover and a caravan, and-well, here we are.”

“Um. Complete with barbed-wire barriers and surface-to-air missiles.”

“It’s the same all over, and don’t tell me it isn’t. People have lost so much they’re frightened of losing even more. But I think it will calm down. We’re not going to live through some survivalist horror show, Lily.”

“We’re not?”

“You’ve been away. It’s not so bad.” She believed that, actually. And she believed she had found strength and resilience in making a home for herself and her kids in a situation she would once have found completely unacceptable, and she resented Lily coming along to demolish it all with a word. “It might get better,” she said defiantly. “They say that if it gets any warmer we’ll be like the Greek islands here. Remember when Mum took us to Cephalonia when we were kids? Olive groves and sea food and that flat, glittering blue sea.” It was a fantasy she entertained in her head, especially on dark winter nights or when the storms shook their crowded little caravan, a fantasy of a sun-drenched future in an archipelago England.

Lily said nothing. She looked extraordinarily sad.

Amanda said, “That isn’t going to happen, is it?”

“No.” Lily took her hands.“I’m sorry, sis. I really do have to take you away from here.”

There was a sudden roar of an engine. A motorbike came bolting along the footpath. Benj was riding it, with Kristie clinging to his waist. Neither of them wore helmets.

Benj brought the bike clumsily to a halt. Kristie clambered off, tearful, and ran to her mother. She had her battered old pink backpack on her back.

Amanda launched in on them. “That’s Wayne’s bike! What the hell do you think you’re doing? He’ll be furious!”

“He already is,” Benj said. “Hi, Auntie Lily.”

“Hello, Benj, Kris.” Lily looked wistful.

Amanda saw her kids through Lily’s eyes. They had grown so much, filled out, changed. The pasty, fashion-conscious, Angel-obsessed teenagers of the days before the flood would have looked like peacocks beside these sturdy rustic laborers.

But Kris was crying. “Mum, it’s my fault. I know you said not to go back, but I had this feeling we were going away for good-”

“ I had a feeling,” Benj said, “when you said Auntie Lily was here.”

“I didn’t want to go without my stuff.” Kris tugged on her backpack straps.

Amanda glanced at Lily, exasperated. “It’s the last of her London things. Accessories, you know, sparkly bits, her string of amber beads. And her teddy!”

“It doesn’t matter,” Lily said quickly.“She can bring it, now she has it. The question is, why did you come on the bike?”

“Because of him,” Benj said. “He saw us.”

And Amanda realized she could hear another engine’s growl.

Wayne came roaring down the track on a big Honda. It was Bill Pulford’s, Amanda realized. Wayne pulled up, killed the engine, and let the bike drop to the ground. He came stalking over, fists bunched.

Amanda forced a laugh, trying to ease the mood. “You know, Bill’s going to kick up a stink if he knows you handled his bike like that-”

Wayne pointed a grubby finger at her. “You shut up.” His hair was wild from the ride; his AxysCorp — durable coveralls were gray with muck, his eyes bright blue. “What the hell do you think you’re doing? Off somewhere, are you? I knew it when I saw these two little arseholes running off.”

Benj faced him. “I may be an arsehole, but don’t call me ‘little.’”

Wayne raised a fist.

To her own surprise Amanda grabbed his arm. “If you hit him it’s over. Don’t-you-dare.”

He glared at her. But he backed off, and shook her hand off his arm. “Isn’t it over anyway? Aren’t you all fucking off with GI Jane here?”

Lily said evenly, “I’ve come for my family. I’ve no quarrel with you.”

“Well, I’ve got a quarrel with you, lady. I’ve got rights. It was me saved them when we got kicked out of Aylesbury. Ah, go on, fuck off,” he said to Amanda. “I’m sick of your whining. You can all go. All but you.” And he grabbed Kristie’s arm. She screamed and tried to struggle, but he was overwhelmingly strong.

Benj made a lunge, but Lily held him back.

Amanda advanced on him. “What are you doing? Let her go!”

“No chance,” he snarled. He pulled Kristie against him, his big hand holding her waist, her arm twisted behind her back. “I’ve got what I want, the rest of you can fuck off. Go on.”

Amanda saw it now. “It’s been about Kristie all along, hasn’t it?”

“Of course it has. I’ve only stayed with you while I’ve been waiting for her. Did you think I wanted you, you ridiculous old bag? How many kids could you give me? Because that’s what it’s going to be about in the future. Kids, strong sons, fertile daughters.” Kristie struggled again, but he twisted her arm tighter until she subsided. “Of course it was always about her. While I was shagging you, I thought about her. Couldn’t get it up otherwise-”

There was a soft detonation, like somebody spitting out a seed. Wayne let go of Kristie and fell to the ground, howling. His right boot had exploded.

Benj hurried forward and grabbed his sister. Lily stepped up to Wayne, on the ground, her pistol in her hand.

He was clutching the bloodied mess of his boot. “You stupid bitch, you’ve shot my fucking toe off!”

“If you make another sound I’ll shoot out a kneecap. What use will you be then to your survivalist buddies?”

He glared, his face a mask of pain and rage, the sweat making rivulets in the dirt on his brow. But he said no more.

Amanda, shaking, took a breath. “You do keep interfering in my life, Lil,” she said.

Lily turned to the children. “You two OK?”

“Yes,” Kristie said.“Auntie Lil, don’t blow his kneecap off if he makes this sound.”

“What sound?”

She ran up to Wayne, timing the run as if taking a penalty at soccer, and kicked him in the balls. He howled and writhed.

“ That sound,” she said. She yelled at him, “Creep!”

“Kris, I’m sorry,” Amanda said sincerely.

“Don’t sweat it,” Kris said coolly, her tears gone now. “He never would have got near me.”

“No, he wouldn’t,” Benj said firmly.

“My God,” Amanda said. “I’m raising vigilantes.”

Lily checked her watch. “Look, he doesn’t matter now. None of this does. We need to get to Cheriton Bishop to meet the car.” She eyed the bikes. “We could be there in fifteen minutes on these things, if we had two drivers.”

“I can ride a bike,” Benj said.

Amanda said, “I know-”

“And so can I,” Kristie said brightly.

“That I didn’t know,” Amanda said sternly.

“Leave my fucking bike alone, you witches,” Wayne said from the ground.

“Shut up,” Lily said mildly. “Well, then. Kris, can I hitch a ride with you?”

Wayne cursed as they got the bikes started and, apparently unable to contain his rage, actually got to his feet and staggered forward. Lily kept her gun visible. Amanda was grateful to get out of his sight.