Flood

6

Lily had no idea how to use this new-fangled phone to contact Gary Boyle. Indeed, she didn’t even know his number. So she took herself off out of the house to find him, huddled up in a heavy waterproof coat she borrowed from Amanda.

Dodging the spray from the cars, she found her way down to the Fulham Road, well remembered from her childhood, but much altered, change upon change, much of it very recent. The grand old villas had mostly been converted to flats, or demolished altogether to be replaced by shops and restaurants and gas stations and estate agents. And you could see the scars of flooding everywhere, tide marks on low walls, slick mud in front gardens, a lingering scent of sewage. Many of the properties were boarded up, in fact, condemned because of flood damage.

She cut down Fulham High Street, heading for Putney Bridge Road. A ticket outlet advertised discounted seats at all the West End shows. Amanda had told her it was so difficult traveling now that it was easy to get tickets for the opera, the shows, even the big football matches. Always free tables in the restaurants too, but the menus were restricted because the international food distribution business was so badly hit.

Before she reached the river she cut down some steps to reach Bishop’s Park, a leafy garden over which the slim tower of Fulham Palace thrust to the sky. The rain, not too heavy, hissed from the thick summer leaves of very old trees. The lawns were flooded, and ducks and moorhens swam complacently on ponds that bristled with long grass and stranded trees.

She found Gary sitting on a bench on the footpath by the riverbank, before a green railing from which hung an orange lifebelt. Lily sat down with him. Gary was humming softly, and tapping his feet. Evidently he’d discovered Angels. He had always talked about how he missed music, down in the cellars; Lily guessed he was catching up.

The Thames was high and fast-moving, it seemed to her, an angry gray beast that forced its way under the pale sandstone arches of Putney Bridge. On the far bank boathouses glistened in the rain; nobody was out rowing today.

Gary said, “I counted seven joggers since I’ve been sitting here. And four people with dogs.”

“Somewhere in this park,” Lily said, “is a memorial to the International Brigade. Who fought for the republic in the Spanish Civil War.”

“Small world,” he said. “Your sister’s hospitable. Made me welcome.”

“Well, that’s her job, sort of. She’s an events coordinator. She’s been having time off since she found out I was released. She says she’s taking the kids out of school and to the Dome in Greenwich tomorrow, end-of-term educational treat stuff…”

“That river looks high to me.”

“And to me.”

“Is it still tidal, as far as this?”

“I think so.”

“Look at this.” He produced a handheld, a gift from AxysCorp, on which he’d been watching news and recording clips; he shielded it from the rain with his hand.

It wasn’t just London. Much of the country was in the grip of chronic flooding, which seemed to have become a regular event. Britain’s great rivers were all swollen, all had broken their banks somewhere, and there were refugee camps, parks of caravans and tents, on higher ground near the Trent, the Clyde, the Severn as far as Shrewsbury. There was a particular crisis unfolding this summer in Liverpool. Lily was shocked by a satellite image of East Anglia. The sea had pushed deeply beyond its old bounds across the Fens, lapping toward Wisbech and Spalding, and there were free-standing lakes everywhere, dark blue in the processed image.

The images seemed unreal. Lily was surprised everybody wasn’t talking constantly about what seemed to her an immense transformation. But she supposed that over the years you got used to it. It was just that she had been fast-forwarded to an unfamiliar future.

Gary said, “Some of these incidents are fluvial-exceptional rain, flooding rivers. The coastal events come from the sea, obviously… I guess you got the call from Helen.”

“Yes. I never knew that bastard Said was the son of a Saudi prince. We were privileged to be abused by him.”

“Yeah, so we were,” he said sourly.

Most of their guards had been Spanish. But when they were in the hands of Muslim factions some had come from further afield. Some Muslim radicals dreamed of retaking every piece of Waqf, the territory claimed under the first eighth-century Islamic expansion, from Spain to Iraq. And so combatants were drawn to the conflict in Spain from other parts of the Islamic world.

The prisoners had cared nothing, really, about their guards’ provenance. All that mattered about the guards was how they behaved. Christian and Muslim alike, they were almost all very young men, almost all radicalized by the fiery words of preachers-almost all poorly educated, and obsessed with sex. Some were stable, almost normal-seeming; they could be friendly with their captives, and some even seemed to crave their captives’ affection.

But some guards harmed them, even though the prisoners were supposed to have value as hostages. There could be punishment beatings, belt-whippings. Usually there was at least some such excuse for the violence, for instance when Lily had gone on a hunger strike. But some had gone further than any possible justification. These were mixed-up young men taking out their own frustration and confusion; it didn’t really matter who you were or what you had done. Lily’s own worst experience had been an amateurish bastinado: to be trussed up, hands behind her back and shackled to her own ankles while the souls of her feet were beaten with an iron rod, an unbelievably painful experience. That had not been Said but a man like him.

She had come to believe that part of the motive for such assaults was always sexual, even if the attack itself wasn’t sexual in nature. You could feel the excitement in the man standing over you, smell the salty spice of his breath at your neck, hear the rapid pumping of his lungs.

As for sex itself, Lily had been groped and pummeled by foolish boys, but she seemed to have had a manner that embarrassed rather than excited them. Helen Gray, fifteen years younger, hadn’t been so lucky. After two rapes by Said, or three-Helen had been taken away each time and wouldn’t talk about her experiences, though the blood and bruising made it obvious-the other guards had put a stop to it. After a time Said went away, perhaps posted to some other front of the great battlefield.

But not before he left Helen with his child. Her pregnancy in captivity, aided by her fellow captives with their bits of first aid and field medicine, and then a delivery by a scared drafted-in medical student, had been terrifying. But at the end of it there was a baby, Grace, whom Helen had loved immediately, and cherished every day of her imprisonment.

“And Helen never knew she’d given birth to a Saudi royal,” said Gary. “A princess!”

Helen had become convinced this was why her baby hadn’t been returned to her, since the first moment of their rescue five days ago under La Seu. The baby must be at the center of some enormous diplomatic row.

Gary said, “So you think that’s why Helen called us, why she’s so adamant we should go to the AxysCorp reception?”

“I guess so. If Lammockson can get us out of Barcelona, maybe he can get the baby back from Riyadh, or wherever the hell she is. So we go, I guess.”

“Sure,” Gary said. “We said we’d stick by each other, didn’t we, the four of us? But, Lily, your mom-”

“There’s nothing I can do for Mum,” Lily said firmly,“but Helen and the baby I can help. In the meantime we’re going to my sister’s for dinner. You’ll love the kids. Come on.”

They set off back, plodding out of the park and over sodden pavements.

At the roundabout where the High Street joined the Fulham Road a drain had blocked, and a lake had formed. The cars were pushing through it, raising great rooster-tails of water, and Lily and Gary had to detour. By the time they made it to the Fulham Road they both had wet feet. This was life in London now, it seemed, rain and wet shoes and road blockages.

But by now the schools were emptying, and the roads filled up with yellow school buses, American style, another innovation since Lily had been away. On the Fulham Road they merged into a growing crowd of parents and children, noisy, laughing, hurrying along the pavement between gushing gutters and lines of sandbags. Lily wondered how many of the world’s nations were represented in the exhilarating rainbow of faces around her. This was an old village long overwhelmed by the growth of London, a place you just drove through, but people still lived here just as they had when Lily was a kid, still worked and went shopping and took their kids to school, still were born and grew old and died in this place.

And then the rain lightened, and a shaft of sunlight broke through the scattering clouds and glimmered from the water that stood on the roads and in the gutters, on lawns and playgrounds. Unaccountably, on this day she had learned her mother had died, Lily felt optimistic. She was free, and here was the sun trying to shine. On impulse she grabbed Gary’s hand, and he squeezed back.