They flew past the Eye, a circular necklace of glass beads, stationary now, its base in the water. People were clearly visible, trapped in the cars, tiny stick figures like flies in amber. And on the far side of the water Lily saw boats crowding around the Palace of Westminster, like explorers cautiously approaching sandstone cliffs.
Suddenly Lily was overwhelmed by the sheer scale of it all. She looked away and wiped her face with a gloved hand, pressed her eyes.
The old lady she’d just strapped in reached over to pat her hand. “There, ducks. It’ll sort itself out, you see.”
The chopper surged and banked again, buffeted by the continuing storm.
19
From Kristie Caistor’s scrapbook:
Three days after the flooding hit, Kristie snipped a report from BBC News about the efforts in flooded London to rescue thousands of people who had been trapped for days by power failures in electronically locked hotel rooms. This in itself would have been a major incident at any other time. It struck Kristie as funny.
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.