Kristie hummed to herself, and adopted the glazed expression of an Angel-user-even though it was fake, for Lily happened to know her Angel wasn’t working this morning; she’d forgotten to plug it into its charger when the power came up last night. Lily felt a stab of affection. Kristie was of a generation that was having to learn to live a life reduced to basics, a generation for whom words like “bowser” and “sewage” and “triage” were becoming far more important than “email” and “phone” and “Angel.” The flood and all its implications had inundated a myriad lives like Kristie’s, she thought, a cosmic intervention into the already tangled stories of parents and children, lovers and enemies. Just as, she supposed, her own sudden resurrection from limbo had dumped her into the lap of Amanda and her kids. Lily considered ruffling Kristie’s hair again, then rejected it as too childish.
At last they reached the head of the queue, and bent to fill up their bottles and buckets. When they were done they plodded back home. Water was always unreasonably heavy, but they had worked out their system, with the yoke to spread the weight over shoulders and the gardening gloves to protect hands that held the string bags, and they toiled up the slight rise.
A light plane buzzed over. They both stopped and looked up. It was a novelty, you usually heard helicopters. The plane’s chassis was bright red, a jewellike toy in the blue morning sky, and it trailed a ragged banner.
“It’s a Flying Eye,” said Kristie.
Maybe. But it wasn’t here to spot traffic. Squinting, Lily could just make out the words on the banner: WATCH THE COCKNEYS SWIM DOT COM. Lily had heard of this, a band of provincial London-haters who hacked into CCTV and phone footage of the ongoing disaster, and rebroadcast choice selections.
Kristie didn’t react, and Lily hoped she hadn’t been able to read the message.
When they got back to the locked-up house it turned out, entirely predictably, that Kristie didn’t have her door key after all. That was eleven-year-olds for you. Kristie hammered on the door, yelling for Benj. Lily was relieved when it only took a few minutes for Benj to shamble down from his room.
“Telly’s on,” he said without preamble. Kristie dumped her water and hurried in.
Lily shoved the water inside so she could shut the door, and put down her own yoke. In the house, the big screen was illuminated, the sound turned up high. It sounded like a news channel.
So the TV was on. More to the point, that must mean the power was on-unusual, for an early morning. Lily made for the kitchen. She filled the kettle and turned it on, and began opening cans and hunting for the rice in its plastic packet. With luck she could get lunch cooked before the power failed again.
From here she could just make out the screen. The news was local, with more details from the flooding. The effects on wildlife were being shown, with burrowing creatures like moles and voles forced up from the saturated soil, and ground-nesting birds like sand martins and oyster catchers driven off. A groundsman was shown scooping fish from a lake on the flooded Oval cricket ground; it was thought they had been put in there as a prank.
And then the story changed, and the image flicked over to an aerial view of a flooded landscape. This was the Bay of Bengal, the captions said, the coast of Bangladesh, a complex delta where the Brahmaputra and Ganges rivers reached the sea, and most of the population of a poor country scraped for a living on the coast or offshore islands. Little of this landscape was more than two meters above sea level. Now flooding had come, and whole islands were submerged. Lily saw before-and-after images, lagoons with shrimp pools and coconut palms transformed to drowned places where a few survivors clung to trees and the roofs of ruined mud-and-thatch houses.
A camera viewpoint pulled back to reveal long lines of refugees, their clothes the color of mud, plodding through knee-high water in search of dry land. There were enormous numbers of them, adults and children, in this one shaky shot. More advanced areas were not spared: a failed embankment had turned an airport into a lake, with helicopters and military aircraft piled on top of each other. Lily couldn’t tell from the commentary if some kind of storm had hit, a typhoon; it sounded as if the sea had simply risen, relentlessly, to do this damage.
And now, as if the viewpoint pulled back further still, the news program switched to a summary map of the world that showed the shapes of the continents outlined in bright blue, all around the shorelines and in the major river estuaries. The blue was a graphic showing how flooding emergencies were cropping up everywhere, in the Americas, north and south Europe, India, Asia, Africa, Australia. Whole low-lying regions were threatened too, like Bangladesh, Florida, Louisiana, the Netherlands, and river deltas, many densely populated. In great cities like New York, Vancouver, Tokyo and Shanghai, populations who had watched the travails of London and Sydney now made frantic preparations of their own.
Ten percent of humanity lived within ten meters of sea level, hundreds of millions of people. Now the risen sea, or the fear of it, was driving them away from their homes, a tremendous flight of population gathering all over the planet. But the images blurred after a time, one desolate stream of rain-soaked refugees looking much like another.
A tagline reported the plight of the Newcastle football team, trapped in Mumbai after losing the Cup Final. And the news flicked out as Benj cycled through the channels. At last he settled on a kids’ channel, showing a gory cartoon.
Lily had just got the rice boiled when the power failed again. Both the kids groaned in frustration as the TV died. Lily hastily poured the last of the boiling water into another thermos, and shoveled in instant coffee after it.
21
Early that afternoon Piers Michaelmas came calling for Lily. He knocked on the door, standing there in battle dress. He refused a coffee from the thermoses.
He was here, he said, to take her on a boat ride into the heart of London. “Sorry I couldn’t call. Blessed phones, you know what it’s like. Here.” He handed her a mil-issue satellite phone. “For future contingencies.”
“So what’s this trip about?”
“Call it old times’ sake.”
So she lodged the kids with a neighbor, and put on her blue AxysCorp coverall. They walked briskly down the street, past the bowser, to the shoreline where the road was submerged. Here a Marine waited for them in an inflatable orange boat tied up to a lamp post. The Marine helped Lily and Michaelmas into the boat, and made her put on a life jacket and a light face mask.
Then he pushed the boat away and started a small motor, and the boat drilled straight down the line of the drowned street toward the old riverbank. Lily found the face mask confining, it was like a surgeon’s theater mask, but given the rising stink of the river and the unidentifiable lumps that floated in the water, she was glad of it.
She watched the Marine check his position on a GPS sleeve patch. He had a kind of miniaturized sounder set up in the boat at his side, and he peered suspiciously at every shadow in the water as they passed. “Tricky navigation,” she said.
“It is that, miss,” he said ruefully. He was grizzled, his skin leathery, though he looked no older than forty. His accent was robust Scottish.
“Don’t be modest,” Piers said. “Harry’s always been a bit of a sailor, is what I hear.”
“Aye, that’s true. I grew up on Skye, you know. But this is different. After all, nobody’s sailed down the Fulham Road before, that I know of. It’s full of obstacles, traffic cones and cars and rubbish. I can’t see a thing in this murk, so thank Jim for this sounding stuff.” The safest course, it seemed, was to make your way down the center of the submerged roads, or better yet to seek out the old river itself, where you could be reasonably sure of clear water beneath your keel.