And what a cornucopia is here! Medicines and unguents enough to tide us and our loved ones through the Fall. We wander at leisure among the stacks. Pethidine and methadone. Methylphenidate and fentanyl. Oxycodone. While Michel fills the rucksack, I go keep watch by the window. I’ve repelled one unexpected visitor already. After a few minutes’ farcical dancing, trying to open a door that was not there, and falling, repeatedly, through a wall he kept trying to lean upon, our visitor has pretty much given up on reality. He’s kneeling now on the lawn outside the clinic, mouth drawn in a scream he will never utter, because it is possible, even at this remove, for me to paralyse precise channels in his vagus nerve. It is daunting that, after years of more or less constructive effort, I should once again be reduced to playing toy soldiers. Making them march. Making them fall. I might be back at the hotel, watching Dad’s soldiers picking their way across the back lawn.
Talking of which.
I weave my fingers in the air, tapping unreal keys, extending my field of influence. The authorities cannot be far away; better that I immobilise them while they are still out of pot-shotting range.
We change number plates twice before attempting to leave the city. We encounter no obstacles. The traffic is light. On the motorway, we listen to the radio. There is still no government. Compromise after compromise, pact after pact has collapsed before the region’s escalating economic and environmental problems. Tensions are running high and foreign interference is making the problem worse. Last night a dozen election observers found themselves trapped in their hotel by a placard-waving mob.
Still, Michel’s millennial interpretations of these events feel excessive to me. For thousands of years, civilisations have dealt with floods and droughts, failed harvests and pests and plagues. Am I so naive to hope that our world might, after all, save itself from itself?
Michel says that collapses happen all at once, and suddenly. I believe this. It does not take long for people to starve.
But when do we start to prepare for the Fall, and how? Michel says we have to become the very thing we fear. That preparing for the Fall brings on the Fall. ‘To survive,’ he says, ‘we may have to hate ourselves.’ The boot of our car is a measure of his seriousness. Packed in party bags of ice: paromomycin, ertapenem. Tamiflu. Meropenem, combivir, cefprozil, ceftobiprole. Every stripe of penicillin, polypeptides, quinolones.
I turn us off the motorway, west, towards Michel’s redoubt. Soon enough the road dwindles to a single lane over which high hedges impend, the canopies of trees touching here and there to make green tunnels.
The road disappears under pools of standing water. The steering wheel pulls oddly as I gun us through. I find a patch of hard-standing in lee of a barn and park up. ‘It’s deeper now.’
‘Yes.’
‘We’ll have to walk from here.’
We change our footwear, pull on galoshes and tug thick jumpers over our Ts. While Michel packs stolen medicines into my rucksack, I go around securing the car. Steering lock. Wheel clamp. I check the padlock securing the petrol cap. None of this would deter a determined thief, but hardly anyone lives around here any more and anyway, the fuel crisis is not yet so intense.
It’s been raining, and we’re still in cloud shadow, though coins of greenish light spin and glimmer over hillsides on the other side of the valley. After ten minutes we come to a home-made barrier – a string of orange plastic tape and a hardboard sign propped against an upturned bucket.
FLOOD
Michel holds the string up for me to duck under. The road lies under six inches of water. A wall has come down and there are stones all over the road.
Turning a corner, everything before us is silver – an inland sea. Birds zig-zag over the vanished land. Otherwise nothing disturbs the stillness. There are no people, no animals, no signs of damage or distress, no abandoned vehicles, no machines listing in the mud. The farmers here are used to floods. They have their routines to save their work and their livestock from the water.
‘“The scene was peaceful. Natural. This was the land as it had been, before the improvers and mechanics and engineers got hold of it, turning it to human use. For all the years men had worked and lived here, this landscape had lain in wait, encysted, weathering the drought occasioned by human progress, longing to be remembered.”’
‘Who’s that then?’
‘It’s you. Twat. Your first book.’
Michel makes a face. ‘What can I say? The copy-editor really got her teeth into that one.’
We stand together in silence, watching patches of light and darkness play upon the water. Michel’s happiness is palpable. After years of waiting and dreaming, his wish has been granted – the sea has come to him.
Me? I wish I had been braver, all those years ago. Even now Hanna and I might be on a boat together, tacking timidly about the poorer and more broken parts of the earth—
‘Help me with the boat.’
The rowboat is hidden under a screen of branches, well away from the waterline. We run the constant risk here of having our kit float off on an unexpected swell. Maps offer only the crudest idea of how the marsh will spread. The neglect and collapse of the old agricultural drainage changes the shape of the shoreline week by week.
The trailer is hidden a short distance away, to discourage thieves. Winching the boat onto the trailer is the hardest part of the job, and the one that takes the most time. Michel frets at this; he fears our exposure here.
‘Relax,’ I tell him, gluey fingers weaving the air. For the moment, we are ahead of the curve, invisible to all unweaponised eyes.
At the waterline, we take our leave. ‘You know how to find me,’ he says, hugging me. At the last minute, it has come home to him that he does not want to live alone.
We kiss. I cradle his chin in my hand. ‘You said that come the End Times, it would be every man for himself.’
‘I did. Give my love to Agnes and Hanna.’
‘I will.’
We stow the rucksacks into the bottom of the boat. Michel seats himself in the bows and unships the oars. A subtle current bears him home, away from me, over flooded levels. I follow him along the shoreline a little way, to where the ground grows soft, and rushes grow up to tickle the branches of dying trees.
He will not thank me for this – for attracting attention like this – but I do it anyway. I wave goodbye to him.
Michel still visits his wife and child.
Picture it:
The gate is flimsy, a hollow bar of moulded plastic, and a gust of wind has brought it down, or maybe the bull-bars of a speeding 4by4. The gatehouse, a burned-out ruin, stinks of piss.
He climbs the slippery decking stairs to Hanna and Agnes’s door. The door has a new lock. He lets himself in anyway. ‘Hello?’
‘Michel?’
Hanna comes through from the kitchen.
Michel kisses her cheek.
She says, ‘Do you want some tea?’
‘Sure,’ Michel says.
‘Come into the kitchen. You’ve missed Agnes.’
‘I can tell.’
‘She’s round at Libby’s. Do you want me to call her, tell her you’re here?’
‘No, it’s all right.’
Agnes is twelve. She is afraid of Daddy now. Just a little. Just enough to count. Michel says, ‘I came to see you’re all right.’
Money flows in from his properties and copyrights. Most of it goes to his wife and daughter. Deep into his rehearsal of the Fall, his training, Michel does not need much money.
They live in separate worlds now, Hanna and Michel. Perhaps they always did. Hanna never did credit the sincerity of Michel’s dreams of collapse. She has always found them childish.
Once again Michel seeks to persuade her. ‘I just want you both to be safe.’
‘To survive.’
All their meetings end this way, however light they try to keep things. It is the tenor of the times. Most everyone has an opinion about this now. The coming Fall.