Stephen Baxter: Flood

“Sounds good to me. I’ll feed the ducks. And I’ll be back here in, what, a couple of hours?”

“You’ll get soaked,” Lily said.

“Not if the pubs are open. Um, can you loan me an umbrella?”

Amanda showed him out.

The sisters sat on the tall kitchen stools, sharing a box of tissues, talking of their mother, the house, Amanda’s kids, and how Amanda hadn’t been able to get her mother buried close by; in London even the cemeteries were overcrowded.

“Mum left everything to the two of us equally. After she died it was all held up for a year; there was no news if you were alive or dead. Eventually the lawyers agreed to execute the will and release Mum’s estate. We got the keys and sold up and moved in. I mean, if we hadn’t I couldn’t have afforded to pay for the upkeep of this place, the recovery after the flood damage and whatnot. That bastard Jerry is still paying maintenance for the kids, but the bare minimum, it wouldn’t have helped with this…” Lily saw how distressed she was becoming, how guilty she felt. “Lil, I’m sorry. I thought you were dead. I had to sort things out.”

Lily put a hand on her sister’s arm. “Don’t. You did what had to be done.”

“You can move in here with us. Or we can sell the house and split the money, whatever you want. Although house prices have been flatlining in Fulham since the flooding.”

“We don’t have to decide that today.”

They had got some of it out of their systems by the time the front door opened and the kids came barreling in.

Lily hadn’t seen her nephew and niece for a year or more before her abduction, a gap she had had five years to regret. Now here they were, grown like sunflowers, and let out of school early to see their aunt.

Kristie was still young enough to give her long-lost aunt a hug as instructed. Suddenly eleven years old, she grinned at Lily with a mouthful of steel brace. “You missed the Olympics,” she said.

Benj, thirteen, with Day-Glo yellow hair, was more diffident, and he had a dreamy expression on his face, as if he didn’t quite see what was going on around him. They both wore brilliantly colored clothes. Kristie had a bright pink backpack on her back, and chunky amber beads around her neck. The children looked like exotic birds, Lily thought, fragile creatures that didn’t belong in the grimy adult world of flood damage and rain.

“You’re home early from school,” she said. So they were; it wasn’t yet three o’clock.

Kristie shrugged. “Wet play.”

Amanda raised an eyebrow. “It’s the rain, the floods. They don’t let them out at break times, or for games. They come home fizzing with energy. Pain in the bum.”

“The Olympics, though,” Kristie said. “The Olympics were right here in London and you were stuck in Spain! Did you see it?”

“Well, no,” Lily admitted. Although the captives had thought about the London games. They marked the passing of time by such milestones, grand dates they remembered from the outside world- this must be happening about now, in some other place. “We didn’t have TV. Was it good?”

“I was there every day of the last week,” Kristie said proudly.

“That must have cost a lot.”

“Not really,” said Amanda. “It didn’t go too well. The weather, the drug scandals, the terrorists. In the end they were giving the tickets away to kids and OAPs, anything to fill the stadia. After all these kids will be paying for it for the rest of their lives.”

Lily asked, “So did you go, Benj?”

Benj shrugged. “For a couple of days. Wasn’t much. It was years ago.”

Amanda glared at him. “Are you on that damn Angel? What have I told you about using that thing when we have guests?”

“Oh, Mum-”

“I’ve heard of these things,” Lily said. “Why don’t you show me, Benj?”

He fished in his jacket pocket and produced a gadget as slim as a cigarette. It was heavy in her hand, seamless, warm from his body heat. Benj set it with unconscious skill, Lily couldn’t follow what he did, and a bright, brassy pop tune erupted inside her head: “I love you more than my phone / You’re my Angel, you’re my TV / I love you more than my phone / Put you in my pocket and you sing to me…” The Angel beamed its music directly into her sensorium, somehow stimulating the hearing centers remotely, without the need for wires and earpieces.

“Cor.”

“That’s ‘Phone,’” Benj said. “This year’s big hit.”

“I never heard it. Well, I wouldn’t have.”

Amanda said, “Of course everybody has to have one of these things. It’s a fashion statement, you know? And it’s a pain to be zapped in the street by some kid who thinks you need a headful of drums and bass.”

Benj nodded wisely. “That’s why they get taken off you at school.”

“They’re working on a video version. Imagine that!”

Lily said, “It’s amazing how much is new since I’ve been away.”

“Nothing useful,” Amanda said. “Not really. Just distractions. What we need is big engineering to keep the flood waters out. The Thames Barrier ought to have been just the start. But that’s not the fashion nowadays.”

“We did the floods at school,” Kristie said. She dumped her plastic backpack on the table and began rummaging in it. “Green studies. Like how the Fens are below sea level. When it floods there the water ponds. They used to pump it away or drain it, but it’s harder now the sea level has risen by a meter.”

“A meter? Really?”

Kristie looked vaguely offended, as if Lily didn’t believe her.“We did it at school,” she repeated. “They told us we should keep a scrapbook of all the changes.”

“What sort of changes?”

“Funny things that happen with the floods. Look.” She dug a handheld out of her backpack, set it on the table and tabbed through entries. Lily peered to see the tiny font.

The first entry was a short video clip about an old man who had been to every Crystal Palace away game for sixty years, he claimed.“Man and boy, rain and shine, I support the Palace.” His accent was broad, old-fashioned south London. “Rain and shine since I was ten year old, but I’d have had to swim to get to Peterborough this week. Never missed a game before, not one, what’s it coming to…” As a contrast Kristie had added a clip about the Cup Final being played in Mumbai; the football was either a world away, or if you followed a local team you couldn’t even get to it anymore.

Another piece was from America. A black woman was describing how she had had to abandon her home in Bay St Louis, east of New Orleans. The Army Corps of Engineers had run a vast project of relocation back from the Gulf coast, abandoning swaths of shoreline to wetlands as a natural barrier against post-Katrina storms. This woman had had her old home bought out by the federal government, and was relocated. But she had then been forced out of her new inland home in turn by the threat of a fresh, even more drastic flooding event. “I never wanted come here, the Bay my home, my momma’s home, but Governor says, woman, you gotta go. So I pack up my kids and my dog and I go. And now look, the damn sea’s in my parlor again, and what I want to know is, what’s the point of moving if that ol’ sea he just follow you anyhow?…”

A snip from a children’s news program outlined the effects of the flooding on the wildlife in your garden. There were striking images of river weed stuck in the branches of trees. The rain washed insect eggs off the leaves where they had been laid, so later there was no food for the birds in their breeding seasons. In Kristie’s garden, and across England, there had been a crash in the populations of blue tits.