Иэн Рэнкин - The Flood

On Christmas morning Mary brushed out her long silver hair for some considerable time. She sat cross-legged on her bed with her mirror wedged in her lap, and watched the waves of static wafting strands around her as if she were sea-blown. A carol service was on the radio. Mary hummed along. She did not want to go downstairs because her father and mother would be there and last night her father had screamed at her mother and had slapped her. Mary had heard it through the bedroom floor. She could not face having to look at either of them or trying to speak to her father. Tom had been away all night at a friend’s. He was home now. He was downstairs, where no one was speaking. The radio was loud in her room so that she would not hear the shouting, should there be any. This was the last Christmas before Tom left for Canada. She had looked at Canada in an atlas at school. It was huge, colossal really, and the towns and cities had good names. Some people there spoke French, but Tom could not. Why was he going to Canada when he could not speak French? It was far too late to put the point to him, so Mary brushed her hair and hummed carols instead.

Her mother shouted up the stairwell, her voice neutral. Lunch was ready. Mary felt as if she had just eaten a plateful of toast, yet she had to go down. There was no excuse.

She walked downstairs into silence. Her presents were the only ones left beneath the tree. Her father smoked in his chair. Tom, lying across the settee, was reading a book. Her mother could be heard singing softly in the kitchen. The large dining table had been ornately set. Mary drew out one of the chairs and sat down. There were six presents beneath the tree. There would be two from her mother and father, one from Tom, and three from her two aunts and one uncle. Her grandparents had died in the war. A whole generation had been erased.

Her mother brought in a steaming tureen of soup. ‘Here we are then,’ she said, and Mary thought that the smile on her bruised face was the saddest thing she had ever had to bear.

On Boxing Day, Mary’s mother went to visit her sister in Leven, taking an overnight bag with her. Mary feigned illness and would not be persuaded to go. Tom had arranged to meet with some friends, as had Mary’s father, so her mother left the house alone. The door clicked behind her. Mary did not expect to see her again. She saw it as her final leaving, and she did not blame her. When her mother returned the very next afternoon, no one but Mary was surprised.

But by then she was too distraught to be glad. Two months later, the family had their first letter from Tom in Canada, and Mary told her mother that she thought she was pregnant.

‘Please don’t tell Dad,’ she said through her tears. Her mother remained silent for a long time.

‘I’m not going to ask who it was,’ she said eventually. ‘Just answer me this: can he marry you?’ Mary screwed up her eyes and shook her head. Her mother sat examining her own hands. It was not an easy life. First her husband had taken to drink, then she had to watch her only son leave for a distant country, and now this. Her son and her daughter. She knew immediately when it had happened. Boxing Day. The whole house had been changed somehow when she had walked into it on the afternoon following. She should have guessed. People had always said that they were very close, even for brother and sister. Unnaturally close. She should have known. She stroked her daughter’s silvery dark hair and contemplated telling her husband the news. Would he guess what she had deduced?

As it turned out, Mary’s father said nothing, just drifted further into his own numbed world where nothing, it seemed, could hurt him. Mary’s mother was not surprised by this. She had always seen herself as the stronger of the two. He often called her “the battler” (in the earlier years of their marriage at least) and she supposed it was true enough. Resilience, she had found, was needed in plenty. She went to church regularly, and knew that every trial was something more than it seemed — a higher test and a kind of judgement. She prayed to God at her bedside on the evening after she had told her husband the bitter news, and she made him get down on his knees too.

‘This needs all our strength, Hugh,’ she said, but his words were slurred and he collapsed his head on to the bed after a few moments and wept himself silently to sleep. Mary’s mother raised her own head towards heaven and prayed with even more intensity. Strength was needed, Lord, strength was needed.

‘But our reserves are not limitless, Lord. Help us in our need. Help Mary to get over all of this. She is a young girl. Forgive her if you can. Bless my son and my husband, Lord. Both are good men at heart. And dear Lord God, please let the baby die at birth. I beseech thee, let the baby die. Amen.’

If the unthinkable had happened, then for Mary’s mother the worst had yet to come. For some time her husband had been friendly with George Patterson, a bachelor of forty who owned the town’s dusty and outdated sweet shop. They often went further afield in their drinking bouts, travelling to Lochgelly or Kirkcaldy for an evening’s entertainment and having to walk the sobering miles home after missing the last bus. In early April, with the town already knowing, as it inevitably would, that Mary was pregnant, and her mother stressing the need for her still to sit her exams, Hugh Miller was walking home with his friend George Patterson.

It was midnight, and enshrouded in a light mist the two men were unevenly trudging the grass verge towards Carsden. They had spent the evening in Kirkcaldy, and had gone down to the promenade after the pubs had closed in order to sniff the sea air. Hugh had sat on the sea-wall and had told George about the many occasions when he had walked with his children along the sands and bought them ices in the now defunct café. Having told his story, and having missed the last bus, they had begun to walk out of town along the main road. They tried hitch-hiking, but were too drunk for anyone to have wished to stop for them, and both knew it. By midnight they were halfway between the two towns. They had become separated to the sight by the mist, but kept up a shouted conversation, the substance of which was lost to the wind and the bitter cold. A car came towards them from Kirkcaldy. Its lights caught George Patterson, and it slowed a little. He jumped from the road on to the verge and waved the car past. It was picking up speed again when George heard Hugh say something out loud and then there was a sickeningly dull and heavy thud. The car stopped. George Patterson could see its red taillights through the mist and ran towards them. At the side of the road lay his friend.

‘For Christ’s sake,’ the driver was saying as he stood above the body in apparent horror. ‘I mean, he just jumped out of nowhere. For Christ’s sake.’

‘Hugh, Hugh man, are you all right?’ Patterson’s breath was heavy as he crouched unsteadily beside his friend.

Mary’s father was able to raise his head a few inches from the frozen ground.

‘I loved her, though, George,’ he murmured, and then coughed a little and was dead.

For Mary’s mother it was almost the end. The girl herself seemed almost too numbed by what had already occurred to be able to take in this latest tragedy, and her mother knew that Mary needed her strength. Indeed, it was that thought alone — that Mary needed her mother’s strength — which kept Mrs Miller from plunging into madness and hysteria. Instead she offered up increasingly bitter prayers to her Lord God and would receive mourners, many of whom were more interested in the condition of the daughter, with a smile like a bar of iron. Mother and daughter came closer and closer together during the arrangements for the funeral, the aftermath of the burial and the approaching birth. Tom could not be contacted, having apparently gone to the far north with a lumber squad, but Mrs Miller hoped that he would not come home in any case; not, at least, until the baby was born. She had forsaken her needlework altogether, but would still make up one of her famed herbal remedies whenever anyone asked her to. Fewer and fewer people did. They had money enough to live on, she told Mary. Mary herself sat her exams, did poorly, but had her father’s death taken into account come the final marking. She stayed at home all the time after that, and so was safe from the few wild and cruel rumours that flew around. Her father had committed suicide, it was said by some, and had done so because of the shame of his daughter’s pregnancy. The lad whoever he was — was to blame, said some, running away from his responsibilities. Then people remembered Matty Duncan, remembered the small witchy girl who had survived a drowning and who had sent a fireball on Matty to destroy him. Matty’s father was the source of these new pieces of evidence. Mary was all bad luck, some agreed. But Matt Duncan shook his head. Luck did not enter into it. She had power: power over the elements, perhaps even power over her own brother and father. The bitter-cold mornings spent shopping in the town were enlivened by these increasingly speculative discussions, while all around Cars den was decaying and altering, as the boards went up across another shop’s windows, wire mesh across the newsagent’s, and the snooker hall closed down for ever.