Desire Line (2 page)

Shiver.

Bring up music.

Yori's eyes narrow and he downs one pill and then a second that he's had concealed in his hand.

Cutaway to—

—but sorry to disappoint. I left my streetgazing to do stretches and lunges so the few kinks were soon out of a body in Grade A condition and if I couldn't stick with the rest of the routine, it was because my attention was on a regional bulletin we actually featured in for once. Through into the kitchen where I did take my morning meds but really I'd come in to zap soup while the power lasted. A degree under boiling's best for miso and since my father cooked for me in the early years and his flavours took root in my mouth, salt's my sugar which is why I always eat Japanese for choice and this wants just a drop of soy— I froze at the coastguard's update.

‘It's breaking higher and higher up the seawall,' he bellowed like a sports commentator.

Another voice cut in with, ‘the tide's still way off its peak. Across the River Clwyd, yes, we can get you that shot. Here it is! That's Beacon Point. You can see the dunes washing away.'

The Point's a bulbous nose of land that curls round and pokes into the rivermouth and is the harbour's only protection from where most weather came from. I couldn't not look. One local landmark that side of the town, the Blue Bridge, appeared on screen as usual a toy version of Sydney Harbour's. (Dorman Lang built them both in the 1930s). Ours is in foam up to its belly now. The latticework once meant as homage to the next-door funfair is turquoise brash against a gutter ice sky, morning traffic at a crawl as Rhylites with jobs in better areas tried to get to them. But no one was risking the white footbridge just visible, edge of shot. Something to be grateful for.

Libby was stirring. She's very short but heavy. You know it. She came clomping down in her fleece suit, hair flat, blotched
mature
face with overnight creases. The smell of bed was on her that would've embarrassed me once— but I'm over it. ‘What d'you reckon on the latest, love? Are we safe?' Then she was in. She lives to get inside. I maintain the place spotless and most of what's on show – a chesterfield with rows of dust-trap bellybuttons, a tub-chair I don't use, plus the unmatched items of wood furniture – are all her castoffs. I don't put her intrusions down to nostalgia. Libby's
never
described any rosy scenes from married life when she was able to spread out through the whole of Number 8. The opposite. One husband was ‘always sodding off someplace', the next ‘a bit of a whiner.'

‘You mean from getting flooded? We're at least half a kilometre from, um—' Gaiman Avenue was uptown Rhyl in both senses. Hard as it is to believe this is where wealth used to holiday and its afterglow lingers in good houses along properly-laid roads. Hoping but not sure about the next bit I said, ‘Yeah, should be safe enough.'

‘There's good.' She scanned my walls but no new artwork was up for her to critic. She had to make do with wrinkling her nostrils at a soup breakfast. My theory is I was accepted as her tenant by getting mistaken for a Thai. Years ago she went to Bangkok on holiday using the first ex-husband's money, and fell in love with ‘out there'. Which makes me an imposter – which of course I am. But further confessions would be out of place here. To be rid of her I gave up the last of my loaf.

Back in Rhyl mass departures were underway from both West and East Parades, also Sydenham Avenue, Marlborough, Osborne, Balmoral, Lake and North— and anywhere else in the beach vicinity. Most terraces actually fronting the sea were four storeys, some later apartment blocks more than that, but from the helicopter they seemed to have shrunk. It's hard to believe what you see when everything's familiar and yet a movie's showing. I was
That's the old Coliseum Theatre!
and
I walked across there yesterday.
Fascinated by a floating van about to hit the wall of BeltBusters I finally came to and got messaging the people from work that in theory I supervise. Unless contacted by Emergency Planning 
(and we all knew we wouldn't be since we were
not Borough
) they could take the day off 
I told them. Many systems were out already. Trying to speak to Tess would connect me with nothingness. And who else? Though this is my town, I'd been away for most of my twenty-nine years and back for less than a couple. There was nobody— which was fine, how I wanted it. I've edited down. The mutant growth of contacts made at university in Bristol – even at the time they felt like another person's – has been starved of updates. Particularly one ex-lover and fellow student, Kailash, now reduced to messaging from wherever her travels took her. It would make Libby mad with envy to see what she's sending.
Here's orchard road from floor 19 singapore savoy you SHIT! crappy where u r? hope you
 
 
you 
ICON DELETED
!
I get a glimpse, a nanosecond, of gleaming towers before the scene combusts. Still mad then, Kailash? I guess so. But it was for the best. You were a temptation, I admit, to a character like mine till Keep It Simple, I decided. Keep to the black outlines with space to fill in, life as a cleared site. A rented flat, a job, a movie library, some music. Tess, not up to Kailash's standard in many ways, understands this. And you're alive and well enough to insult me Kailash so stop whining like the second Mr Jenkinson. But I can't argue with
ICON DELETED
.

I don't reply.

Hindsight tells me someone I knew who'd left Rhyl, a man called Josh Meredith, deserved a tap. But riveted to here and now, I let the soup go straight to stomach untasted as the screen filled with action from Foryd Harbour, seaward of the bridge and the town's oldest feature. Now in jeopardy. The crumbling of Beacon Point's dunes and too much water in too tight a channel meant small moored boats were either disappearing upstream or already engulfed. The camera homed in on one,
The Cariad.
A slim pleasure craft that could take a sail, all elegant lines and minimal appendages on deck, I remembered seeing her at berth. Being primped by a surly owner whenever I took a walk that way. She was about to be turned to matchwood against the bridge piers though you almost expected a giant hand to reach down and fish her out. It didn't and her timbers splintered, shot up into the wind and fell across the tarmac to the sound of ‘Wowee!' from the camera operator.

Those who had made it over the bridge wouldn't be coming back. At least it wasn't Tess's road in. Suddenly—
Yori?

Tess! Where was she?

Where d'you think?

Spiky if she thought she was talking to her boss but jokey to a sexual partner. I said
OK,
instantly breathless, picturing her shiny-faced and definitely not in a fleece suit. Nude. Or in material her sparrow's frame would show through, it being her main attraction, that and the way she says I'm all toast-ty! as she does now. (She's more Welsh than you hear in town). Day off, eh? I wish we were— but her wish gets drowned out by Libby shouting, ‘Fuckinghell!' above my head. Above her head the good grey slates must be grinding together like teeth. A dragon was touching down by the sound of it and about to swipe us with its tail—

So we got The Wave. But The Wave's not the thing. What it caused is the thing. And to be honest every meteorological blip on the earth's so well covered if you're watching them they'll blend. Towyn, that I described at the start, could easily be somewhere in France a decade on. It doesn't take many years to become a quiz question. ‘Atlantic City or Rhyl? Ten seconds, team!' So not to make a drama of it, I survived. Obviously. But I want to say this. Don't credit any reports of panic. Buses loaded with families continued on inland. Exits blocked as entire fascia claddings and street furniture made landfall in the traffic and had to be dragged out. And Rhyl people stayed calm. Over fifteen hundred of them boarded vehicles of every sort and pulled back from the edge with their babies, gadgets and pet-carriers. See them. Not a work day anymore, a crowd had gathered on the promenade near the weak spot opposite Church Street, dead centre of our Victorian seafront. Through a gap between ruined shops and SuperWaterLazer, the esplanade was taking a pounding and cheers went up at every
Splat!
Until round eleven, forty minutes off high tide, when the sea broke in. It swept across the open expanse of the Events Arena and at one edge of this half-acre flat, pavers were loosened. As they lifted, the water became a tumbling trommel of brick and hard-core until the entire surface peeled back like orange skin. Round One to Water. Next came what Rhyl had wanted for decades. The hated ghost-hole of litter and tat, The Children's Village, derelict food concessions and rides, a perfect symbol of the That'll Do For Rhyl vernacular, was reduced to flinders. The Little People's Café raced Pirates' Den and a bright yellow roundabout to be mashed into a reef of wreckage three metres high and stretching right along the face of the old arcades.

A Wave hates everything, even its own. The Seaquarium's rear doors were stove in. At first the tubular viewing enclosures channelled a cataract straight through to spurt out the front entrance and, engineered against static pressure, the tunnels kept their integrity until flotsam arrived heavy and sharp enough to crack the toughened plastic. Then an entire marine collection, from sentient cuttlefish to blank-eyed dogfish, found itself heading inland.

Only SkyTower, our late-twentieth century ‘attraction' bought from the city of Glasgow second-hand, stood. A 75-metre steel needle had a viewing cabin designed to go up and down like a doughnut on a stick, its sole claim to fame in Scotland being to make Diana, Princess of Wales, nauseous. Now looking a prime target. A corset of reinforcing rods gave rigidity but this was the Irish Sea at its base. Yet the needle stuck to its plinth on pilings sunk into the Triassic sandstone. Would they be enough? Eight bolts screwed into eight threaded sockets. Eight bolts each the height of a man. If you carried SkyTower's statistics in your head, suddenly it became too little, too human-scale. ‘SkyTower's holding!' I remember shouting and punching the air. ‘Lucky number 8!' While further east, evacuation of Waterhouse's magnificent Royal Alex Hospital continued. (But patients might as well have stayed put to watch the scrubby grass covered by a tide that failed to make it across the road. I guess few things can cheer up the sick more than the well-world sinking into turmoil.)

West was a different story. The gradient gave any break-in the extra oomph needed to sweep into Marine Lake and swell it to join the Clwyd where pure brine already lipped the embankment. Once the flood had found a level, one continuous sheet of water would comprise lake, river, estuary and sea. You could've got in your canoe at the Miniature Railway Museum (
UK's Oldest!
) and paddled to the Isle of Man. Or Iceland. A news crew captured the town again as the rest of the country salivated for lunch. It showed East Parade was still standing though gappy with a channel of floating timber and fibre-glass panels flowing down it. West Parade was virtually unrecognisable, subsumed in the new shore line. The helicopter hovered over what had once been a Lifeboat Station. Ha, ha! This image would become crass as it was reused during the day though presumably someone at a safe distance thought
neat!