Flood (25 page)

There was no contempt in her voice, but Amanda knew that was the kind of remark likely to inflame Wayne, who didn’t like to be disregarded. She grabbed her jacket from a hook behind the door and pushed her feet into her boots. “We’ll walk,” she said firmly. “I’ll show you around . . .”

Lily picked up her pack and slung it over her shoulders, as if she had no intention of returning.

They walked through Postbridge, not speaking. Amanda sensed they needed time to let the tension from the scene in the caravan drain out.

Postbridge was a pretty little village, right in the middle of Dartmoor, not much more than a scattering of farms, an inn and a chapel. A stone bridge crossed the East Dart River, a medieval construction Amanda had learned to call a clapper bridge. The sun was low. It was a bright spring day. This was a characteristically English postcard scene, though studded with modernity, telephone poles and power pylons and a mobile-phone mast.

You’d never have known anything had changed, Amanda thought suddenly. They were a long way from the coast here. You’d never know that an immense flooding had disrupted the whole world and drowned Britain to thirty meters or more, turning much of southern England into an archipelago. What was different? Kids out playing on a school day, maybe, or even working in the fields like her own two; the village school was reporting only fifty percent attendance. The utter lack of traffic, though she could hear the throaty roar of farm vehicles working the fields. No newspapers in the little post office; the
Daily Mail
board stood empty, blank and weathered. The English flags that fluttered from every rooftop and out of every window, even from the aerials of the stationary cars, the cross of Saint George everywhere. And there was the warmth, of course, the unseasonable warmth that had persisted all winter, and had got the grumbling farmers out working their fields earlier than they had been used to. But this had suddenly become a desirable place, as you could tell from the caravans and mobile homes and tents clustered around the old core of the village, including Amanda’s own caravan, for Postbridge was more than three hundred meters above the old sea level. This was the heart of Dartmoor, the highest location in southern England.

She glanced down at herself, in a battered quilt jacket, worn jeans, heavy walking boots. She looked like a farmer’s wife—which, effectively, she was, though she and Wayne hadn’t married. The Amanda of 2015 wouldn’t have recognized what she had become.

Lily took in the sights of the village curiously. “In the States you see the flag everywhere, the Stars and Stripes, and yellow ribbons tied to the trees for the lost. But I don’t remember all these flags in England. Except when the World Cup was on.”

That made Amanda smile.“Actually they’re still playing football, a lot of the big stadiums in the north stayed open. A kind of cut-down league based on who can turn up. Wayne follows it on the radio. Bradford City are the league champions, imagine that. At least they’ve given up staging big matches abroad. Pity about the World Cup though . . .”

The sisters passed out of the village and followed a footpath south.

They didn’t get far before they came to the village’s barbed-wire perimeter. The path was blocked by a rough barrier of a cut-down telephone pole, manned today by Bill Pulford, son of a local farmer. He nodded at Amanda and let them through.

Amanda tried to break the ice. “We’re not far from Bellever Tor.” The tors, massive granite outcrops pushing out of peat moorland, were Dartmoor’s most famous feature, back in the days when it was a magnet for tourism. “There’s a wood. Only conifers, but you get a lot of bird life now. They’ve come up from the flooded valleys, I guess. And some archeology, hut circles—”

“Where are the kids?”

“Working,” Amanda said, pointing.“A couple of kilometers that way. The new fields have been laid out but they need clearing; the farmers always need muscle for that. I’d rather they were at school, but what can you do? Benj is sixteen now, and Kristie fourteen, they make their own minds up. Anyhow the outdoor work is good for them, and they get paid.”

“With what?”

“The local scrip.” She dug in her pocket and showed Lily a handful of money. It was old sterling or euro notes and coins, marked or clipped to reflect a local barter rate. “We do get stuff from outside, of course, but—”

“Can you call the kids? Do you have mobiles?”

“Of course we have mobiles.” Reflexively Amanda took her phone out of her jacket pocket. It was four years old, elderly by former standards ; it had actually come through the flooding of London with her.

“Call them,” Lily urged her.“Right now. Get them to come meet us. Maybe at the tor you mentioned? Would they know how to get to it?”

Amanda weighed the phone in her hand, frowning. “I don’t know if I should.”

“Please, Amanda. I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important.”

“And then what?”

“I told you. We get out, the four of us, to the car at Cheriton Bishop.”

“It must be twenty kilometers. More.”

Lily glanced at the sun. “It’s not late. I walked here yesterday and this morning. I stayed over in a pub. Four, five hours should do it. The car will wait until the sun goes down, later if I call.”

“And then we all just drive off, is that the idea?” Anger flared in Amanda.“You know, you’ve got a nerve, Lily. Without any warning you parachute back into the middle of my life.
My
life, the life I’ve been building for myself here, me and the kids. It hasn’t been easy, you know.”

“I don’t mean to mess things up for you.” Lily sounded strained, tired; she seemed drained behind her South American tan.

“You’re doing your best to come between me and Wayne, aren’t you?”

“I don’t mean to do that either. Look, please, Amanda—you have to trust me.”

“Why?”

“I promised I wouldn’t say.”

“Promised who? AxysCorp, the great Nathan Lammockson? Why won’t you say?”

“Because it would cause panic.”

That made Amanda pause. Panic? Amanda had seen panic, a frantic sort in Greenwich on the day the Thames Barrier fell, and later a more long-drawn-out miserable sort of panic when the river started rising again and west London had to be evacuated. But here she was in Dartmoor, far above any flooding. What could there possibly be to panic about? She felt resistant, angry, unwilling.

Lily saw this in her face. “Please, Amanda, the kids.”

Amanda had to trust her; this was her sister. And besides she could always come back when the fuss was over, whatever it was. She hefted her phone. “Shall I have them call at the caravan first, pick up their stuff—”

“No,” Lily said. “Forget the caravan, forget packing. Just get them to meet us.”

“Wayne won’t take kindly if he finds out you’re having us sneak off, if that’s the idea.”

“So don’t tell him.” Lily closed her eyes, and a muscle in her cheek worked. “Look, I’ll make a deal. Once I have you and the kids in the AxysCorp car you can call Wayne, or whoever you like. My priority isn’t Wayne. It’s not even your feelings. My priority is only you and the kids. Your safety.”

“You’re scaring me,” said Amanda, though she was still more angry than frightened.

“Good,” Lily said bluntly. “Make your calls. Please, Amanda.”

So Amanda pressed the fast-key numbers, and called.

38

I
t would take a while for the kids to catch up with them. Lily and Amanda walked slowly to the tor.

A farm vehicle buzzed in a field. “More fields being broken,” Lily said.

“Yes. They’re growing crops up here now, instead of raising sheep and cattle. You can thank the warmer weather for that. There are problems, though. Like bluetongue, and African horse sickness. New kinds of viruses nobody’s dealt with here before. The government vets still come around sometimes.” It was another result of the flood-induced warming, a spreading out of the old hot regions of diseases of animals and of humans, like chikungunya and Rift Valley fever.

Lily asked, “Where do you get your fuel from?”

“There’s a tanker port at Taunton.” The lowland of Somerset was all but drowned, but harbors and port facilities had hastily been improvised close to what had been an inland town. “It’s rationed, of course; it’s really just for the farm vehicles and the power stations. We use the cars for emergencies. We’ve a few bikes too,Wayne has one. They’ve had to rebuild the port once already, when the sea kept rising.”

“It’s the same story all over.”

“Nobody seems to know how long the tankers will keep calling.”

“Who controls the rationing?”

Amanda looked at her. “Well, the police. Who do you think?”

“It’s just that you’re kind of remote up here. All that barbed wire. The SAM missiles,” Lily said frankly. “Is it true the locals ‘nationalized’ the Tesco’s in Taunton?”

“Sort of,” Amanda said. “There was a lot of objection to the profits they were taking out of the area.”

“That wouldn’t have happened in the old days, would it? A lot of England is disconnected from the center nowadays.”

“Well, the government is hundreds of kilometers away, in Leeds. They don’t worry about
us
. Wayne says we could be self-sufficient here on Dartmoor, if we don’t get swamped.”

“ ‘Swamped’?”

Amanda ignored that. “The climate’s better than it used to be. It’s because of the sea level. It’s as if we’ve sunk by thirty meters, so what was highland becomes lowland. Wayne takes samples of the changing populations of flowers, the moths and butterflies and birds. He’s keeping a kind of log on his laptop.”

“So this toyboy of yours is some kind of biologist, is he?”

“Toyboy, oh shut up. He’s a marine biologist. He’s from London. But he worked at the Dove Marine Laboratory in Northumberland before the floods.”

“You never told me much about him, in your mails. What did you do, glom onto the first strong man you could find?”

Amanda flared again. “Speak to me like that again and you can walk to bloody Cheriton Bishop by yourself.”

“All right. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it.”

“You fucking did.” But Amanda walked on. “Look, Lil, he’s not perfect, but he’s a decent enough man. He’s got a PhD. He specialized in coastal life, but now the coasts are gone. Sometimes we travel, you know, even as far as the Solent, just to see how the flooding’s progressing. Wayne says it’s a sort of extinction event. It will take a million years for nature to make a proper coast again, the rock pools and sea caves and mud flats with their plovers and their whooper swans. Even the sand dunes are drowned. It’s all gone now, and we won’t see the like again in our lifetimes. Isn’t that sad?”

“So he has a soul,” Lily said. “Go on, then. Tell me how you met him.”

They had met in the holding camp at Aylesbury, in a queue for a water bowser.

When the flooding had started, Wayne had decamped down from Northumberland to Charlton in south London, to be with his family. They had managed to get out, and joined the flow to Aylesbury. After their chance meeting Wayne and Amanda had become close, sort of, spending time together in the refugee camp’s “pubs,” marquees stocked with beer salvaged from the abandoned suburbs.

But the flooding continued. The sea had pushed far into the great river estuaries. The Thames was now an inland sea as far as Buckinghamshire. The Severn had intruded through the Vale of Evesham as far as Warwick, and with Liverpool Bay extending inland as far as Chester, it looked as if Wales was becoming detached from England altogether—just as the estuaries of the Forth and the Clyde, drowning much of Edinburgh and Glasgow, were cutting Scotland adrift. And the Cornish peninsula, dominated by the great upland masses of Exmoor and Dartmoor, looked as if it too was soon to be severed from the mainland by tongues of the sea. As for the rest of England, you could draw a line south from Middlesborough down as far as Cambridge, to the east of which there was only a ragged peninsula formed by scraps of high land like the Yorkshire Moors. In the southeast the sea had pushed far into the vales of Kent and Sussex, leaving the bands of higher ground, the North and South Downs and the Weald, protruding like the fingers of a rocky hand.

In the camps in the Chilterns, among the London evacuees, it had been a scary time. Everyone knew that the rising flood was pushing more waves of people inland from the valleys of the Severn and the Trent and the Humber and all the sea coasts, some of them driven on from camps to which they’d already been evacuated once, millions on the move.

At last, under pressure to accommodate still more refugees from the Thames valley, the authorities had started to break up the Aylesbury camp and move people westward. Wayne had invited Amanda and the kids to throw in their lot with him, and come to a community he knew of being established on Dartmoor. Amanda hadn’t been sure of Wayne, if she was honest. But she couldn’t see she had much of an option.

“So how did he know about this place?”

Amanda took a breath. “OK. Here’s the part Mum wouldn’t have approved of. When he was a kid,Wayne used to run with a gang of Charlton fans. The football, you know? I won’t pretend I like it. I mean, it was just lads being lads, but they were rough. Wayne grew out of it. But he kept in touch with the lads in his gang. And some of
them
, in later life, formed links with, well, fringe groups.”

Lily nodded. “Hence the flags. The far right. Like the British National Party.”

“Not the BNP . . . Similar, I suppose. Look, Wayne isn’t a thug or a neo-Nazi. But he says he found ideas being floated among these people that he wasn’t hearing discussed anywhere else.”

“Such as?”

“Such as, how would the world cope when the oil ran out? I suppose it’s all moot now, we have other problems, but back then people feared anarchy. There was talk of bolt-holes. Wayne says one group looked at locations in places like Croatia, close to the coast, where you could use local rivers for fresh water and live off solar energy. Some of them started planning seriously. Making caches of stuff.”

“Survivalists with swastikas.”

“If you like,” Amanda snapped. “Anyhow when the flooding came they dug up all those old plans. Wayne got in with a group that had considered setting themselves up closer to home.”