Submersion Page 9

  ‘I’ll tell you what’s not normal! Pretending your daughter is alive when everyone else knows she died. That she drowned, Agnes! And then going back to work as if she had simply gone away for a bit! That’s not normal!’

  How long we argue for, I do not know. But the argument continues on with its theme: she’s not normal for over-protecting her son; I’m not normal for letting my daughter roam about on her own; her obsessive cleaning is not normal; my relative squalor is not normal; the fact she has no man is not normal; the fact that I’ve had too many (her view) likewise.

  I’m not sure how long Billy has been stood in the kitchen doorway before we both notice him. But, when we do, we are silenced. The skin around his eyes is noticeably pink from crying. He has his protective gear on, the mask pulled up on his forehead. At his feet, there is a small brown suitcase – belongings that Uncle Jimmy brought him from home the day after the incident with the dog.

  ‘We’re ready to go,’ he announces and we both feel shame.

  I see it in Esther’s face and instantly roll back over the words we have been exchanging. What must he think of us both? What kind of an example must we have shown?

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ Esther tells him, her way of smoothing things over – pretending they are trivial, that they don’t matter. But it isn’t my way.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I simply tell him, bending down to his level. ‘We were not being kind to each other. We were both upset and taking it out on each other.’

  ‘Because of Elinor?’ he asks me and I nod: yes, because of Elinor, it says, but I don’t – can’t – speak it aloud.

  ‘You don’t have to go,’ I tell them both and Esther looks relieved. She genuinely doesn’t want to leave me, is worried about leaving me, I know. What if she gets ill, like last time? I’d heard her say to Aunt Penny. Billy has simply been her excuse to stay and keep an eye on me.

  Billy’s reaction is different, however, and sets in motion what happens next.

  ‘Thank you,’ he says, smiling softly at me, ‘but it is time Mother and I left. Time we went home. Isn’t it, Mother?’

  And suddenly he isn’t that screaming baby anymore; suddenly he’s on the path to his manhood. For the smallest part of a second, Esther looks afraid – change is occurring and she doesn’t like change, doesn’t like its lack of destination. But something about this new Billy, this stronger Billy makes her concede.

  ‘Yes. Yes, it’s time we went home,’ she agrees, turning to me, touching my arm, giving me a look. Sorry, it says, and I return it with a look that says exactly the same.

  ‘But you’ll stay for tea, surely?’ I enquire. ‘Your Great Aunty Penny is bringing one of her famous cherry pies!’

  Billy strips out of his gear with such alacrity, that both Esther and I cannot help but laugh. It serves to ease the pain between us too.

  ‘How on Earth has Aunt Penny got hold of cherries?’ she asks me, sounding almost relaxed, as Billy takes his suitcase back up to Elinor’s for now, keeping it out the way until they leave.

  I shrug. Like many things I couldn’t explain, sometimes it was best not to know.

  In bed, once the house has cleared of guests, Tristan and I talk.

  We skirt around his job with Jessie to start with – I know I’m not going to get any answers out of him, but it doesn’t stop me being intrigued, doesn’t stop me asking just why there is so much dirt and grease on his work overalls.

  We speculate about his and Billy’s exposure to the water. Despite Esther’s fussing over Billy, there have been no side effects. Tristan - who was almost fully submerged when he went back in for the dog corpse - hasn’t suffered so much as a dry patch of skin, let alone any poisoning.

  ‘Makes you think, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Just what we’re all so afraid of?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Just don’t let Esther hear you say that,’ I tell him, snuggling up to him under the covers. ‘It’s such fear that helps give her life order.’

  ‘Meaning,’ Tristan annexes, cruelly, switching my last word, but he’s not wrong.

  We talk about nearly everything – what Papa H said and did once the dead dog was delivered to his door, Billy’s interest in the Cadley House, the rumours that religious missionaries were doing the rounds again – everything but the obvious. But at least I’m talking about it in my head now.

  Maybe you think I’m a little too calm, a little too cold about the whole business of my daughter’s absence? A little too certain that she didn’t simply drown in that nasty accident? I wouldn’t blame you, but I have my reasons.

  I went missing as a young girl myself. It was quite common then. Children were simply taken. Taken and tested for their talents. I was one of the lucky ones – I was tested and promptly returned.

  No one admitted a thing, of course. I was just a young girl who ran away and made up a ridiculous story to get out of a hiding from her parents. But I knew it was true, and eventually the truth came out, absolving me. All that has supposedly stopped now, but my suspicions have been raised. A few months ago, something started up in the schools again – the testing. It had been banned for years – no testing, no measures, no certificates, no prizes, nothing was allowed, just simple education. Nothing to be suspicious about. Nothing to echo the past. Then one day, a letter comes home – the children are to be tested, but there is nothing to worry about, it says. But I wasn’t so sure and complained – put my concerns in writing, went as far as to start a petition – no easy feat gathering signatures when you have to go from door to door, street to street in a rowing boat. But I did it – over a hundred signatures of protest.

  And now my daughter is missing, supposedly drowned in an accident on the way to school.

  Did I mention that none of the other children waiting for the school boat were reported missing or presumed dead? No? No, just Elinor. Just the daughter of the woman who protested.

  ‘You okay?’ Tristan asks, sensing me tense, pulling away from me in the dark. I don’t answer. ‘I know what you’re thinking,’ he says, and I believe him, especially when he replies with: ‘We’ll get her back, I promise.’

  I believe that too.

  Waking the following morning, I hear Tristan below, readying himself for another day’s mystery work with Jessie. I don’t move out of bed until I hear the front door click and the sound of water swishing, as he rows away. Today I will be returning to work myself. I wonder just how I am going to get there. By boat, yes, but mentally – how am I ever going to get there in my head when it is full of so much?

  Before I know it, I am dressed for work and pulling on my outdoor gear, mask firmly in place as I wade through the waterlogged ground floor, heading for the front door, sorely tempted to take it off the mask as I open it. What harm could I possibly come to? The atmosphere had no effect upon Tristan, after all. But, I behave myself and stick to the rules.

  Opening the door, I am greeted by a similarly attired individual – protective overalls and face mask. He is standing upright in a small boat of his own, holding a small book in his rubber-gloved hands, and has the air of someone walking on water. A white shirt collar and black funeral tie are just about visible, revealing to me the very nature of this call. A call that very unexpectedly changes the course of things. And that face – that oh-so-familiar face.

  ‘Hello,’ is his muffled introduction, distorted by the breathing nozzle on his mask, ‘I’m Reuben, and I’m here to talk to you about Hope.’

  PLAY

  ‘The White City was a quiet, sacred place. Cold to look upon, but warm in spirit all the same. Its very name gave away every aspect of what your eyes would comprehend upon approaching and entering the city. From the enormous angel statues that kept sentinel at its grand, wrought iron gates, to the soft sand on the shore of its icy sea, everything about the place was crystal white. The sky, the earth, the water, the food. Every hair on every creature. Even the blood of the folk who lived therein.

  ‘The White City was
pure white through and through.

  ‘And then one day, a lone black cloud appeared on its snowy horizon, casting a shadow of grey.’

  ‘Does it exist?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The White City! Does it exist for real?’

  ‘Listen up and you might find out…’

  PAUSE

  4. Tristan

  I get up before Agnes nearly every morning. I know she is awake – she always was a light sleeper, now more so – but still I creep around, minimising the noise I make. It seems wrong to make excessive noise in the first hours of dawn, whether the rest of the house is awake or not.

  The rest of the house? It’s just back to Agnes and I and that big echo of our absent girl. And for the majority of the time, it’s just Agnes. I’m out with Jessie; when we aren’t searching the ends of our city and beyond for Elinor, we are back at the secret location where we have been working. So she is home alone, with her fears, her doubts and that cold veneer of sanity she wears like a mask. I wonder if she takes it off when I leave her by herself, much like the old war gasmasks we remove once indoors.

  Somehow, I doubt it. Agnes is tough, resilient and, whilst it is unspoken between us, we know what has happened to Elinor. We know it in our blood; certainty flows through us like polluted water washes over our streets.

  ‘You cannot be absolutely certain,’ Jessie reasons, skeptical, yet he still insists on joining me on my excursions.

  ‘How else do you explain it, Jessie?’

  He shrugs.

  ‘That platform was sabotaged, you know that. You pointed it out yourself,’ I remind him.

  ‘I’m not doubting that, but it doesn’t mean she was taken. It doesn’t mean that has started again, Tristan.’

  ‘Then the other explanation is that she is dead,’ I tell him, but neither of us will accept that. ‘But if she is dead, if there ever was any kind of accident, how come the girls I left her with that morning are not dead or missing?’

  Whatever Jessie believes or disbelieves, his fatherly dedication to finding Elinor doesn’t waver.

  On the initial days that followed Elinor’s disappearance, we abandoned our secret salvage job in favour of an expansive search of our local landscape. Using Jessie’s speedboat, we explored our city in full, motoring along the river-roads to the north, east, south and west, checking out every street, major building or landmark. We had no plan on that first day; we simply set off with determination and optimism. I had an unspoken hope we would simply find her, lost at the side of a road, sitting tired and hungry on a rock. Feeling had driven us, but only thought would allow us to search intelligently; only thought would get us closer to a result.

  That first morning we ventured west, covering the last journey Elinor and I took: left at the top of Cedar Street, right at the crossroads, then winding along another street until we reached the now washed-away speedboat platform. Beyond this point, there were more boarded-up shops, restaurants and other commercial businesses, their colours faded with dirt, their purpose jaded with decay from all angles. All provided Elinor with a prosaic backdrop to the final part of her daily journey. Once the long terrace of abandoned business properties ended, the grounds of the school began.

  In the past, St Patrick’s had been set in the middle of several acres of green land, surrounded by a perimeter of lush, evergreen trees. The trees had been hacked away years ago, following an infection that spread rapidly, taking the life from several of the species. In turn, the surrounding green belt had been flooded, and the setting for the school appeared somewhere between a lake and a swamp, with rotting tree stumps peering out of the water like upturned, decaying molars. The school building itself was set right in the middle, perched at the top of a hill that had saved it from the damages of flooding.

  When Jessie’s boat pulled outside the school, he cut the engine and we both stared up at it for a few minutes. There were places to moor around the entire circumference, but we weren’t stopping to get out – just to look. St Patrick’s had been his, Agnes’ and Esther’s school as children and I could tell from the still, searching look on his face that its façade still held him in some way. He wasn’t in awe or fear of what it represented, just brought to a standstill.

  In the decimated landscape of our city, it had become an icon of relative beauty. A red-brick, three-story building, ten broad windows wide, with a great hall in its centre and a mound of lush, green lawn surrounding it, it did appear to gleam when the sun broke the clouds a little, rays catching the glass in the windows. The hill was also one of the few places in the city where there were still a few trees - at least, trees that were living.

  ‘I was one of the lucky ones,’ Jessie eventually uttered, his eyes remaining on the building.

  He could have looked my way, could have probed about my own school memories, but he refrained and I was thankful for that.

  ‘Come on, let’s keep going,’ I suggested and, after agreeing with a nod, Jessie pulled the boat’s motor into action and we sped away.

  Once we were clear of the school and its surrounding, swampy lake, we hit what used to be our town centre. In the past, it had been a buzzing metropolis of commercial success.

  At its centre was the Atrium, a sprawling, four-storied structure made of glass and steel, home to a whole range of different businesses – boutiques, electrical stores, perfumeries, bakers, book stores, cafes, haberdasheries, home-ware retailers; the list was endless. The first, second and third floors could be accessed by tube-shaped glass elevators situated in the middle of the complex, or by a series of steel escalators to the far left and right. From memory, the third floor was mainly restaurants and rest rooms, with a terrace which opened in the summer and was populated with chairs, little round tables and chatter, whilst staff negotiated their way through the shifting maze of furniture and clientele.

  The grand front entrance to the Atrium led out to the high street; a grey-stone, vehicle-free precinct, which was initially occupied by large, warehouse sized premises – supermarkets, discount clothing and sportswear shops, furniture outlets. Yet, as you strolled further away from the epicentre, the buildings and businesses got smaller and more specialist. The supermarkets become family owned bakers, the furniture shops abandoned flat-packed items for antiques. Interspersed along the way were betting shops, cosy pubs and little cafes, all linking up the other businesses, as they reduced in size and commercial power, until eventually they all petered out, giving way to terrace upon terrace of town houses and flats, as the streets became fully residential.

  The city centre that Jessie and I drifted into that first day looking for Elinor was an altogether different picture.

  We began our journey at the residential end. Like the rest of our town, the tarmacked roads and stone-laid streets were submerged in a uniform of grey, still water. As a child, I remember the envy I held towards the people who lived in the slim, elegant, white-painted homes, with their five steps up to the glossy front door, their bars at the windows of the basements, peering up just below street level. How lucky their residents were to be so close to the action, so close to the glamorous lure of the day and night life the centre offered. Drifting through, so many years later, I took a childish, sour comfort in the fact their lives and homes were now as dilapidated as ours, their own hopes and dreams engulfed and washed away along with ours during the flooding. The much envied cellar rooms were now bowels brimming with fetid remains, spilling their sloshy contents onto the ground floors, causing further ruin at every rancid ripple; the glossy front doors were now swollen with damp, hardly fitting their rotting frames. Many of these once affluent homes were simply abandoned, owners having the means to take themselves out of the town to a future I knew little of, but rumour had it there was a future, somewhere, beyond my reach and the realms of my imagination. Although, there was still no proof, still no one returning to confirm and opposing rumours grew strong in absence of this evidence. But I still took comfort in the fact they’d had to leave, that
, when the waters came, no matter your standing or riches, we were all in it together.

  The commercial hub of the town had suffered no better. In fact, it had suffered worse. It wasn’t partly abandoned like the town-house terraces, it was completely deserted. Not a single business remained. From the family run establishments, to the standalone high street stores – all were boarded up. Some of the boarding was patchy, where looters or the homeless had fought their way in and the original boarding had been repaired, to prevent further damage. Some of the old shops and pubs had flats above, but even these were empty, residents scared away by the prospect of having their homes raided by shop looters, or quietly frightened into moving by the increased reality of isolation.

  I thought I saw a face at the attic window of one the old flats; a man’s face, I think, pale, for less than a second, glimpsing out and then gone. Ghost-like. Above an old shop, windows boarded, entrance sealed with a thick metal door, chains and padlocks.

  ‘Did you see that?’ I asked Jessie and he shook his head.

  We waited a second or so longer and I saw nothing further.

  ‘You wanna go in, check it out?’ Jessie asked.

  I wasn’t sure, though. I couldn’t see any easy way in, to start with – with the lower windows boarded and the only obvious way in elaborately secured, I couldn’t see anyone easily getting out, either. And I wasn’t one hundred percent sure if I had seen anyone.

  I shrugged, exhaled a long slow breath, fogging up my face visor a little.

  ‘If someone’s brave enough to live this end of town, well, maybe we should respect their privacy?’

  Having weighed it all up, we were agreed we were done there and moved on through the streets of commercial decay.

  The Atrium was the worst vision of this deterioration. What had been a sparkling jewel in the crown of this area was simply a broken, pale shell of its past. It had been left exposed to the elements, wind, rain and dirt getting into every open pore of the construction. Not a single pane of glass remained – all had been shattered by natural causes or stones of protest. The authorities had made no attempt to protect it. It was too big a job to start with – as it was all steel frames and glass walls and ceilings, the entire building would have needed covering up. So, they left it to rot at the hands of nature and whoever wanted to help themselves to the remaining rusting raw materials was welcome.