Men in high-vis vests sweep water off the pavements and into the roads. The water spills back behind them as they go. They look absurd, trying to Canute the waves like this, but it’s not the water they’re trying to sweep away but the filth and fragments the water has deposited everywhere.
A side road rises and turns right, along the river. All along the embankment, people stand watching. The flow, enormously swollen, has swept the bridge away. Two large piles of fallen masonry break the surface of the water, but most of the bridge is hidden beneath the flood. You can tell it’s there because of the smooth whaleback shapes the water makes, and the rills of foaming stuff in the lee of each bulge. Here and there, rafts of leaf-litter and rubbish shoot past. They touch and drift apart, touching twiggy arms.
Toward the centre of town, a couple are dumping the contents of their home into a skip. The man comes out with a plastic box piled with toys. A boy runs out after him. He’s wearing galoshes and a bright red mackintosh. He wants something from the box. A woman comes out and catches him by the arm.
‘Conrad.’
He’s by my side.
‘Fuck’s sake, Michel.’
‘I startled you.’
‘Fuck’s sake.’
We retrace my steps back to the main road. Michel is looking well but weathered. His hair is turning grey – unless, of course, it’s dust from the sander (old gel coat powder tightening across his skin . . .). There’s a camera around his neck, of course. There usually is. And after all, this is a flood. A real flood. Michel, the bard of apocalypses, has a duty to his readership to get the details right. I ask him, ‘Where shall we go?’
‘Sand Lane, of course.’
‘How are we going to get there?’
‘What do you mean, how are we going to get there? We’re going there.’
‘But it’s on the other side of the river.’
Michel frowns at me. ‘What are you talking about, Conrad? It’s that way.’ He points, between buildings I do not recognise, new buildings, new developments, a new town. He’s been here more recently than I have, many times, checking in on his mother. He knows this place. His mental maps of it are up to date.
Mine aren’t. This may as well be a new town, for all I remember. This is not my birthplace. I was never here.
But the hotel is still standing, my old home, and it’s still in good order. It’s not a hotel any more. I’m not sure what it is. There is a new fence, and a wrought-iron gate. A sign on the retaining wall sports the logo of a high street bank.
The housing estate has declined. There are a lot of unroadworthy vehicles hidden under tarpaulins or simply left to rust on the verges and in gardens overgrown with weeds. The gardens have grown up at last, but they are straggly, untidy. The place has reached old age without acquiring maturity. It still looks as though it was thrown together yesterday – then doused in neglect.
Poppy’s garden, with its dwarf this and dwarf that and miniature the other, is still the neatest of the lot; she must police it from beyond the grave.
In order to wrap up Poppy’s affairs, Michel needs to go through her papers. First, of course, he has to find them. This is not going to be easy. Poppy was always putting things away in safe places. I remember I ran into her one time she was visiting Michel at university. She said she had some money to give him. Off she went to the toilet. She had it hidden in her knickers. Michel unlocks the front door. ‘Check for loose floorboards, for papers stuck in books.’ I imagine us dressed in paramilitary black leather, hunting out seditious literature behind skirting boards and inside ceiling lamps.
A local house-clearing firm has been booked for the middle of the week to take away the furniture. Poppy used to make a big production out of it, but all in all it’s very poor stuff.
I find instant coffee in the cupboard. The kettle is so clean, so polished, it might have been unboxed yesterday. We stand in the lounge, sipping instant coffee. Neither of us dares to sit on Poppy’s sofa.
‘Has Hanna told you we’re separating?’
‘I can’t think why.’
‘It’s not what you think.’
What do I think? What am I supposed to think? ‘What about Agnes?’
‘I’m doing this for her.’
‘Doing what? Quitting? Disappearing? She misses you.’
‘I’m around.’ He sounds very sure of himself. I know this confidence. I have heard it before, and have fallen under its spell. Michel has a project. ‘Let’s look at your hands.’
‘What?’
‘Come on, Mick.’ I take his coffee cup off him and set it down in the sink. ‘Show me your hands.’
He holds them out for me. He smiles.
‘Christ, Michel. What is it? What are you building? A ship?’
‘Why build a boat when the sea will come for you?’
‘Where is it?’
‘Near.’
‘Will you show me?’
He hesitates, caught between his self-myth – the brave survivor, girding himself for the war of all against all – and his pride. Even his most committed and literal-minded fans cannot know, as I know, the deep seriousness that underlies Mick’s stories of the Fall. At last, he shakes his head. ‘Some other time.’
How casually we talk of this! But I have lived with Michel’s project all my life. His determination to survive. It’s nothing new. Nothing strange. He was always going to do this. He was always going to build this. It was only ever a question of when.
Michel wants to get up in the loft straight away. He finds the garage key in the drawer of the telephone table. He wrestles the ladder out from behind buckets and bags of garden fertiliser and carries it into the house. It’s as well that Poppy’s not around to see this. ‘I’m not having you clambering about the loft. I’m not having you up there stamping about in my things!’
The loft hatch is in the hall, directly in front of the frosted-glass kitchen door. The hall is only just wide enough for the stepladder. I can’t get past. The old claustrophobia grabs me suddenly. It is daunting to think of Michel living out his entire childhood in these few, cell-like rooms. ‘How is it up there?’
‘There’s not much.’ Michel is disappointed. He is moving directly over my head and through the ceiling, his shuffling sounds hollow and at the same time oddly intimate – a scratching in the ear.
‘Shall I come up?’
‘If you like. There’s not a lot of room.’
I need the toilet first. I’d forgotten how bloody small the lavatory is – the size of those cells you see in dungeon attractions, meant to contort the body of the inmate before he’s hauled off to interrogation.
The toilet roll holder is mounted on the wall on my right. It is a simple chrome bracket. A sprung plastic rod holds the toilet roll in place. On the wall, above and to the left, there is a blemish. I remember it. It is, as far as I know, the only blemish in the whole, seamlessly white house.
It must have come from the rag of the roller. The fleece. I’m not sure, though; it looks more like a piece of paper. It’s no bigger than the rim of a baby’s fingernail and it’s folded over itself at right-angles to make a circumflex or tail-less arrow, pointing towards the corner of the skirting board. I remember, every day, several times a day, I would stare at this blemish as though it were a sign, pointing me the way out of this place.
I get my thumbnail under the blemish and dig in. The fleck slides under my nail, into the quick, hurting me, and a spot of pinkish gray plaster appears on the wall.
Something pops. A loud, hollow sound, followed by a rain of sand. Michel’s voice cuts sharply through. ‘Fuck.’
I finish up on the toilet and hurry out. ‘Michel?’
A sound of tearing cardboard.
‘Shit.’
Michel has knocked a hole in the ceiling of the dining room – not with ‘great big feet’ after all, but with the corner of a cardboard box. It looks as if the whole thing may fall through. I stand well clear. ‘Are you all right?’