At the waterline, we take our leave. ‘You know how to find me,’ he says, hugging me. At the last minute, it has come home to him that he does not want to live alone.
We kiss. I cradle his chin in my hand. ‘You said that come the End Times, it would be every man for himself.’
‘I did. Give my love to Agnes and Hanna.’
‘I will.’
We stow the rucksacks into the bottom of the boat. Michel seats himself in the bows and unships the oars. A subtle current bears him home, away from me, over flooded levels. I follow him along the shoreline a little way, to where the ground grows soft, and rushes grow up to tickle the branches of dying trees.
He will not thank me for this – for attracting attention like this – but I do it anyway. I wave goodbye to him.
Michel still visits his wife and child.
Picture it:
The gate is flimsy, a hollow bar of moulded plastic, and a gust of wind has brought it down, or maybe the bull-bars of a speeding 4by4. The gatehouse, a burned-out ruin, stinks of piss.
He climbs the slippery decking stairs to Hanna and Agnes’s door. The door has a new lock. He lets himself in anyway. ‘Hello?’
‘Michel?’
Hanna comes through from the kitchen.
Michel kisses her cheek.
She says, ‘Do you want some tea?’
‘Sure,’ Michel says.
‘Come into the kitchen. You’ve missed Agnes.’
‘I can tell.’
‘She’s round at Libby’s. Do you want me to call her, tell her you’re here?’
‘No, it’s all right.’
Agnes is twelve. She is afraid of Daddy now. Just a little. Just enough to count. Michel says, ‘I came to see you’re all right.’
Money flows in from his properties and copyrights. Most of it goes to his wife and daughter. Deep into his rehearsal of the Fall, his training, Michel does not need much money.
They live in separate worlds now, Hanna and Michel. Perhaps they always did. Hanna never did credit the sincerity of Michel’s dreams of collapse. She has always found them childish.
Once again Michel seeks to persuade her. ‘I just want you both to be safe.’
‘To survive.’
All their meetings end this way, however light they try to keep things. It is the tenor of the times. Most everyone has an opinion about this now. The coming Fall.
‘Yes. To survive.’
‘If that is possible.’ She tries to meet his eye. Michel believes in survival. It is why he is so strong now, so muscled, so tanned. He looks as though he has toppled out of one of his own book covers.
The redoubt is nearly done, he says. Wood and lathe and stone. A real house, really hidden, against the day the supermarket shelves run empty and civilisation, having cruised along for millennia, collapses in the space of a day. This happens. Cultures do collapse. The Harappans. Egypt’s Old Kingdom. The Teotihuacans burned down their city in a ritual fire. The Olmec buried themselves.
Michel has done what he can. He has promised his family rooms in the fortress he is building, half-in, half-out of the earth. When things fail and fall, it will be up to families to survive, he says. Families and clans. Michel is very persuasive. (You don’t get sales figures like his, you don’t get option deals, unless you have something simple and compelling to say.)
But let’s be honest here – Hanna is the tougher of these two. She has to be. She has a daughter to look after. She has no choice but to live in the everyday world, with all its prompts to fear and denial and secession. ‘How did you get in, anyway?’ she asks, examining the front door.
‘You’ve had trouble?’
‘What?’
‘To be fitting new locks.’
‘No. No trouble.’ She studies the mechanism, unnerved by her husband’s burglar’s skills, and, by extension, all the brutal lore he lives by now, and which she will not learn.
‘The thing is, Hanna, it still just about makes sense for people to be kind and decent to each other. But this will change, and it will change on a penny.’
‘I know this is what you think, Michel. You have told me this before. You keep saying this.’
‘We have to be ready.’
‘I know.’
‘No. You think you know. You don’t know.’
Hanna sighs. She can only stomach so much of this sort of thing. ‘I’ll give Agnes your love, Mick. Please fuck off now.’
‘Hanna.’
‘Go back to your boyfriend. Go back to Connie. Go on.’
TWENTY
Whatever this is – ruin or renaissance – the future hurls itself at us piecemeal, raising some of us, hurling others down. The future is not democratic. In cities to the east of the country, people are still living out the kind of lives I remember from my childhood.
It’s bloody cold here, but for some reason nobody wears much. I go into a cafeteria to buy a take-out coffee and at the tables sit young builders in plaster-spattered Ts and bare-legged shop assistants. Just looking at them makes me shiver. I try to pay with a card. Stupid of me. The girl behind the counter just stares.
The town, built entirely of brick, is the colour of old blood. I stuff my free hand into the pocket of my puffer jacket and tug its stuffing around my middle. I’m cold to the core. It’s not just the weather. The train was a sleeper in name only, the banquettes were cripplingly uncomfortable and I’ve slept very badly.
Or maybe it’s just that I’m old. Older. Anyway, old enough for my age to matter: at forty, the age my mother was when she died. Sara. I drink my coffee, burn my tongue, don’t care.
There is a taxi rank by the station but after two drivers refuse my fare I haul out a pair of glasses. I blink up a map and a green arrow unfurls along the pavement before me. The colour contrast between the map’s Caribbean-coloured 3D rendering and the town’s scabby frontages is so distressing I have to pause to blink up the preferences pane.
‘Got the time, mate?’
I’m equipped for this. Laboriously, I haul on the sleeve of my puffer and study my cheap plastic watch.
I’ve been caught out before and mugged. Not today. This place has a reputation, and I have come forewarned. Old watch, old shoes, and all I need I’m carrying in a canvas shopping bag – the paranoid preparedness of the middle-aged. The kid pulls a face and doesn’t even wait for my reply. As I thought, it’s just been a ruse to get me to haul out my phone. My spectacles he doesn’t clock, or maybe they have no resale value in this place – it lags so far behind the curve.
The arrow, blue now, leads me to the cliffs. The town, in the days of its pride, made rigorous, geometric shapes out of their slopes and hollows, locking everything in brick. This mathematical neatness makes everything look smaller and nearer than it is. I’m exhausted by the time I reach the sea.
Tenements edge the cliff like long brown teeth. It’s as well I have this map running. The road signs have long since been pilfered for their scrap value. Derelict telephone poles, their wires torn away, stand nude and useless on each corner.
Far away a talk-radio station, its volume cranked up and fuzzy with distortion, attempts to comfort the streets. Broken glass shines in the gutters as I cross and climb a stairwell – brick, of course, and even in this biting cold, sharp with old urine.
There is a pile of dog faeces on the external landing. I step around it. Many of the flats are gutted, their doors and windows stoppered with magnolia-painted metal sheeting.
Those still occupied have had their house-numbers wrenched off. The number I’m looking for, 717, has been scratched over the door’s paintwork in biro. There is no bell. I bang on the door and wait for an answer. I’m half-expecting him to peer out at me from behind the ash-grey nets, but no, he comes to the door readily enough, no chain, no dog, as if he was expecting me.
‘Hello, Dad.’
He stands there, staring at me. It has been a long time since we last saw each other. Most of my life. He’s grey now. Not just his hair. His skin is the colour of blurred newsprint. It is smothered in fine lines. ‘You’d better come in,’ he says, not moving. When I step forward, he steps back.