She laughed at that. “I’m all right, dear, let’s get on with it.” She peered past him. “Still can’t see your car.”
“Well, I don’t have a car, I’m afraid. Let’s see how we’re fixed.” He dug under his jacket, and took the belt from his trousers. He looped this through the suitcase handle and buckled it, and then hung the case around his neck so it dangled behind his back, over his slimmer emergency pack. It wasn’t terribly heavy. Then he reached for Molly. “Now then, madam-”
When he picked her up she laughed again. “Oh my word, what a day this is turning out to be.” But she put her arms around his neck, and settled easily.
He stood in the hall, balancing her weight. She was a solid woman, and heavy, but if he stood straight the case on his back acted as a kind of counterweight. He knew he was thin from his captivity, his muscles wasted; he wouldn’t last for ever. But he was confident he could make it for maybe a kilometer, which might be enough. “Off we go, Molly.” Carefully he stepped over the sandbags, and out onto the path.
He let her fumble for a key so she could lock the door. “Last time I was carried over this threshold it was by my Benny, and that was going the other way, oh I’ll remember today all right.”
“So will my back,” Piers said ruefully. He splashed down the path.
“And these sandbags go back to the war. Really they do. I was a little girl then but I remember it clear as day. My dad dug the sand into his garden but he always kept the sacks, never know when they might start up again, he said, and he was right wasn’t he, in a way..”
Letting her talk, he bent his head away from the rain and walked slowly, carefully. He headed east, roughly, toward the line of the DLR. The current of the flood water was fast, and though the water was still below his knees it tugged at him surprisingly strongly. One step, another, in the swirling, increasingly fetid water. He was determined not to get knocked over or trip.
“Oh, I’ll remember this day I will, are you sure I’m not too heavy? I’ve got some mints somewhere, do you want a mint?…”
The AxysCorp chopper lifted Lily and the others from a soggy sports ground in the lee of the flyover. The helicopter dipped its nose and they flew north, panning over a peninsula that was becoming an archipelago. The water lapped all the way around the Dome now, and the car parks had vanished. Soaked to the skin, Amanda sat with her kids at her sides, holding them both close, shuddering.
The pilot glanced back.“Thought you might like to see this, Captain Brooke. Seeing as you missed the Games and all…”
The chopper sped across the swollen river, and surged further north. Here, spreading up across Tower Hamlets and Newham as far as Hackney, was the Olympic Park. This was in fact the valley of a tributary river, the Lea; it too had burst its banks. Lily recognized a velodrome, and what looked like a complex for hockey or soccer, and a bowl of a stadium, all of it abandoned, desolate, rusting, even vandalized. The filthy water spread across the valley and swirled around the Olympic facilities, as if coloring in a map.
The chopper dipped again and soared away to the west, toward central London.
People in Millwall knew Molly Murdoch. One old man a couple of streets from Molly’s home, who was determined himself to stay put, offered Piers the use of the wheelbarrow he used on his allotment. The water was still shallow enough for that to work, and Piers lowered in his passenger, carefully, trying not to splash her, apologizing for the muck.
“That’s the ticket,” said Molly as she settled into the barrow, and Piers wearily put her suitcase on her lap. “Home James!”
So they trudged on.
They joined a gradually merging crowd, all walking or limping, some pushing baby buggies and barrows and wheelchairs. The crowd converged on a DLR station called Mudchute, on the edge of the park where Piers had been set down. The railway itself ran along a brick viaduct a few meters above the ground. A team of police and DLR employees organized the queuing, and supervised access to the platform.
Molly got priority from the police for her disability. Piers needed a hand getting her in her barrow lifted up to the platform. They didn’t have long to wait for a train, though it arrived packed. Piers was relieved the trains were still running at all. Again Piers and Molly were given priority treatment, though they had to dump the wheelbarrow to make space.
With Piers sitting beside Molly on a soaked seat, the train set off. Outside Mudchute the track was tree-lined, but he glimpsed residential streets. Over an Asda superstore whose car park was steadily filling with water, they were joined by more refugees pushing supermarket trolleys laden with children and possessions. Past Crossharbor Station a train was stranded on the other line, its smart red livery gleaming in the rain, its doors gaping open. A line of refugees straggled past awkwardly.
They crossed the water to South Quay Station, and entered the office district, thirty glass buildings all jammed in, mostly lit up. This was a city in itself, Piers thought, like an American downtown planted alongside the much older community just a few hundred meters to the south, insulated from it with its fast tube links and enclosed rail routes. It felt very eerie to be traveling along this curving rail track surrounded by these gigantic developments; it was like a trail through a mountain range. But the old docks that stood at the feet of the buildings had overspilled, and the buildings were glass cliffs looming up from a shallow sea, through which people struggled, sodden lumps.
At Canary Wharf the line ran beneath the great tower itself, One Canada Square. It was like riding through a tunnel cut into a huge sequoia, Piers thought idly. But the tower, fifty floors of it, was surrounded by a moat of water, and its underground mall must already have been flooded. All over the face of the great monolith above him lights blazed in the gathering evening. He could see office workers at their windows, in shirts and ties or colorful blouses, drinking coffee, peering out at storm-lashed London. Some had binoculars, and others took snaps with their mobile phones; you could see the flashes. Piers knew that the flood wasn’t necessarily bad news for some of these spectators. A disaster was an erasing, an opportunity to rebuild and make a profit in doing so, and perhaps establish a bit of financial control you hadn’t had before. The corporate barons of Canary had never much cared for the old communities like Millwall they had to share the Isle of Dogs with. Now was their chance to change the balance, perhaps. Some of the office workers were laughing at the dispossessed refugees at the foot of their tower, and raising their glasses in salute.
16
Helen Gray was driven into central London. The jam was solid for kilometers.
On East Smithfield the AxysCorp driver muttered an apology and swung the car off the road. Helen, riding in the back, was thrown against her seatbelt, and then jarred as the passenger-side wheels jolted up onto the curb. Sirens were wailing. A police officer in a Day-Glo yellow coat worked his way down the road, gesturing at the drivers to clear the roadway. All the way up the road ahead, Helen saw, with the twin spires of Tower Bridge looming into the gray sky beyond, the traffic had squeezed itself off the road, parting as if for Moses. Even the enormous new bendy buses found a way to shove themselves out of the way.
The rain fell steadily, streaking Helen’s window. But she could see pedestrians pushing past, in waterproofs or just in City suits, under umbrellas or holding briefcases over their heads like shields, stepping through the murky, spreading puddles. Many of them had mobile phones clamped to their ears, or they spoke into the air, gesturing; even more glared at phones that stubbornly refused to find a signal. Talk, talk, talk; she imagined a mist of words rising up like steam from the soaked streets.
But the car was warm and dry, and so was Helen, isolated from the chaos outside, comfortable in her blue AxysCorp all-weather, ten-year-durable jumpsuit. The only sounds were the soft hum of the idling engine, the hammering of the rain on the roof. Nothing outside the car seemed real.
She still wasn’t moving. She tried to set aside her mounting tension. She had insisted on being brought back into London because she had a contact in the Foreign Office, a man called Michael Thurley who, nominally in charge of the case of her baby, had promised to meet her at the end of the working day and update her with progress. To Helen the whole jaunt out to Southend had turned out to be a distraction, irrelevant to her main purpose. Now she was determined to keep her appointment in Whitehall, whether London cooperated or not. But every time the car
