Aftershocks Page 16

  In some ways, she recognized this, it had helped her in her campaigning work, for she no longer had a private life or a home life worthy of the name (though she tried to make a home for George Eliot and to keep her company as well as she could, given her peripatetic existence).

  For the forthcoming conference on the Man Drought, Deirdre knew that she could not address the central question of her life – whether, if the trend continued, and became more extreme, Huia women should consider polygamy as an option. She would love to have found a woman, preferably a young woman, to write a paper advocating this measure. She did not dare to write such a thesis herself. She knew it would be taken up and mocked by her political opponents, and she also knew that it was not a matter about which she could be balanced or rational.

  So, she sat there in the train. Our lovely Island landscape slipped by. The train snaked northwards, out of our bay, and up through the mountain passes north of Aberdeen. It was a great Victorian engineering feat, building the Campbell-Bannerman Tunnel, which penetrates the entire range of the Hai-ruhri. When they burst through the eight-mile tunnel of darkness, the train whooshed out again into the vivid emerald of Chatsworth County. To the west of the train, on the gentle slopes of the Chilterns, the vineyards may be seen, acre upon acre of grapes. A knowing eye – for though an extremely moderate drinker, Deirdre had a discerning palate and knew a lot about wine – made out the ripening Pinot Noir. A little later, the landscape flattened a little. Huge sheep farms could be seen. Despite the high temperatures, everything was a vivid green.

  And then, just as for a few illusory moments the beauty of the scene had soothed her everlasting sorrow, one of the young men in the carriage, who was looking at his phone screamed out,

  —Jesus Christ, it’s another one – it’s a 6 this time.

  Everyone instantly knew what he meant. The train was pretty full – of Carmichael people going back, of Aberdeen people with business in the capital. A significant number felt, instantaneously, as Deirdre did, that they must return to Aberdeen at once.

  She was already dialling Barnaby’s number. She prayed the prayer so many of us were praying at that moment into phones which wouldn’t fucking work – though we were making the prayers to hundreds of thousands of different people – Oh, be alive, beloved, be alive. Nearly half a million of us granted that prayer for one another, but about two hundred and fifty couldn’t.

  Cavan Cliffe always wound down after Island Breakfast with a paper cup of strong black coffee, taken whenever possible in the car park outside the Island Broadcasting Corporation building. This was to allow her to smoke a much-needed cig. Thus refreshed, she would go back upstairs, two storeys, so she took the lift when possible. At eleven, there was a meeting with her producer. They would discuss how the morning’s programme had gone; pick up on any ‘matters arising’; decide a rough outline of the programme for the following morning. This was always provisional because, as Gill Frang (the producer) liked to end every such discussion, in her bright, much-inflected voice – You nee-ver know!

  Well, that morning, she never spoke a truer word.

  Cavan occasionally glanced at her watch during that particular meeting, because it was going on longer than usual. Rex Tone’s office had sent a complaint almost before they came off air, saying that Island Breakfast, and the IBC generally, were filled with Green propagandists, that Deirdre had been given more air-time than him, that she was always on the radio, people were sick to death of being told negative, doom-laden predictions, when Rex and his team had our future and our safety sorted.

  Obviously, this was all bullshit, but the Director of the IBC had come down to the office to talk to Cavan and Gill about this. Clearly, they needed to decide on a strategy. There were elections coming up. Deirdre was an extremely popular and conscientious MP, but there were other parties, and Rex was the Mayor of Aberdeen. He had his point of view, and, amazingly, he had his supporters. Our other MP, Tam Dawkins, was Labour and in many respects she was much closer to Rex than she was to Deirdre. Everyone agreed that Deirdre was an ‘extremist’ who went too far. And of course, in spite of the fact that there had been a severe quake only six months before, everyone hoped that this would be a one-off, never to be repeated.

  So all these things were discussed, and for that reason, Cavan was delayed. Normally, she would have been out of the IBC building by noon and rowing back home down the Windrush. On this occasion, though, she was there, two storeys up, when the Quake struck.

  The third or fourth time she looked at her watch, Gill Frang had said,

  —Cavan, we’ll be through this soon, I promise – would you like to go outside for a puff?

  And Cavan had laughed and said she’d be OK. Then, she’d changed her mind, and said,

  —Actually, I would like a break.

  They were in an upstairs meeting room – simply furnished, it had a long Scandinavian-style table, round which were ten office chairs. There was a jug of water with some glasses on the table. On the walls were huge blown-up photographs of Island scenery – the Southern Alps, the Bay of Promise, Holy Trinity Cathedral in glorious sunshine with summer sun blazing down upon its spire.

  Just as she was saying, ‘Actually’, the plate glass of the window, which overlooked the car park and, beyond, Banks University’s Faculty of Law, shattered with what seemed like a bomb explosion. The block-mounted photographs of beauty spots were hurled off the wall. The picture of the Cathedral came at the Director’s head as an offensive weapon. The surgeon who treated him afterwards said it was as if a vindictive maniac had tried to beat him to death with a plank of wood. If they’d been able to look out of the window at that moment, they’d have seen the whole of that part of town coming down – the Law Faculty buildings crumbling like sandcastles before the waves, the car park breaking up into liquefaction, the houses and shops in Howley Street and Temple Street disappearing in clouds of their own rubble.

  But they did not see this. That was because the floor beneath them and the ceiling above them both seemed to collapse at the same time.

  I was in the garden when it happened, lying in a hammock, reading King Lear. I was really looking forward to the next seminar, which was to be on Shakespeare, and hearing Digby and Barnaby debate whether Lear was a tragedy in the sense we had been discussing, when we were talking about the Greeks, say. Now I’d grasped the concept, which Digby and Barnaby seemed agreed upon – that the essence of tragedy is the contingency of value – I felt I could understand Lear in a new way. Gloucester, for all his moments of insight (‘I stumbled when I saw’), remains trapped in the idea that the gods are moral, and that humanity is sinfully paying for its sins when bad things happen. Edgar clings to this, at the end, with his –

  The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices

  Make instruments to plague us.

  But we know, the audience knows, this is bullshit, crap. Howl, howl, howl – that is the last word, really, corresponding to the Io, moi, moi and the ee ee of the chorus in Trojan Women. Hecuba’s aiai . . . Undiluted human pain . . . It was what you saw every night on the news in some horrible scene: a bombed-out city in the Middle East, where the population had been gassed, arbitrarily shot, their houses destroyed, their children eviscerated . . . An African plain, where starving families dragged their stick bodies through the dust in search of water . . . A screaming crowd, anywhere in the world, where terrorists had, with the tug of one cord in a grenade, destroyed the happiness of hundreds of human beings, taken away daughters, lovers, parents . . . This was reality. Nature’s above art in that respect . . . Thou art the thing itself. Why did we try to kid ourselves? Every consolation is fake – an Iris Murdoch saying that Digby liked quoting. I suppose I can stop saying ‘Digby’ and ‘Eleanor’ now, and settle for ‘Nellie’. (How much I’d have liked to listen to Nellie’s talk with Iris Murdoch! We so love reading her books together.) Our moments of pleasure, in food, in sex, in art, were merely distractions from the reality we all knew to be there –
the raw suffering, which was not simply to be seen every day in the TV news, it was waiting for us. We all knew that. The cancer diagnosis. The telephone call from the police, to say that they were afraid to say that . . . The arbitrary removal of our capacity to be happy, or at peace.

  I was yet to know the slightly different way in which you read it, Nellie – but that lies in the future. You may not believe it, reader, but, as I lay in that hammock, I had got to Rumble thy bellyful! Spit, fire! Spout, rain! . . . And in that precise moment, the hammock gave an almighty jerk, and I was swung to and fro between the apple trees. I watched our solitary chimney come down, and the house shook, and immediately became a Leaning Tower of Harrow, all wonky and on one side. The neighbours’ house, the Whitworths’, wobbled even more, their windows smashed, and the extension they had built on the side, which included a conservatory, collapsed instantly. Over garden walls, I could hear screams, invective being shouted – FUCKING HELL! and the like.

  King Lear had flown out of my hand, and its contents had flown out of my head. Having written that sentence, I want to rewrite it as ‘King Lear had flown out of my hand, and I had flown into its waves and storms, its world of absolute pain’. I immediately reached into the pocket of my shorts and rang Mum. No signal. It’s a sign of how immature I was/am, perhaps, but at twenty-seven, I was ringing to tell Mum the Quake had happened, ringing to tell her the chimney had fallen down, ringing for her to come home. I did not explicitly want her to come home and look after me, but that was what instinct clawed for, on the front of that mobile phone. I needed Mum, and it was only a few seconds later that I began to realize – if she’s not answering the phone, and if she’s not home yet, that means she’s in the middle of town . . .

  I acted impulsively. As I stood on the lawn, I fell over, because it was shaking, but I got up again and went to the garden shed. Its door had been ripped off, but the bike, together with the garden tools and the lawn-mower, was still inside. Some of you, if you’d seen the inside of that shed, would think the Quake had made a real mess of things in there, but that wasn’t the Quake, that was me and Mum, who aren’t the sort of people who arrange all the garden forks and rakes and hoes in neat little rows and all the flower pots in stacks as though we were the Flopsy Bunnies or someone. We tend to make a chaos of pots, deckchairs, old oil cans, trugs, boxes of lawnseed, plastic bottles of fertiliser which we would keep hidden when Deirdre comes round for a cup of mint tea, etc. That’s the way we are. Were.

  I hauled the bike out of the shed. Don’t know if I picked up its front wheel and gave it two hefty bumps up and down – or why I did this – or whether it was the Quake just shaking us up, me and the bike. But on I got and pedalled off towards town. Not ideal cycling conditions, but I was not thinking.

  I’ll never forget that ride, and nor will I ever know how I managed to do it without being killed. The road into town which would normally, at lunchtime, be busy but full of motion was solid with cars, both ways. Adding to the surreality of it all, I wobbled past two bewildered zebras. What were THEY doing in a traffic jam? As many people were trying to get out of town as in. So many that they’d caused a jam, and real anger and panic were on display, with people standing beside their swelteringly hot cars, yelling abuse at the vehicles in front of them, shouting with real hatred at people they did not know, and who – they could see – were simply stuck in the traffic, like themselves.

  Why can’t you get a move on, you stupid fucking CUNTS?

  Some of the time, I was in the cycle-paths which, thanks to Deirdre, had now been installed on all our major highways. Some of the time, however, these paths no longer existed, and great bogs of bubbling liquefaction had taken the place of the road surface.

  DON’T TRY RIDING INTO THE CITY, LADY was among the more polite bits of advice which got shouted at me. YOU FUCKING MAD? CAN’T YOU SEE WHAT’S FUCKING HAPPENING IN THERE? was the more usual sort of question, but I was not really hearing, or only hearing with half an ear and Mum, Mum, MUM was all I was thinking. Normally, cycling into town from Harrow takes ten minutes, quarter of an hour if you get into a real snarl-up of buses and the like. It’s an old bike – an ancient Pashley which Mum bought me second-hand when I went to drama school in Carmichael. Although they’re upright bikes which look like what George Orwell must have had in mind when he talked about old maids biking to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn whatsitsname, or whatever it was he said, they can get up quite a speed, those Pashleys; they are all hand-made, in England, and the few gears can easily match the multi-geared mountain bike if you know how to handle them. This was behaving like a bucking bronco, thanks to the Quake, but like a well-trained rodeo rider I stayed in the saddle.

  It was boilingly hot, but I did not think about that. I’d taken off my bandana, my hair and brow were sweaty, and I’d tied the spotted handkerchief round my nose and mouth, because the heat and dust were now overwhelming. By the time I’d reached what would have been Gladstone Park, it did not really exist. It was like you imagine a battlefield, like Stendhal’s description of Waterloo, when Fabrice just staggers about in the fog, unable to see a thing. In the midst of the cloud, there was just pure, raw, naked suffering – screams, heat, more screams, people calling out names, and making the equivalent of the moi moi, ee ee or aiai of tragic utterance. Through these sounds, there was also a roar – or so I remember – whether the roar of machinery (diggers, already trying to clear rubble and rescue survivors) or aftershocks, which were frequent and loud, I couldn’t say. I wasn’t carefully taking down every impression and putting it in a notebook. I was just trying very very hard to concentrate on where the fuck I was. By now, if I was cycling round the planted roundabout on the edge of Gladstone Park, with its floral clock and the name ABERDEEN picked out in lobelias and aubretia and zinnias, I’d look left and see old George V on his plinth, turn right into Prince of Wales Parade, whiz down until I hit Davidson Street, do a right at Gloucester, cross Oriel Street, with Borough Market on my right, and then be in shouting distance of the IBC building.

  —YOU CAN’T GO DOWN THERE, LADY, IT’S NOT SAFE.

  Some policeman was bellowing this through a megaphone at me, and he continued to bellow,

  —THIS IS AN OFFICIAL ANNOUNCEMENT. YOU ARE ALL ADVISED TO LEAVE THE CITY. YOU ARE ALL ADVISED TO LEAVE THE CITY. THE EXITS ARE VERY CONGESTED AT THE MOMENT BUT IF YOU LEAVE SOUTH BY LEICESTER SQUARE THERE ARE FREE LANES OPEN ON THE HIGHWAY. REPEAT YOU ARE ALL ADVISED TO LEAVE THE . . .

  The clouds of dust were so thick that they could not see you if you crossed the makeshift barriers which had been erected. For a moment, I got off the bike and tried to work out where I was. You literally couldn’t tell any more. All the familiar buildings had come down – the concert hall, the Dyce Gallery – where I began this story – Rex Tone’s Convention Centre – they had all gone. At one point, I found myself near the Cathedral, so I knew I was now more or less in the centre of the city, and only a third of a mile from the IBC building and Mum.

  The dust cleared enough for me to stare in momentary wonder at what had been the Cathedral. The spire was down. The tower was a stump. Obviously, I did not know then that you’d been in the tower, Nellie. But although my stomach was wrenched by the sight of the ravaged Cathedral, and I thought of you – course I did, when at this point of my life, did I NOT think of you? – I was confused. Confused but focused on my chief consideration, which was to find Mum.

  I don’t know how I blundered on through dust, noise and heat. I made many mistakes, but eventually, something about the line of trees which I had now approached, and the proximity of the river, made me realize that I was opposite the IBC building. I paused. My bandana was once again tied round my mouth and nose. I could see the river water, which was choppy like an ocean. Never normally like that. And then I saw it, tied to its mooring with the skill of the sea-guide who had won her special guides’ badge for knotting: the wooden skiff with my name painted round the prow; Little Ingrid.

  Tha
t was when tears and panic took over, and my own versions of aiai, ee ee came forth from my lips. I don’t know what I was shouting, but it was mainly MUM, MUM MUM!

  I must’ve left the river behind me then, because someone had got me quite tightly by the arm and was saying,

  —You can’t go in there You can’t go any further.

  It was a man in uniform, and I was, like, screaming, I guess, and he was calming me down, trying to.

  Eventually, I got my voice, and I said the three fateful syllables,

  —IBC?

  —Yeah, that’s the IBC building. I’m sorry, lady, but you aren’t helping, you can’t go—

  —My Mum, my MUM, my MUM!

  I stood and watched. There was this heap of smouldering rubble. On the other side of what had been the square, there were fire engines hosing the half of the Law Faculty building which was still standing, and which had burst into flames. In the ruins of what I now realized was the IBC building where Mum worked, trucks and diggers were already moving huge slabs of concrete and wood, and already a few bodies were being carried out.

  —Your mum’s in there?

  I must have indicated to the man in uniform – policeman or paramedic I did not know by then – that this was the case.

  —It doesn’t look good, he said. I’m sorry, lady.