Stillicide, Page 2

  How often the process of construction starts with destruction.

  Now they say the run-off channels need a wider margin than they thought. The stillicide channels along the tow-track to the Dock, to catch the melting ice water.

  More homes will be knocked down. More families will be moved.

  And we’ll be one of them. Well. Nita and Hillie. They are the ‘they’ who will be moved. This bedsit.

  But, she says, we might get somewhere better. Nearer to the riverbed. Maybe with a view.

  Somewhere up high, I say. Like a bird.

  Somewhere where we will not hear the soilmen. Or be rattled by the trains.

  We’ll wait and see.

  I reach onto the floor and pop out an immunotab, crunch it in my dry mouth. I should get up and spray myself with alcowash, take a tooth lozenge then boil up some of the sterilised grey water for tea.

  I know though, once I rise Nita will wake, the rhythm will take over.

  ‘What will you do today?’ I’ll ask. And she will say ‘I’ll ride the train to the riverbank. Like every day. And there I will make flowers. And then I will go to sell my flowers, at the foot of the busy bridge.’ And she will then say, as she always says, ‘Will you be with us later?’

  I close my eyes. A few more moments here. My body already moving towards the day’s work. The whine of the polisher. The dust, like flour. Making paste round the seal of my eyeguard.

  The way the heat throws itself back off the walls.

  I think of all the water locked up in the cement of the Dock. One hundred and fifty litres bound up in each cubic metre of concrete. They do not talk about that.

  And how much of that becomes powder in the air.

  Nita moves. Stretches, and the tattoo of a bird seems to dip along the tan sky of her skin.

  On the table close to the bed, the bare light catches her scissors and thread.

  An old lump of smoky white glass, long-ago long-smoothed by the river. It looks like a chunk of impossible ice.

  I try to imagine the berg again, there in the Dock. When finally we’ve finished.

  I can’t help but be in awe.

  Millions in this city. The Thames tanks just can’t hold enough, Water Train or not.

  However many little watercourses they find and reopen. Like the one they’ve found that runs beneath the Dock site.

  Think of it. The city was full of streams and rivers, centuries ago. But they covered them with tunnels and built houses over them.

  And now we have this. An iceberg!

  People are astonishing.

  My father used to say, ‘We fear the worst and do our best.’

  We have the imagination and the science to tow an iceberg into the centre of a city.

  Hillie comes quietly through and climbs onto the bed, as she does every morning, like a little person-clock.

  I pretend to be asleep. Sense she puts her finger on her mother’s bird tattoo.

  Then, from the street there is a sudden cheer. A hiss. A pile of voices. A crisp shatter against the window glass.

  The little one looks up, as startled as I am, and I make a shush with my finger and mouth. Then I lift her off the bed, Nita uncurling.

  I make a funny face to Hillie, squeeze it up at the risk of waking her mother, the little one wide-eyed with wonder; and carry her the few steps to the window, shift the curtain to one side.

  Kids have hacked the old water main – I just catch sight of them, running, their bright clothes flashing like deers’ tails – and for a moment the leftover pressure pushes out the residual water, in a spray like a fountain. Catching rainbows of early morning light.

  Hillie is a contained squeal of delight.

  Laughter in the alley.

  The dirt at the side of the street so dry it pushes the water away.

  The pressure abating. Runnels of water thickly down the glass. ‘Stillicide’.

  And the little one watches.

  The street has changed colour. Birds have come to drink already. Sparrows and pigeons, as if from nowhere.

  Hillie winds her hand in my hair, the way she does, teasing it into stiff clumps. In her other hand, the soft toy she is currently in love with that her mother made from scraps. She watches the street, mesmerised.

  Winding my hair like my own children did.

  Enjoying how different my hair is from Nita’s.

  Even with the extra water tokens that we have as part of our pay, us workers, it’s impossible to wash our hair properly.

  We let the dust thicken in it and make joke hairstyles. Mad, crazy hairstyles that we can tell each other by. With the eyeguards and the work clothes and blankets of dust we otherwise all look the same.

  ‘When we’re done with the polishers, we’ll shave our heads,’ we say. A thing that makes the little one wriggle happily with horror.

  ‘We’ll have some party,’ we say. ‘We’ll swim in the stillicide channels.’ In the meantime, let’s look like pirates.

  All the ways the world has changed and pirates still are pirates!

  Nita joins us at the window. I did not hear her rise and that makes me feel that for a moment I’ve been absent.

  I’ve been thinking about swimming. My whole body in deep water.

  I should take them to the beach . . .

  Hillie points to the street and sways slightly as she’s kissed. I think of my own children, home, the scent of their crowns. Before I travelled here for work. The dream that they would join me. How fast the years have passed.

  But.

  Nita puts her arm around me; pigeons clatter from the street. One seems more a dove amongst them. Seems to carry a coppery metallic sheen, like a beetle’s wing.

  A scruffy dog trots up and puts its nose in the water. A boy, just as scruffy, trots behind.

  ‘Would you like tea?’ I ask Nita. Feel her nod. As if she gives permission for the day to begin.

  ‘What will you do today?’ I ask. And she says, ‘We’ll ride the train to the dried-up river. Like we do every day.’

  And every time she says it, I remember how we met. Sailing on a make-believe liner around a make-believe world.

  They will make flowers, then go to the bridge.

  And while I stand there, white-faced, in the beating heat of concrete, my arms rattling in their sockets with the work, I will imagine them. My Naiads washed up.

  I will hear, through the roar of the work, the snip of their scissors.

  I will imagine them filling the city with blooms. Dancing over the streets. Planting flowers in the cracks of the kerbs.

  BUTTERFLIES

  Ruth steps into the pool of warmth ebbing off the tarmac between the beautiful ornate old gates and the high fence that blocks the park from view.

  Already, the sounds of the city seem muffled. Stripped of urgency and flattened.

  She has a little flush of nerves when she fears she might have left the ticket in her coat back at the staff room in the hospital. But no. It’s there. An old-fashioned paper slip, a thank you from a patient’s family.

  The original railings – tipped like arrowheads, all around the grounds – are finished with black paint. She can’t help but think the paint is somehow melted in the sun. It looks still wet and makes her want to touch it. Recalls the hard liquorice she used to covet from her father as a child, small diamonds sticky in her mouth; the way she and her brother Leo used to see which of them could keep one longest on their tongue.

  ~

  There’s a booth with an actual person, wearing a name badge. So surprising it makes her childish. But then, there’s a warm nervousness just beneath her skin right now. Ever since she lied to Colin. Told him she would be on a late shift and said yes to tonight.

  There’s been nothing recently. And every time she thinks about it, she recognises just how long she means when she says ‘recently’.

  His mind is always somewhere else. Always with the same excuse, ‘It’s work.’

  This business with the Ice Dock.
He’s certain there’s some big scandal to uncover. But when is he not? Certain this is his chance to write his breakthrough story. Always, she thinks, something is the chance to write his breakthrough story.

  He’s sure other journalists are safe in someone’s pocket.

  This piece. The cycling. His love of antique letter openers. He has obsessions. Colin.

  She’s realised that’s all she was to him, and that for a few years now, she’s been little more than furniture.

  That for a long, long time, every time she goes home, she hopes he will be different. Will have lifted from his bubble.

  He was still up when she came in from her actual late shift last night on the ward.

  His finger pattering away at his tablet, the way someone would poke another person in the chest if they were angry.

  Don’t get cold, she’d said to him. And he’d said, ‘Do you mean emotionally?’ Not even looking up.

  Always so clever with his words.

  ~

  Ruth shows the ticket and is let through an old-fashioned turnstile. It clicks and snaps ingeniously. The bar rotates into her bum. A cheeky bump of encouragement. ‘It’s okay . . .’ Into a different world.

  A group of young mothers sit on the grass. Their children bright as flowers.

  Couples walk on the paths. Blackbirds toy in the leaf litter, flick up the ornamental bark.

  Ruth has never looked up and seen so few people outdoors in this city. Feels a strange sense of vertigo at the unbusy-ness, the space. A nostalgia for the beach she grew up next to.

  Remembers watching Leo learn to walk in their parents’ garden by the sea.

  ~

  She builds up the courage to sit. The give of the ground ever-so-slight. Firm and warm. Rests her hand into the soft nap of grass, uncertain that she should.

  It takes her a while to realise the hum is not the city traffic but the sound of insects. Tiny flies displaying, staying in one place in the air.

  The lawn is littered with clover. Another plant she does not know. Tiny. A crowd of heart-shaped leaves with tight-grouped yellow flowers that look like knots in thread.

  There’s a gentle breeze. That she hears more than feels. That knocks the nearby leaves a little.

  Odd-looking alginate bags hang amongst the trees and shrubs, like funny plastic fruit. With the opaque haze of the soundproof pods around the patients’ beds. Leaves bunched up, the bags tied tightly at the neck with string.

  She assumes the plants have some sort of infection.

  Notices each type of leaf makes a sound all of its own. The rattle of dried peas in a child’s toy; the shush sound in a shell. Respirators. Laboured breath.

  She pushes the thought of the ward away.

  . . . Breathlessness . . .

  Tonight. Maybe.

  A tickle on her skin.

  ~

  She watches an aphid stumble through the faint blonde hairs of her arm; its curious feelers flittering busily, tasting the paths of her salt.

  For a moment she is lost, imagining how the world must look through eyes so small.

  Finds the thought of it impossible. That it carries its machinery packed up inside. Its intestines and nervous wires, its breathing apparatus. Something so minute.

  Its tiny eyes are perfect. Absolutely pin-prick black.

  ~

  All around the park, bushes and trees are carefully spaced, or clustered into a balanced fringe. The songs of birds. Movements, every so often, a prattle in the branches.

  She walks. Feels sun on her shoulders; a warmth tracing her edges. Reminds her of her shape.

  A buttercup bends with the ballast of a bumblebee; a bluebottle iridescent, like a blue piece of glass.

  Beetles, like articles of cast-off jewellery, scuttle in the grass.

  She takes some sips from her shift ration, holding the water in the funny space under her tongue.

  Last time she saw a bumblebee she caught it in a cup. Rescued it from the fake daisies pattern of the staff room tablecloth.

  It kept trying to come back in, after she had set it free, bumping on the window.

  ~

  In the glasshouses the heat is stifling and rich. The lights are open in the roof, but she is sure that if she wished she could part the air with her hands.

  The shock of a cactus flower. A bright cerise pink.

  She rolls the names of labelled plants round on her tongue, the way she does with chemicals. Coloured pills in paper cups.

  Gymnocalycium mihanovichii.

  Astrophytum capricorne.

  Delosperma cooperi.

  Not knowing whether or not she speaks the Latin properly.

  You don’t know unless you’re told, she thinks.

  You don’t know unless you try it . . .

  A cactus stands taller than herself, skeletal and branching. Naked with your arms up in the air . . .

  Succulent.

  The word feels succulent itself.

  This cactus, says a sign, can store a tonne of water fully grown.

  When she sees the insect-eating plants, the sticky drops on some of them make her purse her lips.

  ~

  In the orchid house, as if hair clips have been used, there are plants held on branches with thin wires. A sense of moisture in the air.

  The flowers bold and blatant. Vivid. Seem fake. The paper flowers on the patients’ tables more real-seeming than these.

  Loosed and partly sunken in the soft moss bed, a gorgeously puckered bloom.

  She feels a rush, a heady indecision as she softly tunnels her finger to it. The confident intricacy it has. Her blue uniform reflected in the glass of a display case. The sense she steps towards herself.

  She’s still thinking of the cactus flower. It’s daring garishness. What underwear she should put on tonight.

  As she leaves the room she sees the plaque. The collection sponsored by the media company that owns the newspaper Colin works for.

  And it’s as if he’s seen her. As if she has been caught.

  ~

  Seeing the name of Colin’s company has invaded. Told her somehow that he knows. That brings her don’t-be-silly voice again.

  ‘You can’t.’

  The soft electric recklessness that’s set in beneath her skin seems suddenly chased away. A hollow left.

  A slight sick feeling.

  The liquorice, always in the end, disappearing on her tongue.

  ~

  She sits outside the Grand Pavilion at a white table on a patio, before a meadow of longer grass.

  Impossibly, the grasses dance with small blue butterflies, the pale blue of her uniform. Others with buff-coloured wings, fringed, some of them, with orange. Some petal-shaped white flags. Then comes a sudden scratch of grasshopper song. And the buzz of honey bees.

  The cells of her body seem to understand that this is how things should be.

  How things could be. A money spider on her pale skin.

  Her body adrift on Colin’s huge indifference.

  There’s something about the way the butterflies flit above the grass that reminds her how the ward lights catch the translucent covers round the beds. The way their blue uniforms float in the corner of their eye, reflect briefly as they pass.

  From the inside, it must seem as if you’re looking out from a cocoon. The thin skin of a chrysalis.

  Hoping for change. Waiting. Hoping that you will find a way to emerge from your own old skin, to the idea you have of yourself renewed.

  She looks up. Lets the coffee fill her mouth and holds it for a while. Feels it re-warm as she does.

  She almost wants Colin now to know. To watch her. To have him see her do it. And when she thinks of that, his eyes on her tonight, a warm edge comes back to her skin.

  That was always a difference between her brother and her. Leo would just chew the liquorice. Could never wait.

  But she. She was always so careful. As if not giving in to that temptation made her somehow better. And all the wh
ile the thing was just dissolving anyway.

  She’d always put it down to a boy girl thing, but now she wasn’t so sure.

  Maybe Leo was right. What’s the point of having a thing just to see if you can keep it?

  ~

  She had decided that the alginate bags amongst the trees and shrubs protected gangs of caterpillars from predatory birds. That the bags were hatching butterflies. But the bright kid behind the cafe counter explained, pointing at the mural.

  The strange bags in amongst the leaves were hung there to collect water. It’s amazing, what we do.

  ‘Leaves breathe out,’ he said. ‘There’s water in their breath. After a while they breathe enough to make a single coffee.’

  She does not care how much it costs.

  Yes, she thinks. Tonight. I will. In knickers the colour of the cactus flower.

  Wonders if the taste of coffee will stay there on her lips.

  A dizziness from the thought coming, that it will be so new, to feel a body that is so nearly like her own.