The Migration, page 21
“But what about what you said? That things change and we grow stronger from them.”
“This isn’t another disaster we could survive. It’s as if the rules of nature have been rewritten.” She shakes her head. “Death is understandable. It’s part of a natural cycle of destruction of growth. We’re meant to die, Sophie—but this? I don’t understand it.”
“That’s not how history works though, is it?” I argue. “We don’t get to put things back to how they should be just because it makes life easier to understand. You told me not to trust despair and I don’t. But the flip side of immersing yourself in history is false nostalgia, thinking things were better before when they weren’t. The planet was in a tailspin before my diagnosis. There isn’t safety in the way things were. So what if there’s an answer here, something radical and new?”
“What do you mean?” Her eyes are wide.
“Maybe this was supposed to happen.”
“Magical thinking, sweetheart. Nothing is ordained. If this were supposed to happen…” She hesitates and a shadow of grief crosses her face. “Then why you? Why now?” And buried within that question are others: Why not me? Why not my daughter too?
“I don’t know. I don’t know what any of it means, only it isn’t what they’re saying.”
“Sophie.”
Her eyes slide away from mine. For a moment I felt she almost grasped my line of thought but now she’s shifting away, her mind rejecting what I told her, antibodies pushing out a foreign bacterium. I guess that’s one way of living, of protecting yourself. But there’s another way too: you could take what it brought you, let it break through your defences, and you could find a way to use it. But she can’t bring herself to do it. Not yet.
I could show her Martin’s file. Would that be enough to convince her? I don’t know. I need to talk to someone who understands first. Bryan. Still I want to mollify her. “Look. I’ll think about what you’ve said, what the Centre said.”
“Good girl.” My aunt looks faintly relieved. She tries to smile but I can’t bring myself to do the same. I want her to understand but after everything we’re at odds with each other. She doesn’t want to listen.
Outside the sky has begun to dim, casting long shadows. The heady scent of paraffin wafts into the room. The wind starts to moan like a live thing.
32
I hear nothing from Bryan all night, though I check my phone until late, just in case. But the next day, just as Mom is opening a can of beans for lunch, he shows up at our front door.
“Hello?” Mom asks, a tad suspiciously, when she opens it. I can see her taking him in, the collared shirt I haven’t seen before. An air of respectability. After he introduces himself, a thoughtful expression replaces her irritated broodiness and she lets him inside. That dressed-up College look is working. She’s warming to him.
“The place is a bit of a pig-sty,” she apologizes. There are drifts of laundry draped over the radiators, ready to be hung outside. No one’s had the energy to do it.
“I was hoping I could borrow Sophie for a few hours.” Mom glances outside, a small frown creasing her lips when she sees his truck.
“You have a licence?”
He smiles. “Passed it on my first go.”
“Well…” she says. I watch her eyes travel to his wrist, searching for a medical ID bracelet. But he’s either shucked it off or hidden it beneath his cuff. I slip into my shoes before she has a chance to interrogate him further.
“Bye, Mom,” I tell her, planting a kiss on her cheek as I walk past.
* * *
—
Even with the windows down it’s hot in the truck. Bryan doesn’t say anything about what prompted him to show up at the house. But for me it feels strange. For so long I kept him separate from the rest of my life, a secret. But now my worlds are colliding.
We turn onto Banbury Road toward the cement works. There’s a kind of easy trust between us that’s been strengthened since the riot. But I can sense a familiar anxious energy in him as well. He blinks too often, licks his lips—it’s almost a nervous tick. He takes the roads slowly, carefully checking and double-checking before he turns or changes lanes.
It seems like it has been months since I was last at the cement works though it’s only been a few weeks. Still, it feels good to be going back, just the two of us. This is our place, a sanctuary.
The air is scorching away from the river, the grass brittle beneath our feet. I head straight for the tower, which still has the faint sour smell of acetone. My bloody handprint on the door, flaking at the edges. Inside, Kira’s blanket, the dusty-looking fairy lights lying on the dirt near the wreckage of the tarpaulin shelter. Her absence feels strange, like the ache after a tooth’s been pulled.
Bryan walks toward the raw mixture plant, about thirty paces from the tower. When I join him, through the gaps between the oversized, chalk-white support pillars, I see a large shape drawn on the concrete floor. It reminds me of an ancient petroglyph, stark, like the ones I saw back home in Ontario—turtles, snakes, birds and humans, all carved by hand into the gneiss-flecked rock. This has the same mysterious quality, a giant disk with either a rocket or a throne sketched inside.
He says, “This is what I wanted you to see.”
“What is it?”
He stares at the drawing for a moment as if lost in thought and then picks up two slender silver tubes about two inches thick stamped with the letters EMT on them. When it’s clear I still have no idea what he’s talking about, he shows me how they might fit together. “I found Da’s old brazing torch in the shed this morning. I managed to work these bits together without much trouble. It’s not much, but it gives us a frame, yeah? And there’s loads more EMT conduits from back when he rewired the house. See? That rectangle in the centre will be where we mount the harness.” I have the odd sense that it isn’t Bryan I’m talking too, or not the Bryan that I know. This one is expansive in his gestures, loosened, unknotted. There’s a…too-muchness about him, too much pressure, too much force.
“Bryan.” I want to summon him back to me. “What about Martin? What should we do about the report? There’s things I need to tell you.”
His face goes cloudy with something close to rage. I feel it too, reacting to him. That crawling sensation under my skin, a feedback loop, reflecting his excitement and his anger both.
“Martin,” he says, “that’s why…” But he’s shaking his head as if he’s trying to block out a terrible sound. “That’s where I got the idea for this. Listen. That feeling Martin talked about…You’ve had it too, haven’t you?”
I nod slowly. “Like they’re out there. In the sky, somewhere, maybe over the ocean, calling us.”
“We need to do something about this ourselves,” he says. “We can’t trust the media. The Centre isn’t trying to understand this. They’re trying to stop it.”
“I know. But how exactly does this help? What is it?”
“A paramotor.” He says at last, as if he can’t understand why I haven’t been able to keep up with him. “A powered paraglider. I saw a bunch of students using them over Port Meadow once, in the old days. They’re surprisingly simple when you break them down, simple enough that you could build one yourself if you had the tools.” A long pause, as if he’s waiting for me to respond. Which I don’t, until he says, “We could go up there.”
I take in the new angularity of his face, the compact muscles of his shoulders and arms. He looks as if he has been pressurized like coal beneath the heavy crust of the earth. He positively glitters, hard, sharp. I pry my gaze away to look at the thing he has begun to create.
“We can reach Kira up there,” I say. My heart staccatos at the possibility. A gleam of hope. “We could communicate with them. We could find out what they are.” I could get proof, something Mom and Aunt Irene would have to believe. Magical thinking, she told me. But I know it isn’t.
Bryan presses on as if he’s tuned into my thoughts. “Martin knew they were waiting for him. That means there’s intelligence behind what they’re doing. They must have a way of communicating with each other. And with us as well—outside of a lab, I mean.”
“I’ve felt it.” When I’m close to them—at the riot, with Kira, with the nymph that Bryan and I saw. “But there’s a fuzziness to it, hints and images, memories, dreams, out of focus.” He nods and I can’t help grinning. “Getting closer to them—this could be a way to strengthen the signal.”
“All we need is a motor, a propeller, and some sort of fabric sail. Like an aerofoil or a parachute.”
Bryan fills the space between us with his plans. I’m shaking with anticipation. This is insane, I know it’s insane, but it also feels right. What if we could find her? What if I could see her again?
I’m coming untethered. I could drift away, except for this: my hand in Bryan’s, heat in my wrist, my neck, my cheeks. The two of us here, as it has been from the start. I pull him closer. My lips graze his.
His eyes widen and then his mouth presses against mine, he sucks the oxygen out of my lungs. He traces the outline of my hip, buries his hand in my hair. Our teeth knock together. Our second kiss is exploratory, the pressure of his tongue, sweet. Still surprising, but not just surprise.
And then he pulls me into him, harder. His skin is feverish. “Oh, you,” he murmurs and his voice melts my inside. I want to run my fingers over every inch of him. But beneath the elation, some part of me is frightened by the suddenness of this, the strength of his arousal. He jams my back against the cement wall and sparks crowd my vision. “Wait!” But his mouth is against mine. “Bryan, wait—” He doesn’t. Neither do I. My eyes are closed, and a furious white light burns behind them. I rise up onto my tiptoes to meet him, thinking: I could breathe underwater if it only felt like this, I could grow gills and deep-sea dive.
But then he’s gone, slipped out of my arms. “Sophie,” he says, “I’m so sorry. This isn’t me. This isn’t how I wanted it to be. I want to, but I just—”
“I know—it’s the bug.” My stomach collapses in on itself, hollowed out by disappointment.
Fist clenching and unclenching, Bryan walks a slow circuit away from me. “I don’t want to hurt you.” When he turns to face me again, his smile is small, bitter. “It gets into everything, doesn’t it? Fuck.”
As I shift away from the wall, an ache deep in my bones, the beginnings of a bruise, I still want him. His smell is so thick around me, the feel of him imprinted on my skin.
“That’s why we need to do this,” he says, half to himself. “It’s why we need to know what’s happening. What’s us and what’s—”
“Something else.” He’s as far away as I have ever known him to be.
“It’s coming. Can’t you feel it? In the air, in the earth, as if the world is shifting. But my symptoms are getting worse.” His eyes are dark and coppery, the colour of molasses. “My mum said she’s noticed changes. She said I passed out yesterday. While I was talking to you. She wanted to take me to the hospital but when I woke up I wouldn’t let her. You know they’re talking about long-term facilities?”
I nod slowly. “Dr. Varghese told me that.”
“Someone from the Centre called. After reviewing the blood tests from my HemaPen they said they were making arrangements. Said they were opening a facility up north, somewhere near York.”
“Jesus, Bryan!” I reach for him but he wards me off.
“I know, I know. My mum’s scared too, but she doesn’t know what else to suggest. In the meantime she’s started stockpiling supplies from the JR, just in case. But someone’s bound to notice.”
“What can I do? What do you need right now?”
“I need this,” he says, staring at the paramotor. “I need this to work. I need some reason to think there might be a way forward. Until then, I don’t—I can’t—” His voice is strangled. “I can’t risk you getting hurt if something bad happens to me.”
The desire has drained out of me entirely. I know he’s right. There’s a growing heat between us but what chance does it have right now? I want it to be real, to be pure—not just the product of our condition. We need to choose it for ourselves. Because that’s all we really have, isn’t it? It’s what we’ve been fighting for: the power to choose.
33
Something’s coming, Bryan said, and he was right.
A storm breaks over London three days later, in the evening, whipping the sky into bruised eddies of purple and yellow, the rainfall like a flowing river and chunks of hail the size of golf balls. Where we are further inland, in Oxford, the rain is lighter but the air picks up an electric gloss that charges the hairs on the back of my neck. It’s frightening, but also thrilling. The air smells burnt.
Somehow the power is still on so Mom and I gather around the television to watch while Aunt Irene fries fresh ground beef, adding in a can of chili. She managed to get to the store early in the day to load up on fresh food before they ran out, and we have to cook the meat before losing power again. It’s a treat, rich and textured the way that nothing that comes out of a can ever is.
On the TV, helicopter coverage shows a great swell of water advancing upon the Thames Barrier, a series of steel gates and massive hydraulic piers stretching the breadth of the river. It almost looks as if it’s happening in slow motion. The wave crashes into the barrier—weird that there’s no sound, or so little of it, just the breathing of the newscaster—and then it creeps up and over.
“The problem,” announces the newscaster, “is that the storm arrived at high tide when the Thames was already at higher-than-expected levels. The flood damage is expected to be severe. Twenty-six underground stations are in high risk—we have live footage from a reporter, please excuse the poor quality.”
The image on the screen dissolves into a shot of a black metro sign with the following words lit up in dull, orange dots:
Welcome to NORTH GREENWICH Station
JUBILEE LINE: Good service operating.
The camera, lens spotted with condensation, shows a wave of seawater pouring across the walkway, splashing against the glass that encircles the escalators. The water flows down the escalators and smashes against the plastic partitions at the platform. The camera tilts as blue-tiled columns chart the flood’s depths on the concourse. Water begins to surge through the open doors into a stalled train.
Mom is shaking so hard the vibrations travel across the couch. None of us can stand to eat anymore.
Aunt Irene makes a move to turn the TV off, but then the image snaps back into focus, the colours tinted blue, briefly bleeding into one another. Amongst the crowd of trapped passengers in the train is a girl close to my age: a pale face framed by a close-cropped blond bob. The deluge drags her off her feet, her arms flail, she grabs the edge of the door. There’s a moment when it seems like she’ll manage to swim forward, against the current, but she’s slowed by the weight of her clothing, a floral skirt and ivory cardigan. She manages to haul herself halfway out of the train before the foamy crest of a second wave collapses into her.
The news anchor, his voice tinny and distant: “There are reports of people trapped in buildings as well as in Tube stations like this one. They’ve made desperate calls, asking for help, asking for rescue, but the rescuers can’t get in. It’s simply too dangerous.”
The camera catches an image of the girl kissing a bubble of air trapped against the ceiling of the Tube train. Her face is dreamy with terror—and something else, longing maybe. Has she been waiting for this? A tiny stud in her ear winks at me.
“Please, will you just turn it off, Irene? I can’t—I can’t…” Mom moans.
The image shrinks to a single point of light, then vanishes. Mom fidgets, pulls up the edge of a thin coral throw into her lap. Her legs are tucked underneath her, and she looks like a little kid watching a horror movie. “Thank god,” she says. “Thank god we’re safe.”
“Do you think she survived?” I know she didn’t. “They can’t show us something like that without letting us know whether she made it or not.”
The chili lurches in my stomach. We sit in silence and I hold in my thoughts: How old was that girl? and no one could have got her out in time and even after everything, thank god, thank god, it wasn’t me.
But at the same time there’s a part of me that understands, a part that recognized that look in her eyes. She wanted it to happen. And finally I understand. This is what the nymphs have been waiting for: the beginning of the end.
34
At the cement works traces of the storm are everywhere. The wind has ripped handfuls of wildflowers out of the ground, leaving bald patches of soil. Saplings are shattered like kindling. In London, thousands of people are missing. Downing Street is mostly underwater.
Our work on the paramotor is a welcome distraction. Bryan hauled out a portable welder before his mum told him not to risk driving. Our bikes are leaned up against the concrete wall, the smell of burnt ozone all around us.
Bryan’s got the frame mostly finished: a giant steel circle of welded pipes. I leave him to it, for the most part. I have to prepare for my job, which is just as difficult. We’ve agreed that I’ll be the one to fly the thing when it’s ready.
We’ve hung a practice harness from a secure pipe about ten feet off the ground, its copper underside dappled with lichen. Being inside the harness is like being on a swing, but with more support from the foam seat. Pairs of recycled seatbelts encircle my thighs—they’re more comfortable than I would’ve expected. The hang point of the harness has been set so the supporting straps attach to carabiners just above my shoulders. Mostly I’ve been focused on getting the sense of the straps, how easily the harness adjusts to my movement, how I hold the throttle and brake lines. Sweat greases my palms, but the movements are becoming more natural, automatic.
