Until she leant back, and I saw she had conjured a paper rose in her hand.
I hadn’t noticed the first time, but there were flowers laid on a blanket, nearby. Hillie was going to and fro to the dry riverbank, bringing rubbish for her mother to use.
I had wanted to hear her describe again the world go by from the deck of a ship. But instead she had a little fire going in a rusted can, and she melted an ancient plastic bottle to use as drops of glue.
Instead of make-believing the big wide world, here she was. Building flowers.
I couldn’t take my eyes off her. I thought I was over that sort of thing.
I smell the krill blocks from supper at the end of the room. Hear the toing and froing of the passenger trains. Stare at the paint peeling from the ceiling, the curling flakes. Like turning pages.
Let time go a little.
But I begin to feel in my body I should look at the clock. Just thinking of the polishers makes my shoulder blades ache. My hands sore.
But perhaps the protest will stop the work today. They say half a million people will be on the march. It’s not that many, I suppose, in the context of the city. And few of them will be people who are actually affected.
But the Mayor has announced that far more families will be moved from their homes than the water company first said.
Two years since the project started. An anniversary today. Of the beginning of construction, that started with a ribbon of buildings being demolished, before we could begin. A gash cut through the city to steer the iceberg through.
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.