‘Your footings are still there, you know.’
‘Built to stay.’
David’s engineering sense was in his brain, his son’s in his hands.
‘Do they know,’ David asked, ‘who? Is making the attacks.’
‘Angry people,’ Leo said. ‘No one properly organised. They don’t think. Yet. They should go for the dam if they had any sense.’
*
Leo reached out to the bowl of salt, put some directly on his tongue. ‘Do you hear it, from here? The Water Train?’
‘Don’t be duzzy,’ Helen said.
David put down the stripped chop.
‘I fancy we do sometimes, with the sea calm and the wind in the right direction. Now we don’t have to shut our ears against the bloody turbines.’
The air had unfilled when they shut down the wind farm out on the sandbanks, the horrible whine dropping from the sky around the ocean.
They had not realised how much they had come to brace themselves against the sound until it was suddenly gone. The same had happened when the air traffic more or less stopped.
‘Tell me,’ David said, ‘have you heard from your sister?’
‘I’ll see her soon,’ Leo said. ‘We’re going to the city for the weekend, when the shifts work out. Cora and Ruth get on. We’ll try and time it so Colin is away.’
‘You’re not a fan?’
‘I can’t believe she’s with him still.’
Leo had balanced a pyramid crystal of salt on the tip of his upraised finger and it caught in the light of the window behind him with the brightness the iceberg had held on the sea.
‘What did we do wrong, to raise a child who moves into the city?’
‘You fed them limpets,’ Leo said.
*
‘Give Cora this.’ David passed Leo the brooch.
‘Dad!’
‘Bronze Age, we think.’ It was beautiful. It seemed to throb despite the dullness of the metal.
They found more and more things now, now the rising sea chewed away more broadly at the low clay coast.
‘Take it,’ he repeated to his son.
The nod his wife gave was almost imperceptible. As if she had heard him say, ‘We can’t take things with us, after all. Can we?’
Leo seemed to sense something extra from the brooch. Seemed about to speak.
But, ‘Did you hear the old bandstand has gone into the ocean?’ David cut off whatever it was Leo might have been about to say, indicating out to the peninsula, past the fishing boats rotting away upturned.
‘And you used to be able to walk all the way to Holland from here,’ he noted toyfully. ‘Do you want to take some limpets back with you? Better than that lamb . . .’
Leo still seemed to be communicating somehow with the brooch.
‘You know, they barely move more than half a metre from their home scar all their lives. They have a home scar. Chisel a little place out, limpets, on their rock.’
‘So you tell me every time,’ said Leo, patiently.
The sand martins were flicking by as the evening fell.
‘We used to dance in that bandstand. Before you were born. Your mother and I.’
*
David stood by the desalinator. There had been little sun all day and the water sat murky in the sea tank. Hardly any had worked through into the collecting vat. The dust of the previously scraped-off salt rainbowed a little in the evaporation chamber as the sun dropped.
He sensed Helen near. Did not take his eyes from the white dome, promising himself.
Don’t let it get the better of you. Not until the city berg’s gone by . . .
He imagined the extraordinary sight. A fleet of tugs fanned across the water, a giant chunk of ice.
‘You should have told him,’ Helen said.
There was the endless, comforting sea. He took her hand. Her nails still as smooth as the inside of a shell. Her old skin.
‘Then he’ll just wait,’ he said. ‘Won’t a shock be easier?’
CHAFFINCH
Tap tap. Tap tap.
There’s a bird. Repeatedly. Beating itself against the window of the meeting room, its wings raised viciously, beak open, smashing itself again and again against the solar glass.
We try to ignore it, but it doesn’t stop. It hisses like a reptile.
‘Switch the window to privacy,’ I say. The bird is defending itself from its reflection.
‘He’s trying to destroy the image of himself.’
They look at me strangely when I say this. The select covey of press. Here for facts on the Ice Dock. Given there’s a protest march this afternoon against it.
‘Why do you assume it’s a he?’ asks a skinny, nervous-looking guy. Colin, says his lanyard.
‘It’s a chaffinch,’ I say. ‘The females are more dull.’
I’ve found it a useful thing to do. Say something or behave a way that offsides people. Then, when you tell them something sensible it has the added power of surprise.
I look through the glass partition to the worker pool and can’t help thinking of slow dinosaurs. A cow-eyed herd, gathered placidly and chewing amongst low tree ferns with vegetarian stupidity.
Every now and then someone reaches for a mug. Like they’re picking fruit, foraging amongst felty partitions in the sulphured air, their backs hunched over computers, shirts the grey, pale green and soft pink colours of the skins of wild pigs. All with little socks on.
You can tell a lot about a person from their socks. And their mugs for that matter.
I steer myself away from guessing what underwear everyone is wearing and look up dinosaurs on my selphone. I try to figure out what sort of dinosaurs exactly I’m reminded of. Parasaurs, I find.
Parasaurs (they think) produced low-frequency resonances, rudimentary linguistics rivalling some monkeys. Herding bipeds accumulating in a rigid social hierarchy, with a mid-way intelligence.
Mm.
I have a vague memory of reading somewhere that ninety-nine per cent of species that have ever lived have gone extinct. Or perhaps I heard it on the nature discs. I bought them, a job lot, and the mechanical disc player, from the throwback store. Even the little whirr of the machine is calming. Whhhiiiirrrrrr. Click. Zeeeeeeee.
Last night I watched Emperor Penguins.
They talk in-tow melt rates given the increased salinity and warmer ocean currents and how much of the berg we’re likely to lose but how, even so, the maths support bringing it here and that we were right to not dock-build further north and try to move the water overland.
‘Look at the trouble they already have with the Water Train,’ Alan adds, ‘and the increasing attacks.’ He seems to aim that at the Westminster spokesperson, and she tenses in her seat, braced to answer questions.
But Alan nods to Susan and she starts the digigram. The visual looks beautiful. Draws all eyes, as Alan starts the fairy tale. How . . .