Higher Ground

By Susan Iona Swan

The siren sounds around midnight. I’ve never got used to it. The eerie, wavering first note of the melody reverberates in my rib cage. Luckily the kids always sleep through it; most do apparently. I pretend to read my book, the duvet pulled up to my chin. Paul is flicking though a gaming magazine. The siren slides into the second note in the scale. I expected that as it’s been raining for three days solid. But then another sounds. Three. That will be all tonight, surely, but no, the next one rings out, high and shrill, demanding our attention. I keep my gaze fixed ahead. Paul’s magazine drops. When yet another piercing warble follows, our heads jerk round to look at each other. Five?

I leap out of bed and throw open the window. The wind whips my hair. The rain is needles on my face.

‘How bad is it?’ Paul asks.

In the glow of the orange streetlights I see debris in the water moving slowly. ‘It’s not rushing in,’ I report. ‘No waves.’

I peer at the houses opposite. ‘It’s over the washboards. Way over.’ Below me a woman is moving slowly so the water doesn’t spill over the top of her waders, holding a bag on top of her head. ‘Waist high,’ I say.

A grating sound makes me jerk my head back inside. A tile falling from a roof? Or a brick loosened from where the electricity cables are strung? I peer along the wall but nothing’s dangling. ‘Did you hear that?’ I ask Paul but he’s checking his phone.

‘Shit,’ he says. ‘It’s still another hour until high water. Five notes. It could reach 1.8 metres. Well … it is spring tides I suppose.’

I shut the window and draw the curtains. ‘And it’s the equinox. It wasn’t this bad two weeks ago was it?’ The siren begins its ghostly ascent one more time. We count again. Just to make sure.

‘I heard on the news it would be bad tonight. Easterlies blowing towards the Western Tidal Zones. Unusually high tides they said. It’s like it for a week or so.’

I calculate. High water tomorrow is 13:00. Water will start to flood in from 10:30 and be gone by 15:30.

‘It’s good for the kids,’ I say climbing back into bed. ‘They can walk to school at the normal time. Are you still OK to take and pick up?’

‘Yep. What time will you start work?’

Irritation bubbles in my head. I hate that my life is ruled by timings, that I monitor the weather and tides like I work at the Met Office. And now I won’t see the kids for the fourth day in a row. It’s all right for Paul working in a High Rise. He’ll have to deal with the kids. I take a deep breath.

‘I’ll go in at 06:00 and we’ll close at 10:30, before the tide starts to come in. Then I guess I’ll start again about 15:30, when the tide’s gone out.’

‘What time do you finish?’ His tone is sharp.

‘Two and a half hours before high water? 22:30? People will rush off before then. What does the app say?’

‘Be indoors by 23.00.’

‘We’ll shut before then. Since that teenager slipped and fell, they close at the first seepage.’

‘Good. I don’t want you wading in high water. Especially not in the dark.’

All very well for him to say. Last week, nearing high water, I called a water taxi, but I’m not on a priority list and we can’t afford a contract so it never arrived. I had no choice but to wade.

‘Are they still planning on building another floor?’

‘Word is they’re prioritising the supermarkets on Higher Ground. They claim Tidal Zoners are travelling there to shop anyway. There’s more produce available.’

I’m relieved to be honest. When the lift isn’t working, humping the deliveries up one flight of stairs is quite enough. Paul doesn’t know I do this. He imagines me sitting at a till filing my nails.

He looks up from the app. ‘Talking of Higher Ground, are you off on Saturday? We’ll have moved out of spring tides. If the timing’s OK, we could reach your mum and dad’s.’

I check the app. This weekend the wind is dropping and high water is at 06:00. We can wait for the tide to go out, about 8:30, walk out of town and catch the bus. We won’t need to be back until 15:30. Of course everyone will be doing the same thing, so we’ll need to start queuing for the bus about 14:00. We could manage that. Take our waders just in case. Mum and Dad would be pleased to see us.

‘Don’t you have to interview for the new programming jobs?’ I’m careful to make it sound as if I don’t mind him working weekends. At least he works in a growth industry.

‘Not this Saturday. ’

‘Great.’ I snuggle into him. By then, I‘m hoping we’ll have some good news for my parents.

He kisses the top of my head. ‘Let’s try and get some sleep.’

––

It’s worse at night.

The rain slashes the windows like it’s trying to get inside. Images run through my head like a bad B movie. I lie in the dark and imagine the water rising and rising. I meant to ask Paul when he last checked the water alarm on the stairs. What if it doesn’t stop and floods in while we’re sleeping?

I visualise the Earth from space – a mass of swirling blue water, powerful, unstoppable. I zoom in on tumultuous oceans crashing into seas; churning seas funnelling into rivers; swelling rivers careering into streets. We came from the sea and to the sea we will return. There’s an inevitable symmetry to it. Ever since Westbury disappeared in twelve hours, everyone knows the barriers are useless. What hope is there when the pride and joy of the Environment Agency, the six billion state of the art barrier in Tidal Area 1, opened by none other than Prince George himself, has never worked? The sight of those giant molluscs splayed across the mechanism chilled me. Paul mooted a video game based on defending the barrier but the top boss rejected it. Too close to the bone, he said, Give me uplift.

It’s the kids I worry about, wading through God knows what. I’ve explained to them that most of the creatures are harmless; but not everything out there is harmless. I don’t want them complacent but I don’t want them paranoid either. We need to get them out of here. Tomorrow I’ll know for sure if we can.

––––––

It’s still dark when I go into the kitchen. While I wait for a cup of tea to warm in the microwave, I stare at the cute airplane pattern on the wallpaper. How carefully we’d lined up the strips before we pasted them. I’d been pregnant with Tom then. At some point the kids will need separate rooms, and he’ll move back in here. We’ll have to set up the kitchen in our bedroom but that’s already crowded with all the living room furniture as well as the bed and wardrobe. The microwave pings and I pour the tea into a flask. Our first house. Sometimes I think we could have predicted this. But ten miles from the coast, a mile from the river, we thought we’d be OK. They hadn’t figured on the rerouting of the Gulf Stream, how tidal surges would burst the river banks. Or rather, scientists had, but politicians had denied. We’d believed what we wanted to hear.

I peek in on the kids before I leave. They’ll have a normal school day. Don’t say that in front of them, Paul would say. For them this is normal.

After closing the front door quietly so as not to wake Paul, I glance to the bottom of the stairs. The water is ankle deep and judging from the wet on the wall, high water reached over a metre and a half. Rummaging in the pile of green waders, I find mine, sit down on the top stair and pull them on. I can probably get away with wellies today, but last week they kept me late stocking shelves and by the time I left, the water was spilling over the top of them. I squeeze past the canoe, walk downstairs, and peek at the ground floor. Paul resorts to occasional jet-washing to keep down the saline, even though it’s illegal. He claims it prevents corrosion. The jet has taken off most of the plaster and what remains is mottled black. The floorboards are dark and slimy. The bottoms of doors have rotted away. Some bladder wrack has caught on the taps that stick out of the wall like the arms of a skeleton. A fat brown slug sits on the windowsill where I used to keep pots of basil and parsley. I cover my nose at the stench.

Jamming my knee against the frame, my shoulder wrenches as I tug the door open but then it drags easily against the water. I step over the washboard and head up the road, pulling up my hood against the rain, turn into the next street and pass the bungalow where my parents used to live. A huge crack like a lightning bolt splits the front. At least our little terraced house had another floor. At the traffic lights on the corner, a huge barrel jellyfish lies stranded and kids are chasing away a dog that’s trying to eat it. The supermarket has started selling jellyfish. Lobster batons, it says on the packet, high in protein.

The High Street is full of people waiting for the shop workers to remove the wide metal washboards. Delivery trucks are splashing up the road, their huge tyres bridging the potholes. A poster in the window of Boots announces a new delivery of sterilisation tabs and hand sanitiser. The hardware store has a sign up saying Sorry no Candles. Clarks is displaying pretty flowery waders for girls and shark ones for boys. Tasha will go for the sharks, but I don’t think I’ll persuade Tom towards the daisies. I see a bus at the end of the street and text Paul to tell him they’re running and to remember the kids’ travel cards.

I edge through the crowd outside the supermarket and step over the soggy sandbags inside the doors. It’s so noisy I can barely hear the manager above the racket of the pumps and generator. She says there are enough people mopping and drying, tells me the lift is working, and to stock the vegetable section. I clock in. In the backyard, wooden pallets laden with cleaning products are being winched to the first floor. Plastic crates of potatoes and carrots are stacked in the yard, the soil still clinging to them. Not hydroponics then; they’ll sell out in minutes. I put some in a shopping basket along with a yellowing cabbage to take home later. I load the crates onto a trolley, and push it to the lift. I wave to the manager so she knows I’m entering in case it dies between floors. I don’t want to be trapped inside like I was last week. Luckily, I was stocking the biscuit aisle and had a steady supply of custard creams; I can’t see muddy carrots offering the same comfort. I make it to the first floor, wheel the trolley to the vegetable section and unload. I wave to my mate Jan who is peering at printouts and cruising the aisles, filling shopping baskets for deliveries, then I go back down for the next load.

The loudspeaker announces ‘all operators to tills’ and I’m in place by the time the crowd funnels upstairs. I groan quietly as in a matter of minutes, twenty people are queuing. My conveyor belt isn’t working and I have to haul the giant containers of water from one side to the other. While customers scrabble inside their bags for money – why does payment always come as a surprise? – I sip my tea.

At 10:00 we shut the tills. I restock shelves, and at 11:00 I pay for my shopping and clock off. On the ground floor, the water is only just over my knees so it’s easy to carry the bag of vegetables and the water flagon, but it’s coming in fast judging by the speed of the litter flowing down the High Street. I turn at the sound of a siren. The wake of the police launch sends waves crashing against buildings and nearly sweeps me off my feet. It reminds me of how we used to motor around in our dinghy when it first began flooding, before the Civil Contingencies Secretariat made it illegal. Too dangerous, they claimed, too much congestion. Now we can’t get the petrol anyway.

Back home, I have to push against the door. Shit. I almost didn’t make it back in in time, like at spring tide last month. I had to wade to the taxi rank and pay a fortune to reach Paul’s High Rise. I’d hung out there for five hours trialling a game for Paul – Intergalactic Heroines. I got through to level eight. The kids had been dead impressed.

I have four hours before my next shift. Four hours to change our future.

––––

I flop on the settee, switch on my laptop, take a bite of my quornfish sandwich and type Affordable Higher Homes into the search engine. My heart thumps. An image appears of a row of immaculate, cream rendered houses surrounded by trees and hills. I linger on it. House porn, Paul calls it.

A new government initiative. Affordable plots on Higher Ground.

Another click and a photograph flashes on screen, just released, scrawled across it in red. Oh no. It’s a section of the Moor re-designated for housing. I shift uncomfortably and slam down the laptop lid. How could I ever buy a plot there? I’ve been opposed to selling off National Parks for building ever since they mooted it. Paul would say that we shouldn’t let our principles dictate our children’s future. Perhaps I’ll take a peek. I open the lid and click on the photo. The plots are small. No services as yet, but only an hour from town so commutable for Paul. The nearest school is half an hour’s drive but it’s 80% Dry and has been approved for a rooftop playground. Ideal! I select the smallest plot and the price appears on screen. That can’t be right. I must have clicked the wrong one. I click back. No. That’s the right price – 800,000 for the smallest parcel of land. I knew we could never afford a house, but I thought if we joined forces with my parents, we could buy land, stick two caravans on it and build later, when we’d saved enough. A surge of anger overwhelms me. The Affordable Higher Home is a myth. More government bullshit spun by politicians sitting pretty in their new state-of-the-art inverted pyramid on Hampstead Heath, while they zap between heliports thinking up ways to force Tidal Zoners to lower their emissions.

How thrilled my parents were when they found that plot to rent for their caravan. Dad remembered it from when it was a farm, animals grazing on the hillside. That was before they terraced it into plots. Of course the farmer sold up long ago to some anonymous city developer who’s been sitting on it for years waiting for permission to sell the land. It’s in Higher Zone A so they can’t afford to buy there but we thought if we pooled our resources we could afford Higher Zone D. I feel as if I’ve let them down even though I know it’s not my fault.

Another click takes me to the Tidal Zone Affordable Housing site where I check the price of our house. It’s worth less than a month ago – 90,000 – half of what it cost ten years ago. Well, I suppose it’s only half the house now. How much longer can we live in it? Sea levels are only going in one direction.

As a last resort I click onto the High Rise site. There’s only one flat available to rent in Tidal Zone 22, for two thousand pounds a month. Jan lives in that block, on the thirty-seventh floor. I’d envied her the height, but she complains the lifts no longer function, the winds blow off the electricity cables, and water usage is restricted. At least here we only lose power in spring tides, and only at high usage times, and the solid Victorian plumbing still functions. Every time I look into it, I arrive at the same conclusion – we’re better off here. As long as the water doesn’t rise to two metres; then we’ll be condemned.

I open the window and lean out. People are still out going about their business. Someone is taking their dog for a swim. The elderly couple opposite are hauling up a bag of shopping from the supermarket delivery boat, and I watch them struggle to pull it over the windowsill. A group of teenagers splash past without waders. It’s become the thing to do; I can understand it in summer but in November? They’ll always find some way to flout the rules. A girl scoots past on a paddleboard; a Jack Russell sits on the front sporting a buoyancy aid.

I check the local news on the Internet. A landowner on Higher Ground A has been granted permission to bulldoze the tent city that’s sprung up on his land. Two more deaths from house fires within Tidal Zone 16; dodgy electrical cables suspected. A shoal of Portuguese Men o’ War spotted in the High Street in Tidal Zone 22. Shit. That’s not far from the supermarket. A councillor issuing a warning about unregistered water taxis. An outbreak of foot and mouth in one of the cattle towers. But it isn’t all bad news. Atmospheric carbon dioxide has fallen for the sixth successive year. Well there’s a surprise. How could it be otherwise when one fifth of the population has no access to charging points? We should sell our car but Paul refuses. One day, we’ll move to Higher Ground, he says. Meanwhile it sits in one of the multi-storeys on the edge of town costing us a fortune. The silly news item is about an elderly gent rehoused in our Tidal Zone who claims he still hears the bells ringing from the submerged church in Westbury.

I check the weather report. Western Tidal Zoners are warned to stay indoors. Heavy rains and winds expected … river outflow hampered by rough seas caused by Atlantic Storm Ali. Great. That’s all we need. I hadn’t twigged Walid was over and he we are, running through the alphabet again.

In the kitchen, I scrub potatoes and carrots, cut them into chunks and pop them in the microwave. If there’s no power at teatime at least they’ll have something cooked. I write a note for Paul suggesting they eat the veggie burgers from the freezer if the electricity is on, or open a can if it’s not. I take the remaining apples and decide to make a crumble. I picture Paul and the kids tucking into the meal I’m preparing, discussing what they did at school and work, and later playing Cosmic Battlers – their latest addiction. They’ll be asleep by the time I get home.

The siren intrudes on my thoughts. It doesn’t sound as scary in the daytime. I chop the apples and drop them in a dish with a little water. The second note trills. I tip flour into a bowl and add a chunk of margarine. Another rings out. I rub the crumble mixture with my fingertips. Then the next. That’s the last one, surely. I pour sugar into the mixture and as I stir, another note screams out. I sprinkle the crumble mixture on top of the apples and shove the dish in the microwave. How many was that? Why hadn’t I counted? My phone buzzes. I wipe my hands on my jeans and pick it up. The app is flashing red. I’ve never seen it do that. Severe Risk of high water. Well, duh, I can see that by looking out the window. Areas less than 8 metres above mean sea level at risk. I throw open the window. A water taxi weaves up the road with a low hum, unregulated judging by the number of people on board. The height of the water looks about the same as last night. I check the app – still another hour before the peak. The microwave pings and the door springs open. I walk through the bedroom and open the door to the landing. Water is already halfway up the stairs. I count. Up to stair seven. I can’t get out now. I phone Paul but there’s no service. The New Year factor we jokingly call it. I call 999 and get the usual we’ll call you back message.

I email Paul: Water rising fast here, are you OK? Will the kids be OK?

Their school is an old Victorian, three storeys high, Paul’s in a High Rise. I know there’s no need to worry about them.

He emails back. Can you make it here?

I type: I’ll wait it out. It will start to go down in an hour. As I press ‘send’ the screen dims as the laptop switches to battery. I have about an hour before it dies. The water alarm beeps the way it does when the power is off.

I go back out to the landing and count. Stair eight. I check the canoe – fully inflated. A cry draws me back to the window. The street buzzes with yellow army dinghies. A soldier is encouraging the elderly couple opposite down their rope ladder onto a boat. They’ll be evacuating the over-seventies first; taking them to the sports centre. I lean out the window and shout, ‘What’s happening?’ which is a stupid because I know what’s happening, but I want the comfort of someone hearing me. My voice is drowned by the wind. I rush back to the landing. Stair nine. Still twenty minutes to high water, but the flow usually slows towards the end, though these days I use words like usually and normally with caution. I carry the canoe into the living room and prop it next to the window, checking the paddle is secured with bungees.

I tear off my clothes and rummage in a drawer for my swimming costume. I wrestle on my wet suit and tug at my boots. I pull down the buoyancy aids from the top of the wardrobe, find mine and strap it on. Scrabbling in a drawer I find a waterproof phone cover, then jam on a fleecy hat so I can trap the phone inside if I have to swim. I open the window and throw out the rope ladder. If the water doesn’t start to subside in twenty minutes, I’ll lower the canoe. If the water’s rushing, I’ll wait for a passing rescue boat and go to the sports centre.

Later, when the tide goes out, Paul and I will pick up the kids from school and walk home. Who knows? Maybe the supermarket won’t open later and we can all eat together. Thank God I’ve cooked the vegetables and made the crumble. The power will probably still be off.

I’ll wait it out.

I wait it out

I wait

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