The Plot Thickens 2 - Current Stories No.13
She painted a picture with words, for her eyes had become fog-laden lenses. Her great granddaughter watched ivory cataracts shifting now here, now there, not understanding that from within they were mirrored surfaces – concave, focal – taking the staccato images of a long-remembered past, like the judder jerks of an old silent film, and reflecting them to a singularity buried deep within.
“Turn it off.” She implored, but Alice already had and had moved over to the window, triple-glazed and gas-filled, placed her hands on the sealed glass, and was staring out at the vast expanse of river below. “I used to love that, used to hear it everyday.” She paused, her brow furrowed at something she couldn't make out. “I don't know,” she said in the tone reserved for herself, then adding, louder “what's it called again?”
Alice's jaw tightened. “It's the shipping forecast.” She explained. Outside it was roasting, forty-plus, she thought absently about the journey home and could see that the tide had turned. She winced in anticipation of the smell revealed by the receding water.
“No dear, the music. You know…” She waved her right hand back and forth as she sang, her whole upper body moved as the static in her voice, accumulated over five score years and ten, crackled along the bars of quavers, crotchets and minims. Alice shook her head.
“Well. I don't like it anyway. I used to, mind.” She paused. Alice could tell that it was time for the tale, she had to smile at its regularity, how it kept the old woman alive. Alice settled into tight angles of the old chair as best she could and closed her eyes, banishing the new world beyond the window.
“When I was born they said it was a crazy hot summer. Mum, your great great grandmum, she got sunstroke while I was still inside, that's why I could never stand the heat. Phew! If only I had known what was to come! There were ladybirds then, that year specially. They've all gone now, so I'm told…” She twisted her head, pressing her right hand to her forehead, looking for the misplaced thread. “Oh yes. But there were then. Millions of them, they said. They had gone to Brighton with me inside, on the train. Dad said that it was all you could do just to stop the crunch of them under your feet, that mum had got them in her thick red hair. He said that they'd spent an hour sat on the pier picking them out and throwing them off the side into the air. They'd tumble before flicking out their wings to be carried off on the rising air. It was that hour that got mum sick, it was.
“Dad said we were the harbingers, him and me. I had to look it up. There was me in that hot summer and he was born in the attic of the house in Canvey. It's not there anymore, it was one of the first to go. January '53. Nineteen fifty-three that is, before you say anything. I maybe old dear, but I ain't gone doolally quite yet.
“Metres of water they said, yards in those days, I suppose. They'd only survived because his dad had had the forecast on, the Shipping Forecast, that's how I knew it. Three hundred dead that night, they said, and there was my grandma, having my dad while the water lapped the upstairs windows, inside and out. And the stink, he always talked about the stink. Stench like they say it is now, not just water, you know. Only saved he reckoned because of the listening to the radio and having a two storey house.
“That's why he moved us here, but I don't know if that's true. Safe on the fourteenth floor. But if he'd known what was coming, we would have gone inland, up-land, I'm sure.
“I stayed because by the time they'd gone, it was too late for us to leave. And your great grandfather he died so young.
“I kept the Shipping Forecast on throughout the years like a family hand-me-down, almost felt I must. From that night in Canvey to my hot summer and then through the decades of children and theirs and theirs.” She stopped, uncertain for a moment, “Where are you dear?” Alice, pulled from her reverie, lent across and lay her hand on the old woman's, smiled reflexively. “Yes. And then one day I realised that the numbers, the size of everything, day in, day out, four times a day, kept going up. Wind, rain, temperature, you name it. It made me sick that I hadn't noticed, that I hadn't really listened over all that time.”
“Oh well, Gran Gran.” Alice began, trying to be neutral in tone. “There's nothing that you can do about it now, is there?”
“No, I suppose there isn't. Not much any of us can do, I shouldn't've thought.”
“No.” Alice confirmed gently. “Look I'll pop round the same time next week. Okay? Must get off now or the current'll be too strong.”
“Oh dear, yes. I don't know how you youngsters cope.”
“Gran Gran. I'm almost thirty.” She admonished, squeezing a sinuous hand.
As Alice walked out along the pier from what had once been the first floor, the heat bludgeoned her in its motionless intensity, the stench choking. She realised she was going to have to get a move on. The water level was lower than she'd expected, maybe they'd got the tide tables wrong, it wouldn't be the first time. She made her way carefully across a pair of family craft to which she had treble moored, and hopped into her small RIB. As she untied it and gunned the outboard, breaking away from the uncertainties of the bank and headed north, the speed brought notional relief, allowing her to breath easier, to feel the cool touch of the air whisking the dampness from her skin.
By Jim Hitch