Page 2 of The Mars House

The canal water was right below the window. Covent Garden had flooded up to the second floor, and all around it, people were sitting on roofs.3

It was still raining. Opposite, a man he usually only ever saw dressed in a suit, getting cross into a phone at the café, was sitting on a fold-up chair under a bivouac, cooking something on a gas stove.

A puffin was sitting on the windowsill, looking just as interested to have found a January as January was to have found a puffin. Puffins were always much tinier than he imagined, and the markings on their faces made them look sad, but this one seemed cheerful. It had some fish. It must not have minded people, because it waddled across to sit by his arm. He was wearing black; maybe it thought he was a giant puffin.

In a bright orange canoe, just opposite him on the canal, Always Angry Lady from the café lifted a hand. He only knew it was her because she always wore the same yellow headscarf.

January waved. “Hi. Anything on the news?”

“Horrible disaster, emergency services in crisis, everyone at Westminster’s fucked off to fucking Manchester,” she said.

“Right. Where are you off to?” he asked, in case it was a sensible idea everyone here could copy.

“See if I can get a boat out to Peterborough.”

He didn’t know anyone in Peterborough. With a lurch, he realized that he didn’t know anyone anywhere but here. His mum’s vineyard in Cornwall had been sold to a French family with a poodle and triplets. They knew him by sight, because her grave was on the edge of the land and he visited it sometimes, but that was it.

“Good luck,” he said.

“Fuck it all,” she said, and paddled off.

He jumped when, somewhere over the rooftops, something exploded. It was a deep bang that juddered the skeleton of the building. The puffin jumped too, and whirred away.

The conductor touched his shoulder. “Internet’s gone,” she said. “I think we need to get out and find out what’s going on. And some food. There’s twenty-five people here.”

“How?”

She pointed downwards. There was a lost rowing boat bumping against the wall. After a murmured discussion with the director, they climbed down into it, January to row and the conductor to navigate.

Without much hope, they tried supermarkets first. Everything was flooded. The front doors were underwater. They had to give up. Instead, they concluded that what was needed was to find some people who might know what was going on or where you could get help.

As always, there were beacon lights punching up to the storm clouds above St Paul’s Cathedral, and hologram signs to say that you could find shelter there if you had nowhere else. It would have news screens too. The two of them hesitated, because it was a long way to row, but it was downriver and the current would carry them toward the cathedral, at least.

By the time they guided the little boat up to the great bulk of the cathedral, January’s hands were raw, even where he had wrapped his sleeves over them. Away from the silt of the Thames, the water here was very, very clear, and blue; he could see right down to the ancient steps, thirty feet below the hull.

Plenty of other people had had the same idea, and the way in was crowded—the vast doors formed a bottleneck as people had to slow down to duck under the arch of the portico—but it was eerily quiet. The only voices came from the high screens projecting the news down into the gloom of the aisle, and the thousands of little boats floating there. The muted light from the stained glass windows patterned people and water in colours. January and the conductor eased their boat into a space close to a statue of a saint which, when it had been set there, must have been twenty feet above the ground. Now, the water rippled around the hem of its robe.

The news was being projected around the inside of the great dome. Although there were speakers everywhere, it was hard to hear; the echoes were so severe it all sounded as though everything was being said twice, half a second apart.

The conductor, who had been standing up to direct him, sat down next to him now on the bench. In the boat next to theirs, an exhausted-looking man lifted his tiny daughter out to sit at the saint’s feet.

“. . . emergency restrictions banning all travel. Flooding is widespread beyond the capital, presenting a significant danger to life. The national rail network has suspended services across the south and south-east. The Prime Minister, who was evacuated to Manchester late last night, has pledged emergency aid to the capital as soon as possible.”

As soon as possible didn’t sound very soon.

On the way back to the theatre, the two of them broke into the top floor of a camping shop and stole gas stoves, torches, batteries, and everything else they could think of that might be useful. They found a supermarket on the upper floor of a shopping centre too, open and crowded, shelves emptying fast. He waited, tense, in the boat while the conductor hurried in, because he had watched someone tip a girl out of her boat into the water to steal it two minutes before. Perhaps he looked big enough to be trouble, or perhaps there were just better boats around, but nobody tried anything. The sky was grey and quiet. Very quiet. There were no helicopters.

After a week, it was impossible to get enough food, and they rationed. Then they rationed more. Down the street, a lady who’d had the presence of mind to take a fishing rod onto the roof with her caught salmon and brought some around to everyone she could, but it wasn’t much. January had never been so hungry.

They spray-painted SOS—25 PEOPLE onto the roof, and all along the street, people did the same.

In fits and starts, most of the dancers tried to leave, just in case they still had a home to go to, but everyone came back pale and shocked, with stories of whole streets underwater. January tried too, only to find that the entire canal where he lived was sealed off, the water littered with dead seabirds. There were exposed electrical lines under there somewhere, a ragged emergency worker explained. It was a miracle he hadn’t been at home.

On the morning of the fifteenth day, he wondered for the first time if they might actually die here, if it had been stupid to wait so long, if they should all have found boats and rowed as far as they could while they still had the energy and the supplies.

The helicopter came two hours after that.

The crew spoke only Mandarin, and nobody in the company did apart from school-level stuff, but they managed to be reassuring all the same. The director put all the youngest kids on the first round, then was hustled onto the second herself. January was among the last. He was so exhausted by then that he could hardly hold on to the harness on the way up. At the top, the deck was already full of other rescued people, some of them ebullient and some, like him, numb with relief. He couldn’t make them out well. He still couldn’t see properly, and he was beginning to realize that he was going to be stuck like that for a while now. It didn’t matter any more. He let his head bump against the wall, listening to the roar of the engine. He had no idea where they were going, but as they veered away, he found he didn’t care, and when they landed at an airfield where people in orange jackets were handing out food parcels and blankets, he was so happy to see dry ground that he almost didn’t understand when a translator came around with a clipboard and asked if he would like to seek asylum in Tharsis.