I
A perpetual calendar watch has always been a dream possession, seamlessly condensing and integrating every unit of time with haute horologerie and wonderous elan. But a mechanism which boast accuracy for centuries to come without manual adjustment seems a bit unnecessary and vulgar now — and I would need to have made very different life choices to afford and be comfortable wearing a wristwatch more valuable than my old car. I unplugged the clock radio when I first arrived. Before the blackout. I didn’t think to get an electronic gadget showing the days and dates — I don’t like the way time crudely vanishes on a digital time display. I prefer witnessing the passage of time moving on an analogue clockface. I put my family’s Victorian mahogany tavern clock on the right side of the entrance. It hangs stubbornly upright, round faced, shoulders back. The spring-wound pendulum is far too inaccurate to bother maintaining. I keep it wound though. I like the sound it gives to the silence of time.
This rain has a conquering monotony which dissolved into the silence long ago — a languid drone as if the story has already been written so there’s no rush to get to the ending. It’s funny how rain can have so many shapes and voices. It can roar like a ferocious wind, weep, patter with consolation. It can pummel panes and rooftops like jilted nails, sway suspended in midair as a gentle, introspective mist. It can fall in a deluge of cathartic relief, rise to a crescendo that pulls your attention out of a coffee shop street window to be hypnotised by the obliterations of droplets pounding the pavement puddles. (And the sight will hug you with gladness of a hearth you’re inside and not out there.)
It even has a scent and we named it petrichor, which never really sounded like the word should to me. Petrichor should be the pre-intermission for a story about to be told. Growing up on the coast, I can still conjure the ocean spice which sailed ahead of an approaching onshore storm. And after a cleansing winter tempest swept through town, residual raindrops resonated with syncopated curative closure — obese droplets chiming on tin gutters and street lampshades from soaked leaves and boughs above. Sometimes I get tricked into thinking it’s stopped. And I have to concentrate hard to discern its ruthless rhythm from the surrounding quiet. It didn’t used to have that sound. In the beginning it was a thunderous din against the roof and windows. Either its softened or I’ve become used to it — I can’t tell.
I checked into the fourteenth floor at the Piccadilly Jarvis the first week the rain started. In a city of perennial rainclouds, few people questioned the unseasonable weather. Most were simply dark at the prospect of summer cancelling its tour before it arrived. Its funny how the longer the rain persisted, the more confident and certain people became that it would stop. I packed everything I thought mattered, knowing it didn’t really matter. And I’ve left so much behind. I should be bitter at Him. But I’m beyond bitterness now because I am already dead. Just not yet.
Governments became concerned after the second week when water started rolling down the streets of London like an ocean washing over tidal flats. Martial law was invoked. The rest is not that different to science fiction tales. Coastlines sank and agricultural lowlands became submerged. Polar caps made it worse, melting like ice in strong booze. Experts tried tenaciously and bravely early on, but water is an intractable and mutable force. Scientists and ecclesiastics argued and fought until it didn’t matter anymore. Eventually, there was just too much water for the earth to absorb. Uncontrollable as a wildfire but without opposition except human ingenuity to extinguish or stop it. Proactive policy turned reactive, and panic set in like a chill — all for one became everyone for themselves.
Some people stayed behind, stoically poised atop broadcast towers to transmit national and global developments. But in the end, there was no news left to broadcast except the inevitable. I guess staff felt they were keeping people connected, believing in something — bowstrings on the deck of the sinking ship. In the end I imagine the urge to be surrounded by loved ones drove them away too, seeking out family who might be left. The BBC activated a continuous loop of their archive’s greatest hits of all time on final departure. I guess the water level must have reached the human heights of Oxford Road. The transmission went dead four days ago.
I saw a boat about week ago. A young couple passed the Arndale Tower along where Market Street used to be. The posthumous peaks of the city’s skyline are pelagic bones of a gargantuan beast protruding the spuming water. The Sunly stands like a pylon flanking my left. On the far right, further in the distance, the CSI tower is firmly above water — and further over still, the smaller 111 Piccadilly is keeping its head above water. Its exposed framework protrudes from the churning swell like an offshore mining platform, offering a strange sense of familiarity to the otherworldly ocean view from my hotel room.
In a small rowboat the man and woman drifted over Piccadilly Gardens and beneath my window, desperately struggling against the stealthy, under-city current. I couldn’t make out the faces in the downpour but the man had been visibly hurt in a fight. His face was soft and blue and he had a deep contusion over his right eye and left forearm. Blood on the bow stayed fresh in the constant rain, and dyed the ballast that their belongings floated freely about in. I guessed they’d recently stolen or had to defend their new home. It looked as though they were heading north to the Pennines that were now a lighter grey thumb smudge between the Arndale and CSI towers. Even if they survived the city rapids and Preston maelstroms, I was doubtful they survive those reportedly inhabiting the high ground.
I set an 11:00am alarm on my purple travel clock with glow-in-the-dark arms and numbers. There’s no need to wake up too early but it’s important to stay active. Sometimes I stay up late in the evening, sitting in candlelight and let its flame wander over my fingers and feet and try to recreate the sun’s warmth on my skin. It’s getting harder to imagine the enveloping warmth of a sunlit morning — the way the sun scintillates, invigorates, perspires, restores. The heavens pierce the immoveable slabs of granite clouds with veins of diffuse light every so often, but it adds no vibrancy, just sharpens the shadows and buffeting waves of the seething sea below.
It was on an evening just under three months ago, right before it started raining He came to me. How ironic that He disturbed me. I was in the bath, knees exposed, bent out of the tub so I could submerge my chest and head. I cherished the underwater solace of a bath — a muffled escape to the world for as long as I could hold my breath. I blew bubbles to stay under and opened my eyes to peer through the chalky, hot water. I felt the whole bathroom shudder. A deafening hiss and woosh. The room burst into flames with a fluorescent cold blaze. My lungs were empty of air but the demand to rise out of the tub didn’t come. The water hugged me like a soapy summer cloud full of love and tenderness not even the most committed lover could impart. I can’t remember the sound of the voice or whether he actually spoke to me, or I just heard the thoughts in my head. He foretold everything that has come to pass and instructed me where I would find sanctuary. The voice and fire then abandoned me, and I rose out of the water with arms on cold porcelain and a desperate, unfillable loneliness.
My mind plays tricks on me from time to time. I imagine movement and artificial light emanating from the square summit of the CSI building, and distant moans and creaks suggesting human inhabitants. I’m quite sure I’m alone. I spend evenings in the dark all the same signalling out the window with a flashlight — it passes the time.
I look around my room. I customised it somewhat — discarded the television and wooden chest of draws it sat on after the electricity went, moved the setae by the window and relocated my supplies and rations into the corridor once the hotel was evacuated to give me more floor space. I still keep the room door closed. I don’t know why. Adjacent to the entrance is the ensuite bathroom and opposite is the built-in wardrobe, mini bar and bench equipped with coffee making facilities where I have my small gas cooker.
The Jarvis Piccadilly’s legal duty of care stretched a certain measure. They reached a point of brute physicality to remove me when evacuation procedures began then snapped back like elastic as chaos caught on like a common cold and fear spread. I was happily forsaken. Not before I was made to pay the contents of the minibar and all other rooms on my floor were electronically sealed. A goodbye present to a crackpot I suppose who checks into hotels with a house of luggage. I’m dark about it. I can still roam about the corridors and stairwell. I do a bit for exercise though mostly I stay in my room.
Like me, I feel the room changing colours like autumn leaves. The rich vermilion wallpaper that defies the daytime bleakness, and appeared lustrous and gilded by candlelight in the beginning of my stay now glows a famished chartreuse at night. I spend time cooking. I loathed cooking after Sylvia passed. Now I love slow recipes, preparing ingredients, letting them simmer, boil, cool, and settle for the following day’s meal. I like the time it takes — the way time wraps itself around stews and sauces to imbue them with flavours of decay — the viaticum for the last man alive.
Framed photos of my two boys and wife adorn the right bedside table — my side of the bed. I think photos are like cats in a way. The most vain and disloyal of possessions. They surround me but not in a way which brings me warmth — comfort at best. I try not to think about them much. I like having them here but it’s strange seeing all the photos together, how many of them were of fishing trips — up in the highlands, down south, over on the continent. I remember my wife hated the trips.
On the wall across from the bed hangs a contemporary watercolour landscape —an inoffensive ambiguity of colour, contrast, and composition putting it firmly in the school of all hotel art. I’ve grown to enjoy its company. Hard to believe. Colours are difficult to find. It’s good to be reminded of them. Lying in bed, I play a game with the painting, pushing my eyes out of focus and watching the image shift like coloured sands mixing and melting into the background.
Where have all the birds gone?
I just realised I haven’t seen any for days. This drowning Atlantis used to be a seagull’s paradise. I brought my pillow and sheets from home. I don’t know why — perhaps it’s the smell that is familiar. The only trophy I ever won accompanies the bedside photo frames. The patina of age and neglect makes it impossible to read the inscription now. Not that it really matters. Pub darts championship when I was nineteen.
I keep bric-a-brac like a memory game in a Hoyo de Monterrey No. 2 cigar box which belonged to my uncle’s opulent tastes. It’s funny how cigar boxes never lose their smell. The peppered cedar incense of hand-rolled tobacco. I have to concentrate to connect sentiment to the throwaways. A smooth, grey stone caressed by the ocean. I picked it up off the sand in Oregon the first time I stood on the shores of the Pacific Ocean. A flight stub from a trip I took to Florida to see my eldest son’s wedding. My lucky blue dice. A waiter’s friend corkscrew with a white printed inscription “Vintage Wine and Spirits” on the plastic handle. Sylvia and I snuck out of my parents’ house when we visited them in the summer to introduce my soon-to-be wife to them. We stole an expensive bottle of Burgundy from my father’s stock but forgot to bring an opener and had to buy one from the local off-licence. Some old Swedish krona coins. A silver Parker 45. My younger son gave it to me for my fiftieth with my initials and the date engraved on it. An expired credit card.
It’s strange. I look around and squint and can make it feel like home. My overcoat and umbrella are by the front door. The Wedgwood salt and pepper shakers are on top of the fridge. The laptop I never returned to work is set up on the left bedside table. It breathes a pithy sigh whenever I glace at it, pleading to be closed and buried away forever. It’s a decoration now and makes me feel like I’m home. There are too many gaps though. It’s funny how belongings on display in our homes define us — showing us how we got to where we are. I understand my room. This is my sarcophagus.
The water level has reached the floor below. It splashes greedily about in the stairwell. You would think the threat of drowning should paralyse me. It doesn’t. Fear comes from not knowing. I’m more scared of feeling nothing — not knowing if I’m dead or alive. I guess I’m angry at the shameless travesty of Him washing the world away. Wasn’t the human condition passionate enough to be worthy of going out fast in a hellish galactic fireball? It’s difficult now to get too worked up though. I might go take a Japanese shower with the kitchen pots. I don’t take baths anymore. It’s been so long I figure there’s nothing more to be said or heard. I can’t hear the rain. Maybe it has stopped.
