Albedo Chapter Two

Hydrogen Sulphide, Town
Four flats to a floor, seven floors still proud of the rising water. The Doubleday towers housed occupants in nearly half of the usable spots. Slightly higher rates than the surrounding houses, where the flooded lower floors had been deserted en masse. Only some of the upper floors still viable. The tower was sat originally in a recessed trench to maximise floors while still satisfying zoning issues. Two hideous, ugly brown, slim concrete blocks. Erected with shiny grey metal accents and a column of wide glass windows on each side. For a while they had survived sinking into the brackish waters like a blunt ballet double leg, but a few years after the worst first period of Britain's flooding, one of the towers was overtaken by a gang of squatters and accidentally burnt down. The charred frame still stands rusting and looming, bringing down the property value. If it could possibly become lower. Ground and first floors in the extant twin are submerged, full of water and years old hydrophobic foam, second floor no longer housing anyone, scraped back to bone and coated in a slimy non porous layer to impede rising damp, something like a lobby to aid in the transition from the wet to the dry. Three girls on the fourth floor, only one shady shut-in on the one below, most potential renters put off by the aftermarket water-pump and filter station erected in the North-Eastern flat corner. About eight others spread between floors five to seven. The owner of the two buildings had used the fire insurance payout after the immolation of the one to fix up the remainder. In addition to the water treatment room; a solar array, a flying post hut on the roof, and in unit systems for power and water efficiency. Next to the crummy retro-fitted appurtenances of the other local rentals, it looked swish.
The Marsh Estate itself slipped waste deep into the grim ocean water encroaching onto land. A quadrant of the coastal town of Hmmm, slaked away from the un-submerged rest by the camber of a slight hill. Made muddy and then swamped and then pure by the bloating of the Sea. A vicious cycle of shining white ice giving way to murky seductive depths, held energy versus energy rebuffed. An almost forgotten term 'The Albedo Effect' warming the drink and like a siren, calling all that aloft ice into the warming embryonic, amniotic milk.
A placid boat trip might take you twenty minutes from the watery outskirts of town. You'd pass the first vestiges of society drifting up from out of the water. Telephone poles and street lights with tops in touching distance, still confused birds making eye-contact. Pretty verges rising up from the cold placid surface. Brave grasses catching meagre sunlight on those banks, washed of their home the dirt, rippling in harmony, waves of the universe, atoms in dance. Clear breaths of clean air might enter your lungs, cold material all around, fielding your touch. Shifts of debris thatched into old patches of sopping, fallen bush, warp and weft with murky new shoots of aqueous vine, detritus washed clean, blanched of advertisement. Scum bubbles glinting in streaks of sunlight. Dappled beams in the shadow of epiphytic plants and their semi-dead hosts. The harsh rattling of dead branches half-submerged and breaking on the underside of your little craft. You might catch the eye of a few of the remainders, adapted now after years of living on the water, first and second floor dwellers, abandoned by the ground. Boat people. Floating things lashed to guttering, garage rooves converted with scaffolding and painted boards. Black and misty green waterlines from the rising tides fallen, areas of stink leaking into the air where waterlogged possessions bloated and swelled and bubbled. Smiling, hardy people, they might call out to you and give you directions, leading you further into town. "Follow your nose! And avoid the rail line!" or maybe "Follow the roads! Hang a right at the rail line!" As you enter further in, you may follow streets lined by the tops of previously double decker domiciles, made squat by the level of the flood. You might see gangplanks and moored watercraft. You could circle through arcing streets and watch people grouped in gondolas and water-taxis commuting home from jobs they still attended, or heading out to shifts in the town centre where one can still walk around on land, drive a car, and forget that thirty percent of the country disappeared into the sea over the last fifteen years. With more likely to go anytime soon.
Major Hmmm, the un-flooded parts of the town, housed the majority of the local population. A sort of reverse suburban sprawl had occurred as and when the area flooded. All the houses on the outskirts were wrecked and abandoned, leading commercial properties inland to be repurposed as residential - through force or finance. Folks spent years kitting out shopfronts and office spaces to house their families and friends. Those that couldn't afford to relocate elsewhere. Fraught moments had punctuated the lives of these people over the past decade, bailiffs and barristers, right to reclaim laws, adverse possession. Fights mostly memory now. A new status quo built in these wet borderlands now reigned.
One or two of them might look over to you now with a wry grin, loping up old fire escapes into their front doors. Stick on numbers and potted plants, hand-painted signs and chipped brickwork. Rooves holding a life of their own, culture occurring on the tops of buildings, rescued trees in pots, tented restaurants touting hotplates, scaffolded walkways spanning the gaps between fitness studios and art classes and printing presses and libraries with sopping recovered books hung up drying on clotheslines. Life suspended on the husk of old existence, on the shoulders of squat giants. Drones overhead. Feet dangling off the edges of much shortened drops, all splash and no coarse splatter. The view now clear of buildings up this high. The light once again appears from all sides.
Laying flat on her back in a shackled up commuter's boat, in a small holding yard down by the water's edge a few minutes walk from work. Marnie can see blackbirds against the bright blue of the sky. They pass slowly in the clear air. She can feel the sun and smell it warming the plastic of the boat. She's got her shoes and jumper piled underneath her head. The plastic smell reminds her of swimming pools, the trees nearby painting leaf shaped shadows on the brickwork. The mortar seems to glisten and floating orbs fill and invade her eye-line. She closes her eyes and tries not to think about work or what he said to her just now. She's between shifts at the centre, three hours between two stretches of six. Too long to want to stay there, too short to go home. She checks her bank balance and her shifts note, totting up how much would arrive in a few days time. Enough to keep her afloat but not enough to pull her out of the water. "How is it I work so much and have so little" she said to herself. She reads back notes to herself promising to find a better job, to pick up more extra tasks from Lucille, to argue a better price from her building manager.
She sits up and lets out a sigh, the boat wobbles a little. She can hear a train coming into town, then she can see it, rolling slowly through waves of shallow water on un-levee'd tracks, illuminated obliquely by the afternoon rays, framed neatly in the windows of a gutted out old warehouse half sunk into the water. Snapshots of an event, placid nothing becoming pretty and alive as it gets disturbed by the big lumbering force, purposeful and enlivened by hidden power. A conversation was ringing out in her short term memory, confusing her. "What the hell is a scrammel?" she said.
The Doubleday towers' fourth floor girls all worked at the 'Let's all make some money out of this' centre, helpfully shortened by most to LAMSMOOT. It stood on the banks of the estuary just at the brink of where water covered the earth, way further inland than the Marsh estate. The girls shared a car that officially belonged to one of them but was often forgotten by those that lived in and around water. There were better ways to and from work, usually the cheap and quick water-taxi apps did the job, zipping up and down waterways, spitting overboard and hailing each other. On fairer days like these, the girls might sit on the prows of the boats catching sun, chatting amid the milky haze heated from the surface of the sour waters, simmered off to a clear consommé by the time early afternoon came around. Mayflies ripping past in ardent efforts to screw before death, water-boatmen between limpid fallen petals on the rippling surface.
This morning's boat was pulling up to the banks of an old bus stop. A queue had begun forming up in front while everyone waited for the end of a bust-up between two blokes fighting over a flotsam set of nikes in a vacuum sealed bag. Marnie watched over Connie's shoulder while she typed 'Gifts for tropical fish lovers' into a search engine and shared sips of ice water with Fliss from her flask. They splashed onto the shore as soon as the driver got close. It shouldn't have taken so long to walk from the stop to the centre, but due to the superabundance of the unregulated water-taxis in the area, the entrance to land at the centre had become a bit of a transit hub. The link was too convenient and so it drew everyone. Night shifts coming off, mornings coming on, uniforms and mucky PPE, galoshes galore. Muddy channels churned deeper by folks with spare shoes in their bags.
Hmmm was originally a riverside town, now rendered coastal by the great rising of the seas. The architecture reflected it, no squat abodes and wind-breaking walls, no slaloming roads up hillsides, no steep inclines. Semi-flat land and semi-tall buildings, equal historical growth on all sides from the centre out. Fiscal in the middle, wrapped in the retail, giving way to residential and industrial on opposing poles. The blurring effect on Hmmm since the floods was severe and unilateral, wherever water had encroached adopted mixed purpose and mixed transport. The waterways composed themselves out of old roads and river tributaries fluidly, whatever went below the waterline became route. Occasionally savvy planners would dig short new canals to link sections, but they were rare.
The edges of the squat stone wall to their right took on spatterings of sunlight as the girls walked up to the centre. Little channels through the lawn pathing up the hillside led through the shadows of tiny coppices of birch and sycamore, an effort to renew the horticulture a few years back. Here trees were just beginning to take root and fill out, where further down the embankment roots rotted in soaked soil and keeled over exposing their undersides.
One arm of the 'plus' shaped and plus-sized building leant out over the edge they clambered up. Stepping through the auto-doors to the main hall on the waterside gave you an aural thrashing in the mornings. The churning quiet of the ride over in the boat met the throbbing hum of sound and movement in here. Regular shopfronts being so set back, it had encouraged other vendors to poach invented spots in front of them once the centre opened up permits for people with flooded shops outside of the building. Rolling carts of hot coffee and nicotine and pastries and umbrellas and hosiery. Sandwiches rolled past under cloches, paper cups seemed to float past suspended on their own steam. The slightly boggy smell of the outdoors gave way to humid variants indoors; tea or soup steam, the fart-smell of cooked meat coming out of packaging, boutique toiletries dampened by shaken outerwear. The girls sliced through the crowds expertly, hailing cart owners and stall owners from behind and across the scattered stalls. Long cabled lights swung from the ceiling above, heralding off-gassing from the furore, cleaned in the cast iron strutosphere by sun rays leaking through old skylights. Waves of illumination passing through the gaseous swirling haze.
A hidden channel between two shops led into the offices of the internal worker agency for the LAMSMOOT centre. Sub-contracted to the company that owned the place, it propped up the meagre rosters of the cafes and retail outposts, the small supermarkets and the restaurants. The whole thing was organised entirely by one person, working under the building manager Lucille - one S.P Pete. Long blonde hair and bearded, roll-neck and gilet even in summer. Part lazy, part workhorse, a true force. Laid back in their chair when the girls arrived, quickly sitting up and waving away a cloud of just blown vapour. "Not heard of knocking?" they said, not even really looking over. Steam rising in tufts from the machine coffee on the desk, some sort of action scene playing on the phone laid flat, machine guns singing. The girls laid out on the chairs bordering Pete's dark little room, waiting. S.P only stood up once a group of young men came in holding out their phones for a short range secure transfer each for their morning's work. Most blue-collar types still hung onto this face to face payment style long after cash ended, and passed on their superstition to the younger crowds that they fostered. Transactions over, S.P looked over to the girls and decided they needed moving on, leaning over a tablet and waking it to read from a request list. "Marnie, Fliss you're in with Fausto at the Porto, they're looking for a few hours of prep work and cleaning. Should be done by midday. Connie - special request from Lucille, needs your posh voice for some calls or something. Light on details. She just said that Sue's out cause her son got caught shoplifting again." Connie must have pulled a face because Pete was quick to jump to her "I know, it's not for the main boss as far as I'm aware. I haven't seen or heard. Seems like Lucille herself to me." The two others shared a look - 'what's that about then?' But said nothing. S.P turned to them "Either of you want the last shift at Mao's tonight? Porto's isn't really much." The two shared their second look before Marnie said "I'll take it" which set Fliss smiling and S.P replying "Glutton..."
After a few boring hours of washing and peeling spuds under Fausto's watchful but smiling eyes, a broad shouldered man of forty-something with a bright red mullet. Marnie and Fliss parted ways on one of the many cloistered loading ports. "I'm heading back to do laundry" Fliss said. "Do some of mine? You've got a key" Marnie responded. "No chance..." from Fliss. "Cold hearted" shouted Marnie as her friend slipped away between the huge iron gates with a wave. A layer of loneliness painted itself onto her heart as she swallowed down a small staff meal Fausto had put together from odds and ends and saved for her. Almost certainly only given to a temp like her because she'd been complaining about her split shift to him all morning.
Want for a more quiet place to eat and think she packed up the other half back into its carton and walked the wrong way up a service street that led back to the main road from the centre. Only a few hidden wrens and a solitary security camera watched her make her way into a patch of trees. Up against an oak she resumed the meal, big bites that almost hurt on the way down, half-warm restaurant quality food spiced to perfection, amplified by a morning's worth of hunger. A grey squirrel's jigging tail drew her prandially glazed eyes for a minute as she sat back after eating, but then they glazed over pleasantly again. The afternoon's rays mottling in the over-story, gifting her a little sleepiness, eeking away the gap between the shifts. The trees here soaking a bit of the standing water's airborne humidity, clearing the air of its unpleasant closeness. She breathed in sighs and stopped worrying for a little while, and dreamed briefly of a sopping wet matted hound swimming after her in a narrow little rowboat with ineffectual paddles.
A soft crash and a low voice from ahead in the trees burst her from her reverie. "Who put that log there?" The tree at her back growing knots and becoming rapidly less comfortable than it had seemed. Gathering herself up, she tried to move off before the owner of the voice came too near and caught sight of her. "Oooh! Jumpy!" She heard him say, closer than she realised, maybe just behind the tree line. She turned and saw, at the other end of the clearing she'd been occupying, an old bald geezer taking the spot she'd been in. He was tanned and clad in a pressed white shirt and jeans, gold jewellery glinting, but cork sandals on his feet. Sturdy and a little chubby around the waist, groaning as he lowered himself down, pulling a bottle of white wine from somewhere as he sat. "Love this stuff when the sun's shining" he said to no one in particular. "I'll be quick telling yer what ya need to hear, then you can carry on with the running away eh?" he said "you'll want to hear the riddle I've come to tell. It's a bit of a..." he paused to bite the stopper out of the bottle and spit it away "...bit of a corker" chuckling to himself as he supped. Wary, she turned her shoulders a little to him. He smiled "Yam building a little bit of a crux in your heart eh? The three of yer are heading towards a bit of a crescendo, something big. The two of them would always be fine, the one swimming with the fishes and the other blartin' about her daddy, but both better off than you. You'll need the utmost care to come out of this with your skin intact. Summat explosive is upon you and within you." He swigged again, and Marnie started taking a few quiet steps away. "Don't look that scrammel in the eyes. It's too late to avoid meeting it now that the seeds are sown, but if you don't want to take on her whole weight, shut your peepers and do as you're doing now. Step back quietly and go about your normal little life. What a blessing that should be..." He laughed to himself now loudly, pleased with the theatre of what he'd said. Exuent all.


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