Albedo Chapter Nine
BOOK TWO START
The Fukushima Fish, Saline
An old commuter train willed itself north, illuminated inside by soft yellow lights. Sparking above
where its connector swept frost from the cable. An unseasonable blast of cold sandwiched between the
end of Summer and the start of Autumn had appeared. Frying the country into a panic. At first glance
the locomotive seemed to be the only thing moving on the dim landscape. A searching of blue creeping
out of the horizon in the east, silhouetting trees and the eaves of a few houses. Wrens and thrushes
are rolling out of bed to begin their pre-dawn chorus. The icy air seemed to carry sound poorly,
patches of hedgerow frozen from car tyres splashing up puddles. Shallow brown pools still rippling.
Connie and Felicity trundled down the road in a clapped out secondhand people-carrier.
After what had been a really long night, the two were fighting to keep awake. Another last minute
swap in the long row of night shifts Lucille had them working over the past three weeks. The car
heater was struggling against this sudden taste of winter. The inside of the car smelled like hot
dust and sweat. Double rate for unsociable hours and overtime.
Wrapped in hoodies and coats out back on one of the centre's department store loading bays. They'd
spent an hour carefully un-packaging goods and sparing the boxes. An assemblage of space heaters and
oil radiators, taking a functionally derelict barn conversion out in the sticks from harmful to
hospitable. Two hours on a straight line becomes just under four travelling through and around
flooded boroughs. Rounding fjords and veering inland where old roads sank too far under the new
waterline. The same again in reverse tomorrow, after the event had ended to pick up the merchandise
and return to the store to repackage for customers to buy.
When Connie had received word from Lucille the previous night, they'd gone knocking for Marnie.
Hoping she'd reappeared. After being friends for nearly five years and neighbours for three, they'd
grown to expect a level of healthy distancing every once in a while. A spell of solitude for when
they got sick of each other. This stretch, Marnie's, had started to run a a little long now. They'd
tried to include her in a number of shifts recently and each time had no reply. No coming to the
door, no texts back since the summer came to an abrupt end. A solitary set of wet footprints leading
into her flat one time, a light under the door, but Fliss had seen next to nothing of the third in
their group of three, and could keenly feel the absence. On a whim one time, Lucille had mentioned
some ad hoc errands she'd been doing for Michael, Lucille's father, but it hadn't come up in ages.
"When are we allowed to worry ourselves about her, Con?" Fliss said. "I think once she gives us
reason to... and I don't think she has just yet." Connie said, pulling a face. "It's been a few
weeks now, I don't get why she's excluding us?" Fliss returned to her worries that they'd managed to
upset Marnie. Watching the countryside pass by in the twilight she could feel her fear crescendo,
rigid with 'ifs' and 'possibles'. 'All this time, what if she needed my help and I haven't been
there for her?' As if she could read Fliss's mind, Connie said "She's fine, just doing her own thing
for a while, she'll crop up again in a few days and tell us everything she's been up to. It'll be a
laugh." Then to change the subject, she launched into a tirade about whatever she'd been watching on
our break. 'Researching' she sometimes called it, something about economics this time. "Once again I
am forced to go around a break in the road. It must be a nightmare living around here. We're lucky
around our estate, and yet people still complain. The LAMSMOOT centre has built up our roads,
because it has been forced to. So much for our taxes. We could do with a few more businesses like
Lucille's to prop up the areas they're in. The people are resilient if you give them chances" She
took a swig of coffee from the little flask cap Fliss passed over to her. Fliss could tell she was
speaking of whatever came to mid that wasn't Marnie "You reckon people will ever realise that the
earth is just as resilient? As if we could ever throw it so out of balance. You and I? Come on. I've
been reading that the climate's systems are far more complicated than we understand. We're tough,
it's tough. We get by. Just need to get to actually trying to fix problems instead of moaning all
about them all day. "She swerved around a patch of crumbling road. "Starting with fixing the damn
roads!" She was laughing and whooping at the wheel, all performed to keep her mind away from their
friend. Away from her absence.
There had been a span about ten years back where the old polar caps had declined with such alarming
speed that it was easy to think of it like an aggressive, intentional move. The news cycle had
revived numerous clips of blue faced scientists trying to warn about the 'Albedo effect' which came
to be the widely adopted moniker for the years of turmoil. Global warming and cooling had taken a
radical scream into the severe. The old caps that used to reflect light had melted into enough deep
dark water. All that water had soaked up enough energy to tip the warming and cooling into just
warm. The natural cycle turned vicious and everyone had a trying decade. Apocalyptic coverage got
delegated to just weather reports. The doom and gloom reporting lost its lustre while everybody went
back to work. Schedules and performance conversations and tax codes interspersed with apocalyptic
third world scenes released sub-rosa and spread underground on social apps. Never shown on major
networks, bad for morale. Commandos shooting into fleeing crowds, mobs trying to ransack military
stores. No one really wants to see any of that, close your eyes.
Your foot is stuck in the boards and the train is approaching, your life will soon end in a grim
flash, only a fool would turn to watch doom impend.
Connie and Fliss stood on an archipelago by the derelict car, engine still crackling away its heat
into the cold early morning glow. Both with an arm up in the air, hailing valets toting canoes and
dinghies. Waddling over land bridges and sweeping paddles to make it over to them and haggle. Three
already out this morning waiting for a signal on their phones that passengers were waiting. Someone
to take them the last leg of their journey home. Connie had started quibbling over prices with the
approaching boatmen when Fliss spotted a familiar craft trundling up the waterway towards them. An
old converted narrow-boat, scattered with tattered red flags in various shades of weather worn. Some
older leaves near white next to the crimson newbies. Mad little Honey piloting from the back and
squinting over to see who was waving at her from the bank. "Another lift needed girls? You're up
early again" she shouted. This had the effect of deflating the blustering negotiations happening on
the grass nearby. Connie pleased to have someone else to speak to on the way home and smiling ear to
ear. Fliss was happy to be able to sit and think up in the front of the craft, cocooned in the hood
of her jumper, almost dozing even as they set off.
She could feel a rare decision forming in her mind, rare to someone so usually listless, so lost. A
hard piece of rock solidifying from the liquid heat of worry into a plan of action. The ursine roar
of the motor cut in and out in bursts, Honey at the helm expertly adding new vectors of force,
gliding and drifting it through the maze of waterways. This was the trade off for the free ride, the
girls ended up something like a parcel to be delivered. Another stop added to the list. She often
left them unattended as she climbed to the upper floors of half submerged houses, stepping up on
scaffolded docks, gangplanks, and sandbanks. She was gone for long stretches on some of the stops,
tramping up flights of stairs and wading through shallows. Lime lines of algae at the edges of walls
and wobbling skidoos and canoes tied to posts. Eccentric bucket pully systems and locked drop off
points and post-boxes nailed to the tops of makeshift plinths. An ever growing favour had turned
into a career for Honey. After her husband died in protests around the time of the first major
floods, she'd been dwelling in melancholy and had taken in a parcel for a neighbour who lived down
the hill on a waterlogged street and had found a morsel of catharsis for herself in delivering it
safely into the wetlands. Where the regular post service would not. Cue a series of waterlogged
chancers jumping on the bandwagon. Cue Honey having enough regulars that she started to charge a
small fee, buy a small schooner, and work most days. Fairly well off even in an area bereft of
employment opportunities. A bespoke dendrite of the logistics system that had cropped up
independently all over the place in similar flavours. People happening to meet their own
needs.
Back at the block, a bright clear sun had risen up into the sky. The surface of the water bursting
alive into a million rippling silver scales. Cofferdam dwellings frosted over, surfaces shining with
sparks of captured light. Long morning shadows played from the dead trees still standing, a few
little shoots that had suckered in the hot months seemed to turn their cheek to the warm light,
already washing away the sparkles of ice hiding in the shade. Mosses and ferns blanketed the
standing ornamental trunks.
On returning to the flats, Connie and Fliss said their thanks to Honey and walked into the
semi-flooded lobby and up the stairs to the hall between their own little sections of the floor.
Between their doors was Marnie's. They stood for a little while not speaking, tired from the night
of work. Fliss began to cry a little bit. A big sniff and a bluster of tears in the corners of her
eyes, maybe just from sleep deprivation, but likely more. Connie sighed and said "Alright, wait
here." And walked into her flat with the keys left jangling in the door, back in a few moments with
another key in hand. "She lent me these like a year ago and I lost them for a while, then forgot to
give them back." A measure of guilt showing on her face. Fliss barely noticed, just excited to enter
the space again, something like a second home the amount of time they spent there as a trio.
There was a rush of air as they entered, scattering pages that onto the floor and knocking over a
picture frame. An open window at the back giving channel for a draft. Connie went over to close it
and said "Check out the wall." There was a section of paint washed back to plaster by the opening.
The rain must have been getting in for a while. The papers on the floor had taken on the aspect of
litter, mixed with emigrant leaves and bits of debris swirled up in however many days gale. Fliss
had clocked the mess but honed in to the phone left on the bedside table. Inert and out of charge.
"It's off" she told Connie who walked off into the bathroom to snoop. She plugged it in and as it
came to life she could feel it twitching and buzzing in her hands with messages and missed calls and
emails and notifications galore, lists and lists of inaccessible contact. Locked behind Marnie's
password. Scrubbed clean of any identifying data, only revealing how many times people had tried to
get in touch and failed. Connie was at her shoulder again. "Ok, I'll file a report. I'll log on and
let the police know she's missing. We'll start a search ourselves this afternoon. We'll need a few
hours sleep if we're going to do any good though. I'll call and tell Lucille she'll need someone
else for tonight as well. Or tomorrow night or whatever it is." Fliss was only capable of nodding,
holding the phone in her hands like something hallowed. Carting it off to her own residence like an
orphan child.
The rocking was tranquilizing in those humid mornings, all the flood-water heated to a low simmer.
Hot haze all around on their slow lift out of the estate. Connie up at the helm chatting and Marnie
down in the well-deck with Fliss, only pretending to be awake when the conversation turned to either
of them. The long rays of young sunshine dappling on Marnie's sleeping features. Fliss could almost
see her disappear when she fell back into the shadow behind trees and structures, an indistinct
outline amongst the packages.
"Bulky bits and distant destinations come last" she could hear Honey saying. Hold-outs and shut-ins
cornered into sandbag islands and tree-houses and sunken barges all ordering their way out of
disaster. Packs of water purification tabs and pallets of butane tins. Marnie sat amongst the
deliveries smiling in Fliss's view. A flash of sunlight into her eyes and she was drifting somewhere
else, stopped off on an errand for Lucille. A distant, mutant green swatch of the countryside. Long
since departed the motorways and parked up with her two friends. Over a wooden turn-style and down
into the woods. Tiny flowers in bloom by the thousand. The canopy overhead come alive in the
sunshine, shade and translucency and green and white and dark branches all jumping out of a living
painting. An oily, verdant scent in the air, floral, vegetal. The three of them cheesing at each
other and walking, not talking. The purple bells of the flowers almost ringing against the drone of
the quiet breeze pummelling the trees into action. A million fractional sounds all in harmony. An
ecstatic hymn resounding in their ears, harmonizing their brainwaves for a glorious fleeting moment.
Home | RSS