Currents

NOTE: this story contains mention of harm to children.

Crouching over a cardboard box in the loft of her childhood home, Georgia feels the old terror seeping through her organs, pooling in the joints of her fingers and the space between her ribs. Her memories of childhood are scant, and her mind holds those that it has retained at a remove. She vaguely recalls once being lost in Ikea, but she recalls it as if she had been a bystander, seeing herself hiding under a bed and her parents calling her name and choosing to say nothing. What she remembers vividly, though, are her father’s constant rebukes against incaution. Get out, he had snapped at her once as she followed him up through the hatch in the hallway ceiling. The floor’s not solid; you could fall through. The warning had burnt itself into her bones, so that even now, when she is closer to middle age than adolescence, she trembles.

She would likely never have returned to her parents’ house had it not been for the floods. She had left as soon as she had turned eighteen, taking with her nothing but a medium-sized suitcase and a habit of leaving doors ajar, a dislike of the harsh sounds of closure. She had pursued a briefly glittering career in family law that ended in burnout and the purchase of a large ground floor flat with a private garden. This had been when the weather was still perpetually described as warm for the season but before flash flooding became a permanent feature of everyday life; when people still complained about protesters blocking motorways now two feet underwater. What had once seemed a solid investment had, at an indefinable point, revealed itself to be nothing more than money down the proverbial and literal drain, as once-premium real estate began to be swallowed up by the sea and rivers and even canals, the Georgian mechanics of which failed to hold against the sheer weight of the present.

So now that her mother is dead, prematurely though not unexpectedly, and her father still nowhere to be heard of, here she is, retraining as a child counsellor and returning to the site of an upbringing that she once described to her own therapist as perfunctory, carved out by parents who always put her to bed but never kissed her goodnight. Though her own priority is to repaint the master bedroom, which her mother left a shade of yellow that she considers not just ugly but grotesque, the contractors have been pressing her for weeks now to take measurements of the loft. Although the house is uphill and miles from the river, the ground floor would have to be gutted, they had said, hollowed out as a defence against the inevitable future, and so she would have to move upwards. Her relocation has bought her time, but not invincibility, never that.

But the box. It caught her eye as soon as she saw it, marked as it is with her name: GEORGIA. All caps, full stop. Her father’s labelling, undoubtedly, not just from the handwriting but from the certainty of it, the finality. Curiosity had gripped her despite the dread, and she had put away her tape measure and torn off the disintegrating duct tape that had held it shut. Inside are years of exercise books and school reports – precocious, a pleasure to have in class, but always alone at lunchtime. Underneath are photos of a child that she recognises, after a pause, as herself. An early birthday, holding a bumble bee balloon at the bottom of a slide. Riding her bike along the towpath, now long-since submerged. A few school photos. Evidence of a history to which she no longer has internal access, though there is a remoteness to them, a coldness in the framing.

But she turns the pile over and there, at the bottom, is a polaroid of herself, younger than elsewhere, on the lap of a woman who looks exactly like her mother. Or rather, it is, unmistakably, her mother – she has her unusually red hair and the thinness that Georgia, insubstantial herself, has never quite managed to cleave from her definition of the beautiful. But she is also wearing low-cut jeans, and an off-white T-shirt emblazoned with the words TOMORROW BELONGS TO ME, and nothing underneath. It is not the kind of outfit that Georgia can ever remember seeing or would ever have imagined her mother wearing. Stranger still, she is beaming – an expression that Georgia has no recollection of ever seeing cross her face even for a moment. Her long-ago mother has pushed her sunglasses up into her hair and the skin around her eyes wrinkles, but not in the way that Georgia remembers – these are etchings of laughter, of joy.

And then Georgia sees, behind her mother’s deckchair, another child, digging a hole beside the pond in which frogs used to lay their spawn in summer, back when there were still frogs, back when summer meant anything. But they are her, both of them – one the carbon copy of the other, as if the photo had been double exposed, though their poses are, naturally, quite different. She stands up, though her legs quiver, holding the photo to the bare bulb that hangs from the rafters (Fire hazard, her father once said), as if she might simply have been mistaken (Trick of the light, that’s all – her father, again, when she had sought refuge from the monster in her wardrobe in the middle of the night). But in this hazardous light, the dress of the her by the pond is illuminated, and she recalls that day in Ikea; recalls, as if it had happened just moments before, as if it had always been there, tucked away inside her mind, an image of herself walking through a fire exit, her left hand in the grip of a man she does not recognise, her right clasping the hem of her yellow summer dress. The door swinging shut.

As she stumbles backwards and her foot plunges through the foam and into what had been her parents’ bedroom, she thinks that she hears her father scream. But it is just the flood siren, crying out at a bursting of banks on the other side of town.