White and Other Tales of Ruin

We tried keeping to the relative shelter of the buildings and garden walls, rowing against the flow, gaining inch by inch. At one point my paddle snagged on something and I nearly lost it. Reaching down into the mud my hand closed around something soft and yielding, and pulling it away from the paddle realised that whatever it was wore cloths. I did not look down lest I saw it.

But I did catch sight of things in the gardens to my left. I thought they were shrubs and trees at first, branches stripped of leaves and left bare and pale in the grey light. Then I realised that they were limbs. Dozens of bodies were drifted together against one wall, half submerged arms and legs and heads protruding above the mud as if stretching forever for dry brickwork. Faces with mouths and eyes filled with muck. Torsos with horrific wounds. Slicks of blood around them, dark and shiny like oil on water.

I turned away and kept paddling.

The gunfire continued, more sporadic now. Perhaps the numbers on both sides were so reduced by the fighting that there weren’t that many left to shoot.

I hoped that was the case.

“Push harder!” I said, heaving back, feeling my biceps burning, my back straining with the effort. I’d been close to collapse since we saved ourselves from the quagmire. Whatever kept me going now, it would surely not last for much longer. If we let up the current would grab us and drag us out into the faster-flowing central spread of the flooded roadway. And from there … who knew.

Either that or we’d be three more bodies washed against a wall.

Laura dipped her hands in on either side of the dinghy and started to pull as well. She flicked mud up at me — it stank stale and dead, as if filth itself could rot — but I didn’t mind. She was helping. And perhaps having something to do would divert her attention from whatever she was still dwelling upon.

I knew her so well. I was here, we were moving, but she still felt far from saved.

Things floated by. At one point a slick of fresh blood enveloped the boat, and the fleshy objects squelching against the wood were stark against the dark brown mess. Many other things, too, a real mix and match of a life, as if someone’s history was being systematically destroyed somewhere up ahead. A perverse, reverse evolution. There was a shoe, laces still tied but empty; a notebook, pages sprawled like a dead bird, one side used, the other waiting for thoughts that would never come; an unopened tin of dried rice; a sock; a dinner plate, still stained with the grease of its last supper. Spectacles, a boxed pen set, half of a door, a flap of leather from a torn jacket …

It went on.

And then we reached the end of the street where the mud opened up into a lake of filth, and at last we could see what the humps protruding from its mess were.

Bandstands. Three of them, the one in the centre so tall that its whole platform was above the flood-line. It reminded me of small-town America, hot-dogs, Fourth of July parades and brass bands. The other two were smaller, submerged beneath the mud with only their roofs and supports touching daylight. And on each bandstand, people with guns.

Fighting over nothing but mud, filth and shit.

Dying there, flipping into the air, spinning, tumbling into the muck and being carried slowly towards us by the current, past us eventually, back along the street.

More corpses to meet the wall.

The central bandstand seemed to be under siege from the other two, and it was here that the pad-rifle fire had originated. Strangely, its impact on the wooden structures was minimal, and at first I thought it was because they were so open that most rounds missed. But then I saw someone stand against the railings of the central bandstand, prop a pad-rifle on the rail before him and loose off three rounds at the structure to our left. The first two struck a woman hunkered down on its roof, shattering her like a broken mannequin and flinging her pieces far out over the mud. The third round hit the edge of the roof … but only a few shards of wood sprung out.

“It’s all selective,” I said. “All this destruction is selective”

“They’re pad-rifles,” Chele said. “You can’t pick and choose?“

“You saw what happened to that house. How do you think those two bandstands are still there?”

“Bad shots,” Laura said. The gunfire erupted once again, figures dropped and splashed into the mud, some screaming, guts blown out, limbs askew.

The buildings still stood, bearing the designer-scars of battle.

“Have they seen us?” Laura asked. We were bobbing against the gable wall of a house bordering the park, pressed there by the current and exposed to anyone who happened to glance our way.

“I think,” I said, “that their own little scene simply doesn’t include us.” I was comfortable with this idea, if a little confused, and it seemed to fit right into what we were seeing.

“It’ll have to stop soon,” Chele said. “They’ll all be dead.”