The Flood
Ian Rankin
ORION
Copyright ?1986 Ian Rankin
The right of Ian Rankin to be identified as
the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.
First published in Great Britain in 1986 by Polygon This edition published in 2005 by Orion
An imprint of The Orion Publishing Group
Orion House, 5 Upper St Martin's Lane,
London WC2H 9EA
13579 10 8642
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living
or dead, is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library
ISBN (hardback) 0 75287 309 1
ISBN (trade paperback) 0 75287 310 5
Typeset by Deltatype Ltd, Birkenhead, Merseyside Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives pic
For my father and mother
Many waters cannot quench love,
neither can the floods drown it.
Song of Songs
All one's inventions are true.
Flaubert
INTRODUCTION
The Flood was my first published novel. It's not a crime novel, though it contains secrets and revelations. Nor is it a thriller. Fair warning: it's a young man's book, all about the perils and pitfalls of growing up.
I wrote it when I was a student at Edinburgh University. I have the feeling it started life as a short story, only the story started to grow. Before I knew it, I had written a full twenty pages - too long for Radio 4's short story slot (for which two of my stories had already been accepted), or for most of the magazines and other outlets for 'shorties' that I knew of at the time. I decided that instead of trying to edit what I already had, I should just call it 'part one' and keep going. I'd already written one novel, entitled Summer Rites, a black comedy set in a hotel in the Scottish Highlands. The plot revolved around a one-legged schizophrenic librarian, a young boy with special powers, and the abduction of a famous American novelist by the 'provisional wing" of the Scottish National Party. Curiously, no one had seemed to agree with my judgment that Summer Rites was a fully realised contender for the title of Great Scottish Novel.
Undaunted, I set about turning my short story The Falling Time into a new novel called The Flood.
I was reading a lot of Scottish literature at the time, as part of my PhD study into the novels of Muriel Spark.
Looking at The Flood now, I can see influences peering back at me: Neil Gunn, Iain Crichton Smith, and especially Robin Jenkins (author of the marvellous The Cone Gatherers). Although The Flood was written in the mid-1980s, at a time when a fresh urban Scottish fiction was arriving -- thanks to writers such as James Kelman -1 decided that my own story would be local and rural, based in and around a fictitious coal-mining community. The problem was, I named my village Carsden, which is why a lot of people back in my hometown of Cardenden thought I was writing about them. It hardly helped that the main character was called Sandy the name of one of my school-friends - or that when I took the finished novel home to show my father, he perused the opening sentence and told me a woman called Mary Miller lived just over the back fence from him.
Turned out, I hadn't disguised the place of my birth well enough.
Up to this point, I'd been writing a lot of 'shorties', very few of them ever picked up for publication. However, I'd had some success with a story called Walking Naked, which had been based on an actual event from my family's history. In similar fashion, the original idea behind The Flood had been to describe a single scene - the moment when an aunt of mine (my father's sister; a mere girl at the time) had fallen into a stream composed of hot waste water from the washing-plant of the local coal-mine. She sported long hair, of which she was inordinately proud. A young man saved her by hauling her out of the stream by that same coil of hair. It was a tale my father had told me, probably embellishing it for effect.
I would embellish it further.
My first attempts at writing, back in my teenage years, had concerned my hometown. I'd written a long, rambling poem (a homage of sorts to T S Eliot) about the derelict Rex Cinema, some short stories based on incidents real and imaginary, and even a novella (written in niched school jotters), in which the plot of William Gelding's Lord of the Flies was played out not on a desert island but in my high school. I was trying to mythologize the place, to give it a sense of importance at odds with the reality. With the coalmines
redundant, I'd watched some of the life (and livelihood) seep out of the place. As a student, I would spend weekdays in Edinburgh, and most weekends back home in Cardenden, taking my dad for a drink at the Bowhill Hotel, meeting friends from my schooldays at the Auld Hoose. I was trying to fit in, while becoming increasingly aware that I was moving further away from my roots all the time. In Edinburgh, I'd be reading Paradise Lost and Ulysses; back home, I'd be playing games of pool and discussing the previous week's John Peel playlists.
Maybe The Flood was part of the leaving process.
As well as reading a lot of Scottish literature, I'd also been reading about folklore and witchcraft, and catching up on literary effects such as symbolism. In fact, there was more in the final draft of the book than even I was aware of, as I discovered when, for a short time, The Flood became a set text for the university's Scottish Literature department. I was invited to sit in on a tutorial, with my identity being kept secret for the first half of the session - as far as the students were concerned, I was just a newcomer, albeit one a few years older than them. One student (I think he was American) delivered a paper on the book's wasteland imagery; another discussed Old and New Testament themes and borrowings, while a third had made a detailed study of the author's use of elements and colours. I started taking notes at one point: it was all good stuff! Even if I had not consciously meant for these patterns to exist, I was happy to acknowledge them if readers could see them. (I was a fan of the literary theorist Wolfgang Iser - eventually using his name for a Professor in my first Rebus novel. Iser's thesis was that it's what readers see in books that is important, not what the writer intended them to see. The name for this is Reader Response Criticism).
I finished the final draft of The Flood on Monday 9 July 1984, having started it in January. During that first half of 1984 I was studying hard - everything from Proust to Derrida - and writing a lot, amassing a slew of rejection letters in the process. Some of these were from publishers, some from agents, and yet others from magazines, short story collections and competitions. Still I kept slogging, hungry for recognition as a writer. Iain Crichton Smith, having beaten me into second place in a short story contest run by the Scotsman newspaper, had written a letter of introduction to his publisher, Gollancz. But his editor, Livia Gollancz, had already turned down Summer Rites, and would reject The Flood, too. At the university, writer-in residence Allan Massie had helped me to meet a London based editor called Euan Cameron (who would eventually sign up Knots and Crosses to his publishing house, Bodley Head). But Euan wanted neither Summer Rites nor The Flood.
In the end, and unwittingly, it was James Kelman who helped me get published. The students at Edinburgh University ran their own publishing house. It was called Polygon and employed two or three full-time staff, complemented by any number of jobbing, unpaid students. Despite its lack of size and resources, however, Polygon had achieved fame and success with the publication of James Kelman's first collecti
on of short stories, Not Not While the Giro. On the lookout for new authors, I became one of the lucky ones.
Launching an imprint called 'Polygon New Writers', I found myself signed up with two other first-time authors, Robert Alan Jamieson and Alex Cathcart. And even though only a few hundred copies of The Flood would be printed, I can still remember the thrill of walking into the Polygon office on Buccleuch Place to sign my first-ever book contract. By coincidence, that same day (Tuesday 19 March 1985) I got the idea for another book, to be called Knots and Crosses. It would feature a troubled detective who would, in time, even meet one of the main characters in The Flood. (Check out the opening pages of Hide & Seek if you don't believe me).
The Flood was edited by a fellow literature student called Iain Cameron, and proof-read by one of my lecturers. The painting on the jacket was provided by a student at the nearby art college. (A few years back, when Polygon was moving premises, I tried tracking down the original artwork, but it seemed to have vanished without trace). The handsomely-produced book was eventually published in February 1986, in a joint run of hardcover (three hundred) and paperback (maybe eight hundred). One of my diary entries of the time states: 'Saw "Flood" (and the other new Polygons) in Stockbridge Bookshop: it looked as though only one copy (of Alan Jamieson's novel) had been bought. Felt a twinge of failure.' However, the next day I was doing some tutoring at the university, and two of my students had brought copies of the book that they wanted me to sign. (I hope they've held on to them - The Flood has become highly collectable . . . and very expensive as a result, which explains this new edition I want it to be available to everyone who wants it, without them needing to remortgage their house or pawn the children).
Publication week climaxed with a launch party for all three authors held in one of the university buildings. I was photographed, had to read from the book in public for the first time, and even sold and signed a few copies. Afterwards, a bunch of friends took me to the Cafe Royal for a night of riotous assembly which ended with us being asked to leave. I woke up next morning on a living-room floor, with my publication cheque (?00) safe in my pocket. It was a shaking, whey-faced author who posed that afternoon for a photographer from the Dundee Courier.
A trickle of reviews eventually arrived, as did a trickle of sales. By the end of May, I was recording in my diary that I'd sold five hundred copies in total. Meantime, an aunt of mine had finished reading the book and thought me depraved.
According to my dad, she was 'crying for my soul'. If only she'd been a reviewer, some extra interest might have been drummed up. Eventually, I visited her in the flesh, so she could chastise me properly for writing such sordid stuff- 'all soiled knickers and fag-ends', I believe she said. She also asked how I would feel if my niece were to read the book.
Little did she realise that I was already at work on my next project, which, in the fag-end stakes, would make The Flood look like Little Women ...
1963-1969
The Falling Time
1
When Mary Miller was ten years old and not yet a witch, and Carsden was still a thriving mining village, she would watch her brother Tom playing football in the park with his friends. She was attracted, young though she was, to their swagger, to the way they rolled their shirtsleeves up like their fathers and shouted for every ball. She would sit by the goalposts between which her brother danced and would console him when he let in a goal.
At that time she had a doll called Missie Lizzie, and she would clutch Missie Lizzie to her tiny chest as if sustaining her. The sun shone low over long summer evenings and the rumble of the pit-head lulled her into near sleep. Smoke drifted over the park while locomotives slipped away over distant rails. There was a rhythm to everything in those days, as if some tune were being played behind a veil beyond which the young girl could not see. The trees beside the hot burn snapped their fingers, and the lapping of the burn itself added the final cadence to the symphony.
One evening Mary was sitting against the iron fence behind Tom's goalposts, he having gone to the centre of the pitch to share in the half-time refreshments, and was falling asleep as usual with Missie Lizzie lying across her lap. The air was so clear that bird-calls seemed to carry to her ears from way over past the Auld Kirk and even Blackwood's Farm, and these were the sounds to which she fell asleep.
She was a small, skinny thing with long black hair tied back into a ponytail which fell tantalisingly down her back and which, consequently, her brother Tom in one of his moods would often pull. Every hair would cry out as if burning when he did this, and she would run crying to her mother who would tell her father who would scold the bully, perhaps even letting him taste his pit-belt. Then Tom would not speak to her for a day or two, and would give her killing looks. Not today, though; there could be nothing but innocence in the park on such an evening. She could almost feel the warmth of the hot burn behind her, bringing its murky deposits down from the pit-head to be washed into the River Ore and carried out to sea. In the winter, steam rose from the hot burn and people warmed themselves beside it, some even waggling their fingers or bared toes in the dark liquid to revive the feeling in them. Sometimes the burn was red in colour, sometimes black, and occasionally a clearer bluey-grey, but only when the pit was idle.
Mary had been sleeping for only a few minutes when she found herself edging towards wakefulness because of some sounds nearby. There was a rustling and a faint whistling behind her, then muffled sniggers and more rustling. She knew, as she opened her eyes, that something was behind her, creeping through the field across which the hot burn threaded its course, nearing the railings against which she now sat petrified. From her still bleary eyes she could just make out Tom in the centre of the football pitch. He was laughing and biting into a half-orange. He would save a piece for her. The sounds were coming nearer, but she was too afraid to scream. Her mother had told her of the goblins who lived in the hot burn and would eat any young children who wandered close to their home without taking an adult for protection. Tom had laughed and told her that it was all a fairy story to stop her from going too close to the burn and maybe falling in. But perhaps, she now thought, she really had strayed too close to the goblins' home. Perhaps if she edged away now it would be all right.
Suddenly something growled immediately behind her and an arm, very human in design, snaked through the iron railings and snatched Missie Lizzie from Mary's lap. She screamed and stood up. The boys were whooping and careering across the field, tossing the doll between them.
Mary was horrified. She screamed a high-pitched squeal and squeezed between the iron bars, almost getting stuck but eventually forcing herself through. Tom was shouting at her as she stumbled through the barley, which prickled her legs terribly. She made relentlessly towards the two boys, who seemed quite keen for her to follow. They were older boys, older even than Tom, and she recognised both of them. They grinned at her and waved Missie Lizzie towards her, and she was bawling with the tears threatening to blind her. She held out her arms towards Missie Lizzie as she walked towards her tormentors. When she was too close, the boys darted around her and trotted a little distance away. They waved the doll and laughed and jeered at her, and all the time she could hear Tom's voice angrily behind her as he tried to climb over the fence.
'I want it back, I want it back!' she cried as she reached out her arms. The doll, with its smiling stupid face and its red dress, was hanging high in the air now, was pinned by an adolescent arm against the deepening blue sky below which the hot burn murmured. She stood on tiptoe, ignoring the boy and his outstretched arm, and just touched Missie Lizzie's foot with her fingertips. The doll was released, and a soft push in Mary's back was all that was needed to send her toppling into the hot burn, screaming as she hit the water, taking in a choking mouthful of silt and heat and darkness.
Her eyes stung as if sand had been thrown into her face. She knew that she should not be here. She gasped, feeling her hand breaking the surface of the water and touching the floatin
g body of her doll. There was a swirling and a rushing and a bubbling of liquid.
She had no right to be in this place. This was a warm dying place and dark. Her knees touched
the gritty, yielding bottom, her hands in light and air and her body submerged. It was quite pleasant, really, to be away from the teasing boys and their cruelty. She began to give herself to the thick water. Then her hair was screaming, rough things clawing at it. There were goblins in the hot burn and she had disturbed their nest. She opened her eyes, but was blind. Then, hair screaming still, she felt herself rising from the liquid. Her hair was on fire, and suddenly she was in brightness and air and was being sick, spewing up all the silt and the darkness. She was dragged to the bank and her hair stopped screaming. Voices rushed into her ears as the water rushed out. 'By Christ, Tom, that was close.' 'Aye, pulled her out by the pigtail.' 'She was down there a while, though.' 'Are you all right, Mary?' 'I saw them.
It was Matty Duncan and Jock McLeod's boy.' 'Is she all right there, Tom? Should we fetch your mum?'
Her dress clung to her like the dress of a rag-doll. Her stomach hurt and her eyes hurt and her head hurt, and she was shaking and crying and was afraid. She felt Tom touch her face, then she opened her eyes.