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Chapter 1. Winter
Wissant, January 2061
It must have been in the fourth year of Dad’s prison sentence that the concrete had started to crumble. Yes, thought Muir, 2054, that figured: it was the year he had started at the University, to study History. He hadn’t liked it much, in fact he was at that point seriously regretting it. He remembered lying awake that night, fretting over his position in the class, how everyone seemed to ignore him. In particular none of the female students would give him the time of day. Muir smiled, thinking of Hélène. How angsty he’d been then.
The Erskine Bridge had been the first to fall. There had been this awful rending, rumbling sound, accompanied by what sounded like huge crashing waves, and the house literally shook on its foundations. Soon after, sirens started wailing through the night. The dreadful noise had woken Mama and Suna as well, and as it sounded really close, they’d quickly put on some clothes and gone down the hill for a look. Even in the starless night it had been clear to see what had happened: part of the bridge deck had come down into the street and crushed several buildings. Luckily, all those buildings had long been abandoned because of the flooding risk.
In the morning, the full extent of the disaster had become clear. The entire span of the bridge had collapsed and fallen into the Clyde. It had been what is technically called a catastrophic event, which means there is a sudden transition that can’t be predicted. So nobody had seen it coming. It was a global catastrophe in the common sense as well. Initially, it was written off as a freak incident: the bridge was old after all, and it must have suffered from some form of cracks or fatigue that had escaped the inspections. A detailed investigation revealed nothing that could explain it.
The next bridge had fallen a few months later, somewhere in the Alps. Another few months and then two more bridges had fallen, one in Brazil and another in China. People had started to wonder if it could still be coincidence. There had been no need to wonder for much longer, as the pace had picked up and several more bridges had collapsed, within weeks of one another. Amongst those a bridge in Spain, in Benidorm. Bomma and Bompa had been on the coach that was crossing that bridge when it fell, one February morning, only a few hundred metres from the hotel where they had been used to stay. They hadn’t survived.
And so it happened that one of the first things for Dad to do after he’d been released from jail had been to travel to Vienna to arrange the repatriation and the funeral. They’d all joined him for the funeral. As they lived so far away, they’d never been very close to Bomma and Bompa, and Muir hadn’t been all that much affected by their death, but Dad had clearly taken it badly. He had been utterly shaken. He’d stayed behind with his sister, aunt Martha, to settle the estate.
Dad hadn’t come back from Vienna. Instead, he had just disappeared. Aunt Martha had sent a panicky message that he’d gone missing. But before Muir and Suna had a chance to start worrying, Mama had told them that Dad had vanished on purpose, and would be away for a long time, several years at least. She wouldn’t say any more about it except that he’d had no choice, and that he had promised to stay in touch. Muir had fumed about that: he’d been looking forward to reconnecting with his Dad. Instead, Dad had absconded, leaving them all alone again. He still got worked up thinking about it.
Not much after, tall concrete buildings had started to crumble as well, and other large concrete structures, until not a day went by when there wasn’t a news item about the Global Concrete Collapse. Less dramatic but much more far-reaching, the concrete runways and aprons of airports all over the world had turned to sand. As had the Glasgow pavements, Muir thought with a grim smile. The parallel had amused him at the time.
He wondered if all that sand was what had made him end up here, to live within a bowshot of the great beach of Wissant, which Hélène had told him meant “wit zand”, white sand in Flemish. But he knew it had really been Dad’s leaving. His second betrayal.
It was a truly magnificent beach, and the rise in sea level had not affected its beauty. Even on a bleak winter day like this, with a biting easterly wind pushing the clouds over the Channel towards England, it had an austere appeal. Just being able to walk on this beach every day made living here worthwhile, or at least bearable. The enormous expanse of sand at low tide, bracketed between the two promontories of Cap Gris Nez and Cap Blanc Nez, the huge dunes – he never tired of it. The dunes were even taller than those of Àrd-Dhìthreabh, and as a kid he’d thought those were the tallest in the world. They seemed to have gotten smaller as he got older, Muir thought wryly.
On a clear day, when the fancy took him he would climb up to the top and gaze at the cliffs of Dover. But he loved just sitting on the beach and watching the huge rigid-sailed robot freighters make their way through the Channel towards the ports of the Low Lands.
Not today though, it was too cold to sit still for long. A rare cold day, one to savour. Also, this morning there had been only an old lonely sailing boat, a square rigger, and it had made him think of Dad. That was the flip side of the beach, so many things reminded him of Dad. He walked on briskly, watching his breath form surprisingly dense puffs of mist, like small clouds, and ruminating on the past.
Diederik Vandewoesteyne, aged forty, from Glasgow, had committed a crime, confessed to it, and gone to jail. It sounded so simple. That had been in 2050, when Muir had been fifteen. He got out five years later, and Muir and Suna had thought that life would return to something like the old normal, but it wasn’t to be. Of course, it would never be the same, too much had changed. For one thing, neither of them where teenagers anymore. For another, Papa was now Mama. That had not come as a surprise to Dad, but it had still been a big change for all of them.
Well, for a short while, the four of them had lived together, studiously avoiding the past, and things had been cosy. But then Dad had just vanished. Muir had been heartbroken, and filled with resentment. He had missed his Dad so much for all those years, and now he would be away for even longer. He felt cheated. It seemed to him that Dad was being very selfish. But he could see that Mama was fully behind it, and it was clear Dad wasn’t doing this for fun. And that they didn’t want to tell him or Suna anything meant they were better off not knowing. That was a bit sinister; but then Muir had never been able to shake off the feeling that there was a lot more to the affair. For one thing, Dad simply couldn’t have committed that crime. They had all known that. But he had confessed and gone to jail. Too simple.
Dad had said he’d keep in touch. And he had, but that was small comfort. It would be another two years before he would be back. Another eternity.
Muir shrugged. Time to get back. It would be noon by the time he got home. Hélène would have finished her job for today and Sarah would be back from school.
Next: Chapter 2. Spring