Fairhaven Chapter 1
Bazalgette
2.00 am, Tuesday, December 30, 2036
Penang Fairhaven – 8 Gurney Drive
Global average temperature: 2.3°C above pre-industrial levels
It would be the second time Grace Chan fought for her life in the waters of the Fairhaven Project.
Her note, left under a mug on the kitchen counter, read, ‘Out for some air. I need to let off steam and think about my speech. Back by breakfast.’
Wearing jeans and carrying an ancient phone, she tiptoed to the lift, trying not to wake up her flatmates. It was funny to think of them as flatmates after all these years; there was still no better way to describe the communities of peers that were replacing many of Malaysia’s older, multi-generational households in the latter half of the 2030s.
She’d heard a rumour that someone had spotted a manatee. It was unlikely, but just in case, she checked the old phone to see whether its camera was still working. It was still in selfie mode from the last time it had been used, decades earlier. Before making a hasty switch to the front camera, Grace saw her own face, skin fair like her father’s, weathered but still smooth, her ‘famous’ hazel eyes, and her short hair, wavy like her mother’s, still black.
Having descended 38 floors to the car park, she climbed into the old Rivian R1T, registered her annoyance with its oversized cabin (so impractical for a 154cm tall driver), and fastened her seatbelt. She pressed ‘record’ on the phone and shoved it into her front pocket.
The electric pickup passed through the ornate, green-painted gates.
She disengaged the pickup’s autopilot, useless now, as she took the North Dyke service road towards the Bazalgette pump house, speeding up as she recited her speech. She frowned; her message was still too banal considering the unprecedented situation in the world over the past fortnight, and the momentousness of her own accession.
The streets were deserted in a way not seen since the pandemic days of her youth. Other than her pickup, the lights of a few fishing boats and the glow from a small soup kitchen were all that broke the darkness.
Without warning, a large monitor lizard appeared in the headlights.
2.15 am, Tuesday, December 30, 2036
Penang Fairhaven – North Dyke
Grace cursed herself for her instinctive decision to swerve. A collision would have been bad news for the lizard, of course. But she was well aware that the most important decisions in life create collateral damage.
Pinned in by the crumpled side door of the truck, she strained against the seat belt, designed for someone twice her weight. She struggled to push the deflated airbag out of the way. The truck had burrowed nose-first in the soft, deep mud of the dyke. The vast dyke behind her was discernible through the shadow it cast on the rippling water, blocking the reflections of the stars.
She spoke aloud, hoping that the old phone, unreachable in her front pocket, had survived the impact and was still recording. She needed a listener, even if it was insensate.
‘After all these years of tight scrapes, this is the one that gets me. And I’m still at least half a kilometre away from the lock.’
Bazalgette Lock, where she first worked at Fairhaven all those years ago, was her destination when she needed to think. It was an unprepossessing block of concrete, a droning pumping station. Now, it was also a place to ground herself amid the chaos that surrounded her. Long after others were asleep, she would stand on the lock for hours and look north to the Malacca Strait. To the south lay the enormous Fairhaven land reclamation project, which had joined Penang Island to the Malaysian mainland after a million years of separation. On clear days, she could just see the South Dyke, 17 kilometres away.
‘It all happened so fast, but I think when I swerved away from the lizard, the truck clipped the edge at the top of the dyke, and slipped down the outside towards the sea. I can’t believe I was so stupid.
‘To be honest, I was distracted – nothing could have prepared me for the past two weeks.’
11.00 am, Monday, December 29, 2036
Penang Fairhaven – Consulate General, Ocean Independent State
‘That’s all the time we have this morning,’ said her press secretary, earlier that day. ‘We look forward to seeing you at the inauguration.’
Grace thanked the journalists assembled in the stifling room and retreated towards her office.
Grace’s relationship with the media, ever since the early days when her series first launched on Streamberry, had always been prickly. This press conference had been a bad one, without the usual barrier of a screen between her and the reporters’ questions. Although most routine news – weather, sports, and so forth – was now reported by automated feeds (or had been, before the Cloud Bust), nothing could replace a live journalist when it came to badgering a politician until she cracked. The journalists were all local, of course; no international correspondent would fly to Malaysia when both air traffic control and international satellite navigation were unavailable.
The absence of the air conditioners, most of which could not function without an internet connection, increased the pressure.
One reporter caught up with her just before she entered her office. He must have sensed a fracture in her defences.
‘President-elect Chan. One more question. Considering the current situation, how are you planning to address wage gaps for the historically disenfranchised populations that make up much of the new Ocean Independent State?’
Grace raised an eyebrow. If the current situation could not be fixed, there would be no populations of any kind to talk about, let alone disenfranchised ones.
Aloud, she delivered a more measured response. She concluded, ‘That will be all for now,’ and slammed her office door as her press secretary hustled the reporter away.
She flinched at the next knock, but it was an aide, bringing her an early lunch of assam laksa. She took it eagerly, and realised she had not yet been in touch with Auntie Janis and the rest of the clan. She wondered how Auntie Annie was managing in the crisis. She could at least visit; it was one of the few addresses she remembered without consulting an electronic device.
She knew she would not be able to get to sleep that night.
3.00 am, Tuesday, December 30, 2036
Penang Fairhaven – North Dyke
Grace continued to address the unseen phone, as her eyes grew more accustomed to the darkness.
‘I have to accept at this point that the seat belt clip is jammed solid. I’ve spent half an hour trying to open it. My fingernails are gone.
‘At least the tide is still far out. I’d guess I have about four hours before it reaches me.
‘I can just about reach the side pocket in the door, but there’s not much in there. The problem is that this truck hasn’t collected any junk. Nobody has left a screwdriver, or a bottle cap, or a handy Swiss army knife. All I’ve found is an empty crisp packet and a mint without its wrapper.
‘I’ve eaten the mint.
‘Be careful what you wish for. All I wanted was a quiet moment. The press will have a field day with this. Or will they? Given the current situation, most of them won’t hear about it.’
‘Even if I survive the night,’ she told the patient, soulless phone, ‘I don’t know if I can survive the next few weeks.’
4.00 am, Tuesday, December 30, 2036
Penang Fairhaven – North Dyke
The hands of Grace’s diving watch had lost their phosphorescent glow hours ago. But by listening to the gentle plashing of water against the dyke, she could tell that it was no later than four o’clock.
She hummed to herself before she recognised the tune: it was the soppy, old Beverley Craven song she used to listen to with Hans, ‘It’s Four O’Clock in the Morning’. The song was a staple of her Spotify playlist, before that service was superseded by the largest of the newer mega-platforms, Orac.
‘Does Orac still exist?
‘I need to talk about that in my speech.’
She had been searching for a new analogy to describe the climate situation. Years ago, her hit series on Streamberry established the sinking of the Titanic as the standard metaphor, but it had become a cliché. The story that had won her fame, fortune, and political success was already losing its power.
‘Come to think of it, being trapped here in this seat has all the makings of a good analogy. If I ever get out. Trapped in a situation of my own making, because of ill-considered moves I did without thinking, let down by the elaborate trappings we have built for our complex society.’
Another analogy: she could do nothing to address the bigger problem of the climate crisis if she didn’t tackle the immediate problem first.
‘Okay, enough philosophy. As usual, I’m procrastinating on the real problem: how am I going to get out of here? The clip? The seat back? Is there anything at all?’
5.00 am, Tuesday, December 30, 2036
Penang Fairhaven – North Dyke
On a normal night, lights from the North Dyke offered respite from the total blackout of night. Not this time.
It was silent, too, apart from the faint swish of crabs and mudskippers, and the unwelcome sound of approaching wavelets.
Grace was wondering if she should have panicked earlier.
She took another inventory of the truck. Could she make a sharp edge out of something? The clunky old phone was too heavy, and wouldn’t break into clean shards.
‘There must be something. What am I overlooking?’
There was nothing.
She concentrated on the phone. Would a text message still work? But to whom? All the networks were down.
‘I’m on my own. Again.’
6.00 am, Tuesday, December 30, 2036
Penang Fairhaven – North Dyke
The phone.
‘Oh my God. That’s it. The screen protector! Gorilla Glass. I remember.’
Almost dislocating her shoulder, she wiggled the phone out of her pocket with the tips of her fingers. She picked the glass off the phone casing with her last remaining piece of fingernail and used the limited space she had to bend the glass across the steering wheel.
To no avail. ‘It’s tougher than I thought. How am I going to break it into shards without slashing my arm in the process?’
She dug out the crisp packet from the door pocket, slid the glass inside, and tried again. And again. On the fifth attempt she succeeded: the glass broke in two, scratching her hand.
‘Okay, so I’ve gone from having nothing at my disposal to having two Stone Age tools. That’s a big step. I hope this is sharp enough to cut through the seat belt. Who on earth thought that carbon fibre-reinforced seat belts were a good idea?’
She sawed away at the seatbelt with quick, persistent cuts, making headway with excruciating slowness. She saw the first signs of water leaking into the truck.
A glimmer of distant lightning illuminated the horizon. The mosque would call soon. It began to rain.
‘This isn’t working. My hands are so sore. Damn. Do I leave a final message for the world? Tell them how this all started?’
9.00 am, Saturday, November 4, 2017
George Town – Penang
Global average temperature: 1.2°C above pre-industrial levels
In the week since young Grace Chan arrived back in Penang for her college’s term break, the floods were getting worse.
Her Auntie Janis cautioned her as she left the sprawling family compound. ‘Don’t bother going to the refugee camps today. Let one of the other idealists do it. Just because you’re going to college doesn’t mean you have to solve every single one of the world’s problems.’
‘I’ll be careful. For now, Jack needs to be walked. He hasn’t been out yet this morning.’
‘Your Auntie Annie and I told your parents we’d look after you while they’re working abroad. Don’t do anything dangerous.’
‘I’m 19 already. I don’t need any additional looking after. If my parents cared about my welfare that much, they wouldn’t be working in Iraq. Why couldn’t we have stayed in Dubai? Or Cape Town. Or better, Vienna.’
Auntie Janis shouted, ‘Take your umbrella!’ as Grace let the door slam behind her.
It was true, Grace thought as she ambled toward the refugee area, that her local attempts to help people wouldn’t solve the big issues that got them there. Many of those who fled to Penang were from areas that suffered from perpetual water problems: drought half the year, and floods the other half. But she needed to do something.
Jack tugged at the leash as he strained to inspect a fascinating piece of rubbish. Grace pulled him back. ‘You can’t go running after every interesting little bug and stick you see! You have to prioritise; not everything is important. That’s why you’re the only dog in the neighbourhood that has to be leashed up like this, you disappointing, adorable, little mutt.’ She wondered if he had a hunting or tracking dog in his ancestry, but it was impossible to know; Jack, like Grace herself, was beautiful, intelligent, and irrepressible, but was also a mongrel. She yearned for him while she was away at school. It was only in Jack’s eyes that she ever saw the unconditional love that others took for granted. Her amiable parents saw her as a distraction; her aunts were happy to have her as an extra hand around the house. But to Jack, she was everything.
The excited dog didn’t mind the rain, and continued to explore the corners of drains and edges of garbage bins. Grace’s umbrella made no difference, since the block-long puddles were already shin-deep, and the cars and motorbikes created waves that soaked her as they passed. There was irony in people’s attempts to overcome the forces of nature: bicycling through a waist-high puddle was unpleasant, but possible; driving through one with a motorbike, however, risked a drowned carburettor and an expensive trip to the repair shop.
Two streets away from the refugee housing compound, she heard the shouts of an agitated crowd.
‘Come on, Jack. Let’s go. We need to get out of this rain.’
As they turned a corner, a government utility truck passed, leaving a giant wake behind. The wall of water knocked Grace off her feet. As she struggled to stand upright, losing her grip on Jack’s lead, a smaller car ploughed through the flood. She recognised the growing sounds of the crowd as shouts of fear. A swell of water, higher than anything she had crossed so far, flowed toward her. She tried to run, but the moving water was more powerful than her shaky legs.
‘Jack! Where are you? Come here!’
The water was faster than she could have imagined. A woman screamed from a window above, and men cried out conflicting instructions to each other. A large piece of floating debris – a vegetable bin? – almost knocked her over again, but she grabbed a street sign and managed to stay upright. The water, churning and filthy, roared past her as she cried out Jack’s name again and again. A man in full rain gear, attempting to push his stalled motorbike through the inundation, slipped under the moving water and did not re-emerge. A Nissan hatchback floated down the street at a crazy angle and crashed into a Toyota.
Grace searched for Jack as she continued to clutch the street sign. Perhaps his attempts at a furious paddle against the relentless water had brought him to an open window. Perhaps a well-meaning passer-by had caught him.
For many years afterwards, she saw him in her dreams.
Read Chapter 2 here.