We present an extract from What to Put in a Suitcase, the debut short story collection by Liz McSkeane - read an extract from her story Exodus below.
These sixteen stories evoke a rich variety of people and situations: a suburban dinner party whose hosts harbour a troubling secret; a childhood prank in 1940s Dublin with tragic consequences that reverberate through the decades; the sinister challenge of walking along a deserted corridor; a family fleeing environmental disaster in Dublin of the near future; a passionate defence of personal space, even if only in the local café...
Exodus
The hardest part was deciding who should get the last place in the car.
Most people on their street had already ignored the order to postpone evacuation until the appointed time. The sea had not yet reached the Howth Road and if the lull in the rains lasted another couple of weeks, it looked as though it might not, at least not this year. So the compulsory evacuation orders were confined, for the moment, to occupants of dwellings located on Fairview Strand, also on the lower end of St Lawrence's Road and Castle Avenue, and beyond the Watermill in Raheny, anticipating the new coastline of Dublin Bay by a few days. Over a period of at least two hundred years, most of this land had been reclaimed and built on, lauded by the champions of progress as a magnificent feat of engineering. Now, the sea was reclaiming its own.
For the moment, none of the experts could say for sure how far inland the sea would reach. If the results of the most recent computer modelling were correct, it was unlikely to cross the Howth Road. This would leave the homes on their street in relative safety, hence the order for those residents not to leave, but to stay put and ensure that the routes out of the city were free for those whose homes and lives were in real danger.
It wasn’t surprising that most of their neighbours had already ignored the order. They were frightened by the tragedies in the West where flooding had reached the point of no return within hours, surprising the authorities who had deployed the emergency services to the south. By the time the terrifying warning had been broadcast – "It is now too late to leave. Stay and take shelter from the floods" – many fatalities had already occurred. How did anyone find shelter from these swirling waves, for so long having doubted their destructive might and reach? It was only when the Spanish Arch in Galway collapsed before the eyes of horrified onlookers, that the gravity of the situation could no longer be denied. Twenty-four hours later, the entire coastline between Kinvara and Connemara was submerged, vast new expanses of sea penetrating almost five kilometres inland. The scale of destruction in the last week alone had yet to be determined.
That was one of the last news bulletins published, while there was still a functioning internet service that allowed them to keep track of events, predictions and the futile analyses they produced. For the last six days, official news broadcasts had been suspended. No one knew for sure if the servers were down because of weather damage, sabotage or if the authorities had blocked them to limit the rumour and scaremongering spreading on social media. If panic-reduction were the intention, it had backfired, for the absence of hard information created a vacuum that people filled with their own fantasies of imagined catastrophes. And who was to say they were wrong?
Then there was the underground car park a couple of hundred metres away that had flooded every other winter for the last decade. Not from the sea, they were told; the rising waters came from a subterranean stream flowing through a culvert that had burst. How many more of those hidden underground streams and rivers wound their secret way beneath the city, until the rains swelled them and brought them bursting into the light? At one time, such events had entertainment value, the appearance of a stream bubbling up from a manhole in the middle of Collins Avenue an interesting anecdote on the six-o’clock news. Amazing! Now, the incredible had become normal.
But everyone had long forgotten what normal meant. These driving rains, the warm winters that coaxed daffodils and snowdrops out of the earth within days of Christmas, the scatterings of snow in late spring followed by parched summers and high winds, these "unusual weather events," had long provoked exclamation and surprise. Only a few Cassandra-like voices insisted that the acceleration of these phenomena had now reached a tipping point, were no longer unusual, were now the norm.
Fear of the elements was not her only reason for deciding it was time to get moving, take the risk, even if it meant breaking the law. They all knew that the people who stayed behind in ghost communities faced other dangers. Preparations had taken the whole of the last week. Persuading her old Aunt Laura had been the most difficult. She had plenty of provisions, she would not need to leave the house or even answer the door, she would be fine. But she would not be fine, it was clear, alone, surrounded by empty houses that were a magnet for the little gangs of robbers and looters that roamed the city, looking for easy pickings.
Getting the permit to leave the city was tricky. She had to try three processing centres on the south side of the city where there was less chance of her being known, before she found someone who bought her story: an ailing, elderly mother trapped alone in her home in Portlaoise. She had chosen Portlaoise as being safely outside the M50, the first stage on the way to their true destination. A journey of that length, Dublin to North Cork, would never be sanctioned. As it was, the Transport Processing Officer had looked incredulously at the car.
"That thing? You must be joking. You need to get something smaller, a hatchback."
"We need the estate. She’s bedridden, she’ll be on a trolley. The back seats come down. It’s the only way we can transport her."
He looked at her narrowly and just as she was about to reach in her pocket for the envelope, he sighed and stamped the permit, choosing to believe her. It wouldn’t guarantee their passage, for there were sure to be checkpoints on the way policed by nervous Guards with their new handguns on their hip. Any one of them could send them all back to the city, or worse, she herself, as the permit-holder, could end up in detention. If they were stopped, she would just have to talk her way out of it.
When had she learned to lie so well?
What to Put in a Suitcase is published by Turas Press
