Gerhard’s Reviews > The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again > Status Update

It seemed to her as if the whole town stood there for a moment, wondering if the world would end, or only take some simple, beautiful, amazing direction.

A fierce struggle broke out. Someone was pushed to the ground; someone else fell on top of them. Before long they were clawing inexpertly at one another’s cheeks, which stretched like plasticine and came away in lumps.

‘We’re the future now. Now everyone will stand a chance.’
‘Who’s the past?’ Victoria said. ‘What do you mean?’
She shut the door and shouted through it, ‘Can you hear yourself? This is just some rubbish religion!’
‘You’ll keep seeing the visions,’ Tommie advised her from the other side.

Time held all this loosely but carefully in its hand. She was to understand, Victoria knew, that she was seeing a future. People had found fresh ways to live. Or perhaps it wasn’t, as far as the Gorge was concerned, a future at all, only an intersection of possibilities, unconformable layers of time, myths from a geography long forgotten or not yet invented.

‘The bloody Severn,’ as Pearl put it: ‘your waterway of commerce, romance and mystery.’

The fish goggled at him from eyes of turquoise glass inset above its archaic, fat-lipped mouth. We were here before you arrived, it seemed to be warning him silently: We’ll be here after you’ve gone.

It was all hospitals and sports parks, mud and child murder up there. ‘But some surprisingly nice pubs, too.’