The meanest Flood

by Baker, John

  They were quiet for a while. He listened to her heartbeat. Angeles said, ‘What did you think when they told you she was dead?’

  ‘Strange,’ he said. ‘You go through life and you think you know who you are and all the time there’s parts of you come into view that you never saw before. Katherine was someone I lived with and never knew, and I’m the same. I live with myself but there’s huge areas of me I’ve never managed to negotiate with, never managed to meet or come to terms with.

  ‘I thought, when they told me, and later in the car when they took me to the police station, I thought it was like discovering that a part of me had been murdered, part of me that I’d never known had been killed and wouldn’t be available to me any more. Felt like a waste. An opportunity squandered. One of those moments when all your good intentions have come to nothing and you can’t do anything about it.’

  Sam had intended to stay at Angeles’ house for an hour or so and then go to a midnight AA meeting. A dry alcoholic can get through the everyday but stress leads to an overbearing thirst.

  He didn’t get to the meeting, though. Around 11.30 Angeles got to her feet and took him to her bedroom. He felt her cool fingers on his flesh and the warmth of her body next to his and the idea of his meeting evaporated into the night.

  Sam wondered if in some strange, metaphoric way he had murdered every woman he had ever known. If he had managed through his own sense of ego to distance, alienate and eventually smother the essence of his relationships. He couldn’t remember how many years he’d been telling himself he was getting better at it, that he was learning from past mistakes and failures. But the women still kept coming and going. When they came they were keen and excited, and invariably, when they went, they were a little greyer, not quite as perky in the life-force department.

  Was he in the process of doing the same thing with Angeles? He hoped not. She filled his waking and often his sleeping thoughts. He couldn’t remember who it was but someone had once told him that we can’t exist unless the heart is full - we become dry and crumble away. Sayings, lines from songs, snippets of received wisdom, they lodge somewhere in your brain, never seem to leave.

  In the small hours of the morning he came awake with a vision of his ex-wife, Katherine, a knife in her chest and dead staring eyes. He closed his eyes and fitted his body into the curve of Angeles’ back and within a minute or two he was sleeping again, like a man without a conscience.

  7

  ‘How many times has he been married?’ Janet asked.

  Geordie looked up and closed his eyes. ‘You don’t wanna know,’ he said. He scooped a teaspoonful of green mush out of the bowl and fed it into the open mouth of Echo, their daughter.

  ‘Come on, Geordie. How many? Seems like I’ve finally got a grasp of his emotional history and now another wife crops up.’

  ‘Dunno if you can say she’s cropped up when she’s freshly dead.’

  Janet turned her mouth down. ‘That’s bad taste.’

  ‘Taste is bad, the last I heard. It’s part of one-upmanship. One of the ways the middle classes keep ahead of the competition.’

  ‘OK,’ Janet said. ‘Don’t change the subject. How many wives?’

  ‘Depends what you mean by wife, how you define marriage.’ Echo had had enough of the green mush and was sitting with her mouth firmly closed. ‘Just two more spoonfuls,’ Geordie said. ‘Then you can have custard.’

  ‘It’s spoonsful, not spoonfuls.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Geordie said. ‘Strictly, it’ll be spoonful. But I’m talking baby-talk.’

  ‘Let’s say we define marriage as in people who’ve been through a wedding ceremony.’

  ‘If I asked Sam he probably wouldn’t know. I think he’s had more than four wives and a lot of girlfriends.’ lanet shook her head. ‘Bluebeard.’

  ‘He doesn’t kill them. He chooses badly. He can’t discriminate. First he goes for women who’re too young for him, then he’s bored because they don’t understand what he’s talking about.’

  ‘They’ve got different cultural references,’ Janet said.

  ‘Yeah. That’s what I said.’ Echo opened her mouth and Geordie slipped another load of mush in there. ‘Also he likes wild women, you know what I mean, over the top?’

  ‘Indulge me,’ Janet said.

  ‘You know what I mean, Janet. Too much makeup, skirt up around her ass, deep cleavage, a mouth like a foghorn.’

  ‘Oh, tarts,’ she said. ‘You mean he likes tarts?’

  ‘Yeah, I guess. The guy’s damaged. This is one of the ways he shows it.’

  Janet smiled, showing her teeth.

  ‘What?’ Geordie asked.

  She shook her head. She leaned over the table and mopped Echo’s face with her bib. ‘D’you want me to feed her the rest?’

  ‘No, I’m doing it,’ Geordie said, irritated. ‘What’re you laughing at?’

  ‘Too much makeup,’ she said. ‘Mouth like a foghorn. You’re not questioning your boss’s taste, Geordie? Using bourgeois concepts to keep the working classes in their place?’

  ‘You led me into that,’ he said. ‘You took me by the hand and walked me into a trap.’

  ‘Would I?’

  ‘Yes, you would. You just did it. Echo’s a witness. This is the kind of woman you’ve got for a mother, Echo. Just remember that. How do you expect the child to grow into a rounded human being with you as a role-model?’

  ‘She can always fall back on her perfect daddy,’ Janet said.

  Geordie went to the hob and brought a pan with crushed apple and custard to the table. He spooned the mixture into Echo’s bowl and tested the temperature with his knuckles. Echo made a grab for the bowl but he moved it out of reach.

  ‘Anyway, I don’t think you’re right,’ Janet said. ‘Dora wasn’t a tart, and look at Angeles, she’s got real class.’ Geordie was glad that Sam had settled down with Angeles Falco even though they didn’t live together. In the past Sam hadn’t been able to keep a woman. Some of the women he’d picked, Geordie wouldn’t have wanted him to keep. Seemed to be particularly strong on babyfaced smiles and cleavage, gold-diggers and women who were long on legs and hair and short on nous.

  ‘You should see some of the earlier ones,’ Geordie said. ‘He’s getting better but he’s still off kilter. Dora was old enough to be his mother and Angeles is at least twenty years younger than him.’

  ‘And then some. But when I see them together I don’t think about their ages. They seem like a good fit.’

  ‘That’s because you’re a moral relativist,’ Geordie told her.

  Janet laughed. ‘Big words.’

  ‘I was talking to Celia about it. In the old days, before Einstein, everybody believed in good and evil. There were rules about what you could do, like the Ten Commandments. But now we think everything’s relative. We look at the context of things and judge them from that. There’re no absolutes anymore.’

  ‘I feel an example coming on,’ Janet said.

  ‘There were a couple of Iraqi families in Bradford, one with two sons and the other with two daughters. They went through all the routines they would’ve gone through in Iraq and the two daughters were married to the two sons. They didn’t have a registrar or anything like that but they had their own religious ceremony. A few weeks later Social Services moved in and took the girls into care. The boys were charged with sexual abuse.’

  ‘How old were these girls?’

  ‘I don’t remember,’ Geordie said. ‘Thirteen, something like that, which is fine in Iraq, nobody thinks anything about it. That’s how they do it. But here it’s regarded as immoral and we make a law about it.’

  ‘It’s too young,’ Janet said.

  ‘Sure. I think so, too. I wouldn’t like to see Echo getting married in ten, eleven years’ time. But are you gonna say the Iraqi families are immoral for going through with it? Stone them to death?’

  ‘That’d be an over-reaction, I think.’

  ‘See what I
mean? You’re a moral relativist.’

  ‘So this is what we’re going to teach Echo, is it? That there’s no such thing as right or wrong. That everything’s relative?’

  ‘We’ll have to, Janet. That’s what she’s got to learn if she’s gonna live in this society. If we lived in a different society we’d teach her different things.’

  ‘What about these fundamentalists, Geordie? Seems like there’s more of them all the time. People who see good on one side and evil on the other and nothing in between.’

  ‘They’re part of a backlash. But they’re a minority. These’re people who can’t cope without certainty in their lives. They want a strong leader or a dominant church, and they want all their Ts crossed and all their Is dotted.’ Janet sighed. ‘Sometimes that sounds attractive.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Geordie said. ‘But it’s a dream. If we don’t take responsibility for ourselves then somebody else’ll do it for us, and we’ll be slaves again.’

  Janet sniffed and looked at Echo.

  ‘She’s filled her nappy,’ Geordie said. ‘I shovel it in one end and she pushes it out the other. C’est la vie.’ He went to the bathroom and came back with a fresh Pamper and a jar of cold cream.

  ‘I’ll do it,’ Janet said. ‘Aren’t you supposed to be at work?’

  ‘Yeah. Same as you.’

  Janet took the cold cream from his hand. ‘You get off,’ she said. ‘I’ll do this and drop her at the nursery.’

  ‘What’re we having for supper? You want me to pick anything up?’

  ‘No, I’ll find something. You fancy fish?’

  ‘Sure. Whatever. Or bread and wine, we could have that if you like. The Last Supper.’

  ‘I’ll give you that one night, bet you wouldn’t like it.’

  ‘For just one night I could do anything, Janet. Even fast food.’

  ‘I don’t think...’

  ‘What if they’d had, the disciples, instead of bread and wine double cheeseburgers and fries, chilled Coke on the side? The reason they had bread and wine was because that’s what people had in those days. In that place, in that time, you wanted to have supper with your mates, you got some bread and wine and split it around a table. But if Jesus had been born the same time as us, what they’d’ve done, they’d’ve gone to some fast food place and had whatever was on the menu. I dunno, might’ve been pizza, curried king prawns and chips.

  ‘Then in church on Sundays you’d get a few more people turning up for Communion. “This is my body”, and the parson sticks a piece of Cumberland sausage in your face, “and this is my blood”, and you suck up a Vodka Alcopop through a straw.’

  Janet laughed. ‘Are you going to work?’

  ‘Maybe I should. Sam’ll be briefing us on why he lied to the police.’

  ‘Perhaps he killed her,’ Janet said. ‘That’d be a good reason to lie.’

  ‘Sam? He’d never do that. What’re you saying?’

  Janet raised her eyebrows, put a grin on her face. ‘Never say never, Geordie. Remember, there are no absolutes anymore. In the right circumstances, in context, it could all make perfect sense. This ex-wife of his — what was she called, Katherine? — she could’ve been the reason he was in Nottingham in the first place.’

  ‘This’s my friend you’re talking about,’ Geordie told her.

  ‘Oh, I know,’ Janet said as she lifted Echo out of her highchair. ‘And he’s a thoroughly nice bloke. It was probably a mercy killing.’

  8

  Mid-morning and Jody was lying on the couch half-naked. Diamond Danny Mann came in from the kitchen with a mug of tea. He wore shiny black trousers with braces and no shirt.

  ‘I’ve moved the thermostat up,’ he said. He sat on the edge of the couch and used the remote to flick through the TV channels. After a couple of minutes he hit the standby button and gazed over the rim of his mug at a picture on velvet hanging on the wall. In the centre of the picture was a wizard with a tall pointed hat, a black cape and a wand that looked like a sparkler. On the ground by the wizard’s feet was a black cat and above his head a crescent moon.

  ‘I’ve got this thing with my eye,’ Danny said. ‘The last couple of weeks. Maybe I’m rundown?’ He turned his head to the left and then to the right. Focused above the velvet picture and then below it. ‘Some kind of visual fault. It starts to twitch and a small kaleidoscope takes off on the edge of my vision, spinning away in a corner of the retina.’

  Jody didn’t reply. He imagined he heard her sigh quietly but he couldn’t be sure. She wasn’t easy to communicate with outside their double bed.

  ‘Might be a brain tumour,’ he said. He put his hand over his right eye and looked around the room. ‘Right eye, left side of the brain. There’s a rune you can use for tumours. Give them to somebody else or get rid of your own.’ He put his mug on the carpet and walked over to a shelf of books. He selected a large tome with broken boards and ragged end-papers and took it over to a circular table in the pink-curtained bay window.

  He thumbed backwards and forwards through the book for the better part of an hour. Eventually he closed it and sat back in the chair. ‘A Tiki,’ he said. ‘That’s what I need. Greenstone figure, something like jade. Might have to import it.’ He glanced at Jody. ‘Lot to do,’ he said. ‘Three shows this week, another woman to disappear, brain tumour to cure.’ He left his chair and reached down to take her by the hand. ‘And then there’s the question of getting you sorted, my darling.’

  ‘Do you remember,’ Danny had said to the inert body of Katherine Turner, ‘do you remember a time when the world was full of noises, sounds and sweet airs, that gave delight and no pain? When you thought the clouds would open and show riches ready to drop upon you? And did you cry to dream again?’

  He spoke the lines to the still-warm corpse on the bed because there had been such a time in Danny’s life, a time when he hadn’t needed to make his own magic at all. When the whole of his known world had been filled with constant melody.

  At the University of Durham all those years ago Danny’s degree had been in Drama. He had not enjoyed the separation from his mother but there had been aspects of the course that had given him joy. He had learned how to present himself, how to project outwards from his centre, almost anything at all. He could make himself appear tall or short with a mere shift of his internal focus. In a group or in front of an audience he could be regarded as aggressive or passive or any of the nuances in between simply by an adjustment to his posture or a shift in the position of his shoulders.

  And as part of the course he had had to attend lectures in the English department, where the gift of words had absorbed him and would continue to fascinate him for the rest of his life. The richness of his native tongue had been a revelation, a blessed relief for a mind which never dreamed on aught but butcheries.

  9

  Marilyn wanted to know everything about this man. The colour of the carpet in his bedroom, what he ate for breakfast, his favourite television show and the book that he’d always remember because it changed his life.

  She knew already what his hand felt like, the tone of his voice and the sweet smell of menthol on his breath. She knew that his front door was painted red and his back door an olive shade of green. Marilyn knew that Danny had oyster-coloured net curtains and pink drapes at his double-glazed windows.

  There was always something new to learn about a new man but already she had his telephone number and his car registration. From his dustbin she’d culled more information; that he was a member of the AA and that he used a MasterCard which expired next month. Danny’s membership of the Magic Circle had lapsed. He paid his bills on time, gas, electric, telephone, garage, credit card, and he didn’t have a mortgage. He used Wilkinson Sword razor blades and Gillette shaving gel in a pressurized container. But none of this was sufficient. There was still a sizeable part of the man that she hadn’t quite grasped.

  Marilyn was good at lying. She could convince anyone of anything. The key to a good lie was to t
ell it as if you believed it yourself, and that came easily to Marilyn because as soon as she started to tell a story she began living it as well.

  ‘You love drama,’ Ellen had said to her a thousand times. ‘It would be better if you didn’t love it so much. Or maybe you should have been an actress, got it out of your system by playing it on the stage.’

  But Marilyn wasn’t so sure about that. She wasn’t interested in the stage. It was real life that fascinated her. It was love and hatred, pain and romance, the ways that destiny threw lovers into each other’s arms and wrenched them apart. It was separation, death, guilt and an overflowing heart.

  ‘Who were you ringing?’ Ellen asked.

  ‘Mind your own business.’

  ‘Where’ve you been?’

  ‘That’s for me to know.’

  ‘Have you taken your lithium?’

  ‘Christ, will you leave me alone? It’s up to me whether I’ve taken my lithium or not.’

  ‘Oh, no, it isn’t, my girl. I live in this house as well as you. And I know what happens when you stop taking it. The next thing you’ll be chasing this magician around, accosting him in the street. If you don’t take it now, and if I don’t see you taking it with my own eyes, I’ll be on the phone to the doctor.’

  ‘You want me tanked up with chemicals,’ Marilyn said. ‘You and the doctor both. It’s as if I’m a child. I have to do what you say. I don’t have my own freedom. I’m not allowed to decide if I need the lithium or not. If it was up to you you’d keep me on it for ever. For my whole life.’

  ‘You’ll stay on it for as long as it’s being prescribed for you, Marilyn. Doctor knows best. You get out of yourself when you’re not taking it. Fixating on people, going into a fantasy world, speaking to me as if I’m a piece of dirt.’ They stared at each other. Marilyn narrowed her eyes but Ellen didn’t give way.

  ‘You don’t know what it’s like to be lonely,’ Marilyn told her, a perceptible crack in her voice.

  ‘I do,’ said Ellen. ‘I’m lonely as well, Marilyn. But the answer isn’t to fixate on the first man who comes along.’