The meanest Flood

by Baker, John

  And this was a guy who had a face like a broken bag. OK, he had the kind eyes and he could make them twinkle, but in a face with so much old leather in it, what wouldn’t twinkle? And he had a good voice, kind of mellow with some of the blues in it, and when you heard it it made you feel safer, closer to a world that only seemed possible when you were young. Come to think of it there was a whole load of things you could say about Sam Turner: he was a good friend, he could be brave, and was often the only guy around who had the right idea.

  ‘JD thinks it’s karma,’ he said. ‘The universe’s way of telling you to slow down and take time off.’

  ‘Me and the universe,’ Sam said, ‘we’ve been together a long time. Neither of us works like that. I think the universe needs something, I write a letter to the papers or I get Celia to write it and sign my name at the bottom. The universe thinks I need a lift it’ll send me a ticket to ride, Barcelona or a new Dylan CD. In cases of extreme deprivation I’ll get both. This is how we work together. In our long association the universe has never found it necessary to send a photographer to knee me in the balls. The times I’ve been kneed in the balls it always turned out that the knee that did it belonged to a guy who was out of sync, someone with a universe of his own.’

  ‘So what are you telling me?’ Geordie asked. Echo was wriggling so he put her on the floor and she toddled over to the bathroom. Barney followed her like a minder.

  ‘It feels like there’s a connection with Katherine getting herself killed in Nottingham while I was there. I still can’t believe that was a coincidence.’

  ‘You heard about Plato’s cave?’

  ‘Is this more of JD’s wisdom?’

  ‘He mentioned it but I’ve talked to Marie about it, Janet, and I’ve got the book. It’s an allegory so you have to imagine it.’

  ‘This is just what I need,’ Sam said. ‘Better than Lucozade.’

  ‘There’s these people in a cave. They’re chained up so they can only kneel down and face one way, towards one of the walls. Way back in the cave there’s a fire burning and between the people in the chains and the fire there’s a walkway, like a stage. You getting this?’

  ‘I guess. Up to now.’

  ‘OK. The next thing is that there are figures on this walkway and some of them are carrying things, like animals or different figures, and some of them are talking but not all of them. And because of the fire behind them the wall is lit up and the shadows of these people on the walkway are thrown on to the wall.’

  ‘It’s like a marionette show, right?’

  ‘Right,’ Geordie said. ‘Except that the people who’re chained up have been there all their lives so they think it’s reality. It’s the only thing they’ve ever seen. They’ve seen shadows but because they can speak to each other they give the shadows names and don’t think that they’re naming shadows, they think they’re giving names to reality. Also there’s an echo in the cave and when one of the people behind them speaks they hear the echo and think it comes from one of the shadows.’

  ‘Echo,’ said Echo from the bathroom door.

  ‘Not you, darlin’,’ Geordie said, laughing. ‘I’m telling Sam a story.’

  ‘Where we going with this?’ he asked.

  ‘Imagine what’ll happen if some of these people are unchained. First of all they’re gonna be stiff, right? Disoriented. They’re looking into the light for one thing, so their eyes are gonna hurt. They’ve got stiff necks. They can walk around in the cave and everything is a new experience to them. They see these characters walking on the stage and they see the things they are carrying. But if we go up to them and tell them that everything they saw before was an illusion, and that now they’ve been unchained they can see things clearer, what d’you think they’ll say?’

  ‘It’s your story, Geordie.’

  ‘When they look at the people on the stage and the things they’re carrying and we ask for their names, what’d happen would be they’d look back at the shadows and for a while they’d still think that the shadows were the reality. They’d believe that the shadows were more true than the objects.’

  Sam took his foot off the table and placed it tentatively on the floor. ‘This is the power of myth and allegory,’ he said. ‘It forces you to get up out of your chair.’

  ‘I haven’t finished yet,’ Geordie told him. ‘Hold your horses. Next thing is we take this guy, the one who has been chained up, and we drag him out of the cave into the sunlight.’

  ‘There’s only one of them now,’ Sam said. ‘When we started, there were six or seven of them. We didn’t think they were all guys, we thought maybe some of them were women. Suddenly we’ve only got one guy. What happened to the rest?’

  ‘This guy is a representative. He stands for all the rest.’

  ‘The women as well. He stands for the women?’

  ‘Yeah. Just listen, Sam. I’m gonna finish the story. If you keep interrupting it’s gonna take longer than long. We could be here all night.’

  ‘All right, get on with it. The representative guy’s been dragged up into the sunlight.’

  ‘OK, so what’ll he see?’

  ‘He won’t see anything. He’ll be blinded by the light. He’ll think he’s in Hell, he won’t understand why we’re torturing him like this.’

  ‘Yeah. But after a while his eyes’ll get accustomed to the light, he’ll see outlines and then he’ll see reality. This is what we have to do to escape from the shadow world of appearances.’

  ‘Shrug off our chains?’ Sam said. ‘And strive for the sun? Sounds like a pop song, Moody Blues, someone like that.’

  ‘This’s Plato,’ Geordie told him. ‘Real philosophy.’

  ‘Yeah, what do I know?’ Sam said. ‘Long time since I came out of the cave but I still see shadows everywhere. Some of the realities you meet in the sunlight aren’t as convincing as the shadows back in the cave.’

  Geordie scratched his head. ‘It’s got to be better, though, Sam. The more you see, the clearer it all becomes.’

  Sam rested his chin on his hand. ‘Trouble with Plato, guys like that, they give us the impression we can see for miles. The truth is that everything starts to get hazy after a few centimetres, and by the time we’ve seen half a metre we need a white stick or a guide dog.’

  ‘This guy kicking you in the nuts,’ Geordie said, ‘it’s changed the direction of your life. You’re entering a deeply philosophical stage, could end up writing books like Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russell, one of those.’

  Sam watched as Echo came toddling back to her father; Barney, as ever, bringing up the rear. ‘He was wearing leather trousers,’ Sam said.

  ‘The guy who put you down?’

  ‘Yeah. I ask you, what kind of guy wears leather trousers?’

  ‘I’ve seen Britney Spears wear ’em. Geri Halliwell, Elizabeth Hurley. But you see what I mean?’ Geordie said. ‘Questions, questions. Your mind’s working differently. You’re a thinker. You’ve become pensive.’

  13

  He was a beautiful man, there was no doubt about it. Even at midnight, after sitting outside his house for four hours, Marilyn could see him as nothing less than beautiful. He stopped at a traffic light on the outskirts of York and Marilyn, in her mother’s car, drew up alongside and glanced over at him.

  Bathed in red from the stop light he had a long face with a prominent chin, deep brown eyes, and hair that was turning silver around his temples. On the passenger seat next to him was a brimmed hat in felt, possibly a trilby or a Borsalino. Marilyn didn’t know the difference, maybe something to do with the width of the brim?

  He pretended not to notice her but Marilyn smiled. She wasn’t going to fall for that old trick. This was a man who had gazed down on a capacity audience in the theatre and picked her face from all the other hopefuls sitting there with their fingers crossed. A magician who had cast a spell on her, enchanted her so that she was his to command. He was a woman’s man. A man who attracted women. She’d have to watch him.
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  After her ill-fated affair with Jeremy Paxman, Marilyn had tried to read a book by a feminist. Got more than halfway through before she gave up. All that freedom and independence had turned her limbs to stone. She liked the anecdotes, the way the writer pinpointed the wooden ways of men, how they refused to open their hearts in case there was nothing inside and how they were afraid of pain because they didn’t understand how liberating it was.

  She liked the way that the feminist writer talked about her childhood, her relationship with her mother and father and brothers. The way that everyone had loved her, wrapped her in a protective shroud of concern to keep life’s dragons at bay, and how she had finally realized that without dragons life wasn’t worth living.

  But after that the book had dried up; the writer had urged her to rely on her own resources and spurn every outside attempt to control her behaviour. If you read that book all the way through and listened to what the woman was saying and tried to put it into practice you’d end up being like a man.

  Ellen, Marilyn’s mother, had read the book right through and, it was true what she said, she wasn’t at all like a man. But Ellen’s problem was different. First of all she was shallow. She didn’t think things through. And secondly she had turned off her emotions some time in the past and was no longer capable of divorcing herself from reason.

  If Ellen had love in her life, if another wizard would swoop down out of the ether and take her under his magic wings, she would see the world differently.

  Marilyn had a silly and secret dream. It would never happen because she had found Danny Mann and they loved each other and the future was a star-studded sky. But before she found Danny, or rather before he chose her from all the other women, Marilyn had built herself a dreamland in which both Ellen and she had been courted by a father and son. The father had chosen Ellen to be his bride and the son had chosen Marilyn. The father and son were wealthy and they lived together in a large bungalow on the outskirts of York, close to the river. Neither of them needed to work but they had talented hands and made furniture and musical instruments from Brazilian hardwoods.

  Before the double wedding the men worked hard building extensions to the bungalow while Marilyn and Ellen shopped for their dresses and added names to the guest-list. Many of the guests were well-known television celebrities, though they both agreed that Jeremy would not get an invite. Better to be safe than sorry, Ellen said, and Marilyn nodded her head silently. They had a tiff about Ruby Wax’s invitation. Marilyn thought she’d be fun and ensure that the celebrations weren’t too serious but Ellen said that Ruby was common and she didn’t want her dominating the photographs.

  There’d been a whole lot more to the dream... the day that the children were born and the unending happiness they enjoyed together under a rainbow-coloured sky. But Marilyn let it fade as she pulled in behind her magician’s car and followed him along the A64 to Leeds. Danny Mann was reality, not a dream. He had happened like reality happens, in a flash of light, a thunderbolt out of a clear sky which had sent the dreamworld of the double wedding back where it belonged into the realm of fantasy.

  The father and son would never have happened, Marilyn could see that now. She would have spent the rest of her days waiting for them to appear. Amazing how one could let oneself be convinced by a piece of whimsy, blot out the breathing, shimmering world of reality with an imaginary movie playing inside the cinema of the mind. A bungalow by the river, for goodness’ sake. The way the weather was these last days, they’d have been flooded out. What would they have done then?

  The magician followed the Leeds ring road and Marilyn followed the magician. Some lines from ‘The Pied Piper’ came into her head and for a moment she wondered what it was that had brought him to Leeds at the dead of night. An errand of mercy? Some clandestine meeting of Northern wizards? It really didn’t matter. What was important was that she knew everything about him, his habits, his friends, the kind of food he liked and the ways in which he relaxed. A wife has to know these things because it is in these little ways that love is nurtured and grows to become an all-embracing passion.

  Danny’s car left the ring road and followed a tree-lined avenue, eventually coming to a halt outside a block of recently erected flats. The magician took the only available parking space and Marilyn sailed by and pulled into a side street where she wedged Ellen’s car between a VW camper and a motorbike and sidecar.

  Pulling her coat around her, she walked briskly back to the corner and was in time to see that Danny had crossed the road and was making his way up the hill, keeping close to the houses. He was carrying a holdall, long but not bulky, and wearing his trilby. At the midpoint, between streetlights, it was as if he became transparent. Marilyn had to blink her eyes to keep him in focus. The magician, transmuting his physical body into spirit and back again to the corporeality of the flesh. There had been men in Marilyn’s life before but they had been more or less equals. The footballer had been better at his sport than she was and Jeremy Paxman was arguably a better journalist. In both cases Marilyn’s personal qualities had more than compensated for whatever talent the man had possessed. Her dress-sense, for example, and her ability to plunge herself into the emotional depths of a problem.

  But Danny Mann was something else. There was a superhuman quality to him which was beyond her experience. Just as he disappeared and reappeared between the streetlights, he was probably behind her as well as in front of her. Marilyn could be sure of nothing about this man, whether she was following him or he was following her. So inextricably was her destiny entwined with his that her intentions lost form and meaning without reference to the will of the magician.

  And Danny’s life force, his ability to sustain a relationship with the world, was likewise compromised without reference to Marilyn’s intuitive nature. Their undying love for each other created a third being which was not Danny and was not Marilyn and was far more than the sum of their parts.

  At the top of the hill he crossed the road in front of the Taps and headed down North Lane.

  After a hundred metres he turned into a narrow alley which took him to the back of the houses. Marilyn hesitated. She stood at the entrance to the alley and dithered for a few seconds. She didn’t know why. If she had been a man she would have plunged into the darkness after him without thinking. But something about her socialization as a woman held her back. This was Leeds, a big and alien city, and it was already well after midnight. As a woman alone she was vulnerable. And since Danny had disappeared into the dark passage she had felt alone. She would go into the alley after him when she had conquered her fear, but he would not be there.

  Marilyn didn’t know who would be in the passage. It was as if she was being tested. In a relationship with a man like Danny there would be many tests. Was she worthy? That was a question that only a god would ask. Marilyn had a woman’s heart and questions of worthiness didn’t enter into the equation. She was a woman in love and there was nothing else to say. She would live for him or she would die for him, whatever was required.

  She felt her way forward. The glow from the street lamps was consumed within a few steps of the entrance. When she glanced behind, before turning the corner into a black soup, it was like looking into the warm but commanding eyes of a lover. Go on, Marilyn, the eyes said. I’m right behind you. There is nothing to fear. Danny again, Danny’s eyes behind her when she had seen him go on before. Danny all around her, Danny inside her.

  There was a high brick wall which she could explore with her fingers. She could feel the groove between each brick where the cement and mortar had eroded. Beneath her feet were damp leaves, the odd twig and stone, and the enclosed space was permeated by an overpowering smell of cats. Up above was the huge bowl of the night sky, the Milky Way and a pale moon obscured by billowing clouds. The city’s hum was low and constant but there were no other sounds, no footfalls from Danny, no humorous chuckle from his throat as he watched her cling to the wall, carefully placing one foot after another.
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  Marilyn thought that the passage would be filled with light. She thought that it would be transformed. She’d seen an advert on the television where an old man climbs the steps of a dark tenement, inserts his key into the lock and pushes open a heavy door into the dark interior of his apartment. He sighs, his lungs wheezing with the effort of the stairs, and then suddenly someone throws a switch and the lights come on. All of the old man’s relatives and friends are there. There is a table heaving with food and drink and the children have balloons, the women are dressed in their finest clothes and the men are holding up glasses and smiling.

  Marilyn was in two minds. Part of her thought that something like the TV advert would happen, that the magician would work his magic and obliterate the darkness with spiritual light. And another part of her knew that he was no longer there. That he had abandoned her to the darkness. The only light available was the light she could bring to the situation from within herself.

  Danny had left her here so that she could grow. In a way it was an initiation, a rite of passage in a dark and dingy passage in the heart of Leeds in the middle of the night. If she could come through this she would be nearer to her love. There were certain steps to be taken before they could be together. This alley was one of those steps. It was a threshold, but one at which she would not flinch.

  At the end of the passage she followed the wall. There were high, wooden garden gates separated by a few feet of continuing brick wall. She increased her pace now, sensing that she was returning the way she had come. A cat spat and scattered a pile of wet leaves and Marilyn barely flinched at the sound. The magician had given her something easy as a starter. He was leading her gently into his world of transformations. Damp leaves and darkness, a crumbling wall and a spitting cat. You’ll have to do better than this, Danny, she said to herself as she turned the corner which led back to the lights of the street. I’ve been into your darkness and I wasn’t afraid. Not much, anyway.