The meanest Flood

by Baker, John

There had been a student of Bakhtin in his group at university; she was fascinated by dialogical and monological language, the former characterized by a person speaking towards at least one other person in response or anticipation with living language. Dead language was monological like that of the medieval church or any religious state that admits of the existence of no other voice. They had been an item for a while and Danny had discussed Bakhtin’s theories with her, agreeing that poetry was monologic and the novel dialogic. But eventually she had walked off hand in hand with a poststructuralist critic who couldn’t tell the difference between a novel and the Highway Code.

  Nicole Day was no longer terrified. She was frightened of the man but that initial terror had been partially replaced by rage. When he’d taken Rolf away she’d listened to the sounds coming from the spare bedroom and had expected the man to come back and rape her. But that had been hours ago. Her hands and feet had long since gone numb from the tight rope that bound them. For a while she had thought she would choke to death, that she would swallow the flannel that the man had stuffed into her mouth. But she was still alive, alive and resolved.

  At the first opportunity she would tear at his eyes. If he gave her one moment of freedom she would hurl all of her strength at him. Claw her way to his obscene balls, hanging there like a sack of old coins. His silence, the way he came to the door of her room from time to time and hovered there in the shadows, was calculated to undermine her. He knew that if he did nothing, said nothing, but kept her tied and confined and in ignorance of what had happened to Rolf she would go to pieces. He thought that if he wore her down like this then she’d be pliable when the time came for him to assault her.

  When the time came! My God, the time had been here all night. Nicole had been assaulted over and over again simply by having this naked maniac in her house. Rolf was assaulted when the man slapped him across the head with that huge dagger.

  But she also knew that if she was going to survive this intrusion into her house she would have to be clever. The man was clearly mad. She would need to talk to him, to win him over, to show him understanding. She would have to pretend to be his friend, even his lover.

  She spoke to him through the flannel and the masking tape. She said, ‘Hello, I wondered when you would come back.’

  The words didn’t get through the obstructions in and around her mouth. She heard the sounds that resulted, what amounted to a long modulated moan. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Please take this thing out of my mouth so we can talk properly.’

  He shook his head, an arrogant smile around his lips. He couldn’t understand what she was saying. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I’m not going to hurt you.’ He had the heavy dagger with him, hanging from his right hand. So long that the tip of it brushed the floor.

  He took another step towards her. ‘Remember Sam Turner?’ he asked. ‘The detective? He was here a moment ago. Over the street.’

  Nicole wanted to cry. ‘Sam? Here?’ Why would Sam be here? What had this man got to do with Sam Turner? She hadn’t seen Sam in years, hadn’t thought about him for months. She couldn’t imagine any way in which Sam Turner could be mixed up with this madman.

  Sam had been a mess and he’d treated her badly towards the end of their relationship. His drinking and his lack of self-esteem had led him to an attitude of contempt for almost everyone else in the world, and being his woman had meant that she was in the front line of his derision and loathing.

  But he’d let her go. When the crunch had come and he’d eventually transformed her love to a cynical despair, he hadn’t gone into battle. He’d fought against it for an instant and then shaken his head, walked away. Left her with her freedom. Surely he hadn’t come back after all these years to torture her like this, to leave her in the hands of a deranged nutcase with an antique bayonet?

  Nicole felt a whispering breeze pass over her forehead. She was calm. The man with the weapon was outside of her. Perhaps he was close, in the same room, or perhaps he was a figment of her imagination, a dream figure. Either way it didn’t matter. Sam Turner may be in the street or not, he might have been here to save her or to destroy her. He was in the past. Something, someone, she had known. Another of those relationships that had held eternal promise but had resulted only in tears.

  Even her husband, Rolf, with his phenomenological theories, seemed part of another and distant universe. What seemed real was an image from her childhood, a long and empty beach, her mother huddled in a deckchair and her father downwind arcing a Frisbee across the painted sky towards her.

  The picture was like an early video. The colours were not quite true but every detail was known and recorded for posterity. It was something that had already happened and could not be undone. Her mother was reading a medical dictionary, trying to discover if heliotherapy would cure her dermatitis. She was wearing a short flowered skirt with a bikini top and dark glasses.

  Her father was wearing long shorts and open sandals with knee-length brown socks. He’d grown a paunch and accentuated it by wearing his short-sleeved shirt tucked into the elastic top of the shorts. He was still handsome, though. Dashing with his green eyes and dark moustache.

  The Frisbee curved around the sun. It rose and disappeared from sight for a moment before falling, looking for all the world as if it would not reach her. Nicole took a step towards it and at the last moment saw that its trajectory would bring it down in front of her. She dived with her arms outstretched, saw the missile come towards her and grasped it with both hands. Her father laughed and cheered and her mother looked up from her book of miracle cures.

  The man with the weapon took Rolfs pillow and placed it over her face and chest. She tried to shake it off but he held it firm. Nicole didn’t want to scuffle. He wasn’t pushing down on it. She could still breathe perfectly well.

  She fought for the memory. She got to her feet and brushed the sand from her knees. Replaced the plastic sandal that had come off when she caught the Frisbee and fell. She brushed the hair from her eyes. Her hair was long that year, so she was eleven because she had it cut short for her twelfth birthday. She took the Frisbee and flicked it towards her father, watched it rise away from her, somehow capturing the air and using it to propel itself in the perfect arc that would take it to his hands.

  The sheer flawlessness of its flight took her breath. The beauty of it was like a pain in her heart.

  Diamond Danny Mann stood back. He cleaned the bayonet on a corner of the sheet. A flash vision of a barber’s pole. Figaro, Figaro... Rossini’s control of the strings. The deep startled hush of the audience. His mother’s voice, frail, distant: ‘Danny? Danny, have you run my bath?’

  He untied the woman’s hands and feet and collected the rope. There would be odd fibres left behind and some overworked and ambitious genius in the forensic lab would eventually discover that the rope was purchased from a branch of Woolworth’s sometime during the last five years. But they’d have nothing else. Nothing to connect him to the scene. And their eyes would be averted anyway; the circumstantial evidence and his appearance in the street at the exact time of the killing would focus their attention on Sam Turner.

  In the bathroom he washed himself and replaced his clothes. He blocked the overflow on the bath and the hand-basin and left both taps running. In the kitchen downstairs he blocked the sink and watched for a moment as the water splashed into it.

  Symmetry again. Life begins in a womb, the developing foetus swims in a bath of amniotic fluid, it knows only liquid and is swept along, unknowingly, towards the hard realities of life. How fitting, then, how indescribably beautiful, that these beginnings should find their echo in death. Symmetry had informed Danny’s own life and it seemed natural to him to want to share its magic with others.

  He left by the back door and after a short walk was safely sitting behind the steering wheel of his car clutching a twig of privet that someone had tucked under his windscreen wiper. He glanced at the seatbelt on the passenger side and remembered that he
still had to get it fixed. He removed the two pairs of latex gloves from his hands and put them into a paper bag with the rope. He started the car and drove along the A64 to York.

  Jody would be waiting for him in his empty house. Lying still and cold and naked in the double bed. His darling Jody, his life companion since the departure of his mother.

  His compensation was the knowledge of a job well done. And that was how it should be. He was, after all, a professional magician. Danny wondered if he should worry about the twig of privet. But for some reason it didn’t seem threatening.

  15

  Sam got to the office a little before ten in the morning. Geordie was talking to Janet on the telephone. Barney, Geordie’s dog, got up from his sprawl on the floor and wagged around Sam’s legs for a minute. Sam patted him, tickled his ears. He walked over to his desk and sat in the swivel chair. He thumbed through the morning post, putting most of the circulars and envelopes into his waste bin without opening them.

  At the end of the office, in the dark section away from the windows, there was a sink and a draining board, the makings for tea and coffee and a single power point with a kettle attached. Sam filled the kettle and switched it on. He spooned four measures of ground Italian coffee into a small cafetière and fished a carton of milk from the smallest fridge in the world. While he waited for the water to boil he found the first Biograph CD and played ‘Lay Down Your Weary Tune’ so loud that the cups rattled.

  ‘Just a minute,’ Geordie said into the mouthpiece of the phone. He cupped his hand over it and shouted at Sam, ‘It’s too loud.’

  Sam said, ‘I need comfort.’

  ‘I’ll have to go,’ Geordie shouted down the telephone to Janet. ‘The boss’s having a nervous breakdown. He thinks it’s 1963.’

  Sam watched the kettle. The man and his guitar somehow contrived to evoke bagpipes, a Highland silhouette of a mountain with a stag, though there was nothing in the lyric to suggest either. Geordie sat quietly for the whole four minutes of it and then came over to turn down the sound at the opening bars of ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’.

  ‘What’s up?’ he asked.

  ‘I was set up,’ Sam told him. ‘The guy in Leeds, the address he gave me nobody had heard of him. Some kind of practical joke. You want coffee?’

  ‘Coffee’d be good. You could’ve written down the wrong number.’

  ‘I don’t do wrong numbers. He said it was thirty-seven, but the guy there’d never heard of a Bonner. And I tried seventy-three, make sure I hadn’t written it backwards. No reply.’

  ‘Could’ve been twenty-seven,’ Geordie said.

  ‘It wasn’t, it was thirty-seven, I remember the guy saying it on the phone.’

  ‘So why’d you try seventy-three?’

  Sam eyeballed him. ‘Just in case.’

  ‘Could’ve been any house in the street when you think about it,’ Geordie said. ‘Might even’ve been the wrong street. Are you sure it was Leeds?’

  ‘Fuck off, Geordie. I’ve just driven to Leeds and back, wasted half the day for nothing.’ He waited until the kettle stopped singing and wetted the grains in the bottom of the cafetiere. ‘Where is everyone, anyway? I expect to come back to a busy office and there’s just a dog here and you talking to your wife on the phone.’

  ‘Celia’s helping Marie move out of her house. They’re putting everything upstairs and leaving sandbags round the doors. The river’s flooding tonight.’

  Sam filled the cafetiere with hot water, fitted the plunger over the top.

  ‘You know what a flood is?’ Geordie asked.

  ‘Yeah, it’s when I get my canoe out.’

  ‘Metaphorically,’ Geordie said. ‘What it means to us?’

  ‘I don’t know what I’d do without you, Geordie. Slack times, like we’re in the middle of just now, I’d probably be out hustling for business, trying to make something of my life. Know what I mean? But with you around, I don’t have to worry about stuff like that. I can talk philosophy instead.’

  ‘It’s not philosophy,’ Geordie said. ‘It’s a question.’

  ‘And the answer is?’

  ‘A flood is chaos, that’s what it means to us. When the water breaks its banks it’s the same as if all the rules of society are suddenly breached.’

  ‘Breached?’

  ‘Yeah, broken. Or if you’re flooded by someone’s passions or emotions you want to leg it, get as far away as possible. Because they’re out of control, like the river. Then there’s all that stuff about Noah’s Ark, God destroying the earth to punish us for our sins.’

  ‘That’s two different things,’ Sam said.

  ‘How come?’

  ‘In the first place you’re saying the flood is chaos or anarchy, everything out of control. But once you bring God into the equation there’s no chaos involved. He’s controlling the thing. He’s decided to flood the earth and save Noah and all the animals and get rid of the rest of the fat cats who’ve fucked up, eaten all the apples, whatever. It’s not chaos, it’s divinely controlled genocide. If God’s in control of the flood, He’s worked it out to the last centimetre.’ He poured the coffee into cups and handed one to Geordie.

  Geordie took a sip. Sam watched the coating of milk form on the bottom of his moustache and reminded himself never to grow one. Geordie said, ‘OK, they’re different things. Whatever, Marie is really pissed about it. She thought it’d be wonderful living next to the river. Now the river’s moving in with her, taking over the ground floor. Looks really nice in the spring, the sun shining and all those little swirls and eddies going past the house, but it’s not the same when it’s covering your three-piece suite and slopping about in your cooker.’

  ‘Eddies?’

  ‘Yeah, something wrong with that? Eddy, it’s a contrary motion in a stream.’

  ‘Knew a bloke called Eddy once. He sold fish and chips in Manchester.’

  ‘I’m not listening, Sam. If there’s a sucker in this, it’s you wearing the cap.’

  Sam laughed. ‘Maybe I should go give them a hand,’ he said. ‘Celia won’t be a lot of help moving the big stuff upstairs.’

  ‘Marie’s got JD there as well.’

  ‘I’ll go then,’ Sam said. ‘JD lifting furniture, somebody could get killed. You OK to hold the fort here?’

  Geordie looked around the office. ‘Me and Barney’ll cope. If it stays this busy we’ll be doing laps in the pools of our own sweat.’ He gave it teeth to prove he understood irony.

  Sam walked to Marie’s house. No rain, the sky was clear, but he could hear the river chafing and snarling as he got closer. It was raining up in the hills and on the moors and as the waters ran off into the main stream the ancient banks were too narrow to contain them. Lines of sightseers watched the broiling mass of black water as it hurtled past, tourists and voyeurs for the main part. Local householders were too busy packing their belongings to stand and watch the growing threat to their homes.

  Sam stood close to the bank. The rushing water had risen ten feet in as many days and was only inches away from his feet. Broken branches and debris were whipping past at speed and some guys were posing their wives and girlfriends in front of the flow, taking photographs so they’d be able to show their kids and grandchildren. It was like life itself, going past so fast you couldn’t take it all in. You focused on one segment of it, something there that looked like a bed, and you watched it ducking and diving as it came towards you and again as it came close and disappeared downstream and you were never sure exactly what it was or where it had come from.

  Do people throw old beds into rivers? Or did the river reach out and pluck it from somebody’s bedroom as it went past? But it was gone now, leaving no trace behind, and Sam couldn’t be sure that it was a bed anyway. Could’ve been anything or nothing. Something he invented.

  The river was rushing away. Trying its best not to get stuck in the town. Once it breached its banks it wouldn’t be a river anymore. It would be an alien in the city, an agent of mi
sery and destruction. Once it lost its form and its identity it would wreak havoc, turn the relatively civilized and settled lives of the local population into a whirlpool of misery.

  Marie and JD were having a tea break, sitting in the bay window of Marie’s house looking out at the raging river. Celia was having a tea break as well, but in her normal manner, pottering around, collecting small ornaments and books and taking them upstairs then coming back for another sip from her cup.

  ‘Are you another pair of hands?’ she asked Sam. ‘Or a tourist?’

  ‘I’ll help with the heavy stuff,’ he said.

  JD took a notebook from his pocket and scribbled in it. ‘Good line,’ he said. ‘I can use it in the current novel. Post-modern ring to it. A character who helps with the heavy stuff or sees himself as helping with the heavy stuff. Someone who gets involved with other people’s emotions or traumas. Inflated ego.’

  ‘Tell you what,’ Sam said, ‘I’ll go out and come back in a couple of minutes. Try to make a different entrance.’

  ‘No, it’s a good line,’ JD insisted, looking down at his notebook. ‘I mean it. It was worth coming out for.’ JD wrote and published crime novels and from time to time worked with the Sam Turner Detective Agency, ostensibly for research purposes, though he also got a kick out of it if he could avoid violent confrontations. And he needed the money. When he wasn’t doing either of those things he was a drummer in a country blues band called Fried (not Freud) and the Behaviourists and he was a voracious dope smoker. He was also ridiculously in love with Marie, probably more so since she had made it clear to him that he wasn’t an item on her emotional agenda. They had once had a brief affair but in recent years Marie found her emotional and sexual fulfilment elsewhere. She used JD when she had to move furniture or if she needed a driver.

  JD said if he couldn’t have Marie, he didn’t need emotional or sexual fulfilment because he was an artist and good at subjugating. But there were people who said he didn’t remember what he got up to when he was strung out on loud country blues and electric feedback and the devil weed was pumping through his brain. Whatever it was it didn’t deter the handful of painted and bejewelled groupies who turned out when the band were strutting their stuff.