The meanest Flood

by Baker, John

  It was interesting to speculate, a possible area in which to dig, but it didn’t fill Sam with enthusiasm. Better than the student squat and the embroidery guy but he could think about it all night, it wasn’t going to light any bulbs either.

  You sit alone in an empty house waiting for the call from Geordie, waiting for something to happen. You go into those spaces inside your head that the AA handbook tells you to steer clear of. Scary places where the voices tell you you’ll be fine if you have a drink. You don’t want to get drunk, this isn’t the point at all, you just fancy a nip in the middle of the night, something to keep the demons at bay. Medicine. One single shot.

  Sam shook his head, a smile on his lips. The voices had tried it on before, they came back from time to time. They were opportunist voices, insinuated themselves whether he was ready to hear them or not. And sometimes they were lucky. They’d have him going down the road to that all-night club on Bootham where you could score anything if you had the cash.

  But tonight wasn’t their night. Sam didn’t keep booze in the house and he wasn’t going to move an inch until he got the phone call. He might see the world differently after that, he didn’t know, couldn’t tell from here. But he didn’t think that Geordie’s news, whatever it was, would alter his focus. He was feeling strong, alert. There was something going on that he didn’t understand but he knew that it was going to require all of his strength and all of his attention to keep pace with it.

  Sam Turner knew about the illusions that are stored up in bottles of alcohol and he knew better than anybody else that his own physical and emotional constitution couldn’t cope with them. For whatever reason he was an alcoholic and he always would be. And the lesson meant that he couldn’t drink without getting drunk. Not ever. He could bluff it with a bottle of wine and some candles, make it look like he was a social drinker for a while. But once his system tasted the real thing he’d put his head down and charge at the red rag of reason.

  He listened to the night. The expansion and contraction of the house, the gently falling rain, panicking wind trapped in the howling cul-de-sac of the guttering. He heard the occasional footfall as a neighbour or a prowler sought some private meaning of their own. And he started from time to time as the local tomcats fought off the competition, then returned to their soliciting of Miss Debbie and Lala, the neighbourhood’s resident feline beauty queens.

  Sam made a pot of coffee and brought it over to the table and the phone rang before he could pour it into a cup.

  ‘Yeah?’

  Geordie said, ‘OK, I’ve got it. The couple were called Day. Rolf and Nicole. They moved in last year so the neighbours don’t know much about them. He was a lecturer at the university.’

  ‘Small guy,’ said Sam. ‘Glasses. An existentialist. He thought he’d discovered how reality is constituted by consciousness.’

  ‘You knew him?’ Geordie asked.

  ‘Never met the guy,’ Sam said. ‘But Nicole and I were an item before she ran off with him. She talked about him all the time. I got the impression he was a genius.’

  ‘Jesus, Sam, somebody wants you nailed to a cross.’

  ‘Seems that way. I’d better make myself scarce before the knock on the door comes.’

  ‘Where will you go?’

  ‘Dunno yet, Geordie. I’ll be in touch. Look after yourself.’

  ‘You too, Sam. And let me know what to do next, get you out of this one.’

  Sam put the phone down. He scratched his head and reached for his rucksack. No time to waste. With all these clues about and modern policing methods, the boys in blue might put two and two together and be here before Christmas.

  He was ready to leave when the phone rang again. Something Geordie had forgotten to tell him. But as soon as he picked up the handset he knew it wasn’t Geordie. A discernible silence for a moment, then the voice of Bonner. ‘Am I talking to Sam Turner?’

  Sam kept shtoom. Waited.

  A thin laugh came down the wire. No humour to it. Bonner said, ‘I know it’s you, Mr Turner. I’ve an observation for you. It’s the middle of the night now but this morning, when your ex-partner was transformed -could have been you.’

  ‘Who are you?’ Sam said. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Think of me as a man with a list, Mr Turner. You might recognize some of the names on it. Katherine Turner, Nicole Day, Holly Andersen, Alice Richardson, and I think you can add the last name yourself.’

  ‘Indulge me,’ Sam said, knowing whose name would complete the list, but wanting to keep the guy on the phone, hoping he would give himself away, or at least leave a tiny clue to his identity.

  ‘Miss Angeles Falco,’ the voice said.

  The line went dead and Sam headed for the door. ‘File that away,’ he said to himself. ‘That single word, transformed. “When your ex-partner was transformed”.’

  16

  Ruben dropped the empties off and parked his van. Since he’d crushed the detective’s balls there’d been the nagging suspicion that the police would pick him up, lay another assault charge on him. But he hadn’t heard anything. The detective didn’t know who he was anyway, and he’d brought it on himself, chasing Ruben down the street like that. For what? For taking the guy’s photograph? Like that was an offence?

  The detective, Sam Turner, Kitty’s ex... he should be happy that he came out of it with only a knee in the balls. Any other time Ruben would’ve landed a straight right on the guy’s honker, his killer punch. Could’ve been broken bone, blood and smashed cartilage instead of a couple of bruised pills.

  Ruben had noticed this before with other people. They tended to escalate situations. What Ruben did, his instinct was to contain any situation which arose. Violence can flare up in a moment, sometimes it only takes a word or an accidental shove, anything can start the thing off. Ruben would respond by downing the other guy as simply and as quickly as possible. Finished. The situation’s over and contained and everybody can go about their business. But what happened if Ruben didn’t get in there first, sort the thing, was that the other guy would start shouting or shoving, maybe put his fists up and come for you. Other people’d join in, especially if it was in a pub, Saturday night, say, or a football match and everyone’d had a few. You could end up in a brawl. Then before you know where you are the local bottles are round and pushing you into the back of a Black Maria. They’re escalating the situation as well. Next day they’ll have you in front of a beak and there’ll be a fine at least, something you can’t afford. Somebody’s old lady will have to fork it out of the housekeeping or get another loan and so she’s dragged into it now. The kids aren’t getting enough grub. The guy feels guilty because he’s let his family down so the kids and the missis all get a slap or two and the thing’s escalated out of all proportion. And for why? Because somebody like Ruben wasn’t there in the first place to contain it, that’s why. You didn’t have to be a politician or a copper or a soldier to keep law and order. You just needed to have your head screwed on the right way.

  After he showered, Ruben put on a pair of black jeans and a leather belt with a Cherokee buckle and a T-shirt that showed off his biceps. He wore white socks with black trainers and round his neck he hung his gold ingot on its gold chain. Bit of class there to prove he wasn’t a common thicky.

  Kitty’s last boyfriend lived near Anstey and Ruben headed down the A46 imagining what would happen when he came face to face with the guy. All he had was his name - Pete Lewis - and the fact that Kitty had dumped him because he was a skinflint. Ruben couldn’t understand why she’d gone out with a skinflint in the first place. The word conjured up a picture of a Scrooge-like character, somebody who wouldn’t buy himself a razor blade and wore those fingerless gloves and in the winter he’d sit around a candle to keep warm.

  Maybe the guy had gone to the house to rob her? He’d seen she was living OK and thought he could add a few quid to his hoard. Only the robbery had gone wrong. Kitty had found him in the house and he’d killed her to keep
her quiet, cover his tracks. Ruben decided to ask him straight out. He’d know if the guy was lying, squeeze the truth out of him.

  He enquired in the village from some tiny gentleman type with a pooch who looked as though he’d be more at home in the city. Straight people like that, Ruben always thought they’d run off if he spoke to them, but some of them, like this one, didn’t even blink. He knew the area, pointed Ruben back down the road to a building that looked like it had been converted from a ruin.

  He glanced back, got the pooch guy in his mirror and idled the engine while he took in who the man was, what made him tick. But there were no clues. Everything about him was small. He had short legs and a round little body. Made his head look big but Ruben reckoned if he measured it it’d be the same size as other people’s, maybe even smaller. He wore a dark grey suit made for a midget, a checked waistcoat and tiny, highly polished shoes, one on each foot. Gloves with itsy-bitsy fingers. The guy was a doll, and his dog was a doll as well, like a couple out of Toytown.

  What kind of life can somebody like that have? Ruben wondered. If he was any shorter he’d be underground. No woman is gonna look at him twice unless she’s running her own circus. Nothing ever changes for someone like that, it’s the same day rehashed time and time again. No guys would wanna be out with him; like imagine taking him down the boozer on a Friday night. What’s everyone gonna say? Hey, Rube’s brought his uncle out; can you make him walk the walk?

  This’s why euthanasia is such a good idea. Especially for little guys like him. Save all that suffering, all that pain and humiliation. Kitty’d say you couldn’t measure somebody else’s pain and, humiliation. You could never say for certain how someone else experienced existence. And the things that Kitty said, Ruben listened to them, he gave them serious consideration because she was a woman who was usually right. More right than wrong. He could hear her voice from somewhere beyond the grave, sticking up for the little guy, little people all over the world. Anything to do with prisons or with corporal or capital punishment, torture, anything like that Kitty would say it was wrong. You could guarantee it. If it was gonna hurt or someone was gonna end up dead, she’d have an argument against it. It was like a principle with her. Only Kitty had never actually seen the guy with the pooch. Maybe he would have changed her mind?

  Ruben drove up to the old mill building. From a distance it looked like it’d been restored but when you got close up you couldn’t see where any work had taken place for a long time. At least a hundred years. The place was still a ruin. There was a part of it towards the west end that had fallen down and was a heap of bricks and broken window frame. But the end nearest the road was more promising; if you were an optimist you might think people could live there.

  He knocked on the door and listened to the hollow sound that echoed back. He waited a few moments and knocked again, louder. There was a scuffling sound from inside and then that distinctive pad of bare feet on wooden boards. The door opened and the pale face of a girl, couldn’t have been more than sixteen, peered up at him from the dark interior. She had a silver stud above her right eye and a red stone in her nose. She had a blanket around her shoulders and was clasping both ends of it together under her chin. Abnormally long fingernails, could take your eyes out in a flash. Ruben could see she was naked under the blanket and her pupils were large in the light as if she had just been wrenched from sleep.

  ‘Pete Lewis,’ Ruben said.

  ‘He’s still in bed. What time is it?’

  ‘Half-eight, nine.’

  ‘Jesus. D’you wanna come back later?’ Her tongue was pierced and the silver stud clattered against her teeth.

  Ruben leaned on the door and pushed her to one side. He went inside and closed the door behind him. ‘Tell him he’s got a visitor,’ he said. He followed her along a dark corridor, the property smelling more like a barn than a place inhabited by humans. Rank body odours, stale cigarettes, sex and home-brewed wine. Ruben wouldn’t have been surprised to see a couple of chickens in there, a flock of sheep.

  At the end of the corridor she pushed open a large oak door and scurried over to a double mattress in the centre of the floor. Her clothes and shoes were scattered on the floor on one side of the bed and the guy’s clothes were on the other side, next to the bulge under the blanket.

  ‘Peter,’ she said, her hand on the bulge, ‘there’s a chap here. Someone to see you.’

  ‘Uh. Yeah.’

  But the guy’s breathing returned to normal and he remained under the blanket. The girl turned to Ruben and shrugged her shoulders. Tried a smile on him, the kind of facial expression which suggested complicity. We’re never gonna wake him, it said. Might as well let him sleep.

  Ruben took a couple of steps to the side of the bed. He grabbed the blanket and pulled it off the bed.

  ‘Aaaagh,’ said the guy, lying there naked with his eyes screwed shut. His hands patted around the bed for the missing blanket. ‘Oh, aaaagh.’

  Not at all like Scrooge, Ruben thought. He was skinny, it was true, but he was young, still in his twenties, and he had long blond hair and a choker of coloured glass beads around his neck. He was unconscious, his morning hard-on the only thing about him that wasn’t sleeping.

  ‘What are you doing?’ the girl said, raising her voice as Ruben took hold of the guy’s foot and walked towards the door. The guy came awake but not quick enough to stop his head cracking against the floorboards. Ruben walked around the room. The guy’s free leg was crumpled under him and his bare back was scraping along the floor. He was spitting profanities, trying his best to wriggle free, but Ruben kept a tight grip of him. The girl was hysterical. She’d done a couple of ear-splitting screams and jumped up and down for a minute. Now she’d abandoned her blanket, which was the only thing that covered her, and was throwing herself at Ruben in a valiant and fearless attempt to rescue her man. Ruben brushed her aside but he was conscious of her talons which were intent on raking the flesh from his face.

  Her final attack was so ferocious he had to let go of the guy’s foot. He grabbed both of her wrists and held them behind her, pushed her face-down on the bed. ‘OK, it’s over,’ he said.

  The girl didn’t hear or didn’t want to hear. She carried on flailing her legs, twisting her neck and showing her teeth as if she’d been attacked by termites. ‘OK,’ Ruben roared close to her ear. ‘It’s over. Shut the fuck up.’

  That got through. She quietened down, looked around the room and saw that Pete Lewis was sitting on his hands in the corner by the door, his knees drawn up under his chin. Ruben released her wrists and she rolled herself up in a sheet, still muttering under her breath. She said something about muscle-bound tossers, didn’t sound like a compliment. Then there was a reference to testosterone and macho posturing. Kind of things that Kitty might have said, only not about Ruben because he didn’t do macho posturing around Kitty. Or when he did do it he dipped it in a bath of irony first, which seemed to make it acceptable.

  They were both sobbing, the girl on the bed and the guy in the corner by the door. Ruben looked around for someone to blame but he was the only one there. ‘Christ,’ he said. ‘I only wanted to ask you some questions. I drove out from Nottingham and you don’t even get out of bed.’

  ‘It’s the middle of the night,’ the girl shouted at him through her tears. ‘I thought you was gonna kill us.’

  ‘My head’s bleeding,’ Pete Lewis said.

  The girl scrambled off the bed and crawled over to him. The sheet didn’t cover her ass but no one seemed to mind. Ruben didn’t think it was erotic. It could have been if there hadn’t been all that tension in the air or if he didn’t feel guilty or if he was the kind of guy got turned on by a bony ass.

  The girl was ministering to her man’s wounds, whispering sympathetically and dabbing away at the back of his head with a corner of the sheet. His face was white.

  ‘Listen, I wanna apologize for my behaviour,’ Ruben said. ‘I was out of order back there.’ Pete Lewis and his gi
rlfriend looked at him with big eyes. Ruben couldn’t tell if his apology had the effect of calming them or putting them on red-alert. The guy was shaking, his mouth was open and he was wringing his hands like a bereaved mother. He said, ‘I think I’m going to be sick.’

  Ruben took a step towards them but the guy shrank away, tried to push himself through the wall. ‘He’s in shock,’ Ruben said.

  ‘What do you expect?’ the girl asked.

  ‘It’s my fault,’ Ruben acknowledged. ‘I already apologized. I shouldn’t’ve lost it.’ He watched them together for a moment, remembering what you did about shock. ‘I’m gonna make tea,’ he said. ‘You see if you can get him into bed. Keep him warm.’

  He went through to the kitchen and found a kettle and filled it with water. Lit the flame on an ancient gas stove. He emptied the teapot of a mash of cold leaves and flushed them down the sink. ‘Where do you keep the tea?’ he shouted. Then he saw it on the shelf. ‘It’s all right, I’ve got it.’

  What it was, shock, it was to do with the lack of blood supply. The vital functions of the body couldn’t get working properly. ‘How’s he doing?’ Ruben shouted through to the bedroom.

  There was no reply.

  ‘What’s his skin like? Is it clammy?’

  ‘Yeah,’ she shouted back. ‘He’s cold and he’s sweating.’ Ruben made the tea and poured it into a mug. He added a couple of spoons of sugar and a good dollop of milk. He carried it through to the bedroom and sat on the edge of the bed. Pete Lewis was lying on his back, the eiderdown close up against his chin. His eyes followed Ruben’s every move. His breathing was shallow and rapid.

  ‘Make him sip this,’ Ruben said, handing the mug to the girl. He looked at the guy long and hard. There was no way he could have killed Kitty. It wasn’t even worth asking. ‘Maybe you should ring the doctor,’ he said. ‘No.’ Pete Lewis shook his head.