The meanest Flood

by Baker, John

  ‘But who does it remind you of?’

  ‘Beard and specs? The only person I know like that is JD.’

  ‘Right on. He went to JD’s place, borrowed an old pair of specs and the guy’s passport and birth certificate. And he’s travelled halfway round Europe under a false identity.’

  ‘Yeah, it’s easy to do something like that now,’ Janet said. ‘European Union.’

  ‘If I travelled on someone else’s passport, Janet, they wouldn’t let me on the boat. This’s one of the things that’s infuriating about Sam. He can get away with stuff like that. He thinks, Oh, I’ll be JD, and next time you turn around he’s disappeared and a kind of cheap imitation of JD has taken his place.’

  ‘How is he?’

  ‘He’s cool on the outside, like always. You know what he’s like. You look at the guy, you listen to him and you wouldn’t know he was feeling anything. But this thing is getting to him. He can’t understand what’s happening. He doesn’t have any more of a clue than you or me. I’m worried he might crack.’

  ‘He’s under a lot of pressure, Geordie.’

  ‘I’ve seen him under pressure before. Usually pressure gets him going, makes him sharp. But what’s happening to him now’s the opposite of that. Seems like it’s putting him to sleep.’

  Janet was quiet at the other end. She said, ‘You take care, you hear?’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘You can worry about Sam but I’m OK.’

  ‘Where are you staying?’

  ‘Sam’s got this flat. Belongs to a friend of a friend. Somebody he knows. Nice place. The guy who owns it is in Helsinki.’

  Janet was quiet at the other end of the line.

  ‘You still there?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Are you watching your back?’

  ‘All the time. This’s a foreign country. How’re you managing without me?’

  ‘We’ll get by,’ she said coyly. ‘But don’t take too long.’

  ‘Don’t worry ’bout that,’ he told her. ‘There’s nothing here I believe in. Except you.’

  18

  The magician was pleased. ‘He’s gone,’ he told Jody. ‘First you saw him, then you didn’t. Disappeared.’ Sam Turner, private eye, alive and well, living in York until Diamond Danny waved his magic wand.

  The world was astonished. The police and the newspapers, the television people and the man’s neighbours, they were spinning round in disbelief. Where could he have gone? Where could he be?

  Sam Turner was like a rag doll. Diamond Danny’s magical powers had lifted him up in a flash and deposited him in the capital city of another country. The spectators, even the subject himself, were only aware of the movement of the wand and the accompanying flash. They didn’t realize that everything was in the preparation, that everything had been arranged weeks in advance.

  Danny finished moving his bowels and collected the breakfast tray. Jody was lying on the rug in front of the couch, one of her legs behind her neck in a parody of some yoga position. As he washed his bowl and cup at the kitchen sink he smiled to himself. It was the best trick he’d ever devised, no doubt about it. Elegant. But at the same time it carried enormous risks. The research had been rigorous and that was certainly one of the factors that had led to its success. Turner had a logical way of thinking and he rarely panicked. Danny had always known that the man would follow the sequence and take himself off to Oslo. He had to be there, after all, in order to be implicated in the crime.

  If Turner wasn’t by her side the woman couldn’t die. The dominoes were carefully placed. If one of them remained standing the illusion would fail.

  ‘The symmetry is captivating,’ he told Jody. ‘Beguiling.’

  As a teenager, Danny had gone to the National Gallery of Art in Washington with his mother and stood before Picasso’s Tragedy. The painting had brought the young Danny Mann to tears. Perhaps that was symmetry, too? Danny didn’t know what it was. The painting was blue. There were three figures on a beach, thin, emaciated, a man, a woman and a boy. They appeared to be a group but they didn’t communicate; there was no eye-contact. The man and woman looked down at their bare feet and the young boy weighed imponderables in the palms of his hands. Danny thought they were poor but that didn’t explain the title of the painting. It felt as though a death had taken place, that they had lost someone and the loss had fractured their existence as a family. But there was no real story. Only a conclusion.

  Danny had stood before the large wooden panel and let the tears stream down his face. His mother had returned and put her arms around him but he was inconsolable. She had led him from the gallery into the sunshine and eventually he’d stopped crying and agreed to go back for another look. Danny believed that in the whole of his life nothing had touched him more deeply than that painting.

  The attendant had told them that Picasso had painted two other pictures underneath Tragedy. There was a thickly painted action scene from the bullring, and another bullfight painting, showing a dead horse being dragged from the ring. Danny thought that that might be a clue to the tragedy, but he wasn’t sure what the clue meant.

  After his mother died, Danny would wake in the night or in the early morning enfeebled and debilitated, weak in spirit and his physical body. And he would recall the picture of the three blue figures and think of the young Picasso labouring away in Barcelona in 1903.

  Symmetry, perfection. It made you weep because the parts fitted so neatly together. It was a rare thing in the world when that could be conjured up. That moment of harmony when the spinning and exploding atoms of chaos fall into a trance of blueness.

  To the south of York, on the outskirts of Selby, Diamond Danny parked outside an old gabled house set back from the road and surrounded by a line of conifers and waterlogged fields. There was a white canvas kitbag on the passenger seat of the car, held in place by the seatbelt. Danny struggled with the release mechanism of the seatbelt but it was faulty and would not open for some time. He swore quietly under his breath as he tried to locate the exact angle at which he had to press the release button. A ridiculous situation for a magician. He could open any door, make solid objects pass through brick walls, and here he was struggling with a seatbelt. Tomorrow, no, today he would get it fixed. The mechanism finally gave way and Danny tucked the kitbag under his arm. Leaving the car unlocked, he approached the front door of the house and gave three thumps with the heavy brass knocker. A small plaque on the wall declared the occupier to be J. C. Nott.

  The young man who answered the door was slight, bespectacled and balding prematurely. He wore a striped shirt which looked like it had been a pyjama top in a previous incarnation. The sleeves were rolled to the elbows. He raised his eyebrows when he saw Danny Mann. ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘What brings you here?’

  ‘Problem,’ Danny said. ‘Can I come in?’

  ‘Yes. I’m in the workshop.’ He led the way through the rambling house to a room at the back which had a single high window. There were workbenches on two walls, racks for tools above them, and several angle-poised halogen lamps.

  A headless female figure was stretched out on one bench, knees drawn up and hands clenched together over her lower chest. Under the bench was a wicker basket which contained two arms, one with a hand and the other without. Next to the basket was a large glass jar with long tresses of auburn hair.

  ‘Is it Jody?’ the young man asked, indicating the kitbag under the magician’s arm.

  ‘Yes, afraid so.’ Danny laid the bag on the floor and pulled Jody out. She was covered by one of his shirts and he unfastened the buttons to reveal her left breast. The young man winced as he came forward to inspect the damage. Jody’s nipple was almost severed from the breast, hanging on by four or five millimetres of flesh-like plastic.

  J. C. Nott adjusted his spectacles and brought his face close to the injury. He ran his index finger around the torn area, gently pushing upwards to reunite the papilla with the surrounding aureole. ‘Nasty,’ he said. ‘Teeth?’


  The magician nodded, tight-lipped. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘It’s bad,’ the young man said. ‘I can fix it but it’s going to happen again. Better if I replace the whole breast, reinforce it somehow. Or both breasts? It’s not going to be cheap.’

  ‘You’re the artist,’ Danny told him. ‘I don’t want to know the details, and I don’t care about the money. How long before I get her back?’

  ‘I’ll need a week,’ the artist said. ‘Give her a complete going over. She got any other problems?’

  Danny shook his head. ‘A week’s a long time.’

  ‘Give me a ring on Thursday,’ the young man said. ‘I’ll try to get her done for the weekend.’

  ‘I don’t want anything changing,’ Danny told him. ‘I mean size. They’re just right as they are. I’m used to them now.’ He’d wondered, shortly after taking delivery of her for the first time. He’d imagined something bigger, something he could bury his head in, but he’d made adjustments in his thinking, accepting the reality of the situation. Now he liked her exactly as she was. If she came back with a different cup size it’d be like committing adultery.

  He glanced back at her on the bench as he left the workshop. The bottom corner of the shirt had fallen away over her hip and her blonde pubic hair was visible. The magician took a couple of steps back into the room and covered her. Jody didn’t mind who looked at her or what kind of state she was in. But Danny minded.

  On the dashboard of his car was a white petalled flower, its heart deep crimson, as if stained with blood. Danny reached for it and brought it to his nose. He peered through the windscreen and the side windows of the car, but there was no one in sight. He smiled to himself. Could be magic.

  Women did this to him. He released something in them so that they gave him presents. But their ardour didn’t last. They were fickle. The only constant in his life these days, apart from his work, was Jody.

  Driving home without her, he felt bereft, as though some cord had been cut. He was stoical about it, all of these things were sent to try us. And it wasn’t as if she was a lot of help about the house. He smiled, glad that he had a sense of humour. It had been his salvation on many occasions, the ability to see the funny side of a situation. Some men let life get them down, fell into depression and negativity. But Danny didn’t do that; he didn’t need to, he had magic on his side.

  Before Jody he had been lonely. There had always been women, but their presence only added to the loneliness. After his mother died it’d got worse. He’d gone to Bangkok to meet girls who wanted a western husband. Had a fortnight there, interviewing one girl after another, so many of them it was difficult to choose. Their quiet obedience was impressive, their flowing dresses and bright black eyes. He’d learned some magic there as well, on the banks of the Chao Phraya River. The magic of the void. The importance of Zero.

  Back in England he almost got around to ordering one of those girls.

  If it hadn’t been for the man in the Adult Shop suggesting he have a look at the work of J. C. Nott, Diamond Danny would have got himself a Thai wife and he’d never have met Jody at all.

  On reflection Danny was confident that he’d made the right choice. In a way a Thai girl would have been an attempt to replace his mother, and you can’t do that. You can’t replace your mother, not ever. Jody wasn’t anything like a mother.

  She was a work of art.

  Marilyn waited in the street and when the magician drove out of his garage she followed at a discreet distance in her mother’s car.

  He followed a route out of York, through the flooded main street of Fulford and along the A19 in the direction of Selby. When he pulled into the left, behind a plantation of conifers, she drove past and parked by the side of the road. She left Ellen’s car and walked back. She could see Danny’s car in the driveway of a large gabled house but Danny was no longer behind the wheel.

  She avoided the pebbled drive and pushed her way through the trees. The house was quiet, the windows showing only empty rooms. There was no movement and no sound of voices.

  In a small garden around the side of the house she found Hibiscus sinosyriacus ‘Autumn Surprise’, brilliant and cheerful against the dark soil. She plucked the flower from the stem and carried it back to Danny’s car, thinking she would tuck it beneath his wiper-blades. But as she approached the car she could see that the locks were standing proud. With a glance towards the house she pulled open the driver’s door and kissed the flower before placing it on his dashboard.

  From the shelter of the conifers she watched as the door of the house opened and Danny was framed there with a bald young man in a pyjama top. They shook hands and the young man went back into the house, closing the door behind him. Danny got into his car and Marilyn watched as he reached for the ‘Autumn Surprise’ and brought it to his lips. He looked for her, but she kept still and quiet and waited for him to start the car and steer it down the drive, turning back towards York when he reached the main road.

  When he’d gone Marilyn walked over to the door of the house and read the plaque on the wall: J. C. Nott. Nothing else. Just the name. It didn’t say J. C. Nott, Magician, or J. C. Nott, Magicians’ Supplier. From reading the name on the plaque Marilyn couldn’t decipher what it was that J. C. Nott did and what it was that Danny had been to see him about. Danny hadn’t come out of the house with anything, but it was possible that he had taken something inside. She couldn’t say for sure.

  She thought of knocking on the door with the brass knocker. She could pretend that she was lost or she could say Ellen’s car had broken down and ask to use the telephone. But she didn’t knock. There was something about the young man in the pyjama top. She didn’t want to find herself trapped in that house with him. Maybe it was his baldness or the way the light had reflected off his glasses? Marilyn didn’t know what it was but there was something when she thought of being alone with him that made her want to shudder.

  Back at home she looked up the number in the telephone directory.

  ‘J. C. Nott,’ the voice said.

  ‘Do you make magic tricks?’ Marilyn said into the mouthpiece.

  There was silence. ‘Are you sure you’ve got the right number?’ he said finally.

  ‘Yes, I think so,’ Marilyn said. ‘What do you do?’

  ‘My name is James Nott. I’m an artist.’

  ‘Oh, I see,’ Marilyn said. ‘I’ve got the wrong number.’ She put the phone down.

  An artist. That explained it. Danny was going to have his portrait painted. Maybe it was to be a surprise? For her? That was one of the problems of snooping, especially on a lover. You discovered things you’d rather not know. Spoiled a nice surprise.

  But Danny wouldn’t know what she’d done. So long as she didn’t let it slip during one of their long conversations. So long as he continued to sit for the artist. So long as she could act surprised when he eventually presented her with the portrait.

  The doorbell rang and Danny collected his suitcase and checked that he’d switched off the gas-ring and the grill. He locked the door behind him and climbed into the back of the taxi.

  ‘Where we going, guv?’

  ‘The railway station, please. No need to rush. We’ve got plenty of time.’

  ‘The river’s still rising,’ the cabby said. ‘They’re talking about evacuating people from their houses.’

  ‘I don’t think it’ll come to that,’ Danny said.

  The taxi-driver shrugged his shoulders. ‘It’s looking bad, worst I’ve seen, and I’ve been driving over it for the past twenty year.’

  On the train to Newcastle Danny looked out at the waterlogged landscape. Everywhere rivers had crept over their banks and taken to the fields. There was no rain that day and pale sunlight illuminated scenes of reflective stillness. White clouds in glistening lakes surrounded the railway tracks. All wildlife except a smattering of birds had been drowned or moved to higher ground. Here and there the tops of hedgerows were stubbornly visible and magnific
ent oaks and beeches affected a lofty disregard for the rising tides.

  ‘Beautiful.’ The speaker was a young man sitting opposite Danny. Blond hair, blue eyes, slight shoulders and a hard-backed book. The word left his lips like a sigh, a whisper.

  ‘And deadly,’ said his companion, a bespectacled, squat youth who looked around the table for a sympathetic response from Danny and the tall, stately black woman who sat beside him. Danny avoided eye-contact.

  ‘Climate change, this is happening all over the world. The result of western nations opting for economies which entail pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. As the climate warms the polar caps begin to melt and sea levels rise. Result is more rainfall and flooding. Blame the oil companies and the American Senate.’

  ‘Beautiful, though,’ the original speaker said. ‘Breathtaking.’

  The squat one looked around the table shaking his head and smiling, proud of his friend’s sensitivity.

  Danny wondered if they were homosexuals and closed his eyes to imagine them together. He pictured them naked by the sea under a blistering sun, the scene suffused with an air of tragedy. The beautiful one would die and his companion would be left alone to wander the earth. He’d never worry about climate change again.

  People didn’t know about magic even though they were surrounded by it. All that water standing on the fields, they just accepted it, called it rainfall as though that explained something. These days everyone had a schoolboy grasp of science and they believed in it implicitly. But they were hypnotized. Seduced and beguiled by the power of advertising or the fashion business or the dumbed-down norms that society and the political parties paraded as virtue. Everyone, almost everyone, had forgotten that human life is a miracle and that we are all conjurors and wizards. They have been denied so often that the prophecy has become self-fulfilling.

  The history of the world has been a war between wizards. Slowly, insidiously, those with the greater magic have stripped the rest of mankind of their powers. And the final act of the victors, the twist in the tail, has been the vanishing trick to end all vanishing tricks. By a neat sleight of hand the wizards and warlocks of the earth, the necromancers and sorcerers and enchanters who make up the vast bulk of mankind, have had the knowledge of their own magic whisked away from them. Now, instead of mixing potions or guaranteeing a food supply or guiding the destiny of their communities, they sit in front of TV screens and store junk information in databases and fervently defend the infantile thesis that two and two make four.