The meanest Flood

by Baker, John

  22

  Weird things happened to Ruben the first Wednesday after Katherine was killed. He got up at the usual time in the morning - 4.30 a.m. - and went down the depot. He loaded his van with crates of milk and drove to the Marple Square Estate. Not many people around at that time in the morning. Some houses with lights showing, people trying to con the local burglars that they were wide awake.

  The estate had a bad name and it was true there were a few wide boys about and some of the kids ran wild. You asked people who didn’t live there and they’d tell you the place was riddled with crime, robberies and violence; you listened to the Nottingham intelligentsia and the media and you’d imagine Marple Square was terrorized by gangs of drug-crazed vandals ripping down trees and spray-painting their neighbours’ houses and cars twenty-four/seven.

  But it wasn’t so bad. Occasionally Ruben would put milk on a doorstep and when the woman came to collect it for breakfast it’d be gone. But that wasn’t once a week, not even once a month. Two of his customers had been burgled while he was doing the round. One of them lost a video and a wide-screen TV and the other had the house stripped of everything, including a freezer full of pizzas and sausages and onion rings. An old black guy had been mugged coming out of the post office with his pension, and a group of Asian teenagers had tried to set fire to a pub. There must’ve been other incidents that Ruben hadn’t heard about but altogether he didn’t think it was worse than other estates. If he compared it to Hyson Green, where he had been a kid in a high-rise, Ruben would’ve classed Marple Square as crime-free.

  When they’d let him out of the joint Ruben had gone back to have a look at Hyson Green and they’d torn all the high-rise flats down. Looked like a good place to be now. Lot of life on the street, made you feel like you were part of something. Only Ruben wasn’t, because he didn’t live there any longer. Ruben wasn’t part of anything any more, not until he met Kitty Turner, and then he became part of the world.

  He must’ve delivered about half the milk when it happened. He’d dropped two bottles of semi and collected nine empties from the same step. He’d stuffed the empties into crates and got back behind the wheel of the van. What he’d have done normally, he’d have turned the key in the ignition and pulled forward a hundred metres, parked outside number thirty-nine. But he didn’t do anything. Instead he sat behind the wheel and looked out through the windscreen. Didn’t see anything particularly, didn’t feel anything, and nothing was going on in his mind.

  It was like he’d wound down. When he was a kid he’d had a truck did that. Ran off a battery and it’d suddenly stop. The battery’d die and the truck was no good until you got the old battery out and put a new one in.

  Ruben sat behind the steering wheel for nearly two hours. He wasn’t unconscious, he could see people walking along the street. Sometimes someone would look in at him through the side window and Ruben would see them out of the corner of his eye. But he didn’t turn his head. He didn’t move. He played with the idea that if he moved his head it would fall off, that if he lifted his arm his hand would disintegrate. But it wasn’t playing. There was no fun in it. It was serious. He closed his eyes a couple of times and then he daren’t open them in case he’d gone blind.

  Weird things. Your battery goes dead and your mind fills up with fantasies of disintegration. Perhaps he was dying or already dead? Once or twice since Kitty got hers he’d thought of topping himself. So maybe he’d done it to himself, gassed himself with exhaust fumes from the van, or he could’ve taken an overdose of Paracetamol. Didn’t remember doing it, but if he was dead he wouldn’t remember anything.

  There was this place, he seemed to remember, place called Limbo where you went after you died. Somewhere off the shores of Hell. It was like a huge waiting room, white walls fading into blue. But Ruben didn’t know where he’d heard about it. He knew there was something Jamokes did, arching their backs and going under a stick. And that was Limbo as well.

  The woman from thirty-five knocked on the side window of the van and stuck her big face up against the window. ‘D’you know what time it is?’ she shouted.

  Ruben didn’t move.

  She knocked again. ‘What’s wrong with you? I want my milk.’

  Ruben moved. Slowly. He got out of the van and went around the back. He got a pint of each and handed them to the woman.

  ‘Don’t bother apologizing,’ she said. ‘He’s only been waiting for his breakfast half an hour.’

  It was 7.30. Ruben was usually back at the depot by this time, unloading empties. He got into the van and parked outside number thirty-nine. He went through the actions. He delivered milk, collected empty bottles. But his limbs were heavy, his body slow and his mind numb. He stopped again in the next street, spent another hour sitting behind the steering wheel.

  It was 2.20 in the afternoon when he pulled into the last street on the estate. Two women were standing together, their arms folded. They watched him roll the van up to the kerb. Ruben got out of the driving seat and went around the back to load up his hand carrier, and he froze there. He dropped a bottle of skimmed and watched it land on the floor of the van and roll out of reach. Didn’t break.

  Some time later the two women came and got him. Ruben didn’t know how long he’d been standing there with the door of the van open.

  ‘He’s crying, Shaz,’ one of them said.

  ‘Jesus. Whatever next? Help me get him in the house.’

  ‘Big bloke like this, crying.’

  They took him by the hands, one hand for each of them, and led him away from the van, through the gate and along the cracked concrete path to the front door. There was a rectangular lawn with a kid’s bike on it. A blue plastic dumper truck with three wheels.

  These women were the smallest things in the world. Tiny hands, faces like fairies.

  ‘Mind the step,’ the one called Shaz said. ‘Jesus, look at the curtains going. They think we’ve got a feller. Give ’em a wave, Stell.’

  They ushered him into the house and sat him on a red leatherette sofa with imitation zebra-skin cushions. There was a TV with the sound turned up to maximum less than a metre away from his face and a log-effect gas fire blazing in a pale-blue tiled fireplace.

  ‘I’ll put the kettle on,’ Shaz said. ‘Watch him.’

  ‘Are you all right, darlin’?’ Stell said. ‘D’you want some tissues?’

  Her shins were scorched and mottled by long hours of sitting too close to the fire. Ruben took the tissues she offered and held them in his hand while the tears rolled down his face and dripped from his chin.

  ‘What happened to you?’ Stell said. ‘You’re six hours late. I went round the shop and bought a carton. Thought you weren’t coming, or you forgot us.’

  There was a war on the TV. A Pacific paradise was littered with the dead and broken bodies of Japanese soldiers. Guns were shooting off-screen. A helicopter flew over. A dumb American hero larded with olive oil was staring into space while he listened to it-shouldn’t-have-been-like-this music coming from stereo speakers.

  He was the kind of man Ruben had dreamed of becoming when he was young. A man with nothing except an extraordinary punch who would find himself in a position to save the world. When he was a teenager Ruben didn’t know if he would use his punch or let the world go to Hell and it was the same with the figure on the screen. You could see it in his body language. He had done his duty and the world was safe but it might have been better if he hadn’t bothered. The man was still alone. His government would give him a few gongs to mask the bloodstains but even if they gouged out his eyes he’d see the horror every day of his life.

  ‘Kitty,’ he said.

  ‘What’s he say?’ Shaz said, coming back into the room with three mugs of tea on a tray.

  ‘Kiddie, something like that.’

  ‘Sounded like titty to me,’ Shaz said, and they both shook for a moment.

  ‘Might be your lucky day,’ Stell told him.

  ‘Kitty,’ Ruben said, g
etting an edge into his voice. The tears stopped falling and he wiped his face with the tissues. He looked from one woman to the other. Shaz had blonde hair and black roots and Stell had white skin and black features. They both wore glossy lipstick and lilac nail varnish.

  ‘I’m bereaved,’ he told them.

  ‘Oh,’ said Stell.

  ‘Shame,’ Shaz whispered.

  Bereaved. He’d never used the word before. It came out of him and he didn’t know it was in there. Maybe every word in the English language was lodged somewhere inside him? All the words he’d heard as a child and read in books and listened to on the radio and the television. Words he didn’t know the meaning of and composite words made up of the parts of other words. Nonsense words like ninglethroatynop.

  He needed to taste it on his tongue. ‘Bereaved.’

  ‘Who was it? Your wife?’ Shaz asked.

  ‘Not a kiddie?’

  He shook his head. ‘Kitty.’

  ‘It’s his wife,’ Stell said. ‘It’s your wife, isn’t it, darlin’?’ She mouthed the words as though she was talking to a deaf man. ‘Your wife?’

  My life, he wanted to say but it was too much to share. Ruben felt as though there was something inhabiting him, some alien presence. Could there be a part of himself that he had never noticed before, never suspected?

  ‘Awful,’ Stell said. ‘You need to see somebody. When did it happen?’

  He left them standing at the gate. Got back behind the wheel and dropped off the last of his milk. He unloaded the empties at the depot while the gateman asked him over and over again what had happened to him.

  He drove home and changed his clothes and walked down to the doctor’s surgery. The receptionist told him he was wasting his time and that Doctor couldn’t possibly see him without an appointment, but Ruben waited anyway and around 6.30 the doctor called him into her wood-panelled room.

  Ruben told her what had happened. He told her about the milk-round and the two women taking him into the house and giving him tea with sugar and brandy. He told her about being inhabited and about meaning being meaningless and reason being unreasonable.

  ‘Has something changed in your life?’ the doctor asked. ‘Anything traumatic?’

  ‘Kitty was killed,’ he told her. ‘Murdered.’

  ‘And who was Kitty?’

  ‘My lover,’ he said. Another new word. Popped out of him clean as a daisy.

  ‘It sounds like depression,’ the doctor said.

  ‘Not madness?’

  ‘No. Not that.’

  ‘I’m inhabited by depression?’

  ‘You could say that, yes.’

  ‘I’m older than I was a week ago.’

  The doctor looked at him. He could see in her face that she’d thought of a joke, but decided not to tell it.

  ‘You sound like a poet,’ she told him. ‘You’re mentally exhausted.’ She touched her forehead, above her right eye. She had long manicured finger-nails. ‘I think it was Conrad Aiken who suggested that T. S. Eliot’s nervous breakdown might have been caused by the severe strain of being an Englishman.’ She smiled.

  It was the kind of thing Kitty would have said. Then Ruben would have asked her who they were, this Conrad Aiken and T. S. Eliot, and they would have talked through the night. He wondered if Kitty’s spirit, if that was the right word, was trying to contact him through other people. If Kitty was inhabiting the doctor just as the depression was inhabiting him.

  ‘Can you give me something for it?’ he asked.

  ‘We have our own counsellor here,’ the doctor said. ‘I’d like you to talk to her. How would you feel about that?’

  ‘I don’t feel too much today.’

  ‘But if I make an appointment for you, is that all right?’

  ‘Yeah, whatever it takes,’ Ruben said. ‘I don’t wanna be a cracker.’

  He came awake in the night with a vision of Sam Turner standing by his bed clutching a short sword. But there was nothing there, just Ruben and the inside of his head. The newspapers and the newscasters were speculating on what had happened to Turner, where he was hiding out. Some said Scotland or France, the south of Italy or Amsterdam. One hack had him in Argentina and another in Norway.

  Ruben didn’t know where he was. He only knew that when the guy stepped back on to British soil it wouldn’t be long before he was buried under it.

  23

  Merlin and Prospero worked their magic in the realm of time, leaving the mundane spatial expositions to lowly and local conjurors and sorcerers. Diamond Danny worked in time and space. He worked in time for the world of truth and responsibility and, ultimately, for freedom. And he worked in space for his daily bread, to pay the rent and to buy himself as much time as he needed to re-enact the time that had been taken from him, his birthright.

  Time. The time of his life which was now and always and the times of his life which were the moments he held in memory and could retrieve at will. There were the times before fortune was twisted out of shape and the times after. The times before grew on fertile soil and proliferated in his memory like green shoots in spring. The times after were an ocean of sand.

  As a boy his parents had taken him, every year, to stay with his great-uncle Matthew in Whitby. The small cottage in Nathan’s Yard by the harbour had two tiny bedrooms, one of which was used by his parents and the other shared by little Danny and his great-uncle. Even now Danny would hesitate at Nathan’s Yard and look at the house whenever he was in Whitby. It had been sold when Great-uncle Matthew died, shortly after the time when fortune was twisted out of shape, and since then it had been resold many times. Now it was combined with the house next door and used as a B&B. It had bright yellow paintwork and a front door with a glass sun in the upper panel. It was barely recognizable.

  Back then, Danny didn’t remember paint at all. He remembered that the cottage was dark. There was electricity but the only bulbs were screwed into ceiling fittings and must have been of low wattage, one to each room. The windows were small and encrusted with dirt and salt from the sea. Great-uncle Matthew didn’t have a wife to clean them and being a simple fisherman he could not afford the luxury of a cleaning woman.

  Danny’s mother suspected that Great-uncle Matthew preferred the windows to restrict the light. ‘He’s on the open sea all day,’ she’d say. ‘When he comes home he wants the comfort of confinement.’

  Like Prospero’s cell. But Danny only made that connection many years later, when the old man was dead and gone.

  What he remembered more than anything else were the nights. Great-uncle Matthew was a silent man. He spoke few words, none at all to Danny. To Danny’s parents he would come out with the occasional word or phrase, or he would answer a question. But it would never amount to more than a series of grunts, and always in that strange East coast dialect which was composed entirely of diagonal vowels.

  Danny would go up first. He would squeeze between the two beds and look out of the window into Nathan’s Yard below. He would climb on to the soft feathery mattress and snuggle into one of its hollows, pulling the sheets and eiderdown up to his chin. It was always cold at first, no matter what the weather, but would warm up and on some nights become so hot that he would push back the sheets and sleep with his arms and shoulders bare.

  Usually he would be asleep when Great-uncle Matthew came up the stairs and entered the bedroom. But if he was awake he would listen as the old man dragged his deformed shape up the rickety staircase and stood by his bed to undress. First his dark knitted jerkin, which he wore in all weathers, then his boots and workpants, releasing a rare and exotic body odour into the dark chamber. Great-uncle Matthew slept in his vest and long johns, and within a few minutes of laboured breathing the gentle rumble of his snores would fill the room.

  But whether he heard Great-uncle Matthew come to bed or not, Danny would always wake when it was time for the old man to fill the chamber pot. This activity took place in the dark and was therefore unseen, an audible experience with m
ore than a hint of pong. Sometimes so strong that it made the boy’s eyes water.

  His great-uncle’s bed would heave and creak as the man shifted his weight from the hollow of the centre to the edge of the mattress. Danny would listen as the two bare feet slapped on the boards and the scrabbling for the pot took place. The stream of piss would hit the bottom of the pot and continue splashing into itself for what seemed an eternity. Danny thought it would never stop, that Great-uncle Matthew would turn himself into a waterfall, a pissfall, and that the pot would overflow and the room fill up until the beds were rafts, afloat in the stinking effluent of the old man’s bladder.

  But that never happened. Great-uncle Matthew would splash his stuff into the pot until the pot was full and then he would stop. He would put the pot on the floor and back-heel it gently under the bed. In the morning, when Great-uncle Matthew had gone to his cobble, Danny would inspect the pot. It held a quart of cloudy orange piss which obscured the bottom. But the wonder of it was that it was full, always, to within half an inch of the rim. It was impossible to lift. If you tried you were sure to spill it on the boards and then mother or Great-uncle Matthew would know you’d been messing with it again.

  Danny didn’t try. But he made sure he was on hand when his mother or Great-uncle Matthew carried it to the outside loo to dump it and rinse it out later in the morning. They had to be careful. If they made one tiny mistake and got the body of liquid slopping about inside its container there would be nothing to stop it coming over the rim. More than once Danny had seen both of them stop dead halfway down the stairs, under the picture of Napoleon at Waterloo, holding their breath until the foaming piss settled back into the pot before they could carry on.

  ‘Deadly cargo,’ Danny’s father called it with more than a hint of irony in his voice. But Danny never saw him attempt to move the pot himself. ‘Oh, oh,’ he’d say, passing his wife on the stairs, ‘the chamber pot from Hell.’