The meanest Flood

by Baker, John

  What Danny had learned from Great-uncle Matthew was invisibility. Great-uncle Matthew was not a teacher, he was a misshapen beast. He had no learning, no culture. He was like Caliban. And, like Caliban, he could be persuaded of a reality that existed only in his own mind. He could be captivated, beguiled.

  When he was doing the business with the pot in the middle of the dark night, Danny had only to move slightly, as if turning over in his sleep, and Great-uncle Matthew’s stream would falter and terminate. You could imagine its stillness in the pot in the moonlight, a slight swirling motion and the haze of rising steam. There would be an intake of breath and then one, two, perhaps three drops more would splash into the pot. Danny would regulate his breathing, he would lie still and quiet, and eventually Great-uncle Matthew would continue to empty his bladder.

  Because Great-uncle Matthew could not piss into the pot when there was someone else in the room. Or at least he could not piss into the chamber pot when someone else was conscious in the room. Not when there was a chance of him being observed. He could only do it when he felt he was alone, when he didn’t have to worry about prying eyes or ears.

  So Danny practised invisibility when he was around. It meant being quiet and still inside yourself so that the old man forgot you were there. And Danny found he could be invisible, or nearly so, whenever he wished. Not only with Great-uncle Matthew, but with his mother and his father, with his teachers and his friends, with anyone at all.

  And it’s a great asset for a magician, almost a prerequisite, to be seen when you need to be seen and then to slip away without moving from the spot.

  For two days now he’d patrolled Calmeyers gate, watching the entrance to the flat of Holly Andersen, waiting for Turner to show himself. But there’d been no sighting of the man. Danny was beginning to think that Sam Turner might also be blessed with invisibility.

  He fantasized that the two of them passed each other in the street, neither aware of the other’s existence. Two ghosts dancing around the living corpse of this woman. He conceded that he may have underestimated Sam Turner. The man, after all, was trained and experienced in surveillance techniques. Not exactly magic in itself, but it would be necessary for him to understand the principles of concealment. He would know how to make himself small and anonymous.

  For his own part, Danny had left nothing to chance. He wore not one stitch of clothing that he had brought with him from York. His coat, trousers, boots, shirt, sweater and fur cap were all purchased in the streets around the Scandinavian Hotel in Kongensgate. He was a Norwegian citizen right down to his thermal underwear and woollen gloves.

  What it was about Prospero, he mused, as with Merlin and all the great magicians, was the consciousness of the cycle of confinement and release. When Prospero was released from his responsibilities in Milan he was immediately confined by the tempest to the small island which in turn would become his responsibility. In Milan he was free but confined by his responsibilities; on the island he was physically confined but free to practise his magic. He used his magic to confine the native population and the spirits of the island and consequently found that he was confined once more by his responsibilities towards them.

  At the end of the play he has the strength of character and the courage to renounce his magic and as a result he is given back his rightful freedom in the city of Milan.

  Danny would renounce his own magic after the final illusion. There would be no Milan for him, with which to replace it, but that didn’t matter. There would be redemption of a kind. He would be free. He understood that in a strange way Sam Turner was his own version of Prospero’s island. The life of Sam Turner was the cell in which Diamond Danny Mann was imprisoned and it was only by bringing Sam Turner down that Danny would demolish the walls that confined him.

  Through the long days and nights in Oslo Danny made lists in his head. He listed the things he missed: his own bed and Jody, the smell of his sheets freshly returned from the laundry. Television commercials. Why? For God’s sake, why? His slippers, which he could have and should have brought with him if he’d known he was going to be here so long. The photographs of his mother; the portraits of her alone and of the two of them together. The one taken in Blackpool on the front after he’d wheeled a toy horse out of a department store. The other of her face, the background a blur, which he had taken as a timed exposure the day he left school. His mother’s hard-earned furniture. The Chesterfield. The Ercol chair with the broken back in the kitchen (must get that repaired as soon as he got home). The water. The privacy and familiarity of his own house. His mirror and trolley in the bathroom. The silence. The temperature. Minster FM in the background. The English language spoken without an accent. His books. Sunday morning. Fish and chips. Real ale. All-Bran.

  The lists got longer and longer. He would spring awake in his hotel room and add one more item to the list -Evensong at the Minster - though he had only been once, years ago with his mother. But it didn’t matter, he missed it now, terribly, achingly, while he was confined to the foreignness of another land. And once awake he would search around for other things to add to the list, anything would do, even if it was available in Norway it didn’t matter. Brown sliced bread, raspberry jam, his car with the faulty seatbelt. He wanted the list to grow so that it formed a bridge between Oslo and York, a physical walkway that would lead him back home.

  Danny observed himself at times like this. His obsessiveness was something he had inherited from his mother. Her father, his grandfather, had apparently been the same. It was a family trait. Obsession and will, together they got things done. They were movers and shakers. There was a cluster of genes which defined them as separate from other people, made of them a natural elite. This in turn meant that they didn’t fit in and were subject to misunderstandings. But that was the price you paid. There was no point in grumbling. To become a master magician you had to fork out a bag of gold and your heart and your soul.

  Obsessive. But that wasn’t the only thing. What Danny had also inherited from his mother and her ancestors was courage, real courage which involved a large slice of imagination.

  That was what had enabled her to go on after fortune was twisted out of shape, and what had enabled Danny to become a magician and rise above the herd of humanity. Courage and imagination.

  He had watched the street, Calmeyers gate, for two days and seen not a sign of Sam Turner. But there had been a boy there, a young man, early-twenties. He’d been there all day today, off and on, watching and waiting. Danny had been watching and waiting at one end of the street and the young man had been watching and waiting at the other end. Not even in the street, really, but way down over the intersection at Henrik Ibsen’s gate, so far away he could have been watching another street.

  Which was exactly how they worked, policemen and detectives. They didn’t show themselves, they used others to do the legwork. So although he hadn’t seen Sam Turner in person, Danny was convinced that he had seen someone who was working on Sam Turner’s behalf.

  When he’d been nursing the idea for the Sam Turner illusion Danny had not realized that Turner was a magician as well. But he was beginning to see it now. They were worthy opponents. Diamond Danny Mann had earned his reputation by studying the masters and practising their craft. Sam Turner belonged to a different fraternity and was a past wizard in the black art of surveillance.

  Danny was sure that the young man hadn’t seen him. He had been careful to leave Calmeyers gate three times to change clothes and to alter his posture and body language. Nothing special, nothing that would stand out. He’d walked the length of the street in a black donkey-jacket and a woollen cap. He’d returned an hour later with the shuffle of a bespectacled elderly gentleman, complete with black cane and leather gloves. And towards the end of the afternoon, when the shadows were long on the ground, he’d managed an impersonation of a Norwegian businessman complete with white shirt and camel overcoat.

  He’d noticed the boy, Sam Turner’s assistant, taking an int
erest in a Norwegian sailor wearing a T-shirt and waterproof jacket, a peaked cap with a badge. The sailor was gripping the pavement with his toes to stop himself rolling overboard, and Danny had clutched his buttocks together and gritted his teeth and passed so close to the young man that he could have reached out and touched him. But he still didn’t merit a second glance. The boy’s eyes were full of the sailor.

  Later there had been another man with a limp and the furtive sidelong glances of an alcoholic or a drug addict, and the boy had been similarly fascinated by him. Danny’s magic had kept him concealed. Danny’s magic and his subtlety. Sam Turner and his crony were easy, like playing with children.

  Sitting alone in the Scandinavian Hotel writing lists of the things he missed in his confinement, Diamond Danny Mann decided to give it a few more hours. Turner might be prepared to play cat and mouse but the magician certainly was not. If he saw Sam Turner the next day he would go ahead and dispose of the third girlfriend, Holly Andersen. And if he didn’t see Sam Turner the next day he would do exactly the same.

  That would be courageous and imaginative. To take the woman’s life without sighting Sam Turner at all. Because the man was here, in Oslo, he had to be. The alternative was unthinkable. The illusion depended on his presence.

  Danny smiled to himself. He added one more item to the list. An Americano on the terrace of the City Screen cafe, overlooking the river in summertime. He switched off the bedside light. The woman’s fate was sealed. There was nothing anyone could do about it. The magician turned on to his side and within a few minutes he was asleep, snoring gently, slipping into dreams of earlier, less troubled days.

  24

  Sam and Geordie had been in Akers-Mic in Kongensgate, browsing through one of the largest collections of CDs in Europe. Sam had bought a couple of Jo Ann Kelly recordings, songs he’d only heard rumours about. He’d found an early collection by Shirley Horn and a few of her friends. Songs recorded in her living room which every record shop in England had told him were deleted. He’d found nearly two dozen CDs he thought he couldn’t live without but whittled them down to three so he’d stay within his own estimation of who he was.

  ‘Some kind of frugal early-twenty-first-century romantic private eye,’ Geordie said. Soon as he said it he thought he’d gone over the top. On the other hand he wanted to keep the mood frivolous and relaxed. Didn’t want Sam disappearing inside himself.

  Sam took it on the chin. ‘Frugal? Maybe,’ he said. ‘Cash always has a way of getting away. I used to suspect the rich guys had a magnet, so it didn’t matter how you tried to hang on to it, they always got it back.’

  ‘It’s the Protestant work ethic,’ Geordie said. ‘Makes it impossible for you to enjoy anything unless you’ve got into a sweat earning it.’

  ‘That’s true, too,’ Sam said. ‘There was a time I hated that. Being trapped inside some concept from the Middle Ages. I’d go spend all my money, then I’d go around spending everybody else’s, trying to break free.’

  ‘But it didn’t work?’

  ‘Made me a few enemies,’ Sam said. ‘Bought me some debts. Didn’t feel any freer at the end of it. More of a prat, though. That’s when I realized that the old Laingian thing was true.’

  ‘Laing?’

  ‘Yeah, old guru type from the sixties. Dead now. Said something like, “the me that I’m trying to be is the me that’s trying to be it”. Maybe he was quoting someone else, I don’t know. Made sense to me suddenly. Put me in touch with my own slave and my own free man. They were always at war but these days they live together. Still have the odd scrap, but they know they’re dependent.’

  ‘You could’ve bought all those CDs,’ Geordie said. ‘Put them on a credit card, pay for them later. That’s what every other guy would’ve done.’

  ‘Trouble with that, Geordie, I’d be paying twice as much. Making The Man even richer than he is now.’

  ‘But you’d have them,’ Geordie told him. ‘And right now they’re still in the shop, sitting on the shelf, and you can’t take them home and listen to them. You’ve held them in your hand, you know you’d really enjoy every one of them, and you know you’ll never get hold of them in England.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ Sam said. ‘I can live with it. This is not gonna stop me sleeping nights.’

  ‘And the debt would?’

  ‘Yeah. I’d be wild-eyed. Start drinking again. Sell my music collection and pour it down my throat. This’s the kind of guy I am.’

  They were in the Coco Chalet in Prinsens gate, drinking dark Italian roast and waiting for the Andersens, Holly and her partner, Inge Berit. Sam had taken JD’s glasses off and apart from the beard he looked more or less normal.

  There were candles on the tables, and white paper tablecloths. In one corner was an old His Master’s Voice record player with a brass horn sitting on a carved mahogany dresser. The coffee was hot and as black as night and tasted smooth and bitter in the flickering light. The cafe had mirrored walls and the wooden seats were arranged in small booths and before Sam had finished his first cup of coffee he called the waitress over and ordered another one.

  ‘I woke up this morning with a plook on my neck,’ Geordie said.

  Sam looked over his coffee cup. ‘There’re times,’ he said, ‘you dangle a conversation under my nose and I don’t know what to say. It’s happened before, with other people, when I’ve been drinking, out of my skull. Or sometimes on a case when I’ve come across a psycho, say, or someone who believes the world is a mirage.’

  ‘What’re you saying, exactly?’

  ‘Well, plooks,’ Sam said. ‘You woke up this morning with a plook on your neck. What’m I supposed to say about that? Seems like the most mundane subject in the universe. Somebody’s plook on somebody’s neck. I’ve got other things on my mind.’

  ‘That’s because it’s not your plook on your neck,’ Geordie said. ‘If Sam Turner woke up with a plook on his neck it’d be a perfectly valid subject for discussion. We’d’ve got started on it over breakfast and we’d still be talking about it now. Wouldn’t be long before we were enquiring where the emergency room was, get the fucker lanced.’

  ‘I don’t wake up with plooks,’ Sam told him. ‘Last time I had a plook, Margaret Thatcher was in charge. Since she’s been gone my blood’s purer.’

  ‘It’s this attitude you have,’ Geordie said. ‘Like some things are good for conversation and some aren’t. And you’re not consistent about it. Another time you’d’ve thought plooks was a great subject.’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘You would’ve, Sam. I know you.’

  ‘Never in my wildest dreams would I have anything to say about plooks. I can’t think of anything less interesting. God only invented plooks to bore people to death. It’s one of His ways of making life harder for people who can’t see past the end of their nose. And it keeps all His mates in the cosmetics industry sailing round the Caribbean. Wherever they go, I don’t know. Mustique?’ Geordie smiled. He had this smile that involved his eyes, something between a smile and a frown, and it conveyed a knowing irony. Janet couldn’t stand it and told him not to do it, but Sam had never said anything about it. Geordie spoke through it. ‘See what I mean? You’re talking metaphysics already. God only invented plooks to bore people to death. You start off telling me plooks aren’t interesting and a couple of breaths later you’re considering their place in the order of the universe.’

  Sam sipped from his cup. ‘Great coffee,’ he said. ‘Say what you like about Norwegians, but they know how to make coffee.’

  ‘Is that the end of the plook conversation?’

  ‘Yeah. Tell me something interesting.’

  ‘How about sex?’

  ‘What kind?’

  ‘When I was young,’ Geordie said, ‘I dunno, maybe I was seventeen

  ‘Couple of years back?’ Sam said.

  ‘Funny. D’you wanna hear this?’

  ‘So far my tongue’s not hanging out,’ Sam said. ‘I’m a
t the stage I’m suspending my disbelief, waiting, hoping, the story will be a good one. But teenage sex? Y’know, it doesn’t hold a lot of dramatic possibilities. Not much chance of a slow build and an unexpected, even enlightening, resolution. But I’m listening.’

  ‘It’s not a story, it’s an anecdote. Something I remember from being sixteen, seventeen, when my whole body was tuned to sex. My brain, too. I’d wake up in the morning and I’d be thinking about sex, and I’d go to bed at night and the last thing I thought about, that’d be sex, too. And in between, all day long, there’d be sex everywhere: in my mind, in my fingers, my eyes, my ears. I could be turned on by the sun shining on my arms, or if there was no sun, then just by the thought of sun on my arms. You know what I mean?’

  ‘Where are you going with this?’

  ‘Nowhere special. I’d look at girls on the street and I’d imagine having them in bed or having them right there on the street. It was safe because I wasn’t gonna do it, but inside my head I could watch this girl, any girl really, walk along the street and within a couple of seconds I’d have her clothes off and we’d be going at it, back door, front door, you name it, she’d have me in her mouth and I’d have her in my mouth and there’d be juices and sweat everywhere. It was a whole orgy. And then the girl would’ve walked around the corner and I’d look up and here comes another one. I couldn’t stop it, it was like that for months, seemed like years, I couldn’t think of anything else.’

  ‘Sounds more or less normal,’ Sam said. ‘That’s why people hate teenagers, because they’re like that.’

  ‘And then I’d get the guilts,’ Geordie said. ‘Like I’d wonder if they could see what I was thinking, the girls I was having these fantasies about. Because I’d know that it was written all over my face. Staring eyes, tongue hanging out, bits of drool on my chin. And I’d think if they could see my brain working away on them, they’d call the police and have me arrested. I was always surprised I got away with it.