The meanest Flood (14 page)

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 misery 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.

Celia padded through from Marie’s kitchen and put a mug of hot coffee in Sam’s hand. She was a small woman. She wore a ring with a pearl on her middle finger, a gold band with two tiny diamonds on her index finger, and on her ring finger she had a signet ring on the second joint and a bed of assorted jewels in a heart on the third joint. The little finger was bare, poor thing. Celia’s hair had been thinning rapidly over the past months but she still used a bottle of red dye on it every few weeks. Her neck was festooned with a lightly billowing silk scarf to hide the wrinkles and she wore tight velvet trousers. Didn’t look the type to give up without a fight.

‘So, what’s to do?’ Sam asked.

‘Finish your coffee first,’ Marie told him. ‘Maybe you and JD could get the fridge upstairs? The cooker? And the kitchen table if it’ll go. Me and Celia’ll carry on shifting the silver and the Modiglianis.’ She drew the back of her hand over her forehead. ‘Then there’s the antique Spode and my collection of Degas bronzes.’

Sam grinned and JD laughed as though Billy Connolly had done a fart impression. Nearly fell off his chair.

They humped the fridge up the stairs, one step at a time. Looked incongruous sitting there next to Marie’s bed, like a fish in the desert. JD wiped his brow with a red handkerchief. ‘What’re you writing?’ Sam asked.

‘Another novel. About halfway through. I’m past the part where I decide whether to go on or give up.’

‘About cops and robbers?’

‘On the surface, yes. At the heart it’s about exile. About being separated from the thing that feeds you, gives meaning to your life.’

‘You’ve talked about that before, in other books.’

‘I’ve skirted round it once or twice. In this book it’s the main theme.’ He laughed. ‘Don’t know who it was, some writer or other, said we all rewrite the same book over and over again. A writer usually only has one or two things to say and he or she goes on saying it until somebody stops them. The best writers find a new way of saying it with every book.’

‘There’s nothing new in the world,’ Sam said. ‘Only new ways of seeing the same old things.’

JD nodded agreement. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Something like that. Shall we get the cooker?’

One step at a time again, JD above the cooker and Sam lifting from below, remembering all the rules about taking the weight on his legs rather than his back. They left it standing next to the fridge.

‘Exile is when you’re away from home,’ Sam said. ‘When you’re not allowed to go back. Used to be a kind of punishment.’

‘Still is in different countries,’ JD said. ‘To be banished. That’s how America got started, Australia. People the state didn’t want around, shipped them overseas.’

‘This an historical novel you’re writing?’

‘No. I’m using exile as a metaphor. It’s about the places we’re not allowed to go or the places we don’t allow ourselves to visit.’

‘Physical places? Geographic places?’

‘Sometimes. Places can be in the mind too. We’re often exiled from ourselves, from our own experiences, our own memories.’

Sam took a couple of steps over to the window and looked out at the river. ‘I’ve been thinking about that,’ he said. ‘When I heard about Katherine the other day. Seems unreal, somehow, that we were married, spent all that time together, intimate time. It’s as if I wasn’t there, or I dreamed it or read about it in a book. Like it was somebody else’s experience.’

‘You were a drunk, Sam. You were exiled by definition. The alcohol kept you away from everything, yourself, your pain.’

Sam shook his head. ‘It didn’t, though. Not really. I always thought it would help, that the next drink would solve something, some longing, that it would insulate me from life. But it never did. It made every day harder to cope with, harder to bear. I can honestly say that I never had a drink that solved a problem.’