The meanest Flood (28 page)

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 more 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.’

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 interest 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.’