The meanest Flood

is because of your girlfriend’s death. Would you agree with that? It could be that facing up to that is too painful, so you’re transferring your feelings of pain on to the murderer, looking for revenge.’
    ‘Yeah.’
    ‘Do you understand what I mean, Mr Parkins?’
    ‘I wanna kill the guy.’
    ‘That’s a normal response. In the same circumstances almost everyone would react in the same way.’
    Ruben didn’t reply. He knew what she meant but she didn’t know what he meant. She thought that was something to say, that he wanted to kill the guy. But Ruben didn’t care whether he said it or not, he wanted to kill the guy, and if he got half a chance he would do it. He didn’t care if they banged him away for life. They could do what they wanted, it wouldn’t make any difference. He didn’t have a life, anyway, so how could they take it away from him?
    ‘What happens,’ he told her, ‘I go to sleep. I was delivering milk but it didn’t get delivered. I loaded up the van and sat behind the wheel for two hours, never moved. Today I thought I’d go for a walk, keep myself fit. But I got to the corner of my street and stood there for fifty minutes. I couldn’t go for the walk and I couldn’t turn round and go back home. It was like I was paralysed.’
    ‘Those are classic symptoms of depression.’
    ‘And I’m crying all the time. Sometimes I’m wiping my eyes because I can’t see properly. Maybe I’m watching a match on the telly, whatever, I can’t see it and it’s like I’ve got something in my eye. But there’s nothing there. It’s tears. I’m sitting there crying my eyes out and I don’t even know I’m doing it. This’s me, I don’t cry. Supposed to be a man.’
    ‘I think we should talk about Kitty if you feel up to it. How you feel about losing her.’
    Ruben closed his eyes. ‘Kitty was the best friend I ever lost. All she wanted was good things for everybody, especially me. I’m confused. My heart hurts. Every time I take a drink I know it’s gonna end up as tears. I think about the last moments. What she was thinking of. Did she call out my name? I’m not sure she’s not still alive and every day of my life is some terrible joke. Someone’s fooling me. I want to kill the man who stole away our future.
    ‘I can remember the feel of her, her kiss, the scent of her. I can’t believe it when I wake up and find it’s a dream. She’s got me in the palm of her hand. I don’t know what it is, but I’m not all here. Somebody’s put out the light in me. It’s like I’ve been swallowed by a snake. I’m still alive but there’s no point to it.’
    ‘What about nights?’ she asked. ‘Do you sleep?’
    ‘I want to sleep all the time,’ Ruben told her. ‘When I’m sleeping it’s like it never happened. Kitty’s still here and everything’s normal. I go to bed at night and I can’t sleep. So I slug back a few beers and then it gets easier. Makes me feel like shit in the morning, though.
    ‘Sometimes I sleep in the day. I’ll be watching the box in the afternoon and there’s nothing on you wanna watch. There’s these women with the freak-shows, Oprah, Ricki Lake, guys who sleep with their girlfriends’ mothers. I don’t wanna see that so I snooze through it. One minute I’m awake, the next I’m asleep. Then I’m awake again. Like that, maybe a couple of hours I’m floating around. If it wasn’t for the guy, Sam Turner, I’d be thinking seriously about topping myself. Only I can’t afford to leave it to chance he’ll get away with it. I’m keeping myself going so I can take him out.’
    She maintained eye contact. She looked as though she didn’t know where to go next, but she pulled something out. ‘OK, let’s look at that for a minute. This is hypothetical but I’d like you to respond if you can. If this man, this detective, is arrested by the police and brought to court and found guilty... if he’s punished by the state, sent to prison... how would you feel about that?’
    ‘It’s not gonna happen?’
    ‘I’m not suggesting that it will happen, but if it did? The police are looking for him.’
    Ruben thought about it. ‘If it all came out,’ he said eventually. ‘If he admitted it and said why he did it. If they banged him away for the rest of his life. Maybe that would be enough. I don’t really know. It wouldn’t bring Kitty back. She’d still be dead and I’d be walking round wishing she wasn’t.’
    ‘Have you considered that