The meanest Flood

a few of the passengers waiting to add their thanks.
    Danny was flattered. He was worried about the attention of the press but he was flattered nonetheless. He hadn’t thought of himself as brave when it was happening but the weight of public opinion was beginning to get to him. Surely these people couldn’t all be wrong.
     

29
     
    Alice Richardson had married Sam Turner shortly after he split from Holly Andersen. She was looking for a father substitute, though at the time she would have denied it. She loved the fact that he was so much older than her, that he had seen life and acquired what she liked to think of as wisdom. And she believed the silly things he said because they seemed to have more authority than the silly things that occurred inside her own head.
    She folded the Guardian and put it on the piano stool. She couldn’t believe that he had murdered those women, or that he was capable of murdering anyone. Alex, her partner for the last fifteen years, had pointed out that people change, and that you never really know another person. We all manage to hide behind the person we imagine ourselves to be.
    But what did Alex know? Not a lot, unfortunately. The main problem with him was that you didn’t have to be bright to know him very well after a few minutes in his company. A man by whom Alice would be severely embarrassed if she ever accepted responsibility for him. He was the centre of his own universe, had analysed himself and was anxious to pass on to the rest of the world the fruit of his discoveries about human nature. ‘I’m a lucky guy,’ he’d tell complete strangers. ‘I can’t help it, I’m just lucky.’ Almost every sentence that left his lips began with the word ‘I’.
    She shook her head. Alice didn’t want to think about Alex. It was thinking about Sam that had brought him into her mind. Contrasts. You defined each person in terms of the others you met. You constructed an invisible and unconscious table in your mind, with the best ones at the top and the worst ones at the bottom, and as you went through your life you added and subtracted different characters, pushing some of the earlier ones towards the bottom or the top, only occasionally completely replacing the top one or two with new names.
    Alice’s list, when she tried to access it, had only a few constant characters, and Sam Turner was one of them. Before they had married, when she was twenty-two, he had been way up at the top of the list. But a week after the ceremony he had begun dropping rapidly. Within two to three months he was at the bottom, and for a year or two after they separated he remained as the anchorman. She didn’t think she’d ever meet anyone as disappointing as him. She didn’t want to. One was enough.
    And then, imperceptibly at first, he’d begun to make a comeback. She’d only really noticed when she found him at the halfway mark, and for the last six or seven years he’d got back in there with the leaders. Not number one, but probably in the first four.
    And yet there was a truth in what her partner, Alex, said about never really being able to know another human being. She didn’t know Sam, not really. What she had responded to in him all those years ago was not something known, something concrete in his character. If she had known him at all it had been in the sense of his potential. She had recognized something in him that was as yet undeveloped, and might never develop. And she had been young enough and naive enough to believe that she could provide the impetus for that spark of potential to develop into a substantial reality.
    She had been unable to face the fact that the Sam Turner she had married was a man in flight from hope. That he recognized no potential in himself or in anyone else. That Sam thought of the whole of humanity, including himself, as food for worms. He was interested only in an all-out escape from his daily reality. He was never so happy as when he was drunk or unconscious. Alice couldn’t understand how she had thought that that was so attractive before the wedding. It was years later that she realized it was because she was also in flight. From adulthood, from responsibility, from the person she feared she might be or was on the way to becoming.
    In the past four or five years she’d seen more of Sam. They weren’t close friends any more but she’d see him on the street and they’d stop and talk. He hadn’t aged much - some thickening around the waist, the