The meanest Flood

beginnings of jowls amid his creased face. He’d never been particularly pretty. Always interesting, though; you could look at his face for hours. It was like a story book. And then he’d asked if she had some time, could they go for coffee? Coffee was his staple. Alice couldn’t think about coffee without thinking about Sam.
    She’d taken him up on it a few times, hesitantly at first, not wanting to find herself spiralling back into the mistakes of her youth. But he wasn’t a predator and he didn’t come on to her. He talked about himself, about his relationships with women and his work, and he enquired after her as well, wanting to know more about Alex and her children and about her job as an administrator at the university. He was interested in her, Alice realized, not as a potential sexual partner but as someone who had been a part of his life. And if you’d been part of Sam’s life you would always be part of it. He would never give up on you, not totally.
    For the last couple of years Alice had found herself disappointed, somehow let down if she met Sam in town and he didn’t offer her coffee. He’d occasionally be busy with his blessed detective business, on the way from one job to another or to relieve one of his operatives, and he’d be full of regret about it but there were people dependent on him. Alice remembered the times she had been dependent on him. The hours, sometimes days, she’d sat waiting for him, knowing that he was head down in a gutter somewhere or in the arms of some floozy who’d promised him a drink.
    But it had changed now. He didn’t drink any longer. That spark of potential she had recognized all those years before had kicked in and filled out the man. He wouldn’t harm her. Never. There were many people in her life who might be tempted to injure her, even Alex when he was in one of his moods or if she managed to rouse his temper, but she couldn’t imagine Sam doing anything like that.
    Though it was true that you never really knew another person. She was absolutely sure she wasn’t wrong, not about Sam Turner, but her doubt wouldn’t be stifled. It simply was a fact of life, you could never be absolutely sure.
    She put on her coat and wound a long lamb’s wool scarf around her neck. At the street door she stepped into a pair of new green Wellington boots and strode over the sandbags on her front step. The garden and the street were a lake. There was a break in the weather and the sun was reflected in the smooth surface of the water.
    Alice paddled through it. It was shallow on the garden path but by the time she got to the public footpath it was already near the top of her boots. Black river water, almost half of it silt, and giving off a stench of decaying organisms. The river was still rising, almost five metres above normal now. If it continued for another couple of days it would be in the house. They’d already taken up the carpets on the ground floor and had been living upstairs for the last ten days.
    There were army trucks at the corner of the street and soldiers were laying sandbags, trying to keep the properties safe. For people lower down, closer to Terry Avenue, it was already too late. Their houses were awash and many of them were abandoned to the rising waters. Soldiers... dear God, most of them looked little older than Dominic. Sixteen, seventeen years old. Alice didn’t know how old you had to be to join the army, but looking at some of these kids she thought the entry age should be raised. What if there was a war, she wanted to ask their commanding officer, are you going to give them guns?
    Hannah and Conn were waiting for her at the school gate, seemingly unconscious of the waders that reached to the top of their thighs. Hannah, ten years old now, was chatting to one of her friends, completely oblivious of her brother. Conn, the baby of the family, just past his seventh birthday, was gazing up at the sky as if expecting rain. They were as different as toast and marmalade, these two. Hannah was her father’s daughter, somewhat selfobsessed but in possession of a modicum of empathy for others which seemed to have bypassed Alex, the sperm-donor. Conn, named after Alice’s father was, like his grandfather, enquiring his way through life. He was forever inquisitive, a silent boy with big eyes and a degree of warmth far beyond anything Alice had discovered in herself. He certainly hadn’t inherited that from Alex or his line and it was either a