The meanest Flood

throwback to one of Alice’s forgotten Irish ancestors or some kind of blessing. A gift from the angels.
    Alice smiled. She had let her religion lapse and now only the terminology remained. That and the guilt. Especially the guilt. But she kept it close to herself, hidden in case it should somehow leak out and taint her children. Conn meant sense, reason and intelligence, and Hannah meant gracious, and these were the qualities that she wanted them to embrace. She didn’t want them to be bound by the strictures of organized religion, slaves to medieval ideas and sensibilities.
    God was a wonderful idea, she thought. But He was never there when you needed Him. He had spread himself too thin - trying to be everywhere at once. And a God that let Himself get into a state like that really wasn’t worth bothering about.
    ‘Have you seen Dominic?’ she asked.
    ‘He’s by that green car,’ Conn said. ‘With his friends.’
    Dominic was with two boys from his class and a girl who looked like a boy with eye-shadow and a pierced lip. A swagger of fifteen-year-olds, Alice said to herself, pleased with the invention of the collective noun.
    ‘They’re going to Lauren’s house to smoke dope,’ Conn said.
    ‘I don’t think so,’ Alice told him. ‘Dominic doesn’t smoke.’
    ‘That’s all you know,’ Conn told her.
    ‘It’s true, Mum,’ Hannah said. ‘They smoke dope and then they do an orgy.’
    ‘Really? And do they tell tales on their brothers and sisters?’
    ‘Probably do,’ Conn said. ‘That’s what happens in families. Everybody is fighting for the attention of their parents.’
    Alice pulled him close. Seven years old and he already knew too much. There was something dreadfully wrong with the education system. It wanted them all to conform at the same level of cynicism and neo-maturity, producing a generation of political luvvies who thought it was clever to work overtime without getting paid. You could step out of the footprints of the church but you couldn’t avoid what came in its place.
    Dominic waved as they went past his group on the other side of the road. ‘You coming home for tea?’ Alice called.
    He shook his head. ‘I’ll be back by ten,’ he said. ‘I’m eating at Rafiq’s.’
    Rafiq gave her the thumbs-up with both hands, the pale sunlight glinting on the lenses of his National Health spectacles. Vegetable curry and chapatti again, seemed to be the only thing Dominic ate these days. Said that meat made him sick; too much fat, too much protein, human beings weren’t designed for it.
    Hannah and Conn were both like Alex in a way, their natural father. But Dominic was different. And it wasn’t because she or Alex treated him differently from the other kids. It was a simple genetic thing, and it showed.
    Alice had told Dominic that his natural father was someone she’d lost contact with. A man she’d been fond of, but who in the end had not proved reliable enough to marry. And the story was essentially true. The only part of it that was not true was the part about losing contact.
    TOLS, she called it in her mind, indulging her generation’s preference for acronyms. That One Last Shag with Sam long after their relationship had died, after she’d moved out of the house and come back to collect the last of her belongings. A suit she never wore, a Van Morrison album she never listened to and a collection of copper-bottomed pans she’d inherited from her mother. TOLS on the couch in the sitting room.
    She was fully dressed apart from her knickers and he was in his boxer-shorts and T-shirt, his breath stale with whisky fumes. TOLS with no love or passion. She acting out of guilt and compassion and he following the unconscious urgings of his genes, spreading seed.
    When they’d finished she struggled out of the house with two cardboard boxes of belongings. In the tiny flat she’d found for herself she played the Van Morrison album while lying in the bath and envisioning a future. And all the time one of those sperms was struggling up the moist lining of her uterus, through into the fallopian tubes and penetrating the cell membrane of her egg, beginning the process that would eventually result in Dominic.
    And maybe that’s what it was about, this long-term relationship with Sam Turner? Being the bearer of a secret. Because apart from her there was no one in the world who knew the real identity of Dominic’s father. Dominic himself seemed entirely uninterested. He had come