The meanest Flood

you’re deluded.’
    Ruben opened his eyes wider. ‘Hey, I think we’re getting somewhere.’
    Sarah Murphy smiled and shook her head. ‘You’re very direct.’
    Ruben gave her a grin. ‘I don’t hear you denying it. The chemistry.’
    ‘And you don’t hear me confirming it either.’
    ‘No?’ Ruben said. ‘Not with your voice.’
    He left her there, sitting behind her desk with a bemused smile on her face, his mobile number, scribbled on a slip of the doctor’s stationery, clutched in her hand.
    On the stairs he passed her next customer, a young man as sleek as a wet seal.
     
    It was one of those lucky days. Ruben had known it before he got out of bed. Maybe it was in the stars, if you believed in stuff like that, horoscopes, astrology. What Ruben believed and what he used to tell Kitty was that you made your own luck. If he’d been out trying to make his own luck when he was younger, instead of wanting to fight everybody, rob everybody he saw walking down the street, maybe he’d never’ve ended up in prison. If there was something in the astrology stuff then all the guys born on the same day as him would’ve ended up stashed away in Long Lartin. They’d’ve had their own wing.
    As he walked back towards the car park where he’d left the Skoda he looked at the people on the pavement and realized that it never crossed his mind to rob them. Guy there with the business suit, probably had notes stuffed in every pocket, but he wasn’t a mark. Just somebody on the street. And it wasn’t Ruben’s prison sentence, the time he’d spent in Long Lartin that had brought about the change. It was Kitty. And it wasn’t the threat of going back in there, spending another chunk of his life behind bars that kept him out. It was the thought of Sarah Murphy with her short brown hair and the scent of her and the feeling that before too long he’d be getting together with her and they’d be swapping stories and lending each other books and be living like normal people lived.
    Not that he’d forget Kitty. He’d never do that. She’d always be there for him, somewhere close by, and he’d never forget the way she’d died. Though it was true the last couple of nights the images of Kitty had blurred into an image of Sarah. Ruben had fought that for a while, coming awake in his bed and shaking his head, trying to keep them separate. But in the early hours of the morning he’d surrendered to his subconscious, if that’s what it was, something older and wiser than his conscious brain. They weren’t the same person, he knew that and didn’t want to pretend they were. But there was something about each of them that included the other, something beyond manners and class and physical similarities. And Ruben would discover what it was, that evasive quality. It might take him the rest of his life, but he didn’t mind. He had time and the subject was fascinating. Must be like that for people who get Nobel prizes; they find a little thing that interests them and they study it for years and years and they don’t ever get bored.
     
    It was like a jeweller’s shop but a small place, not one of those with big windows where everything glitters. Ruben went in because he thought he might find something for Sarah, when she came round to the inevitability of them being together. He didn’t have a real idea, a ring or a bracelet, maybe, something like that.
    When he looked around there was nothing that would suit her. He’d imagined something fine, tiny links made in soft metal, something so smooth you’d hardly notice it. But what they had in the shop was chunky stuff, kind of things that biker chicks went for. A bangle with a couple of skulls on it. Ankle chains looked more like leg-irons.
    As he was going out of the door he noticed a cabinet with a selection of teeth in it and stopped to look. They wouldn’t do for Sarah, there was nothing in the place that would be good enough for her. But there was one long tooth there, shiny white, mounted in a gold cap and dangling from the end of a chain, that Ruben fancied for himself. He called the assistant over, a short youth with wide trousers two inches too long for his legs. ‘What’s that?’ he asked.
    ‘Shark’s tooth. The chain’s twenty-four-carat gold.’ He opened the cabinet with a key and took out the chain with the tooth and handed it to Ruben.
    ‘There’s no marks on it,’ he said. ‘If it’s gold it should be stamped.’
    ‘Indian gold,’ the