The meanest Flood

change their clothes.
    The clouds had disappeared and the wind dropped to a gentle breeze. There was extensive flooding in the area and a danger of the Ouse breaking its banks in the town centre, putting thousands of homes at risk. People were kayaking and windsurfing on the racecourse. Armageddon was around the corner.
    The media had nothing to say about anything but the floods. It didn’t matter if it rained here or not because the water was coming down from the hills and the town would be swamped because of weather conditions forty or fifty miles to the north. This was God’s sleight of hand, Danny thought. Give the place a few days of bright sunshine and not a hint of rain while up in the hills, out of sight, you pour so much water into the river channels that the banks are washed away.
    Danny left his car behind. So many roads were impassable and the police or the army were liable to direct you in the opposite direction to your destination. Drivers were being told not to come to the city. The police had enough on their hands without traffic problems. He still hadn’t got that damned seatbelt fixed.
    He walked towards the centre and crossed Skeldergate Bridge. People were lining both sides of it, leaning over to watch the volume of black water thundering past. On the banks teams of squaddies were humping sandbags, lining them up precisely under the watchful eyes of their officers. There had been nothing like this in living memory. A strange and unwanted visitor had come to town and the people had left their houses to come and gape.
    When he was a young boy people had gaped at Danny and his mother.
    When she’d been bewitched by Sam Turner, pulled out of her marriage and her sanity by the illusion of the man’s easy-going nature. Sam Turner had been young Danny’s first introduction to magic. The overwhelming power of an art that could collect an entire and harmonious family into its arms and scatter it to the winds. And this from a man like Sam Turner, a naive practitioner without the aid of study or practice, with no knowledge or experience of the culture from which he was working. A wild man of the woods with a talismanic charm of a smile and a roving eye and the gall to use it to his own advantage whatever the cost.
    He was the reason that Danny’s mother and father argued into the night, why his father shouted and bawled with such urgency that the boy thought the walls of the house would crumble and fall.
    A few days after Danny’s father walked out Great-uncle Matthew had gone to bed in the small cottage in Nathan’s Yard by the harbour in Whitby and never woken from his sleep. Danny went with his mother to arrange the funeral. They stood in a howling wind of angry spirits in the graveyard at the top of the cliffs and delivered Great-uncle Matthew into the bitter pains of eternal death. It blew so hard the coffin bearers had to stop every step or so to regain their balance and the black sky was jammed with witches and harpies and the souls of the damned whipped from the centre of Hell.
    The cottage in Nathan’s Yard was sold to a small man with bulging eyes, red trousers and a fistful of notes because they needed the money now. He’d get rid of the furniture for them, the man said, might come in for firewood.
    And when they got back to York she was on the telephone to him before she’d got her coat off, the man who had brought it all down on them, Sam Turner.
    It didn’t last long. She saw him once or twice during the day when Danny was at school, but then it was over. She came home with her black eye and neither she nor Danny mentioned it. She cried through the night for what seemed like months. She became obsessive and Danny also developed small compulsions. For a year or more he washed his hands so many times each day that they became sore and chapped. But Turner had gone. He’d found somebody who could keep him in whisky and spent his time with her instead.
    And Danny was glad. He had grown and he took up magic and plotted his revenge.
     
    Terry Avenue was blocked. There were soldiers in a boat with a couple of old folks clutching photograph albums and blankets. Since his mother had died the magician had looked twice at old men when he saw them in the street,, hoping against hope that he would find his father. But he didn’t really believe that it would happen. He imagined his father was dead now, that he had no parents left at all, that he was an orphan.
    Orphan Danny. If he played with