The meanest Flood

chemical imbalance in her brain cells when her mother, Ellen Eccles, crept into her daughter’s bedroom and scanned the walls. Marilyn had straightened the crumpled playing card and placed it in a frame. She’d hung it on the wall between a promotional photograph of Diamond Danny Mann and a collage of his press cuttings.
    The eight of spades, and written across it in red feltpen, Marilyn Eccles.
    Ellen sighed. She hoped it wasn’t going to be a repetition of the business with Jeremy Paxman: listening to Start the Week every Monday morning, watching Newsnight and University Challenge, and waiting for the postman in the morning, expecting a letter from the man.
    When she looked at Marilyn’s wall and the photograph of Danny Mann and his press cuttings she wondered why there wasn’t a photograph of her dead granddaughter there. She was confused for a moment because it was wrong of Marilyn not to have a photograph of her baby.
    But it was simple, the answer, because there were no photographs of the baby. It had been born dead and you don’t take photographs of dead babies. In a way, Ellen thought now, the playing card was a kind of code for her granddaughter. And she wondered exactly what it meant to her daughter, this playing card, the one item in the whole universe that had been handled by both Danny Mann and Marilyn.
    The absence of a photograph of the baby was problematic in other respects. Without a photograph people didn’t realize that Marilyn had been a mother. Because she was so small, exactiy one hundred and fifty centimetres, people regarded her as still a child herself. To compensate for her size Marilyn wore a belt with a steel buclde in the shape of a pentagram. Ellen could see the buckle now, dangling from the back of the chair by Marilyn’s dressing table.
    She wore anything that had a metallic colour or feel to it. Shoes with buckles, jingling bangles and necklaces, a hair-band in beaten copper and a silver chain on each ankle. Somehow, in her mind, Marilyn associated metal with height. The more metal she could carry around on her person, the taller she seemed to feel.
    The pentagram buckle on her belt was something else as well. It was a magical sign, something that might catch the eye of Danny Mann. Marilyn had explained that it was a five-pointed star, the number of destiny. Ellen had shaken her head, it sounded like mumbo-jumbo to her. What Marilyn meant was that Danny Mann was her destiny, just as Jeremy Paxman had been and those other unreachable celebrities and actors she’d attached herself to. The difference with Danny Mann was that he lived in York, only a couple of streets away. The poor man’s life was destined to become a misery if Ellen failed to keep her daughter Marilyn under control.
    The lavatory flushed and Marilyn padded along the landing to her bedroom singing, ‘Danny Boy. The hills, the hills are caw-aw-ling ...’
    I don’t want you getting fixated on him,’ Ellen said when her daughter came into the room.
    ‘And I don’t want you snooping in my bedroom,’ Marilyn said. She threw off her dressing gown and stood m front of the wardrobe. She was pear-shaped with surplus flesh on her thighs, bottom and stomach, but surprisingly pert and firm breasts. Her skin was milky-white, dappled and becoming varicose on the back of her legs.
    Ellen looked away. She wondered what had become of the small girl she had dragged around for all those years, the pretty teenager with the wide eyes. There was something gross and feral and unknown about this woman’s nakedness that seemed to defy any relationship to her.
    ‘All the signs are there, Marilyn.’
    ‘What? What signs? What are you talking about?’
    ‘Jeremy Paxman.’
    ‘That was different. He was married, with kids.’
    ‘And how do you know this magician isn’t married?’
    ‘I know.’
    ‘But you don’t, Marilyn. It’s the same thing. You talk yourself into it. You convince yourself. This is going to I lead to more trouble, I just know it.’
    Marilyn slammed the wardrobe shut, turning to face her mother. Her naked back was reflected in the mirror on the door. ‘He chose me,’ she said. ‘You were there, I you saw it. He chose me last night. How many women were in that theatre? Come on, tell me, how many?’
    ‘I don’t know, love.’
    ‘How many?’ She stamped her foot, a residue of red nail varnish clinging to the nail on her big toe.
    ‘A hundred... five hundred? But it doesn’t mean...’
    ‘A