The meanest Flood

realization of his limitations. But he’d got there in the end. He was a man, after all, not a gender best known for self-insight.
    ‘I need you to help me with something,’ he’d said. ‘Can we meet?’
    It wouldn’t have mattered to Marilyn what it was he needed help with. It was enough that he needed her. As a woman you have to be prepared to do whatever your man desires. Marilyn wasn’t stupid, she wasn’t looking for an easy life. She fully understood that a relationship with Diamond Danny Mann or with any powerful man would mean a certain sacrifice on her part. How could it not?
    He was the man. He was the magician. She was the hand-maiden. He performed the miracles, and he was capable of performing the miracles because she was there to do his bidding. This was the way of the world, it had always been like that and it always would be. The man got the glory, the adulation, because that was what he needed, his life blood. But the woman knew that his strength, what others saw in him, was the result of her input. There was a power behind the throne, and behind the throne of the magician there was Marilyn Eccles.
    And what did it cost, this abasement? This unselfish acceptance of her role? Not a lot, really. In this instance it cost her a day at home with her mother. It meant that she had to drive Danny’s car to Whitby and wait there until the evening when they would meet back at his house in York.
    That’s all. Nothing else. The occasional knocking from the boot, or not so occasional as it was now, constant thumping in fact, she had to ignore.
    Marilyn couldn’t ignore it, though she wasn’t going to open the boot to see what was in there. Are you kidding? She remembered the fairy stories about people who opened the forbidden box. In one the box was filled with deadly diseases that immediately flew out and attacked her and the rest of the world. In another, when the girl opened the box, she became old and died and fell to dust because it had been three hundred years since her love had given her the box.
    So, no, she would not open the boot of the car whatever happened. But that didn’t stop her wondering what was in there. It was something alive, an animal perhaps, or even a human being. Or maybe it wasn’t alive but something mechanical, a robot or an engine. But if it was something as obvious as that why had Danny warned her against taking a look? What could be the harm in seeing a robot, or a cat?
    She fixed her eyes on the road and tried to put the sound of the thumping out of her mind. Marilyn knew how psychology could lead you astray. As soon as you start to think of what it might be in the boot, you have a desire to open it. She knew that she was capable of talking herself into opening the boot, she would convince herself that Danny actually wanted her to open the boot and that the injunction not to open it was a perverse way of telling her she had to.
    The mind isn’t always on our side.
    It can lead us home and it can lead us astray.
    It wasn’t an engine, nothing mechanical. If it had been something inanimate like that there would have been a pattern to the thumping, a rhythm. But there was no pattern. First there was a kind of frantic kicking sound, then silence. A little later there would be a loud bang, then a series of smaller ones. From time to time there would appear to be a pattern, a solid and regular beat like the drums behind a rock song or the insistent tapping of a code, but just when Marilyn had convinced herself of the regularity it would fall quiet again or the banging would increase in tempo dramatically, turning into a scuffling sound.
    Marilyn made up a story. In the story she was travelling from York to Whitby in Diamond Danny Mann’s car and there was a constant racket coming from the boot which Danny had told her to ignore. She wasn’t, under any circumstances, to open the boot.
    But in the story Marilyn stopped the car and pulled off the road at Boggle Hole. She got out of the car and went around the rear. The thumping was wild, it was as if the boot was packed with wild animals struggling for freedom. She grasped the handle and pulled it open.
    Inside there was nothing. There was no interior flooring, no spare-wheel. Nothing. And there was complete silence. She looked up at the sky and the moors around her and there was a vast emptiness, not a bird or a cloud, no whistling of the wind or the hum of traffic on the country road.
    When she blinked and looked again