The meanest Flood

here?’ she asked.
    ‘No. I thought you were picking them up.’
    ‘Conn wasn’t there. I thought he’d be here.’
    ‘Don’t worry. He’ll be on his way.’
    ‘I am worried,’ Alice said. ‘He always waits for me.’ Hannah came through the front door. She walked up the stairs without speaking, squeezing past her father.
    Alice followed her and Alex came last. ‘What happened this morning?’ Alice asked her husband. ‘You left them both at the school gate as normal?’
    Hannah and Alex exchanged a glance.
    ‘You did, didn’t you?’
    ‘Not exactly at the gate, no. I haven’t done that for a while now.’
    ‘Not exactly at the gate,’ Alice said, hearing her voice grow shrill, unable to keep it down. ‘Then where exactly is it you leave my children in the morning?’
    ‘I leave them at the bus stop,’ Alex said. ‘They’re not babies. There’s loads of kids there at that time. He’d be straight to the school with Hannah.’
    Alice turned to her daughter. ‘You went straight to school?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘And Conn?’
    ‘He follows behind,’ Hannah said. ‘I was talking to Rachel and Sarah. But he was tagging along.’
    ‘You saw him go into school?’
    Hannah played with a wisp of her hair.
    ‘You saw him go into school, Hannah?’
    Hannah opened her mouth and closed it again. She shook her head from side to side.
    Alice sat down heavily on the arm of the couch. Alex reached for his coat. ‘I’ll go and find him,’ he said. ‘He can’t be far away.’ She listened to his footsteps on the stairs. She heard the door close as he pulled it to behind him. Hannah turned away and went to her room.
    Alice let herself fall from the arm of the couch on to the cushion. She splayed her legs in front of her and searched the cracks on the ceiling. This was the place she’d never let her imagination visit. From time to time with each of her children she’d come to the brink of this place and always managed to pull back, knowing that if she gave it space in her head there might be a corresponding space in the world.
    This was one of those times that happened to other people. Unfortunate people. People quite unlike Alice and her family. It was a statistically untenable event. The chance of its happening to her was so remote that it was impossible. If someone somewhere in England was going to snatch a child today, the odds against it being her own child were enormous. Astronomical. It couldn’t happen.
    And it hadn’t happened; Alice tried to bully her own mind into submission. It hasn’t happened, she told herself. There are alternative explanations. Alex will be back in a few minutes and Conn will be with him.
    But she watched those few minutes click past on the digital display on the front of the VCR and not one of them brought a grain of hope. Everything was thrown into immediate relief. The beating of her heart slowed like a clock which was winding down. The blood pumping through her veins was as if poisoned by cholesterol, it clogged rather than flowed, threatening to form curds of thrombi which would burst the vessels in her heart and head.
    Alice looked at the room in which she lived through a darkening tunnel as her eyes glazed over and her mind fought the unacceptable reality which had swooped down from a relatively cloudless sky.
    She thought she was dying. She believed that her vital systems were closing down, even in some way that she was complicit in this act of suicide. That the prospect of living the rest of her life without her youngest child was too much to bear. It was as if the organization of her being was split asunder, her soul and spirit flying off in fear and dread and her abandoned physical body falling into an inspiration of torpor and decay.
    The alarm bell rang for a long time before she heard it. At first it was intermittent like the bell at the start and end of a round of boxing. It triggered hazy, colourless images of bruised and glistening flesh as two heavyweights in silk shorts swung at each other’s heads. The bell transformed itself into a continuous cacophony and the image in her head repeated the same few frames over and over again. A lightning fist from the shoulder connecting with and splitting an area of flesh above an eye, blood and pus spraying out in an arc like a crimson rainbow.
    For an instant the bell was a single, modulated scream, tearing the vocal cords of Conn as fear and incomprehension ripped through the tenderness of his form. Alice felt