The meanest Flood

around a table. But if Jesus had been born the same time as us, what they’d’ve done, they’d’ve gone to some fast food place and had whatever was on the menu. I dunno, might’ve been pizza, curried king prawns and chips.
    ‘Then in church on Sundays you’d get a few more people turning up for Communion. “This is my body”, a nd the parson sticks a piece of Cumberland sausage in your face, “and this is my blood ”, and you suck up a Vodka Alcopop through a straw.’
    Janet laughed. ‘Are you going to work?’
    ‘Maybe I should. Sam’ll be briefing us on why he lied to the police.’
    ‘Perhaps he killed her,’ Janet said. ‘That’d be a good reason to lie.’
    ‘Sam? He’d never do that. What’re you saying?’
    Janet raised her eyebrows, put a grin on her face. ‘Never say never, Geordie. Remember, there are no absolutes anymore. In the right circumstances, in context, it could all make perfect sense. This ex-wife of his — what was she called, Katherine? — she could’ve been the reason he was in Nottingham in the first place.’
    ‘This’s my friend you’re talking about,’ Geordie told her.
    ‘Oh, I know,’ Janet said as she lifted Echo out of her highchair. ‘And he’s a thoroughly nice bloke. It was probably a mercy killing.’
     

8
     
    Mid-morning and Jody was lying on the couch half-naked. Diamond Danny Mann came in from the kitchen with a mug of tea. He wore shiny black trousers with braces and no shirt.
    ‘I’ve moved the thermostat up,’ he said. He sat on the edge of the couch and used the remote to flick through the TV channels. After a couple of minutes he hit the standby button and gazed over the rim of his mug at a picture on velvet hanging on the wall. In the centre of the picture was a wizard with a tall pointed hat, a black cape and a wand that looked like a sparkler. On the ground by the wizard’s feet was a black cat and above his head a crescent moon.
    ‘I’ve got this thing with my eye,’ Danny said. ‘The last couple of weeks. Maybe I’m rundown?’ He turned his head to the left and then to the right. Focused above the velvet picture and then below it. ‘Some kind of visual fault. It starts to twitch and a small kaleidoscope takes off on the edge of my vision, spinning away in a corner of the retina.’
    Jody didn’t reply. He imagined he heard her sigh quietly but he couldn’t be sure. She wasn’t easy to communicate with outside their double bed.
    ‘Might be a brain tumour,’ he said. He put his hand over his right eye and looked around the room. ‘Right eye, left side of the brain. There’s a rune you can use for tumours. Give them to somebody else or get rid of your own.’ He put his mug on the carpet and walked over to a shelf of books. He selected a large tome with broken boards and ragged end-papers and took it over to a circular table in the pink-curtained bay window.
    He thumbed backwards and forwards through the book for the better part of an hour. Eventually he closed it and sat back in the chair. ‘A Tiki,’ he said. ‘That’s what I need. Greenstone figure, something like jade. Might have to import it.’ He glanced at Jody. ‘Lot to do,’ he said. ‘Three shows this week, another woman to disappear, brain tumour to cure.’ He left his chair and reached down to take her by the hand. ‘And then there’s the question of getting you sorted, my darling.’
     
    ‘Do you remember,’ Danny had said to the inert body of Katherine Turner, ‘do you remember a time when the world was full of noises, sounds and sweet airs, that gave delight and no pain? When you thought the clouds would open and show riches ready to drop upon you? And did you cry to dream again?’
    He spoke the lines to the still-warm corpse on the bed because there had been such a time in Danny’s life, a time when he hadn’t needed to make his own magic at all. When the whole of his known world had been filled with constant melody.
    At the University of Durham all those years ago Danny’s degree had been in Drama. He had not enjoyed the separation from his mother but there had been aspects of the course that had given him joy. He had learned how to present himself, how to project outwards from his centre, almost anything at all. He could make himself appear tall or short with a mere shift of his internal focus. In a group or in front of an audience he could be regarded as aggressive or passive or any of the nuances in between simply by an