The meanest Flood

don’t want another episode like, you know, the footballer or... You don’t want that, either, do you?’
    Marilyn shook her head. ‘No. I don’t want that.’
    ‘So, who were you talking to on the telephone?’
    ‘The hairdresser. I want a trim, something to make me feel better.’
    ‘And where were you this morning? You took the car.’
    ‘It’s a surprise. I don’t want to tell you.’
    ‘I don’t want a surprise, Marilyn. I’ve had enough surprises in my life.’
    ‘I went to look at some earrings. They were supposed to be for your birthday. A present for you.’
    Ellen shook her head and smiled. She held out her arms and Marilyn let herself be enfolded in her mother’s bosom. While there, snuggled up between arm and breast, she removed what remained of the lithium tablet from her mouth and tucked it into the back pocket of her jeans. Outside the window the river water on the field was creeping closer to the house, every day a little closer.
    ‘It’s not that you’re bad,’ Ellen was saying. ‘I know that You’re a good girl at heart, always were. You just go off the rails from time to time, when you’re left to your own devices. But if we stick together we can beat it, Marilyn. The two of us together are bigger than this thing.’
    ‘I know,’ Marilyn said, making her body shudder like it would at the onset of tears. ‘And I’m so glad you’re here. Without you there’d be nothing to live for.’
     

10
     
    Sam watched the weather from his office window and wondered where he was with Angeles. Had the best of their relationship already happened? Was the future another slow decline into separate paths? Was there anything he could do to influence the situation one way or another? Grey city was almost deserted. There were a few damp tourists in Betty’s tea shop but the usual queue to get into the place had been absent since the rains came. ‘What do you think?’ he asked Marie. ‘We gonna have a flood?’
    ‘The river’s high,’ she said. ‘Another couple of inches and it’ll be over the towpath. I might have to move out of my house.’
    ‘Come and stay with me,’ he said. ‘Be it ever so humble it’ll be nice and dry.’
    Marie smiled. ‘Celia’s already offered me a room at her place. Thanks.’ She joined him at the window, looked down on scurrying figures with umbrellas, a middle-aged woman in a tartan plastic raincoat and a street person standing outside the Mansion House with a tin whistle and a dripping nose. The sky was padded with black cloud. It was as if the divinity had gone into clinical depression and His system had developed an immunity to all the usual drugs. He wasn’t interested any more.
    Marie was wearing a loosely knitted jumper from French Connection with a pair of trousers in shiny black cotton and new laced boots of Spanish leather. She was a large-boned woman, above average weight but well capable of carrying it. She wore her hair short and was conscious of an overbite which gave her face an interest that eclipsed mere prettiness.
    ‘Do we have any work?’ she asked.
    Sam shook his head. ‘Not a lot. There’s routine stuff that keeps Geordie busy. And there was the Nottingham job last week, but the telephone doesn’t ring. I keep thinking they’ve disconnected us.’
    ‘I suppose it gives me more time to work at the Centre, but if I don’t earn money the bills don’t get paid.’
    The Centre was a women’s refuge where Marie helped out whenever the detective business was in the doldrums. She’d been a nurse and had the ability to listen as well as a well-honed social conscience, and there were times when she was utterly convinced that she could live without men.
    ‘If you need money...’ Sam said.
    ‘Thanks.’ She smiled. ‘I’d just ask. You’d be the first person I thought of, you being so rich. But I’m not broke, there’s money in the bank. And tomorrow or the next day or next week, whenever, some time soon you’ll be telling me we’ve got so much work we can’t manage. Celia’ll be going out on surveillance and you’ll be bringing in the part-timers like JD and Janet.’
    ‘This is true,’ Sam said. ‘Whatever goes around comes around. We’ve got a million customers, it’s just a marketing problem. You busy at the Centre?’
    ‘Always. Why is it that a young mother with a baby attracts a guy with shit for brains and fists the size of lump hammers?’
    ‘Sometimes seems like understanding or tenderness are too