The meanest Flood

much to hope for,’ he said. ‘The culture these guys move in regards reason as unacceptably intelligent.’
    ‘You blame the culture?’
    The government if you like, the way we’ve let ourselves be organized. I don’t have those kinds of answers, Marie. I’m a PI not a medic. My job’s to blow the bad guys away.’
    ‘You don’t believe that.’
    ‘Belief isn’t any kind of answer.’
    ‘Neither is violence.’
    ‘Not in the long run,’ he said.
    ‘Have you ever hit a woman, Sam?’
    He didn’t answer.
    ‘Does that mean you have?’
    He pursed his lips. ‘Could mean I have but I’ve opted to forget it.’
    ‘Yes or no?’
    ‘Only in self-defence, m’lawd.’
    ‘What happened?’
    ‘I shot her,’ Sam said. ‘You know that. It’s not my best memory but I’d do it again in the same circumstances, it kept me alive to fight another day.’
    ‘What about Katherine?’
    ‘Did I hit her? Or did I kill her?’
    ‘I know you didn’t kill her.’
    ‘What’s the question, Marie?’
    ‘Who was she? Did I meet her?’
    ‘No, she was before your time. We were both drinkers. She got out. In a way her getting out was an encouragement to me. I found a way around it myself later, a few years later, but if someone else gets free it gives you strength. You don’t resent them, you appreciate the lesson. It’s good to know that something’s possible.’ Marie nodded encouragement.
    ‘We were young,’ he said. ‘I met her in a bar. It was opening time and she was more or less as pissed as I was. We were the only people in the place, six o’clock in the evening and drinking doubles. I was at the stage I could focus better if I kept one eye shut. The barman was a soak well and he told us the old joke about the drunk who c0uldn’t work out what his limit was because he always assed out before he reached it. And Katherine said she’d been in a bar earlier in the day and asked for the usual so the landlord carried her outside. And we were laughing together, all three of us, and I was supposed to tell a drunk joke but I couldn’t remember one and they both thought that was funnier than if I’d told a good one so we laughed some more.
    ‘I dunno how long we kept going that night. At some point I ended up at her place. It was one room somewhere and we slept together with the light on because she was frightened of the dark. Sometimes we’d go to bed during the day and we still had to sleep with the light on because Katherine would say we might wake up in the dark.
    ‘We were swimming in booze. We’d laugh a lot and we’d always come up with some kind of scam to get the money together for another bottle, or we’d fight like cat and dog and still come up with a solution. We convinced each other we were a good couple, we couldn’t live without each other. So we got married.’
    ‘Sounds like you were in full flight,’ Marie said.
    ‘No doubt about it. I was half-crazy. When Donna and Bronte were killed I stopped sleeping. I used to stand at the corner of that street with a pad and a pen and jot down the number of every car that was over the speed limit. When I got a full sheet I’d take it round the police station and then go back to the corner and fill up another one. I did that for a year, never missed a day. Must’ve started taking a bottle with me about nine months in and soon the bottle became more important than watching the cars.
    ‘I’d wake up screaming in the street, sitting on the pavement, or the cops would put me in a cell. Bronte was two when she died. I’d play the impact over and over again in my head. The head-on collision with iron and steel at ninety miles an hour, her body sailing through the air like a missile. And I’d know it was a dream, although I wasn’t really asleep, it was a vision, a nightmare. The whole thing would take place in silence, like a film when the sound has been lost. And then I’d be awake, wide awake again and back in the world, and Bronte and Donna had both gone in the same fell swoop and it wasn’t a dream at all.’
    Marie touched his hand and stood beside him while they looked out at the rain. He’d still been a drunk when she first met him. The police had brought him into the hospital where she was in the final year of her SRN training. He’d got into a fight with a gang of squaddies; he had a fractured arm, two broken ribs, and his head and face had been used like a football. Before they left him one of them stabbed him in the neck