The meanest Flood

Stonegate. Ruben took a couple of shots with his zoom but could only get the man’s profile. Breaking cover he ran across the square, cutting the detective off, clicking away with his camera as he moved. By the entrance to Stonegate he stood his ground and took a couple of full-face shots of the guy.
    Sam Turner was a couple of metres away and stopped in his tracks as if he might be considering posing for the camera. He looked behind him to check that the guy with the camera wasn’t focusing on someone else. Then he turned back and said, ‘What the...? What you doing, man?’ Real confusion on his face.
    Ruben took another photograph, made sure he had what he’d come for. Then he turned away and walked quickly along Davygate.
    He heard Sam Turner call after him but took no notice, kept on walking.
    When he heard Turner’s footsteps and felt the guy’s hand on his arm, Ruben turned quickly and brought up his knee.
    As he increased his pace and distanced himself from the man crumpled on the wet pavement, Ruben reflected that the detective still had some balls. If slightly crushed at the moment. The thing about having balls was, you had to be able to look after them.
     

12
     
    Sam was sprawled in the chair with his legs spread in front of him. His right foot was balanced on a wooden stool and his left on a low table. He held a cushion over his groin and to avert the pain held himself still and tried to concentrate on Springsteen’s lyrics to ‘Hungry Heart’ which Geordie had put on the CD player. Geordie had his dog Barney and daughter Echo with him, and he was explaining to both of them what had happened to his boss.
    ‘Most people,’ he said, ‘guys like me and Barney, we’ve got a couple of grapes hanging down between our legs. But Echo doesn’t because she’s not a guy, she’s a girl like her mum and girls have fannies, which are different, right? Now, Sam here, he used to have a couple of grapes hanging down like the other blokes but somebody came up to him in the street and turned his grapes into melons.’ Barney cocked his head to one side and glanced at Sam with something like sympathy in his brown eyes. Echo didn’t seem to take in her father’s words and was more concerned with trying to remove one of his eyes.
    Sam shifted his weight from one buttock to the other. 'Very droll,’ he said. ‘Not too far off the mark, though. They’ve shrunk back down now, more or less normal size. Except they ache, feel like somebody’s been playing snooker with them.’
    ‘Cue-ball syndrome,’ Geordie said. ‘I’ve had it myself. Got it on my honeymoon. What it does, it keeps you on the straight and narrow. That old argument about sex being for pleasure or for reproduction loses all significance. You don’t have to concern yourself with safe sex, wearing a condom or doing the rhythm method of birth control. All that stuff is for the rest of the world. The Pope, AIDS, all these great questions of our time, they go out the window. It’s a chance for you to concentrate on morality and on improving yourself as a person. You could take up meditation or write poetry. Nothing is entirely negative.’
    ‘You come to visit me or just to piss me off?’ Sam said. ‘I’ve been attacked here, Geordie. Sustained a physical injury. Apart from that there’s the trauma of the thing, the shame of curling up in the middle of the street clutching your balls, a million tourists taking snaps. I’m supposed to be the tough-guy detective. I’ve got a reputation to protect.’
    ‘You should’ve just let the guy take his photographs. You could’ve offered to pose for him. He was probably a fan taking photographs for his scrapbook. Why’d you have to chase after him?’
    Sam shook his head. ‘I didn’t think. There was something wrong about it. I followed my instinct.’
    ‘You try to take the guy’s camera off him, what d’you think he’s gonna do?’
    ‘I wanted an explanation,’ Sam said.
    ‘And you got a knee in the balls.’
    ‘And I got you,’ Sam said. ‘So I don’t have to worry about beating myself up. I can rely on you to come round at the first opportunity and make me feel good about it.’
    ‘What did he look like?’ Geordie asked.
    ‘Big guy.’
    ‘Of course.’
    ‘He was dark, swarthy, lean, sharp clothes, bright socks, six foot two.’
    ‘Fashion freak. You ever see him before?’
    Sam shook his head. ‘And I don’t wanna see him again.’
    ‘You want my opinion, you never