The meanest Flood

her ill-fated affair with Jeremy Paxman, Marilyn had tried to read a book by a feminist. Got more than halfway through before she gave up. All that freedom and independence had turned her limbs to stone. She liked the anecdotes, the way the writer pinpointed the wooden ways of men, how they refused to open their hearts in case there was nothing inside and how they were afraid of pain because they didn’t understand how liberating it was.
    She liked the way that the feminist writer talked about her childhood, her relationship with her mother and father and brothers. The way that everyone had loved her, wrapped her in a protective shroud of concern to keep life’s dragons at bay, and how she had finally realized that without dragons life wasn’t worth living.
    But after that the book had dried up; the writer had urged her to rely on her own resources and spurn every outside attempt to control her behaviour. If you read that book all the way through and listened to what the woman was saying and tried to put it into practice you’d end up being like a man.
    Ellen, Marilyn’s mother, had read the book right through and, it was true what she said, she wasn’t at all like a man. But Ellen’s problem was different. First of all she was shallow. She didn’t think things through. And secondly she had turned off her emotions some time in the past and was no longer capable of divorcing herself from reason.
    If Ellen had love in her life, if another wizard would swoop down out of the ether and take her under his magic wings, she would see the world differently.
    Marilyn had a silly and secret dream. It would never happen because she had found Danny Mann and they loved each other and the future was a star-studded sky. But before she found Danny, or rather before he chose her from all the other women, Marilyn had built herself a dreamland in which both Ellen and she had been courted by a father and son. The father had chosen Ellen to be his bride and the son had chosen Marilyn. The father and son were wealthy and they lived together in a large bungalow on the outskirts of York, close to the river. Neither of them needed to work but they had talented hands and made furniture and musical instruments from Brazilian hardwoods.
    Before the double wedding the men worked hard building extensions to the bungalow while Marilyn and Ellen shopped for their dresses and added names to the guest-list. Many of the guests were well-known television celebrities, though they both agreed that Jeremy would not get an invite. Better to be safe than sorry, Ellen said, and Marilyn nodded her head silently. They had a tiff about Ruby Wax’s invitation. Marilyn thought she’d be fun and ensure that the celebrations weren’t too serious but Ellen said that Ruby was common and she didn’t want her dominating the photographs.
    There’d been a whole lot more to the dream... the day that the children were born and the unending happiness they enjoyed together under a rainbow-coloured sky. But Marilyn let it fade as she pulled in behind her magician’s car and followed him along the A64 to Leeds. Danny Mann was reality, not a dream. He had happened like reality happens, in a flash of light, a thunderbolt out of a clear sky which had sent the dreamworld of the double wedding back where it belonged into the realm of fantasy.
    The father and son would never have happened, Marilyn could see that now. She would have spent the rest of her days waiting for them to appear. Amazing how one could let oneself be convinced by a piece of whimsy, blot out the breathing, shimmering world of reality with an imaginary movie playing inside the cinema of the mind. A bungalow by the river, for goodness’ sake. The way the weather was these last days, they’d have been flooded out. What would they have done then?
    The magician followed the Leeds ring road and Marilyn followed the magician. Some lines from ‘The Pied Piper’ came into her head and for a moment she wondered what it was that had brought him to Leeds at the dead of night. An errand of mercy? Some clandestine meeting of Northern wizards? It really didn’t matter. What was important was that she knew everything about him, his habits, his friends, the kind of food he liked and the ways in which he relaxed. A wife has to know these things because it is in these little ways that love is nurtured and grows to become an all-embracing passion.
    Danny’s car left the ring road and followed a tree-lined avenue,