The meanest Flood

well. If he hadn’t had so much to drink she wouldn’t have managed and he’d have dragged her back into the alley and raped her, maybe beaten or killed her. But that was speculation. What had happened was that the man had tried it on and she’d escaped and she was safe.
    She no longer knew if she’d lost Danny Mann or if Danny had lost her. There had been the idea of some kind of initiation while she was in the passage, but surely that didn’t include attempted rape?
    Marilyn was confused. She reasoned that she was in shock. In which case she should have a cup of strong tea with sugar. Leeds, half-past one in the morning. Strong tea with sugar wasn’t going to be easy.
    She started the engine and drove along the main road, heading towards the centre of town. She stopped at a hot-dog stand and bought a plastic cup of boiling water with a tea-bag in it and four sugar lumps. She asked the vendor for a spoon and stirred until the water was black.
    Back behind the wheel of Ellen’s car she sipped the liquid without removing the tea-bag. When it was gone and she was no longer in shock Marilyn drove back to the block of flats where Danny had parked his car. It was still there, standing alone now, so that she could pull in behind it and wait for him.
    She took a sprig of privet leaves from a hedge and wedged it under his windscreen wiper so that he’d know she was there. Then she settled down in the driver’s seat of her mother’s car and closed her eyes.
    She dreamed about the attempted rapist twice, and woke each time she failed to escape him. But she finally settled into a kinder dream, with the magician, Danny Mann, and a long blue room the colour of a clear sky. They didn’t speak. They didn’t need to. They loved each other more than words. Sometimes, more than once in the dream, Marilyn wasn’t sure if they had or needed physical bodies.
    When she awoke she was calm, composed. It was as if the blueness and the spiritual feelings that had accompanied the dream had permeated through to the very essence of her.
    She didn’t mind that she had slept through the night and it was now bright daylight, or that there were pedestrians at the entrance to the flats looking in at her. She didn’t mind that Danny’s car had gone and that he had abandoned her once more. This was one of the things she would have to learn to live with, at least in the short term. A small price to pay for the love of a good man, a special man, a man with extraordinary talents and abilities.
     

14
     
    If he leaned forward into the bay and looked along North Lane he could see the Taps at the top of the street. Still closed, of course, no customers at this time of the morning. The early mist was giving way to thin sunshine and if he half-closed his eyes he could see undines and sylphs and salamanders, a host of elementals in the magical air dying into and out of each other, allowing themselves to be divvied up into kaleidoscopic patterns before the life-force rushed in to resurrect them.
    He hadn’t eaten since leaving home the night before but he had a small plastic bottle of sparkling spring water from which he took sips at hourly intervals. ‘Chew your liquids and drink your food,’ his mother used to tell him when he was small. Funny, the things you remembered. ‘Beef tea,’ she’d say at other times. ‘Beef tea, Danny, will cure anything.’
    When he thought back on his life the magician couldn’t remember anyone who had been as constant as her. Not his father. Not uncles or aunts or cousins or school-friends. Not grandparents or agents or other performers. Not audiences. Not women. Most of the people he’d known were fickle, many of them competitors or actual traitors. There’d been illusions of warmth like small oases in memory; a Christmas Eve with his father, a football match with one of her boyfriends, a conjuror with a spotted hat and six doves and a brolly up his sleeve. But the final outcome was always rejection in one form or another. Only she was faithful until the end. Only she was magic.
    The second phase of the trick had brought him to this house in Leeds. The couple who lived here were not important, the man was purely incidental, a nuisance. But the woman, the lady of the house, was an essential component in the presentation of the illusion. Her death would be a deception, it would create a false impression.
    In the simplest of cheats a magician misleads his audience by showing them an apparently empty