The meanest Flood

fashioned and hurled at the sun and there was a dreadful noise of water in his ears and sights of ugly death within his eyes.
    Danny felt a smile crease his face. Outside the window the rain was coming down again. In Nottingham there had been a group of creationists outside the theatre, their placards predicting the end of the world. Well, anything was possible. But Danny believed that the flood in Genesis was a homily, a local flood like any other, and the ‘world’ that was flooded merely the world that was known to Noah.
    When the metallic-coloured Montego entered the street the magician got to his feet. He watched as Sam Turner left the car and walked tentatively up the path of the house opposite, number thirty-seven, where Danny Mann, alias Mr Bonner (his mother’s maiden name), had arranged to meet him. A good-looking man in a tracksuit and trainers answered the door and stood with his hands on his hips. He listened to Turner then shook his head.
    Turner fished in his pocket and brought out a scrap of paper. He said something to the owner of the house and the other man shook his head again. Danny could almost hear his words. There’s no Bonner lives here. No, I don’t know anyone of that name. Not in this street.
    The good-looking man closed the door and Sam Turner returned to his car. He stood by the side of it in the rain and looked up and down the street, unable or unwilling to admit that his journey had been in vain.
    He unlocked the driver’s door of the Montego and then locked it again. He walked along the street, tentatively, as though his trousers were too tight for him, though they looked like a perfect fit. He crossed over, rang the bell of house number seventy-three to make sure he hadn’t become aphasic. No one answered his ring. Back at his car he stopped a young black woman with an umbrella and must have asked her if she knew of anyone called Bonner. He showed her his scrap of paper with the name and address scribbled on it. But it wasn’t his lucky day.
    When Sam Turner got back into his car and drove away Danny went upstairs and entered the woman’s bedroom. She was tied to the bed as he had left her. The gag, which consisted of her own face-flannel and two-inch-wide masking tape, gave her an eastern appearance, as if she was wearing a yashmak, just the eyes staring out at the world.
    Black silk pyjamas like the man, but without the Heidegger crest. In place of it she had embroidered the words Hi, Guys. Her hair was cut short and brushed forward, one or two strands of grey in there, but her face was unlined apart from the crow’s feet around her eyes. Danny might have ended up with a woman like her if he’d managed to maintain any of his relationships. If everything hadn’t gone wrong in his life at such an early age. It didn’t matter now, of course, it was just something to think about.
    There had been a student of Bakhtin in his group at university; she was fascinated by dialogical and monological language, the former characterized by a person speaking towards at least one other person in response or anticipation with living language. Dead language was monological like that of the medieval church or any religious state that admits of the existence of no other voice. They had been an item for a while and Danny had discussed Bakhtin’s theories with her, agreeing that poetry was monologic and the novel dialogic. But eventually she had walked off hand in hand with a poststructuralist critic who couldn’t tell the difference between a novel and the Highway Code.
     
    Nicole Day was no longer terrified. She was frightened of the man but that initial terror had been partially replaced by rage. When he’d taken Rolf away she’d listened to the sounds coming from the spare bedroom and had expected the man to come back and rape her. But that had been hours ago. Her hands and feet had long since gone numb from the tight rope that bound them. For a while she had thought she would choke to death, that she would swallow the flannel that the man had stuffed into her mouth. But she was still alive, alive and resolved.
    At the first opportunity she would tear at his eyes. If he gave her one moment of freedom she would hurl all of her strength at him. Claw her way to his obscene balls, hanging there like a sack of old coins. His silence, the way he came to the door of her room from time to time and hovered there in the shadows, was calculated to undermine her. He knew that if he did nothing,