The meanest Flood

irony.
     
    Sam walked to Marie’s house. No rain, the sky was clear, but he could hear the river chafing and snarling as he got closer. It was raining up in the hills and on the moors and as the waters ran off into the main stream the ancient banks were too narrow to contain them. Lines of sightseers watched the broiling mass of black water as it hurtled past, tourists and voyeurs for the main part. Local householders were too busy packing their belongings to stand and watch the growing threat to their homes.
    Sam stood close to the bank. The rushing water had risen ten feet in as many days and was only inches away from his feet. Broken branches and debris were whipping past at speed and some guys were posing their wives and girlfriends in front of the flow, taking photographs so they’d be able to show their kids and grandchildren. It was like life itself, going past so fast you couldn’t take it all in. You focused on one segment of it, something there that looked like a bed, and you watched it ducking and diving as it came towards you and again as it came close and disappeared downstream and you were never sure exactly what it was or where it had come from.
    Do people throw old beds into rivers? Or did the river reach out and pluck it from somebody’s bedroom as it went past? But it was gone now, leaving no trace behind, and Sam couldn’t be sure that it was a bed anyway. Could’ve been anything or nothing. Something he invented.
    The river was rushing away. Trying its best not to get stuck in the town. Once it breached its banks it wouldn’t be a river anymore. It would be an alien in the city, an agent of misery and destruction. Once it lost its form and its identity it would wreak havoc, turn the relatively civilized and settled lives of the local population into a whirlpool of misery.
    Marie and JD were having a tea break, sitting in the bay window of Marie’s house looking out at the raging river. Celia was having a tea break as well, but in her normal manner, pottering around, collecting small ornaments and books and taking them upstairs then coming back for another sip from her cup.
    ‘Are you another pair of hands?’ she asked Sam. ‘Or a tourist?’
    ‘I’ll help with the heavy stuff,’ he said.
    JD took a notebook from his pocket and scribbled in it. ‘Good line,’ he said. ‘I can use it in the current novel. Post-modern ring to it. A character who helps with the heavy stuff or sees himself as helping with the heavy stuff. Someone who gets involved with other people’s emotions or traumas. Inflated ego.’
    ‘Tell you what,’ Sam said, ‘I’ll go out and come back in a couple of minutes. Try to make a different entrance.’
    ‘No, it’s a good line,’ JD insisted, looking down at his notebook. ‘I mean it. It was worth coming out for.’ JD wrote and published crime novels and from time to time worked with the Sam Turner Detective Agency, ostensibly for research purposes, though he also got a kick out of it if he could avoid violent confrontations. And he needed the money. When he wasn’t doing either of those things he was a drummer in a country blues band called Fried (not Freud) and the Behaviourists and he was a voracious dope smoker. He was also ridiculously in love with Marie, probably more so since she had made it clear to him that he wasn’t an item on her emotional agenda. They had once had a brief affair but in recent years Marie found her emotional and sexual fulfilment elsewhere. She used JD when she had to move furniture or if she needed a driver.
    JD said if he couldn’t have Marie, he didn’t need emotional or sexual fulfilment because he was an artist and good at subjugating. But there were people who said he didn’t remember what he got up to when he was strung out on loud country blues and electric feedback and the devil weed was pumping through his brain. Whatever it was it didn’t deter the handful of painted and bejewelled groupies who turned out when the band were strutting their stuff.
    Celia padded through from Marie’s kitchen and put a mug of hot coffee in Sam’s hand. She was a small woman. She wore a ring with a pearl on her middle finger, a gold band with two tiny diamonds on her index finger, and on her ring finger she had a signet ring on the second joint and a bed of assorted jewels in a heart on the third joint. The little finger was bare, poor thing. Celia’s hair had been thinning rapidly over the past months but she still used a