The meanest Flood

bottle of red dye on it every few weeks. Her neck was festooned with a lightly billowing silk scarf to hide the wrinkles and she wore tight velvet trousers. Didn’t look the type to give up without a fight.
    ‘So, what’s to do?’ Sam asked.
    ‘Finish your coffee first,’ Marie told him. ‘Maybe you and JD could get the fridge upstairs? The cooker? And the kitchen table if it’ll go. Me and Celia’ll carry on shifting the silver and the Modiglianis.’ She drew the back of her hand over her forehead. ‘Then there’s the antique Spode and my collection of Degas bronzes.’
    Sam grinned and JD laughed as though Billy Connolly had done a fart impression. Nearly fell off his chair.
    They humped the fridge up the stairs, one step at a time. Looked incongruous sitting there next to Marie’s bed, like a fish in the desert. JD wiped his brow with a red handkerchief. ‘What’re you writing?’ Sam asked.
    ‘Another novel. About halfway through. I’m past the part where I decide whether to go on or give up.’
    ‘About cops and robbers?’
    ‘On the surface, yes. At the heart it’s about exile. About being separated from the thing that feeds you, gives meaning to your life.’
    ‘You’ve talked about that before, in other books.’
    ‘I’ve skirted round it once or twice. In this book it’s the main theme.’ He laughed. ‘Don’t know who it was, some writer or other, said we all rewrite the same book over and over again. A writer usually only has one or two things to say and he or she goes on saying it until somebody stops them. The best writers find a new way of saying it with every book.’
    ‘There’s nothing new in the world,’ Sam said. ‘Only new ways of seeing the same old things.’
    JD nodded agreement. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Something like that. Shall we get the cooker?’
    One step at a time again, JD above the cooker and Sam lifting from below, remembering all the rules about taking the weight on his legs rather than his back. They left it standing next to the fridge.
    ‘Exile is when you’re away from home,’ Sam said. ‘When you’re not allowed to go back. Used to be a kind of punishment.’
    ‘Still is in different countries,’ JD said. ‘To be banished. That’s how America got started, Australia. People the state didn’t want around, shipped them overseas.’
    ‘This an historical novel you’re writing?’
    ‘No. I’m using exile as a metaphor. It’s about the places we’re not allowed to go or the places we don’t allow ourselves to visit.’
    ‘Physical places? Geographic places?’
    ‘Sometimes. Places can be in the mind too. We’re often exiled from ourselves, from our own experiences, our own memories.’
    Sam took a couple of steps over to the window and looked out at the river. ‘I’ve been thinking about that,’ he said. ‘When I heard about Katherine the other day. Seems unreal, somehow, that we were married, spent all that time together, intimate time. It’s as if I wasn’t there, or I dreamed it or read about it in a book. Like it was somebody else’s experience.’
    ‘You were a drunk, Sam. You were exiled by definition. The alcohol kept you away from everything, yourself, your pain.’
    Sam shook his head. ‘It didn’t, though. Not really. I always thought it would help, that the next drink would solve something, some longing, that it would insulate me from life. But it never did. It made every day harder to cope with, harder to bear. I can honestly say that I never had a drink that solved a problem.’
    ‘You’re an outsider anyway,’ JD told him. ‘A natural exile. That’s why you’re a private eye and not a cop. You never opt to accept the defaults. It’s a custom installation every time for you, even if you don’t understand the jargon. It’s almost as if you’re frightened of convention.’
    ‘Yeah,’ Sam said in a low voice. ‘Convention makes me shiver. I’ve seen what it does to people.’
    ‘I read about an old Pawnee warrior,’ JD said. ‘Guy called Small Ankles. Somewhere around the end of the nineteenth century he was already an old man and it was near the time of the tribe’s creation ceremony. Small Ankles told his son the ceremony would be hard to perform because there weren’t many wolves around any more. The wolf was a central character in their creation myth. In this ceremony the Indians got together and practised “historic breathing”, they inhaled the past and tried to show how it was contained