The meanest Flood

in the present, in the now. And Small Ankles and the other old men of the village were worried that if they lost the ceremony they’d also lose the past. They’d be undefined, broken. If they didn’t have a past or access to their past they wouldn’t be able to continue. Later, when Small Ankles had gone to his ancestors and the tribe had been moved to a reservation, his son would tell this story, about how his father had seen the demise of the Indian as it became more and more impossible for him to inhale his past.’ Sam looked at JD. ‘Are you trying to tell me something?’
    ‘I tell stories,’ JD said. ‘That’s what I do.’
    The kitchen table wouldn’t go up the stairs. Marie scratched her head but that didn’t make any difference. ‘It’s going to get ruined,’ she said.
    ‘What we could do,’ JD said, ‘is plastic bags around the legs. Tie them at the top to keep the water out.’ Sam looked at him for nearly a minute, realized why the guy couldn’t be anything else but a writer.
    ‘Give me a hand,’ he said. JD followed him out into Marie’s yard and together they brought in about forty concrete paving slabs. They made four columns with the slabs and lifted the table into position, one leg on each column. The top of the table was only a couple of inches short of the ceiling. Looked like an abortive attempt to reconstruct a Greek temple.
    ‘Clever boy,’ Celia said to Sam.
    ‘I carried most of the slabs,’ JD told her.
     
    Angeles was managing director and majority shareholder in the soft drinks business which had been founded by her father. It was a demanding job, not made easier by her blindness, but one for which she had been groomed since her earliest childhood. It took her out of the house every day of the week and committed her to a couple of evenings as well.
    Sam arrived at her front door shortly after dark. Her lips were tight and the skin of her face was pale, almost transparent around her cheekbones and under her eyes.
    ‘Something wrong?’ he asked.
    She flashed him a smile. ‘Do I look that bad?’
    ‘No, I just thought...’
    ‘It’s OK. A hard day. Trying to get everything ready for the Christmas rush. Planning with a couple of line managers who don’t believe in planning. Sometimes I wonder if it’s worth it.’
    She splashed a dollop of Talisker into a cut-glass tumbler and added a measure of Highland spring water. She took a sip and closed her eyes, swivelled her head around to ease the tension in her neck. She took another glass from the sideboard, splashed a dollop of Highland spring water into it and topped it up with more Highland spring water, handed it to Sam who poured it down his throat. He reached for the bottle and poured himself another one. He was a hard-drinking man.
    Angeles had slipped down into a cocoon of a chair, lying back on the base of her spine, her legs spread in front of her. One of her shoes had come off but she didn’t bother to retrieve it. Sam knelt and removed the other shoe. He put her feet on his lap and massaged them alternately, kneading the soles, wondering at the tiny perfection of them.
    ‘You and me,’ he said. ‘It’s gone quiet.’
    She sipped from her drink and looked over the rim of the glass. ‘Yes, I know. Why is that?’
    ‘You’re not here. Most of the time we’re together you’re somewhere inside your head. Feels like you’ve met someone else.’
    Angeles sat up. ‘No,’ she said. She didn’t shout but her voice went into a higher octave. ‘I wouldn’t do that, Sam.’
    ‘You wouldn’t meet someone else?’
    ‘Not without telling you. You’d be the first to know.’ She sounded hurt, misunderstood. Sam recognized the territory. An intimate moment metamorphosed into injury and reproach in less time than it takes to sing a love song.
    He gave her her feet back. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. But given the same circumstances he’d play it exactly the same again. If there was any chance, and in Sam’s experience there was always a chance, that she was seeing someone else, he wanted it out in the open. What made it harder was the double-bind: that if she wasn’t seeing someone already, his lack of trust and his general insecurity about relationships could easily push her to look for someone with more sensitivity and understanding.
    ‘Why do you think that?’ she asked.
    He shrugged. ‘The distance,’ he said. ‘The spaces between us.’
    ‘You’re often distant yourself, Sam. Preoccupied.