The meanest Flood

bed.
    ‘Aaaagh,’ said the guy, lying there naked with his eyes screwed shut. His hands patted around the bed for the missing blanket. ‘Oh, aaaagh.’
    Not at all like Scrooge, Ruben thought. He was skinny, it was true, but he was young, still in his twenties, and he had long blond hair and a choker of coloured glass beads around his neck. He was unconscious, his morning hard-on the only thing about him that wasn’t sleeping.
    ‘What are you doing?’ the girl said, raising her voice as Ruben took hold of the guy’s foot and walked towards the door. The guy came awake but not quick enough to stop his head cracking against the floorboards. Ruben walked around the room. The guy’s free leg was crumpled under him and his bare back was scraping along the floor. He was spitting profanities, trying his best to wriggle free, but Ruben kept a tight grip of him. The girl was hysterical. She’d done a couple of ear-splitting screams and jumped up and down for a minute. Now she’d abandoned her blanket, which was the only thing that covered her, and was throwing herself at Ruben in a valiant and fearless attempt to rescue her man. Ruben brushed her aside but he was conscious of her talons which were intent on raking the flesh from his face.
    Her final attack was so ferocious he had to let go of the guy’s foot. He grabbed both of her wrists and held them behind her, pushed her face-down on the bed. ‘OK, it’s over,’ he said.
    The girl didn’t hear or didn’t want to hear. She carried on flailing her legs, twisting her neck and showing her teeth as if she’d been attacked by termites. ‘OK,’ Ruben roared close to her ear. ‘It’s over. Shut the fuck up.’
    That got through. She quietened down, looked around the room and saw that Pete Lewis was sitting on his hands in the corner by the door, his knees drawn up under his chin. Ruben released her wrists and she rolled herself up in a sheet, still muttering under her breath. She said something about muscle-bound tossers, didn’t sound like a compliment. Then there was a reference to testosterone and macho posturing. Kind of things that Kitty might have said, only not about Ruben because he didn’t do macho posturing around Kitty. Or when he did do it he dipped it in a bath of irony first, which seemed to make it acceptable.
    They were both sobbing, the girl on the bed and the guy in the corner by the door. Ruben looked around for someone to blame but he was the only one there. ‘Christ,’ he said. ‘I only wanted to ask you some questions. I drove out from Nottingham and you don’t even get out of bed.’
    ‘It’s the middle of the night,’ the girl shouted at him through her tears. ‘I thought you was gonna kill us.’
    ‘My head’s bleeding,’ Pete Lewis said.
    The girl scrambled off the bed and crawled over to him. The sheet didn’t cover her ass but no one seemed to mind. Ruben didn’t think it was erotic. It could have been if there hadn’t been all that tension in the air or if he didn’t feel guilty or if he was the kind of guy got turned on by a bony ass.
    The girl was ministering to her man’s wounds, whispering sympathetically and dabbing away at the back of his head with a corner of the sheet. His face was white.
    ‘Listen, I wanna apologize for my behaviour,’ Ruben said. ‘I was out of order back there.’ Pete Lewis and his girlfriend looked at him with big eyes. Ruben couldn’t tell if his apology had the effect of calming them or putting them on red-alert. The guy was shaking, his mouth was open and he was wringing his hands like a bereaved mother. He said, ‘I think I’m going to be sick.’
    Ruben took a step towards them but the guy shrank away, tried to push himself through the wall. ‘He’s in shock,’ Ruben said.
    ‘What do you expect?’ the girl asked.
    ‘It’s my fault,’ Ruben acknowledged. ‘I already apologized. I shouldn’t’ve lost it.’ He watched them together for a moment, remembering what you did about shock. ‘I’m gonna make tea,’ he said. ‘You see if you can get him into bed. Keep him warm.’
    He went through to the kitchen and found a kettle and filled it with water. Lit the flame on an ancient gas stove. He emptied the teapot of a mash of cold leaves and flushed them down the sink. ‘Where do you keep the tea?’ he shouted. Then he saw it on the shelf. ‘It’s all right, I’ve got it.’
    What it was, shock, it was to do with the lack of blood supply. The vital functions of