The meanest Flood

click, but she couldn’t do it. Then he’d found a Frenchman who took the photograph sweet as you like, no problems. He had his arm around Kitty’s waist and she was looking up at him and about to plant her lips on his cheek when the guy pressed the shutter. He closed his eyes and tried to remember the kiss.
    It came back easily. There was nothing about Kitty he could forget. He imagined a time in the future, a hundred years from now, when he would still be alive and still remembering. He’d be a mass of leathery wrinkles and memories. When he looked back at the photograph in his hand his knuckles were white.
    The next photograph showed Sam Turner in York. There were four or five of them where the guy was too far away, side on so you could see his profile, get some idea of his bearing but not close enough to see what he looked like. Then there was another, much closer, but he was looking surprised, not clear if he was having his photograph taken or if he was accidentally being caught in a photograph of somebody else. It wasn’t a perfect photograph but it was the best of the bunch. The last two were close-ups and you could see his features clearly but he had realized what was happening by then and was pissed off. If the pictures had been able to talk you would have heard the guy yelling.
    Ruben swilled the remains of his coffee in the bottom of the cup and drank it down. He went back to Prontaprint and ordered six photocopies of the Sam Turner print and asked them to enlarge the ones of Kitty.
    ‘When do you want them, sir?’
    ‘I want them now. I’ll wait.’
    The assistant did the thing where they stop writing on the form and let the pen hover for a moment, deciding if they’ll do you a favour or turn themselves into an obstacle. Ruben kept his cool. He’d already put two people into shock this morning and split open the head of one of them. He didn’t want to go through that again. He hoped this broad with the big hair and the pen would make the right decision.
    She looked at him and smiled. ‘The technician’s busy at the moment but if you come back in half an hour, I’ll have them ready for you.’
    Ruben said, ‘Thanks.’ He said, ‘You’ve got a nice smile, you know that. You should use it more.’
    He tucked the ticket she gave him into his top pocket and made his way back to the coffee house. He took a copy of the Sun out of the rack and read it while he waited for his double espresso. There was an article about a priest with a mistress, and a soldier somewhere had borrowed a gun from the army to shoot a teenager. An obituary for some surgeon who had performed more than three thousand mastectomies. Strange, the different jobs in the world. Ruben always thought delivering milk was an odd way to make a living, but there were weirder jobs. Pleading with an imaginary God to care for someone’s soul. Shooting rubber bullets at Ulstermen. Sticking knives into the breasts of women with cancer.
    But there had been something about the girl behind the counter at Prontaprint. The typeface of the Sun swam before his eyes when he thought about her. It was the smile, it reminded him of Kitty. Not that they had the same smile, or the smile of the counter assistant resurrected any smile that Kitty had ever given him, the connection was more distant and proved something that Ruben had suspected for the last couple of days. That anything could remind him of Kitty. Anything in the world. ‘I love you until it comes out of my eyes,’ he had told her. He didn’t know where the words came from. They weren’t part of a song or a poem and he’d never heard anyone else say them, not even in a film. He’d invented them in order to tell her how he felt. ‘I love you until it comes out of my eyes.’ He hadn’t needed to sit down to think up the words in that particular order. He’d just opened his mouth one night when they were sitting on opposite sides of the table in Kitty’s house and the words had come out like that, as a complete sentence.
    A couple of times he’d tried to do it again but the words never fell out of him so naturally when he forced them. He wasn’t a poet. They’d worked that once, though, and that was enough. They’d shown her something about him that he wasn’t sure of himself. Something that had been born in him when he met Kitty Turner.
     
    There’d be another time, Ruben thought. He’d have Sam Turner at his mercy again. Maybe today, maybe tomorrow, they’d find