The meanest Flood

never been here before but it wasn’t as strange as he’d feared. He saw two different McDonald’s within five minutes. Much of Oslo was instantly recognizable. It was like one of the bigger English cities after a clean-up but with more wealth and style thrown in.
    Trams and tramlines ran along the major arteries and every once in a while the taxi shuddered as it crossed them or hit a cobbled area of the street.
    The car left them in a street off Torgata with three- and four-storey flats on each side. Geordie read the street name aloud: ‘Osterhaus gate.’
    ‘The e isn’t silent,’ Sam said.
    ‘Osterhaus gate?’
    ‘Yeah. Pretty close.’
    Geordie mouthed it again to himself. He looked around him. ‘Like Russia,’ he said.
    ‘You been to Russia?’
    ‘Never.’
    Sam gave him the long sad-bastard look which he’d been practising most of his life. Used to do it with a shake of the head for emphasis but these days he’d pared it down to a minimalist incarnation. No shake of the head, no movement of facial muscles; it was all in the eyes. Less is more.
    ‘But it’s the twenty-first century, Sam. We’ve invented picture books, you know, cameras? There’s this new invention called TV, still being developed at the moment, under-funded and the technology’s primitive but if it takes off, well, we’ll be able to sit at home and watch people in other countries doing all their foreign stuff right in front of us. Janet reckons we could have a big TV set in our sitting room and me and her and Echo, we’ll be sitting in front of it with Chinese take-aways and there’ll be satellites up in the sky so we can beam down to any country in the world. Watch the Olympic games or the latest war in the Middle East.’
    ‘You finished?’ Sam asked.
    “Course, you being so advanced in years, you might not be around when they’ve finished tweaking the technology. But it’s coming. It’s on the way.
    ‘Her grandma, Janet’s mother, she bought a picture book for Echo and it’s got a couple of photographs of St Petersburg in there. Something about the style of architecture, the feel of it, and then when we got out of the taxi and we’re in this street I wouldn’t be surprised to see a Droshki come along or a young Cossack in high boots.
    ‘So what’s happening is I’m making associations. I’ve just arrived in a foreign country and my identity, the guy who I think I am, is out of his depth. I’m looking around and trying to make sense of what’s around me. I’m comparing these new things with the old things that are part of my experience. I’m not fully in control of the situation yet. I might never be. But as long as I’m drawing breath there’ll be a part of me which is weighing and calculating and judging my relationship to the world.’
    Sam opened a door and stepped into the vestibule of a block of flats. He took the stairs two at a time. Geordie followed.
    ‘You finished now?’ Sam asked.
    ‘If you’ve finished giving me the sad-bastard stare.’
    ‘I got it wrong again.’
    ‘At least you’re admitting it,’ Geordie said. ‘Usually takes you a month or two to see where you went wrong. Sometimes a year.’
    Sam stopped on the third landing and inserted a key in the lock of flat number 34. The door opened inwards and he stepped inside. Geordie followed and closed the door behind him. They stood facing each other in a tiny entrance passage. ‘Give me some leeway here,’ Sam said. ‘I’ve been living inside my head the last few days.’ He avoided eye-contact. ‘Angeles?’ he said. ‘She all right? You seen her?’
    There was the crack in his voice, the hint of vulnerability that came to the surface so infrequently it was always a surprise.
    Geordie dropped his bag and threw his arms around Sam. He held him close. Sam tried to return the hug but his arms were trapped by his sides. Geordie could feel Sam’s new beard tickling the side of his neck. ‘She’s fine,’ he said. ‘You don’t have to worry. Everyone’s looking after her.’
    They let each other go and stood back. The eye-contact was there now. ‘We’ll get the bastard,’ Geordie said. ‘It looks bleak at the moment but we’ll come through the other end. Whoever’s setting this up, he’s not gonna get away with it.’
     
    Sam served up something called Fiske Boiler. Seemed to be white fish and flour pulped and tossed around in a frying pan. Frozen fries with that which he’d cooked in the oven until they were