The meanest Flood

almost warm. No pudding. Geordie reflected on the stark reality of his situation. No Janet or Echo, no decent cooking unless he did it himself and got lucky. Sam the man still fighting but looking low and verging on something not many miles from depression.
    Geordie could understand that. The guy had lost an ex-wife and an old girlfriend and was hoping he wouldn’t lose anyone else. What must that be like? Geordie didn’t have ex-wives of his own to compare it with, only one exgirlfriend. He could only imagine what it would be like if he and Janet got divorced and then some years later he discovered that somebody had murdered her and made it look like he, Geordie, had done the deed.
    But his thoughts didn’t lead to empathy with Sam. First he couldn’t imagine Janet and him being divorced. Sure, lots of people got divorced but still, they weren’t the same as him and Janet. Him and Janet, they were serious. What they had together was so much better than what either of them had had before, better than they could have dreamed. Geordie had thought he’d always be an orphan. He didn’t imagine himself living in a house until Sam came along, much less meeting Janet and getting a house and a garden and having cats and a dog which didn’t fight and neighbours and then Echo being born.
    How could he get divorced from all that? Go right back to Go? He’d never get to the bit where Janet was murdered and the murderer tried to make it look like Geordie’d done it. He’d be out of it, mad or dead or both. He wouldn’t still be around like Sam, the ultimate survivor, rocking around in the debris of his past lives.
    ‘What does it feel like?’ he asked when he’d finished pushing the cold fries about his plate.
    Sam shook his head. Stared at the black space of the triple-glazed window. ‘There’s guilt mixed up in there,’ he said. ‘Which is never helpful. There’s all the shit about gender as well, being the male, the protector.’
    ‘Come on, Sam.’
    ‘I know.’ He held his hands up. ‘I know the score with all that stuff. I’m not inviting it in but it’s part of the cultural bag. It’s like nationalism, military music... I don’t believe in it but I took it in with my mother’s milk. Whatever I do with it, however much I rationalize it, it’s still there. I think it’s gone, I tell myself I’ve overcome it, but there’s traces of it in my blood and sometimes they all flow together. It’s like a shadow that starts to take on substance.’
    Geordie had talked to Celia about that. About how the past sometimes came together like a great weight and dragged you down and Celia had said it wasn’t just the past, it could take any form because it was the devil. And the devil always came for you when you were weak.
    ‘I can’t believe Nicole is dead,’ Sam continued. ‘It was different with her. I’d still not let go. I don’t mean there was anything between us. She was married and I’m sure she never thought of me. I only thought of her a couple of times a year. But she was still there, in my memory. There were things we’d never reconciled.’
    Sam had stopped drinking for Nicole so many times he’d lost count. He’d watched her thrown against the gnarled reef of his inadequacy and deception until her being couldn’t take any more. That afternoon she’d left to live with Rolf Day, the phenomenologist, Sam had been drinking since before dawn. She came into his den and turned the sound of Dylan’s ‘St Augustine’ down one notch. Sam turned it up two. He sprawled at the table, a bottle in each hand. His eyes were like separate shrieks, blind and dwarfing his already shrivelled face. ‘I’m going,’ she said. Must’ve been summer because she was wearing a silk blouse with no sleeves. Plum-coloured. Her arms were thin, just bones covered with skin. Her face was hollow, high cheekbones protruding. Her freshly washed hair and the palpable relief in her statement were barely enough to dispel the association with a skeleton.
    ‘It’s not just you being punished here, Sam,’ she told him. ‘You’re trying to bring the whole world down with you.’
    For an instant he’d seen her as a cadaver and then he’d remembered her as she was when they first met. He saw what had happened to her in that house with him. There must have been a choice in that moment, he told himself later. He could have wept or he could have held out a hand to her or told her goodbye with a shake of his head. He