The meanest Flood

taxi.
    ‘Where we going, guv?’
    ‘The railway station, please. No need to rush. We’ve got plenty of time.’
    ‘The river’s still rising,’ the cabby said. ‘They’re talking about evacuating people from their houses.’
    ‘I don’t think it’ll come to that,’ Danny said.
    The taxi-driver shrugged his shoulders. ‘It’s looking bad, worst I’ve seen, and I’ve been driving over it for the past twenty year.’
    On the train to Newcastle Danny looked out at the waterlogged landscape. Everywhere rivers had crept over their banks and taken to the fields. There was no rain that day and pale sunlight illuminated scenes of reflective stillness. White clouds in glistening lakes surrounded the railway tracks. All wildlife except a smattering of birds had been drowned or moved to higher ground. Here and there the tops of hedgerows were stubbornly visible and magnificent oaks and beeches affected a lofty disregard for the rising tides.
    ‘Beautiful.’ The speaker was a young man sitting opposite Danny. Blond hair, blue eyes, slight shoulders and a hard-backed book. The word left his lips like a sigh, a whisper.
    ‘And deadly,’ said his companion, a bespectacled, squat youth who looked around the table for a sympathetic response from Danny and the tall, stately black woman who sat beside him. Danny avoided eye-contact.
    ‘Climate change, this is happening all over the world. The result of western nations opting for economies which entail pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. As the climate warms the polar caps begin to melt and sea levels rise. Result is more rainfall and flooding. Blame the oil companies and the American Senate.’
    ‘Beautiful, though,’ the original speaker said. ‘Breathtaking.’
    The squat one looked around the table shaking his head and smiling, proud of his friend’s sensitivity.
    Danny wondered if they were homosexuals and closed his eyes to imagine them together. He pictured them naked by the sea under a blistering sun, the scene suffused with an air of tragedy. The beautiful one would die and his companion would be left alone to wander the earth. He’d never worry about climate change again.
    People didn’t know about magic even though they were surrounded by it. All that water standing on the fields, they just accepted it, called it rainfall as though that explained something. These days everyone had a schoolboy grasp of science and they believed in it implicitly. But they were hypnotized. Seduced and beguiled by the power of advertising or the fashion business or the dumbed-down norms that society and the political parties paraded as virtue. Everyone, almost everyone, had forgotten that human life is a miracle and that we are all conjurors and wizards. They have been denied so often that the prophecy has become self-fulfilling.
    The history of the world has been a war between wizards. Slowly, insidiously, those with the greater magic have stripped the rest of mankind of their powers. And the final act of the victors, the twist in the tail, has been the vanishing trick to end all vanishing tricks. By a neat sleight of hand the wizards and warlocks of the earth, the necromancers and sorcerers and enchanters who make up the vast bulk of mankind, have had the knowledge of their own magic whisked away from them. Now, instead of mixing potions or guaranteeing a food supply or guiding the destiny of their communities, they sit in front of TV screens and store junk information in databases and fervently defend the infantile thesis that two and two make four.
    ‘Danny, Danny! There he is. He’s got the tickets.’
    A small mousy-haired woman, vaguely familiar, was speaking his name, pointing towards him. She was talking to the ticket inspector, a tall and gawky Asian with bad teeth. The heads of fellow passengers appeared in the aisle as they tried to see what the commotion was about.
    ‘Tickets, please,’ the guard said, standing over Danny.
    The magician reached into his inside pocket, a little miffed at being asked for his ticket for the second time.
    ‘I’m terribly sorry,’ the mousy-haired woman said. She had a copper hair-band on her head and at least five necklaces around her neck, silver, gold, something else that looked like brass, and a pewter choker. She was wearing silver hooped ear-rings that stopped an inch above her shoulders. On her wrist there was a thick steel or chromium slave bracelet.
    ‘This ticket is only for you, sir,’ the guard