The meanest Flood

collecting every last drop of the stuff and channelling it towards the town.
    In theory it didn’t have to stop. York could turn into another Venice and eventually a small Atlantis, buried and lost for ever in a watery grave. He imagined himself and Geordie arriving home and finding a bottomless lake where the town was. No trace of the lives they had known before. A vast expanse of water with a solitary bird soaring high in the sky.
    He pulled on his boots and wrapped up warm to brave the night. He’d always made excuses about the women in his life - why he couldn’t get home one night, why he didn’t bother to phone another. Sam was a past master.at letting it roll on past, feeling somehow that if the world was really interested it would come knock on his door. They’d all been worth fighting for, the women in his life, but Sam had usually been looking the other way, chasing multi-coloured impossibilities. By the time he got home she’d left and taken the home with her.
    He found a tiny Internet cafe by the station, three terminals, all Apple Macs. The proprietor was a teenage entrepreneur who looked like he never slept. Huge young man, cholesterol on the hoof. Sam settled himself down and logged on to his Hotmail account. He told Angeles about the flat and about how well Geordie was sleeping. He told her about his fears for Holly’s safety and how he hoped he wasn’t losing Angeles as well. I’m in a cool room, he said, a room made for long talks. He wrote words that don’t come easily and sent them unencrypted over the world-wide web, imagining them being reinterpreted by her Braille writer at the other end.
    He told her about the 50-50-90 rule: Anytime you have a 50-50 chance of getting something right, there’s a 90% probability you’ll get it wrong. And he told her he was working on the statistics, trying to get them into a different order. I hope my train hasn’t been and gone, he wrote.
    He didn’t know how to finish the e-mail. He sat with his head in his hands for a long time, hoping for words that would make a difference. Then he told her he loved her and signed off.
     
    *
     
    Sam was back by the window when Geordie padded through from his bedroom. ‘You didn’t sleep?’ he said. ‘Is there something to eat?’
    ‘Cupboard over the sink,’ Sam told him. ‘Bran flakes, i Milk in the fridge.’
    ‘Bran? I can’t eat that, Sam. Janet bought bran once and we were both shitting through the eye of a needle for a week. I’m not gonna put myself in that situation in a foreign country. You got anything else?’
    ‘There’s bread,’ Sam said. ‘No butter, though. There might be some cheese left. Continental breakfast.’
    ‘What about muesli? We have muesli at home. Janet buys the oats and sunflower seeds, dried banana... I can’t remember everything she puts in. There’s apple and granola, pineapple. She mixes it together and we have it in a big jar with a lid, keep it fresh. Barley flakes, that’s another thing in there.’
    ‘There’s bran or bread,’ Sam said.
    ‘Even Weetabix would’ve done,’ Geordie said. ‘Just once, for a change. It’s not what I like to eat every day. If I thought there was gonna be Weetabix every morning I wouldn’t get out of bed. Bran or bread and cheese, I’d end up like you, not being able to sleep.’
    ‘You can go to the shop,’ Sam told him. ‘Buy some muesli.’
    ‘What do I ask for?’
    Sam looked at him.
    Geordie said, ‘I don’t know if they know what muesli is. I could go all the way down there and ask for muesli and the guy could look at me like I’m a legend in my own lunchtime.’
    ‘It’s called muesli. People here understand English. Not all of them speak it, but most of them understand what you’re saying.’
    ‘OK. D’you want anything?’
    ‘Get some eggs,’ Sam said. ‘Pack of bacon. Thin-cut. I’m in need of comfort.’
    ‘Good idea,’ Geordie said. ‘How about a couple of sausages and some mushrooms?’
    ‘You’ve gone off the muesli idea, then?’
    ‘No point being fussy, Sam. I’ll have the same as you.’ Sam got the coffee makings together and found a frying pan. When Geordie came back with the food he said, ‘There’s faces from every corner of the globe out there. There’s black and Asian and Russian and Chinese. Every way you look there’s mothers with children in prams. In the shop there was this Ethiopian woman with her kids, real tall woman, elegant. You seen her?’
    ‘Maybe. Did she