The meanest Flood

mention me?’
    ‘I went in a Vietnamese shop, a Thai shop, couldn’t find sausages in either of them. Most of the stuff in there doesn’t look edible. There’s vegetables you never heard of.’
    Sam was ready to cook. He drizzled olive oil into the pan.
    ‘What’s that?’ Geordie asked.
    ‘Read the label.’
    ‘I read the label. It’s olive oil.’
    Sam turned up the heat and tipped the pan to move the oil around its base. ‘Why’d you ask me what it is when you already know what it is?’
    ‘I wanted to be sure. Just because it says olive oil on the label, doesn’t necessarily mean there’s olive oil in the bottle.’
    ‘Nitro-glycerine,’ Sam said. ‘I can’t cook bacon without something highly explosive in the pan. But it’s illegal so I keep it in an olive oil bottle. Saves me going to jail.’
    ‘Y’know what I think?’ Geordie said. ‘I think you must’ve had a real fucked-up childhood. That’s why you’re so defensive all the time. I asked you a simple question, like what’s that in the olive oil bottle, and you have to give me a hard time. You should see a therapist, Sam, I mean it. A good therapist would turn you around in no time. Jungian, somebody like that, he’d find out where the blockage was and set you free. There’s this childhood trauma backed up in your psyche, could be you were jealous of your father because he slept with your mother or you were frightened of his dick.
    ‘What these Jungians do, they’re trained to see what type of trauma it is and they get you to say it and once you’ve said it, admitted it to yourself, you’re cured.’ Sam put the sausages in the pan and peeled the mushrooms. ‘Sounds like an AA meeting,’ he said. ‘My name is Sam Turner and I’m an alcoholic. Doesn’t cure you, though. What it does, it helps you stay in touch with reality.’
    ‘That’s important,’ Geordie said. ‘If you lose touch with reality, where are you?’
    Sam continued peeling the mushrooms. After he’d peeled one he chopped it in half and went on to the next one.
    ‘Is that a real question?’ he asked. ‘If you lose touch with reality, where are you?’
    ‘It’s a real question,’ Geordie told him. ‘Why would you think it wasn’t a real question?’
    ‘It’s like the olive oil question over again, that’s why. “What’s that?” when I’m pouring olive oil out of an olive oil bottle. “If you lose touch with reality, where are you?” when it’s obvious if you lose touch with reality you’re lost, out of sync. I can’t believe this is happening sometimes. I’m locked in a flat with you and you’re asking me these questions that don’t make any sense. I think it might be a dream or I’ve ended up on a mental ward. I keep looking round for big nurse.’
    He turned the sausages and added the mushrooms and the bacon. He reached for the olive oil and added a little more to the pan.
    ‘This’s exactly what I’m getting at,’ Geordie told him. ‘It’s this defensiveness. What you should do, you should ask yourself why you get so worked up in response to a couple of questions.’
    ‘I’m not worked up,’ Sam said. He cracked the eggs on the side of the pan and dropped them into the hot oil. ‘You got some plates ready?’
    Geordie walked around the kitchen, opening cupboard doors, on the hunt. ‘This is typical of suppressed schizophrenia,’ he said. ‘You think you aren’t worked up because you’ve discovered the best way of handling it is to appear calm. Anytime you get worked up you worry that people’ll think you’re worked up so you slow yourself down and talk calmly to make them think you’re not worked up. That’s understandable, you want everyone to think you’re normal.’
    Sam watched the eggs. He said, ‘You know this breakfast I’m cooking here? Your half of the sausages and the bacon and the mushrooms, one of the eggs, and the bread I’m gonna fry in the olive oil that’s left over?’
    ‘My half?’
    ‘What I’m thinking at the moment is, I don’t have to give it to you. Long as it’s in the pan and I cooked it, it still belongs to me. I could eat it all, or I could pour half of it down the John and eat my half by myself at the table.’
    ‘There you go again,’ Geordie said. ‘It starts off and you’re defensive, like someone’s attacking you when they’re only asking questions. And now we’re moving on to the next stage, which it always comes to, and that’s where the defensiveness stops