The meanest Flood

disagree. If you take your medication and get yourself together, though, you’ll stop being such a strange woman and go back to your normal self. Then we can draw a line under all this. But if you don’t I’m going to call in the doctor, and when this magician chap comes back from Norway, I’ll have no option but to go and see him as well. Do you understand me?’
     

22
     
    Weird things happened to Ruben the first Wednesday after Katherine was killed. He got up at the usual time in the morning - 4.30 a.m. - and went down the depot. He loaded his van with crates of milk and drove to the Marple Square Estate. Not many people around at that time in the morning. Some houses with lights showing, people trying to con the local burglars that they were wide awake.
    The estate had a bad name and it was true there were a few wide boys about and some of the kids ran wild. You asked people who didn’t live there and they’d tell you the place was riddled with crime, robberies and violence; you listened to the Nottingham intelligentsia and the media and you’d imagine Marple Square was terrorized by gangs of drug-crazed vandals ripping down trees and spray-painting their neighbours’ houses and cars twenty-four/seven.
    But it wasn’t so bad. Occasionally Ruben would put milk on a doorstep and when the woman came to collect it for breakfast it’d be gone. But that wasn’t once a week, not even once a month. Two of his customers had been burgled while he was doing the round. One of them lost a video and a wide-screen TV and the other had the house stripped of everything, including a freezer full of pizzas and sausages and onion rings. An old black guy had been mugged coming out of the post office with his pension, and a group of Asian teenagers had tried to set fire to a pub. There must’ve been other incidents that Ruben hadn’t heard about but altogether he didn’t think it was worse than other estates. If he compared it to Hyson Green, where he had been a kid in a high-rise, Ruben would’ve classed Marple Square as crime-free.
    When they’d let him out of the joint Ruben had gone back to have a look at Hyson Green and they’d torn all the high-rise flats down. Looked like a good place to be now. Lot of life on the street, made you feel like you were part of something. Only Ruben wasn’t, because he didn’t live there any longer. Ruben wasn’t part of anything any more, not until he met Kitty Turner, and then he became part of the world.
    He must’ve delivered about half the milk when it happened. He’d dropped two bottles of semi and collected nine empties from the same step. He’d stuffed the empties into crates and got back behind the wheel of the van. What he’d have done normally, he’d have turned the key in the ignition and pulled forward a hundred metres, parked outside number thirty-nine. But he didn’t do anything. Instead he sat behind the wheel and looked out through the windscreen. Didn’t see anything particularly, didn’t feel anything, and nothing was going on in his mind.
    It was like he’d wound down. When he was a kid he’d had a truck did that. Ran off a battery and it’d suddenly stop. The battery’d die and the truck was no good until you got the old battery out and put a new one in.
    Ruben sat behind the steering wheel for nearly two hours. He wasn’t unconscious, he could see people walking along the street. Sometimes someone would look in at him through the side window and Ruben would see them out of the corner of his eye. But he didn’t turn his head. He didn’t move. He played with the idea that if he moved his head it would fall off, that if he lifted his arm his hand would disintegrate. But it wasn’t playing. There was no fun in it. It was serious. He closed his eyes a couple of times and then he daren’t open them in case he’d gone blind.
    Weird things. Your battery goes dead and your mind fills up with fantasies of disintegration. Perhaps he was dying or already dead? Once or twice since Kitty got hers he’d thought of topping himself. So maybe he’d done it to himself, gassed himself with exhaust fumes from the van, or he could’ve taken an overdose of Paracetamol. Didn’t remember doing it, but if he was dead he wouldn’t remember anything.
    There was this place, he seemed to remember, place called Limbo where you went after you died. Somewhere off the shores of Hell. It was like a huge waiting room, white walls fading into blue. But Ruben didn’t