The meanest Flood

bereaved,’ he told them.
    ‘Oh,’ said Stell.
    ‘Shame,’ Shaz whispered.
    Bereaved. He’d never used the word before. It came out of him and he didn’t know it was in there. Maybe every word in the English language was lodged somewhere inside him? All the words he’d heard as a child and read in books and listened to on the radio and the television. Words he didn’t know the meaning of and composite words made up of the parts of other words. Nonsense words like ninglethroatynop.
    He needed to taste it on his tongue. ‘Bereaved.’
    ‘Who was it? Your wife?’ Shaz asked.
    ‘Not a kiddie?’
    He shook his head. ‘Kitty.’
    ‘It’s his wife,’ Stell said. ‘It’s your wife, isn’t it, darlin’?’ She mouthed the words as though she was talking to a deaf man. ‘Your wife?’
    My life, he wanted to say but it was too much to share. Ruben felt as though there was something inhabiting him, some alien presence. Could there be a part of himself that he had never noticed before, never suspected?
    ‘Awful,’ Stell said. ‘You need to see somebody. When did it happen?’
    He left them standing at the gate. Got back behind the wheel and dropped off the last of his milk. He unloaded the empties at the depot while the gateman asked him over and over again what had happened to him.
    He drove home and changed his clothes and walked down to the doctor’s surgery. The receptionist told him he was wasting his time and that Doctor couldn’t possibly see him without an appointment, but Ruben waited anyway and around 6.30 the doctor called him into her wood-panelled room.
    Ruben told her what had happened. He told her about the milk-round and the two women taking him into the house and giving him tea with sugar and brandy. He told her about being inhabited and about meaning being meaningless and reason being unreasonable.
    ‘Has something changed in your life?’ the doctor asked. ‘Anything traumatic?’
    ‘Kitty was killed,’ he told her. ‘Murdered.’
    ‘And who was Kitty?’
    ‘My lover,’ he said. Another new word. Popped out of him clean as a daisy.
    ‘It sounds like depression,’ the doctor said.
    ‘Not madness?’
    ‘No. Not that.’
    ‘I’m inhabited by depression?’
    ‘You could say that, yes.’
    ‘I’m older than I was a week ago.’
    The doctor looked at him. He could see in her face that she’d thought of a joke, but decided not to tell it.
    ‘You sound like a poet,’ she told him. ‘You’re mentally exhausted.’ She touched her forehead, above her right eye. She had long manicured finger-nails. ‘I think it was Conrad Aiken who suggested that T. S. Eliot’s nervous breakdown might have been caused by the severe strain of being an Englishman.’ She smiled.
    It was the kind of thing Kitty would have said. Then Ruben would have asked her who they were, this Conrad Aiken and T. S. Eliot, and they would have talked through the night. He wondered if Kitty’s spirit, if that was the right word, was trying to contact him through other people. If Kitty was inhabiting the doctor just as the depression was inhabiting him.
    ‘Can you give me something for it?’ he asked.
    ‘We have our own counsellor here,’ the doctor said. ‘I’d like you to talk to her. How would you feel about that?’
    ‘I don’t feel too much today.’
    ‘But if I make an appointment for you, is that all right?’
    ‘Yeah, whatever it takes,’ Ruben said. ‘I don’t wanna be a cracker.’
     
    He came awake in the night with a vision of Sam Turner standing by his bed clutching a short sword. But there was nothing there, just Ruben and the inside of his head. The newspapers and the newscasters were speculating on what had happened to Turner, where he was hiding out. Some said Scotland or France, the south of Italy or Amsterdam. One hack had him in Argentina and another in Norway.
    Ruben didn’t know where he was. He only knew that when the guy stepped back on to British soil it wouldn’t be long before he was buried under it.
     

23
     
    Merlin and Prospero worked their magic in the realm of time, leaving the mundane spatial expositions to lowly and local conjurors and sorcerers. Diamond Danny worked in time and space. He worked in time for the world of truth and responsibility and, ultimately, for freedom. And he worked in space for his daily bread, to pay the rent and to buy himself as much time as he needed to re-enact the time that had been taken from him, his birthright.
    Time. The