The meanest Flood

time of his life which was now and always and the times of his life which were the moments he held in memory and could retrieve at will. There were the times before fortune was twisted out of shape and the times after. The times before grew on fertile soil and proliferated in his memory like green shoots in spring. The times after were an ocean of sand.
    As a boy his parents had taken him, every year, to stay with his great-uncle Matthew in Whitby. The small cottage in Nathan’s Yard by the harbour had two tiny bedrooms, one of which was used by his parents and the other shared by little Danny and his great-uncle. Even now Danny would hesitate at Nathan’s Yard and look at the house whenever he was in Whitby. It had been sold when Great-uncle Matthew died, shortly after the time when fortune was twisted out of shape, and since then it had been resold many times. Now it was combined with the house next door and used as a B&B. It had bright yellow paintwork and a front door with a glass sun in the upper panel. It was barely recognizable.
    Back then, Danny didn’t remember paint at all. He remembered that the cottage was dark. There was electricity but the only bulbs were screwed into ceiling fittings and must have been of low wattage, one to each room. The windows were small and encrusted with dirt and salt from the sea. Great-uncle Matthew didn’t have a wife to clean them and being a simple fisherman he could not afford the luxury of a cleaning woman.
    Danny’s mother suspected that Great-uncle Matthew preferred the windows to restrict the light. ‘He’s on the open sea all day,’ she’d say. ‘When he comes home he wants the comfort of confinement.’
    Like Prospero’s cell. But Danny only made that connection many years later, when the old man was dead and gone.
    What he remembered more than anything else were the nights. Great-uncle Matthew was a silent man. He spoke few words, none at all to Danny. To Danny’s parents he would come out with the occasional word or phrase, or he would answer a question. But it would never amount to more than a series of grunts, and always in that strange East coast dialect which was composed entirely of diagonal vowels.
    Danny would go up first. He would squeeze between the two beds and look out of the window into Nathan’s Yard below. He would climb on to the soft feathery mattress and snuggle into one of its hollows, pulling the sheets and eiderdown up to his chin. It was always cold at first, no matter what the weather, but would warm up and on some nights become so hot that he would push back the sheets and sleep with his arms and shoulders bare.
    Usually he would be asleep when Great-uncle Matthew came up the stairs and entered the bedroom. But if he was awake he would listen as the old man dragged his deformed shape up the rickety staircase and stood by his bed to undress. First his dark knitted jerkin, which he wore in all weathers, then his boots and workpants, releasing a rare and exotic body odour into the dark chamber. Great-uncle Matthew slept in his vest and long johns, and within a few minutes of laboured breathing the gentle rumble of his snores would fill the room.
    But whether he heard Great-uncle Matthew come to bed or not, Danny would always wake when it was time for the old man to fill the chamber pot. This activity took place in the dark and was therefore unseen, an audible experience with more than a hint of pong. Sometimes so strong that it made the boy’s eyes water.
    His great-uncle’s bed would heave and creak as the man shifted his weight from the hollow of the centre to the edge of the mattress. Danny would listen as the two bare feet slapped on the boards and the scrabbling for the pot took place. The stream of piss would hit the bottom of the pot and continue splashing into itself for what seemed an eternity. Danny thought it would never stop, that Great-uncle Matthew would turn himself into a waterfall, a pissfall, and that the pot would overflow and the room fill up until the beds were rafts, afloat in the stinking effluent of the old man’s bladder.
    But that never happened. Great-uncle Matthew would splash his stuff into the pot until the pot was full and then he would stop. He would put the pot on the floor and back-heel it gently under the bed. In the morning, when Great-uncle Matthew had gone to his cobble, Danny would inspect the pot. It held a quart of cloudy orange piss which obscured the bottom. But the wonder of it was that