The meanest Flood

it was full, always, to within half an inch of the rim. It was impossible to lift. If you tried you were sure to spill it on the boards and then mother or Great-uncle Matthew would know you’d been messing with it again.
    Danny didn’t try. But he made sure he was on hand when his mother or Great-uncle Matthew carried it to the outside loo to dump it and rinse it out later in the morning. They had to be careful. If they made one tiny mistake and got the body of liquid slopping about inside its container there would be nothing to stop it coming over the rim. More than once Danny had seen both of them stop dead halfway down the stairs, under the picture of Napoleon at Waterloo, holding their breath until the foaming piss settled back into the pot before they could carry on.
    ‘Deadly cargo,’ Danny’s father called it with more than a hint of irony in his voice. But Danny never saw him attempt to move the pot himself. ‘Oh, oh,’ he’d say, passing his wife on the stairs, ‘the chamber pot from Hell.’
    What Danny had learned from Great-uncle Matthew was invisibility. Great-uncle Matthew was not a teacher, he was a misshapen beast. He had no learning, no culture. He was like Caliban. And, like Caliban, he could be persuaded of a reality that existed only in his own mind. He could be captivated, beguiled.
    When he was doing the business with the pot in the middle of the dark night, Danny had only to move slightly, as if turning over in his sleep, and Great-uncle Matthew’s stream would falter and terminate. You could imagine its stillness in the pot in the moonlight, a slight swirling motion and the haze of rising steam. There would be an intake of breath and then one, two, perhaps three drops more would splash into the pot. Danny would regulate his breathing, he would lie still and quiet, and eventually Great-uncle Matthew would continue to empty his bladder.
    Because Great-uncle Matthew could not piss into the pot when there was someone else in the room. Or at least he could not piss into the chamber pot when someone else was conscious in the room. Not when there was a chance of him being observed. He could only do it when he felt he was alone, when he didn’t have to worry about prying eyes or ears.
    So Danny practised invisibility when he was around. It meant being quiet and still inside yourself so that the old man forgot you were there. And Danny found he could be invisible, or nearly so, whenever he wished. Not only with Great-uncle Matthew, but with his mother and his father, with his teachers and his friends, with anyone at all.
    And it’s a great asset for a magician, almost a prerequisite, to be seen when you need to be seen and then to slip away without moving from the spot.
    For two days now he’d patrolled Calmeyers gate, watching the entrance to the flat of Holly Andersen, waiting for Turner to show himself. But there’d been no sighting of the man. Danny was beginning to think that Sam Turner might also be blessed with invisibility.
    He fantasized that the two of them passed each other in the street, neither aware of the other’s existence. Two ghosts dancing around the living corpse of this woman. He conceded that he may have underestimated Sam Turner. The man, after all, was trained and experienced in surveillance techniques. Not exactly magic in itself, but it would be necessary for him to understand the principles of concealment. He would know how to make himself small and anonymous.
    For his own part, Danny had left nothing to chance. He wore not one stitch of clothing that he had brought with him from York. His coat, trousers, boots, shirt, sweater and fur cap were all purchased in the streets around the Scandinavian Hotel in Kongensgate. He was a Norwegian citizen right down to his thermal underwear and woollen gloves.
    What it was about Prospero, he mused, as with Merlin and all the great magicians, was the consciousness of the cycle of confinement and release. When Prospero was released from his responsibilities in Milan he was immediately confined by the tempest to the small island which in turn would become his responsibility. In Milan he was free but confined by his responsibilities; on the island he was physically confined but free to practise his magic. He used his magic to confine the native population and the spirits of the island and consequently found that he was confined once more by his responsibilities towards them.
    At the end of the play he has the strength of