The meanest Flood (21 page)

From the shelter of the conifers she watched as the door of the house opened and Danny was framed there with a bald young man in a pyjama top. They shook hands and the young man went back into the house, closing the door behind him. Danny got into his car and Marilyn watched as he reached for the ‘Autumn Surprise’ and brought it to his lips. He looked for her, but she kept still and quiet and waited for him to start the car and steer it down the drive, turning back towards York when he reached the main road.

When he’d gone Marilyn walked over to the door of the house and read the plaque on the wall: J. C. Nott. Nothing else. Just the name. It didn’t say J. C. Nott, Magician, or J. C. Nott, Magicians’ Supplier. From reading the name on the plaque Marilyn couldn’t decipher what it was that J. C. Nott did and what it was that Danny had been to see him about. Danny hadn’t come out of the house with anything, but it was possible that he had taken something inside. She couldn’t say for sure.

She thought of knocking on the door with the brass knocker. She could pretend that she was lost or she could say Ellen’s car had broken down and ask to use the telephone. But she didn’t knock. There was something about the young man in the pyjama top. She didn’t want to find herself trapped in that house with him. Maybe it was his baldness or the way the light had reflected off his glasses? Marilyn didn’t know what it was but there was something when she thought of being alone with him that made her want to shudder.

Back at home she looked up the number in the telephone directory.

‘J. C. Nott,’ the voice said.

‘Do you make magic tricks?’ Marilyn said into the mouthpiece.

There was silence. ‘Are you sure you’ve got the right number?’ he said finally.

‘Yes, I think so,’ Marilyn said. ‘What do you do?’

‘My name is James Nott. I’m an artist.’

‘Oh, I see,’ Marilyn said. ‘I’ve got the wrong number.’ She put the phone down.

An artist. That explained it. Danny was going to have his portrait painted. Maybe it was to be a surprise? For her? That was one of the problems of snooping, especially on a lover. You discovered things you’d rather not know. Spoiled a nice surprise.

But Danny wouldn’t know what she’d done. So long as she didn’t let it slip during one of their long conversations. So long as he continued to sit for the artist. So long as she could act surprised when he eventually presented her with the portrait.

The doorbell rang and Danny collected his suitcase and checked that he’d switched off the gas-ring and the grill. He locked the door behind him and climbed into the back of the taxi.

‘Where we going, guv?’

‘The railway station, please. No need to rush. We’ve got plenty of time.’

‘The river’s still rising,’ the cabby said. ‘They’re talking about evacuating people from their houses.’

‘I don’t think it’ll come to that,’ Danny said.

The taxi-driver shrugged his shoulders. ‘It’s looking bad, worst I’ve seen, and I’ve been driving over it for the past twenty year.’

On the train to Newcastle Danny looked out at the waterlogged landscape. Everywhere rivers had crept over their banks and taken to the fields. There was no rain that day and pale sunlight illuminated scenes of reflective stillness. White clouds in glistening lakes surrounded the railway tracks. All wildlife except a smattering of birds had been drowned or moved to higher ground. Here and there the tops of hedgerows were stubbornly visible and magnificent oaks and beeches affected a lofty disregard for the rising tides.

‘Beautiful.’ The speaker was a young man sitting opposite Danny. Blond hair, blue eyes, slight shoulders and a hard-backed book. The word left his lips like a sigh, a whisper.

‘And deadly,’ said his companion, a bespectacled, squat youth who looked around the table for a sympathetic response from Danny and the tall, stately black woman who sat beside him. Danny avoided eye-contact.

‘Climate change, this is happening all over the world. The result of western nations opting for economies which entail pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. As the climate warms the polar caps begin to melt and sea levels rise. Result is more rainfall and flooding. Blame the oil companies and the American Senate.’

‘Beautiful, though,’ the original speaker said. ‘Breathtaking.’

The squat one looked around the table shaking his head and smiling, proud of his friend’s sensitivity.

Danny wondered if they were homosexuals and closed his eyes to imagine them together. He pictured them naked by the sea under a blistering sun, the scene suffused with an air of tragedy. The beautiful one would die and his companion would be left alone to wander the earth. He’d never worry about climate change again.

People didn’t know about magic even though they were surrounded by it. All that water standing on the fields, they just accepted it, called it rainfall as though that explained something. These days everyone had a schoolboy grasp of science and they believed in it implicitly. But they were hypnotized. Seduced and beguiled by the power of advertising or the fashion business or the dumbed-down norms that society and the political parties paraded as virtue. Everyone, almost everyone, had forgotten that human life is a miracle and that we are all conjurors and wizards. They have been denied so often that the prophecy has become self-fulfilling.

The history of the world has been a war between wizards. Slowly, insidiously, those with the greater magic have stripped the rest of mankind of their powers. And the final act of the victors, the twist in the tail, has been the vanishing trick to end all vanishing tricks. By a neat sleight of hand the wizards and warlocks of the earth, the necromancers and sorcerers and enchanters who make up the vast bulk of mankind, have had the knowledge of their own magic whisked away from them. Now, instead of mixing potions or guaranteeing a food supply or guiding the destiny of their communities, they sit in front of TV screens and store junk information in databases and fervently defend the infantile thesis that two and two make four.

‘Danny, Danny! There he is. He’s got the tickets.’

A small mousy-haired woman, vaguely familiar, was speaking his name, pointing towards him. She was talking to the ticket inspector, a tall and gawky Asian with bad teeth. The heads of fellow passengers appeared in the aisle as they tried to see what the commotion was about.

‘Tickets, please,’ the guard said, standing over Danny.

The magician reached into his inside pocket, a little miffed at being asked for his ticket for the second time.

‘I’m terribly sorry,’ the mousy-haired woman said. She had a copper hair-band on her head and at least five necklaces around her neck, silver, gold, something else that looked like brass, and a pewter choker. She was wearing silver hooped ear-rings that stopped an inch above her shoulders. On her wrist there was a thick steel or chromium slave bracelet.

‘This ticket is only for you, sir,’ the guard said.

‘That’s right. I’m travelling alone.’

The guard turned to the woman with the necklaces. She didn’t speak but looked directly at Danny, pursing her lips and slowly shaking her head from side to side. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said. She turned and walked back along the aisle.

‘I’m sorry to bother you,’ the guard told the magician as he turned to follow the woman.

Danny made light of it with the travellers seated around him. ‘I don’t know what that was about,’ he said.

But the blond young man avoided his eyes, looked out of the window, and the black woman picked up a magazine. After a moment she asked to be excused and he let her get out of her seat. He thought she was going to the lavatory and would be back in a minute or two but she didn’t return. Unkind, the magician thought. The stature of the woman had been pleasing and her smooth black skin had given her the quality of a trophy sitting beside him. The only white hunter on the train to have bagged one that beautiful.

The incident was disturbing. It preyed on his mind. The mousy-haired woman shaking her head and walking away was the kind of gesture his mother used to make when she was disappointed in him.

Danny took the Metro to the airport and the mousy-haired woman from the train came and sat opposite him. ‘I’m sorry about what happened,’ she said. ‘Please forgive me.’

‘It’s fine,’ he told her. ‘No one got hurt. Mistaken identity. Happens all the time.’

‘I shouldn’t have put you in the spotlight like that,’ she said.

Perhaps she was deranged? A bangle around each of her ankles seemed to confirm it. And all the metal on her person. A large brooch on her lapel which he hadn’t noticed on the train. A white bird perched on the edge of a cliff, caught on the point of lurching into space.

‘I didn’t have enough cash for the fare and I couldn’t think what else to do.’

‘No, I can see your predicament,’ he said, winging it, unwilling to disagree with her in case he triggered some violent reaction. But curiosity got the better of him. ‘Have we met?’ he said. ‘What I mean is, do we know each other?’

‘You chose me,’ she told him. ‘In the theatre. Nottingham?’

‘Ah, yes.’

‘And now we’re lovers.’

Danny coughed. He looked around the carriage to check if anyone had heard her. She gazed at him with rapture, her eyes unblinking.

‘Quite,’ he said.

The woman was a nutcase. Out of it. Danny got ready to defend himself if she attacked. There was no guard on the Metro but surely the other passengers would help him. She was a small woman but quite obviously raving mad. Without any civilizing restraints she could cause a lot of damage and as things stood at the moment Danny Mann was the likely target of her aggression. The magician wasn’t a coward but he tried to avoid physical pain, especially the kind that involved unknown elements like sharp finger-nails and teeth and the pulling out of hair.

He smiled at her.

She returned his smile with one of her own. There was coyness in it, something approaching innocence. It was the kind of smile that believed in itself. A rare thing. If you didn’t know that it was fuelled by insanity, you would be moved by such a smile.

‘Where are you going?’ he asked, keen to maintain the equilibrium.

The smile again. ‘You are funny,’ she said.

Danny felt confused, as if he’d been caught out in something. But he couldn’t imagine what it was.

‘I’d go anywhere with you,’ she told him. ‘Obey any command.’

‘Yes, but...’

She was racing ahead of him. A moment ago he’d been in touch. He’d felt equal to whatever it was she was going to throw at him. But already he was stuttering. What on earth was she talking about? ‘Obey any command?’ he asked, his voice low and coming from way back in his throat.

‘Try me,’ she said. She parted her legs and ran the middle finger of her right hand around her knee and along her thigh.

‘Oh my God,’ Danny said. He glanced around as though he might find his God in the carriage. ‘Sweet Jesus,’ he said. ‘Sweet Jesus Christ.’ His hands were fluttering like a couple of birds. He clasped them together and placed them consciously on his knees, watched them sternly until they were still. But as soon as his consciousness lapsed they were off again, fluttering away as if a cat had raided their nest.

‘You like me, don’t you?’ the woman said. She had injected a throaty sound into her voice, like a jazz or blues singer, someone who has smoked a lot of marijuana and has sore and inflamed vocal cords.

‘I do, yes,’ he said decisively. ‘I like you. I find you a pleasant and interesting person to be with.’

‘And what’s my name?’ she asked.

God, there it was again. One minute he was taking control and less than a minute later she was running rings around him. ‘Name?’

‘My name, yes. A magician like you should know my name.’

She’d been in Nottingham. He would have asked her her name then. But that was hopeless. He’d never remember. ‘Josephine,’ he said, hoping for a miracle.

She studied his face. After a time she said, ‘My name is Marilyn Eccles and you know it very well. You can call me Josephine if you like because Josephine was an erotic woman and a disciple of passionate sexuality.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I’ll call you Marilyn... Marilyn, very nice name.’

The Metro train pulled into the airport and Danny grabbed his bag. Marilyn ran after him. ‘Where are you going?’ she said. ‘Take me with you?’

‘I can’t do that,’ he said, running up the steps to the airport concourse. ‘I’m working away for a few days. We’ll have to sort things out when I get back.’

She slowed down, let him get away. Good riddance, he thought. Go bother someone else. But as he looked back she seemed to be shrinking away. He couldn’t understand how she could have frightened him on the train. She was all vulnerability and loneliness and reminded him of himself as a child.

He checked in for his flight to Oslo. Yes, only hand luggage he told the receptionist at the Braathens ASA desk, a plump girl with a permanent smile and sparkling eyes. He was only going for a couple of days, quick business trip.

‘Enjoy your flight, sir.’

The magician smiled and nodded. Of course he would enjoy it. He had never been on a flight that he didn’t enjoy. Soaring above the earth like that, it reminded him of the contest between Simon Magus and Peter, how they had conducted their magic battles in the air above Rome.