The meanest Flood (36 page)

She had been unable to face the fact that the Sam Turner she had married was a man in flight from hope. That he recognized no potential in himself or in anyone else. That Sam thought of the whole of humanity, including himself, as food for worms. He was interested only in an all-out escape from his daily reality. He was never so happy as when he was drunk or unconscious. Alice couldn’t understand how she had thought that that was so attractive before the wedding. It was years later that she realized it was because she was also in flight. From adulthood, from responsibility, from the person she feared she might be or was on the way to becoming.

In the past four or five years she’d seen more of Sam. They weren’t close friends any more but she’d see him on the street and they’d stop and talk. He hadn’t aged much - some thickening around the waist, the beginnings of jowls amid his creased face. He’d never been particularly pretty. Always interesting, though; you could look at his face for hours. It was like a story book. And then he’d asked if she had some time, could they go for coffee? Coffee was his staple. Alice couldn’t think about coffee without thinking about Sam.

She’d taken him up on it a few times, hesitantly at first, not wanting to find herself spiralling back into the mistakes of her youth. But he wasn’t a predator and he didn’t come on to her. He talked about himself, about his relationships with women and his work, and he enquired after her as well, wanting to know more about Alex and her children and about her job as an administrator at the university. He was interested in her, Alice realized, not as a potential sexual partner but as someone who had been a part of his life. And if you’d been part of Sam’s life you would always be part of it. He would never give up on you, not totally.

For the last couple of years Alice had found herself disappointed, somehow let down if she met Sam in town and he didn’t offer her coffee. He’d occasionally be busy with his blessed detective business, on the way from one job to another or to relieve one of his operatives, and he’d be full of regret about it but there were people dependent on him. Alice remembered the times she had been dependent on him. The hours, sometimes days, she’d sat waiting for him, knowing that he was head down in a gutter somewhere or in the arms of some floozy who’d promised him a drink.

But it had changed now. He didn’t drink any longer. That spark of potential she had recognized all those years before had kicked in and filled out the man. He wouldn’t harm her. Never. There were many people in her life who might be tempted to injure her, even Alex when he was in one of his moods or if she managed to rouse his temper, but she couldn’t imagine Sam doing anything like that.

Though it was true that you never really knew another person. She was absolutely sure she wasn’t wrong, not about Sam Turner, but her doubt wouldn’t be stifled. It simply was a fact of life, you could never be absolutely sure.

She put on her coat and wound a long lamb’s wool scarf around her neck. At the street door she stepped into a pair of new green Wellington boots and strode over the sandbags on her front step. The garden and the street were a lake. There was a break in the weather and the sun was reflected in the smooth surface of the water.

Alice paddled through it. It was shallow on the garden path but by the time she got to the public footpath it was already near the top of her boots. Black river water, almost half of it silt, and giving off a stench of decaying organisms. The river was still rising, almost five metres above normal now. If it continued for another couple of days it would be in the house. They’d already taken up the carpets on the ground floor and had been living upstairs for the last ten days.

There were army trucks at the corner of the street and soldiers were laying sandbags, trying to keep the properties safe. For people lower down, closer to Terry Avenue, it was already too late. Their houses were awash and many of them were abandoned to the rising waters. Soldiers... dear God, most of them looked little older than Dominic. Sixteen, seventeen years old. Alice didn’t know how old you had to be to join the army, but looking at some of these kids she thought the entry age should be raised. What if there was a war, she wanted to ask their commanding officer, are you going to give them guns?

Hannah and Conn were waiting for her at the school gate, seemingly unconscious of the waders that reached to the top of their thighs. Hannah, ten years old now, was chatting to one of her friends, completely oblivious of her brother. Conn, the baby of the family, just past his seventh birthday, was gazing up at the sky as if expecting rain. They were as different as toast and marmalade, these two. Hannah was her father’s daughter, somewhat selfobsessed but in possession of a modicum of empathy for others which seemed to have bypassed Alex, the sperm-donor. Conn, named after Alice’s father was, like his grandfather, enquiring his way through life. He was forever inquisitive, a silent boy with big eyes and a degree of warmth far beyond anything Alice had discovered in herself. He certainly hadn’t inherited that from Alex or his line and it was either a throwback to one of Alice’s forgotten Irish ancestors or some kind of blessing. A gift from the angels.

Alice smiled. She had let her religion lapse and now only the terminology remained. That and the guilt. Especially the guilt. But she kept it close to herself, hidden in case it should somehow leak out and taint her children. Conn meant sense, reason and intelligence, and Hannah meant gracious, and these were the qualities that she wanted them to embrace. She didn’t want them to be bound by the strictures of organized religion, slaves to medieval ideas and sensibilities.

God was a wonderful idea, she thought. But He was never there when you needed Him. He had spread himself too thin - trying to be everywhere at once. And a God that let Himself get into a state like that really wasn’t worth bothering about.

‘Have you seen Dominic?’ she asked.

‘He’s by that green car,’ Conn said. ‘With his friends.’

Dominic was with two boys from his class and a girl who looked like a boy with eye-shadow and a pierced lip. A swagger of fifteen-year-olds, Alice said to herself, pleased with the invention of the collective noun.

‘They’re going to Lauren’s house to smoke dope,’ Conn said.

‘I don’t think so,’ Alice told him. ‘Dominic doesn’t smoke.’

‘That’s all you know,’ Conn told her.

‘It’s true, Mum,’ Hannah said. ‘They smoke dope and then they do an orgy.’

‘Really? And do they tell tales on their brothers and sisters?’

‘Probably do,’ Conn said. ‘That’s what happens in families. Everybody is fighting for the attention of their parents.’

Alice pulled him close. Seven years old and he already knew too much. There was something dreadfully wrong with the education system. It wanted them all to conform at the same level of cynicism and neo-maturity, producing a generation of political luvvies who thought it was clever to work overtime without getting paid. You could step out of the footprints of the church but you couldn’t avoid what came in its place.

Dominic waved as they went past his group on the other side of the road. ‘You coming home for tea?’ Alice called.

He shook his head. ‘I’ll be back by ten,’ he said. ‘I’m eating at Rafiq’s.’

Rafiq gave her the thumbs-up with both hands, the pale sunlight glinting on the lenses of his National Health spectacles. Vegetable curry and chapatti again, seemed to be the only thing Dominic ate these days. Said that meat made him sick; too much fat, too much protein, human beings weren’t designed for it.

Hannah and Conn were both like Alex in a way, their natural father. But Dominic was different. And it wasn’t because she or Alex treated him differently from the other kids. It was a simple genetic thing, and it showed.

Alice had told Dominic that his natural father was someone she’d lost contact with. A man she’d been fond of, but who in the end had not proved reliable enough to marry. And the story was essentially true. The only part of it that was not true was the part about losing contact.

TOLS, she called it in her mind, indulging her generation’s preference for acronyms. That One Last Shag with Sam long after their relationship had died, after she’d moved out of the house and come back to collect the last of her belongings. A suit she never wore, a Van Morrison album she never listened to and a collection of copper-bottomed pans she’d inherited from her mother. TOLS on the couch in the sitting room.

She was fully dressed apart from her knickers and he was in his boxer-shorts and T-shirt, his breath stale with whisky fumes. TOLS with no love or passion. She acting out of guilt and compassion and he following the unconscious urgings of his genes, spreading seed.

When they’d finished she struggled out of the house with two cardboard boxes of belongings. In the tiny flat she’d found for herself she played the Van Morrison album while lying in the bath and envisioning a future. And all the time one of those sperms was struggling up the moist lining of her uterus, through into the fallopian tubes and penetrating the cell membrane of her egg, beginning the process that would eventually result in Dominic.

And maybe that’s what it was about, this long-term relationship with Sam Turner? Being the bearer of a secret. Because apart from her there was no one in the world who knew the real identity of Dominic’s father. Dominic himself seemed entirely uninterested. He had come out with a few questions but had seemed to accept his mother’s vague answers. Alex had also been inquisitive during the first weeks and months of their relationship, but during the last ten years he had never breached those areas again.

And Sam? Sam was so out of it in those days he wouldn’t have remembered that they’d done it. He’d assumed that Dominic was the result of an encounter after Alice had left him, which was true. And at the same time it wasn’t true at all.

She couldn’t have told Sam at the time. He wouldn’t have been interested. He would have been incapable of processing the information. If it didn’t lead to a drink in those days he wouldn’t bother taking it on board. But the real reason that Alice didn’t tell Sam was because it might have forced them back together. It had been bad enough living with the guy by herself, she couldn’t imagine taking a baby into the situation.

And so she’d become the bearer of the secret. The only one to know of the connection between this now almost respectable man and her lanky teenage son feeling his way to maturity and adulthood. She fantasized that she would tell them both one day, introduce them casually to each other.
Dominic, this is Sam, your father; and Sam, this is Dominic, your son.
One day, when they’d both grown up, when she was sure they could handle it. The biology, the connection, the length of time that they’d been kept from the truth. She’d dreamed it a hundred times. Half the time the dream turned into a nightmare. The other half it felt good, warm, like being part of a second family.

And now Sam was in trouble again. Maybe the worst trouble he’d ever seen. The women he’d left behind or who had left him in the past were turning up dead. It must seem to him almost as though they had never happened. And the people who didn’t know Sam Turner, the police and the media, the authorities generally, who had always been his enemies, seemed intent on laying the blame at his door.

Now, they seemed to think he was in Oslo when Holly Andersen died. There was a witness who found him with the body, and one of his staff was hospitalized in Oslo. It seemed like someone’s outlandish plot. And Sam, in his bungling way, was playing into their hands.

Because she would never believe he was a murderer. Not Sam Turner, the father of her eldest son. Not in a million years.

But you can never he entirely sure,
she heard Alex saying inside her head.
Sometimes people go over the top. They crack, turn into somebody else. Something that you, they, nobody ever expected.

30

When he left the flat Sam made his way to the Internet cafe and sent a message to Janet, copies to Celia and Marie and Angeles, make sure she had some support. He told them Geordie was in the Ulleval Hospital and that he was injured but that he wasn’t going to die. He told Angeles in a separate note to expect a call from him.

Sam took a tram up to Holmenkollen and looked out over the Oslo fjord from under the shadow of the ski jump. He didn’t have time to climb to the top of the jump. He’d never been much of a tourist anyway and he wasn’t in Holmenkollen for the view or as a visitor to the ski museum. It was part of his route back to England.

Before leaving the town he’d got together some kit and he was wearing a pair of new Norwegian boots in soft brown leather, a dark blue Finnish suit, neat little hat -kind of cross between pork-pie and Borsalino - and a Burberry coat which he left unbuttoned so it flapped in the wind. He still had JD’s glasses perched on his nose but he’d had his hair cut so short you couldn’t tell if he had any until he took the hat off.

As the moon rose he found a silver Volvo V70 estate with Swedish plates sitting outside a timbered villa. With all the skill of a seasoned car-thief and working only with a pen-knife and a multi-purpose screw-driver set which he kept in a pouch in his rucksack, he had the thing unlocked and rolling down the hill within thirty minutes.

He needed a few hours and the signs were favourable that he’d get them. Through the windows of the villa it seemed as though the car’s owners were settled for the night. Their hostess was serving up a large pink trout on a silver platter. The centrepiece was accompanied by small copper dishes of melted butter, marinaded cucumber and white potatoes that had been graded for size. The red wine was flowing into crystal glasses as big as melons. There was a log fire blazing in the grate and the women’s decolletage was emphasized by the soft glow of beeswax candles. The men were middle-aged, secreting success and excess through every pore. They wore smiles as wide as the table. Neither of them looked as though they’d miss a silver Volvo estate. They were driving towards oblivion, way past the point of no return.