The meanest Flood

thousand more like, maybe more than that. And out of all of them Danny picked me. He took me on the stage with him. I was a star.’
    ‘Not a star, Marilyn. You see what I mean, how you exaggerate? You have an idea in your head and it gets out of proportion. He needed someone to help with that trick. It doesn’t mean he loves you. It was a card trick.’
    ‘Fuck you, Mother,’ Marilyn said. ‘I know what this is about, you want him for yourself. You’re jealous that he picked me instead of you.’
    ‘I’m going downstairs now,’ Ellen said. ‘We can talk about this later, when you’ve got yourself dressed and when you’ve stopped using profane language.’
    ‘Thank you,’ Marilyn shouted after her. ‘That means I’ve won.’
    Ellen went outside to the back garden and lit up a Benson & Hedges, drawing the smoke and nicotine deep into her lungs. She watched the water from the river creeping over the field towards their house. Every day it drew a little closer. If it didn’t stop raining up in the hills they would find themselves marooned one morning. Life had been a battle for as long as she could remember and looked set on remaining so for as far as she could see into the future.
    There had been a period of calm when Marilyn married a soldier boy and went to live in a house near Fulford Barracks. Soldier boy helped to train dogs in the art of sniffing out bombs. Ellen felt her life had entered a tranquil patch then and had taken herself off to Scotland to live in a cottage by the Dee, reading books and growing flowers and trying to write.
    She would willingly have lived out her last years there, free from the cares of the world.
    But some of the soldier boy’s mates had plied a couple of working Alsatians with gin and the dogs had gone mad and attacked him, killing him and consuming most of his face and throat.
    So Ellen had said goodbye to Scotland and come home to help her daughter back from the brink of madness. What else was she supposed to do? She was a mother first, a Scot second, a gardener third, and a writer... well, not at all.
    But being a mother is not everything. That is one of the great lies that people have told for ages past, and which they still perpetuate. Being a mother can make you feel that you should be everything to your children, to your child, but as you grow older you have to realize that it isn’t true. When they are tiny you might be able to supply their needs, but as they grow they want a wider world.
    Marilyn needed sex, she needed an emotional entanglement with a man, a real, loving and mutually supportive relationship, and Ellen couldn’t supply that.
    Almost as soon as soldier boy was buried in the churchyard Marilyn was head over heels in love with a Leeds United striker. Irish lad, no more than twenty-two, twenty-three. He had no idea. Not at first.
    Ellen blamed herself. She had accepted the seed of the man who was Marilyn’s natural father, knowing that his father and mother had jumped together off the Valley Bridge in Scarborough. Her egg had been fertilized by the sperm of a card-carrying screwball. A man who had opened his veins in the bath to save making a mess in the kitchen.
    That was why Marilyn was like she was. Part of her a true Scot with a fierce independence and a natural appreciation of beauty and truth; and another part, inherited from her father, which was forever diagonally parked in an unremittingly parallel universe.
    When Ellen had finished her cigarette she returned to the kitchen and watched her daughter eating cornflakes from a bowl. Marilyn was wearing a long wrap-around skirt. She had put on a pair of black tights and a top that her mother had starched and ironed the previous day.
    Ellen pulled a chair up to the table and said, ‘Marilyn, I don’t want us to get into another one of these fixes.’
    ‘What fixes?’ Marilyn asked through a mouthful of cereal.
    ‘Like the footballer. You followed him around. In the end he got the police on to us.’
    Marilyn stopped eating. ‘No,’ she said, thinking. ‘I don’t believe that is what happened. It was his manager got the police out. He was spending too much time thinking about me. He couldn’t concentrate on his game.’
    ‘I don’t want you making a nuisance of yourself over this magician.’
    ‘Danny?’ She smiled. ‘He wouldn’t call me a nuisance. He didn’t think I was a nuisance last night. Not when he was holding my hand.’
    ‘We shouldn’t have gone last night,’