The meanest Flood

small parcel when these ladies appeared on his horizon. Attempting, and to some extent succeeding in making himself invisible.
    Sam wasn’t averse to tasting the charms that such a lady can bestow, and on occasions, more than he cared to remember, had awoken to find himself enchanted by a surfeit of loneliness and rose-water. But Sam already had a girl-friend in York. Although they lived in separate houses, Angeles Falco and he had been lovers for almost a year. Angeles had been virtually blind since she was twenty-two, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t see what was going on. And in any case, Sam didn’t want to jeopardize his relationship with her for the sake of a one-night stand. He’d done it before, too many times. Not with Angeles, but with many of the women who had passed through his life.
    Sam wasn’t young anymore, and he was beginning to learn.
    On the other hand, Angeles had been distant lately, didn’t always seem as pleased to see him as she had in the past. The waters were cooler. Not terminally as yet. Maybe there were ways to save it, turn it around. Sam was still keen. She was a treasure to him.
    He wrote his report to the rhythm of the train’s movement. The client’s wife hadn’t run off with a lover, as he’d suspected. Instead she’d organized a flat for herself close to the Lace Market and was hard at work in a new job at Trent University. She could walk to it on a fine day and in the winter it would be only a couple of stops on the tram. She liked the Arboretum where she spent time alone. She hadn’t run to anything, which would have been some comfort to Sam’s client. She had run away from the guy, preferring instead a strange and empty city, a single and lonely bed in which she could begin to identify the parameters of her own identity.
    Sam looked through the rain-streaked windows of the train and tried to think of something upbeat to complete the report. A sentence or a phrase that would allow his client to go forward, to accept what had happened to him and not to regard his abandonment as a black hole. Sam the counsellor trying to elbow the detective aside. But in the end he settled for the ashes and dust of the truth.
    He scored an excuse for coffee from the trolley and settled down to listen to the chatter of the two women sitting on the opposite side of the table. One of them had had a dream about buying a Mercedes. ‘It was terrible,’ she said. ‘I suddenly realized that I’d done the most stupid thing. Landed myself with this huge car; it would need litres and litres of fuel and be impossible to park. For the whole dream I was trying to reverse the process, get rid of this monster, swap it for a little Rover or a Renault, something manageable in traffic. It was a nightmare.’
    Sam wanted to tell her that it was a middle-class nightmare. If he’d had a dream where he owned a Merc it would have been great. Even a second-hand one. He’d have spent the rest of the night smelling the leather upholstery, running his hands over the smooth lines of the bonnet. True, it would cost a heap to run, but status symbols don’t come cheap.
    The last nightmare Sam had had was when he’d bought a bottle of Scotch. He was halfway through it before he remembered it wasn’t a dream and he’d fallen into the jug again. The future was a blur into which he would drag all his friends and his relationships, his health and his conscience and any sense of self-respect he had built up since the last binge.
    But he didn’t say anything. He sipped his coffee and gazed at the rain-soaked landscape. Two good women on their way to York for some shopping didn’t want to hear about a drunk, have their dreams criticized by a guy who still wrote with a pen.
    At York station there was a Chinese guy with a ponytail leaning against a wall and reading the Guardian and around the bookstall a young Yorkshire entrepreneur was busy taking Upskirt videos. There was the usual drone of tourists, most of them clutching three-colour maps of the city, all seeking ghosts of Vikings or ancient Romans, steam-trains or somewhere they could hire a bike.
    Outside on the street the con artists were perfecting their pitch, the local traders polishing their wares, the restaurateurs thickening their sauces and the beggars sharpening their whistles. It was another day in the market place of civilization. You’d have to be blind not to see how far we’d come since the first Constantine was proclaimed the Great