Read Online The meanest Flood by John Baker - Free Book Online Page B

or less as pissed as I was. We were the only people in the place, six o’clock in the evening and drinking doubles. I was at the stage I could focus better if I kept one eye shut. The barman was a soak well and he told us the old joke about the drunk who c0uldn’t work out what his limit was because he always assed out before he reached it. And Katherine said she’d been in a bar earlier in the day and asked for the usual so the landlord carried her outside. And we were laughing together, all three of us, and I was supposed to tell a drunk joke but I couldn’t remember one and they both thought that was funnier than if I’d told a good one so we laughed some more.
    ‘I dunno how long we kept going that night. At some point I ended up at her place. It was one room somewhere and we slept together with the light on because she was frightened of the dark. Sometimes we’d go to bed during the day and we still had to sleep with the light on because Katherine would say we might wake up in the dark.
    ‘We were swimming in booze. We’d laugh a lot and we’d always come up with some kind of scam to get the money together for another bottle, or we’d fight like cat and dog and still come up with a solution. We convinced each other we were a good couple, we couldn’t live without each other. So we got married.’
    ‘Sounds like you were in full flight,’ Marie said.
    ‘No doubt about it. I was half-crazy. When Donna and Bronte were killed I stopped sleeping. I used to stand at the corner of that street with a pad and a pen and jot down the number of every car that was over the speed limit. When I got a full sheet I’d take it round the police station and then go back to the corner and fill up another one. I did that for a year, never missed a day. Must’ve started taking a bottle with me about nine months in and soon the bottle became more important than watching the cars.
    ‘I’d wake up screaming in the street, sitting on the pavement, or the cops would put me in a cell. Bronte was two when she died. I’d play the impact over and over again in my head. The head-on collision with iron and steel at ninety miles an hour, her body sailing through the air like a missile. And I’d know it was a dream, although I wasn’t really asleep, it was a vision, a nightmare. The whole thing would take place in silence, like a film when the sound has been lost. And then I’d be awake, wide awake again and back in the world, and Bronte and Donna had both gone in the same fell swoop and it wasn’t a dream at all.’
    Marie touched his hand and stood beside him while they looked out at the rain. He’d still been a drunk when she first met him. The police had brought him into the hospital where she was in the final year of her SRN training. He’d got into a fight with a gang of squaddies; he had a fractured arm, two broken ribs, and his head and face had been used like a football. Before they left him one of them stabbed him in the neck with a sheath knife. By that time his drunk had lasted too many years. After they’d nursed him back to health he’d carried on drinking for another five.
    Sam laughed.
    ‘Something funny?’
    ‘When I came round,’ he said, ‘at the hospital, the police came to see me. Check if they should launch a murder hunt for the squaddies or give them a medal each. I was half-asleep and you came to the side of the bed with the Chief Superintendent - what was his name? - and he said, “What’s the prognosis?”
    ‘You told him, “Oh, his condition is very satisfactory.” And then the two of you wandered away towards the nurses’ station.
    ‘Very satisfactory? I thought. Must mean I’m going to die.’
    Marie smiled. ‘Didn’t stop you drinking though, did it?’
    Sam shook his head. It made me think,’ he said. ‘Made me realize I wasn’t the man I’d set out to be.’
    ‘And now you are?’
    ‘Still need to develop some humility.’
    ‘Shall I tell you something, Sam? About