Read The meanest Flood for Free Online Page B

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,’ Ellen said. ‘I should’ve known better when you said you’d got the tickets. All the way to Nottingham when we could have seen him here.’
    ‘Oh, I’m going to see him here as well,’ Marilyn said. ‘You can count on that. Danny and me, we’ll probably end up working together.’
    ‘Look,’ Ellen said, ‘I don’t ask for much, Marilyn. But I want you to leave this man alone. I can see it’s going to get you into trouble, and if you’re in trouble I’m in trouble as well. What happened last night - it didn’t mean anything.’
    ‘It didn’t mean anything to you, Mother. But it meant a lot to me and it meant a lot to Danny. You’re an old woman, you’ve had your life. But Danny and me, we’re still young. We’re in love and our whole future is waiting.’
    ‘He doesn’t know you,’ Ellen said. ‘This is just like the others. You’re going to hound the life out of that poor man, drive him to distraction. I’m asking you, please, Marilyn, leave him alone. Let him