The meanest Flood by John Baker

I?’
    ‘Yes, you would. You just did it. Echo’s a witness. This is the kind of woman you’ve got for a mother, Echo. Just remember that. How do you expect the child to grow into a rounded human being with you as a role-model?’
    ‘She can always fall back on her perfect daddy,’ Janet said.
    Geordie went to the hob and brought a pan with crushed apple and custard to the table. He spooned the mixture into Echo’s bowl and tested the temperature with his knuckles. Echo made a grab for the bowl but he moved it out of reach.
    ‘Anyway, I don’t think you’re right,’ Janet said. ‘Dora wasn’t a tart, and look at Angeles, she’s got real class.’ Geordie was glad that Sam had settled down with Angeles Falco even though they didn’t live together. In the past Sam hadn’t been able to keep a woman. Some of the women he’d picked, Geordie wouldn’t have wanted him to keep. Seemed to be particularly strong on babyfaced smiles and cleavage, gold-diggers and women who were long on legs and hair and short on nous.
    ‘You should see some of the earlier ones,’ Geordie said. ‘He’s getting better but he’s still off kilter. Dora was old enough to be his mother and Angeles is at least twenty years younger than him.’
    ‘And then some. But when I see them together I don’t think about their ages. They seem like a good fit.’
    ‘That’s because you’re a moral relativist,’ Geordie told her.
    Janet laughed. ‘Big words.’
    ‘I was talking to Celia about it. In the old days, before Einstein, everybody believed in good and evil. There were rules about what you could do, like the Ten Commandments. But now we think everything’s relative. We look at the context of things and judge them from that. There’re no absolutes anymore.’
    ‘I feel an example coming on,’ Janet said.
    ‘There were a couple of Iraqi families in Bradford, one with two sons and the other with two daughters. They went through all the routines they would’ve gone through in Iraq and the two daughters were married to the two sons. They didn’t have a registrar or anything like that but they had their own religious ceremony. A few weeks later Social Services moved in and took the girls into care. The boys were charged with sexual abuse.’
    ‘How old were these girls?’
    ‘I don’t remember,’ Geordie said. ‘Thirteen, something like that, which is fine in Iraq, nobody thinks anything about it. That’s how they do it. But here it’s regarded as immoral and we make a law about it.’
    ‘It’s too young,’ Janet said.
    ‘Sure. I think so, too. I wouldn’t like to see Echo getting married in ten, eleven years’ time. But are you gonna say the Iraqi families are immoral for going through with it? Stone them to death?’
    ‘That’d be an over-reaction, I think.’
    ‘See what I mean? You’re a moral relativist.’
    ‘So this is what we’re going to teach Echo, is it? That there’s no such thing as right or wrong. That everything’s relative?’
    ‘We’ll have to, Janet. That’s what she’s got to learn if she’s gonna live in this society. If we lived in a different society we’d teach her different things.’
    ‘What about these fundamentalists, Geordie? Seems like there’s more of them all the time. People who see good on one side and evil on the other and nothing in between.’
    ‘They’re part of a backlash. But they’re a minority. These’re people who can’t cope without certainty in their lives. They want a strong leader or a dominant church, and they want all their Ts crossed and all their Is dotted.’ Janet sighed. ‘Sometimes that sounds attractive.’
    ‘Yeah,’ Geordie said. ‘But it’s a dream. If we don’t take responsibility for ourselves then somebody else’ll do it for us, and we’ll be slaves again.’
    Janet sniffed and looked at Echo.
    ‘She’s filled her nappy,’ Geordie said. ‘I shovel it in one end and she pushes it out the other. C’est la vie.’ He went to the