To Indigo Page 18

Sej’s mobile seemed to have unlimited credit, or was paid for via bills; he recharged it regularly in whatever room he happened to be, never letting it from his sight.

  He had urbanely confiscated my house keys during the initial evening, BB, asking for them in a friendly, casual manner. That was both those to the front door and the key to the kitchen door. A spare key to the kitchen door had once existed but was years since lost, by me. Sej didn’t ask if there was one. Unless I wanted to try to break through either door – both of which opened inward and would be difficult – which means impossible for someone at my physical standard – my only chance was to climb from a window. But the windows, both upper and lower, refitted in the eighties and ‘modern’, opened only at the tops, a narrow strip that might be useable by a skinny infant or a cat. I could have broken them, if with a little effort, as the glazing was fairly tough. (I knew that because, some years before, one of the young footballers who replace each other in the Lane, and hold the World Cup there several times a month, managed to lob a ball square at my front window, which held.)

  But again I’d need to put my back into it. And it would make one hell of a row.

  And Sej was always there.

  Despite his offhand comment on ‘shopping’, and my vague half-hopeful inner reaction, he never left the premises. Instead he would bring out his mobile and either he or I, on his instructions, order things in, paying with two or three of his credit cards.

  Wine came, whisky, soda, dry ginger, bottled water for him, fruit juices, food and bathroom supplies, (including shaving equipment, toothbrush, and other things also for him -he’d brought nothing with him – even some jeans and shirts, socks, boxers, the whole kit. I was reminded, seeing these completely accurate stores and garments carried in by him, of my own future fears for myself as an old man, at the mercy of the careless deliveries of others. Seemingly everything Sej wanted was perfect).

  At night we ate takeaways. Or he did. He never now forced me to join in, and frequently I settled for beans on toast, or a ham sandwich. Once a Chinese meal was delivered. We observed the same ritual as with the Indian, and then Sej served the food before me. There was hot and sour soup, duck with blackbean sauce, pancakes, noodles, sweetcorn and crab, Szechuan Prawns, squid with garlic. “So glad you were tempted to have some,” he said, in his ‘winning’ mode. I did eat a little. It was very good. There were also what the menu described as Two Free Bottles of Beef. He’d ordered desert too, pineapple, toffee bananas and ice cream.

  The food alone was costing him a small fortune.

  After our dinners we’d drink coffee, whisky if he told me I should have one, vodka for him, a double without mixer. I recollected that from when I first saw him in the pub in the Strand.

  The anti-drugging procedure was always kept to.

  I prepared my own food and ‘kept my eyes on it’, he did the same, but mostly had his food brought in. If we shared anything at some point plates and glasses were exchanged.

  Sometimes he brought me morning tea, sometimes not. He never asked me to do or make anything for him. Either he attended on me, as one might with someone ailing or very young or old, or he left to my own devices. Sometimes he would inquire if I had a preference for a type of food or drink. But that was within the limits of what he chose. After all, he was paying. I tried to figure out, in the second week, exactly how much he had spent. At a conservative estimate, well over fifteen hundred pounds.

  The other elements of our relationship, if such it must be termed, went on and around about the day to day minutiae of ordinary life, however odd or opulent.

  At first, what went on was, shall I say, external.

  That is, it affected the house, its objects.

  The inaugural act happened on the fourth day of his occupancy and my imprisonment. Or, more correctly, it had gone on during the previous night.

  I woke at seven-thirty after a restless three hours’ sleep and smelled the acid tang of fresh paint,

  I got up, used the bathroom, and went downstairs. The smell of paint intensified. The morning before I had seen some quite large boxes delivered, all taken in as usual by Sej. Although I was regularly told to make various telephone orders, Sej sometimes ordered stuff of which I had no knowledge until later. This was the case here, for he had got in the paint and brushes etc. without my knowing anything about it.

  The door of the front room stood half open.

  He had covered the piano over with a large dust-sheet, but not bothered with anything else.

  As I stood there he turned from his position on the kitchen ladder. “Hi, Roy. What do you think?”

  The walls of the room, almost finished now, were a deep scarlet. It hit my morning eyes like too bright light. I said nothing.

  Not only were the walls red, but most of the sofa and other furniture, and the carpet, where paint had dripped or, more likely, been idly splashed.

  “Don’t worry about the mess,” he said. “Come on, don’t sulk. You can always get some other chairs.”

  The don’t sulk, though playful, as if only trying to dispel some unreasonable churlishness on my part, was a warning I must heed.

  “Why red?” I asked.

  “Enlivening. We can rip that bloody awful electric fire out next and get the chimney opened up. Picture this on a winter evening, firelit and glowing.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “You don’t sound enthusiastic, Roy. Where’s your spirit of adventure?”

  “You paint very well,” I said. This was true. It looked a professional job, aside from the ruin of almost everything else.

  “Thanks. I’m not bad, am I, for an amateur?”

  He flaunted himself. There was a small red mark on his forehead but his hands were enclosed in protective gloves. His hands, the piano, must come to no harm.

  “Do you want tea?” I asked.

  “That’s all right. Had some. Want to get on. Should have it done in another hour.”

  I made coffee for myself in the kitchen, which also reeked of paint. The coffee tasted of paint. Even the toothpaste upstairs had done so. Through the window I watched a blackbird picking through the dead sides of my paved-over garden, and thought of breaking the glass. But I didn’t trust myself to get it right, and I judged what would happen if I didn’t.

  He had completed the painting of the room by 9 a.m.

  During that and the next day, the paint smell gave me a sinus headache.

  On the carpet, curtains, and the chairs and sofa the splashed paint dried. Over the face of the old clock had run a single red drip like blood. I attempted to rectify nothing. Nor did he. I sensed, accurately, that the furniture couldn’t be renovated, and it was not. I got used to the new look of the room, no longer anything to do with me, an abattoir in hell where offal and gore stayed always fresh and cheerful.

  Two days on from the red paint, Sej threw out most of my crockery, literally threw, smashing it in the back garden.

  I watched, as I had the blackbird, safely shut in like a wayward child who, if let go free, may rush off straight under a speeding car.

  At one juncture, George emerged from 72 on to his neat back lawn, with the cherry tree and bird table.

  I had a moment’s hope. The activity of wreckage looked unusual. How would George react?

  He and Sej chatted in an easy way over the lowest part of the fence, where the other hydrangea was spreading the green cups of delayed flowers.

  I couldn’t make out what was said, my ears like my sinus had been clogged up by the paint. But both men were very relaxed.

  When Sej came in, having swept the shards of crockery into two dustbin bags and dropped them in the black dustbin he’d earlier provided, he said, “I told old George you were going to make a new start. George said he was so pleased I was here. Between himself and me, he and his wife had been a bit nervous about you, here on your own in your present state of mind. They hoped I’d stay as long as I could.”

  “And will you?” It was out before I could con
tain it.

  But Sej smiled. “I can stay forever, Roy, if I want.”

  To replace the china, some of which had gone back to my grandparents’ time, Sej had ordered some thick square plates and square saucers, with large if unmatchingly round cups. All of it was pale yellow, starred with lurid marigolds. I’d never seen anything quite like it. They were less ugly and unwieldy than preposterous. I hadn’t ever cared about the original china however. My only concern was that the awkwardness of the new crockery might make me drop some of it, and would this be taken as a declaration of war?

  At night, when I retired to the virtually doorless environment of the bedroom, still I utilised my waking hours, or some of them, trying to concoct a plan of escape. But by now I couldn’t think of anything that I dared to chance.

  The night after the new cups appeared I attempted a foray downstairs.

  It was well after 3 a.m. The piano, which now and then he played into the small hours, had fallen quiet just after two.

  There were no lights on. Yet at the windows in the study, the narrow box room, and the bathroom where the door also stood ajar, embers of streetlighting fell into the house. The same was true downstairs, through the glass panel in the door.

  Moving slowly and with care in my stockinged feet – I never now slept either in pyjamas or under the covers, but on top of the bed fully dressed – I crept downward.

  As I reached the fifth step from the bottom, darkness flowed directly upward at me like a forming hill, blocking the light, barring my way.

  I knew it was him, not some creature from the Hammer Horror films of my youth. But I cried out, lost my footing, stumbled into him. He caught me firm as a rock.

  “What are you up to, Roy?”

  “You frightened the life –”

  “No, I asked first. What are you doing?”

  I said, because I’d had my story ready, “I was thirsty,” Like the untrusted child again.

  “You should have called down. I’d have brought you something.” He didn’t seem angry, or worse exhibit that resignation that had been a prologue to the blow. “I’m often about at night. I sit in your library and read R.P. Phillips.”

  I supposed he used only the angled lamp on the table there, and pulled the door to, for no light from that room had entered the hallway.

  He said, “Tea? Whisky?”

  “Just water.”

  “You should keep some by you in a bottle, Roy. You can’t keep drinking unboiled tap water, not without a filter, not anymore.”

  I stood marooned on the stair. Decidedly I must not proceed further. He came back with the glass with water in it.

  “It’s Volvic,” he said, “in case you think it tastes different.” And he drank a couple of swallows. “Next time, like I said, just call me.”

  Upstairs I went to the lavatory and poured the water away and flushed the cistern. It wasn’t that I thought he had spiked the drink. I just couldn’t swallow it.

  Other events – adventures – took place during the next week.

  There were all sorts of things. Some were surprising, shocking, some nearly funny in a frightful way, as had been the red paint and the smashed china. Some were on a more instantly invasive scale. For example, his nocturnal application of white paint to the glass of the lavatory window. Others were insidious things I might not notice at first, like altering the positions of the kitchen glasses, putting them where the canned and dried food and tea had been. And those commodities somewhere else again. Or when he had misfiled every book in my library. These had occupied a logical alphabetical order, author and subject. I’d worked in public libraries and this technique, less than petty, I’d found helpful when looking for things. Now I would hardly be able to locate anything without a search. That must have taken him most of a night to arrange as well. Strange I hadn’t heard him, the library lay partly below the bedroom. My study he always apparently avoided entering unless he had asked me if he might. It goes without saying I never withheld my assent. Then I walked into it one afternoon, sent there by Sej to write, and gradually grew oppressively aware of something above me. Looking up I had to squint to make it out, but I at last saw the pale writing, scribbled in the lightest grey paint across the stained white ceiling, almost invisibly. He had climbed up the ladder again, perhaps balanced, incredibly noiseless and careful on the flat-topped desk where the computer stood. This time, no splashes. He must have covered it over. The writing was some of the invented poetry of Vilmos, copied or recalled from Untitled. If I hadn’t written it I might not have been able, now, fully to read it.

  Agony unended. Like the long snow it falls

  And shrouds the edges of a sword

  Too murderous to die from,

  Too tangible to touch.

  Among the webs that midnight spins

  Go staggering to the doors of rotted day,

  And through the keyholes, snakelike,

  Spit.

  This single act horrified me so far the most, worse even than his manifestation on the stair. But the painted poetry of course, was only my little madness and Vilmos’s great one, jarred into life by Sej’s spectacular insanity.

  I said nothing to him about the writing, as I’d said nothing about any of it until, when or if, I was interrogated. Then I was neutral.

  He didn’t refer to the poetry at all.

  That following night, or rather morning, he woke me from one of my piecemeal half hours of sleep. He did this by shining the light of a torch he must also have had delivered, (my own was defunct) into my eyes.

  It’s an old and tried schematic. I had read of it, described it in some of my work – read by him? To experience it is quite devastating.

  I almost attacked him. I was just compos mentis enough to stop myself.

  “Sorry, Roy,” he kindly said, “I wanted to show you something.”

  Presently I went down with him. It was about 4 a.m. That I was being allowed to descend to the lower storey was not lost on me.

  The TV was on, the sound turned down.

  Some old film was showing, black and white, staffed with a cast of, at least to me, unknown movie actors of my parents’ era. I sat on the sofa, stiff and crackling with dried paint. Although he had said he sometimes slept here, I’d never seen any evidence. Now he sat beside me. We stared at the – to me alone? – incomprehensible film. I wondered confusedly and shakily if he simply wanted me to watch television with him. Then he said, “Shall I get rid of this, Roy?”

  My voice, always astonishing me recently, replied quite steadily, “Of course, if you want.”

  And he patted my shoulder, got up and crossed the room, and kicked in the screen.

  A high hard bang sounded, less explosion than gunshot. The red room flashed purple, then white. Bits of the screen that seemed rather to be bits of solid light hailed through the air. A brief electric storm was born in a jet black hole ripped in the fabric of the room. Everything glittered, tinkled, then darkened, while from the TV plug in the wall a white ray, shaped like the classical lightning bolt awarded to the god Zeus, was flung to the ceiling and died. After this all was blackness.

  Sej murmured, “You hardly watched anything, did you? I think you said the news gets on your nerves.”

  He threw a kind of shadow, lighter than the dark, but he himself was now invisible to me.

  “Yes,” I said. “I didn’t often watch.”

  “Oh well, better get you back to bed.”

  He led me up the stair. At the top he turned to me, and now I saw him in the vague orange light from the street-lamps.

  “Didn’t scare you, did I – I mean, doing that?”

  I gazed at him. I said, “What you do is your business, Sej.”

  “Yes, Roy. And so are you. My business.”

  He let me go through into the bedroom alone, and from the outside adjusted my door slightly, to permit me more ‘privacy’.

  Through the pretended barrier he called after me softly, “You haven’t tried to get away. Or n
ot properly. Why’s that, Roy?”

  “Too tired, Sej. At my age, you get fed up, running about.”

  His voice was now so soft I had to strain to catch it as I stood there, rigid, in the non-electrified dark.

  “Do you, Roy? That’s a shame. Not sure I entirely believe you, you know. You’re not that old, either. Young as you feel. Sleep tight, old sport. Tomorrow is another day.”

  I stood by my bed in the darkness for about another forty minutes after he had gone, or I thought he had. I didn’t sleep again that night. I thought what prisoners must often think, that to continue in this way was not bearable, and that I could only bear it, having no alternative. And I thought dispassionately of some callous miracle – George hammering on the door calling for assistance – Vita with chest pains – an ambulance – some logical development which might allow me to evade my captor in two or three freakish moments of unexpectedness. And I thought finally of the stupidity of my situation, and that I ought to be able to get free, there must be some solution. But I could conjure nothing.

  Into darkness I stared, the memory of the explosion of the TV screen sometimes igniting in my brain before my inner eye, truly a flashback. I wished him dead. That was all I had that I could do. I wished him dead, but it was unreal to me. And I believed I’d reached the end of my road.

  7

  He went up the ladder first, and I reckoned I would leave it to him. But when somehow Mr C, standing on that ladder some fifty-five to sixty feet over the back gardens, both hands employed in screwdrivering access through the skylight, had raised the window and it was open, and he leaned inside, looked back down and spoke to me, I knew that I too wished very badly to see into the place above. I wore trainers. I put one foot on the lowest rung and hauled myself up quite efficiently, ignoring the idea of the distance to the ground. I felt different in my 666 role, shaven headed, in jeans and T-shirt and trainers. I felt unencumbered. I felt I too could climb the dangerous ladder. And climb it I had. When I got into the attic room above Sej’s flat, both Mr C and I paused, looking round. I was nonplussed, although I quickly saw he could not be. Given his wide experience surprise would be rare, and then no doubt only associated with types of extreme violence.