Cruel Pink Read online

  “And you have no view,” she added, “nothing to look out on.”

  I have explained more than once that in fact the back view from my flat isn’t bad. I face the Little Common, beyond which the sun sinks behind the burgeoning central city outskirts.

  I shrugged. “Nothing as pretty as your garden.”

  She made an annoyed noise, and told me about her feud with the Gardenman, as she calls him.

  Despite all that, it was, I admit, rather pleasant on the autumnal patio, watching the trees. We drank our coffee, and I fell asleep at one point. She seemed not to notice. She was still telling me, when I woke, about a campaign she was trying to start against too-early schooling of children. She seemed to believe they were now expected to attend nursery school at two years of age. Is she right? God knows, the way things are.

  In the evening we had tea, and ate a very peculiar cake that someone she knew had made. It seemed to be thinly iced in the middle, with a bitter jam on the top, and was wholly organic.

  When it got to seven o’clock I was, as ever, able to remind her of the train I had to catch. She told me of course I must go, it was very noble of me to have visited on Saturday, after my stressful week of work in central London. I replied that the rural quality of her house, the garden, and my brief looks at the sea from the train, had been wonderful.

  She kept her final, if recently habitual remark until I was putting on my coat.

  “Roderick… I do know you’re gay, you know.”

  “I’m not gay,” I replied. As always I do.

  “You won’t admit it, I see that. But why not? There is absolutely no stigma now. Why won’t you be honest at least with me?”

  “I am,” I said, patiently, “being honest. I’m not gay.”

  “But you are, Roderick—you are! And oh, Roderick, I’d be so glad to see you with some nice friend—I’d be so happy for you. You could bring him to visit me! Do you think I wouldn’t welcome him—that he’d sense any animosity from me—me, your Auntie Vanessa? Oh, I’d love to meet him, Roderick. Won’t you trust me?”

  I kissed her cheek.” If there were anyone, Auntie, I’d trust you. But there is no one. No one at all.”

  “Oh, Roderick,” she said as we got her rather complicated door undone. “Oh Roderick.”

  7

  I’m not gay. At least, as far as I know. And surely by now I would. I’m thirty-two years of age. Men don’t interest me. People don’t, a great deal, if I’m honest. But I like to look at women, if not in an especially lascivious manner. I like their scents and the way they colour their hair and choose their clothes and make their faces up. The way they move.

  My mother and sister were killed when I was only five. In a train crash in France. Rotten, yes it was. My mother was only about my age now, and the little girl, my big sister, just nine. A psychologist would say I miss them, so I look at women now and try to see my mother as she was, and my sibling as she might have grown up to be.

  The train back was full of jaded seasiders, lurching home to the sea-less tidal city, noisy or exhausted, or both. I had a vodka and tonic off the jolly-trolley. That would be my limit for today. I like a drink but I don’t have too much. Can’t afford it for one thing.

  I made some notes on the train going back, as I had on the one going down. It was dark, the windows black before we reached Victoria.

  All places smell different. Brighton had been salt and fish and leaves and compost. London that night was newspaper and neon and chemical smoke. I caught the other train out and down, there hadn’t been a stop-off at my station on the way up. I always think that is so strange, going past your own station, unable to stop, having to go all the way in and then out again.

  8

  There was somebody hanging about in my road as I turned into it. As a rule, if that happens, it’s some gang of youths, boys or girls or both, off the common or making for the common, under a street lamp with their death-advertising cigarette packets vivid with plague warnings, and their little toy bottles of alcopops. They may yell at one, or not. They mostly don’t seem to see me, or any adult. We’re like ghosts to them, remnants already faded from the vast movie-screen of life on which, day and night, they get top billing.

  Tonight though, it was just a girl on her own. Dark-haired and in a dark coat. Eye make-up, nothing else. She was walking slowly up and down between the station end, from where I came, and the five detached houses in the middle, the second along of which is where I have my flat.

  She glanced at me as I went by. I assumed she was probably waiting for someone, but somehow it didn’t quite seem like that. Looking out for someone, then. She seemed edgy, nervous and suspicious, less of the casual passer-by—me—than of the area. She was like a girl from a spy film, waiting to meet up with the dodgy contact she had been sent to find, who would help her, or harm her, depending how the script panned out.

  When I crossed over to the house with the flats, I caught the flash of her pale face in the streetlight, turning to see where I went. And as I put the key in the lock, I looked back. She was staring by then, yet when I turned she did too, and hurried away up the street. Unsettling, a bit. But people do weird things now. No doubt, they always have.

  I rent the right-hand north side flat on the second floor. I put the light on in the downstairs hall and went straight up the stairs to it.

  The landlady has the ground floor apartment. We don’t really have dealings. I got the place through an agent, bought it over five years, it being so cheap, paying my dues every month through the bank by direct debit. I’ve only glimpsed her a couple of times. At least I assume it was her. She’s in her fifties, nothing startling, a bit of a recluse perhaps. I have to say, there’s sometimes a bit of a bad smell down there, the ground floor that is. Very faint, but not appealing. It comes and goes. Drains, I reckon.

  My flat is small, two rooms, bathroom and kitchen. I generally clean it over on Sunday mornings, it never takes long. There’s nothing special or ‘graphically amazing’, as Forrel might say, in any of the rooms. White walls and some mirrors, the ordinary blue curtains and carpets that were already here. The electric kettle is mine, like the few books, and the clothes in the wardrobe. The main room and the bedroom have electric fires as well as individual central heating. The cooker’s gas.

  The rear-view, though, as I’ve tried to tell Vanessa, isn’t bad. There are the couple of streets that slope down, and then the tow-path and the canal, and over the other side is the common, with its trees and, framed now on blackest night, the three diamante-windowed fifteen-storey blocks of flats that rule over Parnassus Avenue.

  I’d missed the sunset. But despite the clemency of the day, the sun had gone out in cloud not far outside Brighton. There wouldn’t have been much to see.

  Before I switched on the lamp in the sitting room, the other end of which faces out to the street, I went to discover if the dark spy-girl, Anushka of the KGB, were still loitering in the road. She wasn’t. Either her date had found her or she had slung her hook.

  I made some coffee and sat on the couch to check my notes, but I couldn’t entirely concentrate. It was almost ten. I activated the TV for the news, and whatever hell, horror and idiocy had gone on everywhere while I was cooped up with Aunt Vanessa. Before it came on I did have one quick look in the wardrobe. Only one look. My second, though, if I counted this morning. No worse than the drinks, I thought. Half a glass of white wine at lunch and a double vodka in the evening. Half a minute’s morning wardrobe-look, and two minutes’ look at night. That was enough, and not too much. In the sitting room, the girl reading the news had hennaed her hair. She looked beautiful.

  Klova:

  9

  I tried the lipstick last, before I went out.

  I’m always having make-up. If I can’t afford it, I’ll just steal it.

  But generally I can afford it.

  I never mind stealing.

  It’s so like simple. It’s just a sort of spell I can throw over the store O.C.
’s as they peer and follow me about. I never get caught.

  But I hadn’t stolen the new lipstick.

  I’d had a money-gift wired into my account a day before and the bank-nanny told me last thing that night. Three thousand shots. That’s a lot. I couldn’t work out—often can’t—quite who it came from but, you know, who cares? It was there.

  Although by tomorrow some of it would be gone.

  I was going to the Leaning Tower.

  In my black and gold, and the tinsel hold-ups, and the chandelier ear-drops, and the totter-heels, and the new lipstick.

  I left about Zone 48, because nothing much kicks off in town until around 50—Midnight.

  I thought the male, who lives in the flat across from mine, was in, I heard his news-viewer on as I went downstairs. Such an old-fashioned roost, this flat-house, no slide. The old woman who holes up in the downstairs part was silent too as silence. She is a peculio, and no lie.

  I am very certain she goes all over when I’m out. Gets in my rooms.

  All over the upstairs bit too—not sure even if anyone lives there—and all over the male’s flat as well.

  She doesn’t take anything. Not from me.

  But sometimes she disturbs some piece or other—like the shadow of a chair hangs wrongly and that’s because she has shifted or knocked it. Or the spume in the bath dome is wet, though it wipes itself dry soon after use.

  One morning in winter I came back at dawn, Zone 16, and there was a pearl from one of my gloves lying on the glass tiles of my social room. I hadn’t worn these gloves for nights.

  But so what.

  Live and let love.

  Love and let go.

  Go live.

  When I got outside, I glanced up, and through his window shields I could faintly see the male’s lights were on. So he was home.

  He’s old, too. He might have been pretty when he was younger.

  He’s one of the Older Generation, before it all got changed. In fifty years he’ll be dead.

  In fifty years I’ll still look sixteen.

  I look sixteen now, but I’m twenty-nine.

  They say we are lucky.

  Of course.

  That’s right.

  I took a quick look up and down the long wide ice-cream-gleamy street. The houses here are still quite old, but way over there, beyond the Forest, the sky poles of the outer city sheer up in layers of diamond and ruby terraces. And I could just make out the light on top of the Leaning Tower, pulsing on-violet/off-rose/Chinese-dragon-green.

  If I took the sprint I’d be there in twenty minutes. Did I want to be so early?

  Like but right then I saw this girl and this new male were stood there under one of the float-lamps.

  She was dark and serious-eyed and twentyish, so she might be me-type, or younger old-going-to-die-soon type. I couldn’t tell.

  The male looked like a quack.

  I am going to walk by, but the girl speaks to me.

  “Excuse me, but you just left that house.”

  I walked on.

  She ran after me.

  She had high-heels but not proper high enough.

  He rumbled after her.

  I turned and looked at her.

  “What do you want?”

  “You see,” she said, helplessly, moving her hands as like she was underwater, “I’m looking for my bloke, Sigh.”

  “Sigh?” I said.

  “Yes—short for Simon. He spells it SY.”

  With a name like that he was surely almost being of Older Gen. Perhaps he’d just given up the ghost. I suggested that, and she let out a thin silly scream, as if I’d hit her or turned my Self-D spray on her.

  The male with her said loudly, “Right, d’you know anything about it? He was just fishing down the canal a few days back and he never come home. He’s her feller and my bruvva and we wanta know what the fuck happened to him, ‘cos he doesn’t just vanish, right? She’s scared he fell in the canal.”

  No one calls it the canal any more. It’s called The Nile.

  “Can’t help you,” I said.

  The girl started to cry.

  I walked on, and they didn’t try to stop me. They should go to the Civ Law anyway, if they’re worried. It’s nothing to do with me.

  Only thing is, now skipping about in my mind to the tick-tick of my slenderest totter-heels on the milk-light-washed pavement, a remembering of another girl a month ago, summertime, also asking me on the street about someone else who had gone missing.

  Why do they ask me?

  I don’t know.

  I don’t care.

  Live and let go.

  10

  I danced all night.

  Always do.

  Had carnal with a male in the Singles Rooms of the Tower, and then got the sprint back.

  I felt wonderful. Sex is brilliant, and all the exercise.

  I only drink liquid-silver, which is very good for you and inspires the brain.

  My plan was to go to bed as the sky before the flat-house was blazing with sunrise, and sleep into Zone 34.

  The street, when I reached it, was empty of anything but the dregs of darkness.

  I’d forgotten all about the girl and male and their missing feller—bruvva Sigh.

  But when I got to the house—and undid the door with my ID nail, I smelled this smell.

  The street smells clean and hygiene-brushed. The Forest at the back sends wafts of green and ink perfume and the aroma of birds and shadow. But this house, when you step in from the fresh air—

  The house, just there in the downstairs hall, right by where the old woman has her apartment, it stinks.

  I have noticed this before.

  I have put it down to the place being so old and all that. Upstairs everything smells sweet.

  Maybe it’s her.

  Maybe she’s decaying.

  Maybe she’s died and is falling in bits, and this grey-brown reek of a rotting retro-burger wrapped in metal-foil is the result.

  But I thought, as I stood there, that I had smelled the reek before and then it had gone away.

  Now it was raw.

  It had claws.

  It had sores.

  I ran upstairs and leapt into my rooms.

  I should contact the Civ Law on my Mee.

  Instead I went into my bathdome and threw up all my lovely night, and my sick was silver, worth a fortune if I had the guts to scoop it up and strain it through and package and send it to recyke.

  But I couldn’t.

  Let go.

  It goed.

  Emenie:

  11

  About seven days after my thing with the fishing man, I had a double. They weren’t very much, if I’m honest. But it wasn’t too bad. A man, and later a woman. Obviously, two in the same twenty-four hours is in itself rewarding; it’s only happened twice before, and I’ve been killing people for—well, let me think, almost seventeen years.

  I had a slight concern that night, just as I was drifting to sleep, that I might get a long wait after this.

  As a rule I try not to be superstitious.

  The next morning, at nine sharp, someone rapped the knocker on the front door. (Needless to say, the bell doesn’t work anymore.)

  Years ago this would have been a postman, or a religious fanatic. Now there isn’t any mail service. And usually the religious go about things in more covert or more strident ways.

  I’d gone to bed fully clothed, tired from the second killing, which had taken place a couple of miles away, in the ruins of the suburban hinterland. I rolled off the mattress.

  The exit to the downstairs hall, and the front door I hardly use, goes from the main room, but for some reason I’ve hidden that door in my room behind an old screen. It’s quite pretty, the screen, with peacocks painted and stitched on it.

  By the time I’d moved the screen, opened the room door, crossed the hall, unlocked the front door… well, I thought the unusual caller might have gone. But in fact he was just
rapping the knocker again.

  “Yes?” I asked kindly. I never look a mess, even when I’ve just got up. I look clean and tidy and combed, and my breath smells of mint toothpaste. Again, it’s just something I can do.

  “I’m lookin’ fer my bruvva,” he said.

  “Really.”

  “Yeah.”

  He was a shambling type, in a big—not moth—probably rat-eaten leather jacket. His greasy hair hung in chunks about his miserable face.

  “I don’t think I can help you,” I said.

  “Well, yer see yer might,” he said, squinting at me as if the hall, or I, gave off a bright light. But the hall is dark, even with the morning sun on the front of the house. “He knew this road—we both done, when we was kids. Me bruvva.”

  I smiled benignly.

  He said, “An’ this house, back when things was all right.” We each then sadly looked down at the ground, politely mourning for Civilisation’s end.

  “He wen’ off to the States,” said the man. “Then he come back.”

  Oh, I’d already realised, by then, identified who this one wanted. The rather maleficent miserableness both he and the fishing man had in common. Or, I suppose, had had, before I killed the fishing man.

  “He liked to go an’ see all the old haunts, even when they was rubbish now. He’d’ve come here.”

  It was time to draw two lines through the conversation, and so cross it out.

  “Well he didn’t come here, or if he did, I didn’t see him. No one’s been here.”

  “Man up the park,” said the persistent brother, “he told us, me an’ her, he seen him go off with this woman, off up this way.”

  “Maybe,” I said, “but he wasn’t with me, and he didn’t come here.”

  I tried to shut the door then, and he put his foot in it, in the prescribed manner. I wondered briefly if I should ask him in and properly get rid of him. But you see, I don’t like to kill that way, not to order, as it were. It would spoil the act for me. Put me off. Inevitably, it has happened, though only once, long ago. But I learned my lesson. Unless it really is incriminatory life or death for me, I can’t and I won’t.