Cruel Pink Read online

  Therefore we stood there, him with his stupid big betrainered foot wedged against the door, and me looking at him with patient sternness.

  12

  Very occasionally I do go for a ramble through the empty and neglected house. The upper two floors are mostly bare of anything, although there is a bed in one of the rooms which, a couple of times, I’ve had a rest on through the afternoon, where the late sunlight comes in at the glass via the lacework of the garden trees. This glass too, of course, I haven’t boarded up.

  In the attic, pigeons sometimes make their nests, flying in and out through a broken skylight.

  For some reason, with this obstreperous bore wedging the front door open, my mind travelled briefly off and away, flying like a pigeon-spirit through the higher storeys, as if looking for something, some remedy.

  I said, still patiently and kindly, “I really don’t see how I can help.”

  “You’re ’ER,” he said. “He went off with you. You both come here. He’s in there now. I know he fuckin’ is.” And then he bellowed past me, up the stairs, “Oi, Sy, COME OUT!”

  Naturally, now, there was nothing I could do to deter him, and in a minute he was probably going to stampede past me, and go tearing about. He might not find the fishing man (Sy?) because the cellar door isn’t easy to spot without a light. And it’s difficult to open. But it would be such an intrusion.

  Damn him, I almost certainly would have to allow him entry, make it easy, then kill him. I glared at him with final unhidden loathing.

  And then.

  From somewhere over the street, a girl came running. She had long dark hair and big wounded eyes, and the moment I saw her I knew she was for me. She was mine. It couldn’t have been more evident if she had worn a big scarlet badge reading Kill me, please.

  13

  She rushed straight up to the leather jacket man and grabbed his arm.

  “Stop it! Look what you’re doing! Leave her alone! How can you be such a bully?”

  And, rather to my surprise, Big Bruvva sort of shrank down and squinted at her sidelong, with a childish guilty watery gaze.

  She said to me, “I’m so sorry. He’s just upset. We’re so worried, you see.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  She said, “Simon went fishing in the canal. Yes, it’s crazy, but he was, a bit. We all are now, aren’t we, most of us. But this was days ago…” I thought, yes, I know exactly how many days ago. “…and then there’s this guy on the waste ground down there, and he told us there was a woman with Sy, and he went off with her, and well, the guy said he thought he’d seen her before, the woman, and she lived in a house here—this house, by the bungalow.”

  I said, as if making the decision I had already made by the time she was across the street, “All right. You can come in. Not him. I don’t want him in my house. But you can come in. We’ll have a talk and see if we can work out what’s happened. I can see you’re upset…” At that she started to cry. Lovely, polished crystal tears out of her dark grey crystal eyes. Poor little thing.

  Big Bruvva slunk back. He went to sit on a broken wall by a dead lawn with a rusted vandalised car on it.

  She and I, once I’d shut the front door behind us, walked through into the downstairs portion of the house.

  14

  I made some tea. It had to be black obviously; even though the fridge works, you can never find proper milk now.

  While I made the tea, I saw the damp patch on the kitchen wall had changed shape. It looked like a slim woman in a long robe, or shroud.

  Sometimes, omens can be unsubtle. This one anyway was now redundant.

  My prey was already here.

  I didn’t put anything in the tea, except the sugar she asked for.

  We went through to the main room and she sat on the sofa and I in one of the two armchairs. I didn’t light the overhead lights but used some more candles. (She hadn’t commented on the fridge, but full electricity might be too much for her sensibilities.)

  “It’s nice here,” she said, after a while.

  “It’s all right.”

  “Better than where we are—I mean, Sy and me. It’s an old caravan. But at least we…” she halted. The ‘we’ might now be superfluous.

  Then she began to tell me all about him, her lover or partner or whatever he had been. I wasn’t interested in the least. It was like—what?—dissecting a good meal you’ve eaten when it’s all gone—oh, this meat came from so-and-so, and that cheese-sauce I made myself using this, this and this. No point.

  I barely listened, just watched her. The thing was, actually, although I had known immediately she was to be my new victim, I hadn’t, as yet, picked up from her any idea of how it should be done. And it must be done correctly. To kill with an unsuitable weapon of whatever sort would jar. As if, to use the analogy of food again, you cooked a perfect fruit pie, and then poured beef gravy on it. Although again, I can’t rule that out—in some cases just such an anomaly might be wonderful. A rich acidic apple tart, maybe, with the very saltiest gravy… Or like the man I killed one time, by thrusting a plastic purse into his throat… Yes, nothing should ever be completely ignored as a possible enhancing means.

  I kept thinking, however, as her recital-eulogy went on, that Bruvva would charge up again and start hammering at the front door. Or worse, find his way round to the back. Would she then be able to quell him again?

  Frankly, I didn’t want to kill her here. ‘Sy’ was here. It was too cosy, the two of them in the cellar, rotting side by side.

  Some other arrangement must be made. And hopefully by that time I’d know how I wanted to work with her.

  Suddenly she stood up, as if she had telepathically overheard, consenting and assisting me.

  “I’ve taken so much of your time. I’m sorry. But, we had to try, just in case—thank you for the tea.” She wasn’t nervous, just sad, and solitary. Obviously the hulk outside would be as much use to her as the burnt-out rusted car.

  “Look,” I said, “I know a few of them round here. Why don’t I ask them about all this? And though we don’t have police any more, there’s a little group along the canal, a bit rough, but they sometimes take up a good cause. I’ll see if they can help.”

  “Oh, would you?” Her face flooded with gratitude.

  “Maybe come back tomorrow—sort of evening, yes? Only don’t bring him. I’m sorry. He scares me.”

  “No, I promise. Just me. Thank you,” she said.

  She had stars in her eyes not tears as I let her out again at the front door. Bruvva, I noted, had vanished.

  The morning was turning misty, like soft smoke, powdering over the ends of the road, the tree-tops, the edges of vision.

  Rod:

  15

  On Tuesday morning Forrel delightedly told me I had to see Bins, our Department Manager. Forrel’s delight is always an indicator in such matters. Bins’s face was another.

  Bins has been in charge of The Floor for three years and he has an aging unkemptness, nasal and ear hair, spindly frame and large belly coupled to a self-deceptive—one assumes—youthful urgency to change things.

  He scowlingly smiled at me, and showed me the three awful capped dead-white teeth nestled among his yellower ones.

  “Now, this can’t go on, can it?” Mr Bins demanded.

  It seemed the last report I had emailed through to the Upper Tier, as he calls it, had been full of mistakes—typos, misspellings, misuse of italics, ‘Martian-looking’ names, and so on.

  I explained my machine was playing up.

  “Your machines always play up, don’t they?” he gloweringly reminded me. “No one else has this problem. What do you do to your computer, Terris,” (he always has my surname wrong) “to cause this? Do you spill your coffee in it? Do you play silly war games on it or watch pornography and lose track of your duties? This can’t continue, Terris. Can it?”

  I was certain it could but refrained from saying so.

  “And I see you’ve requested le
ave for this Wednesday afternoon. Why is that?”

  “My uncle, Mr Bins.”

  “It’s most inconvenient.”

  “I’ve offered to come in on Saturday.”

  “Yes, well you’ll have to, but it still isn’t convenient. Why is this sudden absence needed?”

  “My uncle is a very old man.”

  Mr Bins seemed to infer my uncle was near death. His face became grave. But even that failed to bring on any mercy.

  “Very well, then, Terris. You must do as you think best. But you’ll have to work all of Saturday, I must make that clear. And bear in mind, the firm is not at your beck and call. You are at its.”

  16

  Uncle George’s flat is in Lewisham.

  That’s one of my twenty minute journeys. A couple of times I’ve even taken a taxi back from there later in the evening, but their rates are now so high I tend to stick to the train. Though even that, it goes without saying, is exorbitant.

  The day was rather foggy in the morning. There were no repercussions from Bins. I grabbed a sandwich at The Stag for lunch and then went straight down.

  Vanessa doesn’t, apparently, drink, but George was normally continuously drunk. He will start to ‘partake’, as he has termed it, at about 10 a.m., and get through around three bottles of wine, the odd V or G and T, or W and S thrown in as a ‘treat’.

  He was never offensive or incoherent. He talked about the ‘old house in Kent’ where, if one believed him, there were five or six dogs and a parrot, (which finally escaped), and a housekeeper, ‘Sonia’, with whom, one gathered, he had had an ‘arrangement’.

  I reached his flat above Empress Designs in the High Street. The back of the flats is rather bleak, looking into other business back yards, but once up the stone stair and through the door, the area was spacious, and comfortably equipped with battered, pleasant furniture, books and CD’s and vinyl records, three music centres and four drinks cabinets, and innumerable photographs of dogs and parrots and—possibly—Sonia, a buxom young woman in a clinging one-piece bathing costume, under a tree. These photos may be fakes, or from somebody else’s albums. They look about 1950’s in style. George gave his current age as seventy-six, but looked more like fifty-six. I knew nothing of him until after my father died. I was almost fourteen then. Another accident, unfortunately, my father’s death. A plane crash off the coast of Norway.

  As it often has been, when I got there the door of the flat was on the catch and ajar.

  I sidled in, with my token present of three bottles of white wine and two red. The white was French, the red Californian.

  “George?” I experimented. Sometimes he was in the front room that overlooks the High Street, listening to Bach, with the wine, if white, in an ice-bucket. He doesn’t like to be recognised as ‘uncle’. It’s always just George.

  I couldn’t now hear any music. And nobody responded. He always had done. “Come in,” he would cry in his mellow voice, like that of an elegant first class actor acting an elegant first class drunk. “Come in, Roderick.”

  Not this time, though.

  The front room was, as ever, untidy and gently warm, the window letting in the sun between the dark red-wine curtains; no nets. The ice-bucket stood in place too, with a nearly fresh Saint Saône, just a half glass gone from it. But no glass on the table.

  Sat on the turn-table of a well-polished, reinvented gramophone was a disk highlighting Mozart’s Don Giovanni. But the apparatus was switched off and cold.

  George had a regular cleaner here, but I doubt he kept up an ‘arrangement’ with her. I had never seen her, but he had said in ‘later life’ he only liked young girls—about sixteen—or much older women, older than he was, ninety even—they made him feel young. I’ve never had any notion if recently he obtained sex with anyone. That was his business, presumably.

  I took a turn round the crowded room, and looked out at the busy street—shoppers, buses, bikes and bicycles. Opposite was Furnished Futures, its windows that day crowded with glittering curtains and strange chairs that seemed made from dark yellow bones.

  George had once confided he thought, in the small hours, when the road was unbusy, objects from Empress Designs crept across and had relations with stuff from Furnished Futures, and their resultant children subsequently appeared in both emporiums, and elsewhere along the High Street.

  “George?” I tried again.

  Was he in the bathroom?

  I went back into the passage and along to the bathroom but the door stood wide on a pristine modern white water-suite scored for bath, basin and convenience.

  I tried his study then, and his bedroom. George wasn’t there. I looked round the edge of the half-shut bedroom door, and saw the bed, a priest-like single, and the window that in turn, when the blind is up, gazes off at the wall of next door’s supermarket.

  17

  It appeared George had had to go out for something, but the wine was ready. He always offered me a drink, and went on offering, far more than I take as a rule. Later we’d go to The Palace, the Chinese restaurant up the road.

  Presently I put the wine I’d brought into the already quite well-stocked fridge and cupboard. I took a plain, gleam-clean glass from the kitchen shelf that was full of gleamingly-cleaned glasses, and sat down in the front room with some Saint Saône cold from the bucket.

  Taking out my notebook I made some notes. It was then about 3 p.m.

  18

  At 6 p.m. there was still no sign of George.

  I had gone round the flat again, rather foolishly looking under the bed, and in the two big bedroom cupboards. One never knows, especially with the elderly. I could recall him saying to me, a year or so before, “You know, Rodders, you’re more of an oldster than I am. You’re what—thirty-five—thirty-seven—and you’re like an old chap around sixty. But I’m a lion, my lad. I’m eternally sixteen. The boy that never grew up.” I hadn’t argued.

  But by six, I had begun to wonder if all these years of consummate boozing had at last accomplished what the medical fraternity endlessly warns everyone will now happen to them, if they drink as they like, and eat as they want, or pass within a two mile radius of a lighted cigarette.

  I put the notepad away and tried two or three of George’s ‘special’ phone numbers. The cleaner—the local doctor—some female called Mrs Spur(?)—but nobody answered and the phone, too, seemed to be playing up, the dialling and ringing tones fluctuated. Had George forgotten to pay the bill?

  On the ordinary rota of our evenings, he and I would part company about nine to ten. But I didn’t want to linger longer in the empty flat. It felt impertinent. The place too had begun to demonstrate uncomfortable sounds—shiftings, creakings—and curious odours—dog-hair, talcum powder, even cannabis—none of which I’d ever noted there before, and that might anyway be permeating upward from the shop below.

  I put the undrunk wine back in the fridge, shades of Vanessa, and left George a note apologising for having to leave at six-thirty. I asked him to call me at my home number, as I was sorry to have missed him.

  When I let myself out I shut the door.

  Naturally I felt I might have done the wrong thing. But to institute a police search seemed premature, and he would never forgive me if all the while my visit had just slipped his mind.

  I would call him later. Or tomorrow. Then I could act. If I had to.

  By then I was very hungry. But I went to a pub near the station rather than the Chinese restaurant. I couldn’t go there without Uncle George. It just wouldn’t seem right. On the train I thought about the wardrobe.

  Klova:

  19

  There was another thousand shots wired into my account the bank-nanny told me, flashing up the message on my Mee at Zone 14.

  My first thought was I could buy some more clothes.

  By 20 I was out into the city and buying them.

  Then I had a moonshake at the Crazy Cornerhouse.

  The city looks very ordinary by day, I think, li
ke as if it’s too old. But when it gets dark and the lights and neons and lazulies come on, London looks supernatural.

  I love night by the river.

  I like the way the water, which is slicked with gild-oil, looks like gold snakes all in it and over it, like that thing about eels, is it? Some poet wrote.

  In a public dressing-room I changed into my new dress and shoes and put on my make-up and the lipstick, of which I’d also bought two more sticks, it’s so good.

  I went to the Leaning Tower.

  The Tower is seventy storeys tall.

  I think it is.

  You can see, even under the coloured pulse-beams, all over London, all sparkling and night magic, and out to the suburbs with their little lamps, and the parks and empty gaps of land. You can see to my road, and the Forest by The Nile. The moon was up, yellow and hollow like a mandolin. They say the moon is manmade, don’t they?

  20

  He was in the garden at the top of the Tower.

  I mean several hundred males are usually up there, and girls, but tonight he was, too.

  I like the chrysanthemum forest at the middle of the garden.

  The flowers grow up to fifteen feet tall, or almost five metres in Oldy talk. They have these narrow, tough, woody, scaly stems, with little dark green leaves like snake-tongues. The petals on the huge heads are combed, and they rise out of an opening, a sort of sky light, into the night. They’re white and bronze and burgundy red, and they drink fizzy lemonade and Sham-Pain that the sprinklers feed them all evening.

  “Shall I get you a drink?” he asked me.

  “Yes,” I said.

  So he did and while we had our drinks, he asked if I’d have carnal with him. He was like very polite. But not a peculio.

  In looks he was about seven feet, but we are tall now, our generation that doesn’t age, and he seems around nineteen, which means either he is, or that’s where the change kicked in. His eyes were very dark blue and he had spiked blue hair. Live and let love.