Cruel Pink Page 4

  We had carnal in a Singles Room, and that was brilliant.

  Then he bought me another liquid-silver and we walked round the Upper Terrace, and looked at the river and the sky poles, and I pointed out my place miles off, by The Nile.

  He said he could see there was a light burning.

  I said that was the male in the flat across from mine, who is careless with his window shields.

  “Do you like him?” asked my night partner.

  “No. He might have been pretty when he was young, but he’s old now.” We then said together, gravely, “In fifty years he’ll be dead.” And left the correct pause.

  Then my night partner said he would like to see me again. It was by now Zone 8. In two hours the day would start to wake up.

  I said yes. I said he could come and see me at my flat.

  “There’s no slide, but it’s all right otherwise.”

  “I can walk up a few stairs,” he assured me. “I have to all the time.” By then he’d already told me he worked as part of a Human Security Team, in several big old places in central London.

  I said, “Only thing, there’s a non-good stink sometimes in the downstairs hall. The old woman as owns the flats has her place off there. It was truly foul the other night, but a bit less now.”

  “Probably rats,” he said. “We get a lot of that. She should try that humane killer. It works, just sends them to sleep and they die. Then it destroys everything inside five Zones. Not like the filth they used to dose them with before. I used to shoot the poor little fucks to save them that. One clean shot.”

  I liked that in him. I like everything so far. He is beautiful. And the sex was star.

  “I’d tell her, but I never see the old woman. The bank-nanny pays my rent.”

  “OK,” he said. “If I see her, I’ll tell her.”

  Then he asked my name and I told him without any problem.

  “Klova,” he said. “Flower and spice.”

  He is called Coal. Like his skin.

  He walked me to the sprint, and we said goodbye tenderly. I wondered if he really would visit.

  21

  Coal sent a message to my Mee.

  I got the machine to polish the glass tiles in the social room, and set the thing in the bathdome to make it extra prist.

  Last time I was in the downstairs part there was no smell.

  I went over the bridge on The Nile and into the Forest at dusk, when the electric fireflies come on in the trees, and picked a couple of night-blooming violas. You’re not supposed to. But the O.C.’s are pretty stupid there. Or maybe it’s just that thing I can do to surveillance cameras.

  Funny, in a way, because Coal is in security.

  I’ve never met that many people who have to, or want to, work for money. Most of them get by on the wired-in donations, like I do.

  Even the old male across in the other flat—who I’ve only glimpsed now and then—even he doesn’t seem to work, and he’s one of the mud-stuck older-ones-who-will-soon-die.

  I put the violas in cube-ice glasses.

  They burned there all frosty, with purple-blue petals like Coal’s eyes.

  I hoped it would be special.

  It had been, but then, a second time…

  You can’t be certain, ever…

  Love and let go.

  Only thing, no more shots in my account, and now, after my last night at the Leaning Tower, I was down to only five hundred.

  The bank could probably give me a loan, till the next shot.

  22

  Coal arrived exactly at Zone 40. Exactly when he said.

  He brought a hamper of things to eat and drink!

  They were wonderful. And Sham-Pain. (Like the chrysanthemums have in the Leaning Tower.) This though from France, it’s part of the tariff they pay, of course, but generally you don’t ever get to drink any.

  Coal said it was one of the rewards of his job.

  In a while we went to the bed and it was again brilliant. Better even than before.

  Later though, when we were sitting at the social room window in the dark, drinking Sham-Pain and watching The Nile and the Forest lights, he said to me, very seriously, “I do have to warn you, Klova. That woman downstairs—there is something really crap about that smell. I did pick it up, coming in. Not powerful, but there. Sort of ground into the bones of this house where you live.”

  “I so hoped you wouldn’t. I didn’t notice it earlier.”

  “You see, Klova, you get used to things when you’re around them a lot. And that smell—I’m not even certain that it is rats. No, I am not.”

  We sat in silence then, and I began to feel strange and to want he’d go.

  And when it was Zone 46 I made up a lie about how I would have to visit my aunt tomorrow and needed to get to sleep soon.

  And we parted coldly, after all that lovely sweet nice.

  And I cried afterwards, which I do not do.

  I cried.

  Love and let—no. I cried.

  Emenie:

  23

  She arrived at 7p.m. She was alone, not even invidiously shadowed. It was dark by then in the lampless street. No moon. But I could see her coming along the road, through the tiny spy hole I keep in the boarded-up bedroom window at the very front of the house. I had been watching out since five. I’d left the time open, you see, five to sevenish. Anytime then. After that, I’d said, I had to go and look in on an elderly neighbour. What a good Samaritan I was, wasn’t I? She had a faint sheen on her, the girl, that’s what made her visible to me in the dark, like phosphorous, or as if she was radioactive.

  “Hello,” she said shyly.

  I let her straight in, and through into the main room.

  “I found some wine,” I said. “That was such a stroke of luck. Do you like wine? It’s so awkward for you, this. Wine might help?”

  And she clasped her hands together, like an old-fashioned—perhaps Victorian—child.

  “Oh, I love wine. We never have—we don’t—didn’t…” She faltered, said bravely, “Sy likes beer, so we have that. He knows someone with a sort of amateur brewery. It tastes…” laughing suddenly, “…horrible.”

  “Nothing worse than bad beer,” I acknowledged. (More lies. I’d never drink it. Or, only now and then.)

  (She had asked my name, last time, on the cliff-edge of the front doorway. “I’m Micki,” she had said. “Mum called me Michelle—but, well. Most people call me Micki. Can I,” she had asked, “ask your name? Don’t say if you don’t want, it’s just easier for me to get my head round this if—if I have some sort of name for you.”

  “I’m Emenie,” I said.

  And her pale, clear, sad face fell.

  “Enemy?” she asked, staring—less in horror than in despair.

  “No. Emm-enny,” I enunciated, ‘it’s Old English or something.”

  She had smiled. A Victorian child, smiling. Innocent, wanting to be good. So many examples in so much literature. “Did your mother…?”

  “Something like that.”

  I have no mother. No father. And in those peculiar brief moments I didn’t want to deceive her. And she accepted my evasion. Why not, when she’d got my real name.)

  And so now, when I handed her the emerald glass full of ruby booze, she smiled again and said, in the most musical and heart-broken, heart-breaking way, “Thanks, Emenie. I can really do with this.”

  And she could. After all, it wasn’t poisoned.

  24

  We sat in dark candlelight, she on the sofa, I in the armchair. I began my spiel. Now I had to deceive.

  “Right. These guys I know down by the canal. They don’t know anything, they say, but they’ll ask around. I can’t vouch for them, but as a rule they seem to try to protect people. Sometimes it’s an idea to give them a sort of present…”

  “Oh—but what shall I…?” she rushed in anxiously.

  “It’s OK. I didn’t just find one wine bottle. I found four. They had two, and I had two. Yes,
it was lucky. But they are pleased, and they might come up with something.”

  “I miss him so much,” she whispered to her glass, which was already half empty, as they used to say. “I miss him. It’s mental in a way,” she added. “He used to be unkind to me. Oh—I don’t mean physically. I just mean, well, other women, or he just used to go off—but he always came back. And if he said he would be back that night, he was. He always was. And he was so clever. He had a job in the US. You know. Before… And he did really well. But he was always so unhappy.”

  I watched her. She was the unhappy one now.

  Sy wasn’t unhappy.

  Bloody Sy—Simon was stone-grey dead.

  And soon this girl would be. She was mine to make that way.

  I stared at her. I read her, tried to learn her by heart. I had to. Enigma still masked her round. Despite all of it, for the very first time in my career as a killer, I could not grasp what method I must use. It simply would not come to me.

  I got up and refilled her glass.

  She said, “You’re very kind. Thank you. And for asking… those men.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, not sorry at all, obviously, it was none of it true, “everyone else I’ve asked never saw him, knows nothing. That chap,” I added, “in the park—I had a look for him,” (I had, too) “but I couldn’t find him.” (Nor had I. If I ever did, since he claimed to have seen me with Sy, I might have to consider murdering him. A chore. The demeaning of a sacred pleasure. But, if I must.)

  “Oh,” she said wearily, drooping down, her dark hair falling past her face in two charming brunette spaniel ears, “that was more—well the man who came here with me last time…”

  “Sy’s brother.”

  “Yes. He—sort of kept on at the man over there on the waste ground. And the man sort of said he thought he might have seen Sy with a woman and they came here…” She faltered again.

  I said, consolingly, “I suppose, as he’s his brother, he’s pretty desperate to find out.”

  “Maybe,” she said.

  She shut her eyes.

  The refilled-full-again glass wavered in her hand. “I’m so tired,” she said. “I don’t sleep. I can’t. Not at… home.”

  I said, “Why don’t you have a rest? That sofa’s OK. I can bring you a clean pillow and a blanket.”

  She didn’t show anything of being suspicious. Merely looked up at me. Now she was the exhausted Victorian child, dragged over the snow-mounds by some villain, her mother dead amid the drifts.

  By the time I came back with the pillow and coverlet she lay completely asleep full-length on the sofa. The filled green-red-black glass had been stood, most carefully, on the floor. She was on her right side, and had her left hand curled under her neck, and her right tucked against her breast. She hadn’t even taken off her coat.

  I laid the shroud of the cover over her, and put the pillow at her feet not to disturb her. Then I crept out of the room, and into the kitchen, not switching on the light.

  Outside some foxes were fighting, or copulating, in the gardens. At other times badgers come and do the same. I value their savagery. It brings energy and a reason to the feral wilderness of trees and shrubs.

  I sat listening to them. I sat thinking of knives and the gun, and stones, and this poison and that, of strangling and smothering and pushing and so on.

  What was her special need? Until I fathomed it I couldn’t make a move. And now her presence in my flat, in my ‘grandmother’s’ house, was like a briar of clear dark granite. It might entangle me. It would get in my way. There had to be an answer very soon. But I couldn’t sell myself—or her—short. Enigma. Endeavour. Endless. Enemy.

  Rod:

  25

  George didn’t call me, and so the next day I called him, first on the landline at the Lewisham flat, and next on his antiquated but functioning mobile. Both took my message but refused to render up my Uncle George.

  I had work anyway to contend with, plus making up for the half Wednesday escape with a whole dreary Saturday. Weekends generally entail only a skeleton staff, and the most tedious memos to check and respond to through the machine which, of course, soon started to print everything up in what looked like the Cyrillic alphabet.

  One of the caretakers, Bill, strolled in during the afternoon, and we had a chat about his angry and mad-sounding wife, who, according to Bill, was always bolting the house door in his absence and so locking him out—either that or when he was in the house, and she out, taking his keys as well as her own, and so locking him in. I’ve suggested it might be her age, all this, and perhaps she could visit her GP. But Bill said she had always been like it. She had driven him nuts in hundreds of ways when they were in their teens, and terrorised him into marriage when they were twenty. There were no children. But she didn’t want any, and he hadn’t, but now he sometimes wished he had a son or daughter he could talk to. After this, I told him about George, who I’d continued to call, two or three times each day, to no avail. Both landline and mobile now refused even to take a message.

  “They go funny when they get to that age,” said Bill, who seems to be in his late fifties, and whose wife is insane.

  “I keep thinking I ought to get on to the police,” I said. “Except he’d never forgive me if he’s there and just wants to be on his own. He’s pretty spry. He’s never ill,” I added, thinking but not saying anything of George’s alcoholic habits.

  On Sunday, I half meant to go to Lewisham again. But I was worn out, and the thought of another weekend train gave me the creeps.

  On Sunday evening I phoned Vanessa.

  I told her about George.

  “Oh, George,” she said dismissively. “He’s a drunkard. He could be up to anything. I should leave well alone, Roderick.”

  She had little time for George. He was from my mother’s side, and Vanessa was my father’s sister.

  Vanessa told me, at great length, about her next door neighbours, who had started to have parties twice a week and, as the weather was still fine, often spilled with their guests out into the adjacent garden, laughing and drinking and smoking dope, with loud music playing, sometimes until one or two in the morning.

  “Poor you,” I said.

  “I’d complain to the council,” she said, “but they take no notice.”

  “Perhaps they’ll stop when the weather turns,” I opined.

  She said, brusquely, “Are you coming down next Saturday?”

  “Well…”

  “Yes, Roderick, I know you normally only visit me once a month. But remember, I have to go to Wales next, to see Cissy.”

  Who was Cissy? God knew, and apparently Vanessa thought I did too. It would save time to agree.

  “Of course, yes,” I said. “Next Saturday, then.”

  One more day gone down the drain.

  26

  Through the next week I kept up my calls to George, and even wrote him a letter.

  I said I was worried, and did he need a hand with anything.

  I wondered if he had collapsed in the street due to some Bacchic seizure and been carted off to hospital. But George, I knew for a fact, always carried some form of ID, not to mention a note of next of kin, (me), along with a stern, signed refusal of any of his organs for transplantation. I heard nothing from anyone.

  On Friday night, I decided I had to take a detour and drop by his flat on my way home from work.

  When I got there it was well after seven, and the High Street was bristling up with gangs and other evening revellers. But the flat was dark, and no one answered my rings on the bell. I peered through the letterbox and then called through it—“George! George?” But no one replied. There was a smell of dust and dried wine and emptiness. When I rang the bell of the next door flat, a child of about ten came to the door. It had a baseball cap on the wrong way round, and snot on its upper lip. It stared at me aggressively as I asked if its mother was there, before it abruptly slammed the door shut again in my face. I could tell I’d disappo
inted the awful little creature; it must have been expecting someone else.

  Oh, I knew I should go to the police about George. But I felt dog-tired, and tomorrow, now, I had the trek to Brighton. I had a G and T at a pub, and then made one last effort, walking along to the Chinese Palace. “My friend—my uncle—” I described him to the beaming waiter. “Has he been in this week?”

  “Yes, yes,” cried the waiter, trying to lead me to a table.

  “No, no, I’m sorry—you see, I’m looking for my uncle.”

  “Yes, yes,” cried the waiter, handing me a menu, “we do any what you want.”

  “Yes, thank you. Another time.”

  I extricated myself from his non-comprehending web and hurried back to the station.

  27

  I had to change trains for Brighton that Saturday.

  To me this was annoying out of all proportion to the event.

  Watch it, I thought. I was thirty-two and acting like a silly old codger thirty years older. Everything is always like this, I thought, attemptedly philosophically. Nothing works and nothing is ever as you expect.

  Nor was it.

  I arrived, the train having been delayed, nearly an hour late. Already I could audially conjure my aunt’s voice, “Well, Roderick. I’ve been hanging about here waiting…”

  I had made quite a lot of notes during my journey, but also I had tried to call her, both from the train and Brighton Station. Her number was engaged.

  Along with most of the rest of the enormous queue, I waited fifteen minutes for a cab.

  It was a gusty cold day, that Saturday, and suddenly, under the white-blue sky, the ochre and amber leaves were shrivelling from the trees, the taller ones of which were often skeletally bare. The Pavilion looked over-emphatic and windswept, when the cab took some detour or other, as if expressly to show me the famous building. Or show me to it, perhaps, this visitor to its town. The wind howled.