Cruel Pink Read online

  “Something big must still work somewhere,” she said, doubtfully. “For him to do that…”

  “God knows what.”

  “Yes. Oh dear,” she wistfully said, “I used to love God, when I was young.”

  Young. She was young now. Agonisingly young. And not due to get much older. Age would not wither her, etc.

  “Don’t blame God. This mess is down to wonderful mankind.”

  “Yes,” she agreed.

  She seemed pleased I hadn’t blamed her old lost lover. She’d slept well too, she said.

  I said I’d thought the wildlife might wake her.

  Oh no, she said, she found that comforting when or if she heard it. Life going on. The meek conceivably inheriting what was left of the earth.

  She also asked if my neighbour was all right, the one I’d pretended I must look in on. And they were doing well, of course, weren’t they.

  After this interlude we went out, (she had already used the loo, marvelling at the way the plumbing still operated), and along the canal to the Co-op.

  35

  Am I right? There used to be some catch-phrase about something being bigger on the inside than from outside? The Co-op is a bit like that. Except that the Co-op is smaller in the store part, and much bigger in the back rooms than seems possible.

  A lot has fallen through, of course. It’s only a few yards off up the side road that cuts away from the tow-path, and evidently the damp of the canal and its various underground offshoots have undermined the building’s foundations. Even so there are corridors that squinny along for what seems a mile at least, cramped little spider-cells of unused offices, some with ceilings long down. And then the store rooms, tall and echoing. They’re full of rats, of course, and other scavengers, some human. Though the proportion of humans to animals is low. Naturally there are, by now, a lot less of our species. And besides that, many people believe the Co-op was long ago despoiled of all its useful wares.

  Not so. In what I call the Secret Cave, which is tucked in by one of the main areas, a perilous-looking, but so far stable, island of floor leads among the standing shelves. It’s a library of preserved food. I have noticed, very oddly, that some of these supplies seem to re-establish themselves, as if many of the items in here are still being regularly delivered and restocked. At one time I suspected some remnant of government might be responsible, and that the goods were all booby-trapped or else laced with poisons, to clear the last of us out of the city. But I ate some extra things, and used others. Nothing happened. Unless, obviously, I am dead, and just don’t know it yet.

  Below the floor-island, cliff-like tumbles of brickwork and crashed girders and beams—or whatever they are—statically collapse to a damp, weedy sub-basement.

  (Last year I killed a woman here. I hit her with a wine bottle—there were plenty more—then broke her neck—simple enough, she was thin and not strong. She’d looked so sad, and so much happier and more peaceful afterwards. I dropped her down through some struts and she vanished in the deep dark below. No doubt there was the smell, but other things die here, even some of the food probably dies. It always smells.)

  Today I, and my little companion, Micki, went about with my shopping list.

  We got packets of bread-mix and dried egg, and jams and sweeteners and tea and coffee. After that we collected cans of veg and soup—and packets of dried fruit. There was even cotton wool, three big bags of it, and toilet paper. No one else appears to bother with that. But Micki, (forgetting again, I supposed, for a second), cried out that Sy and she always asked for toilet paper as a present. That and beer, she amended. Then remembered Sy had disappeared mysteriously and that was anyway why she had ended up in the Co-op with me.

  At last, the pièce de resistance. A huge freezer that still worked, and which no one else ever appeared to know about. I selected ready-sliced ham and some lamb chops. Micki asked me, as if I owned the place, if she might lift some sausages.

  “Take what you want,” I said kindly. “Everyone does.”

  Maybe the pork sausages, their telepathic lure, would guide Sy home to her. Poor little thing.

  There isn’t always alcohol. But there was. I picked up Vodka and another bottle of wine, but Micki only stared. She seemed to think she was—what?—imagining the goodies in the ruinous storeroom.

  We now had quite a lot to carry. But we went out by the back way towards the High Street, or its remains. Four men were scavenging in the yard, where the big work lorries used to come in. Two vehicles still stood there, their sides ripped wide or blown open by home-made explosives. Almost everything was gone from them long ago. But people still find things. I once found a pack of smoked trout behind a bin, and still ice-cold. But it was winter then. I was lucky.

  In the High Street my companion marvelled. I marvelled how she had never come this way before. How far off was the caravan where she and Sy had been living?

  The bank on the corner had had another fire, I saw. The air smelled charred and little black flakes were even now filtering down from the drained sky. The butchers, once turned into a squat, had been for weeks trashed and vacated. We went into the tobacconists. I stopped smoking years back, and unlike most people, who boast they never lose their craving—like a loyal lover who will go on loving the denying beloved forever—I did lose the habit. A pity, because this place is packed with fags and tins of snout. Once the freezer worked in here too. But no more, and parts of the floor are cemented over by the white and pink death of ice creams.

  Micki went on marvelling, and even pocketed two big packets of cigarettes. “I won’t take too much. Leave some for other people.” Bless her, the silly cow. “They’re for Sy,” she admitted, as we found the Diet Coke—it moves about, this, for some reason, and today was on the shelves of rotting magazines. “In case,” she murmured, “he ever comes back.”

  “He probably will, you know,” I buoyantly told her.

  “You really think so? Oh, I’m glad. I do too. Thank you. You’ve helped me such a lot.”

  “Sorry we couldn’t find those guys I spoke to,” I apologised as we turned back for the house. “They’re up to something else, presumably.”

  “Oh. It’ll be OK,” she said. She had bloomed suddenly with confidence.

  I made a decision then. I would have to put my scruples aside and improvise a modus mortua. Plainly, while she was looking on the bright side, and before sorrow set in again, and bitter doubt, I had to kill her. It must be soon, this side of sunset, before the falling night arrived.

  Rod:

  36

  My mother died, as I’ve said, when I was five. And my sister also died then, too. Tragic, for them. Although I, being so young, hardly knew them. But thinking back, in later years, I have abruptly accepted how comparatively odd my earliest childhood had been.

  Even following the tragedy, my childhood continued to be rather bizarre. Only with my father’s death on the edges of Norway did my thirteen-year-old self graduate to what, I surmise, most of us would consider a saner scenario.

  I have to add there was no unkindness, no cruelty. At least, none that was apparent to me at the time. I had, as far as I then knew, the ordinary, incomprehensible, quite happy madhouse of a life that any cared-for infant and young adolescent experiences. The world is alien, and its rules often make no sense, but one is coerced or guided through, as a new recruit, to the State of Existence. Like any press-ganged soldier, one learns the ropes in order to survive. And a friendly and pleasing home helps things along.

  My parents were rich. They had a house, once a farm, in a remote forested stretch of western British landscape. Neither of them seemed to do much except enjoy themselves. They got various people in to clean and otherwise cope, went out a lot themselves to eat, or on trips, leaving me then to attentive carers. He, I think, had business interests here and there, but others ran the show, he just drew out the money. This continued after the loss of his wife and elder daughter. He drank more then, and sometimes he cried. But he wa
s never violently emotional, and soon enough returned to the normal pursuits, which unfortunately for him included flying light aircraft. He was, on that occasion, with another young woman, of whom there were several after my mother’s death. She recovered from the crash, but the payments of compensation rather depleted his postmortem cash fund. The rest of my teenage years I grew under the hand of an uninterested guardian—who I only ever once saw demonstrate a paroxysm of appalling rage, shame, and utter disbelief. And meanwhile the knowledge that the family ‘fortune’ was going, going, gone, grew with me. At eighteen, depletion was accomplished.

  I left my fairly amenable school, and the country farmhouse, and anything else known and liked, and began the third part of my life, with the firm which, even now, nineteen years after, (or does it only seem so long?), overload and underpay, bore, irritate and employ me. The last also I ever saw of the guardian was in my eighteenth year.

  “Well, Rod,” he said, wringing out my hand and clapping me on the back. “Onwards and upwards, eh?”

  I pacifically agreed. He asked then how my girlfriend was—“Maisie, is it, Rod?”

  “Sophie,” I replied. In fact of course there was no girlfriend. I had made her up to reassure him, the previous year, when he seemed to think my formative phase had somehow deprived me of all the proper joys and adult responsibilities.

  Rather strangely I recall, out on the street again following this interview, I heard a girl’s name shouted from behind me. It was Sophie. But it was, and is, a popular name.

  And the world makes no real sense. To recap: children see this but too well. And somehow I still see it. I’m not immune to the annoyance, or the regret. But I rarely fight the tide.

  I had a dream two nights after Vanessa vanished.

  I dreamed I went to her house again in Brighton, but after dark. There were no stars or moon, no street lamps on, no lit windows. But it was a dream, so I could see the way without them.

  When I reached the house, it was derelict; part of the roof had dropped away, the windows were smashed, the door off its hinges and hanging wide.

  Nevertheless, in I walked.

  Just as I had on the day she went missing, I meant, and started to look all over the place. But now, not unreasonably, it had been stripped and vandalised, and upstairs a fire had been kindled on the landing that, before it was doused, had burned off the top of the stairs, so the upper floor was beyond my remit.

  In what had been the dining room, only half the table was left. The table had been sawn in two. And on what had stayed was an envelope, white and pristine in the gloom of night.

  Picking it up, I saw it was addressed, or at least named for me: Roderick. I could recognise Vanessa’s handwriting from her selections of punctual, functional seasonal cards.

  I tore the envelope open. A single folded sheet of paper slipped out into my hand. I duly unfolded it. Dear Roderick, said the letter, I do know you are gay, you know.

  That was all. She hadn’t bothered to sign it. I assumed she had predicted I would be sure only she could have left this message for me.

  37

  I was kept at work an extra two hours, some rush job; Forrel was involved too. This time his computer, not mine, played up.

  Not until almost nine o’clock was I able to release myself. Then Forrel reappeared and suggested we went to a club in the back streets of Soho. I was worn and enervated and thought, why not, and went.

  Actually, not a bad place. Food and drink—very little of the first and a surfeit of the second—were very overpriced, but to my astonishment Forrel insisted on picking up the bill.

  Girls cavorted around poles, semi-clad. Forrel seemed to like this a lot, but also seemed to be working himself up to liking it, and to demonstrating that he did, as if it were another test our work-place had set him to pass.

  On the other hand, I genuinely did like looking at the women. Some of them were very skilful, sleek and limber as trained stage dancers, which perhaps, when able, they were. Most were pretty, and one extremely beautiful, with black satin wings of hair and long, strangely Oriental blue eyes. But as I marvelled at their contortions, seamless skin and delightful ankles, I also felt a defensive fear of their anger and resentment. Or their frustration, perhaps. Or very likely their utter scorn.

  In the end, about midnight, when Forrel—who had confessed in an undertone he had won just over a thousand on the Lottery, and had meant to spend it with his girlfriend, but then learned she was leaving him—began to go glassy-eyed; the beautiful woman with black hair came straight across to us.

  “Are you having a good time, guys?”

  Forrel assured her he was. I nodded and smiled.

  Doubtless realising I was the less pissed of the two of us, she said to me softly, “I can dance private, for you two only, in a room. Would you like this?” She had the faintest accent. I couldn’t decipher what it was over the hiss of trendy beer-pumps and bottles of fake champagne, the disco music and the yodels of the mostly male crowd.

  “Goshyer,” said Forrel, now himself speaking in a foreign tongue, “is ulaz we wan, eh, Roddee?”

  I said to him quietly, “It will cost.”

  “Fugger costa, Les dwit.”

  So we went with her to the other room.

  38

  The room was so over-the-top it spoilt the illusion that vague dark and intermittent laser lights had partly created elsewhere. It was like something razored out of the Arabian Nights, one dimensional and lacking all glamour. Hard sticky reds and tacky gold and chips missing from corners.

  Anyway, she danced. She stripped off her minimum of top and played with her breasts. Now, poor girl, under the hard light they looked too pointed and solid. As if digitalised. Implants, probably.

  Forrel passed out in the middle of the dance. He slid to the floor. I propped him up in case he was sick.

  She kicked something under the (not) Eastern carpet, and the music stopped. She came over and sat down at the table and poured herself some of the fake champagne.

  “I can see you two guys have had a long work day,” she said.

  “I’m afraid so, yes.”

  “He OK?”

  I had no means or experience of him to know, but said reassuringly, “He’s fine. Just tired.”

  “How tired are you?”

  Eyes like sapphires over dagger-tips of steel. Her naked breasts, that should have been beautiful and no longer were, joggling there, free-standing, manmade, and full of God knew what.

  “Enough,” I said. “But thank you for the terrific performance.”

  “Triffic purr-fremance. I can go somewhere with you, if you like. Hundred fifty. OK?”

  I felt apologetic, so I could look apologetic. “If only. I’m sorry. Married.”

  She smiled, beautiful again. Relieved, I would think. She said, so soft, “I was married once.” And then she drifted away.

  I sat there, finishing my drink.

  And next a man came in and presented the rest of the bill, and Forrel woke up and threw up contemporaneously.

  39

  To get back to the flat a cab was needed. The driver grumbled about going so far, but in the end did.

  He dropped me at the top of the street, nevertheless, refusing to drive down any farther. He had heard, he said, things about that canal and the common. No way.

  I wondered if there would be any lurkers on the street tonight, although generally by now—around two in the morning—they were stoned blind on the common, slumped by makeshift fires, or else gone home to their turbulent bivouacs among the tall blocks of flats and local squats.

  I wondered briefly about Forrel too. I had found him a cab, pondering if the cabby would accept the smell of puke. But Forrel only wanted to get to the regions of Hyde Park. He maintained a tiny expensive penthouse there, somewhere. And he still did the Lottery, and won. He won over the cabby too.

  As I walked down from the station end of the street, I began to see a tall, dark figure, standing on the opposite s
ide of the road to the house with my flat in it.

  This triggered an immediate memory. That girl, the one I’d christened Anushka, the Russian spy. I hadn’t seen her since, admittedly. But now here was this—what was he? As I came inevitably closer, I noted he was indeed a black man, very tall and slim and with short, thick, crisp hair. He had that lion face that comes from the aristocracy of Africa. And all of him was like that. He might have been leaning on a spear, clad in lion skin, still as marble and impenetrably royal as antiquity.

  But better not stare. I kept my eyes down as I went by on the other pavement, and turning on to the front path of the house, I heard him, in the deep silence, give what I took to be a sort of sigh.

  When I reached the front door and let myself in, as I had with her, I glanced back. Unlike the girl, the man didn’t look away. He met my gaze with a glare like black neon. Don’t linger. Go in. Shut the door. I did so.

  Once upstairs in the flat, I did—again, as with ‘Anushka’—go to the front window before I turned on the light.

  She had fled away, but he certainly hadn’t. He just stood there in the dark, worse dark than usual, too, since three of the street lamps had given out.

  Who had she been after? And who did he want?

  I drew the curtains and put on some lights, made a sandwich—the food from the club had melted like fairy gold—and coffee. I had drunk more booze than my ration.

  Sitting down with the TV on, I made some notes. Then I sat thinking. Without looking from the window again, I pondered the black warrior standing across the street. And the phantasmal KGB girl. And the girl with blue eyes and plaster-cement breasts.

  And then I thought about the wardrobe.

  40

  The wardrobe is a valid, if also normally rationed, part of my life. Like the notes I make such a lot of, the wardrobe gives me an extra dimension. Very possibly this will make no sense to another person not similarly moved. But then again, no doubt many of their own private pursuits might well be lost on me.