Cruel Pink Read online

  In the past I’d had Vanessa to contend with, either during my visits or on the occasions when she called me, fortunately not very often. I had weathered her diatribes, almost exclusively about others, as best I could; quod erat demonstrandum.

  Vanessa was gone. Now Forrel seemed to take over the role. It goes without saying his voice and tone were utterly dissimilar and his complaints as unlike as I, or surely anyone, could envisage, but regrettably the niche had been filled. During the working day, fairly often now, he would—what did they call it?—buttonhole me. Pinning me to my work-station, or in a corner of The Stag, he would begin what I had recently titled Forrel’s Lament.

  Tonight was no different.

  “She emptied the joint account, Rod. Every fucking K. Did I tell you? Sure, there weren’t that many. And she sends me these postcards about her and this fucking man she’s with. She ends up Glad you’re not here. I’ll have to move. Get away. And that girl—that girl with black hair and tits at the place we went—can’t stop thinking about her…”

  I put up with it, making conciliatory sounds, for about half an hour. Then I mournfully told Forrel I was expecting a call from my aunt, an old woman, and I’d have to go.

  He let me, with the reluctance of a starving squid.

  It was just after I put the phone down that I heard the noise. Frankly, I’d have had to be deaf not to.

  50

  A woman was shouting at the top of her vocal range, which range seemed enviable. And then there came the crash of breakage. It might have been a window—certainly glass.

  I had jumped up, startled. In this myopic and sedated house I had never before heard any sort of ruckus.

  There was little doubt as to the source. It was the flat across the landing. The silent, darkened, possibly unlived-in flat.

  Two things occurred to me. The tumult had sounded raw and spiteful enough that maybe I should try to summon the police. Whether they turned up, of course, would be down to them. The other element was that I had been damned lucky so far to experience very few of those incursions on one’s private aural or visual state by raucous neighbours. I had heard enough from Vanessa to make me, if only dimly, conscious I had done well in this department. But now, was everything to change?

  An interlude—it didn’t last—of quiet came. And then a huge masculine roaring. Followed by an alarming bang. This sounded as if a large piece of heavy furniture had been dropped from an impressive height. Had someone been under it?

  It seemed not. Up geezered the woman’s rabid rant, wordless with fury and also filtered through the sandwich-filler of the landing space. After which up sprang the male voice again. And here I did make out a selection of words projected in a fruity baritone bellow.

  “Again—my whisky—date of it—woman, I shall—damnation!”

  It came to me that neither voice was young. Both, however, in their unmatched and savage manner, were filled by strident passion.

  New tenants? Like Forrel, it seemed I too would have to move.

  But then again I felt compunction. These two elder persons seemed set on acts of violence. In the ordinary way I would avoid such a situation. But a sudden unease and—almost a compulsion—overcame me.

  I found I went out onto the landing.

  And I stood there, undecided, resentful and cautious, nearly amused in some silly, childish way, yet too appalled, foreseeing the bloody ending of these strangers’ saga, long-enacted if never before here.

  No. I had better call the police. Or else turn up the TV and glug a drink of Vodka from my limited store.

  Precisely as I turned to go back in, the door of the other, south side flat flew wide. I reversed again. Two people were there. In hinder place an irate woman, with shining bobbed hair; in the foreground, looking somehow both homicidal and benign, a bemusingly oldish-youngish old man, wine-glass in hand.

  “Why, Roderick,” he said, all easy-going charm once more. I knew his charm, his pleasant and coherent alcoholically undrunken joi de vivre. It was Uncle George. And behind him, frowning severely, Auntie Vanessa.

  Klova:

  51

  It wasn’t like the old woman, how she sometimes gets in, that is different.

  I was so scared I turned to run.

  To run away from the flat-house, and the old man leering out of my window at me down on the street.

  And the street was like dark black, the darkest of black. No lights but that one light, in my flat, where I wasn’t and no lights ever showed. So I ran right into something I thought was a tree, only trees don’t grow in that street. But the tree reached out and held me.

  “Let go!” I screamed.

  “No, it’s OK—easy, Klova-Spice. It’s OK.”

  And what had grabbed me wasn’t a tree but it was Coal. No flames in his hair tonight. No hell in his eyes. His eyes were black.

  I stopped moving and thinking and being. I just stopped. He held me up.

  After a while he said, “What scared you like that? Was it me?”

  “There’s an old man in my flat,” I heard a voice say, which must be mine.

  “The old male you said lived across from you?”

  “No. No one I know. No one.” And my head turned by itself, or something turned my head, and I looked back at the flat-house, and there was no face looking out, no lit windows. Not even the faulty blinds of the ordinary male in the second flat. Just darkness.

  And Coal was in the darkness, holding me.

  I put my head against him and sighed and was still.

  52

  He told me, out on the street, that he had made a mistake and spoken cruelly and unreasonably to me. He realised I wasn’t after shots of cash, only explaining why I’d have to leave the Leaning Tower earlier than usual. He said he did not care anyway if I wanted any money of his. I was welcome. Whatever I wanted.

  Then he said, if I could forgive and let go any bad feeling towards him for what he’d said, he thought he should come in with me, and find out what had happened up in my flat.

  I had been so destroyed by sadness, now I couldn’t spring back.

  It was like a stem that was crushed in me.

  I didn’t know what to do. I only leaned my head on his chest. I remem’d the feel of his body, its scent.

  I started to think, which is a peculio, about my mother, C. P., that I’d never known. And about the Child Centre. I never made friends.

  They said I was a solitary child. A Solo, they called me.

  I had a different name then.

  I didn’t like it, and when I left at sixteen, and after the Generation Change programme had stopped me ever getting older, I changed my name too. First it was Clover. Then with the K and A. Klova.

  After a while or so on the dark street with Coal I said I wanted to go in. That was all, but Coal and I went across the road to the house.

  I could walk all together by then. But he kept his arm round me.

  He was like a part of me, his arm a part of me.

  But all and none of me wasn’t or was me. I didn’t know who I was. Klova. What was Klova?

  The moment we got into the house, that smell was there. It was thick as mud from the edges of The Nile. It was a grey, liver-brown smell. It was raw and full of metal tines that made a sort of like as steel sounding in your head.

  “Fuck,” Coal whispered. “That there is no rat, girl.”

  But he moved me on, and we ran up the stairs, and then we had outraced the smell. It just seemed to stop before the last step.

  We sprinted into my flat.

  We leaned on the door breathing the nice air. It was clean.

  In the social room, the tiles glimmered because the automatic lamp had come on, and also I could see the blinds were fixed at the front window. No light could show.

  Coal went into each room, including the bathdome, and then he came back and said, “There’s no one here but you and me.”

  I asked myself if I had imagined the old man in the window, because I was so sad. I did
n’t say this to Coal. He worked in Security. He would think again I was or had been lying, to get his attention, saying someone had been here when nobody could be. My bills were all paid. I hadn’t had to use the bank overdebt. There was no reason for the apartment security to have failed.

  Coal came over and held me again. He kissed my hair. I tried to feel glad. Couldn’t feel.

  We went into the bed area and lay down.

  I hadn’t got any make-up on.

  He said, “I always think of your pink lipstick, Klova-Spice. But your lips are sweet pink anyhow.” And he kissed me. We had carnal. It wasn’t like before. It wasn’t real. What’s real?

  The time check said it was Zone 2 and I was awake but Coal wasn’t. Then he woke up. He looked at me.

  I said, “Someone’s on the floor above. Upstairs.”

  “That’s another flat, right?”

  “There’s never been anyone up there before.”

  I was afraid and I’d sat up, looking up like a brainless at the ceiling, though of course you can’t see through.

  Someone was walking about up there. It sounded heavy and the floor/ceiling creaky and sagging. Even so, the ceiling didn’t move.

  “Do you want I go up and see?” he asked me.

  “I don’t know.”

  The noises didn’t stop. I said, “It may be her, the old woman. She gets in my flat sometimes, moves things. Maybe up there, too.”

  “Klova,” he said, and kissed me again—how many times had he kissed me? Oh, a million times a million. To make up for all the kissing we’d missed, he’d said. “That sounds too loud for an old woman, it sounds like a male. I want you safe. I’ll go up and find out.”

  I said, “The old woman’s let the flat up there, that’s all.”

  “Let me make sure. This guy you said you saw in here, what was he like?”

  “Old. Old—soon-to-die old.” I paused, and we both waited the grave respectful moment. “And he waved to me.”

  “Stay there,” said Coal.

  He went out. I heard his bare feet, soft as the paws of a big cat on the next bit of stairway that, in any proper flat-house, or anywhere, is a slide.

  We hadn’t fully undressed. I pulled on an overshirt. I followed Coal out, shutting my door, moving up the stair after him.

  It was very dark again here. And no lights came on to help. On the next landing was a narrow door to one side.

  We would need the correct and personalised nail ID to press and get in—but then, I’d forgotten, Coal worked in Security.

  He did something to the door with a band around his wrist I’d taken for jewellery. And the door, that seemed to be made of jet-black glass, gradually slid away into the side of the wall, the way mine does on the floor below.

  Coal had already seen me following. Obviously he would. Now, not looking back, he raised his hand for silence and care. Then he moved in through the doorway.

  Again, no lights. It was pitch black now. It was like stepping through into nothingness.

  I didn’t want to be there.

  I wanted to be in the Tower, and dancing, and Coal dancing with me, and then we’d go to a Singles Room and it would be brilliant. And then I would go home, by myself, and I’d be the way I was when I was myself and I’d put on my lipstick that is dark sweet hot-flower pink. And in the mirror I’d be sixteen, though I am twenty-nine going on forty-nine. And I’d curl up in the bed. And in the morning the bank-nanny would message me about some more thousands of shots from the kind benefactors that look after all of us since they are so well-off and that is their duty and joy and…

  …and Coal said, in a hushed flat snarl, “Look, Klova.”

  He had a torch-thing, some gadget I’d never seen before. It shone all over without light. Everywhere was still pitch black but you could see every detail, even the bright eyes of a rat peeking out from an old, old cupboard in one corner.

  The room was old.

  Older than the planet.

  The masonry was lopsided, and great warty beams held up the low and listing ceiling. On the floor was a worn rug, heavily coloured and stained and dirty, and with holes. And there was a plate made of some grey metal stuff on the floor, with a yellow bone lying across it. And there was a table with a wood top and some papers, and a glass with a thin pillar that was greenish and very chipped, with black sediment in the bottom. I could smell bad water and damp, as sometimes you smell it walking by The Nile, which used to be a canal. And the remains of food, and human body smells, particularly piss and sweat, But also cold winter-tree smell. And I saw a window, very, very small, with dark glass, but it had a long silvery crack through it.

  Then the torch-thing failed. The images all went. And right then somebody moved past me. Not Coal.

  A male, though? I’m sure a male, and young. Twenty, like that. Dirty too—sweat and piss and spunk—but good too, new-baked bread, like that. And alcohol, some sort. And human hair, unwashed, but too—good, like the bark of a tree smell. And… lavender.

  But he was invisible. Not physical.

  Really he wasn’t there.

  Nothing was.

  The upstairs space was only a neglected flat, with whitish walls that shone even in the darkness, and carpet across all the floor. And the back window was broken, and suddenly a bird flew out of somewhere and in through the window and then straight up through a gap in the ceiling.

  Coal said in my ear, “Let’s get out.”

  We turned, and the door was another sort of door, like as from a Time-Tourist game-stat at the Child Centre. You had to turn a handle on the door, a knob, like that. Coal did, and we walked on to the landing.

  We went down again to my flat, hurried in, and secured my door. Above, in that place upstairs, was total quiet, now, and nobody but Coal and me were in my flat.

  “It was a ghost,” said Coal. “I’ve seen them before.”

  In the automatic soft lamp shine of my rooms he glared at me, blaming me once more for something I hadn’t done.

  Irvin:

  53

  Tomorrow I must fight a duel. A great nuisance. It is a severe interruption, as I had meant to go to visit Mis’us Peck. Such things are sent to try us, and so they do. I shall probably kill the fellow. He is an almighty imbecile. Pretty enough, with his blond locks and silk coat, but entirely lacking in wits. It seems he has found out I merry-digged his wife, (who is sixteen years and flower-of-face, with bosoms white as milk and very full). I am quite certain I am not the first, though she did tell me that I was. But all women lie. It is indigenous to them, as scales to a salmon.

  Well, there is no way round it. I have opted for swords, knowing him a fair shot and not, myself, a great liker of guns. A sword or a knife is silent. One does not always wish all London to know when one has dealt the blow of death.

  I have left the meat bone for the dog. There was little enough meat upon it at the first.

  But he is besides a faithless hound and may not come back till I have gone out. It is always possible too, I must surmise, that I will perish in the morning, on Hyde Hill, when Mr Cuckold comes for me with his polished blade. Now there’s a thought. I must puff out the candle. It is half done, and until my next payment day I can afford no other. Thus, goodnight.

  Up with the cock, as they say, and to The Black Sheep Inn up the track, for a bowl of burnt coffee and a scrag of bread.

  “Ah, Mr Thessaris,” say they, “up and early to your business.”

  Told none where I was to go nor what to be about there.

  A blood-red sunrise, and thereafter snow coming down. Winter has no consideration for a poor actor shoved out to kill some noodle. No doubt I shall die of the winter chills rather than the fool’s prick-blade.

  (I write this in the back of the carter’s cart, as he trundles me to my appointment.)

  Damnation take all husbands.

  Picture then the day. And by the time we were at the outskirt of the city, under the wild ground of the hill, everything was already frosted thic
k white as the Earl of Scarrow’s face in powder. Parted with the carter there, and was roundly cursed by him despite the coin I gave. But this has happened before.

  The snow ceased to fall as I climbed the hill, and I was glad to get some warmth by the exercise.

  Groves of trees dominate the summit of the slope, and from one such I could make out the smoke of a brazier. What a picture was that, then, when once I got in among the trees, all set up as if for some epic scene at Drury Lane.

  For there stood the adjutants and the other hangers-on, and the doctor looking grim, and there the husband, who must probably play the hero.

  Jem Templeyard was not a bad fellow, thought I, with the irony of a man dragged from his bed too early, to clash blades in the ice and snow. A handsome youth, not yet twenty-two summers, and shaking enough I could see it, but whether from fright or freezing it would be hard to tell. Certainly he fired up when he saw me.

  “You’re late, you damned villain!” he howled at me. “Too afraid to come? Or thought to cheat me?”

  I shrugged, and reluctantly took off my coat. It’s better to fight in one’s shirt, I find. “You must allow me to have had some morsel to break my fast.”

  “It will have been your last meal, you gutter scrump.”

  “I am heartily sorry,” said I, “you term your bed a gutter.”

  “What?” cried he, all amaze. “What—you think I meant that? By this it seems you admit you seduced my wife…”

  Another of them intervened. “Hush, Jem, comport yourself as a gentleman. Well, Mr Thessaris, you’ve no second, I see.”

  “None but my hound, who last night vowed he would come, then cried off due to a long interlude with the tinker’s bitch.”

  One or two of them laughed. Which set off the fair Templeyard again. Once more they sternly patted him down. He did not remove his coat. A novice, plainly.

  The brazier, meanwhile, which gave less heat than smoke, began to cough as if it had the autumn plague.