Cruel Pink by Tanith Lee (uplifting book club books TXT) 📕

CRUEL PINK

Tanith Lee

www.sfgateway.com

Enter the SF Gateway …

In the last years of the twentieth century (as Wells might have put it), Gollancz, Britain’s oldest and most distinguished science fiction imprint, created the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series. Dedicated to re-publishing the English language’s finest works of SF and Fantasy, most of which were languishing out of print at the time, they were – and remain – landmark lists, consummately fulfilling the original mission statement:

‘SF MASTERWORKS is a library of the greatest SF ever written, chosen with the help of today’s leading SF writers and editors. These books show that genuinely innovative SF is as exciting today as when it was first written.’

Now, as we move inexorably into the twenty-first century, we are delighted to be widening our remit even more. The realities of commercial publishing are such that vast troves of classic SF & Fantasy are almost certainly destined never again to see print. Until very recently, this meant that anyone interested in reading any of these books would have been confined to scouring second-hand bookshops. The advent of digital publishing has changed that paradigm for ever.

The technology now exists to enable us to make available, for the first time, the entire backlists of an incredibly wide range of classic and modern SF and fantasy authors. Our plan is, at its simplest, to use this technology to build on the success of the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series and to go even further.

Welcome to the new home of Science Fiction & Fantasy. Welcome to the most comprehensive electronic library of classic SFF titles ever assembled.

Welcome to the SF Gateway.

Contents

Title Page

Gateway Introduction

Contents

Cruel Pink

Website

Also by Tanith Lee

Dedication

About the Author

Copyright

Emenie:

1

I kill people; what do you do?

Birds are messengers, and can tell me things. Actually they can tell anyone things, but most people, obviously, don’t grasp this. It was early autumn, really warm, about 6 p.m., and I was walking along by the canal. The pigeon came over and landed on the towpath in front of me. (They don’t tow any barges along it now; there are just the derelict one or two over against the other bank. The old park is up there. Completely overgrown, of course. And beyond the old rambling trees and bushes, and taloned roses and four foot high grass, you can see the ruins of three tall blocks of flats.) The pigeon was slate-blue with a white head and clever crazy eyes. It picked something from the path and then let it fall in disgust. I read the message this time from the pattern of light and dark on its back. It told me the weather would stay good and the light would last until around ten to seven, and then there’d be a long soft twilight. Plus there was somebody by the park I’d see if I continued walking up the path towards the ruins of the Co-op. It was sort of take it or leave it, really. Both the message and my reaction. I had gone out just for a walk, really. And the pigeon didn’t promise me something I might truly find irresistible—just a possible might be worth looking at. Which was fair enough.

Once it was sure I’d got the message, it turned round and took off, rising far up over the orange and yellow and evergreen of the trees, heading for the upper sky, above the wreckage of the suburbs. It would probably be in central London inside ten minutes, the bird. Well, in what was left of London, evidently. But for a pigeon that would, I expect, suffice.

2

After going on for about twenty minutes—I judge time fairly accurately—I saw a man sitting on the opposite path, near the old bridge and the green and crumbly steps, fishing with a real rod and line.

“Hi,” I called over. “Catch anything?”

“Nah,” he said, but without resentment.

“I don’t think there’s anything in there, really,” I said.

“You’re very likely right.”

“Except the odd shoe, “I added.

He looked up and grinned. “Oh yeah. I already caught one of them. I threw it back.”

“So you’re just fishing for pleasure,” I playfully said.

“Sure. Though I suppose I could’ve tried frying it in breadcrumbs and olive oil. But I’d have had to kill it first.”

“Oh, can you do that?” I was admiring. “I mean, if it was really a fish?”

“Sure. Used to catch salmon in Scotland. Silver-fin in California, too, once or twice, ‘bout fifteen years ago.”

“I could never do that.”

“You could if you had to,” he encouraged me.

“No,” I said, sad and regretful. “I can’t kill animals. Not even rats,”

“You’ve got a problem there, then,” he said.

“You’re telling me. My place is overrun with the bloody things.”

He sat, looking at me quizzically. The sun was low in the sky behind him, way over the park, shining its soft, pure, bronzy rays full on me. What did he see? This lone girl, just dressed in jeans and a floppy autumn-leaf colour T-shirt, long brown hair and paler brown eyes, clear skin, lightly tanned. A tawny girl, slim, all right enough, and perhaps lonely as well as alone?

“Where’d you live?” he asked me.

“Oh. Just back up there. Used to be my grandmother’s house.”

“Right?” He was interested. Well, he was probably in some squat, or other derelict premises. He didn’t look dirty though, and his own nondescript clothes were OK. He was about thirty-five to forty. But I’m sixteen going on fifty. You can’t always tell, with me. No, I don’t lie, you can’t, you couldn’t, it’s one of my talents. His teeth were good, I saw that again next minute because again he grinned. “I could drop by sometime. Help you with your rat population.”

I seemed to be thinking. I was, I suppose. “You know, I found a bottle of wine,” I said.

Yet—did I really want to, tonight? Maybe I did. I don’t usually get a message from a bird, or