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

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, like 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.

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,