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

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