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

him, knows nothing. That chap,” I added, “in the park—I had a look for him,” (I had, too) “but I couldn’t find him.” (Nor had I. If I ever did, since he claimed to have seen me with Sy, I might have to consider murdering him. A chore. The demeaning of a sacred pleasure. But, if I must.)

“Oh,” she said wearily, drooping down, her dark hair falling past her face in two charming brunette spaniel ears, “that was more—well the man who came here with me last time…”

“Sy’s brother.”

“Yes. He—sort of kept on at the man over there on the waste ground. And the man sort of said he thought he might have seen Sy with a woman and they came here…” She faltered again.

I said, consolingly, “I suppose, as he’s his brother, he’s pretty desperate to find out.”

“Maybe,” she said.

She shut her eyes.

The refilled-full-again glass wavered in her hand. “I’m so tired,” she said. “I don’t sleep. I can’t. Not at… home.”

I said, “Why don’t you have a rest? That sofa’s OK. I can bring you a clean pillow and a blanket.”

She didn’t show anything of being suspicious. Merely looked up at me. Now she was the exhausted Victorian child, dragged over the snow-mounds by some villain, her mother dead amid the drifts.

By the time I came back with the pillow and coverlet she lay completely asleep full-length on the sofa. The filled green-red-black glass had been stood, most carefully, on the floor. She was on her right side, and had her left hand curled under her neck, and her right tucked against her breast. She hadn’t even taken off her coat.

I laid the shroud of the cover over her, and put the pillow at her feet not to disturb her. Then I crept out of the room, and into the kitchen, not switching on the light.

Outside some foxes were fighting, or copulating, in the gardens. At other times badgers come and do the same. I value their savagery. It brings energy and a reason to the feral wilderness of trees and shrubs.

I sat listening to them. I sat thinking of knives and the gun, and stones, and this poison and that, of strangling and smothering and pushing and so on.

What was her special need? Until I fathomed it I couldn’t make a move. And now her presence in my flat, in my ‘grandmother’s’ house, was like a briar of clear dark granite. It might entangle me. It would get in my way. There had to be an answer very soon. But I couldn’t sell myself—or her—short. Enigma. Endeavour. Endless. Enemy.

Rod:

25

George didn’t call me, and so the next day I called him, first on the landline at the Lewisham flat, and next on his antiquated but functioning mobile. Both took my message but refused to render up my Uncle George.

I had work anyway to contend with, plus making up for the half Wednesday escape with a whole dreary Saturday. Weekends generally entail only a skeleton staff, and the most tedious memos to check and respond to through the machine which, of course, soon started to print everything up in what looked like the Cyrillic alphabet.

One of the caretakers, Bill, strolled in during the afternoon, and we had a chat about his angry and mad-sounding wife, who, according to Bill, was always bolting the house door in his absence and so locking him out—either that or when he was in the house, and she out, taking his keys as well as her own, and so locking him in. I’ve suggested it might be her age, all this, and perhaps she could visit her GP. But Bill said she had always been like it. She had driven him nuts in hundreds of ways when they were in their teens, and terrorised him into marriage when they were twenty. There were no children. But she didn’t want any, and he hadn’t, but now he sometimes wished he had a son or daughter he could talk to. After this, I told him about George, who I’d continued to call, two or three times each day, to no avail. Both landline and mobile now refused even to take a message.

“They go funny when they get to that age,” said Bill, who seems to be in his late fifties, and whose wife is insane.

“I keep thinking I ought to get on to the police,” I said. “Except he’d never forgive me if he’s there and just wants to be on his own. He’s pretty spry. He’s never ill,” I added, thinking but not saying anything of George’s alcoholic habits.

On Sunday, I half meant to go to Lewisham again. But I was worn out, and the thought of another weekend train gave me the creeps.

On Sunday evening I phoned Vanessa.

I told her about George.

“Oh, George,” she said dismissively. “He’s a drunkard. He could be up to anything. I should leave well alone, Roderick.”

She had little time for George. He was from my mother’s side, and Vanessa was my father’s sister.

Vanessa told me, at great length, about her next door neighbours, who had started to have parties twice a week and, as the weather was still fine, often spilled with their guests out into the adjacent garden, laughing and drinking and smoking dope, with loud music playing, sometimes until one or two in the morning.

“Poor you,” I said.

“I’d complain to the council,” she said, “but they take no notice.”

“Perhaps they’ll stop when the weather turns,” I opined.

She said, brusquely, “Are you coming down next Saturday?”

“Well…”

“Yes, Roderick, I know you normally only visit me once a month. But remember, I have to go to Wales next, to see Cissy.”

Who was Cissy? God knew, and apparently Vanessa thought I did too. It would save time to agree.

“Of course, yes,” I said. “Next Saturday, then.”

One more day gone down the drain.

26

Through the next week I kept up my calls to George, and even wrote him a letter.

I said I was worried, and