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

And showed him the little mark on my thumb. If you outstay, an alarm goes off below, and a couple of people come in to remove you. It’s very discreetist, but you have to get out. Under Civ Law, if you don’t they can do things.

He was staring at me.

He said very softly, but now I heard him very clearly, for we weren’t in the loud room, “You can’t afford to stay.”

“No. Oh, Coal,” I said, brightly, chattering from nervy happiness, “I’ve got hardly any currency left. No shots and I can’t get a loan…” I hadn’t meant to blurt it, and now, finding him and that the message-dream had been real, I didn’t care. It was nearly funny being without funds. It would change—didn’t matter.

But he stood back, and looked down at me, with his garnet eyes. And something struck me then, that only the very well-off can use inner-eye cosmetics like that.

“So this,” said Coal precisely, “is why you’ve come after me? You want pay off me, do you, Klova-flower? Yeah? Well, girl, you ain’t go’ have it. Right? Yeah? You can take your girlness out of here and out of my life. You can go and swim in blood and fire in hell you ice-cold cuntess.”

And then he turned round and walked away over the room, silent and straight as a walking spear, and his cruel brain and tongue were the two sides of its blade.

Then I got up and I was dead all over and inside, as if he had hacked me open wide and killed me.

I could barely see or hear, and on the slide I dropped my empty glass and a machine sprang out of the silvery snake-skin of the stair and gobbled the obstacle away.

In the street I leaned on the Tower’s glowing wall, under the staggerish sky poles. All people took me for a drunky, but I was dead. Only dead.

Emenie:

33

The foxes were out that night a long while, sexually screaming for mates, seemingly insatiable once they joined one. Joined being the significant word. They stay caught up, as it were, for an hour, I believe. Who told me this I have no notion. Either its fun or it’s purgatory. From the cries you can’t tell either what it is, but presumably it’s all right: lots of cubs appear in the next relay of months. Foxes are hunted for their fur, of course, as in the past, but in London mostly people are hopeless even about killing a fox, luckily. Most animals get away unharmed from the improvised unworking traps and damfool mobs with sticks and stones. The ones with guns can’t shoot, as a rule, and ammo is scarce. Also there’s less or no traffic on the ruinous and multi-potholed roads. And the men in scarlet on horses, and with trained-to-be-evil hounds, are no more. At least I imagine they’re not. Let them rot.

I dozed through the fox-night, aware—like the princess with the hard green bean—or pea?—under all her mattresses and sticking up into her like a spike—of Micki sleeping in the next room.

Once I thought I heard her stir, and wondered if she would start wandering about. I was ready to forestall her, and if necessary I would have sedated her with some mild opiate or strong pain-killer, of which I had a store. Something in a hot drink. Not to murder, obviously, just to keep everything safe and sound. But I didn’t hear anything much else, and there was a tiny space when, very delicately and softly, she snored. It was more like a cat’s purr, and only lasted three or four minutes by my reckoning.

I wondered what we would do in the morning. Go and look for the Park Man, probably, and/or my invented guys by the canal.

We could visit the wreck of the Co-op, as well. And the High Street. I needed a few things, and she could help me carry them back.

Never look a gift-horse in the mouth, and so on.

34

I didn’t risk the oven. We had rather old bread and a butter and peanut spread I’ve found recently in little individual tubs.

I did put on the electric kettle, and we had black coffee and Sweet-Tooth, this also in individual sachets. She marvelled at the working kettle. I told her the legend of the guy who had wired things up so they worked for a couple of hours a day, if randomly. We had been ‘lucky’ this morning.

“Something big must still work somewhere,” she said, doubtfully. “For him to do that…”

“God knows what.”

“Yes. Oh dear,” she wistfully said, “I used to love God, when I was young.”

Young. She was young now. Agonisingly young. And not due to get much older. Age would not wither her, etc.

“Don’t blame God. This mess is down to wonderful mankind.”

“Yes,” she agreed.

She seemed pleased I hadn’t blamed her old lost lover. She’d slept well too, she said.

I said I’d thought the wildlife might wake her.

Oh no, she said, she found that comforting when or if she heard it. Life going on. The meek conceivably inheriting what was left of the earth.

She also asked if my neighbour was all right, the one I’d pretended I must look in on. And they were doing well, of course, weren’t they.

After this interlude we went out, (she had already used the loo, marvelling at the way the plumbing still operated), and along the canal to the Co-op.

35

Am I right? There used to be some catch-phrase about something being bigger on the inside than from outside? The Co-op is a bit like that. Except that the Co-op is smaller in the store part, and much bigger in the back rooms than seems possible.

A lot has fallen through, of course. It’s only a few yards off up the side road that cuts away from the tow-path, and evidently the damp of the canal and its various underground offshoots have undermined the building’s foundations. Even so there