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

there was no unkindness, no cruelty. At least, none that was apparent to me at the time. I had, as far as I then knew, the ordinary, incomprehensible, quite happy madhouse of a life that any cared-for infant and young adolescent experiences. The world is alien, and its rules often make no sense, but one is coerced or guided through, as a new recruit, to the State of Existence. Like any press-ganged soldier, one learns the ropes in order to survive. And a friendly and pleasing home helps things along.

My parents were rich. They had a house, once a farm, in a remote forested stretch of western British landscape. Neither of them seemed to do much except enjoy themselves. They got various people in to clean and otherwise cope, went out a lot themselves to eat, or on trips, leaving me then to attentive carers. He, I think, had business interests here and there, but others ran the show, he just drew out the money. This continued after the loss of his wife and elder daughter. He drank more then, and sometimes he cried. But he was never violently emotional, and soon enough returned to the normal pursuits, which unfortunately for him included flying light aircraft. He was, on that occasion, with another young woman, of whom there were several after my mother’s death. She recovered from the crash, but the payments of compensation rather depleted his postmortem cash fund. The rest of my teenage years I grew under the hand of an uninterested guardian—who I only ever once saw demonstrate a paroxysm of appalling rage, shame, and utter disbelief. And meanwhile the knowledge that the family ‘fortune’ was going, going, gone, grew with me. At eighteen, depletion was accomplished.

I left my fairly amenable school, and the country farmhouse, and anything else known and liked, and began the third part of my life, with the firm which, even now, nineteen years after, (or does it only seem so long?), overload and underpay, bore, irritate and employ me. The last also I ever saw of the guardian was in my eighteenth year.

“Well, Rod,” he said, wringing out my hand and clapping me on the back. “Onwards and upwards, eh?”

I pacifically agreed. He asked then how my girlfriend was—“Maisie, is it, Rod?”

“Sophie,” I replied. In fact of course there was no girlfriend. I had made her up to reassure him, the previous year, when he seemed to think my formative phase had somehow deprived me of all the proper joys and adult responsibilities.

Rather strangely I recall, out on the street again following this interview, I heard a girl’s name shouted from behind me. It was Sophie. But it was, and is, a popular name.

And the world makes no real sense. To recap: children see this but too well. And somehow I still see it. I’m not immune to the annoyance, or the regret. But I rarely fight the tide.

I had a dream two nights after Vanessa vanished.

I dreamed I went to her house again in Brighton, but after dark. There were no stars or moon, no street lamps on, no lit windows. But it was a dream, so I could see the way without them.

When I reached the house, it was derelict; part of the roof had dropped away, the windows were smashed, the door off its hinges and hanging wide.

Nevertheless, in I walked.

Just as I had on the day she went missing, I meant, and started to look all over the place. But now, not unreasonably, it had been stripped and vandalised, and upstairs a fire had been kindled on the landing that, before it was doused, had burned off the top of the stairs, so the upper floor was beyond my remit.

In what had been the dining room, only half the table was left. The table had been sawn in two. And on what had stayed was an envelope, white and pristine in the gloom of night.

Picking it up, I saw it was addressed, or at least named for me: Roderick. I could recognise Vanessa’s handwriting from her selections of punctual, functional seasonal cards.

I tore the envelope open. A single folded sheet of paper slipped out into my hand. I duly unfolded it. Dear Roderick, said the letter, I do know you are gay, you know.

That was all. She hadn’t bothered to sign it. I assumed she had predicted I would be sure only she could have left this message for me.

37

I was kept at work an extra two hours, some rush job; Forrel was involved too. This time his computer, not mine, played up.

Not until almost nine o’clock was I able to release myself. Then Forrel reappeared and suggested we went to a club in the back streets of Soho. I was worn and enervated and thought, why not, and went.

Actually, not a bad place. Food and drink—very little of the first and a surfeit of the second—were very overpriced, but to my astonishment Forrel insisted on picking up the bill.

Girls cavorted around poles, semi-clad. Forrel seemed to like this a lot, but also seemed to be working himself up to liking it, and to demonstrating that he did, as if it were another test our work-place had set him to pass.

On the other hand, I genuinely did like looking at the women. Some of them were very skilful, sleek and limber as trained stage dancers, which perhaps, when able, they were. Most were pretty, and one extremely beautiful, with black satin wings of hair and long, strangely Oriental blue eyes. But as I marvelled at their contortions, seamless skin and delightful ankles, I also felt a defensive fear of their anger and resentment. Or their frustration, perhaps. Or very likely their utter scorn.

In the end, about midnight, when Forrel—who had confessed in an undertone he had won just over a thousand on the Lottery, and had meant to spend it with his girlfriend, but then learned she was leaving him—began to go glassy-eyed; the