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

beautiful woman with black hair came straight across to us.

“Are you having a good time, guys?”

Forrel assured her he was. I nodded and smiled.

Doubtless realising I was the less pissed of the two of us, she said to me softly, “I can dance private, for you two only, in a room. Would you like this?” She had the faintest accent. I couldn’t decipher what it was over the hiss of trendy beer-pumps and bottles of fake champagne, the disco music and the yodels of the mostly male crowd.

“Goshyer,” said Forrel, now himself speaking in a foreign tongue, “is ulaz we wan, eh, Roddee?”

I said to him quietly, “It will cost.”

“Fugger costa, Les dwit.”

So we went with her to the other room.

38

The room was so over-the-top it spoilt the illusion that vague dark and intermittent laser lights had partly created elsewhere. It was like something razored out of the Arabian Nights, one dimensional and lacking all glamour. Hard sticky reds and tacky gold and chips missing from corners.

Anyway, she danced. She stripped off her minimum of top and played with her breasts. Now, poor girl, under the hard light they looked too pointed and solid. As if digitalised. Implants, probably.

Forrel passed out in the middle of the dance. He slid to the floor. I propped him up in case he was sick.

She kicked something under the (not) Eastern carpet, and the music stopped. She came over and sat down at the table and poured herself some of the fake champagne.

“I can see you two guys have had a long work day,” she said.

“I’m afraid so, yes.”

“He OK?”

I had no means or experience of him to know, but said reassuringly, “He’s fine. Just tired.”

“How tired are you?”

Eyes like sapphires over dagger-tips of steel. Her naked breasts, that should have been beautiful and no longer were, joggling there, free-standing, manmade, and full of God knew what.

“Enough,” I said. “But thank you for the terrific performance.”

“Triffic purr-fremance. I can go somewhere with you, if you like. Hundred fifty. OK?”

I felt apologetic, so I could look apologetic. “If only. I’m sorry. Married.”

She smiled, beautiful again. Relieved, I would think. She said, so soft, “I was married once.” And then she drifted away.

I sat there, finishing my drink.

And next a man came in and presented the rest of the bill, and Forrel woke up and threw up contemporaneously.

39

To get back to the flat a cab was needed. The driver grumbled about going so far, but in the end did.

He dropped me at the top of the street, nevertheless, refusing to drive down any farther. He had heard, he said, things about that canal and the common. No way.

I wondered if there would be any lurkers on the street tonight, although generally by now—around two in the morning—they were stoned blind on the common, slumped by makeshift fires, or else gone home to their turbulent bivouacs among the tall blocks of flats and local squats.

I wondered briefly about Forrel too. I had found him a cab, pondering if the cabby would accept the smell of puke. But Forrel only wanted to get to the regions of Hyde Park. He maintained a tiny expensive penthouse there, somewhere. And he still did the Lottery, and won. He won over the cabby too.

As I walked down from the station end of the street, I began to see a tall, dark figure, standing on the opposite side of the road to the house with my flat in it.

This triggered an immediate memory. That girl, the one I’d christened Anushka, the Russian spy. I hadn’t seen her since, admittedly. But now here was this—what was he? As I came inevitably closer, I noted he was indeed a black man, very tall and slim and with short, thick, crisp hair. He had that lion face that comes from the aristocracy of Africa. And all of him was like that. He might have been leaning on a spear, clad in lion skin, still as marble and impenetrably royal as antiquity.

But better not stare. I kept my eyes down as I went by on the other pavement, and turning on to the front path of the house, I heard him, in the deep silence, give what I took to be a sort of sigh.

When I reached the front door and let myself in, as I had with her, I glanced back. Unlike the girl, the man didn’t look away. He met my gaze with a glare like black neon. Don’t linger. Go in. Shut the door. I did so.

Once upstairs in the flat, I did—again, as with ‘Anushka’—go to the front window before I turned on the light.

She had fled away, but he certainly hadn’t. He just stood there in the dark, worse dark than usual, too, since three of the street lamps had given out.

Who had she been after? And who did he want?

I drew the curtains and put on some lights, made a sandwich—the food from the club had melted like fairy gold—and coffee. I had drunk more booze than my ration.

Sitting down with the TV on, I made some notes. Then I sat thinking. Without looking from the window again, I pondered the black warrior standing across the street. And the phantasmal KGB girl. And the girl with blue eyes and plaster-cement breasts.

And then I thought about the wardrobe.

40

The wardrobe is a valid, if also normally rationed, part of my life. Like the notes I make such a lot of, the wardrobe gives me an extra dimension. Very possibly this will make no sense to another person not similarly moved. But then again, no doubt many of their own private pursuits might well be lost on me.

To be honest, I hadn’t indulged in the wardrobe since I’d felt I must peer into Vanessa’s grimly orderly and staid version in Brighton. I’d been put off, it seems.

By now it was almost 3 a.m., and I was due to rise at six-thirty in order to