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

any other signal, unless I’m up for it—even when I don’t always realise at first I am, I was. I don’t usually want to do it at home, either. But—well, I’d sort of invited him, hadn’t I? It would be rude to refuse now, wouldn’t it?

They know, I’m sure of this, too. Even you would, if you were the one. They—you—always know. It’s a pre-arrangement, perhaps even made between us in a previous life. On such an autumn evening we’ll meet, around six thirty, and then we’ll do it—let’s do it—let’s fall in love.

3

“I remember this road,” he said. “From before.” This was as we were going in at the back door. (I hardly ever use the front, and now the back door lets directly into the rooms I use most often, on the ground floor. I hardly ever bother going up to the second floor. Or the narrow stoopy little attic.)

“You mean before—well…”

“The S hit the F. Yeah. Back then. I was younger then. You weren’t even born, yeah?”

“You might be surprised,” I said.

The back door lets into the utility room and so into the biggish kitchen. Then there’s a space and a bathroom opens off there, and then there’s the main big downstairs room, which is very big, being once—in my grandmother’s time—two rooms. (She wasn’t my grandmother. I killed her some years ago; an older woman. Can’t recall her name.) This house, which is detached, stands between two others, also detached, and one of which is a large bungalow with an upstairs extension. All these other adjacent houses, however, are in a pretty awful state and—like the park—massively overgrown and impinged on by huge feral trees.

“Your fridge works!” he exclaimed as I took out the wine. Now he did sound accusing.

“It does sometimes. Not very reliable. Guy I used to know wired it up to something or other last year. I get about two, three hours, but you can’t ever be certain when.” (This is a lie, of course. I know exactly when.)

“Christ.” He was peering in at the loaf and other stuff, a look of envious almost-pain on his face. “And you’ve got fucking lights,” he almost shouted, as we moved on into the biggest room. There’s only one side window left in here, from the way the rooms have been portioned off, and that is boarded up, like all the front windows. Due to the forest of garden trees at the back I hadn’t so far felt the need to blank out the glass of the kitchen or utility.

“He did the lights, too,” I said.

“Ever see him now?” he asked, greedily.

“No.”

He gave me a hard sad look, and sat down on the sofa. I lit some candles, and turned out the overhead lights. “I’d better, in case they go off suddenly.” Then I took the two dark green glasses off the fake fire-surround—at least there wasn’t any excessive, infuriating electric fire turned on there—and opened the screw-top of the wine and poured us each a large, filled glass.

He drank about half at a gulp. And then sat staring at nothing. He was frowning. Finally he said, in a miserable and unfriendly way, “Perhaps I’d better take a look at the rat situation. Yeah?”

“If you don’t mind.”

“I can smell them already,” he said. He was sullen. He didn’t fancy me now, hated me presumably for having a working fridge and electricity. Or he just didn’t know how to handle this weird brown girl, and the almost-comfort, and the silence, the utter silence, which he thought no doubt was being shut in here, but was really everything listening, waiting.

“Maybe you could look at the cellar,” I said. “That’s where they get in.”

“One’s fucking died down there, I can tell you that,” he elaborated as I undid the door to the basement, which door is back out in that space between the kitchen and the big room.

“Yes. They do. In there and in the walls.”

We stood and stared through the door-slot and down the steps into the utter sub-black below. I’m so accustomed to that stink of death, I don’t even properly register it any more. Conceivably it’s just familiar to me now, part of ‘being at home’.

“Hang on,” I said, “there’s no light down there. I’ll get the torch.”

There’s a cupboard by the bathroom, and I left him staring at the black, the abyss, and took out the torch and then shone it over his shoulder downwards. “Do you mind going first?” I said. “I don’t like the stairs. I’ll shine the light ahead of you.”

He glanced back then, into my face. He looked sorry for being gruff earlier: I’m just a nervous kid, and I’ve given him wine, and I might give him other things, food and sex, and a place to stay that’s better than wherever he is currently holed up.

“Sure,” he said. “S’OK.”

I kept helpfully shining the torch before him.

Then “Oh—just a second…” I said. It was plain I had forgotten something important. I hadn’t though.

I took the light off him, and took something else out of the cupboard, leaving him in blackness a moment before swinging the torch-beam right back exactly into his eyes.

“Shit.”

“Oh hell—I’m sorry…” I cried, contrite. But I wasn’t. Before he could see again, and using the hand-gun from the cupboard, I shot him directly through the face and head.

4

In the night I lay on the bed in the room that led off the main room; it had been part of the main room, part of the part that had been the sitting room once. The bed was large, sagging and lumpy and oddly comfortable, the mattress seeming to alter its shape to fit me in whatever position I adopted. Tonight I was on my back. I had finished the remaining poured-out wine, and put the rest in the fridge to keep cold. (The fridge always works, just as the light and the fire do. Even the electric cooker functions, though I seldom cook