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

We stood together as the old cracked white bath filled itself with steaming water, and I added a few lavender drops from a container.

“Let’s have some wine, too,” I said. “Oh, let’s enjoy ourselves! And tomorrow we’ll have a good night out.”

“Yes,” she breathed. “Yes.”

Christmas comes but once a year.

Treat the time with dread and fear.

47

Poor little girl.

There was quite a strong dose in the wine, sleeping pills, but I’d mulled the wine on the oven hob and put in sugar and ginger.

“It’s a bit bitter,” I precautionarily remarked.

A bit bitter. The biter bit. The bitten bite. The bittern has bitten.

I was fairly sure she wouldn’t drown. The bath is rather slim and short. I’ve fallen asleep in it more than once and still been breathing above the surface when I came to.

When I went in, after about twenty minutes, she was well away.

I stroked back her black hair from her steamy brow. She was breathing deeply, and smiling, in her sleep.

Straightening, I saw myself in the piece of mirror that had stayed attached to the wall. It too was filmed by steam, but I made her out, the slim brown woman with her acorn hair and eyes. Older today, about twenty-nine, thirty. If I chameleoned into forty, I’d certainly be old enough to have had this little girl as a daughter.

How sweet she was. I didn’t want her hurt any more.

Leaning down I gently lifted her pale soft hand, with the faint tracery of its sea-blue veins at the wrist, and carefully and quickly cut across them three times.

The razor was well-honed, the old kind. In the heat I didn’t think she’d feel it. And the pills—they’re good ones, I’ve used them myself once or twice. They’d have a thorough, syrupy effect.

I guided her hand and arm back down to rest on the bottom of the bath.

Just there, instantly, the water was changing, clear into pink and crimson. Into scarlet.

That’s what they used to call it, those bastards who hunted foxes—not for food or clothing, but for sport. The hunting coats. Hunting Pink. Only they were red. Blood red.

Her face hadn’t changed. Her hair drifted in the water. I looked at her body, now I had done what had to be done. She had that ethereal underwater paleness of skin I can remember seeing in reproductions of the work of Leonardo da Vinci, or Boticelli. Black hair at her groin, thick but not in excess. And lovely full little breasts, with small pink bonbons of nipples. But the rose water of her blood was already spreading over her, recolouring…

Sweet child. Poor little girl. Go, as they had once said, with God. God bless you, darling dear. And walk in Paradise.

I left her alone to die. She should have her privacy.

48

Next morning I let all the water and blood out of the bath. Then rinsed Micki off, and picked her up in my arms—she was light as a feather or a moth—and carried her through into my bedroom. I dried her and dressed her in a fleecy blue dressing gown I had, as if to keep her warm, which was irrelevant, but there. Then I sat her in the chair in the corner, with a cushion behind her head.

Dead faces, even those of the young, fall in a strange way. I’ve noted that before. But she was still pretty. And she had that look, too, that I’ve also seen, though less I must admit on the faces of the ones I’ve killed. It’s a sort of secretive knowledge. But of what?

Having settled her, anyway, I went and cleaned the bath thoroughly.

This method had not, for Micki, I’m afraid, been entirely original to me. (I’d have liked it to be.) But not overused, shall I say. I knew however it leaves not much mess.

As for her body, I didn’t want to chuck it in the cellar, down with the others, and her faithless, stupid twat of a lover, Simon. I wished, I confess, I could have found somebody to embalm her. She could have looked really beautiful mummified, even, like an Egyptian princess. But the means of her death at least were classic Ancient Roman. In those days they committed suicide like that, especially the females, a hot bath and a razor or knife and lots of wine, no doubt. And then the right hand, which had wounded the left hand and caused death and so was blasphemous, a criminal against the laws of men and gods, was cut off and buried separately. At least she didn’t need that. I was the killer. She was pure and free of blame.

For now, she could stay where she was. The cold preservative season was getting under way. In a while I’d find a means of disposing of her. For now, let her rest a little longer. She was safe, with me.

Rod:

49

Most of the trees were empty of leaves. The shops were full of the compulsory pre-figurations of Christmas. I recalled the lament of my guardian. “It drives me Christmas crackers.” The cold was gathering in too, like the dark evenings.

It was about this time I noticed that the bad smell had come back to the downstairs hall. It was, in fact, dramatically worse. Not drains now, I concluded, but a selection of rats dead in the walls. Oddly, these stinks had never seemed to reach up into the rest of the house. Nor had I ever heard rats, let alone seen any, about or in my flat, or anywhere on any floor. I wondered if the occupant of the other flat, the southside flat facing mine across the landing, had detected anything. But really nobody ever seemed to live there. I had always reckoned they were generally away, and at those times of their leaving or returning, I deduced I must have been absent myself. Certainly there was never