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

my flat,” I heard a voice say, which must be mine.

“The old male you said lived across from you?”

“No. No one I know. No one.” And my head turned by itself, or something turned my head, and I looked back at the flat-house, and there was no face looking out, no lit windows. Not even the faulty blinds of the ordinary male in the second flat. Just darkness.

And Coal was in the darkness, holding me.

I put my head against him and sighed and was still.

52

He told me, out on the street, that he had made a mistake and spoken cruelly and unreasonably to me. He realised I wasn’t after shots of cash, only explaining why I’d have to leave the Leaning Tower earlier than usual. He said he did not care anyway if I wanted any money of his. I was welcome. Whatever I wanted.

Then he said, if I could forgive and let go any bad feeling towards him for what he’d said, he thought he should come in with me, and find out what had happened up in my flat.

I had been so destroyed by sadness, now I couldn’t spring back.

It was like a stem that was crushed in me.

I didn’t know what to do. I only leaned my head on his chest. I remem’d the feel of his body, its scent.

I started to think, which is a peculio, about my mother, C. P., that I’d never known. And about the Child Centre. I never made friends.

They said I was a solitary child. A Solo, they called me.

I had a different name then.

I didn’t like it, and when I left at sixteen, and after the Generation Change programme had stopped me ever getting older, I changed my name too. First it was Clover. Then with the K and A. Klova.

After a while or so on the dark street with Coal I said I wanted to go in. That was all, but Coal and I went across the road to the house.

I could walk all together by then. But he kept his arm round me.

He was like a part of me, his arm a part of me.

But all and none of me wasn’t or was me. I didn’t know who I was. Klova. What was Klova?

The moment we got into the house, that smell was there. It was thick as mud from the edges of The Nile. It was a grey, liver-brown smell. It was raw and full of metal tines that made a sort of like as steel sounding in your head.

“Fuck,” Coal whispered. “That there is no rat, girl.”

But he moved me on, and we ran up the stairs, and then we had outraced the smell. It just seemed to stop before the last step.

We sprinted into my flat.

We leaned on the door breathing the nice air. It was clean.

In the social room, the tiles glimmered because the automatic lamp had come on, and also I could see the blinds were fixed at the front window. No light could show.

Coal went into each room, including the bathdome, and then he came back and said, “There’s no one here but you and me.”

I asked myself if I had imagined the old man in the window, because I was so sad. I didn’t say this to Coal. He worked in Security. He would think again I was or had been lying, to get his attention, saying someone had been here when nobody could be. My bills were all paid. I hadn’t had to use the bank overdebt. There was no reason for the apartment security to have failed.

Coal came over and held me again. He kissed my hair. I tried to feel glad. Couldn’t feel.

We went into the bed area and lay down.

I hadn’t got any make-up on.

He said, “I always think of your pink lipstick, Klova-Spice. But your lips are sweet pink anyhow.” And he kissed me. We had carnal. It wasn’t like before. It wasn’t real. What’s real?

The time check said it was Zone 2 and I was awake but Coal wasn’t. Then he woke up. He looked at me.

I said, “Someone’s on the floor above. Upstairs.”

“That’s another flat, right?”

“There’s never been anyone up there before.”

I was afraid and I’d sat up, looking up like a brainless at the ceiling, though of course you can’t see through.

Someone was walking about up there. It sounded heavy and the floor/ceiling creaky and sagging. Even so, the ceiling didn’t move.

“Do you want I go up and see?” he asked me.

“I don’t know.”

The noises didn’t stop. I said, “It may be her, the old woman. She gets in my flat sometimes, moves things. Maybe up there, too.”

“Klova,” he said, and kissed me again—how many times had he kissed me? Oh, a million times a million. To make up for all the kissing we’d missed, he’d said. “That sounds too loud for an old woman, it sounds like a male. I want you safe. I’ll go up and find out.”

I said, “The old woman’s let the flat up there, that’s all.”

“Let me make sure. This guy you said you saw in here, what was he like?”

“Old. Old—soon-to-die old.” I paused, and we both waited the grave respectful moment. “And he waved to me.”

“Stay there,” said Coal.

He went out. I heard his bare feet, soft as the paws of a big cat on the next bit of stairway that, in any proper flat-house, or anywhere, is a slide.

We hadn’t fully undressed. I pulled on an overshirt. I followed Coal out, shutting my door, moving up the stair after him.

It was very dark again here. And no lights came on to help. On the next landing was a narrow door to one side.

We would need the correct and personalised nail ID to press and get in—but then, I’d forgotten, Coal worked in Security.

He did something to the door with a band around his wrist I’d taken for jewellery. And the door, that seemed to be made of jet-black glass, gradually slid