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

He grins, boy-like. And says I am an actor, what else would I say?

“It is the Bible has that,” I loftily tell him. To his credit he does not know enough of religious text to correct me. He is both excited and nervous, as one must expect.

As he sits down, he blushes.

A pleasing change, this, from the choleric red of before.

We quaffed the black drink and our spirits rose high and knocked upon our hearts and skulls. Then there was a crimson wine from Girtland, or some other clime.

After that, along the whitied street we swaggered, lords of the earth, and so into the winding back ways of London’s prodigious skirt-hem, and down to a certain tavern, where I acquired a room.

He was all agoggle. But I, of course, have done such stuff.

In the room a sudden girlish terror came over him, but I’d anticipated no less. I gave him brandy, kissed him, and so began upon him. In afterthought, I am not entirely sure he was quite innocent. He took to the procedures, once in, with the willing devotion of a lion cub to meat.

As I had promised him, so I did. And at the last we rolled upon the floor, he screaming in a joyous extremis. Luckily it is a noisy spot, and well used to such jolly uproars.

Then, after, like any maid, he began to weep, and begged to know if he had sinned. I told him he had, and would do so again. And proved to him he would, as we both did so promptly.

Following this he slept, and I, well-satisfied enough, lay wondering a little which of the two of them, Jem or his white-bosomed wife, I preferred. To their credit, I decided to allot them equal pedestals.

When evening fell, and snow lay outside deep as goose-sauce, he told me he must get home. For all that we spent another hour, nor wasted it in chat.

Our quarrel certainly was made up. And he, good lad, paid off the inn-keeper. Having regained the outer byways we parted. For him the road homeward was not too taxing, for he had money for a horse well-shod against the ice, (though I could think it might cost him more in the horse’s motion and saddle under his own well-ridden rump.) I, however, must make my journey as best I could. Which, fortified with a snap of chicken and a pint of bitter ale, I did, slipping and sliding all the way under the blue jeer of a full moon. Three hours it took me. And what a weirded and awesome scene it was when reaching, through the outer lanes and ever more ramblous houses, the track that runs above the water-rill and the rough pastures, where bare trees stood with branches like cat claws, most being coppiced. This too is the rare world I look on from the back window of my hovel-room.

Once indoors, and very glad I was to be so, I climbed the doleful stairs and went in. Cold as a grave the bloody pesthole was, though I have paid the old brown hag who owns this tenement to light me a fire when the weather is inclement. Nevertheless, the work of minutes prepared and ignited a blaze. And then at least all took on a cheery look.

It was quiet in the house that night also, which is seldom the case. They are a queer parcel of citizens that dwell in the building, and where I have glimpsed them, (which, as in the matter of the landlady, brown as a withering leaf, is infrequent); they seem dressed in a diverse and Bedlam manner. So I have pondered, now and then, what they are at or do, to maintain body and soul as one.

I glanced once from the cracked window, and the ground was whiter far than both Mis’us Templeyard’s soft bubbies and her husband’s fine hard haunches. No friend to me, the winter earth, nor that frozen watercourse I musingly call the Nilus Stream.

My arm now ached where he had pinked me with the sword. But I have had much worse in my mature life, yes even from the accidents on a stage. And in childhood, as I have said, a millionfold worseness more.

The dog had not condescended to return, the faithless devil. The yellow bone lay where it was. And for my supper what? A heel of bread and a gulp of brackish wine. Thereon to bed, and might Hell fiddle for the rest of them.

Emenie:

57

Days passed quietly, and the leaves still hadn’t all come down. Clotted yellowish and dried-out, grey-green and brown, they stuck on the taller or smaller trees, as if glued there. It was unreasonably mild, as sometimes happened now. The year would turn its twelfth page in just under another month. But back When, this was how things would have looked in mid-October.

Micki remained in my bedroom, sitting in the chair.

She had firstly tightened up, but by now she had loosened.

Even I had to be aware of the growing stench.

Somehow, and this is absurd, I couldn’t bring myself to throw her out.

My initial plan was to gather her up and take her down to the canal in the depth of night when, mostly, nothing human is about. I could put her in an old canvas bag, (she would be easy to fold in the primal state to which she was reducing), and sling in too four or five empty wine bottles to give my cargo its clanking excuse, should anyone accost me. (The bottles would be useful, too, if I needed to stun somebody.)

But I never made this move. I simply left her sitting in the chair, with the cushion behind her head, while little pieces of her flaked off like petals, and some of her dark hair fell out on the floor.

I took to sleeping in the main room, on the couch, as she had.

I didn’t speak