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

One morning, I took one of my rambles round the entire house. I went into the empty rooms, and ran the taps in the two upstairs bathrooms. Flushed the lavs. The water ran, but looked a bit dark. Sometimes it doesn’t run at all.

In the attic there was an old pigeon agglomerate—a sort of nest, but now vacated, with just a few white splashes and baby feathers left. I admire their tenacity, the pigeons. You get gulls sometimes, from the Thames, or even the sea, God knows. Probably the whole countryside has run to rank seed and is full of fat overfed bugs and worms. Plenty to eat out there, and in the city too.

In the afternoon, I wondered what Wales was like, now. Couldn’t think why I’d started on that, and then recalled how she, (Micki), told me he, (Bruvva of Sy), had gone off there. Certainly he hadn’t turned up here again. Perhaps the Celtic Picts of the west had done for him.

That evening I began to feel defensive. I do sometimes. There doesn’t always have to be a direct reason.

I blacked out the back and side windows with the thick curtains I long ago put up there but hardly ever draw. Each pair has a central zip, and this cuts out almost all vestige of my low wattage bulbs.

It occurred to me I hadn’t gone out for days. I still had plenty of supplies, but it’s never wise to let it go too long. There would be a dearth of certain things quite often. And always the inevitable idea that in the end nothing at all would persist on the shelves. It was a miracle, even with the reduced contemporary population, things had lasted this long. There was always possible vandalism, too. Some furious loony might burn down the leftovers of the Co-op, or Marks and Spencer’s, or the entire High Street, (they had done for the cinema ages back), or else truly manage to poison every can, bottle and package in the freezers.

No, I would have to make a decision on Micki. I would have to put her in the bag and carry her out and dump her in the canal, although right now the water was rather low… there had been little rain for months. But anyway, not tonight. No. Not tonight. It was chillier, frosty perhaps, the stars were up and watching like bright hard eyes on wires.

58

At some point near dawn I dreamed I took the corpse into the back garden, and in among the trees. I had a sturdy spade and dug a grave for her and put her in. When I’d filled up the grave with earth again I lugged along some paving stones and laid them over. They should be heavy enough to keep the badgers and foxes out. In the dream this was straightforward.

As soon as I woke up I lay there on the couch, smelling, tasting the stink from the bedroom, and asking myself if this was indeed a workable plan. Of course it would be a tougher job than in the dream. Aside from anything else I’d have to smash through tree roots and generally clear the ground a bit, even before I could properly start. I would have to find any paving, too, (or other heavy materials—big stones, rocks—perhaps from a garden centre like the one there had been nearer the outskirts of the inner city, if it still existed. And that was a two hour walk, and the same back.) Anything like that around the houses here was worn and broken up too small.

Finally I got out of bed, and precisely then was when somebody began thundering blows on the front door.

59

I knew who it would be. It had to be. It was.

But behind him was another man, a little younger, and in a ruinous old uniform—police, army, it was difficult to tell, it was so torn and filthy and had gone a sort of brassy mothball colour.

As with the first time Bruvva and I ‘met’, I’d gone to bed the night before fully clothed. And as I’ve said, I never look a mess. Clean, combed and tidy. And today about twenty-four. Just something I can do.

I didn’t greet him politely. He had been potentially violent before, and only Micki had kept him off. She would have said to him as well, obedient child as she was, that I didn’t want him there again.

“I bin in Wales,” he told me grimly, as if it was my fault.

I said nothing.

He shook his greasy scabby locks at me. He had the faint remnant of a black left eye.

“I bin there and I come back and she ain’t around. She told this old cow wot lives in the shed there that she’s going to see you. An’ then she din come back. Just like Sy.”

I said nothing.

And now the uniformed side-kick spoke up.

“We understand,” he said, “she come here.”

“Do you,” I said. “Well she didn’t.”

“She’s fuckin’ lying!” judged Bruvva.

Uniform scratched his crotch, not menacing just cooty.

He concentrated while he did this, a combined expression of anger at the itch and enjoyment of the scratch making him go very nearly wall-eyed. Then: “We need to come in.” He added, surprisingly, “Madam.”

Nonplussed, what could I do? I said, “No, I don’t want that,” and I was already trying to shut the door—which I’d only opened because otherwise they could have smashed it down, and still could—and Bruvva caught the door and wrenched it from me, crashing it back against the wall.

He next charged directly past me, making a growling sound, and the other one pelted after him.

I thought, very clearly, and actually in words, I must run now. Leave everything—just get out…

But I couldn’t make myself. I couldn’t do it. So instead I turned and followed them into my main room through the door in the hall.

The smell was already appalling there. Having breathed