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

I gave a quick glance, I admit, to the door of the flat across from me, but so far there was no reaction.

“Oh God,” said Forrel, floundering, and falling on my sofa as if he lived here and had done this a thousand times. “Oh God—Rod—it’s that fucking girl.”

“Oh dear.” I asked him if he would like a coffee. He assured me he had drunk a whole bottle of vodka on the train, hiding it from the guard, and now could only face the same kind of drink. But too aware this was not a sane plan, I poured him a small one, and made sure a plastic bowl was ready in the kitchen, should he repeat the indigestion attack I’d witnessed in Soho.

Then I sat down, as he insisted I must, and he began again on Forrel’s Lament. It was substantially the same, tedious through repetition, if ornamented now with extra flights of fancy, such as leaping from the top of our five storey workplace, or stripping himself naked and lying across the doorway of the room to which, it seemed, the girl with blue eyes and manmade breasts had twice taken him. I wondered if she had charged him the hundred-fifty she had offered me as her going rate. Less, due to his youth? More due ditto? It was impossible to try to follow his raving, not to say exhausting. If I had ever been prey to such passions, could I have been more sympathetic? How can I know? The curse-blessing of sexual love has never overtaken me. Or, more likely, I have never been fleet enough to catch up with it.

Surreptitiously, as he went on, I made out my weekend shopping list, which must include the Co-op, and the light shop for some bulbs. This didn’t trouble Forrel. When he was ready he went off to my bathroom, “for a dump,” and coming back refilled his glass to the top. Prudently, I added vodka to my list.

We reached nine-thirty, the time at which I’d meant to leave. In a pause I said, “I’m afraid I have to go out—shops, you know.”

“Oh, you go, Rod. That’s OK. I’ll be fine. Catch a bit of kip here.”

My leaden heart sank into my boots of clay.

64

George was on the landing. He wore a baggy suit, a somehow baggier tie, and an ancient, ancient overcoat. Vanessa was right behind him in her fake-fur jacket.

“Just about to knock,” said George. “We’re off to the local Co-op.”

Hemmed in on all sides, I stood at a loss. And then behind me, Forrel opened my door, and smiled blearily out upon us all. He was by now in his shirt-sleeves, his hair ruffled.

“Well,” said Vanessa, with cool majesty. “What have I always said, Roderick? Why would you never be honest about this? You are gay. Here is the proof.”

And George looked at me with a quizzical, gentle amusement. “Why not, old lad. Each to their own.”

And “Gay,” repeated Vanessa, holding out her hand to the swaying Forrel who, swaying, shook it. “How good to meet you, at last.”

Klova:

65

So I have put on again that special dress I bought, when next I went to the Tower and met Coal the first.

Before, I bathed under the spume, and scented me. And my hair in the hair-washer, and tinted extra black.

The dress is gold, with pink like glass rain all over. And fringes of goldenness and pink. The shoes are like the dress. And the hold-ups with pink roses.

I made up my face, the best I ever did.

And last of all I put on the lipstick that has C.P. marked on it. Like as my mother. If she was, and not one more lie.

66

He said to me I was a peculio.

I was Weirdness, and so weird things happen round me. And he wouldn’t be one of them.

This is Coal. After we met the ghost in the rooms above. How could I argue? It must be true.

My eyes cried, but I didn’t cry. I wasn’t there, just somewhere in another room inside my head, looking out a window smeared with the rain of my wet tears.

He said, “Don’t do that. It won’t do any good. Take care, Klova. Have a fine life.”

When he had gone I went and sat on the bed where we had had carnal. I didn’t know where I was.

I was nowhere.

No sounds upstairs.

No stink from downstairs.

I am in nowhere and I do not exist.

So it will be easy. I’m all ready now. Like as I have done my best, and then the bank-nanny can distribute the last of my shots to other people who will need them. And no one will remember or think of me.

I will be wiped away, like the lipstick.

The lovely lipstick, which I kiss goodbye, and leave standing upright by the bed, its gold case with the two letters C.P. and the deep pink bud of its being.

The lipstick will be the last thing I see.

My friend. Bye-bye, as they said it in the Centre. Bye-di-bye-byes.

Love. And let go.

Emenie:

67

They performed a cursory search of the rest of the flat—the kitchen, loo and bathroom, the inner hall—very dark, of course, and they missed the cellar door. They seemed disinclined to go upstairs, and look elsewhere. Perhaps they thought other people lived up there who might object.

“No use,” said Bruvva soon enough. “Useless.” He glowered at me again. Again it was all my fault they hadn’t found her.

The ridiculous thing was it was their own. Bruvva must be blind (had the black eye affected his vision?). And both of them lacking all sense of smell.

It was less than ten more minutes before they shambled out. The Uniform with a particularly incongruous “Thank you then, madam.” And Bruvva with a glare and a mutter, “If she don’t show, I’ll be back.”

I shut the front door, and then dragged one or two bits portable enough to lift or pull,