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

Only then did I brace myself, and walk through into the bedroom.

I really would have to get rid of Micki’s corpse now. There was no longer a choice. Why had I delayed?

The light came on when I threw the switch. Because most lights now don’t work, they hadn’t even tried that. But it was a hundred watt blaze. Couldn’t miss a thing.

I couldn’t miss the squalor of the room, the untidy bed. I couldn’t miss the chair with the cushion fallen out of it to the floor. I couldn’t miss that she, Micki, was no longer in it. Micki—was gone.

What did I feel? A wave of utter panic. This was so illogical.

True, I hadn’t looked in on her this morning, but last night I had, one quick stare, and then the door shut to try to alleviate some of the stink.

How in Hell had she gone?

Where to?

Somebody must have broken in and… and what? Taken her up, rotten and disintegrating, got her through the whole flat and out again—all this without ever waking me. All this without any mess. As I say, she’d been falling apart. But now there was nothing at all. Not a single stain or flake, not even one dark hair lying on the ground.

Presently, I went back into the kitchen, shut the door and sat down. I drank some bottled water. I had to think.

There was a plate on the table with a single smear of jam on it. Pallid sunshine, through the high-up crack in the zipped curtain, hit the plate, and I could see the shape of a raspberry-coloured snake spitting out a ray of fire. What did it mean, this sign?

I judged it was about eleven o’clock. I got up and went out of the kitchen into the garden at the back, to get some more clean air.

A small plane was going over. They hardly ever do any more. It might not even be manned, a robot plane, senselessly spying on us all, with nobody left at Government HG to take notes.

I watched it blankly, breathing up the cold garden smell. Leaves and compost, foxes, winter.

When I looked down again I saw at once straight in among the bare trees. What was that?

Without any thought I went to the spot and stood there, gaping down at the mound of earth, with all the long grass and weeds ripped off, and seven or eight broken-up paving stones lying on top. The badgers had been digging there, or one had, but not made much headway. The stones were weighty. I knelt down and touched the soil. Still moist from turning. I had dreamed I had done this. Dreamed it. Had I sleep-walked out and somehow achieved my aim? I examined my clothes, my fingernails—but that was no indication, was it? I could always be clean and tidy, elegant even. What I might have done to get covered in soil and mulch and corpse-dust would all be gone.

Well then, I must have done the work. In the dead of night. Micki was down there now, under the earth and the stones. It was accomplished.

I turned and went back in, and so through the rooms again, and already the flat smelled quite fresh. Even the bedroom smelled only of its ordinary odour of faint must and damp.

Irvin:

68

Dogs are supposed loyal. Even wolves, when tamed, have sometimes been so accredited. They will die for you. Not so the faithless beast I have these past two years nurtured in my care, fed from my own plate, and vaunted, formerly, as a paragon.

For two weeks I have not seen the wretch, but am constantly told of his exploits, for good or ill. But yesterday comes the chandler to me to present a bill for a piece of cheese my dog had, so he swears, snatched from the stores. As luck has it, the chandler is a bone head who is enblissed by the theatre. And so I gave to him a free entrance to our current play, in Stampwell Street, off Cartwheel Lane. A rare piece of tomfoolery it is too, and no mistake, but he is glad, and I no longer forfeit for the cheese.

Then, this very afternoon, I am regaled by the carter, who is wont, under duress, to cart me to my work in London, by a tale of how my dog, last night, possessed five bitches in a row, and kept the folk of seven domiciles from their sleep throughout by the noise.

Said I, “No, not he. It was another cur.”

“It was your own, sir…” (He calls me sir as others have called me felon) “…that black rogue tall as a pony and with one red ear.”

What can I say? So he is. I shall be thrown from my lodgings in the old woman’s charnel-house at this rate.

At four o’clock to the theatre, through the slush of the great snow we had, and by six I am on the boards, trooping with the rest, and Merscilla Peck in the midst.

Thank God, she has gone back to favouring me, for there is such a scene in this play, (during which I seize her and act I have my way behind a curtain), at which otherwise I would burst, I have no doubts. But she and I regularly deal with this matter later, at an inn we know of.

Of all my charmers she is, I must acknowledge, the one most fires me up. Thank God too she is married, or I might have succumbed to the trap of wedlock. And I have slight doubt that herself as a wife, she would not smile upon my other adulteries, though ever permitting her own—as now, indeed she does, and her poor husband kept by her on a leash shorter than a cat’s spanker.

Meanwhile, I also pass the time now and then with Mr Templeyard, who has not yet tired of me, nor I, yet, of