Ivoria by Tanith Lee (uplifting novels .txt) 📕

I’m sure I did - in with the books and notepads. It was very small, squarish, yellow-whitish. Probably plastic. I don’t know, wouldn’t know the difference. I told Laurence he shouldn’t touch it, it was cursed, some black guy had told me it was, and someone I was with took it off him and then found out her mother had just died. So I relieved her of it and brought it to the flat. Absurd and idiotic. I don’t know why I said it.”

“Most of us say things sometimes we don’t know why we did. But there generally is a reason buried somewhere.”

“Yes.”

“As I recall, there was nothing unusual found with Mr Lewis’s body, nor in his car or bags. But then, something so small, perhaps nobody thought it worth mentioning.”

The French girl slaps the face of her lover. She calls him a green pig. A drum beats.

Pond is saying, (having said) “One further point I feel I might put to you. Why this Kitty first contacted you, sir. I believe your brother may have spoken about you to her.”

“He wouldn’t,” Nick says again on the inner soundtrack. “He had no interest in me.”

Pond did not, does not react. He only says, “Sometimes we do mention people we scarcely ever think of even. It’s like what we were speaking of before. Those things we say but have no idea why we did so. I think he may have mentioned you. Or else, perhaps, prior to their weekend, she looked at some personality bio of your brother, and saw you mentioned there. You’ve had some stories published after all.”

“Very few.”

“Enough your name can be found, by anyone meaning to find you out.” Presumably Pond had also been one such. “And then too, sir, as you yourself pointed out to me, your telephone number and address are in the London directory. There for all to find.”

“Along with a hundred other N. Lewises.”

“We have established, I’d say, the lady is quite dedicated. She probably rang them all.”

“But she knew I’m in the escort business. I don’t advertise.”

And Pond had said and now says again, “Your brother didn’t know?”

“No. He didn’t.” (But now Nick is aware Laurence had. He did.)

“Then that piece of information came, as you suspected and indeed Kit-Kitty claimed, from your friend, even though said friend denies it.”

The French girl is leaning dangerously far out of the window. Beyond her the roofs of Paris, always good for a panning shot. She is throwing more things into the street. Her lover’s shoes now, a book he has been reading, (Nick thinks of June in Number 14, shoving the drawer out in the lobby). She is screaming, still beautiful, still in exquisite Parisian French, “Green pig! You fuck the moon - go fuck the moon, you green pig!” (Nick thinks his next to nonexistent French is letting him down badly, mistranslating. Of course, in the other meaning of ‘French’ he is well-versed and quite effective. If not according to Kit. But that, and she, are now irrelevant.) Even if she murdered Laurence.

The interior soundtrack has stopped.

Laurence had taught Nick to read.

Nick thinks this is a lie. Serena lied. She lied and spent a lot of money on a great meal, so she could bound out from the thickets and tell Nick Laurence and she had always known he was a whore.

He can imagine what they have said about it. They have said exactly that.

Laurence. Who taught him to read.

And the rabbits. And foxes, (whose cousins later ate Laurence). And loved. Laurence loved him.

And Laurence is rotting in a closed coffin.

And the credits are coming up. The movie is over. It is nearly twenty to two.

In Nick’s head a new voice speaks. Just one word. Impert-iv, it says. What in God’s name is that? Imperative? Where does that come from?

He does not know. Unimportant.

15

Endlessly the cab driver preaches to Nick, the glass partition opened to its fullest so Nick cannot fail to hear the pearls of wisdom. There is no music, or radio bulletin. Only the preacher’s tireless voice, wide awake because he has to be, and Nick his unwilling confidant.

“Sure I’d send them back. If they don’t like it here, what are they doing here? Taking our work, that’s what. Half of them wanting to bleeding kill us all - ‘scuse my French…” (French again), “but what’s it all about? Layabouts. Terrorists. God knows, you see this bod with a tea towel round his head and a beard down to his socks, and he says I’m British. I tell you what, I don’t like them but I can see where they’re at, the BNP. You can understand it, can’t you, can’t get a job or you get fired and no proper benefit and then this Pole or Darkie - ‘scuse my French - he gets the lo…”

Nick makes no attempt either to remonstrate or to placate. Nick is so exhausted now he feels he will never sleep, but will walk in circles round the main room of his flat, under the moon window (fuck the moon, ‘scuse my French) and even lose consciousness while he does so, but go on walking…

“So I says to this girl, and believe me she can hardly speak this English she claims she is…”

The driver does not anyway need a reaction. Only a body in the back.

If Laurence were sitting propped here, dead and decomposing, (he had been discomposed when he left Kit, decomposition was to follow) the driver would still harangue him. A speechless, (and presumably white English) passenger automatically provides the correct tribal affiliation. Dead is OK. Only foreign is not.

“So I had to laugh…”

“Drop me here, that’s fine,” says Nick. They are on the corner of the cul-de-sac. He pays the cab driver. The man seems quite ordinary, not unpleasant, now he is only taking the note.

“Keep the change.” Why? Oh, maybe it will change him…

“Thanks, mate. Good luck.”

Change him. Change. Changes.

Nick glances up inadvertently at the eight-sided window, and a gleam