Ivoria by Tanith Lee (uplifting novels .txt) 📕

with his legs pulled up close to his body, watching the soundless TV. All these soundless scenes and voiceless people appearing on it.

He had not even got up to close the flat’s main door. Why bother? That was over now.

Nick will need to start packing today, later, sometime. Even if they do not choose to ‘see to him’ he does not expect they will give him much of a margin to clear out.

There are other apartments.

He can stay a night or two in a hotel if he has to. Or something.

Has he thought of calling Pond? Maybe, but again, why? Pond has let him down. Pond did not predict let alone discover that the gang - or whatever the hell they are - from Number 14 would come back. In any case Pond is himself now becoming increasingly dubious again. On both his visits here he had, unaided by Nick, got through the downstairs lobby entrance. As indeed he purportedly had at Kit’s Wimbledon block. Surely that cannot all have been managed by other handy occupants admitting him. Pond is an enigma.

“Enigma,” Nick says softly aloud. But something breaks the spell.

Abruptly he swings off the couch and stands up. His ear no longer burrs from Friendly’s blow, though there is a slight, headache, oddly on the opposite side of Nick’s forehead.

Nick for a few seconds feels disorientated. He seems to be too tall, balanced above a floor some quarter of a mile below. But this effect goes off. Then he walks to the main door and shuts it. With the keys he had dropped on the couch he relocks the door.

He walks across and picks up the two empty and one part full bottle from the table, where they have stood, one in a clear pool of spilt vodka, and two in sticky amber pools of Casey’s Orange Dry. He dumps the empties in the kitchen bin for glass. Then he collects with paper towels the cheese rinds and apple peel and cores, (some neatly cut out for the benefit it would seem of false teeth) and bins them too. Then he fetches their glasses. He tips Friendly’s copious leftovers down the sink – shaved-head and the drawer-man had finished theirs. Then he finds he dumps the three glasses too, and the apple knife, in the bin. He has a drink of tap water, which tastes of chlorine and metal.

When he comes back again from the kitchen he turns off the TV.

What next?

Oh yes, of course.

Nick takes another all-purpose knife from the kitchen and goes up the stair to the loft bedroom. He switches on the uplighter and kneels by the window.

Outside, seen through this smaller pane, vehicles now and then whizz along the open U. Two cars are parked inside the U, neither the one he saw previously with the man in it on the phone.

Nick uses the knife to separate and lever, then tears free the edge of carpet. The glue had put up only a token resistance.

The Roman pin lies there, visible even through the tissue. Nick removes the pin.

What he plans to do with it he has no idea, but then right now he has no real plans for anything. And most of it is out of his hands.

He does not want to sleep.

He stands, bending to accommodate the sloping ceiling of the room, and watches the uneventful street.

He thinks of Pond’s comment on coincidence, how strange it is, making patterns that imply so much yet mean nothing at all; certainly something like that seems to have happened. The ivory which was not, only an inferior decoration from a handle, and Nick’s invented tale of blights and banes - but then the rest, as if the ivory had really been ivory, and operated in just that way. The mad girl Kitty, and Laurence dying like Claudia, but alone in the wild park, and the retributive gang with their obscure ‘racket’ - what was that? Gambling? Drugs? Trafficking? Christ knew. Why had they not merely killed him? Surely that would have been much tidier. Or maybe not, who could tell? But Nick has lost the flat. The window. Everything else had, despite momentary illusion, been already lost.

Nick looks round the bedroom. He can leave all of it, can he? Yes. Take the clothes, toiletries, a few books, CDs, DVDs, his own stories, and the latest one in the plundered notepad. Travel light. He could travel - that might be good. He has been nowhere for years. Re-visit the States, Paris, Holland, Italy…

But the limitless glory of the vista tires him. He closes it down. And anyway, what about the women he sees? Just leave them in the lurch? They could find other men, obviously, other escorts. But he is quite fond of them, and most deserve consideration and courtesy, even Sonia perhaps, who presumably was not indiscreet; but not Jazz, who may have meant to but did not sign off, only vanished into thin air as if – dissatisfied with Nick, in the same way loony Kitty had outlined.

Well, he will not be going quite yet. He can decide what to do. There is still money even if, with the new exciting financial chaos that seems to be looming worldwide, it may be worth a bit less next year. But that, anyway, is next year.

Suddenly Nick does want to sleep.

He sits, then lies down on the bed. A surge of oblivion comes rushing at him, terrifying in its blatant intent to mow him down. It is like - death. Like death, he thinks, and fights it away. But death could never be like that. So he relapses, and the surge recurs more quietly, as if seeing now it must woo not assault. And - and.

The buzzer from the lobby door wakes him. Then, opening his eyes the uplighter, left on, blinds him.

Nick staggers up, his body ahead of his mind or soul. While they belatedly leap from the bed behind him and try to take possession