To Indigo by Tanith Lee (read along books txt) 📕

“And – what…?” I stopped. “It may not be necessary, but if…”

“A few little impacts,” he said softly. “A little breakage, perhaps. Whatever you prefer. Nothing too serious. Enough to show the error of the way.”

A lurch of nausea in my gut.

I evaded contact with his eyes.

“But if it doesn’t come to that?”

“Then I will wish you a happy life, Mr Phillips. And you will be one thousand pounds the richer.”

Perhaps I had incriminated myself enough he would now let me off.

He had seemed to be right handed, but he reached over and took my own right hand with his left. I stiffened in alarm, but he was scribbling something across my palm in black biro. He let me go and I looked down at it. A mobile number.

“You will have to call me in the next few weeks. After that the mobile will have been stolen, or before that, should you do something else, such as tell another. In fact, Mr Phillips, I do advise you not to tell anyone. For your own sake.” More familiar, this. More like one of my own characters. But Christ. What had he done to Tish?

“It’s not in my interest to say anything,” I said. “Thank you,” I added lamely.

“It has been a pleasure to meet you,” said Cart. He rose and turned at once, glass in hand. He walked straight past the bar and into the snooker room. He had ugly black shoes, hand-stitched. Brown Shirt, he of the Bond-Flemingesque name, had already vanished.

Duran phoned me the next morning.

He said, “Hi, Roy, how are you doing? She said like you might need some extra security at your place. Glad to hear you’ve come round to it, mate. We live in interesting times.”

“Aren’t you in Bristol?”

“No, mate. I’m on the train for London. I can fit you in 2nd of May.”

“I’m not sure what’s needed.”

“Leave it to Uncle Duran. We got lots of packages,” he added, unnerving me utterly. “You there, Roy?”

“Yes. Look, I’ll call you later this week, early next, OK?”

“OK, mate. See you.”

I spent the last days of April in the ordinary way. That Thursday Franziska came and scoured through the house. She commented the kitchen was much cleaner than usual. She gave me a haughty, slightly venomous look when she said it. Hours later it came to me she perhaps thought I now had a girlfriend, some aged person like myself, and this ridiculous female had cleaned the sink and surfaces.

Franziska too made a comment on the piano in the front room.

“Should polish this,” she hectored me. “Have you polish?”

“No, I’m afraid not.”

“Not,” she severely said, “spray. Will ruin the wood. And leave the lid up.”

“The lid?” This was unlike the lavatories, where she always insisted lids should be left closed, which apparently was benign Feng Sui.

“Let ivories breathe.”

I was taken both by the old-fashioned English expression ‘ivories’ for keys, and the formula of allowing them oxygen. Maureen had said that, and the piano in the doll flat over the Co-op was always left with the lid raised. Though things were sometimes untidy and dusty there, the kitchen and bathroom were always clean, and the piano dusted, though never, I think, polished.

When Franziska had gone, I sat on the paving at the back in the deck chair, drinking tea. It was a warm afternoon, the leaves unfurling fast on neighbouring trees and trellises.

The fir stood dark and unexceptional.

I thought, I shan’t see him again.

I hadn’t seen her, my Maureen, since that night of our parting those years ago.

Like most of us, after a deep but not crippling blow, I just got on with my life. I told myself it was the regular sex I missed, which was true yet not the whole picture. Months after I found myself down that way, and looking up saw different curtains in her windows. She’d been faithful to her word. She must have married her new old lover and gone elsewhere.

The following year I met Lynda Boyle at a rather flabby disco in Lewisham.

She was totally unlike Maureen. To begin with Lynda was over one year my junior. Thin, and with long limp mousy hair, she danced badly, and wore big glasses and a skimpy dress that did her few favours.

I was at the bar, with Danny Collins oddly, the confrere from the library I’d been with that night I met Maureen.

We’d secured our drinks, and were looking round at any talent, when Lynda came up and began trying to get the barman’s attention.

Lynda was short, five foot three in her heels. No one took any notice of her, except Danny and me.

“Stupid bird,” he said. He leaned across and shouted in her ear over the raucous music, “Wave a note at him, luv. He’ll see that.”

And she said, “I haven’t got a note. It’s all coins.”

Then Danny said, “Hang on, I’ll do it.”

And he bawled at the barman, and the barman came and Lynda got her round of drinks for herself and her two friends.

“What a shower,” said Danny. “Look at them.”

One girl was fat and one thin like Lynda.

They huddled to one side, and sometimes went out on the floor together to gyrate to the music. But they moved like creatures whose bones have been unhinged.

There was a girl that night, I can’t recall her name. She had jet-black dyed hair and she’d danced with me several times. She was one inch taller, but had taken off her shoes on realizing. Then she was one inch shorter.

Afterwards I figured it out that she was only trying to make her male escort jealous. This finally worked; he came over and shoved me aside so hard I nearly fell, lugging her off shoeless and raven-locked into the night.

Disconsolate I went out and it was raining. Danny had to catch the train, but Lynda Boyle was standing weeping under the neon sign.

“What’s the matter?” I said.

She raised her raining eyes to me. No glasses now. “Someone trod on them,”