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

I had been involved in a duel, so he had heard it. (One’s business is never secret, I find.)

I informed him I had only been pinked. He rolled up now the left sleeve of my bed shirt to examine the wound, which had healed well enough. But I was startled, even in my fobbled state, to note black marks in the skin below.

“Now this is not good,” he said, with interest.

“What then is it?”

“I’m not of a certainty yet, sir, but will tell you when able. I must consult my books.”

After which, having extracted the initial coins of payment, (that came to him far less readily than my life’s blood), he left me in my misery.

Then a black tide swam in on me, and somewhere in the midst of it I heard myself declare, aloud, I was a fool indeed. For surely I could now reason things out? Little Sophia, with her own white hand, had made sure of me during our last sad merrymaking. She had thrust into my arm a pin, then licked off and swallowed what was on the stalk of it. So attending to both of us, she swiftly and myself at a much slower pace. Sophia Templeyard had poisoned me.

Dawn:

92

I haven’t been to the Co-op yet. I don’t feel that well.

I went to the doctor instead for the routine visit they demand every year. He examined me, which I don’t like. They are so matter-of-fact now, as if you’re a sack of potatoes.

“Weight still fine,” he congratulated me, having insisted I stand on the scales, “nice and thin. Plenty of young girls would be thrilled to be your weight, Mrs Thorstrestis.” (They can never pronounce my name. And sometimes he forgets it and calls me ‘Dawn’.) He took my blood pressure and said it was a little low, nothing serious, and much better than being too high. “We got you onto those statins just in time,” he now congratulated himself. I have never confessed I don’t ever take them. All these pills. What do they do to you, aside from what they’re supposed to? I remember Susie… or was it Jean…? She took something or other the doctors gave her and it cleared up the original condition, whatever that was, and gave her some other illness. Well, I don’t want any of that. My response to his offer of a ‘flu jab can be guessed.

In the end he smiled at me benignly.

“But you don’t seem quite to be in the pink, do you, Dawn?” This is an old fashioned phrase. Did he use it to patronise me?

“No,” I said.

“Well, we have to remember,” he reminded me, “you are seventy-four now. Not quite a girl. You need to take things more easily, get a bit more exercise, take an interest in something—voluntary work, perhaps.”

I smiled gratefully, and I was allowed to escape, empty-handed. Rest more, exercise more, eat five portions of fruit and vegetables each day to make sure your stomach is nicely upset all the time. What is the matter with them?

I’m just depressed, probably. I was thinking a lot about Ben. He died thirty years ago, about this time of year. It feels awful to say this, but I can’t remember the exact day. I always used to mark it, back then, whenever Then was, then.

He had bronchitis very badly, and it killed him—a systemic breakdown they called it. You don’t hear of bronchitis doing that so much now. There are other more popular things now that kill you.

I came up all the stairs and got into my flat, at the very top of the house. It’s in the attic, or where the attic was before we got the loft extension. There was a pigeon sitting on the skylight, but it flew away as soon as I arrived. Sometimes, if you keep really still, a lot of them settle there. They make a mess, and no window-cleaner any more to clean the glass, only the rain. But I like them. I like pigeons.

There’s nobody else in the house now, of course. I had it all made over after I lost Ben, and let the rooms as flats, but in the end they made such a mess, the tenants, much worse than the pigeons, breaking things, and their children writing on the walls, and all the noise, sometimes until two or three in the morning, and when I asked if they could be quieter they were rude and then they left. Ran off without paying the rent. So in the end I just let it go and didn’t let to anybody else. I live on my pension, which isn’t much, and the insurance on Ben that comes from Ben’s old workplace at the Parnassus Showrooms. Not very much, any of it. I don’t think I could afford five portions of fruit and veg a day, even if I wanted to.

I suppose I’ll have the last of the casserole tonight. I’ve made it last four days. It’s almost six o’clock. Shall I have a sherry? That might be nice. And I can manage until next week, for shopping. There’s bread in the freezer, and some cheese and soup in the fridge. I’m low on tea-bags, but I can use each one twice. No milk left. Oh well.

Nothing on the radio later but jazz or pop, or something about computers. They go wrong all the time, it seems. Just as people do.

Shall I have that sherry?

I just feel so tired. I think I’ll have a rest first in the chair. That’s better. Just a doze by the electric fire until maybe seven. I’ll fancy the sherry then. I can have cheese on toast. Yes.

93

I was back in my youth, but not really the age I was at the time. In the dream I was about twenty, but it was the war.

Outside the flat I could hear the sirens with that awful, frightening whining and gurning they used to do.