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

putting down the other bag, the holdall, which he had also somehow relieved me of in our brief non-fracas.

My front door too was shut. Outside my mobile was lying, maybe useless or not, on the path. But things get thrown on to the front gardens sometimes. There was even once, I’d heard, a whole box of uneaten pizza found floating in the pond at No 82.

“Well then,” said Sej. “Let’s see about that knee of yours. Then we’ll have some tea.”

Naturally I didn’t allow him to touch the graze. I saw to it myself in the bathroom, which he permitted. I had to conclude he had permitted it, even to my locking the bathroom door. But he could break it in anyway, I was fairly certain of that.

I sat on the closed seat of the lavatory and stared in despair at the two bags I’d insisted on bringing up with me – which again, I’d been permitted to do.

I made another mental itinerary.

My bedroom door was locked, (he must have got copies of the front door keys by taking an impression from the locks, so might anyway have a copy of this key too). But the bedroom door now was glued shut. Study, library, front room, kitchen, lavatory and bathroom were potentially open wide.

There was very little food in the house and no phone. Apart I assumed from his own mobile, which he would still have.

Was shampoo in the ginger ale or sink cleaner on the chicken still an option? He’d be watching out now. Doubly cautious.

And there was the strong impression he might like me to ‘try something’. A challenge, like some move in a game of which I didn’t know the rules.

God, what could I do?

He let me take my time up there.

When I came out. I’d removed the disc of Untitled and also my most important documents, and shoved them in the inside pockets of my jacket. He’d see, or suspect these stiffened shapes probably, but at least this way I could run if I ever got a chance. If he took them off me, I still could. Why hadn’t I already? I had had the chance. Not taken it.

Did that godforsaken novel mean so much? Vilmos – Vilmos and that invented City and all that infantile quasi-gothic rubbish, a stale brain’s attempt to sparkle.

Tidily he had cleared the chairs and other things from the hall. The armchair had been lugged back into the front room and to its accustomed place, marked ready by the imprint of its legs in the carpet. When I re-entered the kitchen I saw he’d brought in the steps from outside. As in my macabre premonition, he was sitting at the table, drinking tea.

“I made a pot.”

I sat down and looked at him.

“You look tired,” he said.

“I am, Sej. Why are you doing this?”

“You keep asking. I keep telling. You don’t seem to absorb it.”

“No.”

“I like you. You interest me.”

“Do you understand what you’re doing?”

He smiled. “Perfectly.”

He poured out tea; we both were to have milk. And neither of us took sugar, it seemed.

“Have you put,” I said, “something in the tea?”

“That’s your sort of trick.”

My mind reassembled suddenly. “Apart from the whisky,” I said.

He looked at me. For the first time, like a villain in 1940s Film Noir, he raised one long, black eyebrow only.

“Sorry?”

“I had a whisky last night and I slept – in a way I don’t usually sleep. Actually, Sej, I’d like to know what it was. That was probably the best night’s sleep I’ve had for about fifteen years.”

And then he grinned, as he had when he played the piano like a young contemporary Liszt.

“I think I understand. It wasn’t in the whisky, Roy. It was in the glass.”

“Not the whisky glasses in the front room. I’d used them.”

“No. It was a chunky glass in your kitchen cupboard. You could have put anything in it – water, Coke, take your pick.”

“A glass. How?”

“I broke the tablet. It’s Rohypnol, by the way. I dissolved some of it and wiped it round the bottom of the glass. Put it back on the shelf, to the front.”

“So it could have happened any time.”

“Truly. I wondered why you didn’t come down, when I was playing you the Gershwin, and that Chabrier piece. The Chabrier was his last composition. Sheer fireworks.”

I said, “Yes, I half heard it. Sounded as if you had three hands.”

A look of radiant pleasure went over his face.

He said, “There are times, Roy, I love you. I wish you were my father.”

I took a breath. I hadn’t tried the tea.

Gently I said, “Am I? Tell me the truth.”

“As I’ve said before, what do you think?”

“I think I am not your father.”

He shrugged.

“Then tell me,” I said, “the name of your mother.”

I was calm as a piece of wood. Maybe it was shock. Now he had trapped me entirely. I was letting go all I had ever been. I had to become some other person – or some intrinsic Roy. A kind of non-effusive passion was stirring in me. I can’t explain it. No doubt I was temporarily, and with some reason, mad.

“My mother’s name.” He looked at the table. “Let me think.”

“You wouldn’t have to think.”

“Oh, Roy. I would. I grew up, if you can call it that, in an orphanage. Then I was fostered. I can’t recall quite when, but after I was eighteen someone showed me some clandestine paperwork. And her name was on it. But I didn’t want to know.”

Stunned I sat there. Through my mind, irrepressibly, went an image of Maureen, abandoning her child so her well-off old man wouldn’t get angry. Had she done that?

“It’s important,” I said. “At least, curiously enough, to me.”

And I wondered at myself for I seemed now to be two men. One knew this situation for what it was. The other – the other, less than play along, had become engaged. But this other me also, he had his own agenda, to which I wasn’t sure I