Ivoria by Tanith Lee (uplifting novels .txt) 📕

“Yes. I did tell you that, didn’t I.”

“Nick! Don’t be so cold. It’s cruel to me. I only want to help you. I don’t want you to go. I don’t.”

She cries then, but only lightly, a little April shower of tears months too early.

Nick thinks back, pushing slowly into the recent past. He has vague memories of the whiteness of a hospital, and then a pastel room in the hospital. Of distant fuss, close pain and discomfort, and then just the niggling strangeness in his side which is never quite there, nor ever quite gone. He has dreams that the knife is still lodged in him, wriggling like a trapped fish in the outer edge of his left lung. He knows in the dreams he must not pull it free, because then it will stab him again of its own volition. On the other hand, it seems to be burrowing deeper, towards his heart perhaps. But apparently the wound had not been so serious. The lung had been drained, it repaired, was repairing, healing, something… And the shock, the flashbacks - none of which had or have made him able to recall what had happened. He remembers, over and over again, opening the door of the flat expecting a locksmith - and then there is a sort of dark red blank, inside which the silver knife-fish begins to wriggle in his side. He has not been helpful to the police, he cannot describe his attacker, nor say why he was attacked. His own thought, that the locksmith had attacked him, has been corrected by the police, however. The locksmith had, in fact, arriving soon after the ‘incident’, saved Nick’s life. The unknown, unrecollected (therefore unseen) man had staunched the blood, contacted the emergency services, vanished.

No one says if Nick’s door had been left open. After all, even if not, a locksmith would be able to open it. Just as the Drawer-man and Friendly, all the Number 14 Gang, had managed to do, so very simply. Frankly anyone seemed able to penetrate the flat. And the knife, of course, had been able to penetrate also the domicile of Nick’s body.

Who had done it? If the Number 14 people - why? Perhaps they had revised the idea of letting him off, even of buying his apartment on the cheap. He had said naturally nothing to the police about this.

Really, Nick does not care. He cares less and less.

He supposes, probably, he does not want to know who tried - either to kill - or only to harm him. Or their reason.

He does not want to remember. He is exhausted. He is bored to death with it all.

Nick is entirely aware he believed, during those moments of the red blank, that he was dead.

Had Laurence felt that, in the moments of the aneurysm? Laurence is cosily packed in the ground now, in that obscure place in West Sussex. Buried by Angela, since he had seemingly preferred internment to cremation - or had she only done it to spite him? Nick imagines lying under the earth, locked in there, rotting. This does not distress him, he thinks. But he would prefer fire. Clean ashes. And Laurence, so vain - would he not have preferred that too?

Serena has gone into the kitchen and he can hear her making coffee. She drinks coffee all day long and eats only in the evening. Nick shuts his eyes and sleeps, and sees himself, from high above in the fifteen foot space below his own flat’s ceiling, undoing his door. Kit-Kitty stands outside, and she knifes him, but with a pin. A Roman one, bearing the head of a woman, and about two thousand years old.

Nick is often indirectly yet insistently reminded that he has been tended, intimately handled, while unconscious.

The locksmith, the ambulance crew - doctors - surgeon - mechanical and human observers: the endless touching and monitoring and moving of him about. Even the draining procedure, (which also penetrated his side.)

All this attention, carried on while he was, presumably, quite unaware of it, unable either to protest or assist, completely eclipses what the attacker had done. Nick’s attacker only knifed him.

An almost impersonal act, decorously carried out while the victim was fully clothed.

He knows this is an insane reaction.

But it persists.

The noise of the coffee-making, rustling, grinding, bubbling, producing, aggravates his nerves. He counts how many mugs of coffee she makes herself. Approximately she consumes six or seven in the mornings, four or five in the afternoons. At six o’clock she resorts to dry white wine, or geneva with ice. They eat between seven and nine. She feeds Nick throughout the day, regardless of her own strict regime. But food bores, tires him as well. He hates, he finds, eating a sandwich, or the bread and cheese, with Serena foodlessly prowling about, mug in hand.

He has begun to notice she faintly smells of coffee, under her expensive scent.

All her care of him, (even, at first, she had once or twice had to help him walk to the lavatory) has been tender, solicitous. She has only recently started to chide him a little about his apathy. In the night, at the beginning, lying awake as now he often does, as if he slept too long before in that fakery of death, and must make up the time - he had then seen her creep into his room to check on him. Pretending to sleep, he outwitted her. She left him undisturbed.

Nick associates this, indeed all her kindnesses, (if they are) with his childhood, when she had hugged him one minute, railed against or slapped him the next. When she had been in league with Laurence against him. When, less than two months ago, she had told him Laurence and she knew Nick was a male whore.

He has other dreams. He dreams a lot about Christmas decorations and Christmas trees. Perhaps they are those he had glimpsed in the vast geography of the hospital. One evening