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

by. I assumed she was probably waiting for someone, but somehow it didn’t quite seem like that. Looking out for someone, then. She seemed edgy, nervous and suspicious, less of the casual passer-by—me—than of the area. She was like a girl from a spy film, waiting to meet up with the dodgy contact she had been sent to find, who would help her, or harm her, depending how the script panned out.

When I crossed over to the house with the flats, I caught the flash of her pale face in the streetlight, turning to see where I went. And as I put the key in the lock, I looked back. She was staring by then, yet when I turned she did too, and hurried away up the street. Unsettling, a bit. But people do weird things now. No doubt, they always have.

I rent the right-hand north side flat on the second floor. I put the light on in the downstairs hall and went straight up the stairs to it.

The landlady has the ground floor apartment. We don’t really have dealings. I got the place through an agent, bought it over five years, it being so cheap, paying my dues every month through the bank by direct debit. I’ve only glimpsed her a couple of times. At least I assume it was her. She’s in her fifties, nothing startling, a bit of a recluse perhaps. I have to say, there’s sometimes a bit of a bad smell down there, the ground floor that is. Very faint, but not appealing. It comes and goes. Drains, I reckon.

My flat is small, two rooms, bathroom and kitchen. I generally clean it over on Sunday mornings, it never takes long. There’s nothing special or ‘graphically amazing’, as Forrel might say, in any of the rooms. White walls and some mirrors, the ordinary blue curtains and carpets that were already here. The electric kettle is mine, like the few books, and the clothes in the wardrobe. The main room and the bedroom have electric fires as well as individual central heating. The cooker’s gas.

The rear-view, though, as I’ve tried to tell Vanessa, isn’t bad. There are the couple of streets that slope down, and then the tow-path and the canal, and over the other side is the common, with its trees and, framed now on blackest night, the three diamante-windowed fifteen-storey blocks of flats that rule over Parnassus Avenue.

I’d missed the sunset. But despite the clemency of the day, the sun had gone out in cloud not far outside Brighton. There wouldn’t have been much to see.

Before I switched on the lamp in the sitting room, the other end of which faces out to the street, I went to discover if the dark spy-girl, Anushka of the KGB, were still loitering in the road. She wasn’t. Either her date had found her or she had slung her hook.

I made some coffee and sat on the couch to check my notes, but I couldn’t entirely concentrate. It was almost ten. I activated the TV for the news, and whatever hell, horror and idiocy had gone on everywhere while I was cooped up with Aunt Vanessa. Before it came on I did have one quick look in the wardrobe. Only one look. My second, though, if I counted this morning. No worse than the drinks, I thought. Half a glass of white wine at lunch and a double vodka in the evening. Half a minute’s morning wardrobe-look, and two minutes’ look at night. That was enough, and not too much. In the sitting room, the girl reading the news had hennaed her hair. She looked beautiful.

Klova:

9

I tried the lipstick last, before I went out.

I’m always having make-up. If I can’t afford it, I’ll just steal it.

But generally I can afford it.

I never mind stealing.

It’s so like simple. It’s just a sort of spell I can throw over the store O.C.’s as they peer and follow me about. I never get caught.

But I hadn’t stolen the new lipstick.

I’d had a money-gift wired into my account a day before and the bank-nanny told me last thing that night. Three thousand shots. That’s a lot. I couldn’t work out—often can’t—quite who it came from but, you know, who cares? It was there.

Although by tomorrow some of it would be gone.

I was going to the Leaning Tower.

In my black and gold, and the tinsel hold-ups, and the chandelier ear-drops, and the totter-heels, and the new lipstick.

I left about Zone 48, because nothing much kicks off in town until around 50—Midnight.

I thought the male, who lives in the flat across from mine, was in, I heard his news-viewer on as I went downstairs. Such an old-fashioned roost, this flat-house, no slide. The old woman who holes up in the downstairs part was silent too as silence. She is a peculio, and no lie.

I am very certain she goes all over when I’m out. Gets in my rooms.

All over the upstairs bit too—not sure even if anyone lives there—and all over the male’s flat as well.

She doesn’t take anything. Not from me.

But sometimes she disturbs some piece or other—like the shadow of a chair hangs wrongly and that’s because she has shifted or knocked it. Or the spume in the bath dome is wet, though it wipes itself dry soon after use.

One morning in winter I came back at dawn, Zone 16, and there was a pearl from one of my gloves lying on the glass tiles of my social room. I hadn’t worn these gloves for nights.

But so what.

Live and let love.

Love and let go.

Go live.

When I got outside, I glanced up, and through his window shields I could faintly see the male’s lights were on. So he was home.

He’s old, too. He might have been pretty when he was younger.

He’s one of the Older Generation, before it all got changed. In fifty years he’ll be dead.

In fifty years I’ll still look sixteen.

I look sixteen now, but