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

plane going over. What a shame, I’ll never eat that soup now, and it’s minestrone, one of my favourites. Perhaps they’ll give it to someone. I wonder… I wonder what I’ll do, tomorrow.

Pink:

101

I don’t want to be cruel. Let alone overly cynical. Or—worse—make a big joke out of this. It’s an extraordinary story. I’ve never encountered anything quite like it, I’d never even read before about an instance so complex, so incredible. Plus it is hilarious, in its own rather sinister and deeply sad way. So. I’ve got to be careful. Hence this preliminary work out on it all. A sort of dry run. Or—yes, why not, a dress-rehearsal. The big stuff, when I write it, will have to be very different. And I can’t reveal my source, obviously. Luckily, enough people have been involved on the edges to get a partial idea of what went on. The ones that don’t, don’t count. Some of us will never understand it. I’m not sure I do. It scares me, though. I mean, something like this. You think, if it can happen like that then why not to me, given the right amount of stress, or of peculiar circumstances, or chemicals in the blood and brain, or just plain life. Life will always get you, one way or the other.

OK

My name is James Pinkerton, which I’m afraid, besides sounding very Gilbert and Sullivan, has earned me among my colleagues the dubious nickname of Pinky, or Pink. The last is a slang term too for a certain part of the female anatomy, a wonderful part, true, but I’ve never been that keen on its being applied to me. As a bloke, I’m not, in any other way aside from name, PINK. Not even politically. (Politically I’m not really anything. They’re all crap now, as far as I can see, which I’ve gone into print often enough to point out.) Anyhow, that’s enough of that.

When I first heard about what had been going on, from—I’ll call him D.C.W.—I thought initially it was too crazy to do much with. Then I thought about it. That is, properly. Then I looked up a few other cases. Horrifyingly, there were more than I’d ever have thought could be likely. There are, of course, quite a few of the better known and more ‘modest’ (shall I say) types involving normally two elements. But the extravagance of this dossier puts most of those well into the shade. Similar, or nearly similar examples, however, have been, and still are, documented. I note here particularly the tragedy of Eric Verner Wassen, in Hungary, in the early 1920’s. I won’t go into all that here. Look it up on the net.1

OK

The first thing, after my rather cursory research, was to do the follow-up ground work. Which meant moving around the place, and talking to people.

Most people, I find, really want to tell you things. And if they know absolutely zilch, then they’ll make something up. Of this I’m wary, having learnt the hard way, years back, when I was starting.

The suburbs can be less people-indifferent than inner London, but even so they’re not that socially involved. No, despite what a lot of Londoners say, those little clusters of shops and by-ways, where you can meet the same people again and again, are still not like the old villages that, even now, you can come across, in Scotland, say, or the outlands of Manchester. Plenty down here pretend to be arm in arm, and heart in pocket with the rest of their ghetto. But they’re not. Again, it’s gossip, speculation. If something looks really exciting, or awkward—some gorgeous girl, some dangerous, spiky guy—they may take notice—but even so it’s mostly guess work.

About her, though, one or two, (more than that, of course), began to get the hang of the facts, even if they improperly understood, and so dismissed these, with the usual amused and condescending casualness. Mrs Jones was odd. But, they added, she didn’t cause any trouble. Poor old cow, some of them said, (or bat, or biddy. Or cunt. Depending on their favourite pieces of the vernacular.)

None of them recalled when she’d moved into the area. A lot of them, inevitably, wouldn’t even have lived there, or been born, when she had. Some of them knew approximately where she lived. Some didn’t. No one, not even my source (D.C.W.) knew how or where she got started. She had had a husband—Mr Jones. But this was before anyone’s time. Or, before anyone had ever seen, let alone noticed her especially. Somebody told me he could remember seeing her in her twenties—“Pretty little thing. A bit cagey though.” No, he didn’t recollect a male partner. Thought she might have had a kid, little girl, dark hair, about two or three. Several women guessed Mrs Jones had ‘inherited’ her property, in her thirties, or fifties. She was alone, and a miserable old cow (or bat or biddy etc etc). One middle-aged trendy in shorts said he could recollect, as a child, throwing stones at her windows, and putting a firework through her door on November 5th, because she had told him and his friends off in the street. (But apparently he recounted this anecdote about several women.)

I worked with all this. Then binned most of it

OK

I’m in the pub, the one near the station, and nearest to Mrs Jones’s final address.

It’s an old pub, The Black Sheep. Bits of it go back to the Sixteenth Century, or so the discreet notices say. Certainly the ceiling is low enough that if you wear a piece (I don’t) you could scrape it off on a beam.

There are in this pub a lot of ancient relics. (I don’t refer to the customers.) Aside from the beams and the narrow wooden stairway that leads to the upstairs dining area, there are glass cases with mummified cats in them, blackly hard, so sculptural they might