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

I refused to take the phone.

“I’ll tell you what to order,” he encouraged me. I let the phone ring in his grip, and when a voice answered I did and said nothing. I sat, he stood there, while the man’s voice buzzed out of the phone, and Sej watched me. I wouldn’t take the phone, or speak, wouldn’t play the game. The voice ended. The connection was broken. What used to be the dialling tone sounded.

Sej’s face fell. He looked both upset and resigned.

He put down the phone, leaned in across the table and slapped me violently across the side of the face with the back of his hand. The blow was meaty, it stung, numbed, blanked a second of time, brought me back to pain, my right eye watering, my right nostril running so I thought for a moment my nose bled. But it didn’t.

He said, “Sorry, Roy. I’d much rather not. But we do have to get this sorted out.”

Beaten women learn how to negotiate, where at all possible. Or so I’ve read. Any woman I’ve known had not been beaten, or if she had, never confessed it.

I said, “All right. I’ll do what you want.”

The side of my mouth seemed inert. But it was only rather like what you feel at the end of a dentist’s appointment, as the cocaine is gradually wearing off. He hadn’t seriously damaged me. But he had made me understand.

He rang the number again. I took and spoke into the phone. I ordered, politely, what he requested, then at his urging ordered a meal for myself. I can’t remember what. I knew I wouldn’t eat much of it. Unless of course he insisted.

Sej sat on the table, smiling and once nodding approval. He said, “Ask if they’ll send a couple of beers, too.”

I asked. They would. Then I had to ask him, for them, if he wished to pay by credit card over the phone. And airily he told me the number of his card, even the security number on the back.

But I didn’t try to record it. I had also now stopped ruminating on the idea of his going shopping and maybe leaving me locked in the house, and if this offered any hope. I didn’t care.

Deal done he took back the phone and switched it off. “Brilliant, Roy. Just right.” He looked closely at me. “Better put some TCP on your lip – yes, just there. I don’t wear a ring, but I seem to have caught you. It’s nothing much but better disinfect it just in case. Then maybe, let’s see, you stay upstairs. They said twenty minutes, pretty optimistic for a Saturday. Perhaps they don’t get a lot of custom until later. The thing is, if you’re upstairs I can answer the door. But if you stay at the top of the stair you can also watch me. Once I close the front door, you come down and we both come back in the kitchen. That way there’s no chance I can mess the food up. Or you. Fair enough?” He hadn’t even warned me not to try to persuade the delivery man to assist me. And I – I hadn’t even considered it.

“Yes,” I said.

I rose and he smiled. “You’ve been a real trooper,” he said. My father had once or twice said that. “No hard feelings, eh? Good. These things happen. Now we can move on.”

My father’s advice on bullies was shit. There are many things that, unless you have either great power of some sort, or vast help from some abnormal and constant quarter, there is no point at all in facing up to, let alone trying to combat.

Denial is one of the healthiest physical states discovered by Man.

Following my scrap with Ben Oggey, after which, penless, I had to have a tooth capped, I abandoned confrontation as a modus operandi.

Decades after, and only with Sej, I briefly blotted my well-learned copy book. His swift action had saved me from any more mistakes, thus punishment. Meanwhile the stunning aftershock of his blow wore off quickly. The lesson adhered. From now on I would be a model prisoner.

The meal arrived in fact half an hour later. We played it as he had outlined. He was charming to the delivery man, had a laugh with him, (I couldn’t catch what about), tipped him with a ten pound note. Off the man went, laughing. In came Sej, laughing, with the bag of food. He shut and double-locked the door again, with his own keys, then pocketed them.

Then I came down from my old childhood haunt of the top stair and progressed behind him into the kitchen.

Naturally he had no dread of my attacking him from the rear. Nor did I have any intention of doing so.

I remember what he ate: Chicken Jalfrezi, stuffed Naan, vegetable curry, egg-fried rice, two Poppadoms, a small tub of Raita. What I ate, or did not eat, as I’ve said, I have no idea.

He drank an Indian beer decanted into a tall glass. I had the same and sipped it. He’d suggested I rinse both glasses thoroughly before we used them, in front of him, which I did. The taste of the beer was appealing, slightly bitter, with a hint of chilli. In the end he finished mine too. The remains of my dinner, most of it, I believe he ate for breakfast the following morning.

There were no insidious drugs. Indeed, despite the washing, he insisted halfway through the repast we have each a few swallows from the other’s glass.

He said I was to leave the washing-up, so I left it, it goes without saying.

It was after this, though rather further on, nearer midnight, he broke in my bedroom door, for me.

“You get a proper night’s rest,” he said. He told me he would ‘crash’ on the sofa downstairs. At least, he said, he wouldn’t have to suffer the ‘fucking row’ of neighbourly bad