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

Just before Dawn Jones came round there was another voice. She actually gave her name. Clover, Woods said. And she was straight, he said, out of Bladerunner or The Matrix, rather, I personally judged, muddling up his Sci Fi genres.

Clover had been dancing in a leaning tower with giant flowers and coloured lights, and had sex—Woods assumed ‘carnal’, which was what she called it, meant sex. Also she had stolen some clothes despite the O.C.s (? Did that mean observation cameras—he thought it sounded like it.)

“Two amoral criminals,” he remarked to me, “a serial murderer and a nympho thief. And a sex-maniac in Mediaeval show-biz or whatever, whenever. And a boring old fart with a maiden aunt.”

When Dawn came out of unconsciousness, she was the same as ever she had been. He asked her if she had had any funny dreams when under. She said she hadn’t. Nothing, just a blank. He asked her if she was, at home, reading a lurid book. She stared at him for a second. She seemed only bewildered.

“Has anyone told you you talk in your sleep, Mrs Jones?”

She said no one had told her that.

She didn’t appear upset, but only anxious to get away. So he gave her the usual dental advice and the leaflet to assist recovery, and she left.

He could tell his assistant soon forgot the exoticism of the whole episode. But Woods found it plagued him.

He began to read back issues of the local papers, and make inquiries here and there. Had there been a murder near the cinema? There wasn’t a cinema? Was there a night club in London called The Leaning Tower? Very tall, strobes on the roof, secret rooms for personal liaisons? Nobody had heard of anything so spectacular. He, as I had to, later, tried to locate even the memory of a theatre called The Obelisk off Cartwheel Lane. Zilch. Of course.

Then the consultations with colleagues and others.

“Woodsy, if you’ve never had a patient go off on one before, when they’re under, you’ve been a very lucky man. Had a pretty girl once, seventeen or less, started telling me she’d always fancied me. Woke up and gave me the usual cold shoulder. I was only twenty-five then. Or there was the guy started predicting the lottery numbers. I, like a chump, started to try to memorise them, but it wasn’t just one or two goes, he went on and on. Probably the forecast for the whole year’s draws. And then…”

At length Woods happened, of all places on holiday in Spain, to spend an afternoon on the beach and get chatting with a doctor from Northampton. They exchanged discreet anecdotes of their professional lives. In the end the story of Dawn Jones came up.

“Tell me,” said the (unnamed to me) doctor, “did she ever act this out? By which I mean seem to become fully, as far as she could, any of these—four was it?—people physically?”

“That is the truly unsettling thing,” Woods told him. “Before I moved out of the area—my new practice is in Sussex—I’d begun to hear she was sometimes seen going about dressed as a man, or in a mini-skirt or something like that, truly unsuitable for a lady of her age. Or in theatrical costume. So, she was mad?”

“Oh, yes,” said the doctor on the beach. “Very decidedly. If in a very specific way.”

When he had the facts all keyed in, Woods started his serious reading. In that line he encountered one or two others resembling Mrs Jones. One of the more famous was the notorious Eric Verner Wassen, whom I’ve mentioned previously. Foremost of his episodes, if you ever take time to pursue him, was impersonating—or rather being—the King of Mars. It was this eventually that saw him incarcerated as a public hazard. Woods thought Dawn’s story might be worth making something of, even though it seemed, at least in the real world, lacking in all criminality and violence. It was a tumbled and evasive route Woods took, but finally someone put him in touch with my editor, and so with me. He ‘Foresaw’ a book, a film script; I the writer and he the inaugurator, profits shared. I, on the other hand, saw a long article. We’re still, as they say, ‘talking’ about that. She had no relations surviving, it seems. No one to muscle in or sue. That makes it more sensitive, somehow. The deeper I’ve got into it, the more I have felt this. I’m not a moralist. I’ve done a few things. Most of us have, in my line of work. You have to, to dig things out. But this. As I say, he and I are still discussing matters.

OK

I, even if Woods didn’t, have tried to find out if Dawn’s doctor ever caught a whiff of her condition. But could get nothing at all out of him, or anyone else at the surgery.

Frankly I don’t think they ever much bothered with her. She never got ill, or never told them when she was, and passed her by now obligatory For The Old Folk tests with flying colours. Wasn’t she ever confused or forgetful? I was patiently told that this wasn’t uncommon in our more elder citizens. Providing there was no hint of Alzheimer’s, leave well alone.

I had a notion they were bloody careless, as I say. For there would have been hints of just that very thing, even if wrongly. Because when Dawn was off being Clover, or one of the other three, didn’t she sometimes wonder where she, Dawn, had been, and why she couldn’t recall?

But that is someone else’s problem.

Now, though.

I’d better relate my meeting with Dimble the Timbrel, the charity worker. (I call him that childishly because when I first met him, he kept on for about ten minutes about one of his kids and the word timbrel, is that in the Bible?, Sound the Timbrel or some rot or other.) He was one of