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

those one-drink-and-I’m-sloshed. And not even cheap, since they like to go on having lots of those just-one-more type drinks.

However, he told me about the Jones house-clearance. And even something about how Dawn was found dead.

There were no suspicious circumstances. When the police broke in, she was just sitting up in her flat in the loft extension. (The doctor had called round in answer to her telephone request, and been unable to gain access.) She was in the armchair. The electric fire was on—it seemed she never put in central heating—and a nearly empty tea-cup stood on a table. She wouldn’t have looked asleep. The old dead normally don’t. They look—knowing. Knowing and fierce, as if to reprimand you. Or knowing and pleased, as if they glimpsed, in the last second, the joyful theme park of Heaven to which they were about to transcend. No one told me which of these looks Dawn had. And Dimble hadn’t, of course, seen her at all. But the house and contents—he’d seen every scrap of those.

OK

This, I’d take a bet, is the only proof I can offer, aside from the gossipy or malicious or brainless—or compassionate—eye witness accounts reporting on Dawn at large in her own, or her four other, lives.

OK

(Stop writing that God forsaken two letter word.)

As I understood it, the house was three floors, the upper one being the attic-loft conversion. Although the way Dimble described it the place sounded as if it had an extra attic on the top of that. (And peering at the house through the overgrown trees a couple of times still hasn’t quite got the details straight in my mind.)

Each floor is converted (Dimble) to a separate flat, though on the first floor upper storey there is the potential to alter one large flat into two smaller ones. The stairs are mutual, as is the downstairs hall and front door. Dawn seems to have lived in all these flats, (her last tenant was apparently back in the late ‘70s.) But in fact Dawn, herself, only lived in the loft extension. Judging by what lay about elsewhere, the short-haired business guy had one half of the first floor, and the girl—Clover—the other half. The unlikeable girl in the red T-shirt lived on the ground floor, the biggest flat, (which also had access to a large kitchen, the garden, and a basement with cellar—empty but for the skeletons of two rats.) The second floor flat below the loft seems to have been where the actor set up his pad.

(One wonders what each of these five intelligences made of the others. Were they simply not at all aware of anyone else in the house, or did they get glimpses, perhaps more internal memories than actually thinking they saw anyone. Did too any or all of their imaginary friends ever inhabit the house, directly sharing their lives—the dog, for example, or the Micky-Nicky boy or girl, or the actor’s numerous lovers, the friends and aunt of the short-haired man? I have a theory that perhaps Dawn’s talent may have had to move them in with her, because near the end, as her strength was breaking down, those journeys up to town, or to Lewisham or New Cross or wherever, let alone Brighton, would have become insupportable.) Again Reg, at The Stag and Star, had mentioned that the actor who he thought was called Thes-sris(?) (from Thespian?) had announced he travelled to and from the city by cart. What could that have been? A bus—taxi?

In the rooms, all through the five flats, was a ‘cram’ of furniture, some old and damaged, some newish and cheap. (Just one ‘wonderful’ thing, it seems, a screen, both tapestry and painted, with peacocks depicted.) There were a couple of televisions, radios, and so on. There was nothing, Dimble said, that seemed particularly comfortable or attractive. (Why would there be? The comfort or glamour was invoked by the fluctuations of Dawn’s deranged and versatile mind.) Four of the flats had a wardrobe, however. And in these, variously, and as appropriate to each personality, were T-shirts, jeans and boots (ground floor), suits, shirts and a selection of other ‘dull’ (again Dimble’s word) male garments (half first upper floor flat), short tight dresses and costume jewellery of an extravagant and ‘lurid’ sort (opposite half of second first upper floor flat). The theatrical fancy dress for Thessris, in the third story second floor flat, was strewn about over an unmade bed. There was also one other oddity, (as if all of it were not odd). This being, Dimble gleefully said, a most sensational dress from the Flapper era of the 1920s, pink and gold, beaded and trimmed. It was a collector’s item, and had brought the charity well over five thousand pounds. He had confessed he concealed his knowledge of it from the clearance people. (He trusts I won’t reveal as much.) The thing was, it had skipped their original notice, since it was behind a black and a grey curtain (two of them) in, of all places, the north half of the second floor flat. That is, the short-haired guy’s wardrobe. (A question or two extra there. Had that personality, a male, been less ‘dull’ than thought, having some gender issues, maybe?)(!)

I’ve been shown photographs, on Dimble’s screen, from one of the charity’s disks. House interiors and bits of furniture the charity had taken on, including the screen and the dress. Some other oddities too—such as a realistic-looking toy or model gun, found in a cupboard on the ground floor.

There’s no reason any of that should be falsified. (Unless they’ve gone to so much trouble in order to get my three hundred pound donation, I suppose.) For me the pictures provide solid proof of… something. Some of the items are also still in the local shop. They are minor things, yet present, and as described.

The house itself now stands empty. A builder has bought it and will soon be doing the flats up