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

I stowed the jar in the bottom of the bedroom wardrobe. Perhaps the wasp would go to sleep. Perhaps it would die. I might find no opportunity to use it. I might let it go.

And if Sej discovered it? I’d say with the purest truth I did rescue them and then release them in summer. But, (now lying), this one had seemed comatose, so I’d given it crumbs and let it rest – and then unfortunately forgotten it.

One thinks sometimes, wrongly often, madmen will accept other madmen and their quite dissimilarly insane actions.

By this time I had been told by Sej both of his flat and its address in Saracen Road. The residence had come up once or twice in our communal post-dining phase, among the coffees, whisky and vodka. The 666 aspect of the number seemed never to strike him. He said little about the flat either, only that it wasn’t worth the money, but all right. Aside from being blighted by loud bad neighbouring music. He described the outside more than the inside, (including the glass panel in the door), and in fact said nothing I afterwards recalled of internal appearance. The small park he mentioned several times, the trees and shrubs. And why had he given me the actual address if not to point out its Satanic twist? “You’ll have to pay me a visit one day, Roy. Flat 6, top of 66, Saracen Road. It’s a big white terrace, or it used to be white, back when.”

And I said, “I should visit you?”

“Why not?”

“Won’t you still be here?”

And, “Oh, I might even be, Roy. You’re right.”

The day I caught the wasp and hid it, around eleven-thirty I went down to the kitchen, as during daylight hours I was seemingly allowed to, and through the library door I saw him asleep in the corner chair.

A book, not now one of mine but Milton’s Paradise Lost, lay open on his knee. Over by the power point in the corner, his steely slice of mobile rested on the floor, re-charging.

I froze in the hallway. I stared.

It didn’t seem impossible he might really have nodded off. He was young and would be able to fall asleep, and needed sleep more than I, no doubt. If he kept watch for me so much of every night, ready, playing Chopin or a Brahms Rhapsody on the piano, wasn’t it quite likely he might suddenly flake out with no warning?

But did he sleep? Did he?

His breathing had the sound of a sleeper’s. But things like that can be acted, and Sej, if he could do anything, was quite an accomplished actor.

There I hung from the thread of his tyranny, glaring in, transfixed, a stone.

And he opened his eyes without even any of the slightest sleeper’s momentary dislocation, and smiled.

“Hello, Roy. Making any tea? One for me, please.”

So I made the tea, and found my hands shaking so much I nearly did drop the bloody yellow and marigold cup. When I took it in I swallowed the regulation two gulps, and passed it to him.

“Sit down a minute, Roy.” I sat. “I’ve had an idea.”

Then he drank the tea. He didn’t say what the idea was, I waited. I waited while he drank all his tea.

Then he put the open book and the empty cup aside and stood up.

Going out ahead of me he called back lightly, “Come on. We’re going upstairs.”

I followed him. He climbed the stair. Docile, I climbed at his back. He had left the phone to recharge on the library floor. Had he forgotten? I decided not. It was another tease.

He preceded me into my study on this occasion. Neither had he ever done that before.

The whole surface of my skin was prickling. My eyes seemed stretched to the size, if not the square shape, of the hideous new saucers.

Something else that was new was about to happen, and I was to see it happen, be a part of it. It was like the smell of smoke, of burning, like the sick marzipan odour that still hung in the front room round the gutted TV.

My jacket and the two bags he wanted arranged in the middle of the room, by the desk.

He had suggested, (“I suggest, Roy”) that we both open them up now. He wanted to know, he said, if he’d guessed correctly what I had in each – aside from toiletries and clothes that I would have unpacked for use on my ‘return’.

I unloaded the jacket first. There was no sense in evasion. He’d been right on everything there, almost. He hadn’t itemised, however, the house deeds. He was quite impressed by my having included those. “Are these copies? They look like the originals. Well done, Roy. Your parents must have paid off their mortgage. Those were the days.”

“Yes,” I said.

Then we did the bags, and it was all as he had said, aside from one or two things that he joked about, as if I had entertainingly put over a clever trick on him. “You weren’t taking any chances were you, old sport?” Reminding me, as before by his abrupt use of this antiquated expression, of the eponym of Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby. The DNA samples, including the fork, seemed to fox him a moment. After that he realised and laughed. “Not bad. Not bad.” Eventually he opened the small box and pulled off the bubble wrap. “I’d wondered where it had gone. Your parents’, right?”

“Yes.”

“Lovely.” He stood caressing my mother’s red glass dog tenderly and I wanted to snatch it. I wanted, as now I did so often, to kill him. Impotently and despairingly, need I say.

Carefully he placed the dog on my desk.

Not once had he glanced up at the writing on the ceiling.

“Well,” he said, “that’s that then, all cleared up. Got anything else hidden, Roy? Anything you want to confess to?”

I stared at him, blanking from my wide eyes and mind the glass of wasp in the bedroom wardrobe.

“Well,” he said again.