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

They say we are lucky.

Of course.

That’s right.

I took a quick look up and down the long wide ice-cream-gleamy street. The houses here are still quite old, but way over there, beyond the Forest, the sky poles of the outer city sheer up in layers of diamond and ruby terraces. And I could just make out the light on top of the Leaning Tower, pulsing on-violet/off-rose/Chinese-dragon-green.

If I took the sprint I’d be there in twenty minutes. Did I want to be so early?

Like but right then I saw this girl and this new male were stood there under one of the float-lamps.

She was dark and serious-eyed and twentyish, so she might be me-type, or younger old-going-to-die-soon type. I couldn’t tell.

The male looked like a quack.

I am going to walk by, but the girl speaks to me.

“Excuse me, but you just left that house.”

I walked on.

She ran after me.

She had high-heels but not proper high enough.

He rumbled after her.

I turned and looked at her.

“What do you want?”

“You see,” she said, helplessly, moving her hands as like she was underwater, “I’m looking for my bloke, Sigh.”

“Sigh?” I said.

“Yes—short for Simon. He spells it SY.”

With a name like that he was surely almost being of Older Gen. Perhaps he’d just given up the ghost. I suggested that, and she let out a thin silly scream, as if I’d hit her or turned my Self-D spray on her.

The male with her said loudly, “Right, d’you know anything about it? He was just fishing down the canal a few days back and he never come home. He’s her feller and my bruvva and we wanta know what the fuck happened to him, ‘cos he doesn’t just vanish, right? She’s scared he fell in the canal.”

No one calls it the canal any more. It’s called The Nile.

“Can’t help you,” I said.

The girl started to cry.

I walked on, and they didn’t try to stop me. They should go to the Civ Law anyway, if they’re worried. It’s nothing to do with me.

Only thing is, now skipping about in my mind to the tick-tick of my slenderest totter-heels on the milk-light-washed pavement, a remembering of another girl a month ago, summertime, also asking me on the street about someone else who had gone missing.

Why do they ask me?

I don’t know.

I don’t care.

Live and let go.

10

I danced all night.

Always do.

Had carnal with a male in the Singles Rooms of the Tower, and then got the sprint back.

I felt wonderful. Sex is brilliant, and all the exercise.

I only drink liquid-silver, which is very good for you and inspires the brain.

My plan was to go to bed as the sky before the flat-house was blazing with sunrise, and sleep into Zone 34.

The street, when I reached it, was empty of anything but the dregs of darkness.

I’d forgotten all about the girl and male and their missing feller—bruvva Sigh.

But when I got to the house—and undid the door with my ID nail, I smelled this smell.

The street smells clean and hygiene-brushed. The Forest at the back sends wafts of green and ink perfume and the aroma of birds and shadow. But this house, when you step in from the fresh air—

The house, just there in the downstairs hall, right by where the old woman has her apartment, it stinks.

I have noticed this before.

I have put it down to the place being so old and all that. Upstairs everything smells sweet.

Maybe it’s her.

Maybe she’s decaying.

Maybe she’s died and is falling in bits, and this grey-brown reek of a rotting retro-burger wrapped in metal-foil is the result.

But I thought, as I stood there, that I had smelled the reek before and then it had gone away.

Now it was raw.

It had claws.

It had sores.

I ran upstairs and leapt into my rooms.

I should contact the Civ Law on my Mee.

Instead I went into my bathdome and threw up all my lovely night, and my sick was silver, worth a fortune if I had the guts to scoop it up and strain it through and package and send it to recyke.

But I couldn’t.

Let go.

It goed.

Emenie:

11

About seven days after my thing with the fishing man, I had a double. They weren’t very much, if I’m honest. But it wasn’t too bad. A man, and later a woman. Obviously, two in the same twenty-four hours is in itself rewarding; it’s only happened twice before, and I’ve been killing people for—well, let me think, almost seventeen years.

I had a slight concern that night, just as I was drifting to sleep, that I might get a long wait after this.

As a rule I try not to be superstitious.

The next morning, at nine sharp, someone rapped the knocker on the front door. (Needless to say, the bell doesn’t work anymore.)

Years ago this would have been a postman, or a religious fanatic. Now there isn’t any mail service. And usually the religious go about things in more covert or more strident ways.

I’d gone to bed fully clothed, tired from the second killing, which had taken place a couple of miles away, in the ruins of the suburban hinterland. I rolled off the mattress.

The exit to the downstairs hall, and the front door I hardly use, goes from the main room, but for some reason I’ve hidden that door in my room behind an old screen. It’s quite pretty, the screen, with peacocks painted and stitched on it.

By the time I’d moved the screen, opened the room door, crossed the hall, unlocked the front door… well, I thought the unusual caller might have gone. But in fact he was just rapping the knocker again.

“Yes?” I asked kindly. I never look a mess, even when I’ve just got up. I look clean and tidy and combed, and my breath smells of mint toothpaste. Again, it’s just something I can do.

“I’m lookin’ fer my bruvva,” he said.

“Really.”

“Yeah.”

He was a shambling type, in a big—not moth—probably rat-eaten leather jacket. His greasy hair hung in chunks about his miserable face.

“I