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

I nearly laughed. I controlled it. All George really cared about, like most of the human race, was how he might be affected, and if he might even suffer symptoms like my own invented ones.

“No, you’re OK, George,” I said. “That wasn’t what I got fobbed off with. Your medication is one of the best, or so I’ve been told.”

He loosened and gave me a little smile.

“Well I’m glad you’re better, Roy. And your – he – has he gone?”

“Back to his own life I hope, George.” One truth anyway.

I opened up my newly complicated door, went in, closed and re-locked it. Then I took the groceries and other things into the kitchen and put them on the table. I’d just filled the kettle from the tap, still half sneering at George, when my legs went from under me. They gave way.

I’d heard of this.

I sat on the lino listening to water drip, and thought. Brace up, Roy. It’s over now.

But the kitchen reeled, or something in my head did so.

And I thought, He’s done something to me – some other drug – something – he’s in the house – he’s here – he’s standing in the doorway…

But he hadn’t, he wasn’t.

I was alone.

The collapse lasted for about ten minutes, after which I knew I could move again, and cautious as old George I got myself up and sat on a chair.

Finally I rescued the kettle and made the tea and drank it in a white mug. (Why had I bought three of these?) It tasted of a bitter nothingness.

About four-thirty I went to bed.

I dreamed of Sej by night floating down a river, perhaps even that black river in Vilmos’s City. He was presumably already dead, but nevertheless I hefted a large stone, using unusual strength, and dropped it on his body. He sank. Without a trace.

8

Mr C shook my hand before we parted. This was on the far side of the park, after we had left Sej’s flat in the roof.

“Don’t worry about him, Mr Phillips,” said Mr C in his university accent. “I really don’t think you have anything to bother about now. He was – shall I say – well cared for.”

I looked him in the face. “Hospital job,” I said.

Now he shook his head. “Best not to ask. He’s alive. He’ll get over it. Lesson learned. All you need to know. Nice working with you, Mr P.”

I’d called Cart’s number again, some way on from the day of the collapse. It was after I’d destroyed everything Sej had brought into the house, just binning some of it, like the toiletries, smashing and binning some, (such as his phone, which I’d already seen to), tearing or cutting up garments and binning them. I’d have made a fire and burned them if I’d lived elsewhere. But I could just imagine Ian and George and Vita if I got an incinerator and started it up out the back. Actually the black dustbin was what I used, put out the front for what Lynda used to call the rubbish people.

Sometime I must also acquire a new landline telephone; for now my current mobile would be adequate. While in a few more days I’d go into Woolwich or Greenwich and check out places for fresh carpet, covers and curtains. My ‘emergency fund’ was almost gone, but once I got Kill Me Tomorrow properly on track, written, delivered, I’d have enough. Sometime too I would sell the piano. I might get a couple of quid for that, but I’d need to shop around. Until then there was the other credit card. Never before had I been so profligate, but now I had no choice.

I had cleaned the house too.

The faint writing on the study ceiling I left. I had a phase of sitting in my desk chair, staring up at it. One night, in fact the night before I called Cart’s number again, I wrote a little more of Untitled, the first onslaught I’d made on it concisely for years. The idea that I shouldn’t be doing it, that I should be working on KMT, seemed to have revitalised the ‘project’. Or. Something had.

But I had started to have a recurring dream by now. I kept dreaming of his flat, at that point unseen. It was always different, but always there. I’d walk up endless wooden stairs to reach it, or stone stairs; it was always upward I had to go. And sometimes in the dreams I’d force a door with the glass panel he had described, often ornate, the glass stained, or it would already be forced, but inside I would find not a flat, but a garden with fountains, or a wasteland with a mirage of sun, or a dripping cellar, or a flooded municipal library – countless varieties of symbols, secret ciphers, of my id, or his. God knew. And so at last, rather than seek the furnishing departments of Woolwich, I went to central London, to Saracen Road, and broke in. And then I came back, and called the number and returned to the flat with Mr C.

Once halfway rational again, I’d been a little puzzled Cart’s number had been and was still available. This was far more than a “few” weeks. I decided on a simply theory. Maybe everyone was told the number evaporated in that time, a precautionary lie. After all if you used them you were implicated. And who could prove anything? However odd the name announced to callers, it was a business, and perhaps had a front that legitimately was. They took credit cards for Christ’s sake. How would it show on a statement – Bizan poos…

Now anyway I knew about the apartment in the attic. I’d seen it, climbed up to it in waking reality, by the ladder, and climbed down knowing its nature.

All the way home on the train from Charing Cross I thought about that place, its greens and blues, its ambience of money and