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

but used some more candles. (She hadn’t commented on the fridge, but full electricity might be too much for her sensibilities.)

“It’s nice here,” she said, after a while.

“It’s all right.”

“Better than where we are—I mean, Sy and me. It’s an old caravan. But at least we…” she halted. The ‘we’ might now be superfluous.

Then she began to tell me all about him, her lover or partner or whatever he had been. I wasn’t interested in the least. It was like—what?—dissecting a good meal you’ve eaten when it’s all gone—oh, this meat came from so-and-so, and that cheese-sauce I made myself using this, this and this. No point.

I barely listened, just watched her. The thing was, actually, although I had known immediately she was to be my new victim, I hadn’t, as yet, picked up from her any idea of how it should be done. And it must be done correctly. To kill with an unsuitable weapon of whatever sort would jar. As if, to use the analogy of food again, you cooked a perfect fruit pie, and then poured beef gravy on it. Although again, I can’t rule that out—in some cases just such an anomaly might be wonderful. A rich acidic apple tart, maybe, with the very saltiest gravy… Or like the man I killed one time, by thrusting a plastic purse into his throat… Yes, nothing should ever be completely ignored as a possible enhancing means.

I kept thinking, however, as her recital-eulogy went on, that Bruvva would charge up again and start hammering at the front door. Or worse, find his way round to the back. Would she then be able to quell him again?

Frankly, I didn’t want to kill her here. ‘Sy’ was here. It was too cosy, the two of them in the cellar, rotting side by side.

Some other arrangement must be made. And hopefully by that time I’d know how I wanted to work with her.

Suddenly she stood up, as if she had telepathically overheard, consenting and assisting me.

“I’ve taken so much of your time. I’m sorry. But, we had to try, just in case—thank you for the tea.” She wasn’t nervous, just sad, and solitary. Obviously the hulk outside would be as much use to her as the burnt-out rusted car.

“Look,” I said, “I know a few of them round here. Why don’t I ask them about all this? And though we don’t have police any more, there’s a little group along the canal, a bit rough, but they sometimes take up a good cause. I’ll see if they can help.”

“Oh, would you?” Her face flooded with gratitude.

“Maybe come back tomorrow—sort of evening, yes? Only don’t bring him. I’m sorry. He scares me.”

“No, I promise. Just me. Thank you,” she said.

She had stars in her eyes not tears as I let her out again at the front door. Bruvva, I noted, had vanished.

The morning was turning misty, like soft smoke, powdering over the ends of the road, the tree-tops, the edges of vision.

Rod:

15

On Tuesday morning Forrel delightedly told me I had to see Bins, our Department Manager. Forrel’s delight is always an indicator in such matters. Bins’s face was another.

Bins has been in charge of The Floor for three years and he has an aging unkemptness, nasal and ear hair, spindly frame and large belly coupled to a self-deceptive—one assumes—youthful urgency to change things.

He scowlingly smiled at me, and showed me the three awful capped dead-white teeth nestled among his yellower ones.

“Now, this can’t go on, can it?” Mr Bins demanded.

It seemed the last report I had emailed through to the Upper Tier, as he calls it, had been full of mistakes—typos, misspellings, misuse of italics, ‘Martian-looking’ names, and so on.

I explained my machine was playing up.

“Your machines always play up, don’t they?” he gloweringly reminded me. “No one else has this problem. What do you do to your computer, Terris,” (he always has my surname wrong) “to cause this? Do you spill your coffee in it? Do you play silly war games on it or watch pornography and lose track of your duties? This can’t continue, Terris. Can it?”

I was certain it could but refrained from saying so.

“And I see you’ve requested leave for this Wednesday afternoon. Why is that?”

“My uncle, Mr Bins.”

“It’s most inconvenient.”

“I’ve offered to come in on Saturday.”

“Yes, well you’ll have to, but it still isn’t convenient. Why is this sudden absence needed?”

“My uncle is a very old man.”

Mr Bins seemed to infer my uncle was near death. His face became grave. But even that failed to bring on any mercy.

“Very well, then, Terris. You must do as you think best. But you’ll have to work all of Saturday, I must make that clear. And bear in mind, the firm is not at your beck and call. You are at its.”

16

Uncle George’s flat is in Lewisham.

That’s one of my twenty minute journeys. A couple of times I’ve even taken a taxi back from there later in the evening, but their rates are now so high I tend to stick to the train. Though even that, it goes without saying, is exorbitant.

The day was rather foggy in the morning. There were no repercussions from Bins. I grabbed a sandwich at The Stag for lunch and then went straight down.

Vanessa doesn’t, apparently, drink, but George was normally continuously drunk. He will start to ‘partake’, as he has termed it, at about 10 a.m., and get through around three bottles of wine, the odd V or G and T, or W and S thrown in as a ‘treat’.

He was never offensive or incoherent. He talked about the ‘old house in Kent’ where, if one believed him, there were five or six dogs and a parrot, (which finally escaped), and a housekeeper, ‘Sonia’, with whom, one gathered, he had had an ‘arrangement’.

I reached his flat above Empress Designs in the High Street. The back of the flats is rather bleak, looking into other business back yards,