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

threat, and his omnipresence. Even unseen, he would be immanent. Less God or demon than spirit.

The name Denis, of course, comes from the name of the Greek wine god Dionysos. As well as inventing wine and so allowing men and women to become drunk, thereby sloughing all convention and restraint, he was called the Breaker of Chains. No god of the ancient world could be more terrible. Or, in other circumstances, more seductively gentle.

But that’s a diversion. A swift psychoanalysis of that single choice of naming, which anyway sprang from the memory of my mother.

Neither I, nor Sej, have anything to do with the gods.

There was a single graffito in the lift. SHITE, it read.

Someone had obviously tried to clean it off, but then the perpetrator, or some other linguistic artist, had spray-painted it back on in whitest white, and two feet high.

At the top floor, the fourth, I got out. The lift had lurched like a hippo on the way up and even bracing myself for the landing hadn’t quite been enough.

I crossed the space and looked at the smartly painted indigo door.

It stood ajar.

This was in Camden Town, and the month by now was August.

Something horrible and extreme, subconsciously expected yet prayed into impossibility, had become possible and occurred in London this last July. The perfection of its date – 7/7 – stayed in my mind. It was as if it had been planned for that day and month in order not only to maim and kill, but to enable Londoners not to have to worry about the opposing reversal of day and month of the USA and England. So it would be simple for us to equate 7/7 with 9/11. They even rhymed. Just supposing the bombs had been detonated on the 8th July – what then? 8/7 or 7/8?

You could still feel and see the afterimage of the attack in the city. On the tube no one spoke about bombs. If the train stuck for two minutes between stations the fume of fear rose with an already everyday accustomedness. “Ain’t got no choice but be cannon-fodder, has we?” some man asked me in a pub. “It’s not the bleeding wartime spirit. Wasn’t in bleeding wartime neither. You gotta get on. Or you lose yer work, yer income. Get on – what else you s’posed ter do.”

Beyond the indigo door the hallway stretched off to the right. It was clean and unexceptional. A lavatory and then a bathroom opened to the left as I walked through, then a biggish kitchen. These rooms and their furnishings were universally white, and with the same beige carpet as in the hall. The kitchen though had brown lino tiles. At the end of the hall was a large lounge. This too was white and beige, but had a couple of armchairs upholstered in a deep blue which seemed fresh and recent. A wide sash window in the left hand wall looked out, as the others had in the lavatory, bathroom and kitchen, to where tall green trees were in heavy leaf, and through them, just visible, ran an overland railway line.

He was sitting in one of the armchairs. No colour match. He wore light blue jeans and a faded cream shirt.

As I went in he smiled, but didn’t get up. “Hello, Denis.”

He’d altered – been altered. He looked ill even now, pale and haggard. And he looked young as only the very old do. How old was he really? In his early forties perhaps? It couldn’t be more than that.

His left eyelid had a slight droop to it, and his mouth that side, only very slightly. This wasn’t anything you could fake, not so close, not some cunning injection or theatrical subterfuge. I’d heard he limped a little too. Even the pin in his right leg hadn’t caused that. But the brain, of course… Of course.

And when he spoke, even the two words, Hello Denis, there was an almost undetectable slur. That certainly was as if his mouth had not quite recovered from dental work. Or a blow. Or a minor stroke.

Marga had ‘prepared’ me over the phone.

“They said it may all go. Or – it may not. But it doesn’t spoil his looks. You can see it’s still Sej.”

Leo had also called to reassure me. “He’s OK.”

I hadn’t bothered to replace the TV. But I’d got my landline phone sorted out in late June, about the time I got the cooker fixed and the new carpet and coverings for the front room. It hadn’t been too difficult. A routine check on my bank balance had shown me someone had paid in anything I might have spent during my tussles with Sej – the cost of staying at the Belmont, new bolts and locks, the alarm. (I hadn’t had to pay for the kitchen repairs. C had come over unasked and done it, gratis. He’d also cleaned the white paint off the lavatory window. “No charge,” he’d said to my silence. “If you’re going to be one of the family.”) And of course Cart’s Bits and Booze had never taken any money off the credit card. He had called and explained that carefully. The way they all seemed to take such pleasure in explaining their cleverness, their plays. When I told him I had thought someone in the publishing world I knew had put his hit-team on to me, he rejoiced down the line at the often helpful nature of coincidence. I had been meant to think someone corrupt in the police service had done me this kindness. He reminded me there had been something like that in one of my short stories. Cart also pointed out to award me a handy assassin was in fact to prevent my doing something like that off my own bat – as Cart himself once did. Personal attack against Sej must, it seemed, be acted only, unless it were to come from Sej’s chosen victim. Which, Cart added, in the end generally it