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

To that I said nothing. Nothing at all.

“Sit down,” said Sej from the blue chair. “You look tired. I’ll make some tea.”

I sat down in the second armchair. Yes, just the feel of the material showed it was brand new. This was Sid’s place. Presumably he didn’t mind our meeting here, or the new colour scheme, if someone else – Marga? Biro? – forked out for it. Sitting, I looked round at Sid’s TV and various radios and stereos and the antique record-player for playing vinyl, his plants in the window. He had some Escher prints and the print of one of Picasso’s blue girls, and a photo of a man and a woman circa 1980, perhaps his parents. A guitar and a piano were over against the far wall, where another closed door perhaps gave on the bedroom.

Once out of his chair and moving, Sej did limp. He could have acted this. But perhaps not. I didn’t think he did, not now. The impression given was all that, with me, was done with. We’d reached the breaking point and travelled through, and on. Now… But I didn’t know about Now.

“Go and see him, Denis,” had said Marga, scrupulous as they all were over my newly-picked name. “The last time you saw him was when he stopped breathing.”

And that had been the last time. There in the hospital. When they wheeled his bed away in the snow-storm of white nurses and wires.

When I’d stood there like the other three, C and Liss and Leo.

I had stood and stood, and then someone came and told me, as his only valid relative, that Sej was on a ventilator, and these things could happen, not to give up hope. I felt nothing, nothing at all. But I must have looked as if I did, I thought.

They took me to see him after about two more hours. I saw him.

The Sci-Fi aspect of his care was quite extraordinary. Such a huge, alien machine.

After a while I went out and into the lavatory. And as I stood there pissing in the urinal, I recalled how I’d done this when my mother lay dying.

In the mirror I looked to myself like an old man of eighty-five or more. A bald old man with a moustache. Nobody I knew.

When I came out I didn’t go back to the others. I rode the lift down to the entrance and called a cab, and I went home to my house, leaving my clothes, my documents, everything, even the files and the novel Untitled there in Leo’s Skoda.

The door keys they had returned to me were in my pocket. I let myself in.

I walked about the house most of what was left of that night-morning, but it was already getting light. About six I fell asleep, sitting on the paint-splashed couch in the front room, facing the smashed TV.

A day later Leo came over and dropped off my bags.

“He’s off the ventilator, Denis. And conscious – off and on. He knows who he is. And us, he knows us. Thought you’d like to know. You should’ve stayed, come back to the flat. Marga’s roast lamb – you missed a treat.”

I didn’t ask him in, nor had he attempted to enter.

I have tried to estimate how long I holed up there in the house. I’ve never been quite sure. Some days, weeks.

When I went into the back garden one morning, and stood on the paving, head and face unshaven, George had come out too and glared at me over the lowest part of the fence.

“Well I have to say,” he had to say, “you know some funny types, Roy. I’m quite put out, you know, by that last upheaval. That young man. Those other ne’er-do-wells. An awful scare for Vita.”

I turned and looked at him and heard myself say quietly, “Fuck off, you fucking old freak.”

And he went crimson then grey and did as I had suggested. He didn’t even bang their kitchen door.

“This is good tea,” said Sej. “Sid’s a fan of tea, like me. An Assam blend, with ginger. And look, ginger and chocolate biscuits. Have one.” I had one.

“And how are you?” he asked me.

“All right. How are you?”

He smiled, then the smile opened out into a laugh. “I am entirely fine, Denis. Look, you were worth it, like the advert says.”

“Why do you do this?”

“I thought they filled you in? Thought I had, really. Because life does it. Disease, bombs, so-called natural disasters. We should get in first. Teach the lesson life is supposed to and seldom does. You know the old saw, Not Care was made to care?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I know you don’t like to be ungrammatical, Denis, but: Care was made to NOT care.”

“And that’s what you do? Risk one of us murdering you, in order to get rid of our misguided carefulness.”

“Oh, Denis. No, Denis. You know No. We have to learn to let go of the blind safety that isn’t even real. We all die. Do you prefer to be inadequately secure and entirely bored and dead-alive, or to learn and grow?”

“That’s your aim, not mine.”

“No. Not my aim. My achievement.”

The calm certainty with which he said this convinced me, if nothing else ever had, of his totally certifiable madness. But his dignity made me look away. Where my eyes fell was on the piano.

I thought, I have succumbed to the unsubtle flattery of his pursuit of me, as have the others, his intense coercion and concentration on me. No one else – no one, not parents, never friend, not even she, my Maureen – no one ever gave me so much – attention.

Still looking fixedly at the piano I said, “That evening, as per your instructions, I assume, everyone wore dark blue. And the door there, and here, and these chairs, are dark blue.”

“Indigo, Denis. Homage to your book. When the flame hits the sixth chakra and turns to indigo, and the self is realised and used. I never met anyone,