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

fit the everyday, even an everyday established menace – like a thug with a gun or a warning from a gang.

At the end of Old Church Lane I turned into Bulivante Crescent. Round the curve of detached houses, meshed in their hedges and trees, lay the roaring high street. But even as I took in the vista, I saw him, seated on a low wall, drinking from a can of cola.

He wore white today, a white shirt and whitish jeans. Over his shoulder was that kind of male handbag that is so useful, and this too was in a sort of bleached denim. He had already seen me. He got up, smiling, and raised his friendly hand in greeting. No recrimination was obvious at his having had to wait for me so long.

FOUR

No one ever told me anything about the sexual act. As for love, it was something you saw in films. By the time I was seventeen, you could see quite a bit of the sexual act in them, too, particularly in foreign cinemas in the West End. I had also been handed certain educational books by my father when I was about fourteen. He suggested I read them; I was now ‘old enough’ to ‘understand’. Needless to say I already understood. One’s body tends to inform one. Despite all this however, I wasn’t a quick learner, I wasn’t ready to equate what I felt with any chance of sharing it. It was a solitary pleasure, as they were wont to say. I needn’t, I think, go into details. My own writing is scanty in this respect. I will open the bedroom door and let my protagonists through. But what goes on thereafter the reader may deduce for himself.

Repressed? Of course I was, and am, and very wisely. I was an unattractive thin spotty youth, who grew into a short, thin and nondescript male adult. My hair was already going at twenty, despite all the preparations I tried on it. My height had never materialised. I wasn’t a ‘Tich’, like Mark Brighton, the poor sucker in my last year at school, who was still under five foot. Men go on growing, they say, until they are twenty-one. Maybe he suddenly dashed a final thirteen inches and put them all to shame. But there are short men with plenty of charisma. Not me.

By seventeen I had liked girls, fancied girls. (Fantasised girls). But I’d never been to bed with one. Naturally I lied about this. Did anyone believe me? Doubtful.

Then I left Chaults Grammar and started to work in the central library. One night when I was eighteen I went to the Feathers for a drink with some partial friends, and there in a corner I saw Maureen Parner.

Truthfully, I barely gave her a second glance.

She was well over thirty, and this was in the early 1970s. She was just a woman with done-up blondish hair, sipping spirits with a fat man who kept laughing. There were girls elsewhere in the bar with swinging hair and off-the-shoulder tops and blue nails. My three male companions ogled them, as did I. “Look at her. What ya think?” “I like her friend best.” “Her skirt’s too short.” “Well, that’s OK.” “Yeah but the legs aren’t good enough.”

The evening rambled on, getting smokier and darker. It was just October, and outside the then-white streetlamps lit a scene of rainy murk. In the Feathers rings formed about the yellow lamps, and over there Maureen Parner, barely seen by me, sat on with her fat escort, crossing and uncrossing her plump, shapely, stockinged legs.

Everyone smoked then. About ten-thirty, only half an hour from closing time, the air was tindery stale and brown. Mick and Steve had got off with a ‘couple of birds’. Danny, who was a non-starter as was I, decided he needed to get home. “Promised I’d mow the lawn tomorrow. My dad always wants it done, right up till November. Mad. It’s my last Saturday off and all.”

Left alone in the Bacchanalia, I had another half, I’d already swallowed five or six – abruptly it felt like a whole barrel.

And that was when I did see her. Maureen.

A lot of people did.

She got up, slung the contents of a full glass of gin and lime in the fat man’s face and said, quite loudly and in a very beautiful voice that had a cockney accent, “You rotten bleeder! Well damn you, then. Get lost.”

(Maureen’s voice was lovely. When I heard her sing to her piano, the songs of Ivor Novello, Cole Porter, The Beatles, she had no trace of any accent. Hers was a clear rich soprano, silvery on the higher notes and plum-lush in the lower register. She’d sung professionally in her early youth. There’d been talk of light opera, the stage. But her husband happened instead. Back then, the late fifties, women’s careers often finished at the altar.)

The fat man rose. He wiped his face, swore, and left her. He stalked past my table.

Even then I used to be careful who I stared at, or at whom I stared, mitigating my glances into something more clandestine, so I hoped.

But Maureen Parner merely got to her feet and went into the Ladies.

As for me, my head was now ringing like a bell. I too hoisted my thin frame upright, left most of my drink, and wavered out into the misty night.

I was sitting on the bench by the bus-stop in the main road when she emerged from the Feathers. She wasn’t drunk. She had spruced up her pale pink lipstick and relacquered her hair – not that I could have worked that out then, she just looked fresh, almost new. She came straight along the pavement and sat down beside me, about a foot away.

“Has it gone?”

“I beg your…”

“The bus. The 176.”

“Er, no.”

That was my bus, too.

“Thank God,” she said. “My watch’s stopped. Thought I’d missed it. Then it’s only the other one and all round the houses.