by Tanith Lee
“Well, you see…” I tried.
“No, I really do have to talk to someone. There isn’t anyone else, you see. No one. Not since that slag left me. And I just don’t—I don’t know what to do.”
With a sense of despair, I capitulated. And inside fifteen minutes he was ringing the main downstairs doorbell. I let him in, and up he blundered, stumbling about on the stairs and eventually lurching into my flat. I gave a quick glance, I admit, to the door of the flat across from me, but so far there was no reaction.
“Oh God,” said Forrel, floundering, and falling on my sofa as if he lived here and had done this a thousand times. “Oh God—Rod—it’s that fucking girl.”
“Oh dear.” I asked him if he would like a coffee. He assured me he had drunk a whole bottle of vodka on the train, hiding it from the guard, and now could only face the same kind of drink. But too aware this was not a sane plan, I poured him a small one, and made sure a plastic bowl was ready in the kitchen, should he repeat the indigestion attack I’d witnessed in Soho.
Then I sat down, as he insisted I must, and he began again on Forrel’s Lament. It was substantially the same, tedious through repetition, if ornamented now with extra flights of fancy, such as leaping from the top of our five storey workplace, or stripping himself naked and lying across the doorway of the room to which, it seemed, the girl with blue eyes and manmade breasts had twice taken him. I wondered if she had charged him the hundred-fifty she had offered me as her going rate. Less, due to his youth? More due ditto? It was impossible to try to follow his raving, not to say exhausting. If I had ever been prey to such passions, could I have been more sympathetic? How can I know? The curse-blessing of sexual love has never overtaken me. Or, more likely, I have never been fleet enough to catch up with it.
Surreptitiously, as he went on, I made out my weekend shopping list, which must include the Co-op, and the light shop for some bulbs. This didn’t trouble Forrel. When he was ready he went off to my bathroom, “for a dump,” and coming back refilled his glass to the top. Prudently, I added vodka to my list.
We reached nine-thirty, the time at which I’d meant to leave. In a pause I said, “I’m afraid I have to go out—shops, you know.”
“Oh, you go, Rod. That’s OK. I’ll be fine. Catch a bit of kip here.”
My leaden heart sank into my boots of clay.
64
George was on the landing. He wore a baggy suit, a somehow baggier tie, and an ancient, ancient overcoat. Vanessa was right behind him in her fake-fur jacket.
“Just about to knock,” said George. “We’re off to the local Co-op.”
Hemmed in on all sides, I stood at a loss. And then behind me, Forrel opened my door, and smiled blearily out upon us all. He was by now in his shirt-sleeves, his hair ruffled.
“Well,” said Vanessa, with cool majesty. “What have I always said, Roderick? Why would you never be honest about this? You are gay. Here is the proof.”
And George looked at me with a quizzical, gentle amusement. “Why not, old lad. Each to their own.”
And “Gay,” repeated Vanessa, holding out her hand to the swaying Forrel who, swaying, shook it. “How good to meet you, at last.”
Klova:
65
So I have put on again that special dress I bought, when next I went to the Tower and met Coal the first.
Before, I bathed under the spume, and scented me. And my hair in the hair-washer, and tinted extra black.
The dress is gold, with pink like glass rain all over. And fringes of goldenness and pink. The shoes are like the dress. And the hold-ups with pink roses.
I made up my face, the best I ever did.
And last of all I put on the lipstick that has C.P. marked on it. Like as my mother. If she was, and not one more lie.
66
He said to me I was a peculio.
I was Weirdness, and so weird things happen round me. And he wouldn’t be one of them.
This is Coal. After we met the ghost in the rooms above. How could I argue? It must be true.
My eyes cried, but I didn’t cry. I wasn’t there, just somewhere in another room inside my head, looking out a window smeared with the rain of my wet tears.
He said, “Don’t do that. It won’t do any good. Take care, Klova. Have a fine life.”
When he had gone I went and sat on the bed where we had had carnal. I didn’t know where I was.
I was nowhere.
No sounds upstairs.
No stink from downstairs.
I am in nowhere and I do not exist.
So it will be easy. I’m all ready now. Like as I have done my best, and then the bank-nanny can distribute the last of my shots to other people who will need them. And no one will remember or think of me.
I will be wiped away, like the lipstick.
The lovely lipstick, which I kiss goodbye, and leave standing upright by the bed, its gold case with the two letters C.P. and the deep pink bud of its being.
The lipstick will be the last thing I see.
My friend. Bye-bye, as they said it in the Centre. Bye-di-bye-byes.
Love. And let go.
Emenie:
67
They performed a cursory search of the rest of the flat—the kitchen, loo and bathroom, the inner hall—very dark, of course, and they missed the cellar door. They seemed disinclined to go upstairs, and look elsewhere. Perhaps they thought other people lived up there who might object.
“No use,” said Bruvva soon enough. “Useless.” He glowered at me again. Again it was all my fault they hadn’t found her.
The ridiculous thing was it was their own. Bruvva must be blind (had the black eye affected his vision?). And both of them lacking all sense of smell.
It was less than ten more minutes before they shambled out. The Uniform with a particularly incongruous “Thank you then, madam.” And Bruvva with a glare and a mutter, “If she don’t show, I’ll be back.”
I shut the front door, and then dragged one or two bits portable enough to lift or pull, heavy enough to impede entry a little, against it.
Only then did I brace myself, and walk through into the bedroom.
I really would have to get rid of Micki’s corpse now. There was no longer a choice. Why had I delayed?
The light came on when I threw the switch. Because most lights now don’t work, they hadn’t even tried that. But it was a hundred watt blaze. Couldn’t miss a thing.
I couldn’t miss the squalor of the room, the untidy bed. I couldn’t miss the chair with the cushion fallen out of it to the floor. I couldn’t miss that she, Micki, was no longer in it. Micki—was gone.
What did I feel? A wave of utter panic. This was so illogical.
True, I hadn’t looked in on her this morning, but last night I had, one quick stare, and then the door shut to try to alleviate some of the stink.
How in Hell had she gone?
Where to?
Somebody must have broken in and… and what? Taken her up, rotten and disintegrating, got her through the whole flat and out again—all this without ever waking me. All this without any mess. As I say, she’d been falling apart. But now there was nothing at all. Not a single stain or flake, not even one dark hair lying on the ground.
Presently, I went back into the kitchen, shut the door and sat down. I drank some bottled water. I had to think.
There was a plate on the table with a single smear of jam on it. Pallid sunshine, through the high-up crack in the zipped curtain, hit the plate, and I could see the shape of a raspberry-coloured snake spitting out a ray of fire. What did it mean, this sign?
I judged it was about eleven o’clock. I got up and went out of the kitchen into the garden at the back, to get some more clean air.
A small plane was going over. They hardly ever do any more. It might not even be manned, a robot plane, senselessly spying on us all, with nobody left at Government HG to take notes.
I watched it blankly, breathing up the cold garden smel
l. Leaves and compost, foxes, winter.
When I looked down again I saw at once straight in among the bare trees. What was that?
Without any thought I went to the spot and stood there, gaping down at the mound of earth, with all the long grass and weeds ripped off, and seven or eight broken-up paving stones lying on top. The badgers had been digging there, or one had, but not made much headway. The stones were weighty. I knelt down and touched the soil. Still moist from turning. I had dreamed I had done this. Dreamed it. Had I sleep-walked out and somehow achieved my aim? I examined my clothes, my fingernails—but that was no indication, was it? I could always be clean and tidy, elegant even. What I might have done to get covered in soil and mulch and corpse-dust would all be gone.
Well then, I must have done the work. In the dead of night. Micki was down there now, under the earth and the stones. It was accomplished.
I turned and went back in, and so through the rooms again, and already the flat smelled quite fresh. Even the bedroom smelled only of its ordinary odour of faint must and damp.
Irvin:
68
Dogs are supposed loyal. Even wolves, when tamed, have sometimes been so accredited. They will die for you. Not so the faithless beast I have these past two years nurtured in my care, fed from my own plate, and vaunted, formerly, as a paragon.
For two weeks I have not seen the wretch, but am constantly told of his exploits, for good or ill. But yesterday comes the chandler to me to present a bill for a piece of cheese my dog had, so he swears, snatched from the stores. As luck has it, the chandler is a bone head who is enblissed by the theatre. And so I gave to him a free entrance to our current play, in Stampwell Street, off Cartwheel Lane. A rare piece of tomfoolery it is too, and no mistake, but he is glad, and I no longer forfeit for the cheese.
Then, this very afternoon, I am regaled by the carter, who is wont, under duress, to cart me to my work in London, by a tale of how my dog, last night, possessed five bitches in a row, and kept the folk of seven domiciles from their sleep throughout by the noise.
Said I, “No, not he. It was another cur.”
“It was your own, sir…” (He calls me sir as others have called me felon) “…that black rogue tall as a pony and with one red ear.”
What can I say? So he is. I shall be thrown from my lodgings in the old woman’s charnel-house at this rate.
At four o’clock to the theatre, through the slush of the great snow we had, and by six I am on the boards, trooping with the rest, and Merscilla Peck in the midst.
Thank God, she has gone back to favouring me, for there is such a scene in this play, (during which I seize her and act I have my way behind a curtain), at which otherwise I would burst, I have no doubts. But she and I regularly deal with this matter later, at an inn we know of.
Of all my charmers she is, I must acknowledge, the one most fires me up. Thank God too she is married, or I might have succumbed to the trap of wedlock. And I have slight doubt that herself as a wife, she would not smile upon my other adulteries, though ever permitting her own—as now, indeed she does, and her poor husband kept by her on a leash shorter than a cat’s spanker.
Meanwhile, I also pass the time now and then with Mr Templeyard, who has not yet tired of me, nor I, yet, of him.
As for his tasty wife, they have quarrelled over the other business of my ‘insult’ to her, and she is off to the country with her mother. A shame, for my appetite is still whetted, there. But likely she may come back. Or if not, other fruit may fall to my hand.
It is a fact both women and men become enamoured of the actor kind. And since nowadays women, too, parade on the stage, as in former times they did not, they draw so many admirers they (and I) must sometimes leave the premises by a side-door. Merscilla for one has seven drones of this sort. I think she indulges none of them, having her bedroom hours mostly crowded up with me, or her spouse. But I do not tempt fate by looking into this, much. For myself I have had two or three other girls in the past month. One need not go hungry. But one wants, where one can get it, the roast hog not the cutlet.
Returned home, I find for once the old bell-wether of a landlady has laid and lit me a fire, and set out a dish of meat and eggs, as I had asked.
But Satan himself has been before me. He has got in and snouted out all the viands, leaving for me but a few chewed embers of the meal.
And how should I know who is thus responsible for my starvation? Why, he has left his signature, bold as any Shakespeare, in the egg and gravy on my rugs: a great paw-mark the size of a hoof. The dog.
69
Last night the snow came down again, and mantled the wild land beyond the village with its ermine carapace.
I had, having got to the play, half thought I should remain in town with Mis’us Peck. But alas, old Peck sends the page for her. He is sick of the winter plague, (there is for sure a plague for every season), and she must get to their broad house on Hampstead Walk, to tend him.
Losing heart then, I too travelled home, though not on foot but by the carter’s cart, for he had been delayed in London.
“You should make your roost in the city, Mr Thessaris,” says he, calling me Mr now as if he called me villain. “This must be an irk for you to wrestle with, such racketings up and down on my poor cart.”
“Your cart is a swan, sir,” said I. “She breasts the snow with grace and courage.”
He spat into the white-flecked void beyond the lantern.
It was well past midnight when I climbed to my room.
Just at the door, I heard within a stealthy shift, and took it for my fiend of a dog. Charging therefore in I stopped with an oath. For no canine lay beside the once more lighted hearth, but on the bed a naked female form, gilded by the dimness and the fire to a creation of marble and amber.
“Never be startled, dear love,” she said. And for an instant I did not know her. She was instead every female I had ever idled with, yet also none of them. In the strange light her hair showed both dark and golden, and her eyes had no colour, only flame in them.
“Madam,” I said, “should you be here? Is this not unwise?”
“Does Cupid bid us to wisdom or to delirium?” she replied. “Shall we try, and see if we can work the puzzle out?”
I am an actor, and so know voices. Now I knew hers. It was the young wife of Jem Templeyard, back from the country, it seemed, and primed for battle.
I cannot say such an event has never befallen me. But never quite in this way. Jem had led me to believe she was infuriate with me and no less with himself, saying I was a philanderer and rapist, and he a coward, who would not credit the truth. He must run to hide, while I might smoulder in Hell, she would pray for it. (One rarely believes such vows, save on a stage. Men and women both volley out these dragon-vapours here and there. I have done so myself. We are all fools, and can generally be appeased.)
Oh, but she was a tempting sight. So smooth and soft and gleaming, as if limned by gold and opal. To take her so would be like a love-dance with a statue, but one alive.
She did not move, so I went to her, and then she gripped my hands and put them upon her bosom. Up sprang jack, and very next down lay Irvin Thessaris. And we galloped our measure in the riotous firelight, at which her shrieks came on so high and piercing I must stifle them with my mouth, for fear the whole bedlam house-full ran up to ask who had been slain.
As the dawn began to come, we by then beneath the bedclothes, she woke and said to me, “Did you never know I loved you, proud actor?”
“Aye, my lady. How else did you give yourself?”
“I might have done it,” she said, “as with my doddle-dun of a husband. Because I must. No other pass for such as me. A poor girl. Christ aid me, I was sold by my father as you sell a shoe.”
“More beautiful, for sure.”
“Well, then, scholar, a beautiful shoe.”
As a rule such brooding at the chime of midnight, or as the wash of the day comes back, is tedious and sour. But from her
pretty lips, ripe and rosy from my kisses, I knew the sadness in her. Poor lass. To be a woman, and sold, as she said, to a man she despised. (For it was plain enough she did despise Jem Templeyard. To me he was a divine romp of a rump. But to her; her master, and her doom.)
“Well, sleep now, sweetheart,” I said.
“No, I cannot sleep. I must be off and away to my mother’s house at Levishamm. But before I go, I must say this. I loved you, faithless dog, as some love God. I loved you as the winter loves the spangled spring—that kills it. And you, my lord, thought me less than a breath of spice, or perfume. One breath. No more. Poor me,” she said, and she did not shed tears, nor whine or cling. Cool she lay by me, my firelit statue of silk, with her velvet purse, and her prow of satin, and her eyes of smoke and fire. So I listened. The playwright, he would have been to his papers, and written down her words. I write them down, however, for—despite my doglike and Satanic thievery—I heard them all, and the song of her sad heart couched in that lovely cushioned breast.
“Dear girl…” I said, when she paused.
But she spoke again. “Hear me out. In less than a quarter by the clock I’ll be gone. And, I think, never again shall I see you. No, not in this mortal life. Will you let me work one last act on you?”
Stupidly I said, “An act, my love, is the ballast of any play.”
At which a falling star shot through her eyes. I swear they blazed from gold to white to grey. And then I felt a sore hot pain in my left arm, not far from where he, her husband, had struck me in the duel, pinked me, as he said. A scratch, a little bite. Nothing. Only recompense.
One may imagine I had started up, and then I saw she had only stuck in me a pin, the kind a woman may use about her dress, less than two inches. It was, even so, bloodied, but that only half an inch along its tooth.
She stared at me, tearless and intent. “I never wished to hurt you, my lord, my love. But this—I will have.” And then she licked the pin, licked off my blood from it.