by Tanith Lee
I confess with another jade I might have been moved to some violence. But with her, no, only I felt a profound sorrow.
“Sweetheart,” I said, and took her in my arms, and held her close as the light stained in upon the wall. “Shall I never see you again? Surely, next summer, when…”
“No, never,” she said, her voice very soft. “Not in this life. But you must always remember, while you live, I loved you. I have proved how much. May God forgive me.”
Then she got up, and dressed herself, at which my lust returned. But it was as if my loins and my mind were at a complete variance. Neither would accede to the other. One was a lion, but his adversary a mourning dove.
I would have gone with her to find transport. I would have taken her to an inn for food or wine or coffee. But I did not speak. I lay and watched her leave me, and only after she was gone did I lie back. And then it was I who wept, yes, even I who never ever wept for twenty years without he was on a stage. After which I fell asleep and did not wake again till noon. Or, perhaps, not at all.
Rod:
70
Vanessa’s grim determination had soon dragooned all of us out on to the street, down the intervening streets to the canal, and along to the Co-op. All-Of-Us comprised by then not only George and myself, but Forrel.
He was still so drunk he had been fairly easily coerced. If Vanessa realised his condition, (probably she did), she made no comment on it. She was almost offensively eager to demonstrate her acceptance—no, her entire approval—of what she took to be my and Forrel’s homosexual liaison. She had even made sure I had lent him my other overcoat, which was rather too long for him in sleeves and hem. To the half bottle of vodka he carried in tow, refilled I assumed at my larger one and now thrust into a pocket, she paid no overt attention. For myself I had been relieved to see the ‘whole bottle’ he had consumed on the train had been of this slightly smaller variety. I’d visualised his guts full of two litres, at least. However, as he now went on, they soon would be.
The Co-op is a sprightly place, sparkle-clean and well lit, and full of seemingly welcoming staff, who may be failed RADA students, even successful but passed-over ones, for all I knew, using their rejected skills to imply friendship and kindness.
Vanessa began to organize the shopping, naturally, George’s, mine, and—presumably—Forrel’s.
A great deal of salad and root vegetables ended up in our baskets, (Forrel had been given a basket too), brown bread and honey. I managed some lamb chops and butter and the cheaper eggs. Forrel distractedly picked up two packets of chocolate biscuits.
“Yes, why not,” congratulated Vanessa, intent on her partisanship. “A little treat. I suppose,” she added, “you can only get together at weekends?”
“Oh—er—yeah, sure,” beamed drunk and hazy Forrel, and next nearly collided with a stand of carbonated drinks.
George, the couth and practiced drunk, wandered more sedately, and far more independently than Forrel or I did, we so assiduously herded by my aunt. George’s was the trolley, stacked with many alcoholic beverages and a few mixers, one box of savoury biscuits and a plastic-wrapped selection of cheese.
When we attained the check-out, the girl smiled encouragingly on us, this strange little family of two aging, or aged, (or, in George’s case, teenagéd) relatives, and two youngish, oldish nephews or sons.
“Having a party?”
“No,” said George, amiably, producing a credit card. “It’s the dog. The dog drinks a lot.”
The girl giggled. “You oughta have a word with his vet.”
George now paid, waving away all protests, including Vanessa’s, which seemed to annoy her. But she reined it in not to upset Forrel.
Outside, a cab was already waiting. “Good-day, Max, old boy. Help us load up, would you?” Seeming quite willing, Max did so. He and George exchanged a little banter about life in general, paying no particular heed to the six bottles of spirits, and twenty-five of wine, settling clankingly in the boot with the cabbage, broccoli, lettuce, and other actual food.
George, it appeared, had already established contacts in the area, Max being one.
Max drove us to The Black Sheep, where George had decided we’d lunch, then Max waited in the pub car-park, reading a newspaper contentedly and sipping the large Coke George had bought him as the clock on the meter ran merrily on.
Forrel entered the pub like a man returning after too long an absence to a loving home. Everyone but Vanessa had stiff vodka-tonics, and thereafter en masse got through three bottles of Sauvignon. Vanessa drank orange juice. As for food, we all ate fish and chips, which wasn’t bad, considering how far it had had to travel, frozen, from the sea; except, again, Vanessa, who had a prawn salad without chips.
Forrel only toyed with his meal. I was uneasy, fearing a recurrence of projectile vomiting. But what he had, thankfully, stayed down.
Once, he nodded off, unconsciously leaning to one side, his head a moment resting on my shoulder. Vanessa smiled, nearly glowing with affiliation. “You see, Roderick,” she said, “how simple it is just to act as you want. These days no one, except a savage, would have any problem with it.”
I’m afraid the vodka and Sauvignon spoke. “You’re making quite a mistake, Auntie. In fact, this young man is insanely in love with a striptease dancer.”
“Well, Roderick, I’m sure that will pass. I’m sure this other young man in the sex trade looks very good to Edward,” (this was Forrel’s first name, it seemed), “but a good relationship means far more. A perfect body isn’t everything. And you could take some time to visit a gym, perhaps, improve your muscle tone. Edward would appreciate that, I’m sure.”
My mouth had dropped open. I closed it. I had a vision of Forrel (Edward) prancing after some well-packed member of the Chippendales. I laughed.
George too looked amused. I thought he had very likely spotted her error from the first. Fortunately, though, the laugh dislodged Forrel, who sat bolt upright, and said, “It’s nice.” And smiled radiantly, and then got up and, in a sort of staggering amble, headed for the gents.
“Would you like another orange juice, Van,” Uncle George courteously inquired.
“No, thank you, George. And I insist, when we get back, that I pay you for my groceries, and my lunch.”
“Right you are,” said George, lazy as a cat on a just-the-right-temperature tin roof.
Vanessa then also rose, and walked with the carriage of a queenly policewoman, to the ladies. George and I watched her progress, as other men might wait out the passing of a tiger.
71
“You know, old son,” said George, “I have a bit of advice to give you.”
I must confess I was worried, briefly, when he said that.
I’ve mentioned my far and distant pink past. How much of this either George or Vanessa knew I had never been certain. Neither of them had ever given me a clue. Unless, of course, I counted Vanessa’s determination that I must be gay, which stemmed, I might suppose, from my being treated as a girl until the age almost of fourteen. What now though would my uncle say to me, in the intervals of Forrel’s perhaps puking and/or passing out in the lav, and Vanessa’s wholesome adjacent visit?
“Ever read Cervantes?” George asked me.
Surprised, I had to think. “I’m not sure. I may have tried to and not got very far. But I’ve seen it dramatized on TV once or twice. You mean Don Quixote, yes?”
“Yes, good old Don Quixote…” adherently, George pronounced it, yet as it would have been in his youth, Don Quick-Sott. “After all,” George would doubtless have pointed out, “we have from this name the description quixotic—can hardly pronounce that kee-hoe-tick, can we?”
“So you know the idea, at any rate,” he continued. “And you’ll know the bit about the windmills?”
“Yes, of course. Most—well, a lot of us do. Tilting at windmills, when he thinks they’re giants.”
“Quick-Sott’s whole life, more or less, is that, at least in the or
iginal intention. I don’t mean, old chap, he always does things that are useless, because for what he wants out of life, they give him just the buzz he needs. The barslut is a princess, the innkeeper can knight him. The windmills are giants, meant to be slain by the perfect knight.”
“And the advice?” I had just seen the door of the Ladies open, but actually it wasn’t Vanessa who came out, but another woman in black jeans. She went up to the bar.
“The advice is this, just what Sancho Panza the servant-squire says to old Quick-Sott: ‘Take care, your worship, those things there aren’t giants, they’re windmills.’ ”
“You think I take too much on myself, George?”
“No, Roderick. I think you don’t see life quite as it is. You see girls as princesses, maybe, and ordinary streets as castle corridors, trains as chariots, for all I know, clouds as camels, (though that’s good old Hamlet, of course), and giants where there are only windmills. Or, maybe, the odd princess as a waitress, and giant—as a windmill. We all do it a bit. But you do it a lot.”
I gazed at him, quite unable to relate this statement to anything at all in my life. What did I ever see in such a reckless, mad and glamorous manner? My bloody awful job? The irksome train journeys? My lonely, stuck, just-adequate tiny life?
I was about to question him in a way unusual for me, when two new things occurred. Forrel emerged from the gents looking presentable and face-washed, though not yet shaved, and walking reasonably steadily. And as that happened the girl in black jeans came up to us.
“He says you’re with that woman that’s in the toilet.”
George and I both goggled.
The woman in jeans resumed, “She’s throwing up like crazy. I’ll go back in, but we may need, like, an ambulance.”
72
It had been the prawns, it seemed, and Vanessa, with her normal intolerance of all irritations, both voided herself and recovered remarkably quickly. George nevertheless sent her home in the cab asking Max to wait on there, for us, clock still running.
George’s triumph was to get Vanessa to drink a single brandy, for ‘medicinal’ reasons. She obeyed him. Afterwards she got into the cab, pale, but reasonably self-possessed.
“Poor old bat,” George said to me, as we again sat down.
Forrel was now drinking tap-water, but standing up. He told us how sorry he was about my aunt, and thanked us for a ‘great break’. He said he would need to catch the one-thirty back to town. Someone had called his mobile, someone he had to see, and he winked at me. By a quarter past one he was gone.
“Silly chap,” said George. “He’s not your boy, is he? No, thought not. Besotted with a stripper, well, he could do worse, but he’ll need funds.” Then, turning back to me, he said, “And I need a word with you, Roderick.”
Now what? I found I was frowning at him.
“Roderick,” said George, “I’d like to buy your flat off you. Private sale. Will save me no end of money.”
“My—flat.”
“I’ll give you a good price, and a bit over. I don’t mind you getting something, old lad. Just not the damn government and estate agents, all the rest of the vultures. Why should I pay for their holidays and lunches and porno films? I need to pay for my own. And we’ll square it with your landlord. After all, my first deal there was easy enough.”
He explained that he was very fond of Vanessa, in his way. He enjoyed sparring with her, it kept him up to scratch. But inside the one small flat it was too much. And sharing a bathroom with a woman was bloody hell. You could never get in there.
So if I could let him have my place, he’d be just across from her and they could go at it kick and bucket (as he put it) whenever they wanted, and both get a bit of peace too.
“You could move closer to your work,” he added, “or farther out.”
Then he named the sum he had in mind. For a man who had had to run because of imminent bankruptcy, or whatever he had said and implied before, he seemed to have plenty of dosh. His credit card, as I’d already observed, still operated.
The thing was, the moment he added those words or farther out, a beautiful rural landscape welled upwards in my mind, like a rising chord of music.
It was the farmhouse, below the hills. The house of my peculiar beginnings. Obviously, even with extra cash, I could never afford to go back there. Yet… to the neighbourhood—why not? I’d never really seen much of it, beyond the grounds. And no one much had ever seen me, save those persons my father paid to forget. And I was very different now. Oh, entirely different. No longer in pink. No longer a little girl.
Did I, truly, want to go there? For sure I didn’t want to stay either in my current apartment, or employment. They could go. I could find a little place somewhere, off the beaten track. Some little job, anything, just to pay the bills. I was thirty-two. I was fifty-nine. It was time I found a proper life that could suit and sustain me. That even, possibly, could wake me up.
The title of Don Quixote was still floating in my head, just over the resonance of my rural dream. Now another title came. Five of My London Lives. Not a book, I thought, puzzled. A play, perhaps? Why had I thought of that?
“What do you say,” George asked me, “yes or no?”
Nothing could get out of me apart from thoughts. I said, “George, look, give me till this evening. Come across for a drink, about six.”
“Make it a big drink, and I will,” he said. He smiled his alert, serene, teenagéd smile. “Don’t worry, I’ll bring the booze.”
Klova:
73
A shadow bends over me.
How has it got in?
Is it the landlady?
No…
Of course. It’s Coal. He works in Security. He can go anywhere he wants.
I was thinking about getting up and trying the lipstick, before I went out.
But I’m not.
Not going out.
I’m going… in.
Like a flower closing in darkness or too strong sun.
Like that.
I didn’t steal the lipstick. Like I’d had the money-gift wired into my account.
Who cares where it came from?
Who…
Who’s bending over me?
“Klova,” he whispers. “Klova-Spice. What have you done? Klova—what have you done?”
“Turned off the youth,” I said.
“But…”
“I turned it off. Then you grow old. I grow old. And—that’s it. Then I die.”
I can’t see him. Only the shadow.
He begins to tell me lots of things. That he made a mistake. It was all his fault. He didn’t understand. He is sorry. He loves me.
Who is he?
Coal.
He is Coal.
He says, he can get a medic.
I said, “Too late.”
74
Coal fetched that light-thing he used in the place upstairs, and it lighted, not dazzling me, but I closed my eyes, and I hear him breathing.
“It doesn’t work like this, Klova,” he said. “You can’t kill yourself just by—what in hell did you say? Turning off the youth…?” And then there was silence, as he stared down at me. He said, “Klova.” That was all.
Then he started to cry.
It doesn’t mean anything. We all cry.
Like as if we rain. Like the rain-beads on my dress. Pink and gold.
Then he tried to lift me, move me, and it hurt me, and I screamed. I heard the scream from miles off. It sounded angry.
But then the inside comes in again and washes up over me, and I’m comfortable again. It’s nice to die.
75
Who is there?
Oh, it’s Coal. He can break in anywhere.
He is holding my hand, which is now all bones. My body like is bones. My skin, just a bit of stuff draped over.
“Let go my hand,” I said. “I want the lipstick.”
“What?”
“The lipstick. Just there by me. Give it me.
I want to hold it.”
So he found the lipstick and put it carefully into my hand.
It has these two big letters on it, my lipstick. I love my lipstick. That was my mother’s name. C.P.
Nearly there now.
It’s like falling down and down through black feathers. Soft. Nobody loves me, all alone.
But I hold the lipstick close, and kiss the pink bud of its mouth that so often, like as it has, kissed me. Darling lipstick. Darling love.
I always liked its name, from the very first. What made me buy it. Then we kissed, the lipstick and I.
People leave bruises on you. The lipstick just leaves pink. It’s kind and sweet, even though its name is Cruel. C.P. Cruel Pink.
Let go.
Gone.
Dawn:
76
I think I’ve been away. You know how it is. At my age, you don’t always remember. But I was always like that. When I was thirty I was like that. I’d go into a room or along a corridor and think, what was I after? Or I’d forget where a shop was in relation to the other shops. And as for names, I couldn’t remember them. It’s just that I’m worse now. It’s funny really. I’ve grown into being old.
I wonder where I’ve been, though, if I was away somewhere? Years ago I’d sometimes stay with Susie, after she lost David, and I’d lost Ben. And sometimes I went to France, to see Jean. Did I fly? I think I did.
Anyway, I can see the cupboards and the fridge need replenishing. I’d better get my skates on and nip out to the Co-op.
I get tired doing that walk now, though it isn’t far.
Also I had a bit of a funny experience the last time I was down that way.
You have to go by Rothall Street and Sundridge Drive, and then to the canal and walk along. Takes me about twenty-five minutes, and then a half hour back. When I was younger I could’ve done it all in half that. But the Co-op wasn’t built then. And the canal was really a canal. Now they’ve drained and roofed it over, and underneath you can hear skateboarders screeching, and anybody that walks down there does so at their peril.