by Tanith Lee
There used to be a sort of park or common beyond, but they’ve built on it since. Flats. When was that? About 1984, I think it was. The previous century. What a thought.
To get back to what happened to me last week. Or the week before that, I’m not certain.
I went out, as I always do, checked a couple of times I’d locked the front door, to be sure, to be sure, as Ben used to say, and up the road and down into Rothall Street.
The trees were losing all their leaves so fast. Time flies, doesn’t it. It was only August a minute ago, or so it seems. And tomorrow it’ll probably be Christmas Eve! I’m joking. But it seems that way, to me.
In Sundridge Drive there were a lot of extra cars, and Number 15—or 25, was it?—had scaffolding up. It’s silly, but house repairs always remind me of the war. I mean the Second World War, 1939 to 1954—no, no, 1945, of course, I mean. But the war wasn’t like that. I was only little, about four, five, six. But I remember those awful sirens. And the red in the sky, even out here. And the noise. Things falling. I wasn’t evacuated, you see. I can’t remember why not. Horrible times.
Then I got out of Sundridge Drive, and walked along the old tow-path by the roofed-over canal underpass, and there was this gang of four boys. They looked about fourteen or fifteen to me. They could have been older.
Usually, if I see something like that, I’d cross the street, but there isn’t anywhere, you see, there, until you come to the old bridge.
So, I kept going. They didn’t seem to notice me at first. Just lounging there against the wall. And I don’t look rich. I’m not interesting to them. Or, I thought I wasn’t.
77
I shan’t try to duplicate how they speak. I’ll simply translate it into ordinary English, so far as I understood them.
1st Boy: Here she comes, look, do you see?
2nd Boy: That her, is it?
1st Boy: Yes, like a scarecrow. But she’s just an old bag today.
3rd Boy (lighting a cigarette): You said she dresses up funny.
1st Boy: Yes, she does. Couldn’t believe my eyes first time I saw it. You should have seen.
3rd Boy: Well I didn’t. I don’t believe you. You’ve been smoking too much f***ing skunk, you a***hole.
4th Boy: I seen her. I seen her down the station. Thought it was a loony.
1st Boy: She is a loony, you t**t.
4th Boy (taking a drink from a bottle of lager): She had a real short dress on. And a wig. F***ing gross-out.
2nd Boy: I see that too. From the back thought it was a bint. (Did he mean Girl?) F***ing weird one. Then I see her front ways. And she’s ninety, like she is now.
(I am seventy-four, or seventy-three. I am not ninety.)
By then I was just about level with the gang, and I was afraid, rather, to go on.
And then:
3rd Boy: Yes, I seen her and all. Thought it was an old geezer. In a suit. That was up the High Street. Talks to himself. Herself.
They were all staring straight at me. So I had to go right by. And the oddest thing, they all pressed right back hard to the wall, to let me pass. Not as if to be polite, you see, but as if I was contagious, had some modern illness that can’t be cured, or I was radioactive, maybe. I think they held their collective breath.
It was only when I was about ten yards on up the path that one of them, I think the 1st Boy, shouted after me: “Here, grandma, next time make sure you’ve got your other clothes on!”
And they all laughed.
Probably they were all just high on this drug named after an animal—what did I say they said it was called… bear? fox?
No, of course, skunk. Why do they call it that, I wonder, does it smell horrible?
When I came back with my shopping they weren’t there, but I’ve decided I’ll have to go the long way round next time, up through Wilchester Road. I don’t want to meet them again. It made me feel a bit ill. They are all mad, or they’ve been driven mad by the drug. Nothing is safe anymore. It was safer really in the war, with the bombs falling. People were different then. They were—people.
Emenie:
78
For a couple of nights I stayed in the room higher up the house, the one with the bed. I took a few cans of beans and pasta and one of peach slices up, and some water and Coke to drink. No electricity on the higher floors so I couldn’t make a hot drink. In the end that drove me down. I made a cafetiere of coffee, and stayed in the kitchen. The main room and the bedroom seemed warped out of true, their angles all wrong. And that clean smell was intrusive as any stink.
It snowed that afternoon, all this tattered cotton wool whirling down, like cold-white flesh flaking off the sky.
I still couldn’t get round it, couldn’t figure out what the hell had happened. I knew I had not buried Micki’s body. Yet someone had. Who? Why? How?
The snow set in pretty solidly. My supplies were low. I needed toothpaste and shampoo etc., not to mention food. In this sort of weather as well the persons who still exist hereabouts go a bit mad, rushing into the remains of the shops, even loading up home-made sleds to drag away. Of course I knew I had to pull myself together, and go on with my life. If something happens that’s impossible, you can only push it off into the back rooms of your brain. There would be an explanation. But I wasn’t going to solve the mystery yet, maybe never. So, close the door on it.
I did think about Micki now and then. I wondered how she was, breaking down as she would be, gently snowing under the ground. Her hair would go on growing for a while, what hadn’t already fallen out. That was a pleasant thought. She’d had lovely hair.
Even the cellar didn’t smell now. But this was almost certainly because of the general cold. And, too, the corpses were mostly getting quite ancient. Even Sy’s was pretty old—for a corpse, that was.
I got my thick coat, and my leather boots with the tough flat soles that came from the shoe-shop in the High Street before it was set on fire. I’d put on a jumper of dark orchid-red. I sometimes do wear red clothes. Though I don’t always dress to kill, red’s often my killing gear. If I wear red, I am fairly certain I’ll be hunting. (Hunting pink.)
Frankly, the best way I could see of scotching my concern with the mysterious grave of my last victim, was to take a new victim, and make bloody sure (or unbloodily, if the method avoided it) I left them far outside my own premises. The shopping was one thing, but it provided too the backdrop and excuse for another murder. That would do it. Wipe the slate clean. Begin a new chapter. Get me back in the ordinary and workable groove.
79
There was no one about as I plodded down the tow-path.
The Co-op, as I’d feared, had been massively scavenged by others. No bread, not a drop of wine locatable. There used to be a pub farther up, I can remember having a beer in there once or twice—people used to walk in and help themselves, even sit down at a table to drink. But that didn’t last, obviously. It was looted and cleaned out.
There were some lagers in a box. I found some soups and peas in cans, and some chicken in the freezer.
It is peculiar. The supplies do seem genuinely to be restocked, from time to time. I’ve never figured that out either, have I? But it’s as well they are, even if not today.
Having got what I could, I made my way back down to the tow-path.
The sky was that lurid greyish-white the snow turns it. It had a bulging look, the sky, as if pregnant with the snows. It was going to eject snows like multiple quintuplets all over the ruined city and its feral outskirts. It was already starting.
The deciduous trees of the park were already in full leaf again, white foliage thick as late July. The evergreens still showed a little dark. Some crows went over, jet black, the snowfall making them like pieces of a jigsaw.
This message told me there might be something very close for me.
So then I looked more intently at the park. You couldn’t make out the distant wreckage of the flats through the ongoing snow, but I could see a thin dark column win
nowing lightly up in the windless debris of the air.
I crossed the bridge very carefully: half of it is down but the rubble has been solid for years, and you can get across if you have to. (Simon-Sy had, after all; I’d watched him do it, following my rat-laden promise of wine and, perhaps, sex.)
I suppose people came into this park once and played games, or had fights, read on seats in the shade, or sunbathed, or screwed behind the bushes.
Now it was just a man sitting on a pile of bricks, tending his fire.
He glanced up at me warily. And he had it written all over him. He was mine. My kill.
“Hi,” I said.
He glanced up at me again, having already averted his eyes.
“I’ve got a couple of lagers here,” I said. “You care for one?”
“Yeah. All right.”
He was young. He looked about eighteen. The way I did, that afternoon. Perfect match. I’m often clever, that way, looking the right age before I even spot the quarry. Though I can, surreptitiously, grow a bit younger, or older, if I have to, when I meet them.
I went over and sat down on the broad, whitened root of the tree across from him. I handed him a lager from my not-very-full bag.
Bemusing me slightly, he twisted the bottle round in his hand, studying it, as if looking for a wine provenance label or something.
I said, “Cold day to be out.”
“Yeah,” he said.
I didn’t like him. That can sometimes be an extra incentive when it comes to killing. It can add a nice bright red-pink cherry to the cake.
“So, going to tell me your name?” I smilingly asked.
“Why’d you want to know?”
“Well, just so I can call you something.”
“Why’d you have to call me anything.” It wasn’t even a question.
“OK,” I said. Then, “Want a cigarette?”
“Nah,” he said. “They ain’t good for you.”
This made me laugh. Surrounded by ruin and chaos, he worried about smoking.
The method was already coming to me. After he had relaxed a bit, I’d get behind him. The fire was glowing under the smoke. In ten minutes it would be very hot and hungry.
“I had to come out,” I said. “My mum sent me.”
“Your mum?” He gaped at me.
God, he was stupid.
I handed him a Mars bar from the bag and previously from the Co-op freezer. Everything was so cold he might not mind. But he took the bar and turned it round and round in his other hand, (the lager now, still unopened, was in his left.)
“Do you want me to open the bottle for you?” I asked sweetly.
“Yeah,” he said, and handed it back.
I thought, next bottle after this one: I can brain him with it, pull him forward rather than push him from behind…
I undid the lager and handed it back to him. He took a swallow. No reaction. He stared down into the fire.
Was he on drugs? Of all the commodities left behind by Armageddon and the Apocalypse, drugs had remained available. He might be, then. He had that pasty, saggy face, spotty too, and lank hair. His leather jacket had holes in it that seemed to have been punched through by a machine, they were so regular. Even out in the cold he smelled nasty.
I let him have his drink. He was slow. All the bottle, go on, boy, drain it. It’ll help you when I do it, help me to do it.
The snow, so far shielded away somewhat by the crowded trees, began after all to flicker through. White moths swarmed to the cherry-red of the fire. Red was pink. Hunting pink.
I took out the second lager. (Still one left for me when I got home. I too turned the bottle in my hand. He was back gawping at the flames. And the cigarettes were in the bag. I didn’t smoke. Why had I taken them?)
Abruptly I said, “Are you expecting someone?”
“Eh?”
“Someone’s up there, on the higher ground.” (Would he know what ‘higher ground’ meant?) “On that hill-thing,” I amended. “Kind of waving—like,” I added, to assist.
I thought he’d look round. But he didn’t bother. He took another sluggish drink of the lager. He was probably only sixteen, in fact. It occurred to me he couldn’t read, hence his gaping at the bottle. He hadn’t recognised the colours, the signs, the omens of the label.
I stood up suddenly. “Fuck!” I gambled even he would react to my urgency, and my use of the still high-power word. “Christ!” I added, staring off beyond him over his shoulder, looking terrified and confused.
And he did at last respond. He tried to turn and look and get up all at the same moment, and, losing balance and purchase, he skidded on the snow.
The crucial instant had arrived. I had the unopened bottle, the liquid adding weight. I must smash him on the head and pull him down in the same second. Straight into the fire. I could do that. I had done things like that before. The burning warmth of the flames was so close. The burning close happiness of fulfilment strengthened and steadied me. And I reached forward and—
80
And I reached forward and
and
and I reached forward
and
81
And I couldn’t do it. It wasn’t a physical difficulty. I was agile, and it was quite simple. But my brain couldn’t give the order to make my body move. Instead I let him slither, and right himself, and turn round in a rage on me.
“Wha’s the fuckin’ problem yer fuckin’ ol’ bitch?” he yelled at me. Oh, he was awake now.
I said hoarsely, “I have to go.”
“You go, you ol’ fuckin’ cunt! Gwon. Get off.”
I moved as fast as I could away from him, with my bag, and the second lager stupidly in my hand. I shambled off through the snow-bushes and reached the rubble and got over that, and on to the more solid remains of the bridge. I slipped and fell twice. Hurt my knees and one wrist. Kept going.
My heart hammered. My heart was screaming: Why? Why? Why hadn’t I done what I had had to do? I didn’t know.
When I was on the tow-path, tears were running down my face. I stumbled back along the slippery path.
I didn’t know why. Why I hadn’t done it. Had I gone mad? He had been mine. For me. The crows had shown me. Birds are messengers. I read their omens. What was wrong?
I don’t remember the rest of the journey. But I must have fallen again. There was red blood on my chin, and on both my palms, when I got in. Hunting pink. But I hadn’t killed. I hadn’t done what was there for me to do. And he had been mine.
Rod:
82
Before he came over that evening, I made some notes. Quite a lot of notes. They encouraged me to do that, the people who purported to help me after my father died and my pink girlhood with him. And somehow I never lost the note-making habit. In fact, probably, it’s become slightly obsessive. Like keeping up a diary.
When we got back to the house, George had paid off and tipped Max, the obliging cabby, with an impressive amount of notes.
As Max helped us bring in the sheaves, as it were, bottle-clanking upstairs like a Roman legion on the march, I noted that the foul stench in the hallway had finally been attended to. Well, thank God anyway for that. I had, I admit, a suspicion the smell had already been gone when we first came down earlier, with Forrel in tow. But my thoughts had been slightly distracted.
They were distracted worse now. Not only by George’s bombshell about my flat and my subsequent musings on escape, but by the peculiar thing that had happened as he and I were walking back.
We’d taken the other, longer, route, for some reason, up around Wilchester Road. “Looks like snow,” George had remarked as we dawdled along. “Good to get a bit of a walk in before the siege.”
About half way along the curve of the street, a couple of youthful yobs came shambling out of a side alley, and seeing us, stopped short, staring as if never had they beheld a couple of men, older or old, before. And then both of these kids burst out in raucous laughter, pointing and hopping
, with a sort of brainless yet threatening glee.
“Tol’ yah! Din I tell yah, man? It’s ’er. Dun I say?”
It was at me, incidentally, they pointed. Not at George. What had they said—“It’s ’er.” Or was it Kerr or Ayre–some name mangled by their sloppy mouths.
We walked sedately past, or George did. And the two creatures did drop back, piling to a garden wall as if scared we might confront them. Others would have, perhaps. Once we were past, however, one of them shouted, loud through his own giggling, “‘Ere, sir—great fucking coat, sir!” And the other gave what used, long ago, to be called a wolf whistle.
As their chortles died off behind us, (thankfully they hadn’t followed), one word jogged my memory. Coat. Forrel had made off with my spare one.
83
I got my small array of drinks out, including the original bottle of vodka; to my surprise Forrel hadn’t finished it off. He must have topped up his own bottle—from the tap.
In the kitchen I polished two spirit tumblers with paper towels, and brought them through.
All the time I kept on thinking about the yobs. No, it wasn’t a name, was it. The little prick had said: It’s her, or he would have, had he been able to pronounce it properly. Her. To and of me. Of course, it was plainly absurd. Or was it? Did I, from that first training long ago, still carry some vestige of the female? In my walk, perhaps, or certain gestures? I didn’t think so. I don’t think so. Without any doubt my voice is masculine, and so is the stubble I shave off every morning. Therefore, what had prompted such a particularised insult? The idea had begun to raise its head that somehow, in some entirely unforeseen and unfathomable manner; hints of my childhood had surfaced round about.
Putting down the glasses, my hands turned cold as ice. I thought. George. George who, after all, must know my history. George, now here, friendly and urbane, teenager at heart, easy-going, George, telling Max the Cabby in a burst of chat, as they rode somewhere or other, And Max incredulous—“What? For real—they dressed him like a girl?”