by Tanith Lee
I informed him I had only been pinked. He rolled up now the left sleeve of my bed shirt to examine the wound, which had healed well enough. But I was startled, even in my fobbled state, to note black marks in the skin below.
“Now this is not good,” he said, with interest.
“What then is it?”
“I’m not of a certainty yet, sir, but will tell you when able. I must consult my books.”
After which, having extracted the initial coins of payment, (that came to him far less readily than my life’s blood), he left me in my misery.
Then a black tide swam in on me, and somewhere in the midst of it I heard myself declare, aloud, I was a fool indeed. For surely I could now reason things out? Little Sophia, with her own white hand, had made sure of me during our last sad merrymaking. She had thrust into my arm a pin, then licked off and swallowed what was on the stalk of it. So attending to both of us, she swiftly and myself at a much slower pace. Sophia Templeyard had poisoned me.
Dawn:
92
I haven’t been to the Co-op yet. I don’t feel that well.
I went to the doctor instead for the routine visit they demand every year. He examined me, which I don’t like. They are so matter-of-fact now, as if you’re a sack of potatoes.
“Weight still fine,” he congratulated me, having insisted I stand on the scales, “nice and thin. Plenty of young girls would be thrilled to be your weight, Mrs Thorstrestis.” (They can never pronounce my name. And sometimes he forgets it and calls me ‘Dawn’.) He took my blood pressure and said it was a little low, nothing serious, and much better than being too high. “We got you onto those statins just in time,” he now congratulated himself. I have never confessed I don’t ever take them. All these pills. What do they do to you, aside from what they’re supposed to? I remember Susie… or was it Jean…? She took something or other the doctors gave her and it cleared up the original condition, whatever that was, and gave her some other illness. Well, I don’t want any of that. My response to his offer of a ‘flu jab can be guessed.
In the end he smiled at me benignly.
“But you don’t seem quite to be in the pink, do you, Dawn?” This is an old fashioned phrase. Did he use it to patronise me?
“No,” I said.
“Well, we have to remember,” he reminded me, “you are seventy-four now. Not quite a girl. You need to take things more easily, get a bit more exercise, take an interest in something—voluntary work, perhaps.”
I smiled gratefully, and I was allowed to escape, empty-handed. Rest more, exercise more, eat five portions of fruit and vegetables each day to make sure your stomach is nicely upset all the time. What is the matter with them?
I’m just depressed, probably. I was thinking a lot about Ben. He died thirty years ago, about this time of year. It feels awful to say this, but I can’t remember the exact day. I always used to mark it, back then, whenever Then was, then.
He had bronchitis very badly, and it killed him—a systemic breakdown they called it. You don’t hear of bronchitis doing that so much now. There are other more popular things now that kill you.
I came up all the stairs and got into my flat, at the very top of the house. It’s in the attic, or where the attic was before we got the loft extension. There was a pigeon sitting on the skylight, but it flew away as soon as I arrived. Sometimes, if you keep really still, a lot of them settle there. They make a mess, and no window-cleaner any more to clean the glass, only the rain. But I like them. I like pigeons.
There’s nobody else in the house now, of course. I had it all made over after I lost Ben, and let the rooms as flats, but in the end they made such a mess, the tenants, much worse than the pigeons, breaking things, and their children writing on the walls, and all the noise, sometimes until two or three in the morning, and when I asked if they could be quieter they were rude and then they left. Ran off without paying the rent. So in the end I just let it go and didn’t let to anybody else. I live on my pension, which isn’t much, and the insurance on Ben that comes from Ben’s old workplace at the Parnassus Showrooms. Not very much, any of it. I don’t think I could afford five portions of fruit and veg a day, even if I wanted to.
I suppose I’ll have the last of the casserole tonight. I’ve made it last four days. It’s almost six o’clock. Shall I have a sherry? That might be nice. And I can manage until next week, for shopping. There’s bread in the freezer, and some cheese and soup in the fridge. I’m low on tea-bags, but I can use each one twice. No milk left. Oh well.
Nothing on the radio later but jazz or pop, or something about computers. They go wrong all the time, it seems. Just as people do.
Shall I have that sherry?
I just feel so tired. I think I’ll have a rest first in the chair. That’s better. Just a doze by the electric fire until maybe seven. I’ll fancy the sherry then. I can have cheese on toast. Yes.
93
I was back in my youth, but not really the age I was at the time. In the dream I was about twenty, but it was the war.
Outside the flat I could hear the sirens with that awful, frightening whining and gurning they used to do. Of course, it’s meant to be frightening, it’s to warn you. I never forgot their sound from my infancy. And all through the Fifties and Sixties, long after the war was over, they would keep on testing them out to make sure they still worked, in case someone dropped an atom bomb on us all. I remember Ben used to say “Four minute warning—what can you do in four minutes?” And then he’d wink at me. “I don’t know, though.” And we’d laugh.
After I lost him, you know, that was when I started to lose myself. Bits of me seemed just to drift away, as though they wanted to be with him, and not with me anymore. My silly memory got so much worse in my forties. And now, half the time, I don’t know what I did yesterday, or even where I went. If I did. I don’t, of course, ever mention this to the doctor. I can guess the grim and fussy result.
But to go back to the dream. There was the siren, and then I looked out of an uncurtained window—which I doubt I’d have done, or ever did, in the childhood blackout. I could see them all coming, on the blacked-out sky, the bombers, like a swarm of horrible fat wasps or flies. And their eggs falling out of them. And concussions miles off and then nearer and nearer. And the sky flickering red. And then one of the planes came in through the window at me so I jumped away. It wasn’t very big, only about the size of a child’s balloon. But it dropped the bomb straight down on my carpet. And everything exploded with a terrific bang.
I leapt up from my chair and stood clutching at the back of it, and for a few seconds, even wide awake, the room seemed full of burning crimson fires. It was the electric fire, of course, that was all.
Emenie:
94
Throughout the rest of the short day and the evening I couldn’t settle.
I walked up and down the flat, even through the bedroom now, round and round. I didn’t want to go out and through the rest of the house. It seemed full of weird noises, as though other people were there. Only they weren’t. No one had broken in, or could have got in without breaking in. But everything felt wrong.
Obviously it was because of what had happened in the park. What hadn’t happened—the man I hadn’t killed although he had been mine.
Never before had that sort of disaster befallen me. Once or twice, even, in the past, where I was almost interrupted in the instants of action, I’d managed to forestall everything, yet do just enough to be able to start the procedure off again, and continue and conclude once my way was clear.
And this time no one had interrupted. No one was about. It was a flawless situation. That still, white-grey air, the silent sound across the trees—such a pristine canvas, inviting, urging the master stroke—I should have been able to enjoy it to the full. What had happened to me? Why? Why. I hadn’t lost my nerve, or ability. It wasn’t that. Just some extreme—almost physical—failure of connection between my will and my reflexes. Sort of like the kind of
thing that might happen when you were half asleep. You roll across to grab and shut up the alarm clock, (in the days when they were necessary), and instead your hand passes through thin air; you’ve missed the target.
But really, it hadn’t even been like that. It was as if my brain shouted Go! And my hands, already reaching out, had suddenly answered No.
The worst thing was I was frightened. This hadn’t happened before. Now it had. Which meant it could happen. It could happen again. And again…
The world got dark outside.
95
Eventually I found half a bottle of wine left in the fridge. It didn’t taste too bad and I drank it all straight down. Then I went to my made-up bed on the sofa. I didn’t want to sleep in the bedroom. That hadn’t changed.
The electric fire was on, and I left it on. I was very cold.
Bit by bit the wine started to fuzz over the chipped edges of my shock and grief. I began to form a plan. Perhaps, tomorrow, I should try again. I would take the gun this time, make it easy on myself. It might not be quite the right method for my next victim, but it would do. I couldn’t be fussy now; I had to make everything work.
I told myself to stop worrying. Anybody could make a mistake. Even I could, after so much perfect-making practice. It had just been the time for it, that was all. One slip doth not a downfall make.
I heard myself giggle stupidly, and felt sleep come gently in, coating me in layers of warmth and wine and abruptly stirring optimism. It would be all right.
96
An explosion…
The air cracked and blew about in bits.
The bang reverberated inside my ears. On and on.
The atmosphere was crimson with more than the reflection of the single electric bar.
I thought: A bomb has fallen through the roof.
I rolled off the couch and pulled myself upright. I didn’t know where I was for a moment. I could smell petrol and fire, and where the door was behind the peacock screen, the door to the outer hall, was the origin of the deep red glare. No sooner did I think this than the peacocks began to burn.
What was it? Not a bomb—surely not a bomb. And if so, why here?
I thought of a shambling lout with greasy hair, and another one in a ruined uniform who had, like the old song, called me Madam. Bruvva and his mate.
The door was burning. Which meant the outer hall must be. The nails sealing up the wide old letterbox in the front door must have been picked or ripped out. Then something was shoved through. A half-flattened can of petrol, presumably. With some material wadded in the neck—a towel—something. And the end of it had been lit. It went off inside the hall, a sort of much larger Molotov Cocktail.
Yes, the door was on fire, and the peacocks were consumed, and now the main room carpet was burning in here. Mindless with instinct I found myself retreating through the room backward, into the short interim space, where the bathroom and loo are, and the door to the cellar, and so into the kitchen.
Smoke was building already, as floor boards and carpets, general furnishings, household debris and dust, ignited and joined in the festival of light.
I could think of nothing to do to stop all this. There was nothing I had to put out the flames. It was like a piece of music on a CD; long ago; the music began and had to run its course. No off-switch.
Once in, I shut the kitchen door.
The air was misted now, even in here, and loud with cracklings and sighing shifts of air and smoke. The whole house had become a smoker, filling its wooden lungs with the glorious fix. Oh, you never stop missing it, do you, a fag?
Even through the closed door, through all its little splits and holes and thinnesses, the red glow eagerly beamed at me… The insistent lover.
I’d thought of fire in the park, the fire the young moron made, and how I could stun and thrust him and yank him into it, so he would begin to burn. And I would beat him there, and kick him, keep him pinned just long enough, until he was well-alight and so no chance, even should he manage to propel himself finally from the flames. The burning man.
But it would have been on a much smaller scale to this.
I would have to get out. Leave everything and run, as I’d previously told myself I had to when Bruvva and Uniform first appeared.
Quickly I got into the utility room and undid the back door. I shot the bolts and worked the locks. I was cool enough, in a brain-dead way. There had been no space for panic.
But then, the door refused to open. Naturally. Would they have overlooked this adjunctive back-up? Even if never seen by them, (and though they had never seen Micki, let alone detected the stench of her rot), still Bruvva and his side-kick infallibly guessed I must have killed her. Maybe Bruvva came back, and found the grave outside, at which I hadn’t looked for several days, not liking to, as if… shy. And that way, finding the grave he had located the back door, too.
Men love to burn women, they always have. For witchcraft, or heresy, or adultery. I cite Joan of Arc, Mistress Pently, Queen Guinevere—so burn this fucking heretic witch-queen called Emenie. And block her every exit from the pyre.
I tried the kitchen windows next. Outside the thick zipped curtains I could see at a glance every pane of glass now had external bars of heavy wood nailed across. When had they done this? How had I never heard them? Oh, it was like the burial—Christ had they even done that? Broken in, taken and buried her, then stormed back pretending still to be looking for her, to judge my reaction?
No—all insanity. Stop thinking, you cretinous bitch. I need to get out!
Already I had dismissed any idea of the front bedroom windows, or the side window in the main room. I myself had fully or partly boarded them up. And besides that area would be—was—fiercely ablaze by now.
The kitchen too was beginning to creak and sing with heat.
Smoke curled like a filmic Dickensian river fog, bleak, mutual and expectant. Oh for a real fucking river to put out this fire—my eyes were running, trying to help. My skin was tight. I could just make out how the plaster on the walls seemed to be blistering. I thought of the basement. Should I try to get back into the space beyond the kitchen, even though the fire would already be fingering, probing it—get down into the cellar—maybe the cellar would be fire-proof? (Down among the bones and stink, the accusatory remains—would they shelter me, their un-creator?) But where was the key? I’d hidden it, hadn’t I? Where had I hidden it? I turned round full circle, staring through water and smoke and heat, a whirl of drawers, cupboards… No. No use.
It did not matter.
Only the fire mattered. The red lover. The Hunter.
I found a frying pan—out of the—into the—in the very instant I heard the second explosion of the electric fire from the main room.
Raising the pan high, I smashed it with all the force I had against the kitchen window. Glass disintegrated, and with it one small section of the nailed-over wood.
I heard a louder crack behind me. It was the kitchen door. Took no notice.
I was swinging again with the heavy pan when ice cold hands clutched against my back and into my hair. A hundred hands, two hundred, and all bright red, hunter’s red. Not ice but fire. Liberated by the breaking door frame, enticed and fed by the inward gush of oxygen from the window.
The roar of the inferno swallowed me as the freezing scald of the flame-sea covered me up. As in a million meltings I was amber, I was crimson, I was molten gold. Far, far away I heard my shriek before the flames ate up my throat. Drowning in hunting pink. I was sunrise. I was dead.
Rod:
97
Ghostly as twilight, a paramedic bent over me. “I’m just going to put this oxygen mask on for you, Rod—it is Rod?”
Max must have told him. Unless George was out there somewhere.
Pain is an excruciating and striated envelope, but I float inside it, indifferently.
Ah, now the oxygen flows.
“Thank you,” I said. Or I didn’t.
They still hav
e to cut me out of the cab, but the gang, the crew, whatever they are, are assembled, limbering up. I get the blast of oxygen, and then that goes. Can’t risk oxygen with sparks about.
They had given me something, I assumed, to ease the pain, not that it had much, although maybe the something given it is which enables me to float free inside the pain.
The gang were energetic now. Everybody else in the world stood clear.
I hear a blast of sound, drill-like, or like a gigantic wasp, possibly. I shut my eyes, as I don’t want to watch.
I can see instead, under my eyelids, the stripper-girl’s blue stare, and Forrel’s wet unsober one, and my guardian in his paroxysm of rage screaming What have they done to you? And Max’s wife coughing with her bronchitis which, years ago, could kill people. I recollect the KGB girl with dark hair lurking outside the flats. And the tall young black man with the kingly face.
Pink for a girl. Pink sparks sizzle. Something hurts through the drug, axe-hard and razor-edged. And a man curses.
A waste of time, George said, inside my ear.
I’m not afraid as I slip the leash. “Good boy,” says George fondly, “good old chap.” And dog-like I sink into sleep. What a bloody relief.
Dawn:
98
I was thinking about Brighton—or was it Wales? Of course I can’t remember. I used to like Brighton. The Pavilion, and the pier, the old one, when it was there. Ben used to call Brighton London-on-Sea.
I called the doctor this morning. They said it was very difficult for a doctor to come out to see me. Patients really must try to go to the surgery. It saves everyone so much time. Except for the patients, I supposed, but didn’t say. I said I couldn’t. I was having trouble walking. They said they would see if it was possible he could make a call. When I was young they’d always come. All weathers, all times of day or night. I remember the doctor coming to see Ben. “I’m sorry, Mrs Tawstereries, but I do think your husband would be better off in hospital.” All the old ones knew, when I was a child, that hospital was the last port of call. You didn’t go to be made miraculously well, but to die. I resisted the doctor until it became frighteningly obvious I, and he, could do nothing else. They had oxygen at the hospital, too. It would help Ben to breathe. But it didn’t help him. The night they moved him in, about an hour after, he died.