by Tanith Lee
“We have established, I’d say, the lady is quite dedicated. She probably rang them all.”
“But she knew I’m in the escort business. I don’t advertise.”
And Pond had said and now says again, “Your brother didn’t know?”
“No. He didn’t.” (But now Nick is aware Laurence had. He did.)
“Then that piece of information came, as you suspected and indeed Kit-Kitty claimed, from your friend, even though said friend denies it.”
The French girl is leaning dangerously far out of the window. Beyond her the roofs of Paris, always good for a panning shot. She is throwing more things into the street. Her lover’s shoes now, a book he has been reading, (Nick thinks of June in Number 14, shoving the drawer out in the lobby). She is screaming, still beautiful, still in exquisite Parisian French, “Green pig! You fuck the moon - go fuck the moon, you green pig!” (Nick thinks his next to nonexistent French is letting him down badly, mistranslating. Of course, in the other meaning of ‘French’ he is well-versed and quite effective. If not according to Kit. But that, and she, are now irrelevant.) Even if she murdered Laurence.
The interior soundtrack has stopped.
Laurence had taught Nick to read.
Nick thinks this is a lie. Serena lied. She lied and spent a lot of money on a great meal, so she could bound out from the thickets and tell Nick Laurence and she had always known he was a whore.
He can imagine what they have said about it. They have said exactly that.
Laurence. Who taught him to read.
And the rabbits. And foxes, (whose cousins later ate Laurence). And loved. Laurence loved him.
And Laurence is rotting in a closed coffin.
And the credits are coming up. The movie is over. It is nearly twenty to two.
In Nick’s head a new voice speaks. Just one word. Impert-iv, it says. What in God’s name is that? Imperative? Where does that come from?
He does not know. Unimportant.
15
Endlessly the cab driver preaches to Nick, the glass partition opened to its fullest so Nick cannot fail to hear the pearls of wisdom. There is no music, or radio bulletin. Only the preacher’s tireless voice, wide awake because he has to be, and Nick his unwilling confidant.
“Sure I’d send them back. If they don’t like it here, what are they doing here? Taking our work, that’s what. Half of them wanting to bleeding kill us all - ‘scuse my French…” (French again), “but what’s it all about? Layabouts. Terrorists. God knows, you see this bod with a tea towel round his head and a beard down to his socks, and he says I’m British. I tell you what, I don’t like them but I can see where they’re at, the BNP. You can understand it, can’t you, can’t get a job or you get fired and no proper benefit and then this Pole or Darkie - ‘scuse my French - he gets the lo…”
Nick makes no attempt either to remonstrate or to placate. Nick is so exhausted now he feels he will never sleep, but will walk in circles round the main room of his flat, under the moon window (fuck the moon, ‘scuse my French) and even lose consciousness while he does so, but go on walking…
“So I says to this girl, and believe me she can hardly speak this English she claims she is…”
The driver does not anyway need a reaction. Only a body in the back.
If Laurence were sitting propped here, dead and decomposing, (he had been discomposed when he left Kit, decomposition was to follow) the driver would still harangue him. A speechless, (and presumably white English) passenger automatically provides the correct tribal affiliation. Dead is OK. Only foreign is not.
“So I had to laugh…”
“Drop me here, that’s fine,” says Nick. They are on the corner of the cul-de-sac. He pays the cab driver. The man seems quite ordinary, not unpleasant, now he is only taking the note.
“Keep the change.” Why? Oh, maybe it will change him…
“Thanks, mate. Good luck.”
Change him. Change. Changes.
Nick glances up inadvertently at the eight-sided window, and a gleam of light shoots over it, a slim firework, as the lighted taxi grumbles off along the main road. Nick has somehow never seen that reflected phenomenon before. Or he has, and forgotten.
A car is parked in one arm of the cul-de-sac’s U. A man huddles in it, using a mobile phone. Another man by the car turns and comes straight over to Nick. So now what is it? A mugging? Nick looks at the man wearily. If you are going to mug me, hurry it up. I’m tired.
“Do you know the Lion?” the man asks. A strangely silly query. Nick resists the urge to answer Which lion? Aslan?
“The what?”
“Lion. Supposed to be a pub up here keeps to the twenty-four hour opening. We been looking for the bastard for over an hour.”
“Sorry,” Nick says. “I don’t know of any pub with that name round here.”
“I told Rod he’d got it wrong. You sure though?”
The man has a doughy tense face. He wants a drink, it seems.
“I’m sure.”
“Right.”
The man turns. Then he glances back. He looks at Nick silently as Nick goes by and up to the front steps of the flats. All the while Nick anticipates an assault. But he has always been this way, the writer thing again; a story must occur. No one ever has attacked him, even robbed him. Not since childhood.
Inside the lobby it is warmer. He climbs slowly, taking off his jacket as he does so because it seems heavy to him now. His shoes also feel heavy. When he gets in he will strip and shower, make some tea, put on the TV, sit and watch until he goes to sleep. He does not want to think of anything else. He has had enough. Enough.
When he reaches the flat, out of nowhere again comes that terrible urge to weep. And he stands immobile, pushing it from him with the last of his strength. Only then, lachrymosity mastered, does he open the door and step into the darkened flat. For a split second he beholds the window incoherently luminously floating there ahead of him, before the lights go on. But he has not lit them.
“You’ve kept us waiting, you have. Where’ve you been? Out cruising? Or cottaging? Took your time.”
There are three of them. Two sit on the longer couch, and one has a powerful flashlight next to him, currently switched off. The other one, the third, has just come from the kitchen, now also lighted, with the second bottle of vodka and the Orange Dry and the ice tray. They have finished, it seems, the first bottles of both drinks, which stand vacant on a table. The man from the kitchen is the man who lost the drawer. He still looks a bit sheepish. But the man who called out to Nick just now from the couch does not. He seems assured, cheerful and friendly, his banter just a bit crude, but then that will not matter, will it, between open-minded guys?
Nick says nothing. What the fuck can he say? Again they have broken in, leaving no external evidence he could see. They have made themselves at home with his booze, even the last of the Cheddar and apples. They have only been waiting, knowing it will be all right, he will not object. Probably they have watched the TV, the stand-by light is on - and yes, now one of them turns it on again with the remote, but cuts the sound down to nothing. Once more a scene or soundtrack is to be played against other scenes from a foreign film, this one seeming to be Japanese Science Fiction.
Nick is aware they must have turned off the lamps and TV at some previous point so that, from the road, he had not seen light in the big window. The firework gleam he had thought was a reflection from the taxi’s headlights was most likely the flashlight they had used afterwards, being hastily switched off - in response to a call from the man in the car outside, while the other man there had detained Nick an extra minute with his Lion inquiry.
So there are in fact five of them. Three here, two outside.
They wanted to surprise him. Like those moronic parties with the distressed fifty-year-old woman whose birthday seems forgotten, but then everyone springs from the abruptly floodlit room waving glasses and shrieking Happy Birthday. Which is surely enough to kill her.
But not all women in their fifties die from loving kindness.
Christ.
Oh Christ what do they want?
Are they going to kill him?
The drawer-man has put the new drinks on the table.
Sit down,” says Friendly from the couch. “It’s your pad.”
Nick does not move.
Then the other one from the couch, who is younger, about Nick’s own age perhaps, gets up and comes towards him. The man is pale and shaven-headed, and he speaks with a slight accent. Nick cannot identify it.
“Sit down. He said.”
“All right.”
Nick crosses the room and sits on his other, vacant, couch.
“That’s it,” says Friendly. “Won’t offer you a drink. Not enough to go round. OK with you?”
Nick stares at him.
Then the drawer-man speaks. “Shall I pour?”
“Yeah, pour away. You be mother.”
Nick looks at the big drinks, the tumblers. They don’t seem to be his or anything to do with him.
Friendly takes a prissy little sip of his sloshing glass; sets it back and leans forward, his pudgily muscular arms resting on his thighs, and he is smiling at Nick. He has a round face and furry out-of-date sideburns, somehow like a bear.
“Now you see, our mutual friend’s bint upstairs, the one he called June, which isn’t her name, had a bit of a tiff with him and put a drawer of his property out. Now June, I’ll still call her that for convenience, has seen the error of her ways. She has seen it enough that she is in a hospital bed at the moment, getting over the manner by which she saw it. You may be wondering why what was in the drawer was so important. Well, not all of it was. Cheers,” he adds, sitting back and taking another minuscule sip.
Nick thinks, the thought appearing in the dark of his mind, (which has no other thought any more) like a small whitish stone: The ivory. It’s the ivory they wanted. And it’s gone…
“The thing was,” says Friendly, leaning forward again in the same sociable disgusting way, “we run a little racket, me and my chums. Nothing you need know about. But sadly, our friend here, the partner of June-in-the-hospital, rather carelessly kept some written notes. On the notebooks and in the paperbacks you confiscated. They were all in code, so none the wiser, eh? And just as well for our friend too, or he might be in the next bed to Junie-kins, even though I don’t approve of mixed wards.”
The drawer-man is speechless. He only watches Friendly with a dog-like absorption. His tail should droop now, or wag propitiatingly.
A wave of nausea seizes Nick, passes.
He says, “I didn’t know.”
“No, of course you didn’t. If you had, you too would be in the hospital, in bed three, and a rare temptation I have no doubt to every person there. I used to fancy nurses. But some of us grow out of that.” He pauses. Another little, little sip. The younger shaven-headed man has gone to the book-case. He is looking at Nick’s books quite couthly, even replacing each one just where he has taken it from.
Friendly says, to Nick, “There’s no great harm done really, after all. You’ve just been a bit of a cunt. It can all be put right and no need for any rough stuff. I expect you’d prefer that, good-looking youngster like you. So all we want from you now…”
It comes out, like vomit, tears, like all the things said where we do not know why we have said them, but there always is a reason…
“I haven’t got it.”
Friendly seems slightly offended. He sits back. “Got what ?”
“The ivory - whatever it is - someone took it…”
Friendly - seems startled. For a second his face looks different. Then it reverts.
“What the fuck is he on about?” Friendly asks the room generally, and maybe God.
Nick says, “In the drawer was a small piece of ivory, or fake ivory - plastic - there was nothing written on it. Is that what you want? I don’t have it. My brother…” He stops.
He stops because Friendly has held up his meaty puffy paw. Friendly squints at the drawer-man. “What is this wanker on about?”
“I don’t know,” says the drawer-man. In horror he gazes at Nick, begging mutely it seems to be saved from Friendly’s unfriendly side.
Nick must save the drawer-man, for both their sakes.
He begins to describe the ivory. A small square. Ivorian ivory, perhaps, from Africa’s Ivory Coast…
The drawer-man is blank.
Friendly blinks from one to the other, as if at an inane theatrical performance by three-year-olds, in which and whom he has no vested interest.
This all goes on until the shaved-head intervenes from the bookcase, standing there with a copy of Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana, his finger between the two pages he was reading.
“I know what he means. That yellow square thing. He,” he indicates with Graham Greene the drawer-man, “said it fell off the drawer handle, so he put it in the drawer. It was only stuck on, then it came off. It was never ivory. Ceramic, was it?”
“Oh, yes – yes…” the drawer-man cries in relief to Friendly, “it was just rubbish.”
“It was just rubbish,” translates Friendly to Nick. “It doesn’t mean a fucking thing. So let’s get on shall we? And this time, zip it, till I’m through.”
Friendly then explains that in a day or so, enough time for Nick to get himself ‘sorted’, a man will drop by and make Nick a knock-down offer for the flat. It seems they all like Nick’s flat, especially now they have had a proper chance to look at it. But he will not expect them to give him the going rate, of course. Just enough to make it legal and cover his moving expenses, because no hard feelings. And then, providing they never clap eyes on Nick again, or Nick is never such a pillock as to go to the pigs, he can get on with his life, and they can get on with what they do. ‘Nough said?
“Yes,” Nick answers.
More than anything, at this moment, he simply dreads they will never go. But they are getting up. They are preparing to leave. Drawer-man takes the floodlight and the vodka, but leaves the Orange Dry. Shaved-head peculiarly says, “OK if I keep this?” and pockets the Graham Greene. Friendly lifts nothing, even leaves his mostly full glass. He needs his hands free after all, for as he passes Nick suddenly he leans right over and grabs Nick up and, holding him there, smiling good friendly false teeth about half a foot from Nick’s face, “No hard feelings, right?” he reiterates.
“No.”
“And they say British fair play is dead,” says Friendly, a rogue echo of the cab driver. And then he says, playful as a child, “Although whether you can trust us - who can tell? Maybe we’ll just see to you anyway.” And child no more, he smacks Nick hard across the head so he falls back on to the couch. And from there Nick hears them, through his droning ear, letting themselves quietly out, leaving the door a quarter inch open behind them. A symbol, conceivably, that never was it, or can it be, shut against them.
16
The window had always pleased him. Seeing it first, from outside in the strange, busy little cul-de-sac, had made him want this flat. Like a moon, the window, in some indefinable way, and the moon does often appear in it.
But that moon is down by now. Fallen in the river, drowned. It is nearly 5 a.m.
He has just sat here on the couch, with his legs pulled up close to his body, watching the soundless TV. All these soundless scenes and voiceless people appearing on it.
He had not even got up to close the flat’s main door. Why bother? That was over now.
Nick will need to start packing today, later, sometime. Even if they do not choose to ‘see to him’ he does not expect they will give him much of a margin to clear out.
There are other apartments.
He can stay a night or two in a hotel if he has to. Or something.
Has he thought of calling Pond? Maybe, but again, why? Pond has let him down. Pond did not predict let alone discover that the gang - or whatever the hell they are - from Number 14 would come back. In any cas
e Pond is himself now becoming increasingly dubious again. On both his visits here he had, unaided by Nick, got through the downstairs lobby entrance. As indeed he purportedly had at Kit’s Wimbledon block. Surely that cannot all have been managed by other handy occupants admitting him. Pond is an enigma.
“Enigma,” Nick says softly aloud. But something breaks the spell.
Abruptly he swings off the couch and stands up. His ear no longer burrs from Friendly’s blow, though there is a slight, headache, oddly on the opposite side of Nick’s forehead.
Nick for a few seconds feels disorientated. He seems to be too tall, balanced above a floor some quarter of a mile below. But this effect goes off. Then he walks to the main door and shuts it. With the keys he had dropped on the couch he relocks the door.
He walks across and picks up the two empty and one part full bottle from the table, where they have stood, one in a clear pool of spilt vodka, and two in sticky amber pools of Casey’s Orange Dry. He dumps the empties in the kitchen bin for glass. Then he collects with paper towels the cheese rinds and apple peel and cores, (some neatly cut out for the benefit it would seem of false teeth) and bins them too. Then he fetches their glasses. He tips Friendly’s copious leftovers down the sink – shaved-head and the drawer-man had finished theirs. Then he finds he dumps the three glasses too, and the apple knife, in the bin. He has a drink of tap water, which tastes of chlorine and metal.
When he comes back again from the kitchen he turns off the TV.
What next?
Oh yes, of course.
Nick takes another all-purpose knife from the kitchen and goes up the stair to the loft bedroom. He switches on the uplighter and kneels by the window.
Outside, seen through this smaller pane, vehicles now and then whizz along the open U. Two cars are parked inside the U, neither the one he saw previously with the man in it on the phone.
Nick uses the knife to separate and lever, then tears free the edge of carpet. The glue had put up only a token resistance.
The Roman pin lies there, visible even through the tissue. Nick removes the pin.