by Tanith Lee
No one says if Nick’s door had been left open. After all, even if not, a locksmith would be able to open it. Just as the Drawer-man and Friendly, all the Number 14 Gang, had managed to do, so very simply. Frankly anyone seemed able to penetrate the flat. And the knife, of course, had been able to penetrate also the domicile of Nick’s body.
Who had done it? If the Number 14 people - why? Perhaps they had revised the idea of letting him off, even of buying his apartment on the cheap. He had said naturally nothing to the police about this.
Really, Nick does not care. He cares less and less.
He supposes, probably, he does not want to know who tried - either to kill - or only to harm him. Or their reason.
He does not want to remember. He is exhausted. He is bored to death with it all.
Nick is entirely aware he believed, during those moments of the red blank, that he was dead.
Had Laurence felt that, in the moments of the aneurysm? Laurence is cosily packed in the ground now, in that obscure place in West Sussex. Buried by Angela, since he had seemingly preferred internment to cremation - or had she only done it to spite him? Nick imagines lying under the earth, locked in there, rotting. This does not distress him, he thinks. But he would prefer fire. Clean ashes. And Laurence, so vain - would he not have preferred that too?
Serena has gone into the kitchen and he can hear her making coffee. She drinks coffee all day long and eats only in the evening. Nick shuts his eyes and sleeps, and sees himself, from high above in the fifteen foot space below his own flat’s ceiling, undoing his door. Kit-Kitty stands outside, and she knifes him, but with a pin. A Roman one, bearing the head of a woman, and about two thousand years old.
Nick is often indirectly yet insistently reminded that he has been tended, intimately handled, while unconscious.
The locksmith, the ambulance crew - doctors - surgeon - mechanical and human observers: the endless touching and monitoring and moving of him about. Even the draining procedure, (which also penetrated his side.)
All this attention, carried on while he was, presumably, quite unaware of it, unable either to protest or assist, completely eclipses what the attacker had done. Nick’s attacker only knifed him.
An almost impersonal act, decorously carried out while the victim was fully clothed.
He knows this is an insane reaction.
But it persists.
The noise of the coffee-making, rustling, grinding, bubbling, producing, aggravates his nerves. He counts how many mugs of coffee she makes herself. Approximately she consumes six or seven in the mornings, four or five in the afternoons. At six o’clock she resorts to dry white wine, or geneva with ice. They eat between seven and nine. She feeds Nick throughout the day, regardless of her own strict regime. But food bores, tires him as well. He hates, he finds, eating a sandwich, or the bread and cheese, with Serena foodlessly prowling about, mug in hand.
He has begun to notice she faintly smells of coffee, under her expensive scent.
All her care of him, (even, at first, she had once or twice had to help him walk to the lavatory) has been tender, solicitous. She has only recently started to chide him a little about his apathy. In the night, at the beginning, lying awake as now he often does, as if he slept too long before in that fakery of death, and must make up the time - he had then seen her creep into his room to check on him. Pretending to sleep, he outwitted her. She left him undisturbed.
Nick associates this, indeed all her kindnesses, (if they are) with his childhood, when she had hugged him one minute, railed against or slapped him the next. When she had been in league with Laurence against him. When, less than two months ago, she had told him Laurence and she knew Nick was a male whore.
He has other dreams. He dreams a lot about Christmas decorations and Christmas trees. Perhaps they are those he had glimpsed in the vast geography of the hospital. One evening he had heard carols being sung somewhere, perhaps only on the hospital radio. But there were constant sounds there. Nights, there, always unsilent.
Serena likes sound, noise, noises. She uses her music centre, or various radios, as auditory wallpaper, not listening, he thinks, too much of it. There are speakers everywhere, even in the guest bathroom. Cold Play or Jacques Brel, or irate discussions flood the air.
“Children, even at secondary school level, are being found who can only eat with their hands!” a stupid, over-educated voice whines, and Nick visualises the superior, properly-trained children who, of course, hold their knives and forks in their toes.
But he makes no note of this irony of inadequate syntax.
Though Serena, who had gone to his flat to pick up for him toiletries and clothing, had also brought books and his current story on the stolen pad. He had not asked her to do this. He had been surprised, and inquired, almost on a reflex, how the flat was. “It’s fine,” she said. She had added she had got someone in to ‘clear up’. He guessed she meant clear up the blood and any other mess his brief death had left there. It was then he told her the flat was sold, but no, he did not know yet when it would be claimed.
Nick wonders anyway if the gang still want the flat. Surely not, if they were the ones who provided the attack. But he has lost the flat, whether they want it or not. Lost everything. Lost. Now and then he has tried to remember where he put the Roman pin, once he unearthed it from the bedroom carpet. There is a vague idea in his mind that it was on the pillow of the bed, lying there when he fell asleep that last night. He had meant to keep hold of it. As if it mattered.
Sometimes he dreams about the pin, as in the Kitty dream, (although he has also dreamed others have come through the door and stabbed him with other implements. Once it was Sonia, with a metal nail-file, once - no, twice - Jazz with a long red fingernail. After the radio moment he is half afraid he will dream next of an acrobatic superior child stabbing him with a fork, held nimbly in one foot.)
“Look, isn’t the sky beautiful?”
“Yes. But I don’t want to go out for a walk.”
“Nicky - please. I’m getting so worried about you.”
He grasps she must have been leaned on by the doctors to take him in. This was when he was at his weakest and most foggy. He would have protested otherwise. But then he had not, he thinks, properly understood. He is, in a detached way, rather sorry for her. All this acted loving compassion must be wearing her out.
Her apartment is of reasonable size, with two bedrooms, one, hers, en suite, the guest bathroom, a study, and a long, oblong of living room. They can, and do by now, get away from each other. She goes out, too, but never for much more than a couple of hours. Afraid to leave the ailing brother. (They had written her out of 999. She said she might have to film one final small scene, but no hurry apparently. She reckoned they had sacked her. Said she did not care.)
“Serena, really it’s time I went back to the flat. I’ll have to be there, won’t I, to make sure about the contract exchange?”
“I don’t believe you, you know,” she says, sitting on the arm of an armchair and swinging one slim leg, and bare foot with toenails painted pale strawberry. Who the hell is she? Is he supposed to know her? “I think you’ve gone off your head a bit, Nicky. They said, it can happen. It’ll pass. But you ought to see someone.”
“No thank you.”
She envampirises her mug, stands up to fetch a refill, pauses. She asks abruptly then, “Is it the press? I mean, why you don’t want to go out? Honestly, I can promise you, that’s been taken care of, at least for now and here. Danny…”
“What do you mean, press?”
“The press. The paparazzi. What else would I mean, you twot, something to flatten trousers?”
She had gone to Laurence’s funeral, Nick suddenly recalls this. It had occurred while Nick was still in intensive care. How, or if, she had squared her presence with Angela he did not know. Serena had said very little about it. He sees a mental picture of her standing over the grave, throwing in some hapless flower. Tears, another April shower of rai
n. Or perhaps a genuine deluge. Nick cannot tell.
“You mean the press have been hanging around you because of Laurence?”
“Of course they have. He’s - he was a bloody TV celebrity. They started trailing after me in Corfu. I called Danny. He says, of course, the fucking bastard, the publicity can only do me good. He arranged some awful interviews with magazines, and on TV. That gets the rest of the mob off you, if someone else has bought you up they keep them off. Like rival bloody pimps. But Danny’s worse. He even suggested I bleach my hair - be more like Claudia. I reminded him my dead brother had black hair too. That’s contented him for now. But God, I’m sick of it all. And inevitably, with or without current pictures, it was in the papers. Christ, you should have seen The Sun - I assume you didn’t? No. The Lewis Case they called it. Laurie must have raided some Egyptian tomb when he was thirty or less - oh, that was front page stuff - a big black draped photo of Claudia from the ’80’s, and then a smaller pic of Laurie from that Roman garbage he did, and then you. And me, with a big question mark - ‘Is Serena next?’”
“Me.”
“Well yes, you. What else? Laurence dies in Richmond Park and then you get yourself fucking stabbed. It might all have calmed down till your little adventure revved it all up again. Christ, Nick. Didn’t you even realise? The trouble we had at the hospital, and then Danny and Anil” (some other agent/life support) “fixed things with a security firm. But somehow the paparazzi have never quite located my flat. Though we had to use a decoy when I had to bring you here. But trust you, Nicky. You never noticed a fucking thing.”
She is her old abrasive furious spiky self.
“I’m sorry.”
“No you’re not. You’re just lazy. You even hate having the radio on - in case real life ever intrudes. Oh, I know you’ve been knifed, poor little helpless thing - what was that, then, some fucking mad client you couldn’t make come? God Nick, I’m going to show you those papers. I mean, after Laurence they were after you anyway. How could you be so blind to everything?”
Nick sits in the chair. He does not move. In a minute Serena is back from the study with a pile of broad sheets and the smaller fatter tabloids. She dumps them in his lap as if emptying a bin on him. She stalks into the big white kitchen and slams the door. Which dims at least the noises of the coffee-maker.
On the top of the pile is a rag with a fuzzy picture of Serena, looking pretty and tragic, en route to the funeral. The next two put Laurence first. The Sun is almost as described The Guardian and Independent both carry, if only on inside pages, slender retrospectives of Claudia’s and Laurence’s individual careers. It is the Mail and not The Sun that proposes a curse. Then, near the bottom of the heap, Nick sees his own slightly blurred face. The photograph catches him walking across a street which he recognises as part of the U of the cul-de-sac. The scene is otherwise very empty and it is night. He is billed as Laurence’s brother, home late post bereavement, after a night out drinking. He realises, slowly, from the date, that this is that same last night when, having left Serena, he came back in the fascist cab, to meet with Friendly, and subsequently the knife.
Nick gazes at his picture. He looks both younger and older than he is. His face is set and humourless, grim, unintelligent.
How had they got it? From some neighbouring window? Surely the angle is wrong for that. From a car, perhaps…?
Nick hears a voice in his head. Do you know the Lion? Pub keeps to the twenty-four hour opening. Looking for over an hour.
He almost laughs. The two men, one in the car, the other asking him about the invented pub. Not look-outs for Number 14, then. Why should they have been? The gang could more easily have watched for him from his own flat, and doubtless had done, using the bedroom porthole. But the press… He considers what Pond had said about the usefulness of tiny modern cameras. How long had they been tailing him? It was true, he had missed it when it was in front of him, so why not anything else?
He lifts the paper nearly idly, and underneath is the final journal, and on its front, in those faded yet over-emphasised modern colours, he sees himself again, clearly labelled. This time he is horizontal on a trolley, wrapped in a sheet or blanket that is patterned with red, an oxygen mask over his face.
Nick stands up and all the papers skitter and thud to the floor.
He goes directly out and along the corridor to the guest bathroom, and locks himself in.
Having turned on the water for a bath, he sits in the wicker chair, and abruptly through the speaker high up on the wall burst the furious roars of The Prodigy.
Then he does laugh. He laughs and runs the bath very full, strips and gets into it and shuts his eyes as if they were also his ears. He falls asleep in the hot water to Serena’s surrogate lullaby of rage.
When he wakes the room is black. The January sun has removed itself; just a ghost of external lighting manifesting from outside.
The water is cold.
He gets out and grabs a towel, shoves on his clothes. He will collect his few things and go. Stay at an hotel, (Serena had brought him his cash and cards). He should not have remained here so long. She is correct. He is lazy, a sloth.
But the press, he thinks. Will they still be after him? Surely he is nothing, a nobody, not like Laurence or his sister.
Already he feels enervated, as though the water had leached something else away. There seems so little of him left to stand, or to pack, to call a cab, decide on a destination. To move at all.
Only then does he switch on the lamps above the basin mirror.
The room had been full of steam, a mist of which still, wet and trickling, coats the bottom inches of the glass. Reflected in it he sees his own white face, and behind him the picture hung on the far wall, a peculiar poster-like creation showing a scene from an Italian film he has never identified. It is framed too, but has always survived the steam in the bathroom. Or has it? Something black and white has come adrift, and is hanging down like a weird curled papery tongue below it.
Curious, Nick examines the poster, then turns the picture round. He finds another smaller poster has been cellotaped to the picture’s back, but is now mostly loose. He straightens it out on mindless impulse. It is a government, or perhaps police-sponsored warning, no doubt intended for a female toilet.
It shows a woman’s high heeled shoe lying on a wet pavement. The bold lettering, white on black, declares: One in three reported rapes happens when the victim has been drinking. Below, in black felt-tip someone has carefully added: So drink up - you might get lucky!
To him, at that instant, it makes no sense, but he detects a crudeness, a viciousness that is quite at variance with what he merely sees.
It would seem Serena had collected the second poster, but written the comment? Even with Serena, the quip seems at variance. Nor is it like her distinctive writing. Besides, why put it in here - and then hide it?
He wipes the mirror and tidies the room, then unpeels the warning from its last fragile tape. He carries it out and through into the main area.
Serena has started on the geneva early. She does not look at him. She is painting her fingernails to match those on her feet. Her act that she is quite, quite alone is, for an actress of any ability, disappointing.
“Reenie - Serena, it really is time I went. I’ve taken up too much of your space. Thank you for everything you’ve done but I can take care of myself now.”
She glances up at him and her face switches character in three extraordinary starts. First to anger – which crumples immediately into a sort of childlike dismay that might even be pain - and then her eyes fix on his hand and she has instead the face of a terrified demon. In a high-pitched metallic tone she screams at him, “Where did you get that?”
“This?” He raises the poster.
“Yes - where was it…”
“Cellotaped behind the picture in the bathroom. The steam…”
He stops as Serena stands up. The nail varnish drops, mapping her black skirt as it does so
with strawberry doodles. It lies lavishly leaking on the fitted carpet, ignored.
“Christ - in there? All this time - and I’ve been in there, I’ve sat - I’ve had a bath - the bitch put it there? Oh Christ…”
And she runs right at him and Nick believes she is going to tear pieces out of him, rip him to shreds. But it is the rape poster she grips and rips and shreds and lets go in bits and then stamps upon. “Bitch!” Serena shrieks, over and over. And then she cries. Not an April shower, not even really like grief. The tears on her face are like broken glass, and then shiny black acetate as she rubs her mascara into them. She has ruined her nails.
Beta
In her black and pink garments, black and pink nails, face, eyes, Serena sits drinking geneva. And tells him with a dead voice, undramatic and flat, about her recent past.
“Late last summer. Sort of suddenly too. It began then. Awfully sweet, I thought. And so attractive. Ghastly accent, I thought. But - well. It’s all the thing isn’t it, as Mum used to say - London accent, Mockney, whatever. I’ve never been interested in that kind of - I mean, I have no objection to it. Half the people in the business are this or that or something even wilder. But I’d never felt any interest except for men, that way. But she sort of started to - well, what do I call it? Woo me. I never quite worked out what her job was, where she was in the building. I just used to keep running into her. And sometimes she wasn’t there for weeks, I’d never see her. Then she’d be back. We used to go for a drink sometimes. Or to a club. I used to get men after me, obviously, and so did she, but she never picked anyone up. I’m saving myself, she said. For who? Oh, she said, who d’you think? I said I didn’t know. Try and guess, she said. And one night in this club we were dancing and it must have been a gay club, or bi, or God knows, but she started kissing me. I was pissed. I didn’t mind. I thought, Oh well, why not. It’s all experience. I mean, I have never even acted a Lesbian. But we came back here. And that was it. By which I mean I enjoyed it. No, it was amazing. No. It was better than that. I was astounded. I was - I didn’t - it scared me. I said I’d call her, like men are supposed to, and I didn’t, ditto. And then I didn’t see her for quite a while again anyway. And one evening I tried her mobile and I got someone else, a man - so I just thought she’d had it stolen. I was relieved and sorry. See how truthful I’m being? I decided she had left the BBC, no one seemed to know much if anything about her there. I thought I probably wouldn’t see her again. Maybe she’d ditched me, after all. Better that way. Only then one evening she turned up again, here, on the doorstep. You know the way this flat is - kind of cloistered. Some people, even after they’ve been here, can’t remember quite how to get up to it, they have to ask. But she found it, found me. And then she sort of moved in. I sort of let her. I wanted her to. Oh God, I wanted her to so much. But after a couple of days, nights, it all started to change, gradually, then fast. It altered. She altered. She altered me.”