by Tanith Lee
C was there too in a navy shirt. He raised his hand to me.
“Hi, Roy. She’s upset.”
“I’ve seen her upset,” I said.
“Sure. But that wasn’t for real. How are you, OK? Hang on,” he added. “I’d better give you these while I think of it.” He handed me a set of keys. They were mine, the originals, the ones I’d posted back through the front door of the house. Meaninglessly I shoved them in my pocket. Props… keys, cars… the toy white dog, by now dry-cleaned of the ketchup poured over it to represent its running over – yes, Marga had flourished that too, to show me no animals had been harmed in their production…
Did Alice ever feel, in her sinister Wonderlands, as if she were losing her mind?
Leo had already got hold of someone and informed them I was Sej’s uncle. “Be a relative. The only way you’ll be able to get near him. What name do you want to use?”
Oddly I’d thought at once that changing my name would be a sensible move. William crossed my mind, my father’s name. But then there was my mother. She’d been called Denise. Quite a daring French name in the late twenties. “Denis,” I said, “Denis Phillips.”
“They have Sej as Joseph Traskul. Phillips – Traskul?”
“Then I must be his mother’s brother, mustn’t I?”
“I understand,” said the doctor now, “your nephew collapsed due to a mixture of pain-killers and alcohol, and hit his head on the corner of a table. This was what his friends thought. The injury is consistent with that. Perhaps they’ll have told you Joseph was attacked a short while before – some blows to the ribs. Not too serious. And there’s an old injury – a titanium pin in the right leg. But he was depressed?”
“I didn’t know.”
“No, of course not. This must be a shock. You’ve come down from Manchester, they said.”
“His skull’s fractured?”
“That’s the better news. It isn’t. To be honest, Mr Smithson – that’s the surgeon – took a look at him and had a definite feeling there was a hairline fracture. But there isn’t. But it’s a major concussion. The brain is bruised. In these cases, I’m afraid, we can only hope for the best. Sometimes there is damage to nerves, and so on. It can affect…”
Just then something happened in the room, a flare of green lights and a terrible beeping screeching sound.
The doctor forgot me, sweeping me aside.
From nowhere nurses of both genders came rushing.
Leo ran up, grabbed me and pulled me away.
I was standing by a blue wall, (or do I only imagine it was blue?) and there was pandemonium in the glass-walled room, a white flurrying like snowfall on a windy night. And then out came the bed very fast, with his body on it, and all the wires snaking out of him, and machines wheeled along with him, his head turned away, his closed eyes stained darkly, and one hand lying deadly. His pianist’s hand.
And the woman called Liss put her arm round me. She was sodden with tears and her nose ran. She said gently, “Roy, it’s all right. We’ve all done this in the past. He’s been hurt so often. He makes us. Don’t be sad. He’d never blame you.”
The four of us, C and Liss and Leo and I, stood by the blue wall and watched as they hurried him away and were gone with him, while overhead the lights burned white.
9
I always dreamed I met him where there was water. Fluidity, what was mutable, in alchemic terms. His danger was apparent in the dreams, also the psychosis of threat, and his omnipresence. Even unseen, he would be immanent. Less God or demon than spirit.
The name Denis, of course, comes from the name of the Greek wine god Dionysos. As well as inventing wine and so allowing men and women to become drunk, thereby sloughing all convention and restraint, he was called the Breaker of Chains. No god of the ancient world could be more terrible. Or, in other circumstances, more seductively gentle.
But that’s a diversion. A swift psychoanalysis of that single choice of naming, which anyway sprang from the memory of my mother.
Neither I, nor Sej, have anything to do with the gods.
There was a single graffito in the lift. SHITE, it read.
Someone had obviously tried to clean it off, but then the perpetrator, or some other linguistic artist, had spray-painted it back on in whitest white, and two feet high.
At the top floor, the fourth, I got out. The lift had lurched like a hippo on the way up and even bracing myself for the landing hadn’t quite been enough.
I crossed the space and looked at the smartly painted indigo door.
It stood ajar.
This was in Camden Town, and the month by now was August.
Something horrible and extreme, subconsciously expected yet prayed into impossibility, had become possible and occurred in London this last July. The perfection of its date – 7/7 – stayed in my mind. It was as if it had been planned for that day and month in order not only to maim and kill, but to enable Londoners not to have to worry about the opposing reversal of day and month of the USA and England. So it would be simple for us to equate 7/7 with 9/11. They even rhymed. Just supposing the bombs had been detonated on the 8th July – what then? 8/7 or 7/8?
You could still feel and see the afterimage of the attack in the city. On the tube no one spoke about bombs. If the train stuck for two minutes between stations the fume of fear rose with an already everyday accustomedness. “Ain’t got no choice but be cannon-fodder, has we?” some man asked me in a pub. “It’s not the bleeding wartime spirit. Wasn’t in bleeding wartime neither. You gotta get on. Or you lose yer work, yer income. Get on – what else you s’posed ter do.”
Beyond the indigo door the hallway stretched off to the right. It was clean and unexceptional. A lavatory and then a bathroom opened to the left as I walked through, then a biggish kitchen. These rooms and their furnishings were universally white, and with the same beige carpet as in the hall. The kitchen though had brown lino tiles. At the end of the hall was a large lounge. This too was white and beige, but had a couple of armchairs upholstered in a deep blue which seemed fresh and recent. A wide sash window in the left hand wall looked out, as the others had in the lavatory, bathroom and kitchen, to where tall green trees were in heavy leaf, and through them, just visible, ran an overland railway line.
He was sitting in one of the armchairs. No colour match. He wore light blue jeans and a faded cream shirt.
As I went in he smiled, but didn’t get up. “Hello, Denis.”
He’d altered – been altered. He looked ill even now, pale and haggard. And he looked young as only the very old do. How old was he really? In his early forties perhaps? It couldn’t be more than that.
His left eyelid had a slight droop to it, and his mouth that side, only very slightly. This wasn’t anything you could fake, not so close, not some cunning injection or theatrical subterfuge. I’d heard he limped a little too. Even the pin in his right leg hadn’t caused that. But the brain, of course… Of course.
And when he spoke, even the two words, Hello Denis, there was an almost undetectable slur. That certainly was as if his mouth had not quite recovered from dental work. Or a blow. Or a minor stroke.
Marga had ‘prepared’ me over the phone.
“They said it may all go. Or – it may not. But it doesn’t spoil his looks. You can see it’s still Sej.”
Leo had also called to reassure me. “He’s OK.”
I hadn’t bothered to replace the TV. But I’d got my landline phone sorted out in late June, about the time I got the cooker fixed and the new carpet and coverings for the front room. It hadn’t been too difficult. A routine check on my bank balance had shown me someone had paid in anything I might have spent during my tussles with Sej – the cost of staying at the Belmont, new bolts and locks, the alarm. (I hadn’t had to pay for the kitchen repairs. C had come over unasked and done it, gratis. He’d also cleaned the white paint off the lavatory window. “No charge,” he’d said to my silence. “If you’re going to be one of the family.”) An
d of course Cart’s Bits and Booze had never taken any money off the credit card. He had called and explained that carefully. The way they all seemed to take such pleasure in explaining their cleverness, their plays. When I told him I had thought someone in the publishing world I knew had put his hit-team on to me, he rejoiced down the line at the often helpful nature of coincidence. I had been meant to think someone corrupt in the police service had done me this kindness. He reminded me there had been something like that in one of my short stories. Cart also pointed out to award me a handy assassin was in fact to prevent my doing something like that off my own bat – as Cart himself once did. Personal attack against Sej must, it seemed, be acted only, unless it were to come from Sej’s chosen victim. Which, Cart added, in the end generally it did.
To that I said nothing. Nothing at all.
“Sit down,” said Sej from the blue chair. “You look tired. I’ll make some tea.”
I sat down in the second armchair. Yes, just the feel of the material showed it was brand new. This was Sid’s place. Presumably he didn’t mind our meeting here, or the new colour scheme, if someone else – Marga? Biro? – forked out for it. Sitting, I looked round at Sid’s TV and various radios and stereos and the antique record-player for playing vinyl, his plants in the window. He had some Escher prints and the print of one of Picasso’s blue girls, and a photo of a man and a woman circa 1980, perhaps his parents. A guitar and a piano were over against the far wall, where another closed door perhaps gave on the bedroom.
Once out of his chair and moving, Sej did limp. He could have acted this. But perhaps not. I didn’t think he did, not now. The impression given was all that, with me, was done with. We’d reached the breaking point and travelled through, and on. Now… But I didn’t know about Now.
“Go and see him, Denis,” had said Marga, scrupulous as they all were over my newly-picked name. “The last time you saw him was when he stopped breathing.”
And that had been the last time. There in the hospital. When they wheeled his bed away in the snow-storm of white nurses and wires.
When I’d stood there like the other three, C and Liss and Leo.
I had stood and stood, and then someone came and told me, as his only valid relative, that Sej was on a ventilator, and these things could happen, not to give up hope. I felt nothing, nothing at all. But I must have looked as if I did, I thought.
They took me to see him after about two more hours. I saw him.
The Sci-Fi aspect of his care was quite extraordinary. Such a huge, alien machine.
After a while I went out and into the lavatory. And as I stood there pissing in the urinal, I recalled how I’d done this when my mother lay dying.
In the mirror I looked to myself like an old man of eighty-five or more. A bald old man with a moustache. Nobody I knew.
When I came out I didn’t go back to the others. I rode the lift down to the entrance and called a cab, and I went home to my house, leaving my clothes, my documents, everything, even the files and the novel Untitled there in Leo’s Skoda.
The door keys they had returned to me were in my pocket. I let myself in.
I walked about the house most of what was left of that night-morning, but it was already getting light. About six I fell asleep, sitting on the paint-splashed couch in the front room, facing the smashed TV.
A day later Leo came over and dropped off my bags.
“He’s off the ventilator, Denis. And conscious – off and on. He knows who he is. And us, he knows us. Thought you’d like to know. You should’ve stayed, come back to the flat. Marga’s roast lamb – you missed a treat.”
I didn’t ask him in, nor had he attempted to enter.
I have tried to estimate how long I holed up there in the house. I’ve never been quite sure. Some days, weeks.
When I went into the back garden one morning, and stood on the paving, head and face unshaven, George had come out too and glared at me over the lowest part of the fence.
“Well I have to say,” he had to say, “you know some funny types, Roy. I’m quite put out, you know, by that last upheaval. That young man. Those other ne’er-do-wells. An awful scare for Vita.”
I turned and looked at him and heard myself say quietly, “Fuck off, you fucking old freak.”
And he went crimson then grey and did as I had suggested. He didn’t even bang their kitchen door.
“This is good tea,” said Sej. “Sid’s a fan of tea, like me. An Assam blend, with ginger. And look, ginger and chocolate biscuits. Have one.” I had one.
“And how are you?” he asked me.
“All right. How are you?”
He smiled, then the smile opened out into a laugh. “I am entirely fine, Denis. Look, you were worth it, like the advert says.”
“Why do you do this?”
“I thought they filled you in? Thought I had, really. Because life does it. Disease, bombs, so-called natural disasters. We should get in first. Teach the lesson life is supposed to and seldom does. You know the old saw, Not Care was made to care?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I know you don’t like to be ungrammatical, Denis, but: Care was made to NOT care.”
“And that’s what you do? Risk one of us murdering you, in order to get rid of our misguided carefulness.”
“Oh, Denis. No, Denis. You know No. We have to learn to let go of the blind safety that isn’t even real. We all die. Do you prefer to be inadequately secure and entirely bored and dead-alive, or to learn and grow?”
“That’s your aim, not mine.”
“No. Not my aim. My achievement.”
The calm certainty with which he said this convinced me, if nothing else ever had, of his totally certifiable madness. But his dignity made me look away. Where my eyes fell was on the piano.
I thought, I have succumbed to the unsubtle flattery of his pursuit of me, as have the others, his intense coercion and concentration on me. No one else – no one, not parents, never friend, not even she, my Maureen – no one ever gave me so much – attention.
Still looking fixedly at the piano I said, “That evening, as per your instructions, I assume, everyone wore dark blue. And the door there, and here, and these chairs, are dark blue.”
“Indigo, Denis. Homage to your book. When the flame hits the sixth chakra and turns to indigo, and the self is realised and used. I never met anyone, old sport, who put it more clearly, more – exquisitely. Indigo. The Indigo Instant when everything superficial burns off – hope, fear, denial – and only self-dominion remains, and after that, you can rule the world.”
“That was Vilmos,” I said.
“Yes, Denis. Or should I say, Roy. And Roy, Vilmos was always you.”
I swallowed noisily.
Outside, as if to cover my swallow and then silence, a train zoomed by, flashing away along the track towards home or hell.
“Can you still play?” I asked. I heard what I’d said. I amended, “I mean, a piano.”
“Ah, that.”
He looked down and I found I watched him.
Then he got up and he went to the piano by the far wall, and I could see how he strained to make the left leg move, and at the same time strained not to show it. It was the way an old man, a proud old man, would go on. It wasn’t an act.
As he sat down at the piano on the stool there I wanted to shout out. I wanted to grab hold of him. The last time he had sat at a piano, his back to me – But even now the train was gone, I still kept my silence.
Sej sat there a long while.
Then he put his hands on the keys.
As once before, a rill of notes came, flawed. They stumbled and fell over each other. A little phrase of music leaked between, all disjointed, like a stammer that can’t catch itself and so can never be put right.
I too had got up.
I bawled at him. I stood there bellowing at him, roaring. I can’t remember what I said. It was about his loss of something so true – his wicked wilful throwing away loss of it – an
d, I believe, about my unwilling part in this.
In the end I stopped and sat down again. I put my head in my hands.
When I glanced up once more he was looking at me, over his left shoulder from his impaired left eye, a laughing look, a loving look. That of a father or a mother. Or a son.
“Gotcha,” he softly said.
And then his hands sprang back on to the keys.
He played me Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody, which is the concert showman’s piece, melodic, episodic, pyrotechnic, impossible. He played it perhaps as Liszt may have done, the golden notes firing off like showers of bullets, striking the ceiling, the windows, the earth and the sky.
When he’d finished he sat on there with his back to me. I sat staring out of the window. And another train, having it seemed waited for him to conclude, rattled along the track.
When ultimately I rose he said, “So long, Denis. Take care.”
The lift felt like a hippo going down too. The sun had come out. My eyes were full of golden bullets.
Near Camden Lock I saw a man selling violins on the pavement. I remember that. I’m not convinced he was real.
He called me this morning about ten, via the landline. The number remains the same as it was.
“Outside the V and A at 4 p.m.,” he said, without any preamble. “Smart casual dress. Leo will be there. You go up to him and start to shout at him. You’re angry, a bit out of control. He’s taken something of yours – doesn’t matter what – a lover, a rare book, a CD – something important. He’ll improvise on what you do, he’s had more experience. Trust him. Keep this up a bit, then I’ll be there. There’ll be a woman around. She shows promise, but it’s early days. Not like you. I knew with you from the first. Anyhow, you ignore her. And I, to you, will be a stranger. I’ll calm you and Leo down. Make it difficult for me, but after a while, give in grudgingly but completely.”
I didn’t speak nor did he require me to.
He added, “Then just walk off, any direction you like. It’s straightforward, if not undemanding. But then it’s your first real go at this sort of thing. There’ll be a meeting later, Marga, Leo, me if I can make it. Marga will call you, tell you where. She’ll call you at home, unless you want to let her know your mobile number. If you decide you don’t want to be involved in any of this, just don’t turn up this afternoon. That’s understood. We’ll manage, though we could use you. In the case of your absence, I won’t bother you again. Though of course, you do know where I live, so to speak. Cheers, Dad. Au revoir.”