by Tanith Lee
The bathroom is madder. The walls were raw cement and broken tiles, and when patched up to seal, they looked impossible. Then, in another market, there were sky-blue tentlike waterproof coveralls going at four in the morning for next to nothing because no one wanted them, and the stall-keeper had a virus and was dying to get home. These, cut in lengths with a kind of spontaneous but enticed shirring and ruching, are glued over every inch of the walls. The waterproofing looks like silk, and they make the room into a weird oriental fantasy, particularly when the rose-red paper lamp hanging from the rose-red clouds comes on, and hits every pleat and fold with an electric magenta streak of shine. We re-enamelled the bath, hand basin, drinking-tap basin, and the lavatory, all blue. The enamel is cheap and will probably crack inside six months. But for now, each area is reminiscent of a lagoon. The second night, Silver stripped the floor and put the new planks down, polished and varnished them. The bathroom floor is now a golden fake pine, and looks as if it cost a thousand. Well, at least five hundred.
“How do you know how to do all that?” I asked him, endlessly.
“I read the instructions,” he endlessly and innocently replied.
Of course, a robot can just read instructions and then know exactly how to follow them, and get it absolutely right. I kept saying to myself I mustn’t persist in thinking of him as an exceptionally talented man, no I mustn’t. Yet it was difficult, and besides, that’s what I’d asked him to pretend to be.
On the last afternoon of the first week, the caretaker came puffing and grumbling up the stairs to collect the rent, plainly thinking he wouldn’t get it.
“It’s just the one quarter month,” he announced as I stood there, a plum in one hand and a long artist’s paintbrush in the other. “Just the one week. Then I shan’t be up till the first of next month for the three quarters.” As the end of the month was also only a few days off, that meant nothing. He implied, in any case, I’d have run away by then in arrears. “It’s legal, you know,” he said. But already his eyes had gone past me and were bulging on the room. “Well,” he said. “I wondered what your boyfriend wanted the steps for.” He tried to edge in by me, so I let him. He stood and gaped, as if in a famous cathedral. “Not everyone’s taste,” he said, “but it’s cheerful.” Which is more, I thought, than can be said for you.
I waited for him to go on and say: “Now you’ve spent your rent money on all that, you’ll have to get out.” But he only glanced at the huge evergreen plant which Silver and I had dug out of the subsidence the night before and planted in a big cracked beer jeroboam of wondrous amber glass. “That’ll die,” he said.
“Perhaps you’d like to come to its funeral,” said Silver, who was seated on a pillow, reading, at fifteen seconds per page, a job-lot of books we’d picked up that morning.
The caretaker scowled.
“This flat,” he said, “is only supposed to accommodate one person.”
I felt a stab of terror, but Silver said, “I’m not paying her any rent. I’m her guest.”
Grudgingly, the caretaker accepted that this was all right, and Silver smiled at him.
I was already fumbling out the rent and electric money, all in small change by now, when Silver rose and graciously gave the monstrous visitor a tour of the bathroom. I could hear the monster grunting away, things like: “Don’t know I’d want it myself,” or “What’s that white thing in the ceiling? Oh.” And then, surprisingly: “Quite like that.”
They came back, and Silver poured the caretaker, and me, a mug of very cheap and vinegary wine, which the caretaker gulped down. When we finally got rid of him, and the rent, I lost my temper. The beautiful apartment, on which we’d slaved, smeared by that old man’s stupid carping.
“He’s just forgotten how to respond,” said Silver. “And he’s sick. He has to take a prescription medication that gives him another sickness as a side effect.”
“How do you know?”
“The night I borrowed the ladder, we sat around for a while, and he told me.”
“Still trying to make everyone happy,” I said.
“Still trying. Uphill work all the way.”
I looked at him and we laughed. And I went to him and put my arms round him. The carpet floor is nice to make love on, too.
The evergreen plant, by the end of the month, had spread up to the ceiling in a lustrous fan.
Which brings me to the end of the month.
The night before the first day of the new month, we were sitting out in the subsidence, on one of the girders, watching the stars stare their way past the last of the clinging leaves, and the distant city center blooming into its lights. We often came out there, which had firstly been his suggestion. Sometimes he played the guitar there quietly and sang to me. It was beautiful in the subsidence. Mysterious at dusk, and wild, like the heart of some forest, with the safe edges of civilization around it. Now and then, the white cat appeared, and we’d bring a plate of cat’s meat and leave it by. Despite its apparent homelessness, Silver had spotted, with his faultless sight, the little mark on the hindquarters of the cat, which means it’s had its anti-rabies shots quite recently. I had a wish to lure the cat into the apartment. But that night the cat didn’t come, just the stars. And as I lay against him, wound with him in the cloak, I said, “This is the happiest time of my whole life.”
He turned and kissed me, and he said, “Thank you.”
I was touched suddenly by the innocence inherent in his sophistication. I held him. The coolness though not coldness of his body had never troubled me, and now, from proximity to mine, he seemed warm.
“I don’t even mind that you don’t love me,” I said. “I’m so happy.”
“But I do, of course, love you.”
“Because you can make me happy.”
“Yes.”
“Which means I’m no different from anyone you make happy, you can love us all, so it’s not what I mean by love.” At last, it didn’t hurt; I was arch and unconcerned, and he smiled.
I shall never grow tired of, or familiar with, his beauty.
“I love you,” I said. “Let’s go out to dinner. Do you mind? Will you pretend?”
“If you’re sure you want to spend money on it.”
“Yes, yes, I do. Tomorrow I’m back to a thousand.”
“I confess,” he said, “I rather like the taste of food.”
“You do?”
“Should I be ashamed, I wonder?”
“Oh yes,” I said. “Most reprehensible.”
Our positions were reversed for an instant, our dialogue, our speech mannerisms. He was playing, but I had still learned.
“You’ve changed me,” I said. “Oh thank God you have.”
We went in, and I washed my hair. I’d hardly seen it since we’d started work. It had been bound up in scarves as I painted and glued things, and it was thick with dry shampoos because it takes so long to dry without a dryer when I wash it. But tonight I was lavish with the wall heater. As my hair began to dry before the painted mirror, I saw emerge among those blue hills and that tigerish foliage, a mane of light, the color of blond ash.
My mother had got something wrong. Or had she? Or the machines, perhaps, the coloressence charting. Or had my natural hair color simply altered as I grew older? Yes, that must be it, because—
“Oh,” I said, touching my hair, “it’s beautiful. It’s beautiful in a way it never was.”
“And that,” he said, “is your own.”
I put on one of my oldest dresses, which Egyptia once gave me, and which had been hers. Demeta hadn’t thought it suited me, and neither had I, but I’d kept it for the material, which was strange, changing from white to blue to turquoise, depending on how light struck. And tonight it did suit me, and I dared to put on the peacock jacket and buttoned it, and it fit. I was slim. I was slim and tall. And my hair was moonlight. And I w
ept.
“I’m sorry, I don’t know why—”
“Yes you do,” he said. He held me until I began to laugh instead. “Poor Demeta,” he said.
“I don’t understand.”
“If I told you,” he said, “I was hungry, you wouldn’t believe me?”
“No. Tell me why my mother is supposed to be ‘Poor Demeta.’ ”
“I think you know. Look at your hair, and ask yourself if you do.”
But I was feverish and elated. I thrust thought aside and hurried us out of the building, through the streets which now I knew quite well, up onto the only partly moving escalator on South Arbor, to the flyer platform.
We sailed into the center of the city. I wasn’t afraid of meeting anyone. Part of me, perhaps, almost wanted to. Who, after all, would know me? (And I forgot what he had said.)
As we sat in Hunger And Answer, eating charcoaled steak and tiny little roast potatoes shaped like stars, I thought: Now I can phone them, all of them. Egyptia, Clovis. My mother. The wine was red. It matched his hair. And like his own glamour, the wine didn’t interest him very much.
We walked home all across the city.
The ultimate leaves blew and crunched beneath our feet. The streets close to the Old River were shut off again, unless you bought those smelly throwaway oxymasks at the check gate. We went over Patience Maidel Bridge though the center end had the Walk Fast notices up, and there were no buskers. When we got past the halfway mark, it was apparently clear, though empty. For some reason he and I started to sing, idiotic songs we made up as we walked, no longer fast, about the snarling fish in the purple water. Catch one for the cat—Oh hell—the fish has ate my cat—Oh well—dress the fish in fur—teach the fish to purr—kid me it’s the cat—Cat-fish can be swell.
The green light was on as we came off the bridge, and just as we moved down toward East Arbor, I saw there were two buskers. They weren’t performing, but seated on a rug, a boy and a girl, eating french fries out of a paper over a guitar with three broken strings.
Despite my thoughts of earlier, I hesitated. For they were Jason and Medea.
Once, a year ago, they’d done this before. It was a basic idea. Jason sang, rather badly, and Medea went around the crowd, if one was tone-deaf enough to gather, or if not, through the passersby with a plate. As she did so, she picked pockets. Usually she was caught out, or had been last time. Both were minors, but their father had had to pay a considerable fine.
“What’s wrong?” Silver asked, sensing how I held back.
“Some people I know, and don’t like.”
As we spoke, Jason looked up and right at me. An expression of astonishment went over his face. Very slowly, he nudged Medea. Their thin still eyes seemed to congeal identically. There was no other way but to walk on and meet them. Did they know about Silver? About me? About me and Silver? Or not?
“Hallo, Jane,” said Medea.
“Hallo, Jane,” said Jason.
I looked at them, pausing, my hand in Silver’s. The strength in his hand comforted me, though it seemed a long way off.
“Hallo,” I said. And then, rashly, coolly, “Do I know you?”
Jason laughed.
“Oh, I think so.”
“I think so,” said Medea. “Your name is Jane, isn’t it?”
“The bleached hair’s not bad,” said Jason. “And the diet. Does Mother know?”
Then they hadn’t been told I’d absconded from Chez Stratos. Or had they….
“Did you have a nice evening?” I inquired politely.
“Pickings were quite good,” said Medea flatly.
Jason smirked. He smirked beyond me, at Silver. Suddenly Jason’s smirk faltered.
I glanced at Silver. There was that look I’d seen before, like a metal mask, the eyes burning, impenetrable, fearsome. Circuits switching?
“Who’s your gorgeous actor friend?” said Jason. His voice didn’t quite sound as sure as it usually did. “Or is it a big seekwit?”
“Does your mother know?” repeated Medea.
I stood there, my skull quite empty, and Silver said to them in the most gentle and reasonable and truly deadly of voices, as if it were an analogy for their lives: “You have just dropped a chip inside the sound-box of your guitar, which won’t do either of them much good.”
“Oh, thanks for caring,” said Jason.
“Personally, I don’t like silver makeup,” said Medea. “What drama are you in? Or are you out of work? It must be nice for you that you met Jane.”
“Yes, Jane’s very rich, isn’t she,” said Jason. “We’re rich too, of course. But we don’t make friends with out-of-work actors.”
“But Jane’s such a softy,” said Medea.
“Luckily for you,” said Jason.
They stopped. They’d said all they could think of for the moment.
I knew none of this mattered, but it was still awful. I didn’t look at Silver anymore. I could feel the roughness of the embroidered cuff of his shirt, which we’d bought in the market three nights ago, against my wrist. I supposed it was up to me to make the move to get away. To Silver, this was irrelevant.
Then I began to see what was happening to Jason and Medea, and I started to be fascinated. They were wriggling, actually and definitely physically wriggling, their little hard eyes glaring at him and slithering off him. And Medea had gone a dreadful yellow color, while Jason’s tanned ears were turning red—I’d never seen anything like this happen to them before, even when they were children. And now their hands were plucking feebly at the french fries, they were gazing at the ground, their backs were stiffening as if in the grip of a horrible paralysis. I didn’t turn to Silver anymore. I realized that cruel annihilating look of his, which he said meant nothing, was still trained on them like a radioactive ray, mercilessly letting them shrivel beneath it.
It was Medea who finally managed to say, in a shrill, wobbly wire of a voice: “Why won’t he stop staring? Doesn’t he know it’s rude. Make him stop it.”
But it was Jason who scrambled suddenly to his feet. Not waiting to pick up the guitar, the ill-gotten gains, the chips, or even for Medea, he thrust by me and jumped hastily away onto the escalator up to the bridge. Medea, in a speechless frenzy, snatched the money and the guitar and bolted after him. I felt Silver turn to watch them go, as I had turned. Medea turned too, just once, though Jason didn’t. She was at the top of the escalator. Her face was a yellow bone triangle and her mouth hissed, or looked as if it did. Then she ran after Jason.
I was shaken too. I didn’t move until Silver slipped his other arm round me.
I knew his face had changed then, so I looked up at him.
“I thought,” I said, “you wanted everyone to be happy.”
“Don’t I?” he said.
“Your circuits were just switching over,” I said.
“Not exactly.”
“You meant to frighten them.”
“I meant to shut them up.”
“But why did it matter to you?”
“The temperature of your hand changed. It went very cold.”
“And I bought you, so your loyalty was to me. Like the Golder robot being a personal bodyguard,” I said, with amazing stiltedness.
His eyes, unblinking and jewellike, looked back at me. There was a long pause.
“Jane,” he said. But nothing else.
And I was suddenly afraid. At the meeting with the twins, at the uncanny thing he’d been able to do to them. Afraid of being here with him, afraid for him, and for myself.
“What is it?” I whispered.
“I think it’s time we walked on,” he said.
And he let go of me, even my hand, and we walked on. Like two lovers who’d quarreled. And the night was cold as knives.
The bed was cold that night, too, and we didn’
t make love in it.
* * *
—
In the morning, just as the light started to come, I woke up. Silver was sitting cross-legged on the rainbow carpet. He was dressed, and his hair fell forward over his face because his head was bowed. He looked like a beautiful advertisement for psychosthetic meditation. But sensing me awake, he looked up. He smiled at me, but the smile wasn’t the same as at any other time before.
“Do you mind if I walk about outside for a while?”
