To Indigo

by Tanith Lee

  “Yeah, and they ain’t done a half bad job,” Duran agreed. “Looks professional – apart from the mess. But I’ve heard of worse.”

  I said I hadn’t had a chance to try to clear up yet. It would undoubtedly mean replacing the sofa and chair covers, even the carpet and curtains. Funny the piano wasn’t messy, he said. I said this had struck me too. If he noticed the pale painted words on the ceiling in my study he said nothing. He asked if I’d called the police. I told him I had, but got nowhere. He nodded in gloomy belief.

  I liked Duran. I couldn’t rid myself of the urge to get him off the premises, as if some poisonous gas cloud lay in wait inside the house, and no other must be exposed to it. Also an intense need remained to be on my own. Normally he didn’t get on my nerves, but this time, once he left, I broke down. I snivelled for about a quarter of an hour, and then I slept, inside my newly bolted and barred fortress. I dreamed my mother was in hospital and I had had to go to the lavatory, and coming back into the room I found I stood there, a grown man and naked in front of her, but she only said, “Don’t worry, Roy, dear. I’m dying. It won’t matter.”

  I’d checked the call register on Sej’s mobile.

  All calls were deleted, except my pair, of course. I myself for some reason deleted these. Then I smashed it to pieces. On the morning of the third day I made myself go out. The security of the house was now impressive. Even the alarm worked. Beyond the fortress however, might Sej still lurk?

  My common sense told me he would be in no fit state to do anything of the sort. The little I’d seen of the pasting Mr C and his ‘colleague’ had given Sej assured me he’d be out of action for some while. After further ‘work’ I doubted he’d get far at all for two or three weeks. And he wouldn’t come back. No. Even he, even he wouldn’t come back for more.

  I kept seeing him in my mind, when awake, the way the blows had gone into him – this always recaptured in slow-motion, whereas at the time the whole sequence had been blurred by speed – and the way he was when they’d finished. Which was like a very life-like dummy, lifeless. Even when I had drugged him he hadn’t looked this way. The man in the baseball cap was correct. There was no visible blood. They hadn’t marked his face. It was hard and yet, conversely easy, to put his two personas together – the lifeless bundle of limbs and hair and face, the dominating tyrant AB, who had made me strip and take a bath in front of him.

  And that was strange to me, too.

  Because this last act I had had to perform seemed to have unlocked so much implacable horror inside me, and still I couldn’t analyse why. I wasn’t some virgin Victorian girl. It was nothing, that thing I’d had to do, nothing.

  And yet. It had been the pivot.

  On that, my bid for freedom had turned.

  My excursion to the high street and back went almost without event. I bought some food and various other necessities. I even bought some mugs and plates from the expensive shop which sold them, plain white. (The ordinariness of the high street both reassured and disturbed me. My ‘adventure’ must have gone on in some other parallel world. Not a ruffle on the surface here. Irrelevant).

  As I returned up Old Church Lane, I was feeling a dull shaky elation. Then I saw George Fulton was out, slowly mowing his front lawn.

  What would he do, I wondered, when he saw me? Turn and run like last time, pointing something sharp in my direction for good measure?

  Besides, what had he seen of my paint-and-carpet ‘vandal break-in’?

  Better take the bull by the horns.

  “Hello, George.”

  He glanced up, switched off the mower and eyed me carefully. Carefully too he said, “Hello, Roy. Feeling better?”

  I’d previously made a decision on how to handle this.

  “Yes, I’m fine now. He got in a state and blew it out of proportion.”

  “Your son.”

  “He really isn’t my son, George. I used to know his mother a long time ago. I hadn’t seen him for years.”

  “No,” said George doubtfully, “I didn’t think we’d seen him, Vita and I, not before. He said something about that. I can’t remember what…” George paused and regarded the mower handle. “Why did you ask me to get the police, though? You did, you know. And your – your young friend told me you insisted he smash all your plates.”

  So that was how Sej had covered his actions in the back garden. My fault again.

  Nor could I in turn incriminate Sej. Not now.

  “Yes, George, I did, I’m afraid. I’ll tell you the facts. I’ve had to take something for years for blood pressure.” (George nodded inadvertently. I knew, so did he have to). “This new stuff the doctor put me on can have a very funny effect on the brain. The dose was wrong too. Frankly I’d like to clobber the man, but in the end it’s been sorted out. I’m fine now, and I apologise for worrying you.”

  George’s eyes looked nervous. He said, very fast, “But what are you taking? It’s not Captopril, is it? Only I take that, you know, have done for years – I mean, you hear these things don’t you, and I’m not as young as I was…”

  I nearly laughed. I controlled it. All George really cared about, like most of the human race, was how he might be affected, and if he might even suffer symptoms like my own invented ones.

  “No, you’re OK, George,” I said. “That wasn’t what I got fobbed off with. Your medication is one of the best, or so I’ve been told.”

  He loosened and gave me a little smile.

  “Well I’m glad you’re better, Roy. And your – he – has he gone?”

  “Back to his own life I hope, George.” One truth anyway.

  I opened up my newly complicated door, went in, closed and re-locked it. Then I took the groceries and other things into the kitchen and put them on the table. I’d just filled the kettle from the tap, still half sneering at George, when my legs went from under me. They gave way.

  I’d heard of this.

  I sat on the lino listening to water drip, and thought. Brace up, Roy. It’s over now.

  But the kitchen reeled, or something in my head did so.

  And I thought, He’s done something to me – some other drug – something – he’s in the house – he’s here – he’s standing in the doorway…

  But he hadn’t, he wasn’t.

  I was alone.

  The collapse lasted for about ten minutes, after which I knew I could move again, and cautious as old George I got myself up and sat on a chair.

  Finally I rescued the kettle and made the tea and drank it in a white mug. (Why had I bought three of these?) It tasted of a bitter nothingness.

  About four-thirty I went to bed.

  I dreamed of Sej by night floating down a river, perhaps even that black river in Vilmos’s City. He was presumably already dead, but nevertheless I hefted a large stone, using unusual strength, and dropped it on his body. He sank. Without a trace.

  8

  Mr C shook my hand before we parted. This was on the far side of the park, after we had left Sej’s flat in the roof.

  “Don’t worry about him, Mr Phillips,” said Mr C in his university accent. “I really don’t think you have anything to bother about now. He was – shall I say – well cared for.”

  I looked him in the face. “Hospital job,” I said.

  Now he shook his head. “Best not to ask. He’s alive. He’ll get over it. Lesson learned. All you need to know. Nice working with you, Mr P.”

  I’d called Cart’s number again, some way on from the day of the collapse. It was after I’d destroyed everything Sej had brought into the house, just binning some of it, like the toiletries, smashing and binning some, (such as his phone, which I’d already seen to), tearing or cutting up garments and binning them. I’d have made a fire and burned them if I’d lived elsewhere. But I could just imagine Ian and George and Vita if I got an incinerator and started it up out the back. Actually the black dustbin was what I used, put out the front for what Lynda used to call the rubbish people.

&nb
sp; Sometime I must also acquire a new landline telephone; for now my current mobile would be adequate. While in a few more days I’d go into Woolwich or Greenwich and check out places for fresh carpet, covers and curtains. My ‘emergency fund’ was almost gone, but once I got Kill Me Tomorrow properly on track, written, delivered, I’d have enough. Sometime too I would sell the piano. I might get a couple of quid for that, but I’d need to shop around. Until then there was the other credit card. Never before had I been so profligate, but now I had no choice.

  I had cleaned the house too.

  The faint writing on the study ceiling I left. I had a phase of sitting in my desk chair, staring up at it. One night, in fact the night before I called Cart’s number again, I wrote a little more of Untitled, the first onslaught I’d made on it concisely for years. The idea that I shouldn’t be doing it, that I should be working on KMT, seemed to have revitalised the ‘project’. Or. Something had.

  But I had started to have a recurring dream by now. I kept dreaming of his flat, at that point unseen. It was always different, but always there. I’d walk up endless wooden stairs to reach it, or stone stairs; it was always upward I had to go. And sometimes in the dreams I’d force a door with the glass panel he had described, often ornate, the glass stained, or it would already be forced, but inside I would find not a flat, but a garden with fountains, or a wasteland with a mirage of sun, or a dripping cellar, or a flooded municipal library – countless varieties of symbols, secret ciphers, of my id, or his. God knew. And so at last, rather than seek the furnishing departments of Woolwich, I went to central London, to Saracen Road, and broke in. And then I came back, and called the number and returned to the flat with Mr C.

  Once halfway rational again, I’d been a little puzzled Cart’s number had been and was still available. This was far more than a “few” weeks. I decided on a simply theory. Maybe everyone was told the number evaporated in that time, a precautionary lie. After all if you used them you were implicated. And who could prove anything? However odd the name announced to callers, it was a business, and perhaps had a front that legitimately was. They took credit cards for Christ’s sake. How would it show on a statement – Bizan poos…

  Now anyway I knew about the apartment in the attic. I’d seen it, climbed up to it in waking reality, by the ladder, and climbed down knowing its nature.

  All the way home on the train from Charing Cross I thought about that place, its greens and blues, its ambience of money and impermanence. It was like a camp in a wood. A middle-class bivouac between battles. Stocked with straightforward nourishing proteins and edible delicacies, bandages, painkillers, areas for not-quite-ordinary R and R. A hidden sanctum. What else? We’d found no weapons.

  Some of my neurasthenia at being outside the house had gone. I walked home from the station, up Bulivante Crescent, along my own familiar road.

  When I was almost there I saw the eccentric car, a 1930’s Morris in shiny condition, parked by the curb.

  This car I knew.

  But I couldn’t recall from where, or why.

  Then Harris Wybrother opened the driver’s door and got out, looking round uncertainly at me, this hitherto unseen shaven-headed, moustachioed Roy all in black.

  “You look really well,” he told me, pummelling my hand and arm. “More than you’ll be able to vouch for me, I expect.”

  Astounded, I could only say, “This is a surprise.”

  “Yes, old boy. Janette got some bee in her hairdo, the day I got back – last Friday – she thinks she had a message that you were having some kind of dodgy squabble with a publisher.”

  Shaven house-breaker, employer of hitmen, Roy shook his head with a thin smile. “She misunderstood. It was a personal matter. I’d have liked to ask your advice. But that’s in the past.”

  “Oh, she tends to get things wrong. Wrapped up in her own multi-tasking. She’s in Strasbourg till tomorrow. I thought I’d run over and see you. I can do with a breather. So this is your domicile?”

  We both stood and looked at my house, semi-detached, inadequately paved, unimpressive, slightly run down – aside, of course, from its brand-new security locks.

  “Somehow I didn’t picture your pad like this.”

  My pad.

  “Come in,” I said.

  “Glad to,” he said, “I’m done in, I can tell you.”

  He looked all right to me, despite a yellowish half-formed tan which he tends to put on at the start of an English summer anyway. Perhaps Spain had been overcast?

  “Oh the weather stank. Hot, and storms. They put it down to the usual global hoohah. And they’re still in a state from the terrorist stuff.”

  We had gone in and I guided him through into the kitchen; the door of the front room was shut and the curtains I had drawn. He glanced at the shut door but made no comment. He was already telling me about his father’s funeral, which apparently had had to take place in Spain, according to Veronica the thirty plus child bride, and also to Wybrother Senior’s will. “The official crap – you’ve no idea, Roy. It wasn’t red tape – more like red bandage.” He had declined coffee or tea so I fetched the whisky, shutting the door of the front room again when I came out. The old bottle had already been emptied, this was a fresh one. “Christ, Roy. You have no idea.”

  “You had a bad time.” I felt remote as I said this. I felt, actually, contemptuous.

  “Bad’s not the word. And that bitch Vero – that’s what Dad called her, apparently, Vero. So now she’s Vero. Sounds like some US brand of energy drink, doesn’t it. Vero took me aside the first evening, after I’d bought her quite a lavish dinner at my hotel. She put it to me very clearly that most of the money, and any property outside the Hampshire place, was hers. I’m sure you grasp, Harris, she said, I’m entitled to that. I’ve had to put up with quite a lot from your father. This with him on his bloody slab not two miles away.”

  “It must have been tough.”

  “Yes. And I went down with food poisoning, or some Spanish bug…”

  Somehow I couldn’t resist. “A fly, perhaps?” I asked mildly.

  A month ago he might have got that and laughed. A month ago however I doubt I would have said it aloud.

  “Flies? You are correct. Everywhere. The air conditioning just made them frisky.”

  He continued to fill me in on his saga.

  I pictured him, racked with worry and the unadmitted grief or fear I’d glimpsed in his eyes that day in the restaurant in Holborn. And stuck there in the luxury hotel, with his still current expense account from the firm, via which, I had no doubt, he had financed Veronica’s lavish dinner.

  “And there’ll be death duties I’ll have to pay on the damned house. Can you believe it, Roy? I mean, that crumbling wreck of a place. Hampshire! Miles from London. The dunnies don’t even work properly. For God’s sake.”

  The light was darkening. It looked like rain again.

  “But you haven’t told me anything about you, Roy.”

  I hadn’t had much chance. “I’m fine.”

  “So this personal stuff of yours blew over.”

  “Yes.”

  “They have a habit of blowing over, don’t they? These nasty little troubles. I suppose even all this shit with Dad will blow over. And you’re OK with Gates – old Lew Rybourne?” (Lewis was at least twelve years his junior).

  “Yes.”

  “Working well?”

  “Fine, Harris.”

  I poured him another drink. He was already leading us towards the last third of the bottle, although I’d only had a couple.

  “Are you seeing anyone?” he asked suddenly. There was a kind of sly subterfuge in his voice.

  “You mean a woman. No. Not at the moment.”

  “You’re a wise boy, Roy. Wish I had your bloody self control.” He then launched into a monologue on ‘someone’ he had met on the plane back from Spain, which rhyme he included several times, like a chorus. “I mean that is a dire little flight. Don’t know if you’ve e
ver done it – the plane from Spain? No, well. Not missed much. Too short to get stuck into anything, too long to manage not to get cabin fever. But then this plane from Spain had this girlie on it. And I got lucky. Or she did. Sat side by side. Really bright girl – oh,” as if I’d asked, “about twenty-nine or so. Could be a bit older – don’t you find women don’t look their age now. Until they hit about forty-five, and then – everything falls, as they say in Venice. Anyway. We got on, shared some champagne – Look, Roy, would you do me a completely priceless favour?”

  “Why not?” I said, smiling.

  “You’re a diamond. Jan is a bit suspicious. Don’t know why. She never used to bother. Her age, maybe, she’s coming up for the big four nine this year. Tonight I’m going up west, and my plane from Spain friend and I – well, you can guess, I have no doubt. Doesn’t need one of your sleuths to solve it, does it? But Jan’s due back tomorrow and I may not make the airport to collect her. Not that she needs me. If she left her car in London that’s her look-out and she’s perfectly well able to call a taxi. But you know what they’re like. Could you back me up if it comes to it? That is, you and I had dinner tonight, it got late so I kipped in your spare room – you do have one, don’t you?”

  Kip. His word – Sej’s word had been the more modern crash. Kip or crash. Crash…

  “I’ve got a spare bed. Yes. I can say that, Harris. If you want.”

  Rather than feel any fleeting gladness that Janette was to be deceived, or that I’d been involved in it, I felt a strange rush of oblique anger at him. Not because he wanted to involve me. It was far less logical. I was remembering how his brief flare of panic and distress during our last lunch had unsettled me, and sent me ultimately into the pub in the Strand. Where Sej had found me. Was found the right word? Dreadfully, maybe it was.