To Indigo

by Tanith Lee

  “In a way. Yes. But it isn’t towards insanity.”

  Leo said, “You should have seen what I did to him, Roy. I threw him down a flight of stairs, broke both his legs. His right leg’s full of metal.”

  “No one blames you, Roy,” said Cart, the first time he’d used my Christian name.

  “I don’t care if you blame me,” I said woodenly. “You rescued him, you took him to a hospital – if any of this is true.”

  “It’s true.”

  “What about the last time? That beating up, C and – who is he? Sid?”

  “No, he didn’t need the hospital bit then. The doing over – some was real – most faked,” said Leo. “Really just the first blow, that was genuine, to convince you. Then stagecraft. The way actors learn to do it. It would look good, like it did in movies before the digital stuff came in and made all the stunt-men redundant. C’s taught us all a lot of it. Marga’s an actress too. She still has contacts. Even I have now been to drama fight school. I could fight for real before, you understand. Had to unlearn quite a lot.”

  They cracked another bottle.

  I still hadn’t touched my first glass.

  No one pressed me now to eat or drink.

  About 2.30 a.m. by my watch, the man called Sid came in via flat 5 below, to which they all had keys. He was the young one with the bony face I recognised now not only as C’s companion hit-man, but the tall man kissing tonight the tall girl by the dark blue car in Old Church Lane. And she had been the one called Liss, the girl whose car had originally ‘stalled’, allowing her to glue or break my door-locks. Tonight’s blue car had been her white one. They’d simply resprayed it. (I’d asked. They’d told me).

  Sid now wore dark blue also, a dark blue pullover with a white 0 on the right arm. This seemingly represented his full name, which he told me was Obsidian. “Obsidian mate, innit. But just call me Sid.”

  He told us Liss was waiting at the hospital. The op hadn’t happened yet. Surgeons were discussing X-rays. Liss had said could one of the others relieve her before 4 a.m. C was still there, but she needed to get home, she had to work tomorrow. “I’ll do it,” said Leo, “haven’t been out all day. I’ll give the car a run.”

  About ten minutes later another man arrived. For a minute I didn’t think I had seen him before, but I had. He wore a dark blue suit, Armani it looked like, a dark blue Italian tailored shirt. His shoes were possibly worth two thousand pounds.

  Dark blue. All of them wore that. The car had been sprayed dark blue, even C’s van, I’d gathered, which had waited round the corner in the Lane and which I hadn’t spotted. Certainly the inside of the upper door into the attic.

  Dark blue: indigo.

  He had read the MS. The colour was one more game played against me, the rules made up so no one new could learn them. There were no rules. In fact, that was what you had to learn.

  Marga said in the ’90’s she hadn’t had work for three years and her husband was a bastard, but a rich one. He still kept her on as insurance against any of his “tarty birds” trying to force marriage. Divorce, he told them, was out of the question. He couldn’t harm his wife like that. Once one of the birds, crazed with jealousy mostly of the bastard’s bank balance, got the address of his and Marga’s huge flat in Hampstead. “She came round with a gun. It was only a toy, but I didn’t know and I passed out. Scared her, I suppose, and she took off. A couple of months after Sej homed in on me out of nowhere. I nearly went mad with fear – only it wasn’t. The worst thing,” she said, serenely, “was when I had to strip naked. I was over forty. Too old to be very confident, and with few reasons to be, either. I hoped even so he’d make love to me. Hoped that was what he wanted. But he didn’t. He doesn’t, Roy. He’s – celibate, so far as any of us know.” (I thought, He gets his jollies from this game he plays. But I didn’t say it. Although she was an actress and this was likely only one more performance, her stillness held me there.). “So that was why I tried to finish him off. Do you know what I did? I stuck a carving knife in him.”

  “But you got it wrong.”

  “It struck a rib. Apparently a common mistake for the novice assassin. Yes I got it wrong. But he was hospitalised then, too. Quite a while.”

  “And then?”

  “And then, Roy. And then.” And her face lit up.

  Leo said, “And I was a bloody alcoholic, Roy. I’m not now. Oh I like my dram. A glass of wine. But the shit stuff all went. I’d had nothing in my life. D’you know what he said to me, Sej? Life plays with us. So we don’t play that game. We play our own game. Harder. That’s what it is, Roy. It’s play. Like kids do. Cruel sometimes. Funny sometimes. But it breaks the mould. Then we can get out.”

  “Out of what?”

  “Ourselves. Ourselves.”

  Cart said, “My nickname is Carton, when spoke in full. I own three tobacconists, now also general grocers and off-licence. Bits and Booze they are called. So, not Carton for the hero in Mr Dickens’s work of the French Revolution, but Carton for the cartons of cigarettes. My wife died of cancer – oh, not of cigarettes, not she nor I smokes. But my son got into drugs and my beautiful daughter ran away with a man unworthy to lie under her foot. I tried to survive the lack of revenue for cigarettes, as everyone is told they must give up, and branched out into the groceries and alcohol. I paid my tax and my VAT. At night I go up to empty flat over shop and watch TV. One morning Sej comes into my shop. What you want? I ask him. You, he said. You interest me. Of course, I am going to call the pigs. They forget to arrive. But he arrives. Over and over he arrives. My cousin then was in a business, the sort you think I am in, Mr Roy. Only I am not, that is the playing. I hired for real these men to warn off Sej. They beat him up. As we have pretended to. He is a very strong customer, Sej. Only one week in hospital. He makes me strip and get in bath and then – he washed me. He does this without aggress, no nasty sex, like a kind mother when you are only four. That for me was my breaking. More gentle than with Marga. Or you, I think. To me, he is my mother. I call him this sometimes. I call him up and say, Mumma, how are you?”

  The one they called Sid (Obsidian) spoke from another chair, a palmful of nuts ready in his hand to eat. “He breaks you. He breaks you and then you remake yourself, Roy. Get it innit? Like you’re badly made, but then you go to pieces and when you’re repaired, better than new. Now you work.”

  The other man, who had been silent in his suit and shoes, said, “My name’s Jeremy. Only I’m not that here. I gave myself a new name, which is Biro. Marga’s name isn’t the original, nor Leo’s.”

  His voice had the twang of the stockbroker belt. But he spoke quietly, modestly. I thought, this is AA. Hello, I am Biro…

  “I am very, very rich,” said Biro, “And I, along with Marga, or should I say Marga’s husband unbeknownst to him, bankroll this group. None of us, however, are in this for profit or gain. We are in it, as Leo said, to play back at life. I first tried to top myself at fifteen. I’ve done that seven times in my life. Never made it. Cry for help? Cry for cry. I didn’t kill Sej either. It was a bit like you. I clubbed him with a cricket bat. Tough skull. Maybe now it’s just been thumped once too often.” There was a pause.

  Now I knew him. I thought, He was with Sej the first time, in the pub in the Strand. That whole thing they did – Biro quiet, Sej volatile – attracting attention – an act to snare one more possible target. And it worked.

  Leo, since deciding he would be the volunteer to relieve the girl Liss at the hospital, had left his second glass of champagne untouched.

  “Are there more of you?” I asked. Sometimes one asks these things, whether believing they may be facts or not.

  “A few,” said the man who called himself Biro. “You’ll get to meet them. Probably meet Liss tonight. Second time you meet her, of course. She works for a very prestigious company, likes her job. You’re our first writer.”

  I said nothing. I wasn’t theirs.

  Sid said, “All this is just sketches like, man.
Just an overview.”

  And then Leo got up. “OK, folks. I’ll go and relieve Liss. She must be worn out. See you later. Keep some dinner for me will you, Margie? I’m going to be famished.”

  “Yes, darling. Lots of dinner. And I’ll roast your potatoes freshly.” To me she added “I love to cook. Husband never let me.”

  “Blessings upon ye,” said Leo.

  I found I too got up. “Wait.”

  “OK,” said Leo.

  “I’m going with you,” I said. “To this fictional hospital.”

  “OK.”

  Marga said, “That is a very good idea. Roy, a suggestion. Why not pretend to be a relative of Sej’s. You’ll get more access.”

  “Why not,” said Leo. “You don’t reckon this is for real. You’ll get to see it is, maybe.”

  I said, “Unless you kill me on the way.”

  “Ah come on,” said Leo, smiling. It was Sej’s smile. They all had it – or one of them. I – had it. “We don’t kill people. Life does that. It can maim you, kill you. We just take risks. The same kind life makes us take, whether we want or not”

  We were at the opening in the green plasterboard, the blue door ahead, and Marga called after us, “Sej once said to me, he was like Jesus Christ. He said I teach you how to live. Then you crucify me. I’m quite religious, in a laid-back sort of way. I’d have been offended. Only he was in the hospital bed then, getting over my carving knife.”

  “He isn’t Christ,” I said. “Whatever Christ was or wasn’t.”

  “No, he didn’t mean that, Roy. He doesn’t think he’s Christ. But he does teach, he does it with a scourge and a sword, and with – parables. And then we crucify him. And one day, one day, the cross and nails and lance will work. Perhaps it already has. And he won’t rise on the third day.”

  Bitterly I said, “I wouldn’t put it past him.”

  And they laughed. My God they laughed, with a kind of happiness in the concept, and in me for proposing it. And Sid and Biro raised their glasses, clinked them, and drank.

  Then Leo went out and I followed him, down to the car. It was a Skoda, mid-eighties model, and it had taken a few knocks. But it was red, the colour of my mother’s glass dog.

  In the car, as we rumbled off among the jolting back streets, I sat quiet for a while. I was in the front with him. The back seat was full of a medley of magazines and old books, and a cardboard box with what looked like tools in it. My bags had gone in the back, too.

  I had done up my seat-belt. He hadn’t, only draped it over his shoulder.

  But then, they took risks, didn’t they?

  Finally he said, “You OK there? This is the quickest way, but it’s going to take about half an hour even at this time of night. The hospital, I mean.”

  “I’m all right.”

  “Don’t you want to ask me some more things? I’m fine to talk while I drive. Believe me, when ye’ve scannied the craggy glens o’ the Heelands, London hails nae chinny.” Or so I thought he said.

  “Tell me about the other people in the flats,” I said. “Are they all part of your, what shall I call it? Fraternity?

  “Not them, Roy old love.” He’d reverted to the London accent. “Sej owns the house, No 66, Saracen. So he gets some rent, but not much. I can pay, because I’m on an early retirement deal with a pension. But most of them are crazy, with drink or drugs higher on the must-do list than the monthly retail – I know that one. Been there, done that. Thank God didn’t buy the T-shirt. He lets them off, poor bloody cretins. Unless they cause dangerous bother. In that case C steps in. It’s like my music. I can play two million decibels, but if Sej asks me to turn it down, or off, I do.”

  “He gives the orders.”

  “If you like. But I love the guy.”

  “And if you don’t C steps in.”

  Eyes on the road, he was smiling. “I was part of the show that brought C in. You’ll hear his story sometime. No, it isn’t a threat with us. Just – mutual courtesy.”

  “But,” I said deadly, “you love him. Sej.”

  “Yes.”

  “Because he broke you free of yourself.”

  “That’s the one.”

  “I remember Mr C thumping the man from flat 2.”

  “Oh him. The guy in flat 2 is a cunt,” said Leo indifferently. “He likes to get off his skull and hurt things, cause damage for no reason. Sej lets him stay but only if he leaves Tina alone, when she’s there.”

  “So there is a Tina.”

  “Yes, there’s a Tina. She’s in rehab at the moment. Sold everything she had for a blast of crack and then it’s an ambulance and one more programme, poor cow.”

  “Why doesn’t he rescue them?” I asked. I sounded older than normally I do. “Free them from their moulds.”

  “You can’t, Roy, can you, some people. Most people. Sej looks out for the ones who seem like they might have potential for change, for growth. We’re a bit thin on the ground. He’s always prepared to try. Some of them freak out and run away and don’t come back anywhere he, or any of us, can find them. Some of them cling on to him but still don’t change. Some he’ll give up on after one meeting.”

  “His life’s work.”

  “Right again.”

  “And you are all what? Disciples?”

  “Still swimming with that stick Marga threw to you? No, we’re not disciples. We have our own lives, but he calls us up sometimes. Militia, Roy. How’s that? Reservists.”

  “In which war?”

  “The war against terrifying real life.”

  We swerved around a corner and a cat darted over the narrow road. Leo slowed the car like a sensitive knife in butter. He drove well, but not exactly as they tell one to. Well. Of course not.

  “Then,” I said, “did he meet you when you moved into the flat?”

  “No, the flat was after. He offered me the flat. The last guy had it was dead.”

  “What from?”

  “Old age. He was ninety-one. He climbed those flamin’ stairs at least twice every day. One day, he left a note that said he’d had enough climbing. Took some tablets. Ninety-one. Tablets. No more climbs. Bit classy that.”

  “Was he one of you?”

  “No. He just let us use the door now and then.”

  “Tell me what you know about Sej.”

  We had come out on to a tree-lined road. We were by now in that place all taxi drivers fear to go late at night. South of the River.

  “I don’t know much. Honest injun. None of us do. He was brought up in a children’s home. Then someone he didn’t know left him some dosh and the flats. That’s it.”

  “What’s his mother’s name?”

  “Oh that.” Leo laughed. In his laugh I heard again the laughter of Sej. “He calls her Cinderella. Or Ashabelle. Always something like that. It’s a joke. He never knew her. Let alone any daddy figure.”

  “Why Cinderella?”

  “She went after a ball, lost her shoe… the shoe is a sexual symbol here and there.”

  “I know.”

  “Speed humpies,” he said, as the things once known as sleeping policemen rose up before us along the road. “We are getting near.”

  I thought, He’s taking me somewhere, but to a hospital? Sej isn’t in any hospital. This will be one more set-up, one more round in the game.

  And then we drove into a square and through another street and the grey depressing bulk of a building that could be nothing but a hospital stood shining in its cold clear light.

  A memory of my dying mother came unwanted into my mind. She’d always been afraid of hospitals. Over the door, for her, would hang that warning from Dante’s Gate to Hell: Abandon Hope all Ye that here Enter.

  At the car park he paid the toll and we got out. I couldn’t carry the bags anymore, less weight than distraction, and left them on the seat. I felt old, I felt beaten.

  I stopped Leo some yards from the building’s glass entrance.

  “Did Sej ever punch you, slap you, anyth
ing?”

  “Once. That’s when I threw him down the stairs. That’s what it’s all for, Roy. We said. To get you to break and mend yourself and react and come back different. Ach, laddie,” he tenderly said, not to me.

  An oldish man had emerged from the hospital entrance. He stopped on the forecourt and put a handkerchief to his face and wept, his shadow falling black in front of him.

  In the other shadow beyond the blinding light, Leo and I stood and watched him.

  Softly Leo murmured, “That is what life does. That’s what we get. However stupid or clever or rich or poor or good we are. So take it by the seat of its pants. Rebellion. We move first. And if we get hurt? If it be now, ‘tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come.”

  “Hamlet,” I said.

  “Hamlet. Shakespeare. There’s a feller knew a thing or two. And look where it got him. In the ground. Y’know, some teacher once said to me that the only flaw in Hamlet, both the play and the character, is their predictability. But Roy, Hamlet isn’t predictable, even though you know how it, and he, is going to end.”

  The man had put his handkerchief back in the pocket of his coat. It had been linen, I suppose. Not Kleenex. He walked past us into the car park, not seeing us. He would be driving away alone. As we all do, in the end.

  He was in a glass-walled room set apart.

  I gazed through the glass. It was him.

  I could see that, even with the network of wires and tubes, the machines that clicked and whirred, the strange specific pillows.

  It was Joseph. Sej.

  And a doctor came out and spoke to me.

  “Mr Phillips? You’re his uncle, I gather.”

  “Yes.”

  “Right. Well I can tell you what we know so far.”

  When we had got up to the correct floor, the young woman called Liss was standing in the bright light among the piles of magazines you look at in hospital waiting areas, trying to take in articles and pictures of super models and rabbits, with your heart in your mouth.

  Liss had a plastic cup of coffee she wasn’t drinking. Like Marga she could doubtless cry to order, but now she came up to Leo and he held her and she howled. Her jumper was a deep purple-blue.