To Indigo, Tanith Lee [best ereader for comics .TXT] 📗

father had sometimes said that to my mother, gently in that way, if she was distressed. Hush, dear. It’ll be all right. Lies, of course. But the human tenderness. Hush, dear. Hush.

Sej guided her out and both of them now disappeared. Beyond my line of sight he must have handed her the butcher’s bundle, and put her in the cab.

When he came back in he was chalk white.

Unlike the old, who can look so young, almost childlike, in certain situations of stress, the young have a way of looking abruptly aged. You see it in the faces of children from famine zones or bombed out villages on the TV news. I don’t know why this is. Sixty looks six, and six – a hundred.

“Sorry, Roy,” he said, and slumped into his former chair. “Some shit ran over her dog. Just out there. At least it must have been quick. He didn’t stop, naturally. Poor little cow.”

“You’d better drink something.”

“No, actually. I feel a bit sick again. I had to – pick it up.”

“I’ll fetch some water.”

I marched back into the bar and got him one of those small bottles of still water that are now so popular. When I came out he had gone, his bag too. He was nowhere to be seen.

I stood in the foyer, staring round for him. Searching anxiously, confused and made uneasy by the absence of my enemy.

ELEVEN

One can make small excuse for some things one does. And yet perhaps all such things are in some way recognizable by the rest of us. And if not, then they may come to be. And if never, possibly they should.

When Joseph returned from the lavatories, which lie off the foyer of the Belmont and are, like the entire hotel, mirrored and gilded, urinals white as the brand new false teeth of my parents’ era, he was still gaunt and pale.

He sat down once more opposite to me.

“Really sorry, Roy. I had to throw up again.”

My fault? Apparently not.

“I’ve always been squeamish,” he said.

“You didn’t seem to be.”

“Well, you kind of put that on hold, don’t you, when you have to.”

I struggled not to say it, but I had to. “You dealt with all that very well.”

“I tried. I was lucky with the cabdriver. Good man. He said he’d lost his own dog. He said drunks get in the cab and puke everywhere, so he had plastic bags… I saw to that. She couldn’t. Poor little thing,” he said, as if she were his younger sister. “Her husband must be a twat. But she got herself together. They went off with the dog on her lap. She said she’d bury him in a big pot, grow a plant. They don’t have a garden, just this rich apartment in Hampstead. I think she said Hampstead.”

He looked drained. He let his head sink back on the chair.

“Roy, I’m really sorry, now I do need a drink and then I need some food. Crazy I know if I was sick, but that’s gone and I feel hollow. As I said, I’m glad to pay, but it has to be in the next ten minutes or I’m going to drop. I could do with your company too.”

Stiffly I said, “All right. Take this water. What drink do you want?”

“Tea, please,” he said. “Black, no milk, no sugar, no lemon.”

That would have to be the restaurant. The bar ran to coffee only.

On his left hand there was a little bright smear of blood. It was on the palm, which must have been pressed to the body of the dog – washing his hands must have cleared the rest. I hoped he wouldn’t see it.

I wondered what I was doing. I should have made myself scarce long before. But I hadn’t, had I?

We went into the restaurant and ordered tea for Joseph who was Sej, and a glass of red for me. Then we had lunch.

He perked up bit by bit.

He thanked me several times.

What did we talk about? Not much. The food, London, nothing. We ate, I a little, all the while watching him. He ate a lot. And at the end he paid, and left them a lavish tip, thanking the waiter with an odd, sophisticated joy, as if he had consumed a slice of heaven on a plate.

At the Belmont, just before you reach the lifts on the ground floor, there is a big blue function room, which that day stood wide open.

A few chairs and long tables were left about, the latter decorated with water glasses. But the dais from which, I suppose, the officers of various businesses address their captive, pre-empted staff, stood vacant, and the mikes turned off. To the left was positioned a piano, a baby grande, black and polished, its lid for some reason upraised.

I saw it because he had gone back that way when he went to the Gents again, and returning, told me.

Why this time had I waited for him? But then, why had I stayed and waited earlier?

Without ducking all responsibility, partly I blame my father. He had so often told me I must try to see the ‘Other person’s side’. Plus I had been heavily indoctrinated in ideas of polite behaviour. Of course this is absurd, for many of us, especially from my own and prior generations, have been and were so instructed, and often with physical beatings to augment the process. My father was not a brutal man, but he had his standards and his eye could turn very cold. “I’m a bit disappointed in you, Roy.” The whole structure rested on a quasi-Christian ethic, despite the fact my father was strictly agnostic. It was not to be what one wanted oneself, but what would be “fair” to others. As a kid I had absorbed this and sometimes sobbed in combined frustration and shame – at not being understood, at the fear that I had been understood too well and found unpleasantly wanting. Countless other people, as