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

the opposite sex, and I don’t expect to be.

However. If Joseph were about the age I’d eventually thought him, lying there on my kitchen floor, twenty-eight-seven – he could maybe have been mine, mine and Lynda’s.

Except surely she would have let me know. Not from any sense of my fatherly rights, but to get some extra financial support. At the very least, to blame me. Or did the aunt take care of everything? There was less stigma by then in having a baby without an adjacent man. Besides, we were still married. In the aunt’s eyes, it would be respectable. And if the old woman liked children, perhaps this seemed a good arrangement, leaving me out of it, all the better.

But then again, could this – creature, this demon, who was physically so unlike either Lynda or myself, this pianistic genius – be the product of our midnight fumblings?

“Are you saying,” I said, “you’re my son?

“Am I? Do you think I am, Roy?”

We had gone out of the hotel and were walking together along Lang Passage, up to the Gardens. When he saw them he said, “There’s a park near my place. Huge trees and rhododendrons.”

“I didn’t ask you about the park, Sej. I asked if you genuinely believe you’re my son.”

We stood by the low railing and looked into the Gardens. The trees were leafing early, the sun out and shining on them. A small bird was drinking from the drinking fountain drips.

“You tell me,” he said presently. “Could I be?”

“I doubt it.”

“But you doubt everything, don’t you, Roy?”

I said levelly, “It’s often the best way to doubt.”

“Innocent until proven guilty. Guilty until proven innocent. Stupid until proven clever. Purple till proven blue.”

“What are you saying?”

“Nothing much. Just passing the time. That bird on the fountain is a wren. You don’t often catch sight of them in inner London. Or I don’t. Did you know, they have pelicans in Hyde Park. That took me by surprise. Great big bills and red legs. What’s the time, by the way?”

What to do? I glanced at my watch. “Getting on for four-thirty.”

“Shit,” he said. “I have to be somewhere.”

“Tuning a piano?”

“Not this time. Sorry, Roy, I have to get going.”

“Really.”

He turned and laughed at me, then he put his arms round me and hugged me, giving me also the obligatory masculine clap-on-the-back.

“I’ll see you, Roy…” he said. “Daddy,” he added, like a mischievous child that knows you love it and, though disapproving, won’t really mind you just heard it use the F word.

Then he turned, vaulted the railing, his bag bouncing on his shoulder, and broke into a run, vanishing though the Gardens in the direction of Langham Place and Oxford Street. And I stood there, mind depleted of all coherent thought, staring after him, staring after everything.

4

My first search of 6, 66, Saracen Road had been fruitless. I went to a grimy window in the main room and looked out and down. Below, the street, and then Joseph’s park of “Huge trees and rhododendrons”. A few people were sunbathing there, I now saw. The June sun had brought them out like certain flowers. From up here they had a flowery quality too, already tanned and in bright colours. How easy it looked, to sample life.

As luck would have it, I peeled off the rubber gloves I had donned, because of their sticky hotness, and stuffed them in a pocket.

It was when I turned back into the room, wondering if all I could do now was go away, I heard the flat door, (already smashed and undone by me) pushed briskly open.

I thought instantly it would be him. Joseph. Sej.

Therefore, when the burly middle-aged man in shorts and T-shirt came into the room, I felt a most inappropriate near relief.

He stopped and gawped at me. He had a newspaper in one hand, and a six-pack of beer in the other.

I said, “Christ, can you believe it? Someone broke in.”

“Er – yeah,” he said.

I recognised, hypersensitive as perhaps I was in that moment, the voice of No 3A, he who had let me in via the main entrance.

“I came up here,” I blustered on, “to deliver this bloody packet…” I pointed at my fake delivery, which now lay on the floor. “I meant to leave it by the door. You never know, do you? I mean, the table downstairs, anyone might have had it.”

“You’re fucking not wrong there,” he rewarded me.

“And someone’s smashed the glass window. Been in and taken – well – everything from the look. Even the carpets.”

Roy was on form again, indeed he was. But I’ve said, I write this sort of drivel for a living. Improv comes with the job.

3A gazed round. He looked both disgusted and sullen. I sensed immediately he was not astonished, had been up here before and knew the flat was always basically exactly as now.

He said, “Like, I don’t think they took nothing much. Tina don’t have much to start with.”

Touché, monsieur. Now he really had floored me.

I said, “Tina? But the name on the packet is for a Mr Trazcool. But I suppose she’s his partner?”

“How should I know?”

How should he?

“But surely he lives here. Look…” I’d put a lot into the fake package and confidently picked it up and held it out to him.

He shambled over and scrutinised it. “Tra – skull, that his name?” he asked. (He could read).

“Presumably. The address is right, is it?”

“Yeah, man. That’s right.”

“So Tina…?”

“She’s the only one lives here I know of. She gets people up here sometimes. I thought you was one of ’em.”

Below us, the noise of No 5’s bad music abruptly ceased.

Both 3A and I stared down at the floor.

“He’s going out,” said 3A. “Thank fuck for that.”

3A, it seemed, didn’t like 5’s music either. But whether that was due to its volume or its type, remained obscure.

My mind turned back to what he had said just before.

People coming up… he’d thought I was one of them.

Was she, this Tina,