Ivoria, Tanith Lee [popular ebook readers .TXT] 📗

eat. Let’s get out of here. If that twat of a builder over there says at the end of the day one more time I am going to go over and break my glass on the bar and cut his throat.”

“Well, that might make him a bit quieter.”

But they get up and walk over the river and up the bright night streets to Sarastro.

Among the eccentric exotic glamour of the gilt swags and rich multi-colours and artefacts, they eat well and drink too much good wine, and the evening ceases to be a difficult wake. It becomes a sort of carousel. And they revolve then at a pleasing pace to opera music, glancing now at this or that, past, present future - without haste or loss, as slowly and encouragingly they are circled through it over and again, until the singing and spinning have to stop.

The ultimate climax comes with no warning, when Serena has covered the bill, and they are again out in the black, frigid air. Here they hug each other, and then kiss each other decorously on the lips, like sweet children in a panto. Then:

“You can always crash at my place, it’s only ten minutes away,” says Serena. “I think I said, shitty X-lover has departed and can’t cause any more trouble. The spare bed, I’m told, is delicious. And I make the best coffee on earth.”

“Thanks. I’m not so far from home. And I really have to see someone early tomorrow.” He means Pond’s recommended locksmith.

But Serena, tipsy and pretty, sparkles into giggles. “Oh then I won’t keep you. Is she one of your specials?”

Nick looks at her. “My specials? What do you mean?”

“Oh, you know. Your - how shall I say - what do you say? Clientele?”

With all the things they have talked about, slips, slides, plummets, rescues, his guts had not lurched as now they do. Nick is queasy, and for a moment feels himself also redden. “What are you talking about, Serena?”

And her face goes stark and she claps one of her hands to her mouth. Histrionically?

“Christ - Nicky - Oh - but I thought you knew we - knew, Laurence and I. We’ve known for years.”

“Knew, know what?”

“That you - what you do. The escort thing. Is that the right word?” She bristles abruptly. “Sorry, but why are you all uptight and embarrassed about it, if you choose to do it. I mean surely you never needed to? Claudia hardly left you short of cash…”

He turns from her. He takes long strides, which propel him rapidly away down the lumpy slope of the streets towards the Strand. He hears her calling him, twice, and the light clatter of her high heels as she runs to catch him. And then she curses him, shouts it after him. “Fuck you then you stupid little up-your-own-arse prick!” And somebody else on the street laughs at this performance, but she is used to an audience. And Nick is gone. Oh yes, gone far off, falling through roads toward the river where he should have taken flight from her before.

How did they know? He had never thought they knew. He had never known they knew, nor had they - either of them, these alien things - ever intimated that they did. Till now. But the pitfall has always been waiting, the trap when the ground gives way. The trick. It has been for that, then, tonight. All lies to lure him, and he, the fucking sucker, has been taken in. They know. How? How do they? How do they know? It has never mattered. He is not ashamed of it. But it was not for them to have, to play with and feast on. It was something separate. How do they know? They know. They know. Serena, and Laurence too, even if he is dead and rotten and half eaten and soon to be in the stenchful ground. Know. Know. Known. Know.

In Crown Street off Leicester Square, the Exchange is showing a French film from the ’70’s, La Maison Drages de Mars.

Nick takes a seat near the back. The cinema is virtually empty and feels too hot, then cold. It is close to midnight.

He tries to watch the film. His French is sketchy, and the subtitles seem too complicated and come and go too quickly. He thinks he saw the movie in his teens, replayed somewhere or other, but then thinks he has confused it with another one.

He cannot follow the drama. One of the girls is beautiful. He watches her, not trying to grasp what she says or is doing. When she hurls a shoe out of a window he laughs, but none of the other three patrons do; presumably it was not meant to be funny.

Against the music and the noises of the film, his own inner soundtrack is playing, replaying (as this film has done, does). Nick cannot switch the internal sound off and so listens to that instead of anything else.

Most of it is a monologue delivered by Pond’s voice. It begins with the previous evening, when Pond had said, I have an odd apprehension, Mr Lewis, you don’t know how your brother died. Am I correct?

No, Nick had not known. No one, not even the TV or radio he had caught, had informed him. He had found it confusing that Laurence’s body, found in Richmond Park, and subjected to an autopsy inevitably, had not then occasioned police investigations.

Then, and now, Pond had told - and here in the cinema tells over and over again, why.

For Laurence had died of natural causes. He had suffered an aneurysm. There had not been, as sometimes there never is, any warning - or certainly none so intrusive he had ever heeded it. Just like Claudia before him, he must have been one moment alive and ostensibly well. The next smitten and dying. Dead. (She just turned, and frowned as if the sun was in her eyes, only it wasn’t… and then she just