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

That must be it. His warped and extraordinary mind had abruptly swerved away from me.

I’d be glad, thankful, but only if I could be certain.

Or would I be glad, and thankful?

Surely, for Christ’s sake, I wouldn’t miss any of this?

Unless. Unless he was my son.

Odd perhaps, I’d kept the elements that would contain his DNA, to help protect me from him. Now for the very first I fully recognised they might have another purpose.

But then, DNA tests aren’t always conclusive. And anyway, if he were mine – what would he want? And I. What would I want of him?

At 7 p.m. the burglar alarm went off, apparently because some kids were playing football outside. Later it did it again because the bicycle boy from up the road went past. It had always behaved like this. I turned it off.

That night I dreamed of Joseph Traskul as Vilmos, in the dim City of my imagination’s night. He lay half dead in the upper room of the Master’s house, as outlined in chapters thirteen through fifteen. In this dream-version rain was pouring in through the ceiling.

And I went into the room and stood looking down at him and he lay looking up at me.

“Don’t do this, Roy,” he said. “I never meant to harm.”

But I answered in the Master’s words, a script I had learned well, that he was for the use, not of myself, but of Great Powers beyond – yet in – the world.

And then Maureen stood beside me on the floor running with water, and she said, “He’s not worth our concern, Charlie. Bleeding bugger.”

And I woke, and I thought, My God, can I wait until Saturday to get away?

In the morning I called Matt.

“I’ve got to make a trip to your neck of the woods. Are you up to dinner?”

“I’m up to anything, Roy. I’m up to killing that bitch.”

I thought, This then, Matt’s anti-Sylvia maelstrom of bitterness, is my alternative. Never mind. I need to remove myself somewhere.

“Any chance I could sleep on the couch a couple of nights? These bastards aren’t paying expenses.”

“Why not, Roy? Have the spare room. She’s had her fucking lover in there enough times. And now she’s gone. So exorcise it for me.”

Duran was due to come back on Thursday. On Thursday morning something happened. Someone rang the door bell, obviously Duran, yet as I opened the door I thought – I thought -

A woman, youngish, tall, willowy, stood there looking upset.

“I’m sorry to trouble you – but my car’s stalled…” She waved in a helpless way over her right shoulder. “It’s just, my mobile’s out too. Could I possibly use your land-line? I’ll be happy to pay.”

I looked at her, and I thought now: There have been too many things like this. Too many.

I said, “I’m sorry, my phone isn’t working.” (This was, of course, true). “Perhaps try next door.” I indicated 76, Ian the house-husband.

She said, looking even more upset, “I did, they don’t answer.”

We stared at each other, she and I.

The ultimate impasse. I didn’t believe her. I was thinking, if not coherently, This is a scam. She’s up to something, this forlorn female, coming here and saying she must use my telephone.

And then I recalled, in the most unpredictable rush, so many incidents in my life, and how curiously I had met so many characters who were now integral, even if our time of contact had vanished away. Maureen with her dramatically sloughed lover Reg, Lynda with her broken glasses – even events, for example the urge to hurry to the hospital lavatory, missing, like some cruel train, my mother’s moment of death.

I mustn’t be so self-involved. Everything did not revolve around myself. Everything was not a conspiracy, a plot.

“Wait, I’ve got a mobile. You can use that.” I turned and left her by the door. I only had to go to the kitchen table. I hadn’t asked her in, nor did she come in. She didn’t look particularly strong; there was nothing to steal in the hall.

“Oh thank you,” she said, when I gave her the phone. “What do I owe…?”

“That’s fine.”

Encouraged, grateful, she did step up, just into the shelter of the doorway. She leaned by the door, and pushed in numbers.

Then she pulled a Kleenex out of a pocket and rubbed her nose, turning her back to me shyly.

I could see it now, the white car, stalled very definitely down where Old Church Lane gave way to the Crescent. Steam rose from the bonnet.

I walked off into the kitchen, let her mumble into the phone in private.

As such conversations do, it took a little while. I’d better top the phone up again, to be safe.

When I came back, she’d dropped the Kleenex on my mat and was grabbing it up. She stood clutching it and wiping her nose with it again, though now it would be less than clean. She was shaky. I retrieved my phone before she dropped that too.

“Thank you, thank you so much. It’s OK. They’re coming to rescue me. I shouldn’t get so silly… Really, can’t I pay for…”

“It’s quite OK.”

She went off along the path. I wondered why she was driving through these streets, where she was going, why she’d got in such a flap. She was rather a pretty woman, only about thirty. She looked sad, sad anyway without car problems to upset her. She was wiping her eyes now. What would he have done? Asked her in and made her tea.

I shut the door.

It rained in the evening. The sunset was like a squashed blue plum. I’d gone out of the back door and looked at the paving, for some reason. It was beginning to crack. I suppose not unreasonably, it had been laid some years before. Built-in obsolescence, as they say. Bad workmanship, as my father would have said.

Duran hadn’t turned up. This wasn’t like him. Nor did he call.

I dreamed about my father that night. He was walking with me through a