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

he had heard carols being sung somewhere, perhaps only on the hospital radio. But there were constant sounds there. Nights, there, always unsilent.

Serena likes sound, noise, noises. She uses her music centre, or various radios, as auditory wallpaper, not listening, he thinks, too much of it. There are speakers everywhere, even in the guest bathroom. Cold Play or Jacques Brel, or irate discussions flood the air.

“Children, even at secondary school level, are being found who can only eat with their hands!” a stupid, over-educated voice whines, and Nick visualises the superior, properly-trained children who, of course, hold their knives and forks in their toes.

But he makes no note of this irony of inadequate syntax.

Though Serena, who had gone to his flat to pick up for him toiletries and clothing, had also brought books and his current story on the stolen pad. He had not asked her to do this. He had been surprised, and inquired, almost on a reflex, how the flat was. “It’s fine,” she said. She had added she had got someone in to ‘clear up’. He guessed she meant clear up the blood and any other mess his brief death had left there. It was then he told her the flat was sold, but no, he did not know yet when it would be claimed.

Nick wonders anyway if the gang still want the flat. Surely not, if they were the ones who provided the attack. But he has lost the flat, whether they want it or not. Lost everything. Lost. Now and then he has tried to remember where he put the Roman pin, once he unearthed it from the bedroom carpet. There is a vague idea in his mind that it was on the pillow of the bed, lying there when he fell asleep that last night. He had meant to keep hold of it. As if it mattered.

Sometimes he dreams about the pin, as in the Kitty dream, (although he has also dreamed others have come through the door and stabbed him with other implements. Once it was Sonia, with a metal nail-file, once - no, twice - Jazz with a long red fingernail. After the radio moment he is half afraid he will dream next of an acrobatic superior child stabbing him with a fork, held nimbly in one foot.)

“Look, isn’t the sky beautiful?”

“Yes. But I don’t want to go out for a walk.”

“Nicky - please. I’m getting so worried about you.”

He grasps she must have been leaned on by the doctors to take him in. This was when he was at his weakest and most foggy. He would have protested otherwise. But then he had not, he thinks, properly understood. He is, in a detached way, rather sorry for her. All this acted loving compassion must be wearing her out.

Her apartment is of reasonable size, with two bedrooms, one, hers, en suite, the guest bathroom, a study, and a long, oblong of living room. They can, and do by now, get away from each other. She goes out, too, but never for much more than a couple of hours. Afraid to leave the ailing brother. (They had written her out of 999. She said she might have to film one final small scene, but no hurry apparently. She reckoned they had sacked her. Said she did not care.)

“Serena, really it’s time I went back to the flat. I’ll have to be there, won’t I, to make sure about the contract exchange?”

“I don’t believe you, you know,” she says, sitting on the arm of an armchair and swinging one slim leg, and bare foot with toenails painted pale strawberry. Who the hell is she? Is he supposed to know her? “I think you’ve gone off your head a bit, Nicky. They said, it can happen. It’ll pass. But you ought to see someone.”

“No thank you.”

She envampirises her mug, stands up to fetch a refill, pauses. She asks abruptly then, “Is it the press? I mean, why you don’t want to go out? Honestly, I can promise you, that’s been taken care of, at least for now and here. Danny…”

“What do you mean, press?”

“The press. The paparazzi. What else would I mean, you twot, something to flatten trousers?”

She had gone to Laurence’s funeral, Nick suddenly recalls this. It had occurred while Nick was still in intensive care. How, or if, she had squared her presence with Angela he did not know. Serena had said very little about it. He sees a mental picture of her standing over the grave, throwing in some hapless flower. Tears, another April shower of rain. Or perhaps a genuine deluge. Nick cannot tell.

“You mean the press have been hanging around you because of Laurence?”

“Of course they have. He’s - he was a bloody TV celebrity. They started trailing after me in Corfu. I called Danny. He says, of course, the fucking bastard, the publicity can only do me good. He arranged some awful interviews with magazines, and on TV. That gets the rest of the mob off you, if someone else has bought you up they keep them off. Like rival bloody pimps. But Danny’s worse. He even suggested I bleach my hair - be more like Claudia. I reminded him my dead brother had black hair too. That’s contented him for now. But God, I’m sick of it all. And inevitably, with or without current pictures, it was in the papers. Christ, you should have seen The Sun - I assume you didn’t? No. The Lewis Case they called it. Laurie must have raided some Egyptian tomb when he was thirty or less - oh, that was front page stuff - a big black draped photo of Claudia from the ’80’s, and then a smaller pic of Laurie from that Roman garbage he did, and then you. And me, with a big question mark - ‘Is Serena next?’”

“Me.”

“Well yes, you. What else? Laurence dies in Richmond Park and then you get yourself fucking stabbed. It might all have