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

He looked genuinely interested. But that was his way. And long ago I learned to resist the urge to spill plotlines before anyone, even the most innocuous listener. You bored them, or they ripped you off. Or both.

As I didn’t reply, he smiled. “Some authors don’t like to discuss work in progress. You must be one. What’s the title?”

“A working title only.”

“Which is?”

“Kill Me Tomorrow.”

Unlike the sub-editor whom I’d first informed of this, and who’d instantly wanted a change to avoid Bondism, Sej had the source at once. “Ah. Desdemona as her jealous partner slays her – Kill me tomorrow – let me live tonight.” He added, throwing me, “The Irish play.”

“It isn’t Macbeth.”

“No, Roy. Macbeth is the Scottish Play, as we both know. I mean the Irish Play: O’Thello.”

I stared at him. It was possible, if someone else had made this joke elsewhere, I might have laughed, at least – as he always did – smiled. “Very good,” I said, stilly.

“Not mine. But there. So one disc is your new novel, and the other, was I right, the big unfinished manuscript now in the smaller bag – why else is it so heavy? – and which I found last time anyway, tucked in one of your study drawers under some loose blank paper.”

My heart knocked.

I felt a kind of different alarm, inexplicable, together leaden and sharp. The very thing that had made me pursue the bags and so him, back to the trap of the house.

Silent, I waited.

As I now knew he now would, he told me, “I read it, Roy. It’s Byronic – but more accessible, more perverse. Bit of a masterpiece. Probably, like so many of those, unpublishable. All that wonderful rambling, murky stuff about his life, the constipated family with their failed fortune, the grisly murders – which remind me of Poe, and sometimes of de Sade – that girl, what was her name – Libenka – with her throat cut, hanging by her hair from the beam, where he’d left her – until her own weight dragged the – what was it? hennaed tresses – out of her scalp, and she fell through the flimsy floor into the room below. And his demented visions of dogs and cattle and fiends and beasts of bone and metal. Purple passages to eat with a spoon – I expect you know, don’t you, Roy, to tell an author he’d written a Purple Passage was to compliment him. It meant the section was unusually rich – like expensively purple-dyed silk. No, it’s one hell of a book. And unfinished. What comes next?”

I swallowed.

“It stuck some years ago. And thank you, but I know it’s rubbish.”

He shook his head. “Nay, do not think I flatter,” he said, “…and that of course is the Danish Play about the pork butcher – It isn’t rubbish, Roy. You should finish it. So there we are. The two things you should do this summer. Finish that novel and shave your bloody head. Your hair is going fast. Steal a march. Get rid of it. You’ll look good, more yourself. We should all, like Vilmos’s creepy alchemic Order, try to become ourselves. It’s about all we can do.”

I thought, What will he do, drug me again, then shave my hair off while I sleep?

A huge, heavy, watery terror filled me. I felt, as the Americans illustratingly say, sick to my stomach.

He read my mind, of course. Perhaps not so bizarre.

“I won’t do that, Roy. It has to come from you.”

Then he got up and walked round the kitchen, looking out of the glass of the closed door and window briefly. It was getting on by now for evening. The sky had a thickened amontillado sherry light, the fir black, its needles delineated like spikes on some giant black porcupine. By a similar light, against the fir, I had seen him here first. And earlier today, by the fir, he had jumped up to intercept my escape.

“That’s a beautiful tree,” he remarked. Then, cutting through me, irrational as I now was, to the quick, “You feature it, am I right? In your untitled work. The tree on the Kolosian Hill, where your hero stabs the thief.”

After this he opened the fridge, next the freezer, and gazed in. No comment then. He went on to the cupboards, looked at, removed and looked at, various cans.

“Not much food.”

“I was going away.”

“Of course you were. Don’t worry. I can go shopping. Enough shops are open on Sunday. As for tonight…” He was thoughtful. “How about a take-away? Do you have a good local Indian or Chinese?”

I rarely indulge myself that way, but there was an Indian restaurant at the end of the high street, the Spice Lal.

“If you want.” Thought clicked. I added, expressionless. “But I won’t join you.”

“Oh Roy, come on. I can’t drug that. Not if you keep an eye on me from the moment the food arrives to the moment it gets to the table. And then we each keep our hands in sight. I still haven’t quite figured out how you did that trick with the wine that time. I’ll watch you. You watch me. We’ll have a good meal. And don’t worry. I’ll pay.”

With an inappropriate abrupt rancour I heard myself say “You seem to be rich.”

“Not exactly. But not poor either. Do you have their number?”

“No.”

He drew from his pocket the most slender of phones, the colour of matt steel. It was more up-to-date than the last one he’d had at our third meeting. He must change them every week. “Tell me the name and address, Roy.”

“Why should I? I don’t particularly want an Indian meal.”

“Yes, you do,” he said.

I tightened my mouth. Stupid. Redundant.

Sej smiled. “Don’t worry, Roy,” he falsely reassured me again. “I remember a place in your high street – The Lal – yeah, the Spice Lal.” Then he called one of those directories we now use, at great cost, to learn unknown telephone numbers. Next he