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

calmed down till your little adventure revved it all up again. Christ, Nick. Didn’t you even realise? The trouble we had at the hospital, and then Danny and Anil” (some other agent/life support) “fixed things with a security firm. But somehow the paparazzi have never quite located my flat. Though we had to use a decoy when I had to bring you here. But trust you, Nicky. You never noticed a fucking thing.”

She is her old abrasive furious spiky self.

“I’m sorry.”

“No you’re not. You’re just lazy. You even hate having the radio on - in case real life ever intrudes. Oh, I know you’ve been knifed, poor little helpless thing - what was that, then, some fucking mad client you couldn’t make come? God Nick, I’m going to show you those papers. I mean, after Laurence they were after you anyway. How could you be so blind to everything?”

Nick sits in the chair. He does not move. In a minute Serena is back from the study with a pile of broad sheets and the smaller fatter tabloids. She dumps them in his lap as if emptying a bin on him. She stalks into the big white kitchen and slams the door. Which dims at least the noises of the coffee-maker.

On the top of the pile is a rag with a fuzzy picture of Serena, looking pretty and tragic, en route to the funeral. The next two put Laurence first. The Sun is almost as described The Guardian and Independent both carry, if only on inside pages, slender retrospectives of Claudia’s and Laurence’s individual careers. It is the Mail and not The Sun that proposes a curse. Then, near the bottom of the heap, Nick sees his own slightly blurred face. The photograph catches him walking across a street which he recognises as part of the U of the cul-de-sac. The scene is otherwise very empty and it is night. He is billed as Laurence’s brother, home late post bereavement, after a night out drinking. He realises, slowly, from the date, that this is that same last night when, having left Serena, he came back in the fascist cab, to meet with Friendly, and subsequently the knife.

Nick gazes at his picture. He looks both younger and older than he is. His face is set and humourless, grim, unintelligent.

How had they got it? From some neighbouring window? Surely the angle is wrong for that. From a car, perhaps…?

Nick hears a voice in his head. Do you know the Lion? Pub keeps to the twenty-four hour opening. Looking for over an hour.

He almost laughs. The two men, one in the car, the other asking him about the invented pub. Not look-outs for Number 14, then. Why should they have been? The gang could more easily have watched for him from his own flat, and doubtless had done, using the bedroom porthole. But the press… He considers what Pond had said about the usefulness of tiny modern cameras. How long had they been tailing him? It was true, he had missed it when it was in front of him, so why not anything else?

He lifts the paper nearly idly, and underneath is the final journal, and on its front, in those faded yet over-emphasised modern colours, he sees himself again, clearly labelled. This time he is horizontal on a trolley, wrapped in a sheet or blanket that is patterned with red, an oxygen mask over his face.

Nick stands up and all the papers skitter and thud to the floor.

He goes directly out and along the corridor to the guest bathroom, and locks himself in.

Having turned on the water for a bath, he sits in the wicker chair, and abruptly through the speaker high up on the wall burst the furious roars of The Prodigy.

Then he does laugh. He laughs and runs the bath very full, strips and gets into it and shuts his eyes as if they were also his ears. He falls asleep in the hot water to Serena’s surrogate lullaby of rage.

When he wakes the room is black. The January sun has removed itself; just a ghost of external lighting manifesting from outside.

The water is cold.

He gets out and grabs a towel, shoves on his clothes. He will collect his few things and go. Stay at an hotel, (Serena had brought him his cash and cards). He should not have remained here so long. She is correct. He is lazy, a sloth.

But the press, he thinks. Will they still be after him? Surely he is nothing, a nobody, not like Laurence or his sister.

Already he feels enervated, as though the water had leached something else away. There seems so little of him left to stand, or to pack, to call a cab, decide on a destination. To move at all.

Only then does he switch on the lamps above the basin mirror.

The room had been full of steam, a mist of which still, wet and trickling, coats the bottom inches of the glass. Reflected in it he sees his own white face, and behind him the picture hung on the far wall, a peculiar poster-like creation showing a scene from an Italian film he has never identified. It is framed too, but has always survived the steam in the bathroom. Or has it? Something black and white has come adrift, and is hanging down like a weird curled papery tongue below it.

Curious, Nick examines the poster, then turns the picture round. He finds another smaller poster has been cellotaped to the picture’s back, but is now mostly loose. He straightens it out on mindless impulse. It is a government, or perhaps police-sponsored warning, no doubt intended for a female toilet.

It shows a woman’s high heeled shoe lying on a wet pavement. The bold lettering, white on black, declares: One in three reported rapes happens when the victim has been drinking. Below, in black felt-tip someone has carefully added: So drink up - you might get lucky!

To him, at that instant, it makes