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

no sense, but he detects a crudeness, a viciousness that is quite at variance with what he merely sees.

It would seem Serena had collected the second poster, but written the comment? Even with Serena, the quip seems at variance. Nor is it like her distinctive writing. Besides, why put it in here - and then hide it?

He wipes the mirror and tidies the room, then unpeels the warning from its last fragile tape. He carries it out and through into the main area.

Serena has started on the geneva early. She does not look at him. She is painting her fingernails to match those on her feet. Her act that she is quite, quite alone is, for an actress of any ability, disappointing.

“Reenie - Serena, it really is time I went. I’ve taken up too much of your space. Thank you for everything you’ve done but I can take care of myself now.”

She glances up at him and her face switches character in three extraordinary starts. First to anger – which crumples immediately into a sort of childlike dismay that might even be pain - and then her eyes fix on his hand and she has instead the face of a terrified demon. In a high-pitched metallic tone she screams at him, “Where did you get that?”

“This?” He raises the poster.

“Yes - where was it…”

“Cellotaped behind the picture in the bathroom. The steam…”

He stops as Serena stands up. The nail varnish drops, mapping her black skirt as it does so with strawberry doodles. It lies lavishly leaking on the fitted carpet, ignored.

“Christ - in there? All this time - and I’ve been in there, I’ve sat - I’ve had a bath - the bitch put it there? Oh Christ…”

And she runs right at him and Nick believes she is going to tear pieces out of him, rip him to shreds. But it is the rape poster she grips and rips and shreds and lets go in bits and then stamps upon. “Bitch!” Serena shrieks, over and over. And then she cries. Not an April shower, not even really like grief. The tears on her face are like broken glass, and then shiny black acetate as she rubs her mascara into them. She has ruined her nails.

Beta

In her black and pink garments, black and pink nails, face, eyes, Serena sits drinking geneva. And tells him with a dead voice, undramatic and flat, about her recent past.

“Late last summer. Sort of suddenly too. It began then. Awfully sweet, I thought. And so attractive. Ghastly accent, I thought. But - well. It’s all the thing isn’t it, as Mum used to say - London accent, Mockney, whatever. I’ve never been interested in that kind of - I mean, I have no objection to it. Half the people in the business are this or that or something even wilder. But I’d never felt any interest except for men, that way. But she sort of started to - well, what do I call it? Woo me. I never quite worked out what her job was, where she was in the building. I just used to keep running into her. And sometimes she wasn’t there for weeks, I’d never see her. Then she’d be back. We used to go for a drink sometimes. Or to a club. I used to get men after me, obviously, and so did she, but she never picked anyone up. I’m saving myself, she said. For who? Oh, she said, who d’you think? I said I didn’t know. Try and guess, she said. And one night in this club we were dancing and it must have been a gay club, or bi, or God knows, but she started kissing me. I was pissed. I didn’t mind. I thought, Oh well, why not. It’s all experience. I mean, I have never even acted a Lesbian. But we came back here. And that was it. By which I mean I enjoyed it. No, it was amazing. No. It was better than that. I was astounded. I was - I didn’t - it scared me. I said I’d call her, like men are supposed to, and I didn’t, ditto. And then I didn’t see her for quite a while again anyway. And one evening I tried her mobile and I got someone else, a man - so I just thought she’d had it stolen. I was relieved and sorry. See how truthful I’m being? I decided she had left the BBC, no one seemed to know much if anything about her there. I thought I probably wouldn’t see her again. Maybe she’d ditched me, after all. Better that way. Only then one evening she turned up again, here, on the doorstep. You know the way this flat is - kind of cloistered. Some people, even after they’ve been here, can’t remember quite how to get up to it, they have to ask. But she found it, found me. And then she sort of moved in. I sort of let her. I wanted her to. Oh God, I wanted her to so much. But after a couple of days, nights, it all started to change, gradually, then fast. It altered. She altered. She altered me.”

“Little things at first. Why did I do that with my hair? Why not do this? So I’d try it and then she’d wait till we were out somewhere and then she’d put her head on one side and pull a sort of face and say no, it hadn’t worked. Or another shade of lipstick - and no, it didn’t suit me, or my mouth didn’t suit it. And then things I’d been in - like bloody 999, and why had I acted that scene in that pathetic way, it wasn’t convincing. Not the director’s fault, surely? Or my voice was wrong, too prissy. Or I was putting on weight, I ought to watch out, I’d end up too big and no one would give me a part except