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

as some fat old slut. Or - You can imagine. Perhaps you can. Perhaps you think it was nothing. But I’m not that secure. I never was. I act that I am. But it’s a bluff. She was scratching, pulling all the time, all the time, little bits out of the underpinning. Hey! Look at Reenie’s frown lines! Ssh! Don’t make so much noise when you come, you’re deafening me, you put me off. God, you can’t cook, Reenie, can you?”

(Serena’s voice has not livened up, not put on again its panoply of rage. It is the same dead voice, dull even when emphatic, and lacking in timbre.)

“I must have been in love with her, I must. I was. To hate her so much. We started to have diabolical rows. Once I threw something at her - a crystal ashtray I kept for the smokers still among us - and it went straight through the TV screen. She laughed. I said fine, you don’t have to fucking pay for it, do you. And she said, Oh, I’ll pay for it if you want. And next morning - she’d gone by then, she was always going by then - days, whole nights - I found a cheque for three K on the coffee table. She’d written along the bottom Charity Funding to Aid Bad Actors. I tore it up and threw it away. I wanted to push it up her arse with a - no. No. I did try not to go crazy. You won’t believe that, but I did. I asked her if she was seeing someone else. Of course, she said. You don’t think you tick all the boxes, do you? I wanted her to leave and I was petrified she would. I kept getting into stupid rows on the set, I kept being sick - as if she’d made me pregnant. I said, she’d moved in with me, but she hadn’t really - only brought some clothes, make-up, that sort of thing. She had her own flat, but she never said where - or I never asked. But now, as if our arrangement really was a partnership, she started to change the decor of this place. She had a chair recovered in tartan flowers - and horrible additions - a plastic chicken hung on a hook with its head half off and ketchup - I thought it was real. She poured red wine down the loos and left it there like blood. She wrote things over my scripts - crude ugly brainless filth. I was frightened of her. And that poster you found - oh there were lots of things like that. She put one on STD’s in the en suite bathroom,blue-tac’d it to the wall. Revolting, foul, and she’d written on that too. It said Go on, take the risk. We all gotta go, eh?”

(Serena is - serene. Or she looks as if she is a sort of serene. As if heavily sedated, perhaps. She has folded her hands over her empty glass.)

“One day she took off and she was gone about four days and nights, and I began to pray she’d been run over, or pushed under a train. I phoned an abuse line. Do you know what I got? A recorded message. Their lines were busy. If I was in danger I should call the police. She came back at three in the morning - she was drunk and she threw up in here. Over there, actually, where that lamp is. Then she went to sleep in that chair. Yes. The one you’re in, Nicky. In the morning I’d packed her bag - I put all the rubbish in it too, the posters, all of it - and I told her to get out and never come back. I told her if she didn’t I would kill her. You and whose army? she said. No army, I know a hit man. She said, so do I. I said, perhaps it’s the same man. But he and I go back a long way. It’s a family thing. I don’t, obviously, know anyone like that. But she was hung over. She looked really ill. After a bit she got up and peered at me, and said, You know what, Reen, you’re crap. And then - she took her bag and went into the bathroom and then came out and she left. I haven’t seen her since. And then there was Corfu, and about a week - was it? I lost track - a week or ten days after, Laurence disappeared. And then they found Laurence…”

(There is a pause. Serena is crying again, but without any passion now. Like a forgotten, thinly-running tap.)

“I’d tried to make sure she took everything she’d contaminated this place with. But she stuck the poster up again, behind the picture in there, to shock-repel me some day, when I discovered it. God knows, I never might have. You found it, didn’t you. You know, I asked her, that one time, what she meant, what she’d written on it meant - drink up, get lucky… Do you know what she said? She said, Just what it says, babes. Just what it says. Maybe it was her curse - a real one - on me. I’ve felt cursed. I’ve felt - wrong ever since. And - this is awful, but it’s true - I felt that Laurence dying like that was - it was as if the edge of her curse caught him too. Her fucking white-blonde blue-eyed shit of a curse.”

Nick moves in the chair.

“She was called Kitty,” he says. “Or Kit. Right?”

“Yes, yes,” says Serena almost impatiently. She has no idea it seems she did not tell him this.

“And she looked like Claudia.”

“Christ - did I say that too?” Serena gapes at him through the water and mist of her pain. She is blanked a moment by surprise at her own over-forthcomingness. But of course she had not told him that either.