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

When he got out, Nick stood below the block with the great window, not looking at it. The bag weighed heavily on his left side, though he carried it in his right hand. “You all right, mate?” the cabdriver had inquired, the query a weird combine of inquisitive indifference. Nick said he was, just a bruised rib, he had added, when the driver started to elaborate on how Nick did not look all right at all.

Nick went briskly to the outside steps and up, opened the main door, strode in.

Then he had to cross to the bench and sit there a while. The drizzly morning light washed hallucinatory shapes into the foyer. Nick saw an old drawer in a corner, and under the table one of his own note-books. But they were not real.

Going all the way up all the stairs was almost impossible or seemed so; nevertheless he achieved it. The labour and breathlessness made less of the panic, however. He had to work physically and the panic took second place. He wondered if he would always be physically impaired like this now. They had told him he was fine. No lasting damage. He could even fly abroad in a month, they said, in five weeks to be sure. And more time than that had already passed.

Reaching his door, he waited. Then - he knocked.

Serena had come to the flat before, on his behalf. No one had been there, or she must have said. No one answered now. He had a vision of Friendly upstairs in Nick’s bed with some busty girl in a nurse’s uniform. Nick sat down on the floor and leaned his back on the wall. This lasted a few minutes only.

He got up presently, unlocked his door and went in. The light came on. He had not caused it to do so. Ah. It was unexpected sunlight in the window.

The light displayed nothing. That was, nothing extra. No men sitting, standing, walking or lunging, no bottles or rinds or cores. No blood. It looked, the flat, rather as it generally had, except now it was dusty, and the wooden floor was lacklustre. A cobweb hung from the cabinet, catching light, swinging in some momentum of its own, or of his, coming in.

He would put the flat on the market. That was all he could do. It was not his flat. If the gang did not want it, someone else would. He thought again of going to a hotel, but he was too tired. He had shut and now relocked the door. He pushed no furniture up against it. His own apathy nearly interested him, but not quite.

Nick did not really look at the window. It seemed naked and absurd today, all that glass, showing so much and revealing nothing.

He slept upstairs. As before, fully clothed.

No one visited or broke in. No one called. Nothing.

He stayed in the flat for two days, two nights, after which he made the correct arrangements and removed himself to a small hotel in Bloomsbury.

He stayed in the flat in Athens for a month, a little longer. This was not out of fascination with the flat or the confused city, nor from illness, cowardice or neurasthenia. His energy merely, revved up to such a ridiculous pitch, had run out. Like a clockwork thing left unwound. Like Laurence’s stupid Angie-watch.

The Athens flat was spic and span, a term Mrs Rush had sometimes used. It had white walls, red furnishings, green blinds, and opened on a shady courtyard where tall palm trees rose from pots. At the front, a number of ornamental balconies ascended above his window, creating a webby illusion he did not unravel, but which he was uncertain he liked.

Mopeds and bikes, bicycles even, donkeys even, went along the narrow road outside.

The Acropolis was visible miles up, between a gap in the buildings. Its elevation, the slope appliquéd with papier mache shapes of houses that were blinding white at certain times of day, and ending in its ruinous crown, haunted his thoughts. He meant to go to see it, but put off the jaunt. One night he dreamed of flying out of the window, wingless but levitating, and sailing around the pitted columns, through the holes and mathematical spaces. He had seen so many photographs and drawings of it, probably this surreality was authentic enough.

Awake, and during the day, the light, the Greek light of which so many had written, seemed to him to make all things transparent. That was, he could not see through them, and yet the light could. For the light had eaten them all long ago. The stones, ancient or modern, the streets and plants, (even the gaudy scars left over three years back, by the Olympics), the people and any animals or traffic that moved or was still. Then, having eaten all, the light set out their perfect facsimiles instead, these standing or moving just as before, and now enduring as no actual existing object could. No wonder the Acropolis and the Parthenon had lasted so well, no wonder that eldritch woman in her black, her face wrinkled like a sort of tattooing, no wonder they were still there after so many hundred or thousand or million years.

But Athens did not feel old. It felt and was heard as young and vociferous. It shrilled and shrieked and pushed and raced. At night, and into the early hours, bars pounded like excited hearts, neons flaring and pop music bellowing. It smoked too, lit cigarettes everywhere.

A cat, thin as a serpent, which by day sometimes hunted for vermin across the street, or came to sun itself briefly at the sunny end of the courtyard - always bolting at any sound - after dark prowled the roof and wall-tops, a skinny vampire with luminous pale eyes. He came to dream of the cat, too, dreams in which it was his enemy, trying to enter the flat and rip and claw his