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

indescribable, vaguely humorous, terrible way, “Don’t mind me.”

In prisons of war or kidnap, guarded by jailors indifferent, sadistic or murderous, men have had to do this. They have had to urinate and defecate and vomit, also under the keen eyes of these enemies. Would that be the next step?

The soap was in my hands. I began to wash.

Still I hadn’t once looked into his face, let alone his eyes. Not looking at him, even though he never took his eyes from me, seemed peculiarly to leave me a measure of privacy, perhaps safety. This is irrational, and afterwards became meaningless.

With each ordinary everyday move I made, I wondered what would come after.

He said nothing for a while.

He watched.

When I’d performed these ablutions, sluiced myself over, then he said, “Don’t you ever lie back for a minute in the water?”

“Not often.”

“So that’s all.”

I thought, He is going to instruct me now to do something else. To play with myself, perhaps. Or to sing a song. Am I going to do that? Either of those? I suppose I’ll have to.

I stared at the light shining on the chrome taps. They weren’t very clean. Franziska hadn’t done a very good job, but to be fair too, that had been weeks back because he’d made me cancel her visits. The agency were very understanding about the emergency journey abroad he’d told me to say I had to make. I could have rung another number, pretended, let her arrive. But what would she have done anyway? Besides, I’d imagined him telling her he was my son, and how deranged I was, she’d been lucky. Even playing the piano to her, asking her for a date, God knows.

“Well, Roy,” he said, breaking in on these random thoughts, “the water will be getting cold. Better get out now.”

When I was out again I reached for the towel, but before I got hold of it he said, “Now leave the towel. First I want you, just for a minute, to stand there and look me in the face.”

It wasn’t chilly in the bathroom. It was nearly June and the sun was out.

I raised my head and looked directly at him.

Only I couldn’t. Somehow I couldn’t. My eyes slid off his face. I tried to make them stay – less for any affirmative reason of my own, than in order to obey and so appease him. And I couldn’t. My eyes began to water. This was not fear, or tearfulness. It was the strain, as if I forced myself to stare into the sun, or hold up some huge weight that was going to break my back.

“OK,” he said then. With the edge of vision I saw he smiled his smile. He threw the towel to me. And walked past me and out of the bathroom.

I heard him go down the stairs.

What happened next surprised me. I pushed the door shut and locked it, then I lifted the lid of the lavatory and was sick. The bath was still gurgling as it emptied. Perhaps he didn’t hear the noise of my nausea.

I stayed in the bathroom after this for some time.

I believed, even if he’d heard nothing, even if he came to ‘check’ on me again and I made some excuse as to why I was still there – cleaning the bath perhaps – even so he guessed, had calculated and foretold how I was.

I advised myself I had been very afraid that something frightening, a thorough assault, a beating, was about to be perpetrated on me. Even after all male rape. But I knew I hadn’t thought that. And I had been convinced also that so long as I did as I was asked, there’d be no violence. My subsequent physical reaction, and my mental one still, were not caused by actual anxiety or terror. It was something else.

On the floor by the basin I sat on the damp towel, thinking, thinking of this. Thinking of how I had been naked.

It was a very minor ordeal. Nothing dramatic or ghastly had occurred. It amounted to nothing.

But my brain held it. As in dreams sometimes I do, I saw myself as a separate person, and viewed from above. I saw myself standing before him, then in the bath washing, getting out and standing again in front of Joseph Traskul, unable to meet his eyes, unable to look at him. I knew that once more clothed, I would remain unable to look into his face.

I found too I didn’t want to leave the bathroom. I wished to stay there, by the basin, seated on the floor, not focussing, staring inward, thinking about myself seen from above as another person, naked. Or rather, this was not what I wished. It was all I could do. Even to move my left leg, the foot of which had gone to sleep, was beyond me. My mind was filling the room, and the house outside, with a kind of cerebral fog. In this Sej vanished. He would not therefore come up to the bathroom, knock, break down the door. Nothing would happen. Time had stopped.

NINETEEN

When I went downstairs it was almost 4 p.m.

Outside birds sang, and a couple of lawnmowers droned. Now and then a car went up or down the road. Everything was completely normal. But there was no sound in the house at all. I might have been alone there.

He was lying on the paint-splattered sofa in the front room, the shattered TV to his far left, a cushion under his head, reading Milton.

Without looking up, he read to me.

“‘Som natural tears they dropd, but wiped them soon,

‘The World was all before them, where to choose

‘Thir place of rest, and Providence thir guide:

‘They hand in hand with wandring steps and slow,

‘Through Eden took their solitarie way.’”

I said, not looking at him, or no further than the book. “I’m going to make something to eat.”

“Go ahead,” he replied.

I walked out and on into the kitchen. There was no smell of