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

child? And why, if you meant to find us all, didn’t you tell us who you were? I’ll suppose committing incest was all part of the plan - or just an inspired extra?”

“Oh,” she says again, smiling again, “I meant to screw you all. To screw you all up.”

Nick thinks that she has certainly managed that with Serena, and decidedly with Laurence - Kirri has killed Laurence. But he, Nick, Kirri has done nothing much to him.

He is about to challenge her with that fact, when something shifts very oddly inside his brain. It is not like those moments in the blue-tiled room, when Greek Stephanos had said that Kirri’s mother had called her after the bee goddess, because “Her mother, you see, was fanciful,” and Nick had intuitively known at once the mother referred to must be Claudia. Then he had felt faint. Now he feels something indescribable, a sort of terror and a sort of elation.

A vast portal opens in his memory. He sees himself from some way above, inside his flat in London and unlocking the door. Then he drops, is slammed, without any impact, straight home inside his own body.

There are two men outside the door, the locksmiths Pond had recommended.

Nick can see them clearly. The first locksmith, smoky-skinned with blue-black hair, the white guy behind with dreads.

Nick tries to explain the door will not need attention now, as he is about to sell up. The locksmith insists. “No, you need it. And you’ll receive it. Imp…” he says, “perative.”

And the man comes into the flat and the one outside shuts the door, and Nick and the first locksmith are alone together.

“You are Nick? Yes. How she exactly describes you. Jasmina. He has said to tell you, she is with him. His. So now you are to take receipt.”

And then the locksmith, (who obviously is not a locksmith at all, but some henchman of Jazz’s other unknown, ever-unmentioned possessive boyfriend) jerks forward and stabs Nick in the left side, well below the heart. It seems the henchman understands efficiently how to do this, in order to cause a lot of trouble, even a significant risk of death - without actually intending (maybe?) to murder Nick.

Nick stands on the hill in Greece and remembers dying.

And why.

Then he sits down on the grass. Like the grass, unlike the grass wall in the house, Nick is abruptly aware none of these events have any pattern at all. None of it really makes sense. These things - the partial assassin has nothing to do, for example, with the Drawer-man and Friendly’s gang, nor with this red-head blonde who is his mother’s other daughter. None of it really concerns Nick. He had unknowingly ‘stolen’ a woman, he had unknowingly ‘stolen’ a criminal code - he has been smacked and knifed. He is the child of a woman who had four children, one outside her marriage. He is peripheral, barely included, brushed painfully off the notepads of their lives like a fly. As he had suspected here and there before, though incidentally damaged he may be, his has only been a walk-on part. Something though grinds into his thigh. He thinks it is a stone. Then recalls the Roman pin he had brought with him today. And nearly lazily, he draws the pin from a pocket and unwraps it. Cleaned off by the constant wrappings, the friction of a pillow, a travelling bag, he can see now it is not made of verdigrised copper, or bronze. It is made of ivory, or some substance that resembles ivory. He raises his head and notes she is now looking at him, or in fact looking at the ivory pin. He has lost interest. It seems, most of this, irrelevant suddenly. Perhaps that is only the aftershock of his returned memory. Or not. But she is all eyes. All attention.

Omega

Qirri, (which is how, left to herself, she spells this version of her metamorphic name) has a last memory of her father. He had been called Yorgos Andrezou. He had kissed her as he shoved her in a taxi. The cab was paid for. She had nothing to worry about. Go straight back to Granny.

In itself going to Granny was worry enough. Granny, at that time, was in charge of Qirri. In Greece as a child Qirri had suffered from Granny’s guardianship. In England it was worse. Granny’s English-born husband too was a bully. Granny deferred to him, and put curses - horrible ones - on him when he was away (“with one of them tarties,” Granny would say). Granny’s name also had metamorphosed, from Eireni Narcissa to Jonquil. The grungy terrace where they lived, almost under the railway bridge that roared day and night like an indigestive lion, was a much nastier home than the village hovel where originally Qirri grew up. That too had had landscapes, trees, fresh fish from the sea, sunshine. Of course, there was money, lots of it mootedly. But nothing to show beyond a pittance until the girl (Qirri) was eighteen. The last time she saw her actual father, Yorgos, Eireni Narcissa Jonquil’s son, Qirri had been what? Fourteen, fifteen, or just sixteen - she never really recollected. She was not then as she would come to be. Overweight, her white skin spotty, particularly on her back and face, her dull brown hair cut short for ‘convenience’ and not washed as often as it might have been, this pre-imago Qirri lacked confidence, slouched, and spoke in the slum-London accent her slum-London environment had taught her. A year at a private drama school when she was nineteen would iron that crust away - save when she conjured the old voice up. Her Greek though was always fluent and beautiful. From the start, she liked her Greek voice.

The last memory then, when Yorgos put her in the cab, followed on the only time Qirri ever saw her mother. That was, met her mother, in the flesh. Claudia Martin was in