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

exercise amuses Nick while he waits for his meal, but his mind then starts straying back to the short story he is working on. It is more interesting to him than the invented story he gave Laurence. He has lied to Laurence off and on always, Nick acknowledges. Begun in childhood, no doubt in self defence against Laurence’s bullying, Nick has continued the custom unworriedly. None of the lies matter much, and Laurence, he is fairly sure, rarely believes them. Yet it affords Nick some kind of obscure pleasure to do this to Laurence still, even now it is no longer necessary. It is a game, a mind-stretching work-out, maybe needful in another way – as a writer, even a mostly unpublished and intermittent one.

He pays the bill with a credit card. Debby’s payment stays in his jacket. Black night has settled on the city. There is a movie at the Cellar, just along from Bush House, he might as well go and see that. Two weeks back they had one of Claudia’s old films showing, and he went twice. Topaz it was called. She was about twenty, blonde as lemon ice.

After she died he had been unable to watch her films for three whole years - and they had run two seasons of them on TV. (Serena had bought box sets of videos, then DVD’s, as they became available, of Claudia’s movies. She had the lot, in many versions, including a very flickery one dubbed into Polish. She showed them, Laurence had said, when friends dropped round.) In the fourth year, one evening Nick came in about midnight and turned on the TV without thinking, and saw Claudia in old, faded colour, and the spike that had long ago dissolved punched a hole through his abdomen. That was when he should have cried, perhaps. But still he had not. He had only sat there on the couch with the coffee going cold in his hands, staring at his mother, his own age that night, and in a turquoise frock, drinking a vermouth in a make-believe bar in an invented Paris.

He had never called her mother, nor by any form of title, nothing like that. Virtually everyone had called her Claudia. And she called him Nick.

When the film on TV ended, he had just gone on sitting there holding the cold coffee, in that flat her legacy had bought him, the flat before the one he lived in now that had the eight-sided window.

Sat there. And he saw he had at last learned she was a long way off. That was the only thought he had - not that she was dead, or alive in another better world. Only that she was, and now would always be, a long way off. As if she were on the moon perhaps, up on the moon, the real unreachable one where nobody had ever landed; there.

Without remembering he re-activates the mobile at 9 a.m. the next morning.

There are three messages. The first two are in the voice of the unknown woman from the previous evening. She sounds increasingly more wild and furious. “Listen, you bastard, you don’t get rid of me that easily. If you haven’t got the guts, get the arch-bastard to call me himself!” This is message number one. The second is this: “For Christ’s sake, Nicolas - this is mental cruelty - it is sadistic - fucking call me you bastard! I want you to know I have already contacted the police. I won’t stand for this from him. Nor from you.” The third message comprises only two or three strangled noises, a kind of wordless explosion of violence.

Nick drinks the coffee he has just prepared and thinks that, due to the repetitions, the woman’s voice now does seem slightly familiar.

Who is the other ‘he’? Presumably some partner or lover.

He picks up the notebook with his own story in it, and begins to check and amend some of the pages. He always writes long-hand, then verbally records the result. Robyn then types it up on her computer. Theirs is a different business arrangement, platonic. She performs the service, he pays her in cash.

The phone goes again. It is not the mobile but the land-line.

Nick has a sudden odd premonition that this caller will be his brother Laurence. But Laurence was here only - what was it? - only four nights back. It would not be like him to call again so soon.

People do unexpected things sometimes. Nick is faintly curious to find that although he gets up, he skirts the shrilling phone, and instead walks down the room to where the stair leads to the little gallery and the entry to the loft bedroom overhead. Coffee and notebook in hand, he climbs the stair, crosses the gallery, enters the bedroom and shuts the door. It is by contrast a low-ceilinged room, with a tiny porthole version of the lower window. Below in the cul-de-sac, lots of big vans are delivering mysterious things to other flats. The vehicles are parked nose to tail all around the U shape of the road, which loops in off and back out to the busy main artery of traffic.

Downstairs Nick has heard the ansa-phone accepting a message, but due to the acoustics of the flat, up here he has not caught a word.

There is another stranger in the main lobby when Nick walks down there about 11 a.m. But the whole building is always presenting strangers, most of whom are the occupants of the other flats. Due to remarkably good sound-proofing, which probably was not even planned, no flat ever hears much from another. Nick in his upper apartment, has always had the sense of being entirely alone.

The stranger, unusually however, turns and looks fixedly at him.

“Sorry to trouble you,” says the man, who is tallish, slim, nondescript. “Did you see a drawer down here - oh, about a week ago - Monday I’d guess.”

“A drawer. What sort of drawer?”

“Out of a desk.”

Nick