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

to the car. It was a Skoda, mid-eighties model, and it had taken a few knocks. But it was red, the colour of my mother’s glass dog.

In the car, as we rumbled off among the jolting back streets, I sat quiet for a while. I was in the front with him. The back seat was full of a medley of magazines and old books, and a cardboard box with what looked like tools in it. My bags had gone in the back, too.

I had done up my seat-belt. He hadn’t, only draped it over his shoulder.

But then, they took risks, didn’t they?

Finally he said, “You OK there? This is the quickest way, but it’s going to take about half an hour even at this time of night. The hospital, I mean.”

“I’m all right.”

“Don’t you want to ask me some more things? I’m fine to talk while I drive. Believe me, when ye’ve scannied the craggy glens o’ the Heelands, London hails nae chinny.” Or so I thought he said.

“Tell me about the other people in the flats,” I said. “Are they all part of your, what shall I call it? Fraternity?

“Not them, Roy old love.” He’d reverted to the London accent. “Sej owns the house, No 66, Saracen. So he gets some rent, but not much. I can pay, because I’m on an early retirement deal with a pension. But most of them are crazy, with drink or drugs higher on the must-do list than the monthly retail – I know that one. Been there, done that. Thank God didn’t buy the T-shirt. He lets them off, poor bloody cretins. Unless they cause dangerous bother. In that case C steps in. It’s like my music. I can play two million decibels, but if Sej asks me to turn it down, or off, I do.”

“He gives the orders.”

“If you like. But I love the guy.”

“And if you don’t C steps in.”

Eyes on the road, he was smiling. “I was part of the show that brought C in. You’ll hear his story sometime. No, it isn’t a threat with us. Just – mutual courtesy.”

“But,” I said deadly, “you love him. Sej.”

“Yes.”

“Because he broke you free of yourself.”

“That’s the one.”

“I remember Mr C thumping the man from flat 2.”

“Oh him. The guy in flat 2 is a cunt,” said Leo indifferently. “He likes to get off his skull and hurt things, cause damage for no reason. Sej lets him stay but only if he leaves Tina alone, when she’s there.”

“So there is a Tina.”

“Yes, there’s a Tina. She’s in rehab at the moment. Sold everything she had for a blast of crack and then it’s an ambulance and one more programme, poor cow.”

“Why doesn’t he rescue them?” I asked. I sounded older than normally I do. “Free them from their moulds.”

“You can’t, Roy, can you, some people. Most people. Sej looks out for the ones who seem like they might have potential for change, for growth. We’re a bit thin on the ground. He’s always prepared to try. Some of them freak out and run away and don’t come back anywhere he, or any of us, can find them. Some of them cling on to him but still don’t change. Some he’ll give up on after one meeting.”

“His life’s work.”

“Right again.”

“And you are all what? Disciples?”

“Still swimming with that stick Marga threw to you? No, we’re not disciples. We have our own lives, but he calls us up sometimes. Militia, Roy. How’s that? Reservists.”

“In which war?”

“The war against terrifying real life.”

We swerved around a corner and a cat darted over the narrow road. Leo slowed the car like a sensitive knife in butter. He drove well, but not exactly as they tell one to. Well. Of course not.

“Then,” I said, “did he meet you when you moved into the flat?”

“No, the flat was after. He offered me the flat. The last guy had it was dead.”

“What from?”

“Old age. He was ninety-one. He climbed those flamin’ stairs at least twice every day. One day, he left a note that said he’d had enough climbing. Took some tablets. Ninety-one. Tablets. No more climbs. Bit classy that.”

“Was he one of you?”

“No. He just let us use the door now and then.”

“Tell me what you know about Sej.”

We had come out on to a tree-lined road. We were by now in that place all taxi drivers fear to go late at night. South of the River.

“I don’t know much. Honest injun. None of us do. He was brought up in a children’s home. Then someone he didn’t know left him some dosh and the flats. That’s it.”

“What’s his mother’s name?”

“Oh that.” Leo laughed. In his laugh I heard again the laughter of Sej. “He calls her Cinderella. Or Ashabelle. Always something like that. It’s a joke. He never knew her. Let alone any daddy figure.”

“Why Cinderella?”

“She went after a ball, lost her shoe… the shoe is a sexual symbol here and there.”

“I know.”

“Speed humpies,” he said, as the things once known as sleeping policemen rose up before us along the road. “We are getting near.”

I thought, He’s taking me somewhere, but to a hospital? Sej isn’t in any hospital. This will be one more set-up, one more round in the game.

And then we drove into a square and through another street and the grey depressing bulk of a building that could be nothing but a hospital stood shining in its cold clear light.

A memory of my dying mother came unwanted into my mind. She’d always been afraid of hospitals. Over the door, for her, would hang that warning from Dante’s Gate to Hell: Abandon Hope all Ye that here Enter.

At the car park he paid the toll and we got out. I couldn’t carry the bags anymore, less weight than distraction, and left them on the seat. I felt old, I felt beaten.

I stopped Leo some yards from the building’s glass entrance.

“Did Sej ever punch you, slap you, anything?”

“Once. That’s when I threw him down the