Greyglass, Tanith Lee [general ebook reader .txt] 📗

“What does his firm import?” Susan asked in desperation; obviously they had to talk on and on about Wizz.

“I don’t know. Everything, I think.”

“How did you meet?” Trying to be interested, to please Anne.

“Oh that.” Anne, taking off with cold cream her cosmetics, what Wizz had left of them, paused. “He came into the office. There was some kind of palaver about something. I wasn’t really listening. Mr V got in his usual flap. Then… he came and leaned over my desk.”

In the stories Wizz had told, stories which never seemed to have a beginning or any real ending, the other characters were always making excuses, crawling – in a flap, like Mr V.

“What did he say? Did he just ask you out?”

“He just said, Are you free for dinner tonight? I said, No, I can’t. He said, Tomorrow then. I said, Yes.”

The flat had smelled on and on of Wizz after he left, despite the summer-wide windows. A stagnant odour, like old plant water.

They had had cocktails, apparently, at the Waldorf. And probably, Susan thought, gone up to a bedroom.

“I’ll write to Silverguilds. You can start the course a week or so late. It won’t hurt.”

“No, I don’t want to go.”

“Don’t be silly. Not go – to the States! I haven’t been abroad since I was in my twenties. Never America. I can’t wait. Of course we’ll go. Thank God I got the passport situation sorted out last month. There, you see, you’ve even got a passport. That’s a thrill isn’t it?”

“I don’t –”

“Air travel is nothing. It’s easy. They won’t expect us to fly the plane ourselves.”

“It’s just –”

“Susan, listen to me. Soon he may be going to live over there. Indefinitely. And he wants me to live with him, and I want to, Susan. Oh God, do I. I’d get shot of this flat. No rent to find. He’d see to visas, everything.”

Susan felt her carefully knit expression cracking into sections, which slipped from her and lay along the floor.

“Don’t pull that face. What’s the matter with you? It’s a glorious, wonderful chance. Christ, Susan, what’s here that’s so special? Silverguilds? You’ve never shown much enthusiasm.” Susan found to her own shock that she started to cry. “Stop it. Stop it, Susan. I don’t want to spend the rest of my bloody days in this dump, breathing in car fumes, working in some hole-in-the-corner job. I want to see some action.” A phrase Wizz might have used? “New York – oh, Susan, you can’t begin to see, can you, it will be so exciting. Any other girl, she’d be crazy to go.”

“He’s weird,” Susan blurted. “I think he’s a crook – a gangster –”

“Oh don’t be so ridiculously melodramatic and –”

“All those men he told us about, saying sorry, sorry, and blaming other people – and he smells.”

Anne’s face reached a crescendo of rage and burst, unexpectedly – to both of them, it seemed – in a torrent of helpless mirth.

“Smells? You’re mad, child. Smells of money, yes. Of life. Go to bed for fuck’s sake.”

And so they parted for the night, Anne laughing, Susan crying.

In the morning, as usual in the holidays, Anne left for work before Susan woke. Anne had pinned a note on the corkboard in the kitchen, but all it said was, Please get another pint of milk and a large Hovis. Merci.

Susan showered and dressed rebelliously. She made up rebelliously, painting out her spots by the accustomed method, using a paintbrush and disc of white eye make-up, then applying layers of powder and blusher. Jo had once told Susan she put shadow on her lids like a panda. Anne, though, her mother, never made a criticism like this.

“It won’t happen,” Susan said to the painted face in the mirror, (make it laugh at that.)

After she had gone out and bought the milk and bread, and a pound of plums, Susan checked her funds. There seemed quite a lot of money saved from her allowance.

When she thought of the Trip, which constantly she did, Susan felt sick. When she thought of Wizz she felt sick.

The flat throbbed with induced nausea.

All that summer break she had been roaming about with Jo, her half-friend from school, a looming, argumentative, ungainly girl who wore glasses. Susan was tired of Jo by now, and anyway, it would only take one long bus-ride to conduct her back in time, to the land before Wizz and America.

When she turned into Constance Street, the aura of its familiarity was sharp, almost surreal. Dazed, Susan gaped at the old houses and the tall dusty trees, so well remembered, the garish off-licence on the corner, the Chinese take-away, the post-office. Here it all was, still intact, the past. But then she came to the wall of the house where she had lived with Anne, and the wall was there but the house was not.

Susan stood in the open gateway, staring up a tarmac drive parked over with cars, to a five-storey modern block of flats. On either side, the other houses rose aloof, entire. Only her own building, hers and Anne’s, had been eradicated. It was like a plot against them, to expunge their image, pretend they had never been, and if they said they had – they lied.

A woman flounced out of the flats. She wore a white suit and a lot of gold jewellery. She unlocked a bright red car, got in, and presently drove out right past Susan, still standing gawping in the widened gap in the wall, where once a gate had been.

Susan walked along the street. She stared up into the burnt green clusters of the chestnut trees. Everything was there, just the same, except for the house where she and Anne had lived.

Turning into Dunkirk Street though, Susan found some trees had been planted along the pavements in wire cages. Someone had white graffitoed over the Dun of Dunkirk and written in above, Capt.

Susan walked, not knowing whether to turn back, to