Cruel Pink by Tanith Lee

Author:Tanith Lee [LEE, TANITH]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction
ISBN: 9781473206229
Publisher: Orion Publishing Group
Published: 2015-12-30T16:00:00+00:00

61

As I’ve mentioned, I had a guardian after my father’s sudden death. He was no relative. Someone appointed by a court, I imagine.

His subsequent horror and bemusement were spectacular. And next I was cast in a new mould very strange to me, and I had to visit an endless (it seemed) stream—no, a river—of people who’d ‘wanted to help me’.

I recall less my confusion and disbelief, which soon enough transmuted into a complete amazement, than the dreadful interviews I had to undergo.

In awful over-bright little rooms, or more awful darker ones, smells of damp or nail varnish-scented new paint, window-frames full of cloistered courtyards beyond. Everyone was determined to assist me.

At almost fourteen, I realised fairly swiftly what they were on about. And after that I learned to speak and then to listen, and so to seem to come to an enlightenment which, frankly, I never felt, and do not feel now. Not even now do I fully, I think, grasp what all the fuss was about.

Most of all I came to see that after each interview, all rather, in their intense ways, resembling the debriefing of a prisoner of war, (or, sometimes, his harsh interrogation), I felt much, much better. I myself was aware this was solely because said interview was finished. I was free for the rest of the day or, as things ‘improved’, the week, the month, the year. And my knowledge of the liberation to come made me tell them all how much better I felt. Although, wisely, I never expanded to explain it was the escapes from my ‘helpers’ that lightened my heart.

In that way, rather rapidly perhaps, given the situation, I progressed out of their remit.

At least, by then, I knew what was, and what was not. What I was—and was not.

Did I ever blame my parents? My sister? I think I never blamed them, and I know I don’t blame them now. Did they destroy my life? I doubt it. It was life itself that destroyed their lives. Smashing them like special whisky bottles in trains and planes, while I, little bastard, lived on.

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