The Radleys (6 page)

He smiles. “It’s al right. I know you like me.”

She can’t be dealing with this. She doesn’t seem to have her usual supply of polite and useful excuses at hand to help her deal with him. Instead, she can do nothing except walk on.

But Harper somehow gets in front of her, plants himself in her path, and smiles as if they are sharing a joke. A joke that could get crude, or ugly. He walks backward as she walks forward, staying in front of her when she needs more than anything for no one to be there. No one except her mum and dad.

And he looks suddenly dangerous, his drunken face revealing its potential for human evil. She wonders if this is how dogs and monkeys feel in the laboratory when they suddenly realize the scientists aren’t there to be nice to them.

“Please,” she manages, “just leave me alone.”

He is cross at this, as if she is deliberately trying to hurt him. “I know you fancy me. Just stop pretending.”

Pretending.

The word swirls in her mind, becomes a meaningless sound. She is sure she can detect the earth spinning around on its axis.

She tries to focus.

There is an empty road at the end of the field.

A road that leads to Bishopthorpe.

To her parents.

To home.

And away from him.

She must cal them. She must, she must, she must . . .

“Fuckin’ ’el !”

She has thrown up on his shoes.

“They’re new!” he says.

She wipes her mouth, feeling slightly more normal.

“Sorry,” she says. She is now able to realize how vulnerable she is, this far from the party and not close enough to the road.

She walks past him with a new urgency, keeps heading down the sloping ground toward the road. But stil he fol ows her.

“It’s al right though. I forgive you.”

She ignores him and starts to dial her parents’ number, but in her nervousness she gets it wrong and goes into her settings instead of her contacts.

He catches up. “I said it’s al right.” His voice has changed. He’s sounding angry, even when he dresses the words with a laugh.

“I’m il . Just leave me.”

She clicks on address book. It’s there, the number, glowing at her from the screen with comforting accuracy. She presses dial.

“I’l make you better. Come on, I know you like me.”

She has the phone to her ear. It starts to ring. They wil be eating. They won’t be near the phone.

Clara prays on each mechanical bleat that her parents wil pick up. But three or four rings in and the mobile is out of her hands. He has grabbed it roughly from her. He is switching it off.

She can sense, even though she is very il , that the joke is becoming darker. She is a girl, and he is a boy twice her size who could do anything to her. Three miles away, she thinks, her mum and dad are having a friendly conversation with the Felts over dinner. Three miles have never felt so far.

“What are you doing?”

She watches her mobile slide into his jeans pocket.

“I’ve got your phone. Samsung piece of shit.” He is a child. He is a three-year-old blown up into a monster.

“Please, give it to me. I need to cal my mum.”

“Come and get it.”

“Please, just give it back.”

He comes closer. Puts his arm around her. She tries to resist, but he is using more strength, tightening his grip. She catches the alcohol on his breath.

“I know you fancy me,” he says. “Eve told Toby you fancy me.”

Clara’s heart trips and speeds toward panic. “Please,” she says, one last time.

“Shit, what’s the matter? You’re the one who was sick on me. You’re as weird as your brother.”

He tries to kiss her. She turns her head away.

His voice comes at her, hard as stone. “What, you think you’re too good for me? You’re not too good for me.”

She shouts for help now, with his arm across her, his hand pressing onto the body he wants to enjoy.

“Help!” she shouts again, her head turning toward the way she came. The words only reach cows, who are watching her with a fear she shares. Harper too is now in a panic. She can see it on his face, his desperate smile and frightened eyes. Unable to work out a better solution, he places his hand over her mouth. Her eyes scan the road. No cars. No sign of anyone. She screams through his hand, but only a desperate muffle escapes. The sound causes him to press harder, hurting her jaw.

He presses at the back of her legs, behind her knees, and pul s her down to the ground.

“You’re not better than me,” he says, his hand stil suppressing her screams. “I’m going to show you.” Al his weight is on her as his hand goes for the top button of her jeans.

It’s at this point her fear starts to harden into anger. She punches at his back, pul s at his hair, bites into his palm.

She tastes his blood and bites harder.

“Aagh! You bitch! Aagh!”

Something changes.

Her mind sharpens.

Suddenly there is no fear at al .

No sickness.

No weakness.

Just the blood, the beautiful taste of human blood.

A thirst she never knew she had is being quenched, and she experiences the relief of dry land absorbing the first drops of rain. She loses herself to it, the taste, and is unaware of his scream as he yanks his hand away. There is something black and shining on his hand. A large gaping flesh wound where his palm should be, with little pipes of bone left intact. He looks at her with complete terror and she doesn’t question why. There isn’t a single question in her.

She lashes out in wild, uncontrol able rage and with sudden strength she pushes him, slams him into the ground to keep that taste alive.

His stifled scream eventual y fades, along with the unearthly pain she has given him, and she is left with nothing but the singular and intense pleasure of his blood. It floods into her, drowning the weak girl she thought she was and lifting someone new—her strong and true self—to the surface.

She is, in this moment, more powerful than a thousand warriors. The world suddenly holds no fear, as her body holds no pain and no nausea.

She stays lost in this moment. Feels the intensity of this present, free from past and future, and keeps feeding under the comfort of a dark and starless sky.

The Blood, the Blood

Helen gets up to answer the phone, but it stops ringing before she is even out of the dining room.
That’s odd
, she thinks, and has a vague sense that something is wrong. She turns back to their guests, to see Mark Felt’s spoon carrying a substantial quantity of summer pudding into his mouth.

“Delicious, Helen. You should give Lorna the recipe.”

Lorna throws him a glance, clearly aware this is a dig at her. Her mouth opens and closes, and then opens again, but she doesn’t say anything.

“Wel ,” says Helen diplomatical y, “I think I overdid it with the red currants. I probably should have just got something ready-made from Waitrose.”

They hear Rowan’s music filtering from upstairs, a morose suicide note over guitars, a song Peter and Helen last heard years ago in London on their first date. Helen can just about make out the lyric “I want to drown in the flood of your sweet red blood” and smiles without meaning to, remembering how much fun she’d had that night.

“I’ve been wanting to see you, actual y,” purrs Lorna.

“Oh?” asks Peter.

Lorna’s eyes stay on him. “In a professional capacity, I mean. You know, make an appointment about something.”

“An appointment with an old-fashioned GP?” says Peter now. “Bit conventional for a reflexologist, isn’t it?”

Lorna smiles. “Wel , you’ve got to cover al bases, haven’t you?”

“Yes, I suppose you—”

Before Peter finishes, the phone rings for a second time.

“
Again?
” Helen says. She pul s back her chair and leaves the room.

Out in the hal way she notices the time on the smal clock perched next to the phone. It is five to eleven.

She picks up, hears her daughter’s breath, heavy and hard on the other end of the line.

“Clara?”

It is a while before she hears Clara’s voice, above Vivaldi’s interpretation of “Spring,” which is stil chirping its way out of their stereo. At first her daughter doesn’t seem able to form coherent words, as though she is having to learn to speak again.

“Clara? What is it?”

Then the words final y come, and Helen knows a world is ending.

“It was just the blood. I couldn’t stop. It was the blood, the blood . . .”

Quiet

Rowan has spent the whole evening in his room, working on a poem about Eve but getting nowhere.

The house seems quiet, he realizes. He can’t hear the polite, strained voices of his parents and their guests. He hears something else instead.

An engine, outside. He peeks through his curtains just in time to see his parents’ car speed out of the drive and up Orchard Lane.

Strange.

His parents never drive that fast, and vaguely wondering if the car has been stolen, he puts his top back on—he had taken it off to do three agonizing push-ups—and heads downstairs.

Béla Lugosi

The trees whip by in the dark as Helen drives out of the vilage. She had wanted to drive because she knew Peter would flip out as soon as she told him, but even with him in the passenger seat, she decided to wait until they were out of the vil age. It felt easier that way somehow, away from the houses and lanes of their new life. Now she’s told him the inevitable has happened and he is shouting at her while she tries to concentrate on what she’s doing, fixing her eyes on the empty road ahead.

“Shitting Christ, Helen,” he says. “Does she know?”

“No.”

“Fuck.
Fuck.
So what does she think has happened?”

She breathes deep, tries to detail it as careful y as she can manage. “The boy was being a bit forceful with her, and she attacked him. Bit him. She kept on about the blood. Tasting it. She was hardly making sense.”

“But she didn’t say—”

“No.”

Peter says what she knew he would say, and what she knows she has to agree. “We’ve got to tel her. Both of them. They’ve got to know.”

“I know.”

Peter shakes his head at her and gives her a furious look she tries to ignore. She concentrates on the road, trying to make sure she doesn’t miss the turning. But stil she can’t shut out his voice, yel ing in her ear.

“Seventeen years! And now you know we should have told them. Great.
Great
.” Peter pul s out a mobile from his pocket and starts dialing. He inhales sharply, about to talk, but then he hesitates for a second. Watching him, Helen’s mind starts racing.

Voice mail.

“It’s me,” he says eventual y, leaving a message. “I know it’s been a long time.”
He’s not. He
can’t be.
“But I think we need you. Clara’s in trouble, and we real y can’t deal with this on our own.”

He is. He’s phoning his brother.
“Please, cal us as soon as you get—”

Helen takes her eyes off the road and a hand from the wheel to grab the phone. They nearly swerve into the trees.

“What the hel are you doing?” Helen presses the off button. “You promised never to phone him.”

“Who?”

“You were phoning Wil .”

“Helen, there’s a dead body. We can’t handle this kind of a mess anymore.”

“I’ve brought the spade,” she says, aware of how ridiculous it sounds. “We don’t need your brother.”

They don’t say anything for a few seconds as they reach the turning and carry on.

Will! He phoned Will!

And the real y difficult thing is that she knows, in Peter’s mind, it makes perfect sense. The road narrows and the trees seem a lot closer, leaning in like wild-hatted guests at a midnight wedding.

Or funeral.

“He could fly the body out of there,” Peter says after a while. “He could be here in ten minutes.

He could solve this.”

Helen’s hand grips the wheel with renewed desperation.

“You promised,” she reminds him.

“I know I did,” says Peter, nodding. “We promised lots of things. But that was before our daughter went Béla Lugosi on a boy at some party in the middle of nowhere. I don’t know why you even let her go in the first place.”

“She asked you, but you weren’t listening.”

Peter returns to his theme. “He’s stil practicing. In Manchester. He emailed me last Christmas.”

A jolt runs through Helen. “Emailed? You never told me.”

“Wonder why,” he says, as Helen slows down. Clara’s instructions had been vague, to say the least.

“She could be anywhere down this road,” says Helen.

Peter points out the window. “Look.”

Helen sees a fire in one of the fields, and distant figures. She can’t be that far away now. Helen silently prays that no one else has gone to search for Clara yet, or for the boy.

“If you’re not going to let me get him involved, I’l do it myself,” says Peter. “I’l fly the body out of there.”

She dismisses the idea. “Don’t be ridiculous. And anyway, you couldn’t. Not anymore. It’s been seventeen years.”

“I could if I tasted the blood. I wouldn’t need much.”

Helen looks at her husband, incredulous.

“I’m just thinking of Clara,” he says, keeping an eye on the roadside. “You remember what it’s like. What happens. She wouldn’t be looking at prison. They’d—”

“No,” says Helen firmly. “
No
. We take the body. We bury it. We’l go to the moors and we’l bury it. The human way.”

“The human way!” He is almost laughing at her. “Jesus!”

“Peter, we’ve got to stay strong. ‘We are civilized, and civilization only works if instincts are suppressed.’ Remember the Handbook, Peter.”

He thinks. “Okay, okay. You’re right. But before we do this, I want to know something.”

“What?” she asks. Even on a night like this—
especially
on a night like this—Helen can’t help but fear such a statement.