The Radleys (13 page)

She realizes what she’s doing. She starts running. Out of the changing rooms and through the shop, knocking into a mannequin decorated in a 1980s-style crop top and glitzy crucifixes. It topples over and lands on a clothes rack, making a kind of bridge.

“Sorry,” says Clara breathlessly, but continues on her way out. The security alarm goes off when she runs outside in her tagged clothes, but she can’t go back. She needs the fresh air to dilute her desire.

The sound of feet on concrete hammers in her head. Someone is running after her. She darts down an al ey, past overflowing trash bins, but sees a high red brick wal ahead. A dead end.

The security guard has her cornered. He talks into the radio strapped to his shirt pocket as he walks closer.

“It’s okay, Dave. I’ve got her. It’s just a girl.”

Clara stays with her back against the wal . “I’m sorry,” she says. “I didn’t mean to steal anything. I had a bit of a panic attack, that’s al . I’ve got the money. I can—”

The security guard smiles like she’s told a joke. “Yeah right, love. You can explain al that down at the police station. Not sure they’l believe you, mind.”

He places a heavy hand on her arm. As it presses into her, she stares at a tattoo of a mermaid on his forearm, the blue inked face staring up at her with a kind of forlorn understanding. He starts to pul her toward the street. As they near the end of the al eyway Clara hears the feet of shoppers going by, the tapping getting faster and faster until they seem to be doing a kind of col ective jig.

The hand presses harder and a desperate rage surges through her. She tries to pul away.

“Don’t think so,” says the security guard.

Without thinking, she does her fang trick. “Stay away from me,” she hisses.

He lets go suddenly, as if she is something burning him. He senses she can smel his blood, and fear consumes him. His mouth drops open and he steps backward away from her with his hands pressing down into the air as if soothing a dog.

Clara sees the fear she has created in this grown man and trembles with the terrible knowledge of this power.

Save the Children

Peter’s morning at the clinic is a bit of a blur. The patients come in and the patients leave, and he goes through the motions. As the day wears on, he thinks more and more about that feeling inside him as he soared through the air last night, that fast and weightless joy.

He’s finding it harder to concentrate on what is happening now. Things such as the door opening and Mr. Bamber appearing, only a day after his rectal examination.

“Hel o,” says Peter, hearing his voice from somewhere high above the North Sea. “How are you?”

“Not so good, to be honest,” says the old man, as he sits on the orange plastic chair. “It’s those antibiotics. They’ve been playing havoc with my system.”

He pats his stomach, to indicate which part of his system he’s talking about. Peter checks his notes.

“I see. Wel , normal y amoxicil in has only the mildest of side effects.”

Mr. Bamber whistles a sigh. “They’ve affected my control. It’s not very dignified. When I’ve got to go, I’ve real y got to go. It’s like
The Dam Busters
down there.” The old man fil s out his cheeks and mimics the sound of an exploding dam.

For Peter, this is too much information. He closes his eyes and rubs his temples, soothing a headache that had gone for hours but is now slowly creeping back.

“Wel , okay,” he manages to say. “I’l change your prescription and recommend a lower dose.

Let’s see how that goes.”

Peter scribbles out an il egible prescription and hands it over, and before he knows it there is someone else in the room. And someone after that.

The embarrassed lady with thrush.

The man with the uncontrol able cough.

A woman with flu.

That old chap in the cricket blazer who can no longer get it up.

A mole-covered hypochondriac who has Googled himself into believing he has skin cancer.

Margaret, who worked at the post office before it closed, breathing her halitosis into his face for him to examine (“No, honestly, Margaret, you can hardly notice it.”) By two thirty in the afternoon Peter already wants to leave. It’s Saturday, after al .

Saturday!

Sat-ur-day.

Those three syl ables had once contained such exquisite excitement. As he stares into that giant red drop of blood on his wal , he remembers what Saturdays used to mean, years ago, when he and Wil used to go out to the Stoker Club on Dean Street in Soho, a members’ bar for committed bloodsuckers, then maybe to some meat market in Leicester Square to look at the flesh on offer. Or sometimes, if they’d already been necking on VB, they’d just rise above the city, align their flight paths with the snaking curves of the Thames, then speed away for a wild vampire weekend.

Valencia. Rome. Kiev.

Sometimes they would sing that sil y tune they’d written as teenagers, for their band—The Hemo Goblins. He can’t remember the song though, now. Not quite.

But it was an unthinking, immoral way of living. He had been glad to meet Helen and slow things down a bit. Of course he never knew that he would stop drinking blood completely, fresh or otherwise. Not until Helen became pregnant and told him to get his priorities straight. No, he hadn’t seen that coming. He hadn’t seen this future of headaches and monotony and sitting in a broken swivel chair waiting for the door to open and another hypochondriac to enter the room.

“Come in,” he says wearily, the soft knock having sounded like a hammer.

He doesn’t even bother to look up. He doodles blood drips on his prescription papers until he notices a scent of something he knows, vaguely. He closes his eyes for a moment to savor the aroma, then opens them to see Lorna, ful of health in tight jeans and a floaty top.

If he were a normal man, with a normal hold on his cravings, Lorna would look to him how she actual y looks. Like a mildly attractive thirty-nine-year-old woman with manic, over-madeup eyes.

But for Peter she could have stepped out of the glossy pages of Helen’s Marks and Spencer catalogue. He gets up and kisses her on the cheek, as if at a dinner party.

“Lorna. Hi! You smel nice.”

“Do I?”

“Yes,” he says, trying to concentrate solely on the perfume, which was in fact overapplied.

“Meadowy. Anyway, how are you?”

“Told you I’d make an appointment.”

“Yes. Yes, you did. Take a seat.”

She places herself down in the chair.
Gracefully
, he thinks.
Like a cat. A slinky Burmese cat,
minus the fear.

“Is Clara okay?” she asks, in a sober tone.

“Oh yes, Clara, she’s . . . you know. Young, experimental . . . you know, teenagers.”

She nods, thinking of Toby. “Yeah.”

“So, what was it again?” asks Peter.

He half hopes she has an ailment that might put him off her. Something that would defuse the energy between them. Hemorrhoids or IBS or something. But her symptoms are so ladylike and Victorian they only add to her attractiveness. She tel s him she has been feeling faint, been getting blackouts when she stands up too fast. He thinks, for an egotistical moment, she could be making al this up.

Stil , he tries to be professional.

He wraps the armband from the blood pressure monitor around Lorna’s arm and starts to pump it up. Lorna smiles with flirty confidence at him, while he battles his desire at the sight of her veins.

Thin, beautiful streams of blue amid her peach-colored skin.

It’s no good.

He can’t stop himself.

He is lost now, trapped in the moment. He closes his eyes and sees himself leaning down toward her arm, causing her to giggle.

“What are you doing?” she asks him.

“I have to taste you.”

“Test me?”

She sees his fangs and screams. He sinks his teeth into her upturned forearm and, given the pressure on the veins, blood spurts everywhere. Over Peter’s face, over Lorna, the monitor, the posters.

“Are you al right?”

Her voice breaks the fantasy.

Peter, without any blood on him or anywhere else, blinks the hal ucination away.

Peter, without any blood on him or anywhere else, blinks the hal ucination away.

“Yes, I’m fine.”

He takes the pressure reading, undoes the strap, and tries to be serious.

“Everything’s normal,” he says, straining not to look at her or inhale through his nose. “I’m sure it’s nothing serious. It’s probably just that your iron levels are a little low. Stil , it’s better to be on the safe side, so I’l put you down for some blood tests.”

Lorna winces. “I’m such a girl about injections.”

Peter clears his throat. “You’l need to see Elaine at reception.”

Lorna is about to open the door but obviously wants to say something. She has a nervously mischievous look on her face Peter loves and fears simultaneously.

“They have jazz evenings,” she says, eventual y. To Peter, her voice is as smooth and inviting as the stil surface of a lake. “At the Fox and Crown out near Farley. Live music. Mondays, I think. I thought we could go. Mark is down in London on Monday, gets back late. So I thought, I don’t know, we could go.”

He hesitates, remembers her foot pressing down on his last night. Remembers the taste of blood, shortly after, washing away his guilt. Feels the frustration of al those unreturned “I love you’s” he has sent to his wife over the years. It takes every bit of strength he has inside him to softly shake his head. “It’s . . .”

She chews on her bottom lip, nods, then her mouth widens slowly, like the wings of an injured bird, into a kind of smile. “Okay. Bye, Peter,” she says, unwil ing to wait for the ful rejection.

And the door closes and regret drowns out his relief. “Bye, Lorna. Yeah, good-bye.”

A
message to the converted: NEVER GAIN CONTACT WITH YOUR

CONVERTOR. The emotions you feel toward the individual whose blood caused
such a profound change in your nature will always be difficult to ignore. But to see
this individual in person may provoke an avalanche of emotion from which you
might never be able to recover.

The Abstainer’s Handbook
(second edition), p. 133

The Oarless Boat

One of the wel-known consequences of excessive blood drinking is that it has a profound effect on your dreams. General y, this effect is good and the average practicing vampire enjoys lush and pleasure-fil ed sleep movies, brimming with luscious nudes and exotic details which change from dream to dream, and Wil Radley used to be no exception. His dreams would conjure the richest details of places he had visited—and he had visited
everywhere
(if only at night)—and add a few more from the outer reaches of his imagination. Recently though, he has been having nightmares, or rather the
same
nightmare, over and over, the location or events only changing in the minutest detail.

He is having it right now, this Saturday.

Here is how it goes.

He is in a rowboat, with no oars, floating on a lake of blood.

There is a rocky shore, al around, and there is a beautiful woman, standing barefoot on the rocks, beckoning him.

He wants to join her, but he knows he can’t swim, so he uses his hands as oars, splashing through the blood, until he hits something.

A head rises up. A woman with her eyes rol ed back and mouth open emerges out of the red water.

Today, this woman is Julie, the checkout girl from last night.

He sits back in the oarless boat as other dead faces emerge, al white-eyed and wide-mouthed, with fatal y wounded necks below them. They are al the men and women he has kil ed.

Hundreds of heads—speed-daters, Croatian waitresses, a French exchange student, hangers-on from the Stoker Club and the Black Narcissus, Siberian goatherds, swan-necked Italians, infinite Russians and Ukrainians—bobbing like buoys in the blood.

The woman on the shore is stil there, though, stil wanting him to come to her. Only now he sees who it is. It is Helen, seventeen years ago, and now he knows this, he wants to be with her more than ever.

A wet noise.

Someone swimming in the blood. And then someone else, splashing in a desperate front crawl.

It is the bodies. It is the dead, coming for him.

Julie is the closest. He sees her dead eyes rol forward and her arm reach out of the lake as she grasps onto the boat.

Then, as she pul s herself on board, he hears something else. Someone is under the boat, knocking on the wood, trying to break through.

He looks to Helen, on the shore. She is gone. In her place is Alison Glenny—the smug, crop-haired deputy commissioner who runs the police’s countervampirism operations. She nods, as if everything is going according to plan.

The bodies are al around, joining Julie as their arms reach out of the blood and onto the boat and the knocking gets louder and louder. The arms are about to reach him, but he closes his eyes, then opens them, and he is in his camper van, with the blackout blinds pul ed down.