The Radleys (21 page)

How their parents always went that extra mile to make their infancy special, like the time they brought a freshly kil ed department store Santa Claus home for their midnight Christmas feast.

And then they talk a bit about the darker years, in that modern house in suburban Surrey, throwing stones at their abstaining foster father as he watered the tomatoes in his greenhouse, and biting into the terrified guinea pigs they’d foolishly been given as pets.

They talk about the flights to London to watch vampire punk bands.

“Remember the night we went to Berlin?” asks Wil . “Do you remember that?”

Peter nods. They had gone to watch Iggy Pop and David Bowie play a joint set at the Autobahn nightclub. He had been the youngest there by miles. “Nineteen seventy-seven,” he says. “Great year.”

They laugh as they talk about the 1980s vampire porn they used to watch.

“
Vein Man
,” says Peter. “I remember that one. About the autistic vampire who memorized everyone’s blood group.”

“Yeah, and what were the others?”

“
Beverly Hills Vampire.
”

“
My Left Fang.
That was seriously misjudged.”

“
Ferris Bueller’s Night Off
was a fun one,” says Peter with a smile.

Realizing this could be the moment, Wil gestures to the bottle of vampire blood. “Old times’

sake? Forget the merlot.”

“Wil , I don’t think so.”

Maybe if he explained. “It’s not like it used to be, Pete. You can get VB anywhere. There’s a place in Manchester, actual y. A nightclub. The Black Narcissus. Went there last night. Bit gothy for me, to be honest, but it’s stil going. And the police don’t touch it because it’s run by the Sheridan Society. Twenty quid a bottle from the cloakroom attendant. Finest you can taste.”

Peter considers this, and Wil notes the wrenching strain on his face, as though he were pul ing a rope in an internal tug-of-war. Eventual y, Peter shakes his head. “I better go to bed.”

Bloodless Excuse for a Marriage

But once in his bed, Peter can’t stop thinking about it.

Accessible, guilt-free blood drinking.

You didn’t have to be unfaithful, or steal, or kil someone to get a fix. You just went to a place in Manchester and bought it and drank it, and you could be happy again, if happy is the word.

Things had changed so much since his day. Things seemed so much easier now. With that society Wil was talking about and its list of names the police couldn’t touch.

Peter lies there thinking this and wondering how Helen can read with al this going on around her. Okay, so she hasn’t actual y turned the page since she got into bed, so it’s unlikely she’s
actually
reading, but stil , she’s sitting up with whatever pale-blooded dirge she’s got to get through for next week’s book group meeting and
trying
to read. It just about amounts to the same thing.

He looks at Helen’s book. A tasteful historical novel,
When the Last Sparrow Sings
. The title means nothing to Peter. He has never heard a bird sing in his life.

Why, he wonders, is it so important to her? To carry on as if nothing had happened? To bother with a Sunday roast, the book group, putting things in recycling bins, having sit-down breakfasts and percolated coffee. How does she do these things when the stress is buzzing around her like electricity around a pylon?

To paper over the cracks, yes, but with cracks this wide, what is the point of bothering? It is a mystery to him. Just as it is a mystery why she has backtracked on the Wil situation. “He’s staying til tomorrow.” Why? It makes him bubble with anger, but he doesn’t know precisely what the anger is about, or why things are getting to him so much.

He decides to let some of his issues out, to air them in the bedroom, but it is a mistake.

“A nightclub?” Helen places the book down on the bed. “A
nightclub
?”

He feels exposed, and a little bit pathetic, but it is also a release, to talk so openly with his wife.

“Yeah,” he goes on, as cautiously as he can manage. “Wil says you can get it from the cloakroom attendant. I thought it might help, you know,
us
.”

Oh no,
he thinks.
I’ve gone too far.

Her jaw clenches.

Her nostrils flare.

“What do you mean
help
? Help
what
?”

No going back now. “Us. Me and you.”

“There’s nothing wrong with us.”

He wonders if she’s real y being serious. “Oh, and in which universe is that true?”

Helen puts the sparrow book down, shifts lower in the bed, lands her head on the pil ow, and switches off the light. He can sense the tension like static in the darkness.

“Look,” she says, in her stop-this-nonsense-immediately voice. “I’m not going to stay up discussing your midlife crisis.
Nightclubs!
”

“Wel , the least we could do is taste each other’s blood once in a while. When was the last time we did that? Tuscany? The Dordogne? That Christmas we went to your mum’s? I mean, which
century
?”

His heart is racing and he is surprised at how angry he sounds. As always in a row, he is doing himself no favors.

“Tasting blood!” scowls Helen, tugging the duvet sharply. “Is that al you ever think about?”

“Yes! Pretty much!” He has responded too quickly, and he is forced to face the truth of what he’s just said. A truth that he echoes again, sadly. “Yes. It is.”

Helen doesn’t want to fight with Peter.

She hasn’t the energy, for one thing. And she can imagine her children in their beds, listening to every word. And Wil . If he is stil outside on the patio, he can probably hear too, and is no doubt loving every second.

She urges her husband to be quiet, but she doesn’t think he’s even heard. Either way, his rant continues and so does her own anger, which—like everything else that’s happened during this cursed weekend—she seems to have no control over.

So she just lies there, cross with herself as much as Peter, as he carries on tipping table salt into the open wound that is their marriage.

“I don’t get it,” he is saying now. “I mean, what’s the point? We don’t taste each other’s blood. It used to be fun.
You
used to be fun. But now we don’t do anything together other than go to the theater and see plays that never end. But it’s us, Helen! We’re the bloody play.”

She can’t respond except to mention the pain pulsing around her head. This only seems to act as a prompt for another aggressive diatribe from her husband.

“Headache!” he says, broadcasting at ful volume. “Wel , you know what, so do I. We’ve al got headaches. And nausea. And lethargy. And aching, aging bones. And a total inability to see the point of getting up in the morning. And the only medicine which would make it al better we’re not al owed to take.”

“Wel , take it,” she snaps. “Take it! Go off with your brother and live in his bloody camper van.

And take Lorna with you!”

“Lorna? Lorna Felt? What’s she got to do with anything?”

Helen is unconvinced by his mock surprise but manages to lower her volume. “Oh Peter, come on, you flirt with her. It’s embarrassing watching you.”

She compiles a mental list, quickly, in case he wants examples.

Friday, at the meal.

In the queue at the deli.

Every single parents’ evening.

The barbecue last summer.

“Helen, you’re just being ridiculous. Lorna!” Then comes the inevitable dig. “And what would you care anyway?”

She hears the creak of a floorboard, somewhere else in the house. Some moments later, her son’s familiar footsteps are going by on the landing.

“It’s late, Peter,” she whispers. “Let’s just go to sleep.”

He is in ful rant mode now though. And she doesn’t think he’s even heard her. He just keeps on and on, making sure everyone inside the house can hear every syl able.

“I mean, real y,” he says, “if we’re like this, what’s the point of being together? Think about it. The kids wil go off to university and it wil just be us, trapped in this bloodless excuse for a marriage.”

She doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry. If she started either she knows that she would never stop.

Trapped
?

Is that what he just said
?

“You real y don’t have a clue, Peter. You real y don’t!”

And in the smal dark cavern she has made with her duvet, her uncontrol able self yearns deeply for that feeling she had years ago, when she had forgotten about al the problems in her life—work, the despairing visits to her dying father, and a wedding she didn’t know she wanted. By creating a new problem, an even bigger one, in the back of a bloody camper van. It hadn’t felt like a problem, though, at the time. It had felt like love, and it was a love in such excess she could almost bathe in it and wash away everything else, to step out into the pure comforting darkness and exist as freely as in a dream.

And the worst thing is she knows the dream is sitting there, outside on the patio, drinking blood and waiting for her to change her mind.

“Oh, don’t I?” Peter is saying, somewhere above the duvet. “Oh,
don’t
I? Is this another competition you win? The ‘feeling trapped’ competition?”

She surfaces again. “Just stop being such a child.” She is aware of the irony as she says this, aware she is as much a child as he is, real y, and she knows being an adult can never come natural y for them. It wil always be an act, a suit of armor over their craving infant souls.

“For fuck’s sake,” Peter says slowly. “I am just trying to be myself. Is there any crime in that?”

“Yes. Lots.”

He makes a kind of braying noise. “Wel , how can I be expected to live my whole life not being me?”

“I don’t know,” she says truthful y. “I real y don’t.”

Millennia

As Lorna Felt feels the rough bristle of her husband’s face against her inner thigh, she wonders just what precisely has gotten into him.

Here they are, beneath the pinks and yel ows of the tantric diagram of a right foot and its symbols of enlightenment.

The little conch and the lotus.

Here they are, naked in bed, and Lorna is enjoying Mark licking and kissing and nibbling her like he has never licked or kissed or nibbled anything.

She has to keep her eyes open in order to make sure this
is
the same man whose pil ow talk normal y centers around his tenants’ overdue rent.

He rises above her. They kiss brutal and primal kisses, the way people probably kissed mil ennia ago, before names and clothes and deodorant were invented.

She feels suddenly so wanted, craved, as the warm, sugary pleasure rises with each beat of him. And she holds on to it—and on to him—with a kind of desperation, her fingers pressing into his back, clinging to his salted skin as to a rock in savage waters.

She whispers his name, over and over, as he whispers hers. Then words end altogether and she wraps her legs around him, and they stop being “Mark” and “Lorna” or “the Felts” and become something as pure and infinite as the night itself.

Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know

Dehydration is one of Rowan’s major symptoms and he is suffering it now, despite having drunk a ful carton of apple and elderflower juice before coming to bed. His mouth is dry. His throat is sticky. His tongue is a piece of rough clay. And he is finding it awkward to swal ow.

When his parents started to argue, he sat up and sank what remained of the Night Nurse, but it didn’t quench his thirst any more than it helped him sleep. So he is downstairs in the kitchen, pouring himself some water from the filter jug.

From the hal way he notices the patio doors are open, and he finds himself heading outside in his dressing gown. It is a mild night, and he doesn’t fancy going back upstairs just yet, not while his parents are stil going at each other. He wants to talk to someone, take his mind off things, even if that someone is Wil .

“So, what do you do?” Rowan asks, when the conversation is up and running. “I mean, do you have a job?”

“I’m a professor. Romantic literature. The vampire poets, mainly. Although I had to touch on Wordsworth too.”

Rowan nods, impressed. “Which university?”

“I’ve worked al over. Cambridge. London. Edinburgh. Done bits and pieces abroad. Spent a year at the uni in Valencia. Ended up in Manchester, eventual y. It’s safe. For vampires. It’s got a kind of support network.”

“So, are you stil there?”

Wil shakes his head. A sadness glazes his eyes. “Began mixing work and pleasure, eventual y crossing a line with a student. A post-grad. She was married. Tess, she was cal ed. It went a bit too far. And although the university never found out the truth, I decided to give it up two years ago. I spent a month in Siberia getting my head straight.”

“Siberia?”

“The December Festival. It’s this big arts and blood-drinking event.”

“Right.”

They stare out at the dul pond water, as the angry voices continue above them. Wil gestures to the sky, as if the dispute they are hearing is between distant gods.

“Do they always do that? Or is it especial y for me?”

Rowan tel s him it’s quite rare. “They normal y keep it in.”

“Ah, marriage.” He lets the word linger for a while and savors a mouthful of his drink. “You know what they say: if love is wine, marriage is vinegar. Wel , I say it. Not that I’m a great wine fan either.” He studies Rowan. “So, do you have a girlfriend?”

Rowan thinks of Eve and can’t hide the pain from his voice. “No.”

“That’s a crime.”

Rowan sips his water, before revealing the embarrassing truth. “Girls don’t like me, real y. I’m pretty much off the radar at school. I’m the pale, tired boy who gets skin rashes.”

He remembers what people told him at school, about how he mumbles Eve’s name when he fal s asleep in class, and winces inwardly.