The Radleys (30 page)

The dog growls.

Charlie the Birdman?

“I suppose so,” says Lorna.

Peter nods and finds to his surprise that he is doing a little mime of someone playing the piano.

“Exactly! Yes! So . . . if you’re stil up for going to the Fox and Crown to see the jazz people, then I’d love to go with you. Real y, I would!’

Lorna hesitates. “Wel , I don’t know,” she says. “Things are . . . better now.”

“Right.”

“With me and Mark.”

“Yes.”

“And Toby’s going through a bit of a bad patch.”

“Real y?”

“I think he’s a bit worried about his friend.”

“Oh,” says Peter, disappointed.

But then comes a change to Lorna’s face. She is thinking about something. Then she smiles a devilish smile. “No, okay. You only live once. Let’s go.”

And almost as soon as she has said this, Peter’s happiness begins to ebb away, and he feels the true guilty terror of temptation.

Shoebox

Rowan is ready to go out.

He has washed, changed out of his school clothes, and put his poem for Eve in his bag. The only thing he is lacking is a fresh bottle of blood. So he takes his bag, puts his wal et in his pocket, checks his hair in the mirror, and heads out onto the landing. He hears someone in the upstairs shower, which is strange for this early on a Monday evening. As he passes the bathroom door he catches his father’s voice above the sound of the spray of the shower. He is singing, in his embarrassingly inadequate voice, a song Rowan doesn’t recognize. “You look so good in your scarlet dress . . .” That’s about as much as Rowan catches before he eyes his sister out on the landing. She nods at him, concerned but a little proud, and then he heads downstairs. He is aware of his mother in the kitchen but doesn’t think to question why she is standing motionless, staring down into the knife drawer.

He has other things on his mind.

Rowan knocks on Wil ’s van but he’s not there. Knowing he’s not in the house, he tries the door.

He climbs into the van, starts hunting for a bottle of vampire blood, but he can’t find any. There is one but it is empty. He lifts up Wil ’s mattress. There is nothing except a few leather-bound journals, which aren’t going to satisfy any thirst. He spots a rol ed-up sleeping bag with an unopened bottle inside and grabs it, but as he picks up the sleeping bag, he slides the lid off a shoebox. The lid fal s back to reveal a phone number. Their phone number.

Inside the box is a bundle of photos wrapped in an elastic band. The first photo is quite an old one of a baby boy, sleeping contentedly on a sheepskin rug.

He knows this baby.

It’s him.

He takes the elastic band off and flicks through the images. His first few years stutter by. He becomes a toddler, then school age.

Why?
The pictures end when he is about five or six.

It’s his birthday.

His face is covered in a rash his mother told him was German measles. Suddenly, he wants to know what these pictures are doing here. The letters might hold more of a clue. He starts to read the one at the top of the pile and recognizes, with a start, his mother’s handwriting.

17 September 1998

Dear Will,

I have no idea how to start this, except to say this will have to be my final letter.

I don’t know if you’ll be upset by this, or if you’ll miss the photos of Rowan, but I truly think
that now he is starting school, it’s time we got on with our lives for his sake, if not our own.

You see, I almost feel normal again. An “unblood,” as we used to say like cynics. Some
mornings when I am actively looking after the children—getting them dressed, changing
Clara’s nappy, rubbing teething gel onto a sore gum, or giving Rowan another dose of
medicine—I can almost forget myself, and forget you, completely.

The truth is, this shouldn’t be too hard for you. You never wanted me, if having me meant
you had to live like a faithful partner and give up the thrill of new blood. And I still remember
the look on your face when I told you I was pregnant. You were horrified. I had scared
someone I never knew could be scared. So in a funny way I might be doing you a favor.

You hate responsibility just as much as I need it. And from now on you won’t even have
to have the responsibility of reading these letters or of looking at his photos. Maybe you
haven’t been getting them at all. Maybe you’ve moved jobs again and these letters are just
sitting in some mailbox at the university.

I hope one day you’ll be able to stop what you are doing and settle down. It would be nice
to think that my son’s father will eventually manage to find some kind of moral center within
himself.

It’s a stupid wish, probably. Rowan is looking more like you day by day, and it scares me.

His temperament is different, though. “Apples don’t fall too far from trees.” I suppose they
do if they land on sloping ground. As his mum I know it’s my job to try and steepen that
slope.

So, good-bye, Will. And make sure you don’t lose that last piece of respect I have for you
by trying to see me, or him. We made a promise and we must stick to it for everyone’s
sakes.

This is like hacking off an arm, but it’s got to be done.

Stay safe. I’ll miss you.

Helen

It is too much to take in. Rowan knows only that he wants to obliterate what he’s just found out, to make it go away, so he lets the letter fal , not caring where it lands, and pul s the bottle of blood out of the sleeping bag and into his rucksack. He staggers out of the van, and heads up Orchard Lane.

Someone is walking toward him. At first he can’t see his face, as it is hidden by the leaves of the drooping laburnum that pour out from number three’s front garden. For a moment he is just a raincoat, jeans, and boots. Rowan knows exactly who it is now, but then he sees his face, his
father’s
face, and his heart doesn’t so much beat as wildly flap, as if someone inside him were trying to knock the dust off a rug.

“Wel , Lord B,” says Wil , his lips curled into a lopsided smile. “How the devil are you?”

Rowan doesn’t respond.

“Real y? That good,” says Wil , but Rowan doesn’t turn back.

Rowan wouldn’t be able to speak even if he wanted to. He clenches the hatred inside him like a coin in a fist and walks on toward the bus stop.

Toward Eve, and the hope of forgetting.

Lazy Garlic

Eve plans to tel her dad she is going out tonight.

What can he do? Drag her into her bedroom and nail planks across the door?

No, she is going to pretend she has her old, prepsychotic father back and act like she’s a seventeen-year-old human being living in a free society. She goes to announce the news in the kitchen, where he is found shoveling spoonfuls of something into his mouth. Only when she gets closer and reads the label on the jar does she realize it is Lazy Garlic and that he is already three-quarters of his way to finishing the whole lot. Maybe he needs to go back to the hospital.

“Dad, that real y is disgusting.”

He retches but takes another mouthful. “I’m going out,” he says, before she has a chance to say the same thing.

“Where are you going? I mean, if you’ve got a date, then I’d probably recommend some mouthwash.”

He doesn’t even seem to realize this is a joke. “Eve, I have to tel you something.”

She doesn’t like the sound of this and wonders what he is about to confess. “What?”

He takes a deep breath. “Your mum isn’t missing.”

At first the words don’t compute. She is so used to tuning out her father’s ramblings. A second later, though, she realizes what he’s said.

“Dad, what are you talking about?”

“She’s not missing, Eve.” He takes hold of her hands. “She’s dead.”

Eve closes her eyes, trying to shut him out. The garlic smel is overwhelming. She pul s her hands away, as she has heard al this before. “Dad, please.”

“I have to tel you the truth, Eve. I saw her. I was there.”

She engages, despite herself. “Saw her?”

He puts the spoon down, and in the voice of a rational adult he speaks. “Look, what I tried to tel you in hospital . . . it wasn’t a rant. She was murdered on the university campus. She was kil ed on the lawn outside the English Department. She was murdered. I saw everything. I was running and screaming but no one was there. I’d gone to pick her up. She’d been working late, you see, in the library. Wel , that’s what she’d told me, so anyway I’d gone to the library to pick her up only she wasn’t there so I looked everywhere until I saw them, across this big ugly piece of water. And I ran through it and I saw him bite her and kil her and take her and—”

“
Bite her?
”

“He wasn’t normal, Eve. He was something else.”

She shakes her head. It’s the same old nightmare. “Dad, this isn’t fair. Please. You shouldn’t be on those tablets.”

He’d told her the vampire story before, but only when he was in hospital. After that it had only slipped out if he had been very drunk. And he’d always undermined himself by denying it al later, thinking he was protecting her.

“She was murdered by her tutor,” he says, carrying on. “And her tutor was a monster. A vampire.

He bit her and took her blood and flew away with her. And he’s here, Eve. He’s come here. To Bishopthorpe. And he might be dead already, but I’ve got to make sure.”

There had been a moment, a few seconds ago, when she half believed him. Now, though, she is deeply hurt that he is actual y trying to mess with her head like this.

He puts his hand on her arm. “You must stay here until I get back. Do you understand me? Stay in the house.”

Eve stares at him, and the fury in her eyes seems to work because he tel s her. “The police.

They’re going to get him now. I spoke to the woman who gave me the sack for speaking the truth.

Alison Glenny. She’s here. I’ve told her everything. You see, I saw him today in the pub. The man who—”

“The
pub
? You went to the pub today? I thought we were broke, Dad.”

She feels no hypocrisy saying this. After al , Rowan has insisted he’l pay for her ticket tonight.

“I haven’t got time for this.” He takes one last mouthful of garlic, then gets his coat. His eyes are manic. “Remember, stay here. Please, Eve. You have to stay in the house.”

He is out the front door before Eve can respond.

She walks into the living room and sits down. On the TV a L’Oreal ad is showing a woman’s face at various ages. Twenty-five. Thirty-five. Forty-five. Fifty-five.

She glances at the photo on top of the TV. Her mother, age thirty-nine, on their last family holiday. Majorca. Three years ago. She wishes her mum were here, aging like she was meant to, not just preserved forever in photographs.

“Can I go out tonight, Mum?” she whispers, imagining the conversation.

Where are you going?

“To the cinema. With a boy at school. He asked me.”

Eve, it’s Monday.

“I know, but I real y like him. And I’l be back by ten. We’l get the bus.”

So what’s he like?

“He’s not my normal type. He’s a good boy. He writes poems. You’d approve.”

Well, okay, love. I hope you have a good time.

“I wil , Mum.”

And if there’s a problem, just call.

“Yeah, I wil .”

Bye, darling.

“I love you.”

I love you too.

Curry Sauce

The smel from the curry sauce is overwhelming Alison Glenny as she sits next to Geoff watching him eat chips dripping with the stuff.

“It’s a good little chippy they’ve got here,” he informs her. And then he offers her the polystyrene tray and the fat, limp chips drowning in monosodium glutamate.

“I’m al right. I’ve eaten, thanks.”

Geoff looks with mild scorn at the little crumpled paper bag on the dashboard, which had contained a gluten-free quiche Alison had bought herself from the deli on the main street about an hour ago.

“So, we’re just supposed to sit here vampire spotting,” Geoff says. “Is that the idea?”

“Yes,” she says. “We sit here.”

Geoff looks frustratedly at the camper van parked opposite number seventeen. “I stil think this is a setup, mind.”

“Wel , I’m not forcing you to stay. Though if you leave and you tel anyone about this, wel , I’ve made it very clear what wil happen.”

Geoff stabs his wooden fork through one of the last remaining chips. “I haven’t seen anything to tel , to be honest, have I, love?” He eats the chip, which flops in half before it’s in his mouth and has t o be retrieved from his lap. “And if he’s not in the van, why aren’t we searching it, getting evidence?”

“We wil .”

“When?”

She sighs, fed up with the endless questions. “When he’s eliminated.”

“Eliminated!” Geoff shakes his head with a chuckle.
“Eliminated!”

A few minutes later, she watches as he gets his phone out and starts to text his wife. “Back late,” Alison reads, checking he’s not giving too much away. “Up 2 neck in pprwrk. Gxx.”

Alison is surprised by the double kiss. He doesn’t seem the type. She thinks of Chris, the man she nearly married ten years ago but who was put off by her continual late nights, her working weekends, and her inability to tel him anything about what went on at her work.

Chris had been a nice guy. A soft-spoken, beta-male history teacher from Middlesbrough who loved hiking and who had made her laugh on a regular-enough basis for her to imagine they had a connection. After al , it had never been particularly easy to make her laugh.

But it hadn’t been love. The giddy, mad love talked about in poems and pop songs was something that she had never real y understood, not even as a teenager. Companionship, though, was something she often craved, someone to be there and make her large house a little bit cozier.