The Radleys (32 page)

“That health authority thing I told you about.”

“Oh yes,” she had said, after a bit of a delay. “Of course.”

“I’l be back about ten, hopeful y.”

She said nothing to that, and he had almost been disappointed by her lack of suspicion.

“Love you,” he said guiltily.

“Yes. Bye.”

The “love you” had, as always, gone unreturned.

But she had been besotted with him once. They had been so in love that they had turned Clapham, back in its pregentrified days, into the most romantic place on earth. Those drab, rainy South London streets had hummed quietly with love. They’d never needed a Venice or a Paris.

But something happened. She had lost something. Peter knew that, but didn’t know how to bring it back.

A car turns into the pub car park, with another couple inside. He thinks he recognizes the woman as someone Helen knows. Jessica Gutheridge, the card designer. And he’s sure she goes to Helen’s book group as wel . He’s never met her before. Helen had pointed her out once at a Christmas market in York ages ago. It’s very unlikely that she would recognize him, but it is another worry and makes the evening more risky than it would otherwise be. He sinks down slightly in his seat as the Gutheridges step out of their car. They don’t turn in his direction as they head toward the pub.

Farley is too close, Peter muses. They’d have been better picking somewhere further away.

He feels sick with it al . The giddy happiness he had felt, drinking Lorna, has now vanished completely. Al he is left with is temptation itself, devoid of its shiny wrapping.

The trouble is, he
does love
Helen. He always has. And if he felt she loved him back, he wouldn’t be here, blood or no blood.

But she doesn’t love him. And so he is going to go in there and talk to Lorna and they wil laugh and listen to the terrible music and after a couple of drinks they wil wonder if it is leading anywhere. And there is a sincere possibility that it wil and one night soon, maybe even tonight, they wil be fumbling like teenagers in this car or a Travelodge or maybe even at number nineteen and he wil be faced with the prospect of her nakedness.

The thought panics him. He reaches in the dashboard for
The Abstainer’s Handbook
, which he’d retrieved from Rowan’s room, without asking.

He finds the chapter he’s looking for: “Sex without Blood: It’s What’s on the Outside That Counts.” He reads about breathing technique, skin focusing, and various blood-canceling methods. “If you feel the changes begin to occur while you are engaged in foreplay or the act of copulation, close your eyes and make sure you breathe through your mouth instead of your nose, thereby limiting sensory and imaginative stimulus . . . If al else fails, withdraw from the act entirely, and say out loud the abstainer’s mantra, which was discussed in the previous chapter: ‘I am

[YOUR NAME‘ and I am in control of my instincts.’ ”

Again he stares at the road. Another car pul s in and then, a minute or two later, a bus goes by.

He is sure he sees his son’s forlorn face staring out through the glass. Had Rowan seen
him
? He looked terrible. Did he know something? The thought scares him and a shift takes place inside him. Fluid pleasure becomes solid duty. He starts the engine and heads home.

“I am Peter Radley,” he mumbles wearily. “And I am in control of my instincts.”

Thirsk

Rowan and Eve are at the cinema in Thirsk, seven miles from home. Rowan has the bottle of blood inside his bag. He hasn’t drunk any yet though. He was going to at the bus stop, after seeing more graffiti about himself: ROWAN RADLEY IS A FREAK. (As with the same sentiment on the boarded-up post office, this was in Toby’s handwriting, although he had taken more time on this one, going for 3-D cubic letters). But then Eve had arrived and the bus came to take them here.

He just has to sit stil , knowing who his father is, and with al his mother’s lies inside him.

The film they are watching makes no sense to him. He is happy watching Eve, her skin glowing yel ow and orange and red as wild explosions bloom across the screen.

As he watches her, the revelation of his mother’s letter begins to fade, and there is nothing but the sight and scent of Eve. He stares at the column of dark shadow along the tendon in her neck and imagines the taste of what flows beneath.

He leans in closer and closer. His teeth change as he closes his eyes and gets ready to sink into her flesh. She sees him move toward her, and she smiles, even tilts the bucket of popcorn toward him.

“I’m al right,” he says, covering his mouth.

He stands up, makes to leave.

“Rowan?”

“I need the toilet,” he says, rushing past the empty seats in their row.

Right now, he knows he should never see her again. He was so close there, so out of control.

I am a monster. A monster fathered by a monster.

He needs to satisfy this intense thirst inside him.

Once inside the gents’ toilets, Rowan pul s the bottle from his bag and yanks out the cork.

Instantly, the scent of stale urine disappears and he is lost in pure pleasure.

The aroma seems both intensely exotic and deeply familiar, although he can’t think how he knows it. He glugs back. Closing his eyes, he appreciates the ecstasy of the taste. Every wonder in the world is on his tongue. But that weird familiarity is there too, as if he is returning to a home he’s forgotten existed.

Only when he breaks off for air and to wipe his mouth does he look properly at the label. Instead of a name Wil has written THE ETERNAL—1992.

Slowly, it dawns on him.

The Eternal.

And the year he was born.

She is in his mouth and in his throat.

The bottle trembles in his hands, an inevitable result of the earthquake of horror and rage taking place inside him.

He hurls the bottle against the wal and blood slides down the ceramic tiles, creating a puddle on the floor. A red puddle that seeps toward him like a protruding tongue.

Before it reaches him, he walks around it, crushing a piece of glass as he heads to the door. In the foyer there is no one but a man behind the box office desk, chewing gum and reading the
Racing Post
.

He notices Rowan with suspicion. He must have heard the smash of the bottle, but he goes back to studying the horse-racing fixtures, or pretending to, slightly wary of the look on Rowan’s face.

Outside on the steps Rowan breathes long and deep. It is a little cold. There is a dryness to the air. There is a total and overwhelming silence that he needs to break, so he screams up to the night sky.

A three-quarter moon is veiled in thin cloud.

Stars flash signals from past mil ennia.

Scream over, he runs down the steps and along the street.

Faster and faster and faster he goes until the run becomes something else and there is no longer hard ground or anything else under his feet.

Atom

I
ce Mutants: The Rebirth III
is not the best film Eve has ever seen. The plot is something about embryos of extraterrestrial life-forms frozen in polar ice caps since the last ice age and now, due to global warming, the embryos are thawing and hatching and turning into deadly underwater aliens wiping out submarines, fishing trawlers, deep-sea divers, and ecowarriors, before being blown to pieces by the US Navy.

But after about twenty minutes it stopped being a story and started being a sequence of more and more extravagant explosions and ridiculous CGI alien octopuses. But it hadn’t real y mattered, because she had been sitting next to Rowan, and she was starting to realize there might be nothing she likes more, actual y, than sitting next to him. Even if it meant watching rubbish like this.

Although, in fairness to Rowan, it was the only film on. Thirsk Palace Cinema isn’t exactly a multiplex, after al . But then Rowan left her and now that she has been sitting on her own here for—

she checks her watch, sees the time in the glow of another exploding boatful of aliens—nearly
half
an hour
, she is starting to wonder where he’s gone.

She puts her carton of popcorn on the floor and goes to have a look. After the momentary self-consciousness of walking past some other young couples and groups of explosion-worshipping geek tragedies, she is out in the foyer.

There’s no sign of him here, or of anyone except a man behind the little box office who doesn’t seem to be paying attention to anything except the newspaper he is reading. She heads over toward the toilets, tucked slightly out of view from the foyer.

She moves close to the door of the gents’.

“Rowan?”

Nothing, but she senses someone is there.

“Rowan?”

She sighs. Maybe she put him off somewhere along the line. And her usual insecurities creep out. Maybe she’d gone on too much about her dad. Maybe it’s the news of that extra couple of pounds the scales broke to her this morning. Maybe it’s halitosis. (She licks her hand, sniffs it, but can’t smel anything but the dul sweet baby scent of spit on skin.) Maybe it’s the Airborne Toxic Event T-shirt she’s wearing. Boys have a tendency to be taste fascists about such things. She remembers that night in Sale when she made the admittedly worse-for-wear Tristan Wood cry—
cry
—by saying she preferred Noah and the Whale to Fal Out Boy.

Maybe she’s overdone it on the makeup. Maybe apple green eye shadow is too much for a Monday. Maybe it’s because she’s a Dickensian pauper whose psychotic paranoid garbageman father can’t pay the rent. Or maybe, just maybe, he’d got close enough to sense the melancholy that sits at the core of her, usual y hidden deep behind a superficial mask of cheerful sarcasm.

Or maybe it’s just because she might have been starting to want him back.

Third try. “Rowan?”

She looks down at where the carpet meets the door.

It is a hideous carpet, old and trampled, with the kind of busy bingo hal pattern you can’t stare at for too long without losing your balance. It’s not the pattern that troubles her, though. It’s the dark wetness slowly creeping into it, from beyond the door. A wetness, which, she slowly realizes, could very wel be blood.

She pushes the door open slowly, her mind preparing herself for the worst. Rowan lying col apsed in a pool of blood on the floor.

“Rowan? You in there?”

Before the door is ful y open, she registers the pool of blood, but it is not how she imagined.

There are pieces of broken glass, like from a wine bottle, but this is too thick for wine.

A sense of someone.

A shadow.

Something moving. Something too fast to make sense of, and then, before she knows what it is, a hand is on her arm pul ing her into the toilets with limitless strength.

The shock forces the air from her lungs and it takes her a moment or two to gather the capacity or awareness necessary to scream. In that time, she sees the man’s face but real y can’t take in anything except his teeth, which aren’t like teeth at al .

And in that second of being dragged toward him, there is only one horrendous thought bobbing on top of her panic.
My dad was right
.

The scream arrives, far too late.

He has his arm gripped hard around her now, and she knows those teeth that aren’t teeth are getting closer. She fights and struggles with every bit of useless strength she has, kicking back at his shins, her hands clawing at the face she can’t see, her body wriggling like a desperate fish on a hook.

“Got pluck.” His breath in her ear. “Just like your mother.”

She screams again, looking in desperation at the empty, open-door cubicles. She feels him on her skin, piercing her neck, and fights with every single atom of her being in order not to share the fate of her mother.

Pity

It had taken Wil wel under a minute to fly from Bishopthorpe to Thirsk, and the cinema hadn’t been hard to find in such a smal and lifeless place.

He’d landed on the top step and walked inside, expecting to head straight for the auditorium.

But in the foyer he had caught Helen’s blood scent on the air and fol owed it to the toilets.

Once there, he’d seen his worst nightmare. The whole and perfect dream of that night in 1992, the sweetest and purest of his entire life, smashed and leaking away on a dirty toilet floor. It had been too much. He’d stood there for a while, staring at the little fins of broken glass rising out of Helen’s blood, trying to absorb the sight.

And then the girl came in. The Copeland girl. Looking how her mother might once have, and with that same type of fear in her eyes.

He’d grabbed her because there was no reason left not to grab her. And now, right now, as he bites into her, he keeps on staring at the blood on the floor, before closing his eyes.

He is swimming in that lake of blood, without even a boat this time. Just swimming underwater.

Underblood.

But as he keeps sucking the life out of her, he has that terrible realization again. The one he had last night, with Isobel at the Black Narcissus.

It isn’t enough.

It isn’t even nearly enough.

And it isn’t enough because it isn’t Helen.

What’s even more troubling is that Eve tastes almost exactly like her mother, and when he tasted Tess, he had enjoyed himself very much without even a thought of the woman he is thinking about now.

No.

I don’t like this taste.

I don’t like any taste but Helen.

And as this truth becomes clearer in his head, the blood that slides down his throat is becoming more and more repulsive. He pictures himself swimming up to the surface of the lake, gasping for air.

And he has let go of Eve, he realizes, before she is even dead.