Talulla Rising (20 page)

‘I’m going to go for a walk with the baby,’ I told him. ‘Why don’t you take a nap?’

‘I can’t sleep.’

‘Just try. Have a brandy and put a movie on and take your shoes off and lie down on the bed. Just do that. Just rest.’ I spoke calmly, running my fingers through his hair, thinking of the scar on his foot from where his mother had burned him with the poker. Again I felt the unjustifiable nature of our relationship. And again the obscure entitlement.
Wulf
knows its dues, and will have them. ‘Listen to me,’ I said. ‘I know you wanted to protect me. You think I don’t trust you? You’re the
only
person I trust. Don’t you know that?’

He couldn’t answer. Tenderness upset him, having been so long absent from his life. When it appeared now it was like the return of a glamorous unreliable parent who’d abandoned him umpteen times before. He knew it wouldn’t last.

And it didn’t. With gentle insinuation from my knees and hands I let him know it was time for him to get up. His shoulder pained him when he did.

‘How long will you be gone?’ he asked, quietly.

‘I don’t know. No more than a couple of hours. I’ll call you if it’s going to be more.’

I added Zoë’s last layers, hatted and mittened her, stuffed a couple of diapers in the pocket of her carrier, then snapped her into place against my breasts. ‘This is what Dolly Parton must feel like the whole time,’ I said, straightening my spine against the weight. ‘I’m going to end up a hunchback lugging this critter around.’

26

God knows what I was hoping for. For whatever it was that was stalking me to be sufficiently provoked, I suppose, to stop all the sneaky stuff and walk right up to me and do whatever it was going to do. Not that I was sure I was being stalked. The feeling was more like the one I got close to transformation, that call of the wild that went from innocent to sly to vulgar to raging, the need for moonlight and the ground rolling under me and air streaming over my snout and the sudden exploded stink of a victim...

Whatever I was hoping for, I didn’t get it. Hyde Park was green and wet and littered with red and gold leaves, but empty of supernatural signals. I bought a hot chocolate from the Serpentine Gallery and turned back on myself, northeast, towards Marble Arch. Zoë rested snug against me, stupefied by the world’s soft tumult and shifting odours. The temptation wasn’t a temptation now but a frail revolt, a forlorn rebellion against the hardened heart. Don’t. Don’t. Don’t. But there whether I wanted it or not was my daughter’s lethal particularity, that uniqueness that called up the too-late love that must fall away, atomising into nothingness, the same nothingness my mom saw between morphine doses, the same nothingness that was where I wanted Jake’s ghost to be, the same nothingness everyone glimpsed now and then, and denied. I pulled her hat down to cover her ears, inside still falling away, falling away. Serves you right, Aunt Theresa’s voice said. You had your chance.

I took a cab to Leicester Square. Maybe whatever-the-fuck-it-was hid in crowds. Here
were
the crowds. Humans, woollen-hatted and scarved, raw-nostriled, frowning, jabbering into cellphones, wrapped in their own details. Christmas had already started to show in window displays, glitzy and merciless as Lucifer. The capital’s nerves were shot from the financial meltdown, and Londoners everywhere had the look of trying not to think about how bad things were going to get. I moved among them, struggling to block out regular perception and open myself to its twilight-zone counterpart.

With zero success.

I got nothing. Spent two hours getting nothing. If anything the signal dimmed. What had been a continuous nagging interference faded, sometimes disappeared altogether.

Charing Cross Road. Soho. Piccadilly. Regent Street. Oxford Circus.

Nothing.

My back ached. My left eye watered in the cold. Zoë wanted feeding. She fed every two and a half hours, like clockwork, with a four-hour sleep between one and five a.m. My choice was find a mother-and-baby room in a store or hail a cab and go back to the hotel.

I hailed a cab.

Traffic was slow going west on Oxford Street. I took out the cell to let Cloquet know I was on my way home – then thought better of it: I didn’t want to tie it up and miss a call from Walker. Zoë wriggled and kicked her legs against me – then suddenly went still.

I’d felt it too.

One second of... of
what
? Something like forced intimacy. A lecher’s breath on the neck. Furious tingling in my legs and breasts and scalp. Then it was gone.

‘Please stop here.’

‘You don’t want to go to the Dorchester?’

‘No. Here, please. Stop.’

Back on the sidewalk I turned slowly through 360 degrees. The street was tagged with globalised brands: McDonald’s; Nokia; Subway; the Gap. Light bounced off the flanks of cars. An open-topped bus went by with an enormous diesel yawn, tourists on the exposed top deck, freezing, taking photographs.

Nothing.

All but on tiptoe I walked back the dozen yards it had taken the cabbie to find a space to pull in.

Cold. Colder.

I turned again and walked slowly west. Zoë had her eyes closed against the flaring and subsiding light. She looked like a tiny ancient trying to recall something from long ago.

A little warmer... Warmer...

I stopped opposite Selfridges.

Warmer.

I crossed the road.

Warmer.

Moved towards the one of the doors – GO IN – and went in.

Perfume counters. Prismic, noisy, jammed with scents in migrainy concentration. Bottles like science fiction
objects d’art.
Precisely made-up sales girls with glittering eyes and
chignons
you could see the effort it cost them to keep intact all day. Women and men bent, sniffed, frowned, debated as if the fate of the world was at stake. It made you wonder – the way a gridlocked freeway or heaving Burger King did – why we lived this way. Why humans lived this way, I mean.

The store was hot and lit by too many halogens. I took off Zoë’s cap and mittens. She was quiet and alert. There was nothing to do but keep moving.

Bags. Sunglasses. Jewellery. Menswear: a wall of ties like a paint colour chart. Odours of new leather and serge and talc. Very faintly...
very
faintly, a pull up the escalator.

I was sweating by the time we reached the second floor. Womenswear. The familiar vibe or subsonic murmur of female concentration. Self-assessment, self-doubt, self-loathing, self-cruelty, self-love. The endless argument with shape and size. Some women stood in front of mirrors holding things up in front of themselves and evaluating the result the way a pathologist might a corpse. Others visibly willed themselves different – hips, thighs, belly, breasts – working through the finite range of minute adjustments to posture and facial expression that ought to but never did make any difference.

I moved into the designer section.

Warmer.

Versace. Karen Millen. Armani.

Much
warmer.

Dolce & Gabbana. Diesel.

Hot.

Prada—

I stopped. Zoë tensed against me.

It was in the changing room.

And I knew without doubt, as the full impossible scent hit me, exactly what it was.

My skin was wet and heavy, my head full of blood. I looked down at Zoë’s face. Her black eyes were wide open. Questions massed. I had to ignore them, ignore them and think – think!

‘Madam?’ a woman’s voice said. ‘Madam? Are you all right?’

I was leaning on the edge of the doorway to the dressing room. A young sales assistant with corkscrewy brown hair and hazel eyes too close together had her hands out towards me.

‘Are you not feeling well?’

‘I’m okay,’ I said, my face fat with heat.

‘Let me get you a chair. I’ll be two seconds.’

‘Really, it’s—’

‘I’ll be right back.’

I stood, concussed, skin tingling. Zoë’s scalp was piping hot, her soft hair aloft with static. My legs felt empty. It’s not possible. It’s not possible.

Then the door to one of the cubicles opened – and the werewolf stepped out.

27

It was a girl in her mid-twenties, blonde hair scraped back in a ponytail, lime-green eyes in a catty little face and a small body without an ounce of fat. She wore no make-up but you could see she’d be pop-kitten glamorous if she did. Men, without exception, would go: Yes. Absolutely yes. It was a huge part of her life, men looking at her. It was her aura, that was both a power and an irritant. She was dressed in a white roll-neck sweater, black leggings, oxblood leather knee-boots and matching satchel. She had a black frock coat over her left arm.

For what felt like a long time we stood staring at each other. The air between us pounded with Jake’s first words to me at Heathrow: I know what you are and you know what I am.

‘Here you are, madam, have a sit down for a minute. Can I get you a glass of water?’ The sales assistant had returned with a plastic chair. ‘Any luck?’ she said to the blonde girl.

Neither of us was capable of responding. Now that I knew what
someone walked over my grave
was it seemed it could never have been anything else.

‘Well,’ the sales assistant said (thinking Okay, fuck you both), ‘the seat’s there if you need it. I’ll be back in a moment.’

And even when she’d gone, and the girl and I were alone face to face, time and silence solidified around us. Meanwhile the world quietly rearranged itself like a CGI effect on a planetary scale. Alarming sorority flowed between and through and around us. (
How do we really know there aren’t any others?
I’d asked Jake. He’d said Harley would have known. But Harley was nine months late finding out
I
existed.) Somewhere in the store I’d passed the ad slogan for the latest iPhone:
This changes everything. Again
.

At last I made my mouth move. ‘Who are you?’ I said.

She swallowed. Opened her mouth, closed it. Started again. ‘Who are
you
?’ she said. Her voice surprised me: working-class London, East End I supposed. From the horsey get-up I’d been expecting public-school posh.

‘It’s not “who”, is it?’ I said. ‘It’s
what
.’

‘Fucking hell,’ she said. ‘Fucking
hell
.’

Someone tutted in one of the other cubicles.

‘You’re American,’ she said.

‘Yes.’

‘Who did it to you?’

‘Maybe we should—’

A cubicle door opened and a heavy woman in a quilted overcoat stepped out between us, arms laden with items. Her face was flushed. She wasn’t the tutter. She was deep in her own schemes and anxieties. I had to stand aside to let her by. When she’d gone I half-expected the girl to have disappeared. Except the ether remained dense with her scent. So different from Jake’s. Breathing it caused a pile-up of feelings: excitement, familiarity, claustrophobia, arousal, a dash of shame. I could see the same in her face, the stunned compulsion, the forced immediate intimacy. It was as if someone had grabbed us and shoved us against each other.

‘Let’s go somewhere we can talk,’ I said. She stood motionless, face still struggling to accept. ‘It’ll be fine,’ I said. ‘Don’t worry.’

‘I can’t believe you’ve got a baby,’ she said.

Zoë had assimilated her. The small body had relaxed. Now my daughter was just a hungry infant again. If I didn’t feed her in the next few minutes she
would
start crying.

‘How is this possible?’ I said. ‘I mean how did this happen?’

‘Was that you on the Great West Road?’

‘What?’

‘Were you in Hammersmith the other day?’

‘Yes.’

‘I knew it.’

‘Were you there?’

‘I’ve been...’ She couldn’t complete it. Too many thoughts. Too much.

‘Ever since I got here,’ I said, ‘I’ve had this feeling, in different parts of the city. I thought it was... I don’t know what I thought it was.’ Relief – joy, almost – was like a physical presence nearby, because whatever else it meant it meant I wasn’t –
we
weren’t, me, my daughter, my son – alone. Not alone! The dressing room, the cubicle, her hands and face and voice and her tight-packed
wulf
stink – all of it formed the point from which the world shifted again to let me back in. It was like a broken love affair against all the odds getting a second chance. I could have lain down on the floor and slept with relief.

‘Do you know about it?’ she said. ‘I mean do you know anything?’

Again I could feel my Heathrow questions leaping up in her: What does it mean? How did it start? Is there a cure? I remembered the sudden conviction as soon as I met Jake that since it wasn’t just me, since it wasn’t just a freak occurrence, then someone, somewhere, must have the answers. I felt sorry for her, since I could only tell her what Jake had told me:
Don’t bother looking for the meaning of it all. There isn’t one
. Unless of course Quinn’s Book turned out to be more than a bagatelle.

‘Let’s just go and sit down somewhere,’ I said. ‘There’s got to be a cafeteria in here, right?’ Zoë let out the first plaintive note. ‘Fuck,’ I said. ‘Listen, I’ve just got to – oh, to hell with it, I’ll do it in here.’ I went into the dressing room and sat down in the cubicle she’d just come out of. The dress she’d been trying on was still hanging there, pale green Twenties-style in silk with a tasselled hem. There was an olive green chiffon scarf to go with it. ‘I’ve got to feed her,’ I said, making the necessary adjustments to the carrier and my clothes. ‘Look away if it grosses you out.’ In a Wendy’s with Lauren once a woman had breastfed her baby in full view. Lauren had said: I think I’m going to puke my goddamned nuggets.

‘What? Oh, right, no, I don’t care. Jesus fucking Christ I can’t believe this.’

‘
Lang
uage,’ the tutter said, half under her breath.

‘Fuck
off,
you stupid cow,’ the girl called out. She stood in the cubicle doorway, tense, both arms folded under the black coat. There was a lot of quick nervy life in her white hands and throat. I just sat there, incapable of picking a place to start. Milk came from the universe and bounded through me into Zoë – but the universe had changed. I thought: What if we don’t like each other?