The Radleys (10 page)

He finds this hilarious and looks at the remainder of the bottle in his hand. The sight of the broken glass gives him an idea. A minute later he is biking past Lowfield Close and decides to take a detour. He sees the crappy little Corol a Eve’s dad had been driving that night parked outside the flats. He looks around, then he smoothly gets off his bike and leans it on the road. He has the broken bottle in his hand.

Crouching down beside the car, he presses the sharpest bit of the glass into a tire. He saws it a little bit to cut through the rubber but gets nowhere. Then he spies a loose piece of stone beside a garden wal , picks it up, gets on his bike, and with his foot ready on the pedal throws it through the front passenger window.

The sound of the smash sobers him up rather than delivering the thril he expected.

He races away, pedaling home as fast as he can, before anyone has time to get out of bed and pul back their curtains.

Saturday

B
lood doesn’t satisfy cravings. It magnifies them.

The Abstainer’s Handbook
(second edition), p. 50

There Is a Rapture on the Lonely Shore

There are few things more beautiful than a deserted motorway at four in the morning.

The white lines and il uminated signs shine their instructions, as indifferent to whether humans are there to fol ow them as the Stonehenge standing stones are to the fates of the pathetic ancient abstainers who carted them across Salisbury Plain.

Things stay.

People die.

You can fol ow the signs and systems you are meant to fol ow, or you can sacrifice company and live a life true to your instincts. What was it Lord Byron said, only two years after he was converted?

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,

There is a rapture on the lonely shore,

And somewhere else, in the same canto:

Oh! that the Desert were my dwelling-place,

With one fair Spirit for my minister,

That I might all forget the human race,

And, hating no one, love but only her!

Love but only her.
That’s the curse of a lot of vampires. They seek many but truly crave only one.

No,
muses Wil ,
you can’t beat Lord B.

Well, Jim Morrison comes a close second
, he concedes, beating along to “Twentieth Century Fox” on the steering wheel (although Wil never bought the theory that Jim Morrison was Byron’s 1960s identity of choice). And Hendrix isn’t bad at it either. Or the other Morrison, around about the time of
Astral Weeks
. Or even the Stones, when the vampire was stil with them. Al that 1960s ego-fueled blood rock his and Peter’s father used to play when they were infants.

Wil hears the engine start to sound a little throaty and sees from the gauge he’s low on fuel. He pul s in at a twenty-four-hour garage and fil s the tank.

Sometimes he pays for fuel and sometimes he doesn’t. Money is absolutely nothing to him. He could have mil ions if he wanted, but what could they buy him that tastes as good as the stuff he takes for free?

Tonight he wants to breathe in some pol uted air, so he goes inside with his last twenty-pound note. (Three nights before he’d been at a speed-dating event at the Tiger Tiger bar in Manchester, where he’d met a girl with the right kind of neck and two hundred pounds fresh out of the cash machine.)

A boy is sitting in a chair behind the counter. He is reading
Nuts
magazine and doesn’t notice Wil until he is right there pushing the twenty toward him.

“Pump three,” he says.

“What?” the boy asks. He unplugs his iPod from one ear. Wil ’s blood-sharpened sense of hearing is strong enough to catch the fast, tinny noise of the house music the boy is listening to, like the secret buzz and pulse of night.

“Here’s the money for pump number three,” Wil says again.

The boy nods and chews, pressing the necessary commands into the til .

“That’s not enough,” the boy says.

Wil does nothing but look at him.

“It’s twenty pounds seven pence.”

“I’m sorry?”

The boy senses his own fear but doesn’t fol ow what it’s trying to tel him. “You went a bit over.”

“By seven pence.”

“Yeah.”

“I went over by
seven whole pennies
?”

“Yeah.”

Wil taps the Queen’s face on the note. “I’m afraid this is al I have.”

“We take al cards. Visa, MasterCard, Delta . . .”

“I don’t have a card. I don’t have any cards.”

The boy shrugs. “Wel , it’s twenty pounds seven pence.” He sucks on his top lip to underline this unshakable fact.

Wil looks at the boy. He is sitting there with his tracksuit top and his magazine and his iPod and his misguided experiments with facial hair as if he is something new, something he himself has created. In his blood, though, there would be the taste of ancient origins, the tough and long-fought struggle for survival over hundreds of generations, echoes of ancestors he’s never heard of, traces of more wondrous and epic times, hints of the primeval seeds of his existence.

“You real y care that strongly about seven pence?” Wil asks him.

“The manager does. Yeah.”

Wil sighs. “There real y are bigger things to worry about, you know.”

He wonders about this boy. There are some who know, who know what you are and subconsciously wil it on themselves. Is that what he is doing?

Wil walks away, watching the gray ghost of himself on the CCTV screen. He gets to the door but it doesn’t open.

“You can’t leave until you’ve paid the rest.”

Wil smiles, genuinely amused at the unblood pettiness on display here. “Is that seriously the value you put on your own life? Seven pence? What can you even
buy
for seven pence?”

“I’m not letting you leave. The police are on their way, mate.”

Wil thinks of Alison Glenny, the head of the police unit in Manchester who has wanted him dead for years.
So, yes
, he thinks to himself,
the police are always on their way.

Wil walks back to the counter. “Do you have a little thing for me? Is that what it is? You see, I see this little quibble we’re having as representing something a lot bigger. I think you are a very lonely boy doing a very lonely job. A job which makes you start to crave certain things. Human company . . . Human . . . touch . . .”

“Piss off, you gay.”

Wil smiles. “Very good. Very convincingly heterosexual. One hundred percent. No messing there. Now, what scared you most? That I might kil you? Or that you might quite enjoy it?”

“The police are coming.”

“Right, wel , I suppose you’d better open the til for me then.”

“What?”

“I said open the til .”

The boy reaches for something under the counter, keeping his eyes fixed on Wil . He pul s out a kitchen knife.

“Ah, the knife. The phal ic weapon of intrusion and penetration.”

“Just fuck off, al right?”

“The trouble is, with someone like me you real y need something
bigger
. Something which wil go al the way through.”

Wil closes his eyes and summons the old forces. He transforms himself in no time at al and starts the blood minding.

The boy looks at him. Fear turns to weakness turns to empty submission.

“Now, you wil put the knife down and open the til and give me some of the little paper portraits of the Queen you keep in there.”

The boy is lost now. The unwinnable battle is written on his face. His hand trembles, the knife wilts forward, then drops onto the counter.

“You wil open the til .”

He opens the til .

“Now, give me the money.”

A clutch of meaningless tens and twenties are handed across the counter.

This is getting too easy. Wil gestures toward the back of the counter. “You wil press that little button and unlock the door.”

The boy reaches under the counter and flicks a switch.

“Do you want me to stroke your hand?”

The boy nods. “Please.” A hand lands on the counter. Freckled skin and bitten nails.

Wil caresses his hand, tracing a smal figure eight on his skin. “Now, after I’ve gone, you wil tel the police it was al a mistake. Then, when your boss asks where the money has gone, you wil say you don’t know, because you won’t. But then, maybe, you wil understand it belongs to a better man now.”

He walks away, pushes the open door. Once in the van, Wil smiles as the boy puts his headphones back in his ears, completely oblivious to what has just happened.

Scrambled Eggs

“Don’t come here. Please.”

No one seated at the kitchen table hears Helen’s prayer, whispered down toward the scrambled eggs she stirs in the saucepan. It is safely drowned out by the drone of Radio 4.

As she keeps stirring, Helen thinks of the lies she has told. Lies that started when they were in nappies, when she told her friends from the National Childbirth Trust that she was switching to formula milk because the midwife was worried about “lactation problems.” She couldn’t bring herself to say that even before their teeth came in, they sucked and bit so hard they made her bleed. Clara proved even worse than Rowan, with Helen shameful y tel ing her breast-is-best friends she was resorting to bottle-feeding after only three weeks.

She knows Peter is right.

She knows Wil has contacts, and gifts. What is that word?
Blood minding.
He could blood-mind people. Blood-fueled hypnotic power. But there are things Peter stil doesn’t know. He doesn’t quite realize what he is playing with.

The eggs are more than done, she realizes, scraping them off the bottom of the pan and spooning them out onto everyone’s toast.

Her son looks at her, baffled at the pretense of normality.

“It’s Saturday, so we’re having scrambled eggs,” she explains. “It’s Saturday.”

“At home with the vampires.”

“Rowan, come on,” says Peter, as egg flops onto his toast.

Helen offers Clara some egg and she nods, prompting a scornful sigh from her brother.

“Now, me and your dad have been talking,” Helen says, when she sits down. “And if we’re going to get through this as a family and make sure we remain safe, then we have to act as we normal y would. I mean, people are going to start talking and asking things about last night. The police, probably, as wel . Although at the moment it won’t even be a missing persons case, let alone anything else. Not until twenty-four hours after . . .”

Her glance presses some support out of Peter.

“Your mum’s right,” he says, as they al watch Clara start to eat her scrambled eggs.

“You’re eating eggs,” observes Rowan. “Eggs are from chickens. Chickens are living creatures.”

Clara shrugs. “Enlightening.”

“Come on, she has to go back to her normal diet,” says Peter.

Rowan remembers his father’s casual tone, last night, as he listed famous vampires. And then Clara, this time last Saturday, explaining her veganism.

“What happened to the ‘chicken Auschwitz’ speech we had to listen to last week?”

“These are free-range,” says his mother.

Clara sends Rowan a sharp look. Her eyes, stripped of their glasses, gleam with fresh life.

Indeed, even Rowan has to admit to himself that she looks better than he’s ever seen her. Her hair seems shinier, her skin has more color, even her posture has changed. Her usual meek, heavy head and forward hunch have been replaced by a bal erina-straight back and a head which sits as light as a helium bal oon on top of her neck. It is as if she doesn’t feel the ful weight of gravity anymore.

“What’s the big deal?” she asks him.

Rowan looks down at his plate. He isn’t going to be able to eat anything. “Is this what happens?

You taste blood and lose your principles along with your glasses?”