The Radleys (22 page)

“What, so you guys find it hard?” says Wil , with what Rowan reads as genuine concern.

“Wel , Clara seems to handle it better than me.”

Wil growls a sigh. “School, I tel you. It’s cruel.”

He sips his blood, black in this light, and Rowan can’t stop himself from watching, wondering.
Is
this why he came out here? For blood?
He tries not to think about it and carries on talking. He tel s Wil it’s not that bad at school real y (a lie) and that he could have quit by now but wants to finish his A levels—English, history, German—and go on to uni.

“To study . . .”

“English lit, actual y.”

Wil smiles at him affectionately. “I went to Cambridge. And hated it.”

He goes on to tel Rowan about his brief spel with the Midnight Bicycle Club, a scarf-wearing and rather nauseating clique of guffawing blood cravers who regularly met to listen to obscure psychedelia, discuss Beat poetry, recite Monty Python sketches, and share each other’s blood.

Maybe he’s not so bad
, thinks Rowan.
Maybe he only kills people who deserve it.

His uncle seems momentarily distracted by something at the other end of the garden. Rowan looks at the shed but he can’t see anything. Whatever, Wil doesn’t seem too bothered. He just carries on talking in a voice that is ageless and al -knowing.

“It’s hard being different. People are scared of it. But it’s nothing that can’t be overcome.” He tilts the blood in his glass. “I mean, look at Byron.”

Rowan wonders if this might be a deliberate hook for him to bite down on, but he can’t remember tel ing his uncle about his love of Byron’s poems.

“Byron?” he asks. “Do you like Byron?”

Wil looks at him as if it is a no-brainer. “Best poet that ever lived. The world’s first true celebrity.

Mad, bad, and dangerous to know. Worshipped by men and desired by women the world over.

Not bad for a chubby, cock-eyed, short-ass with a club foot.”

“No,” says Rowan, smiling involuntarily, “I suppose not.”

“ ’Course, at school they tore the piss. It was only when he was eighteen, when he was converted by a Florentine vampire in a brothel, that he turned things around.”

Wil looks down at his bottle. He shows the label to Rowan. “ ‘The best of life is but intoxication.’

Byron would have liked Isobel.”

Rowan stares at the bottle and feels his resistance weaken. He is forgetting why it is so important not to succumb. After al , he is a vampire whether he drinks it or not. And Clara hadn’t kil ed someone because she’d drunk any vampire blood. If anything, the opposite. Maybe if she had drunk vampire blood in moderation, then none of this would have happened.

Wil stares at him. A poker player about to lay down his best hand.

“You want to fly,” he says, “then she can do it for you. If there’s a girl you want, at school, a special girl, you just taste Isobel and see what happens.”

Rowan thinks of Eve. Of how it felt sitting next to her on the bench. And if she’s going to find out he’s a vampire, he might as wel be an attractive and confident one. “I don’t know . . . I’m a bit . . .”

“Come on,” coaxes Wil , as seductively as the devil. “Don’t hate what you don’t know. Take her to your room, you don’t have to drink her now.”

As he says this, the voices upstairs escalate again, Peter’s becoming distinct.

“
What’s that supposed to mean?
”

And his mother: “
You know perfectly well what it’s supposed to mean!
”

Rowan reaches out and takes the bottle almost without thinking.

Pride brims in Wil ’s eyes. “That’s the world. It’s yours.”

Rowan nods and stands up, suddenly nervous and awkward. “Okay. I’l take it, you know, and think about it.”

“Good night, Rowan.”

“Yeah. Good night.”

Panic and Pondweed

Wil drains the last drop of Isobel from his glass and closes his eyes. Now that Peter and Helen have final y stopped arguing, the thing he real y notices is the quiet. He thinks of al the sounds that define his normal life. The smooth purr of the motorway. The car horns and pneumatic dril s of the city. The rough blare of guitars. The flirtatious whispers of women he has just met and, not long after, their howls of ecstasy and fear. The fast roar of air as he flies over the sea, hunting for somewhere to drop the dead.

Silence has always troubled him. Even reading poetry, he has to have some kind of background noise—music or traffic or the babble of voices in a crowded bar.

Noise is life.

Silence is death.

But now, just for this moment, silence doesn’t seem so bad. It seems like a desired ending, a destination, a place where noise wants to reach.

The quiet life.

He pictures Helen and himself on a pig farm somewhere, a couple of sweet little sirkers, and smiles at the idea.

Then, as the breeze changes direction, he smel s the blood he smel ed earlier. And he is reminded of the living presence behind the shed.

He stands up out of his chair and walks steadily past the pond, as the scent gets stronger.
This
is not a badger or a cat. This is human.

Hearing another crack of a twig, Wil stands stil .

He is not scared, but he knows whoever is hiding behind that shed is there because of him.

“Fee-fi-fo-fum,” Wil says quietly.

There is a total silence after that. An unnatural silence. The silence of tense limbs and held breath.

Wil wonders what to do. Whether to go up to the conifer trees and satisfy his curiosity or just head into the house. He has little craving for the sour male blood he smel s, and eventual y he just turns and walks away. But not long after, he hears footsteps running toward him and then something swiping through the air. He ducks, catches a glimpse of the axe that’s been swung at him. The man nearly fal s from the forward momentum of the action. Wil grabs him, holding tight to his footbal shirt. He shakes him, sees his desperate face. The axe is stil in his hand, so Wil lifts them both off the ground to splash-land in the pond.

Time to put the frighteners on
.

He pul s the man, whose face is covered in panic and pondweed, out of the water. A flash of the tusks, then the question: “Who are you?”

There is no answer. But there’s a noise only Wil can hear coming from the house. He sees Peter and Helen’s light go on, and he dunks the man back under the water by the time the window opens and his brother appears.

“Wil ? What are you doing?”

“Fancied some sushi. Something that wriggles when I bite it.”

“For God’s sake, get out of the pond.”

“Okay, Petey. Night.”

The man is starting to real y struggle now, and Wil has to lower him to avoid visible splashes.

He presses a knee into the man’s stomach, pinning him to the pond bed. But then Peter shuts the window and disappears back into the room, probably worried their conversation would draw attention from the neighboring houses.

Wil pul s the man back out of the water.

He coughs and splutters but doesn’t plead.

Wil could kil him.

He could fly him out of there and kil him a thousand feet above this pathetic vil age, where no one would hear a thing. But something has happened. Something
is
happening. Right here, in the garden owned by his brother and the woman he loves, he is slower. There’s a delay. A space for thought before action. An idea creeping in, that if you act you have to face consequences. That this man is probably here now because of some earlier action, some spontaneous decision Wil might have made days or months or years ago. To kil him would only create another consequence.

Al Wil craves is an answer. “Who are you?”

He has seen those eyes before. Smel ed his blood. Noted that same cocktail of fear and hatred.

Something about this recognition weakens him.

Wil lets go without getting the answer and the nameless man retreats through the water, then hurriedly pul s himself out of the pond. He backs away so he doesn’t lose sight of Wil , dripping a trail across the paving stones to the gate. And then he is gone.

A second later, Wil is cursing his weakness.

He scoops a hand back down into the cold water to feel the fast slither of a fish.

He grabs it.

Pul s it out.

It flaps and struggles in the empty air.

Wil presses the fish’s bel y into his mouth and, with his reemerged fangs, takes a bite out of its flesh. He sucks on the meager blood before letting it fal to the water.

He steps out of the pond and drips his soggy way back to the van, leaving the floating fish corpse and sunken axe behind him.

Saturn

When he returns to his room, Rowan sits for a while on his bed with the bottle of vampire blood cradled in his hands.

What would happen, he wonders, if he just took a sip? If he keeps his lips almost tight shut and lets only the smal est drop get through, surely he would be able to stop himself from drinking more.

He doesn’t hear the commotion in the garden, at the other side of the house, but he does hear his sister’s footsteps leaving her room. As soon as he hears her, he speedily hides the bottle under the bed, next to the old papier-mâché puppet he made years ago when his mother made him go to a Saturday morning arts and crafts club in the vil age hal . (He decided not to make a puppet of a pirate or princess like the rest of the club, but to make one of the Roman god Saturn, depicted midway through eating his children. It made quite a strong impact on ten-year-old Sophie Dewsbury, who broke down in tears at the sight of Rowan’s imaginative use of red paint and crêpe paper. Later, the teacher told Helen it might be a good idea if Rowan found a new Saturday morning activity.)

His sister pushes open his door and eyes him quizzical y. “What are you doing?”

“Nothing. I’m sitting on my bed.”

She comes into the room and sits down next to him as their parents carry on quarreling.

Clara sighs and stares up at his Morrissey poster. “I wish they’d shut up.”

“I know.”

“It’s my fault, isn’t it?” She seems genuinely upset for the first time al weekend.

“No,” he says. “They’re not rowing about you.”

“I know, but if I hadn’t kil ed Harper, then they wouldn’t be like this, would they?”

“Maybe not, but I think it’s been building up. And they shouldn’t have lied to us, should they?”

He sees his words aren’t doing enough to comfort her, so he decides to pul the bottle out from under his bed. She looks at the half-drunk liquid with astonishment.

“It’s Wil ’s,” Rowan explains. “He gave it to me but I haven’t drunk any yet.”

“Are you going to?”

He shrugs. “Don’t know.”

Rowan hands the bottle to Clara, and there is a satisfying squeak as she pul s out the cork. He watches as she sniffs the aroma leaking out of the top. She swigs some back, and when her face comes back down it is free from worry again.

“What did it taste like?” Rowan asks.

“Heaven.” She smiles, the blood staining her lips and teeth. “And look,” she says, as she hands the bottle back to her brother. “Self-control. Are you going to try it?”

“I don’t know,” he had said.

And ten minutes after his sister has left the room, he stil doesn’t know. He inhales the scent, like his sister did. He resists. Puts the bottle on his bedside table and tries to focus his mind on something else. He makes another attempt at the poem he is writing about Eve, but he is stil stuck, so he reads a bit of Byron instead.

She walks in beauty, like the night

Of cloudless climes and starry skies;

And all that’s best of dark and bright

Meet in her aspect and her eyes:

His skin is itching and he struggles to concentrate, his eyes slipping off the words like feet on ice. He pul s off his T-shirt and sees an atlas of blotches spreading across his chest and shoulders, the areas of normal skin tone retreating like ice caps in a red-hot sea.

Robin Redbreast!

He thinks of Toby’s hateful voice and Harper laughing as if it were the funniest thing in the whole world.

And then he thinks of something that happened last month. He had been walking on his own toward the shade and solitude offered by the horse chestnut trees at the far edge of the school field when Harper had run up behind him for no reason except to jump on him and bring him to the ground, which he did successful y. Rowan remembers the vast remorseless bulk pressing him into the grass, suffocating him, his lungs about to burst, and the muffled laughter of other boys, including Toby, and Harper’s brutish Neanderthal yel above them al . “Dickweed can’t breathe!”

And as Rowan lay there, crushed, he hadn’t even wanted to fight back. He had wanted to sink into that hard earth and never come back up.

He picks the bottle up off the side table.

To Harper
, he thinks, then swigs it back.

As the delicious taste floods over his tongue, every worry and tension floats away. The aches and ailments he has always known disappear almost immediately and he feels awake.

Wide, wide awake.

Like he has slept for a hundred years.

Pul ing the bottle away from his lips, he studies his reflection as the pink blotches disappear, along with the tired grayness under his eyes.

You want to fly, she can do it for you
.

Gravity is just a law that can be broken.

Before he knows it he is floating, levitating, above his bed and above
The
Abstainer’s
Handbook
lying on the bedside table.

And he laughs, curling himself up with it in the air. He can’t stop rol s of laughter coming out of him, as if his whole life up to now has just been one long joke and only now has he final y reached the punch line.