by Glen Duncan
“You won’t. But there’s nothing we can do about that just now. In any case they won’t make a move yet. They’re trophy hunters. They’ll wait for the next full moon.” The words “full moon” made us look at each other again. All the big things we’d said nothing about. I was down to my last pound coin. I memorised her New York address.
“I can’t just go,” she said. “I need answers.”
“You’ll get them, just not like this. I have to know you’re safe.”
A piercing sweet catch in my chest when I said that, for the simple reason that it was true. Suddenly something mattered. In films someone finds a spaceship that’s been buried for thousands of years and switches the power on—and the whole system flutters magically back into life, lights, gauges, indicators, drives. The lovely thrilling thought that this capacity’s been there the whole time, waiting.
“Tell me one thing,” she said. “Is there a cure?”
“No.”
She closed her eyes. Swallowed. Absorbed. She’d grown a new glamorously deformed personality to accommodate werewolfhood but there in the closing of the eyes and the swallow was an indication of how much of the old personality remained, allowed to stay on condition she could pretend it wasn’t really there. Even this pronouncement—No, there’s no cure—didn’t quite kill it. It would probably live for decades, holding hope in its hand like a hot coal.
“Don’t be alone after sunset and don’t sleep at night,” I said. “You’ll have to go to a club or a bar or whatever. Sleep during the day. With someone, if that’s an option, but only someone you know well.” Now, imprudently, we were staring at each other. The wulf certainty between us was as ugly and exciting as a massive haemorrhage on a white tiled floor. But there was the other certainty too, human, a shock to us both. Anachronistic in this day and age, almost embarrassing. I had an image of Ellis and Grainer and a crew of tooled-up Hunters surrounding us, laughing their heads off.
“You better fucking come after me,” she said, quietly. The composure wasn’t absolute. Desperation was right there, waited only her nod. The dark eyelashes and that beauty spot were her face’s erotic accents.
“I will.”
“Promise me.”
“I promise.”
“This is insane. There’s so much … I don’t know anything.”
“You will. Everything I know, which isn’t much.”
“You’ll phone me in half an hour?”
“Trust me.”
A pause. Eyes meet again.
“You know I do.”
Moments like tiny gearings; an oiled click and the tectonics giantly shift and suddenly you’re saying, Trust me, and she’s saying, You know I do. Behind the immediacies—the ifs and thens still swarming us—was the carnal eventuality, or rather two carnal eventualities: the coming together in human flesh, and …
I knew it would remain unspeakable, the other consummation, deliciously held in the mouth, in the heart. It had sent an intimation of itself back to us from the future that put a seal on our lips. They’ll wait for the next full moon, I’d said, and as through the wink of a Third Eye we’d seen that nothing, nothing would compare to—
Then it was gone.
“I really don’t want you to go,” she said.
“I really don’t want to go.”
37
BUT GO I DID. I selected a cowboy cab from Heathrow, tipped the driver (a dreadlocked Rastafarian in a leather hat the size of a post box) fifty pounds in advance for the use of his mobile. The car, an unloved Mondeo, stank of ganja and Chinese food. She answered after a single ring.
“How are you feeling?”
“No sickness. They both followed you out.”
“Perfect.”
“You can’t talk freely, can you?”
“No.”
“I can’t stand this. It’s three thousand miles.”
“I’ll be there before you know it.”
“Are we really the only ones?” she said.
“I thought I was the only one, but now there’s you I can’t be sure of anything.” Except that now for the first time in half a century I’m—
“This is like waking up. I’ve been …” She sighed. I pictured her clamping her jaws together, closing her eyes, controlling herself. “Do you know what it is?” she said, eventually. “Does it fit into anything?” “It” being the Curse. “It” being Being a Werewolf. Did it fit into anything? Anything like God or the Devil or UFOs or voodoo or clairvoyance or life after death? There was no disguising her fear that it did, her hope that it did, her deep suspicion that it didn’t.
“No more than anything else,” I said. “We’re here, we do what we do, that’s it. You’ve read the fairy stories, obviously.” Quinn’s journal, I decided, could wait. There was enough for her to take in already without adding the ancient desert, mad dogs and dead bodies. Besides, the driver was listening. Not a vamp lackey, nor WOCOP unless their agents had got a lot better at blending in, but I didn’t want him to have anything useful to say when questioned. As it was I was going to have to give him a crazy price for the mobile, or trash it and risk a scene. Few things more wearying than a stoned cabbie with martial arts delusions. “I wish there was a big secret I could let you in on,” I told her, “but there isn’t.”
“I had a feeling you were going to say that,” she said. She’d absorbed the first shock wave: me, the encounter, the confirmation of the world she’d fallen into nine months ago, the brutal attraction, the violent pitch into a new theatre. She assimilated fast, Manhattan-speed. Here already in the “I had a feeling you were going to say that” was her bigger, calmer, more sophisticated self that was always waiting after whatever temporary naïve furore had died down. Here already was the acknowledgement that whatever else this was it was the beginning of a liaison of fabulous proportions. Here already was the wry aspect, the curious, the playful. Here was the intelligence committed to life, whatever the cost. I was the one still inwardly flapping, grinning, hopping about with excitement. The impulse to thank God, it turned out, was still there. Something in me looked … upwards, humbled.
“Does anyone know about you?” she asked. “I mean apart from the vampires and the agents?”
“Not anymore. You?”
“No. There’s my dad, but it would kill him. I can’t.”
“I understand. Don’t worry. I’ll help you.”
“You are going to follow me, aren’t you?”
“Do you really have to ask?”
“Tell me my address again.”
“Not advisable. Please believe me, I have it.”
The cab slowed for the Chiswick roundabout, got a green light, whipped through. It started raining. If the boochie was a flier he’d be cold and wet up there.
“I still don’t see why I have to take the flight,” she said. “Why can’t I just check into a hotel here?”
“This country’s too small. You have to trust me. I’ve been doing this a long time.”
“How long?”
“Again, inadvisable.”
“You’re old, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
A pause. She was realising what getting the answers would mean. Without them carrying on could be mere blind reflex. With them it was an informed decision. A werewolf by choice, as it were.
“How long will I live?”
“A long time.”
“A hundred years?”
“Try four.”
Silence. I could feel her effort at immense logical extension from the present (via science fiction, Microsoft, the space program) into the future. Impossible: One knows logical extension won’t cover it. One knows the far future will involve unimaginable, perhaps comedic leaps.
“But you’ll look the same,” I said. “Does that help?”
She didn’t answer. Suddenly the full weight of her aloneness—her aloneness, not mine—hit me. There’s my dad, but it would kill him. Nine months she’d been living through this. They found three- and fo
ur-year-old kids who’d survived alone in their homes for days, eating sugar, ketchup, butter. You didn’t want to think about what that had been like for them. They were objectionable, somehow. Unless of course you’d been through it yourself. Unless of course you were one of them.
“Shit,” she said. “I need to check in. If I’m really going.”
“You’re really going. Remember: public places at night, okay?”
“And call up an ex to sleep with during the day.”
“I’m serious.”
“Okay, but the longer it takes you to get there the longer I’m going to have to put out for someone else.”
“I’ve changed my mind,” I said. “Sleep in the public library. Drink coffee. Take uppers.”
“I don’t even know your name.”
Aliases like a whirlwind of dead leaves. Me in the middle, myself.
“It’s Jake,” I said.
“You’re lucky. Jake’s a good name.”
“Whereas?”
A pause. Then, “Might as well get this over with, I suppose. My name’s Talulla.”
•
You mustn’t fall in love with a woman because you’ll end up killing her.
Not if she’s a werewolf.
I didn’t invent the necessities. But I am bound by them.
•
There was no appeal in taking the vampire on. Not with my new investment in not dying. Simpler to wait for sunrise and the shift change with his human proxy. Therefore I got the cabbie to drop me at Caliban’s, a night club (one of my subsidiaries’ subsidiaries’ subsidiaries owns it, as it happens) on New Oxford Street, where I stayed, buoyed by hastily scored amphetamines, until five a.m. Breakfast of eggs Benedict (the first human food since my depressing banquet-for-one in the Hecate’s hold) at Mikhail’s in Holborn took me through to six, whereupon a mirror-windowed Audi rolled up for the vamp and relieved him with a pair of familiars. The WOCOP tail had been replaced, too. Three agents, as far as I could tell. This was getting ridiculous. I left the café, bought a fresh pack of Camels at a newsstand and wandered down to Trafalgar Square. London was up and running. The rain had stopped and the sky was absurdly pretty, a single layer of floury cloudlets pinked and peached by the rising sun. Only the juvenile, the mad and the newly in love noticed. The rest of the city got its head down and ploughed tearily into another day of neurosis.
I bought a new mobile and called Christian at the Zetter. I wanted a haircut, a massage, a hot shower and a little time and space to gather myself for the laborious business of escapology.
38
TALULLA, LIGHT OF my life, fire of my loins … Ta-loo-la: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate … Ta. Lu. La.
“Talulla’s bad enough,” she said. “Put it with ‘Demetriou’ and you’re in the realm of the ridiculous.”
It was afternoon and we were lying in bed in the Edwardian Park Suite at the New York Plaza, having just had sex for the fifth time in approximately six hours. I never had a sister but I imagine if I had fucking her would have felt something like fucking Talulla, sometime in our very early twenties, coming to it with relished capitulation after years of dirty adolescent telepathy.
“Talulla Mary Apollonia Demetriou,” she said. “Even in New York you rattle that off and they think you’re speaking Vulcan or something.”
It had taken less than twenty-four hours to ditch the tails, albeit after a wearing epic of old-fashioned cat-and-mouse. With Christian’s help I got out of the Zetter under a pile of soiled sheets in a laundry hamper, and away in the back of the cleaning company van. That did for the vamp flunkies. Not so the agent, whom I clocked still with me barely five minutes after leaving the depot. I wasn’t much surprised. Christian is solid, but there can no longer be any doubt the Zetter’s WOCOP moled. Three hours of Underground-and-black-cab switches (and four agents) later, I was back at Heathrow, if not certain of having slipped them then driven past caring by the force of the need to see her again. Flying business as Bill Morris (an airport-bought first class ticket would’ve waved a flag to anyone watching) I’d had the width of the Atlantic to coddle and thrum my lust. By the time she arrived in the hotel lobby in sunglasses and a pale pink cashmere dress I’d reached maximum agitation. Given which you’d expect a debut fuck of eye-popping gymnastics. In fact it was a thing of slow, hyperconscious deliberateness. You’d similarly expect a dive straight into werewolf biography, an immediate compulsion to compare howler notes. Not so. The deep reflex was postponement. To speak of what we were would be in the long run (but not long enough) to speak of death. We had this one opportunity to come together as if the rest of the world didn’t exist. Thereafter the rose would be sick.
Wulf was with us. Wulf knew what was going on. Wulf wanted in, materially. Wulf prowled the blood, rushed up repeatedly only to effervesce into nothing at the surface of the skin. Wulf swung and tossed its head and let loll its degenerate tongue and wreathed us in its feral funk, an odour as dense as the stink of a crammed zoo. If it was getting nothing else out of us it was getting the primary admission, that we knew what we were, that we had both felt the peace that passeth understanding, that this, now, sex in human form, was the imperfect forerunner, the babbling prophet, mere Baptist to the coming Christ. Wulf knew how good it was going to be and would not, even in abeyance, suffer us not sharing in the knowledge. Therefore we knew. Had known from first glance at the airport. Had always known.
Six human victims, I counted. Few enough for each to be still a raw perfume, ghost-traces in the involved and generous scent of her cunt, on the hot flower of her breath. She’d tell me in her own time, we both knew. For now it was the draped obscenity. My own wailing dead in disbelief at the broken agreement had been churned back into the hurrying blood. Only the spirit of Arabella remained still, fixed me with—
Like this?
Yes, just like that. Don’t stop. Don’t stop.
We found ways. This is the story, the human story, the werewolf story, the life story: One finds ways. Kissing, slowly, was one. Though dark-haired and dark-eyed she was fair-skinned, a sensuous contrast that required continual reapprehension. All of her required this (or rather all of my desire did), repeatedness, over again–ness. The beauty spot by her lip was one of a dozen or so scattered over her body. My new constellations. There was no performance, no pornography, just complete conversion to the religion of each other, that erotic equalisation that mocks distinction between the sacred and the profane, that at a stroke anarchises the body’s moral world. All her parents’ love and spoiling were there in her parted thighs’ sly confidence. She knew the measure of her riches. The wolf had first raped then made her larger, forced on her in addition to the human gifts nauseous exemption from the moral city’s ordinances and limits. You accepted the wolf and grew, or you rejected it and died. She’d had the soft toys and pink bedroom as a little girl, the ballet aspirations, the pony fixations. These had flared and mutated, books, a smart mouth, finding the balance between sophistication and sluttiness, a little material greed, the headache of being sufficiently pretty so that politicisation was a sulkily performed chore, then work, business and the daily shifting survival strategies that made the freshman small-hours ethical arguments quaint. All this was still there, dwarfed under the dark arch of the monster. The challenge was to find the devious bloody-mindedness to keep both, who she used to be and what she was now.
Fucking (the word “lovemaking” offered itself, with some legitimacy) let clairvoyance thrash about a bit between us: Here I was looking out from behind her eyes when she was eight, sitting on a back stoop twittered over by leaf shadows and stinging from some giant injustice. There she was behind mine in the sunlit library—WEREWULF—at Herne House. Here was a glowering sky over a dark field with a solitary Dutch barn. Here a car showroom, light bouncing off too much glass. Here Harley lighting the evening fire and saying, Well that’s just fucking nonsense. Here her feet poking out of glittering bath foam, toenails like a lit
tle family of rubies. We lived a handful of each other’s moments, or imagined we did. Coming, I gripped the soft warm hair above her nape and stared at her. She stared back. Her eyes had the cold omniscience, her cunt the hot. Her open mouth moved very slightly, a barely perceptible shape of affirmation. This and the beauty spot did for whatever Tantric resolve I was holding on to. A first climax of total dissolution, as into God or void—then the return, the humble reassertion of fingerprints, scalp, knees, tongue, heart, brain. You forgot sex could do this, cast the divine fragment back into the divine whole for a moment, then reel it out again, razed, beatified.
So the six carnal hours had passed.
But passed they had. Now we lay on the bed like starfish. It’s one of the Platonic forms, lying with someone on a hotel bed after transcendent sex. Outside, Manhattan was chillily sunlit under a blue March sky. Somewhere back down the hours it had rained. We’d been aware of it, as one harmless animal going about its business might be aware of another harmless animal doing the same. Now the air had a rinsed optimism. To be resisted, my realist warned, because already the future was groping, like a temporarily blinded giant, towards us.
“It’s the Irish Talulla,” she said. “Not the Chocktaw one. My mom’s family came over in the 1880s. Not that it makes a difference. It’s still a god-awful mouthful.”
“Demetriou” from her Greek father, Nikolai, who’d come to the U.S. as a physics postgrad in ’67, got sidetracked by the counterculture, barely scraped his MSc at Columbia and nearly died of a mysterious stomach infection on a trip to Mexico in 1973. He’d survived, however, and emerged traumatised, presumably into readiness for love, since less than six months out of hospital he met, fell for and married Colleen Gilaley, heiress to the not inconsiderable pile represented by her father’s four delis and three diners spread over Manhattan and Brooklyn, a familial empire into which Nikolai was grudgingly (and unproductively) absorbed. In 1975 (Ford in the White House, Jaws in movie theatres, Saigon fallen, the Khmer Rouge overrunning Cambodia, Humboldt’s Gift on the highbrow shelves, Shogun on the low) Colleen gave birth to what would be the Demetrious’ only child, a girl, Talulla Mary Apollonia, now thirty-four, divorcée, werewolf.