Marlane..?
Christ in heaven, this stranger was the older Cain sister. The one everybody whispered about at Abona: the spectre in Brixton, just as your dad was the ghoul of the Estate. She was the shadow, who’d been behind the slave books, the bottles and the starvation.
M.C. looked me up and down scornfully. ‘Dad would’ve trained up a bitch alright for you. One dat knew how to behave.’
Your voice was icy. ‘I didn’t want a broken doll.’
‘Or a slave?’
‘Well, it seems like I got one, doesn’t it?’
‘Nah, sis, it don’t.’
At last, you brushed past your sister, snatching up a pad of paper and a rollerball, before perching on the edge of the Sponge chair. M.C., however, slunk towards me, which was like being stalked by an anarchist tiger with added attitude. ‘The wallad’s not kneeling. Kneel.’
Not sodding likely.
‘Bad,’ M.C. admonished. Now I knew why you spoke to me puppy style. ‘First thing you need to understand about Blood Club sis, is dat it be all about image, innit?’ M.C. was lecturing you - half-bored, half-matter-of-fact - but she was facing me, her black nail varnished fingers sliding down my chest… ‘Dat’s why it be unique, safe and guaranteed,’…having a cheeky tweak at my nipples through the thin cotton of my t-shirt… ‘But da product? Dat’s gotta be perfect,’…around my arse… ‘Dat’s why dey be sourced from all over da world. Then Yates trains at Abona. Dad on da Estate for da tailored, individualised orders. Specialised shit. And you…’…and then for a wank wander…
That did it. I tried to jerk away, but M.C.’s other arm cradled round, holding me trapped against the marble fireplace.
I stared over M.C.’s shoulder at you for rescue. But you were deliberately scrutinising the notepad, which was balanced on your knee.
I guess it was time I stood up for myself.
Just as M.C.’s black-nailed fingers curled around my jean encased goolies, I whispered close to her lobe, ‘A little lower, luv. I think you missed a spot.’
M.C.’s hand froze in its tarantula exploration. Then she was swinging it in a hissing arc - slap.
My nut snapped back, hitting the wall. My pride hurt more than my smarting cheek, but M.C.’s spiked bracelet had caught my mouth. I licked at the coppery blood: waste not, want not.
I’d never seen a punk First Lifer about to explode with fury before. It was fascinating.
‘You’ve gotta discipline da liccle bitches, you get me? Don’t you ever..?’
M.C. had taken something out of the pocket of her bondage trousers and was swiping her finger over the display.
Shooting, spearing agony, like a white hot tree. It branched down my spine and then every nerve inside my body, until I was consumed by it.
M.C. played around with the touchscreen.
Yet all I could fixate on was the black logo of the Manx.
I tried to form words, but none would come. My heart was thundering. My palms sweating. Still I didn’t kneel (let alone prostrate myself): not to that bint. Not to any First Lifer. Not anymore.
Instead, I braced myself to endure.
I hadn’t heard your approach behind M.C. ‘Light, go to your room and wait for me.’
I’d never heard you so coldly furious. It was too late now. I assumed you wanted to compare notes on effective discipline measures. And you know what?
It was bloody worth it.
Another swipe of the touchscreen by M.C., followed by the agony falling away, leaving a low level tingling buzz.
I edged around M.C., who sneered at me, like older siblings everywhere, when they’ve told on you and earned you a spanking. Then I made my escape to my cell.
The last thing I heard before I slammed the door behind me (because I never pretended I’m mature), was M.C.’s disdainful snort, ‘Light? Dat’s its leech name, sis. Its name be shadow, boy or slave.’
I paced the room, counting each circuit.
Stand, sit, even bloody kneel, I’d start to do one and then freeze.
Permission, I hadn’t been given…
Yeah, everything was hunky-dory: I couldn’t even take a decision on where to park my bum for fear of getting it wrong because bad here. Stupid. Worthless.
At last, I risked perching on the edge of the bed, my hands resting flat on my knees, with my palms up, as the least offensive position. Except that’s when the traitorous thoughts came burrowing their way in slimy.
OK, so I was going to cop it. Nothing new there.
You’d not…done that before, but it was only a matter of time: you’re a Cain after all. Yet you’d sounded so enraged. And you hadn’t defended me. Not even when I’d been reduced to an it.
That’s when the thought squirmed its way in, which wobbled my stiff upper lip: what if my punishment was to lose my name again?
Its name be shadow, boy or slave.
Beat me bloody but don’t steal my name. The first time I survived it. The second time..?
That’s when my mind went bye-byes.
Silently I stretched out on my back, on top of those Egyptian cotton sheets and then lay there, still as a corpse, staring up unseeingly at the ceiling.
I don’t know how long I was like that.
All I remember is your arms wrapped around me - my cocoon – and your cheek against mine, as you whispered, ‘She’s wrong, I promise. You’re Light still. Your name is Light…’
When I blinked, flexing my fingers, like I’d woken back into my body, which after only the briefest break from the fear and anxiety was rejuvenated - like rebirth - you were gone.
But I was back. I’d survived. And I was going out this week.
You have no bloody idea what that promise means to me.
Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe - just maybe - you do.
MAY 23
Last night I saw the outside of this apartment for the first time since you bought me. My first taste of freedom. I earned it.
Ha-bloody-ha now, right?
I intended to write…something…in the early hours and count it as yesterday’s entry. I even had the journal spread open…one line…something…but I was still too raw.
Instead, I lay back down - motionless - and stayed that way. After all, it worked last time.
I didn’t budge. Even when you dragged the duvet off me. Even when you shook me. Even as you screamed my name.
It was only when I heard the front door bang that I finally unfroze.
You’re home again now but at least you’ve stayed away from my cell.
Look, I’ve got to sort out some things. Like how last night could’ve led to that.
If I write it, I’ll face it. And if you read it, so will you.
Yet maybe it’ll only be part of a story then, and everybody knows words can never hurt them.
It all began with chocolate cupcakes - fancy little affairs - with silver balls sprinkled on the gooey, dark cocoa buttercream, from a bakery with late night opening on Gloucester Avenue.
I dragged you into the shop, like I was a crack pusher and persuaded you to buy a boxful. I tucked them under my arm, before stepping out into the night.
The moon was half-grown; the stars masked behind cloud. I could feel the pull of the night, the coursing of my blood and the predator calling – I was me again.
Of course, I still had to ignore the sodding naffness of my white trainers.
Then I felt your hand snake into mine, pulling with proprietorial firmness towards Regent’s Park.
You led me on the climb up Primrose Hill, until you collapsed in exhaustion on a bench at a junction of footpaths near the summit. I slid the cupcakes along the bench towards you, like a double agent exchanging secrets, before peering out over London.
I remembered when Ruby and I had stood here - conquerors of our world - the kidsman and his gang reduced to tasty titbits. My chest ached to feel such…exhilaration again.
For a Blood Lifer there’s nothing like the freedom of the fight, feast and fuck.
The air was fresher than I remembered. I could see London from here. To the East: pitched slate and tiled roofs, brick and painted stucco, trees and church spires. In the far distance were the towers of Canary Wharf.
Something caught in me, like a photo that’s been Stalin-like doctored, when I saw St Paul’s. It was the same as all those decades ago but now was framed by black glass. I spun to point it out to you, as if we were no different to the other sightseers, tourists, dog walkers or couples strolling hand-in-hand (rather than Mistress and slave). To explain this surreal feeling of being out of time…to see you’d devoured one cupcake already.
Chocolate crumbs clung to the corners of your gob, as you busily stuffed in a second cupcake.
When you caught me having a shufti, you looked so much like a guilty kid that I couldn’t help laughing.
You frowned but then grinned around the buttercream.
I think it’s the first time I’ve seen you unguarded.
For once, you’d let me choose your outfit. I’d picked this silk floral number, which at least didn’t make you look like you were planning a boardroom takeover.
Now breathing in the evening air as deeply as me, whilst relishing the last of your second cupcake, I wondered whether this was your night of freedom, as much as it was mine.
‘It’s the quick or the dead around here,’ I nabbed a cupcake, munching it in two bites and then sucking the buttercream off my fingers. I caught you having a butchers. Were you flushed? I sucked a little bit harder on my fingers.
‘There are no calories in these, huh?’
‘Tonnes. Have the last one.’
Your hand shot out, before I’d even finished gabbing. I like an appetite on a bird.
I sprang up again, bursting with the night’s possibilities. I sprinted down the hill, diving behind plane trees and playing at the hunt.
‘Hey, where the frig are you..?’
‘Back in a tick.’
As I ran, I scanned for primroses, even whilst my predator heart screamed at me for the hunt, and my phantom fangs - tiny needle points now - tore my gums, struggling to grow back on the good, fresh blood you’d been feeding me. I imagined the cream flower, with its sun face, tucked in your ash blonde hair.
Primrose Hill is considered a sacred site because of the primroses, which are believed to treat paralysis. Nature always grows its own remedies: maybe it’d only take something that simple to cure our venom..? We’re part of nature, no different to the primrose; we’re the other side of the coin. Yet I couldn’t find a single flower.
Primrose Hill without a single bloody primrose? How can you miss the irony in that..?
At last I gave up the search, stalking a jogger instead. I didn’t have the fangs and was decades out of practice. But the instinct? The pull? That’s always there: a bubbling, insistent, evolutionary river.
The puffing bottle blond had these iPod thingies wormed in his lobes. I could hear the bass of thrash heavy metal, like a siren’s call, after these last weeks of silence.
With an effort, I shook myself, instead working back from oak to oak, until I was behind your bench. Then I slunk to your shoulder.
You were scanning the dark for me, like an anxious parent. You made as if to tap your Apple watch, startling in confusion when you realised your wrist was empty.
I’d argued – begged – for you to leave all technology behind, so there’d be no chirping, swiping or Fernando.
Only us.
I grinned, as I touched your shoulder. I hadn’t, however, expected you to squeal quite that loudly. Out came your narked face again. Still, we’d drawn too much attention to be comfortable: one bloke with a white knight complex tried to clock me on your behalf. Then there was the kindly dogwalker, who insisted on calling the pigs.
So we scarpered.
Of course that suited me just fine because this was still your London. I wanted to explore its other face: the dark and the glory. In the happy bubble of North London? That wouldn’t happen.
And one night – that’s all I had.
Except as we reached the road, with its boutiques, quiet restaurants and lampposts, which were decorated with homemade signs for book clubs, I realised you were heading back towards the apartment.
I tried to pull my hand free. ‘Where are we..?’
‘We’ve been out.’
I set my feet squarely in the universal body language of I’m not bloody budging.
You sighed. ‘We can’t go any further than Primrose Hill on account of then we won’t be able to see my apartment. That’s, like, my limit.’
‘My night, my rules.’ I snatched my hand sharply out of yours; you gasped at my strength.
You’ve not seen anything yet, darling.
You hopped from foot to foot in indecision. At last, you nodded.
When I heard a rattling sound behind us, I waved out my arm, flagging down the black cab. As if in a state of shock at my sudden dominance, you let yourself be hustled inside.
The Sikh cabbie, with a mask of indifference, swung us back into the traffic. ‘Where to?’
I slung my arm around your shoulders. ‘South.’
We jumped out on a random street, which turned out to be Rye Lane. It didn’t matter where we were: it simply needed to be different. New to you. Fizzing with the night-time Blood Lifer energy.
If I was only getting one shot, then I needed to make sure it was high dose.
I had a plan (half-arsed but it was all I had), to drag you into the real world of the twenty-first century.
Only when you connected with your humanity and the truth of the dirty, dark but beautiful world on your doorstep, would you understand us Blood Lifers - or be fagged about what was happening to us on a global stage.
Pillock, right?
I’ve spent, however, my First and Blood Life copping it – once quite literally – because I try to play the hero.
I know you can’t figure it: seeing a Blood Lifer in that role. But I have business to sort. I’ve made promises. And I’m enough…recovered to know I will find a way to keep them.
So the plan was to open your peepers. And yeah, I definitely managed that.
You turned round on the spot, bewildered.
I grabbed you by the waist and spun you, as I scented the bus fumes, fresh fish, chicken and vegetables in a kaleidoscope of aromas. A police car - all blues and twos - blared past. A streak of flashing neon in the black. Music boomed from behind shuttered shops. Songs in so many different languages and styles, they melded into one: a babble of noise. Rubbish spilled in stinking piles in the shops’ doorways: the ugliness and the grime, which we all dirty ourselves in when we step out into the world.
Blokes in white shirts swaggered down the street, as if they personally owned it. They catcalled to birds, who wore such an array of vibrant costumes, it reminded me of Carnaby Street in the 1960s.
My heart soared, and I let it - just for that second.
There were a multitude of nations on one street: London was no longer a single nation but many. Why not add one more species to the mix? It’s not like I don’t realise there are those, who’d want to send us home too.
Yet this is our home. It has been for longer than any of you First Lifers have breathed London’s polluted air.
You wriggled out of my grip, smoothing down your hair. ‘Where are we?’ You asked, as if I’d taken us to the moon.
‘The twenty-first century.’
‘Na-ah, where are we?’
‘Peckham.’
‘What the frig..?’ You hissed.
‘Look, you’re barely more than a kid. Why don’t you…live?’ I strolled away, past cycles chained to lampposts, red-and-blue awnings for Halal butchers, Afro food shops, Caribbean vegetable market stalls and fly posted 98p shops.
At last, I heard the clack of your sandals, as you hurried to catch up with me. I smiled.
‘These are nizza,’ you’d stopped, peering into an African
wig shop, as you tapped on the glass enviously.
Each wig was displayed on a mannequin’s dolled up decapitated head.
A layered bob of box braids with gilded thread, like a modern-day warrior queen… Ashanti…
Why did I have to remember them – the others? Thorns, waiting under petals to prick me when I dared to forget?
‘How about we wet our whistles? There must be a boozer around here somewhere.’ A pint and an e-cig - that’d do me.
You glanced around, before true to form, pointing at a long queue, which was snaked outside a bar that was lit up in poncey pink.
The bar stuck out, as some wanker’s idea of gentrifying the postcode for the Johnny come latelys. Bints from Essex or Kent, with fake tans and stilettos, were clutching onto spikey haired blokes, just as lushingtons hung onto the barrier, trying to strike up chin-wags with anyone, who’d make eye contact. One pillock was pissing into the gutter. And the worst of it?
A fascist bouncer, (some bird in head-to-toe black), was doing the clipboard business.
I turned away. ‘Not my style.’
You seemed to mistake me – no surprise there. ‘No worries, I’ll get us in.’
‘Sorry to pop your bubble…actually no, I’m not sorry, but I don’t reckon you can.’
Affronted, you glared at me.
I listened to the crackly vinyl hip-hop, which was bleeding out of the bar, whilst watching a hipster’s swagger, as he called out baby girl to the clipboard Nazi. She let him through with a brief, shy smile.
Yeah, we weren’t getting in.
‘My daddy could buy--’
‘Money can’t buy everything. Hard lesson?’ For a moment, I reckoned I’d pushed too hard, and you might actually storm over and brat-like demand to buy the bloody place. Lock, stock and barrel.
Instead, you followed silently at my shoulder, as I led you to a quiet Irish boozer on the corner.
Suddenly I was overwhelmed by the thorn-like memories of my Irish cousin Donovan. They threatened to unman me into poufy tears, before I boxed them deep again. Donovan was not, however, forgotten. I’d raise a pint to him. And when I did? I’d force myself to think about what was still happening to him.
Blood Shackles (Rebel Vampires Book 2) Page 9