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 that 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 embarrassment 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.
Nothing like freedom.
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 that you’d devoured one cupcake already.
Chocolate crumbs clung to the corners of your mouth, as you busily stuffed in a second cupcake. When you caught me peeking at you, you looked so much like a guilty kid that I couldn’t help laughing.
You frowned, but then grinned around the buttercream.
It was the first time that I’d seen you unguarded.
For once, you’d let me choose your outfit. I’d picked a 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 studying me. Were you flushed?
I sucked a little bit harder on my fingers.
“There are no calories in these, huh?” Your brow arched.
“Tonnes. Have the last one.”
Your hand shot out. I like an appetite on a woman.
I sprang up again, bursting with the night’s possibilities. I sprinted down the hill, diving behind plane trees and playing at the hunt.
You frowned. “Hey, where 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 fresh blood that 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 ears. 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 realized that your wrist was empty.
I’d argued — begged — for you to leave all technology behind, so that 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. One bloke with a white knight complex tried to clout me on your behalf and a kindly dogwalker insisted on calling the police.
So, we legged it.
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 decorated with homemade signs for book clubs, I realized that 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 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, and fizzing with the night-time Blood Lifer energy.
If I was only getting one shot, then I needed to make sure that it was high dose. I had a plan (half-arsed but it was all that 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 dark but beautiful world on your doorstep, would you understand us Blood Lifers…or be bothered 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 t
ry to play the hero.
I know that 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 that I will find a way to keep them.
So, the plan was to open your eyes. And yeah, I definitely managed that.
You turned around 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 blared past.: a streak of flashing neon in the black. Music boomed from behind shuttered shops; the songs were in so many different languages and styles that they melded together into a single babble. 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 girls 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 wasn’t like I didn’t realize there were those who’d want to send us home too. Yet this was our home. It had been for longer than any of you First Lifers had 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.
I raised my eyebrow. “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, when I heard the clack of your sandals, as you hurried to catch up with me, I smiled.
“These are wicked.” You’d stopped, peering into an African wig shop and tapping 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 other Blood Lifers? Thorns, waiting under petals to prick me when I dared to forget Abona?
“How about we wet our whistles?” I muttered. “There must be a boozer around here somewhere.”
You glanced around, before true to form, pointing at a long queue that snaked outside a bar, which was lit up in pink. The bar stuck out, as some wanker’s idea of gentrifying the postcode. Girls from Essex or Kent with fake tans and stilettos clutched onto spiky haired blokes, just as drunks hung onto the barrier, trying to chat with anyone who’d make eye contact. One pillock was pissing into the gutter.
And the worst of it…?
A fascist bouncer (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.
You arched your brow. “My daddy could buy—”
“Money can’t buy everything. Hard lesson?”
For a moment, I reckoned that 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 pub on the corner.
Suddenly, I was overwhelmed by the thorn-like memories of my Irish cousin, Donovan; they threatened to unman me into tears, before I boxed them deep again. Donovan was not, however, forgotten. I’d raise a pint to him and I’d force myself to think about what was still happening to him.
There was a gang of lads, joking around and smoking outside the entrance to the pub. They were getting in the last ciggie before their pint in tribal camaraderie.
That’s when the craving hit: I missed my lighter. I slipped out my new e-cig and started to vape. The lighter though…it had this…feel. Yet you gave me the e-cig. It’s the first thing that you ever gave me that’s new to this life. The e-cig’s beginning to fit in my hand, in the way that my lighter always did…and I don’t understand it.
I sneaked a glance at you out of the corner of my eye. “Anyway, I have a rule: no lists. If a place has a list — sod it. No one gets to judge whether I should be on or off a bloody piece of paper.”
You nodded.
I blinked with surprise as I pushed through into the pub: tatty wooden bar at the back, whose shelves were stacked with different brews, spirits, and crisps (none of the snazzy alcopops or flavored vodka rubbish), round wooden tables spotted across the bare floors and emerald upholstered booths underneath the windows. An Irish flag hung limply on the wall; it looked like it’d been hung when the pub had first opened…and hadn’t been washed since.
My kind of place.
I strutted to the bar, resting my elbow on it. I was about to order, when I heard…
“Can we get two tonics here?” Your clipped command.
I caught the barman’s arm. “Hold on, scrub that. Two pints of Guinness, cheers mate.”
The barman, who had narrow eyes and a beard that was so bushy, it was as if he was compensating for the smallness of his face, glanced between the two of us. Then he gave a curt nod. The dark liquid began to pour slowly, before settling in the glasses.
I smiled innocently at you. “My night—”
“Your rules?”
When the Guinness had taken its sweet time, and you and I finally had two pints with creamy heads in front of us, we inched into a booth. There was a tiny dish of nuts in its center, as if this was the height of generosity. The window looked out over the street and the station beyond. We could hear the tortured squeal of the trains through the glass, and when they went overhead, the whole pub rattled.
I raised my glass: to Donovan and the Lost.
I sensed you watching me, when I took my first sip. My eyes fluttered closed: since Abona I’d been teetotal. It’s not like I have to protect my liver. Those degenerative diseases that you First Lifers fear? We Blood Lifers have evolved past such anxiety. We regenerate, or for half a millennium at least.
It’s not eternal life, but I’m a glass half full type of bloke.
Opening my eyes, I smacked my lips. “Go on then. You do drink?”
You hesitated one moment longer, before slurping a good quarter of your pint. “There were these wicked keg parties back in Boston. Fernando and me would hide all this beer on account of, you know, not being twenty-one yet. If the college authorities came, we’d book it. And this one time?” You leant closer, conspiratorial, “Fernando invited me to his cuz’s house, which he did a lot on account of me having no… I mean, his whole family were out there; he’s a lucky guy. So, I was at his cuz’s. We were drinking and swimming in his pool, and then the cops showed because of the music. We booked it out of there, over the fence, wearing nothing but…” You snickered as you took another pull on your pint.
“So,” I played with my glass, twirling it around, “you and Fernando are...?”
Suddenly, you were stone cold sober. “None of your fricking business. Now drink up, this little outing is over.”
I drew back, whilst my heart pounded. “Hold up—”
You waved your hand through the air like a blade. “Naw, I’m done. London’s not yours.”
“The Lost have walked these streets as long as you humans,”
I whispered, low and intense, “which makes them ours, as much as yours.”
I might as well have clouted you. You shivered, crossing your arms. “You hunt here — parasitically. But England? The world? It belongs to us. You’re just…”
“Parasites?” I offered, stiffening. You didn’t even have the decency to look away.
“These are my streets.” You tapped the sticky table for emphasis, in a pub, street, postcode that you’d never have ventured into, if it hadn’t been for me.
I took a drag on my e-cig. “Over hundred and fifty years says different, sweetheart.”
You wore that narked expression, which I’d hoped we’d left behind for the night. “My home. Not yours.”
My gaze softened. “Any reason that it can’t be both?”
“On account of you’re…” You stopped yourself, pushing your Guinness away with a jerky shove. Your shoulders slumped as you finished softly, “…not human.”
“Right. Because I’d missed that.” I took a mouthful of nuts, munching thoughtfully. You’d withdrawn hermit-crab like, your hair falling in two curtains over your face. “There were humans once, who thought like you, the last time a Blood Lifer had the courage to reveal himself to a First Lifer. It was one of my ancestors. A man of reason in an age of superstition. He reckoned that our two species could live out in the open — side by side — so I was told. These First Lifers? They thought that he was the devil.”
You’d raised your head; I could see your eyes — stormy gray now — through the veil of your hair. “What...?”
“They burned him.”
A train screeched past; the smoke-stained walls shook. The tables rattled, spilling Guinness down the sides of my glass.
You scrutinized me, as your fingers tore minute strips out of a stained beer mat. “But you were with a human: Kathy?”
My chest ached. To you, I didn’t even deserve a home…to walk these streets…because I wasn’t human. You’d been trained by the Cains as much as any Blood Lifer slave: I hadn’t broken to believe myself nothing but a shadow. Why couldn’t you see me as Light?
“And that’s none of your business.” I downed my pint, avoiding your gaze. “Let’s clear off then. Stop while we’re behind.”
Rebel Vampires: The Complete Series Page 33