Free.
Even if it was only for one night.
I don’t have to tell you what happened. But me and you? Whatever this is…Stockholm Syndrome or…
Last night, however, you gave me back something that I’d reckoned lost: I was a true Blood Lifer, alone again in the world. I prowled the black, under the wide white moon, led only by my blood. I was exultant in my anonymous freedom, camouflaged once more in the warm night dark.
Gangs of First Lifers wandered the vomit splattered pavements, searching out strip clubs or brothels, kebabs or cheesy chips, cocaine or cabs home.
Cruisers were hanging around a public toilet; I glimpsed a couple shagging against a wall in the shadows of an alley. Junkies slumped in self-induced trances, or crouched in payphones inhaling crack pipes. One girl, who was off her head on ketamine, drooled and dodged honking cabs.
This was London: my London, where no one knew or cared who I was, and I was safe even in the darkest of worlds.
I slipped your iPod out of the pocket of my jacket, worming in the earbuds. After all these months of sensory deprivation, it was blinding.
But your taste in music? It was so bland that it might as well be white noise. What you needed were the greats: Billy Fury and THE FOUR JAYS, Jimi Hendrix, and The Sex Pistols.
So, I’d uploaded them. Because your passwords hadn’t been difficult for a bloke like me to memorize from a glance over your shoulder.
In the dark, I put on The Rolling Stones. It was like coming alive. Around me, London took on a clash of experimental chaos.
I ran and ran and… Alessandro. My hands curled into fists, as I jumped benches and scaled walls. The music spun me back to the summer of 1968, when I’d discovered my Blood Lifer family.
The Stone’s Their Satanic Majesties Request had been Alessandro’s favorite in his obsessive vinyl collection. Alessandro had been my mate: my first and only.
Yet I bloody got him killed.
I stopped running, panting for breath. I rested my forehead against the cool brick of an alley.
See, there’s the problem: the last time I played at hero, someone else paid the price. I tried to be the leader and I messed it up; I’m terrified that I will this time too. I incited the innocent to rise against his tyrant of an Author.
I incited Alessandro to his death.
Until I met Hartford and Donovan, I was alone. With Kathy I was always a Blood Lifer in a First Lifer world. Now I have mates again — family — and I can’t bugger it up.
The otherworldly harpsichord started of “In Another Land”, and I forced myself on towards a park, which was dark with leathery-leaved plane trees. When a desolate wind swept across an empty plain on the track, I felt it keenly: the loneliness and dislocation. It plunged me back into the despair of Abona. Then began the drumbeat like a heartbeat.
A coming alive.
I was sprinting now, desperate to reach those trees, with an animalistic instinct for shelter and panicked flight. And that’s when I thought of you and calmed, slowing, until I was jogging again.
In this strange new world, which I’d found myself in, yours was the only hand that I’d had to hold. I’d reckoned that it’d been proprietorial: a sign of ownership. That I wasn’t the type to need hand holding.
Only maybe the truth was that I did need to hold your hand. Maybe the truth was that you needed to hold mine as well.
Once, when I was visiting London from our home in Watford with my papa, I let go of his hand. I didn’t realize it straight away, but it was nearly the end of me.
By letting go, I risked losing everything.
Papa and I were on Regent Street outside Bassano’s, surrounded by a gaggle of grave men in overcoats and sober suits, with side-whiskers or beards, which ran under their chins, who were debating the relative merits of using paper or glass negatives.
Paper had revolutionized the photographic process by producing not one negative but hundreds: multiple identical twins. A man’s youth enslaved for eternal parade.
I half-listened, restlessly shifting under the molten summer sun. Sweat trickled under my collar.
Papa was extolling glass coated with collodion (gun cotton dissolved in ether). It sharpened the prints to mimic real life: photography not as art but truth. Folks were passing in and out of the studio in a steady stream to record forever the rites of passage: a nurse with a babe in arms, who’d achieved the feat of sitting unaided and a lanky youth (not much older than me), who in his shiny new suit was celebrating his first job.
Then my little fingers slipped out of papa’s larger hand in the heat of his debate.
And I was free.
At first, I stood there, obedient. In these London expeditions, I was papa’s joint explorer. Today, however, in the height of the afternoon sun, I was frustrated because papa had insisted on holding my hand, like I was not yet in breeches.
Papa had blamed the Season, saying that he didn’t want me to be swept way. Yet I’d also heard him muttering to mama his promise to keep tight hold of precious Light because kids were being snatched for unnatural crimes.
When I’d asked papa about it, however, he’d blushed in a way that I’d never seen before.
Papa had always urged me to seek out knowledge and to question everything. And what I’d learned that day was all adults had secrets.
I stared around at the thronging street.
It was terraced and stuccoed, with parades of shops. Tides of carriages washed down the dusty wooden thoroughfare, rattling and clattering; their panels glittered and the flanks of their horses gleamed. I caught glimpses of golden tresses, lilac muslins, and cravats in the cushioned interiors.
Men, women, and kids of every class and type — duchesses, foreign counts, and schoolboys — chattered, laughed, lounged and ebbed and flowed along the street, free to explore its delights.
I peeked once more up at my papa, who was still intent on his debate. He hadn’t cottoned on that he’d broken his promise to keep hold of his precious Light.
Then I melted away silently into the crowds, allowing them to carry me along. I figured that I could sightsee and be back before papa even missed me. I was heady with the excitement of Regent Street. I’ve always wanted more — more than childhood, London, England, the world, First Life, my own skin, and even Ruby. More than…
Sometimes I don’t even bloody know.
Then, I thought Regent Street was it, with its fancy shops and temptations.
I wandered from glass-plate window to glass-plate, passing footmen leaning in the stores’ doorways. I gazed at the paisley patterned shawls, tiered cape jackets, and feathered bonnets on pegs, before resting my fingers against a confectioner’s window. My stomach growled at the glorious sight: piles of buns, cakes, bon-bons, jellies, preserves, and glistening barley-sugar cages.
I forced myself away from the delicious treats, jostled as I tried to peek at the itinerant vendors who were calling out to passers-by in jovial patter with their wares laid out on the kerb: prints, stain-cleaning pastes, and mosaic gold chains.
Fascinated, I was listening to an Italian boy grinding a piano organ, when I noticed a dealer hawking spaniel pups at the lamppost. He had one of the tiny things captured in his weathered hands, and it was kicking its front legs piteously.
I struggled through the crowds, weighing up papa’s reaction if I returned with one of the back-and-white bundles with sad eyes stowed in my pocket.
The dog could be my mate: I didn’t have one of those.
I only hesitated because papa might drown it; I wasn’t sure — for the first time — if I trusted adults anymore.
That’s when I felt the fingers curl around my arm.
I stiffened. “Papa...?”
“That’s right, my pretty little boy. How bad you are for running off.” Terror, like I’d never experienced before. That wasn’t papa. Too nasal and harsh. The man smelled wrong: mildewy. And the hand was huge in a too neat glove. I tried to wrench away, but the man’s grip t
ightened... Snatched for unnatural crimes… I swung my fist, catching the Impostor Papa a hook under his bearded chin. “You wretched rat!”
The man, who wore a seedy linen suit and whose oily hair was smartly parted (at least I’d knocked off his top hat), caught my two wrists in his one strong hand. Then he hauled me up by my middle; my legs kicked ineffectually. He snatched up his top hat, ramming it back onto his head.
The spaniel seller sniggered, as if this was all part of a shared adult joke.
Hot tears sprang into my eyes. Why couldn’t he see — why couldn’t everyone see — that I was being kidnapped?
“Papa!” I wailed. “Papa—”
“Shut up, you little…” the kidnapper hissed, squeezing me, until it was painful.
Still I didn’t stop crying, “Help! Help! Papa—”
At last, thank Christ in heaven, a gentleman in quilted overcoat, who was resting on a fancy walking stick, tapped the kidnapper on the shoulder with an imperious knuckle. “See here, my good man, what is this rumpus about?”
I gasped on a sob, staring up at my rescuer with desperate eyes. “My papa—”
The kidnapper slapped his hand over my mouth. Then his wily face smoothed into an expression of utter consternation. “Such a wicked lad. Incorrigible. The worst of liars and a runaway.”
At once the kindly gentleman’s concern transformed into a frown. I wilted under his stern scrutiny. Because wasn’t the kidnapper right? I had run away.
This was my fault.
I stopped struggling, although I couldn’t stop the tears, which were now mostly of shame.
This seemed to confirm what the gentleman was looking for because he gave a curt nod. “My apologies, sir. But you hear such things just now; I was only doing my civic duty. Still, boys are cunning creatures. Quite despicable. I hope that you don’t intend to spare the rod?”
The kidnapper’s mouth slid into a nasty curve of a leer. “Have no concern on that head, sir.”
I lay limply in the man’s arms, as he dragged me off Regent Street, further from my papa and towards Piccadilly, on a long, ugly road.
It was as if every step, I was lost a little more to a darkness, which I hadn’t known existed until that moment.
I’d wanted more: knowledge and the adult world. Well, looked like I was going to bloody get it, didn’t it?
We passed a livery, coming to a brick and tile Stuart house that was attached to it. I could see pale kids (boys the same as me), peering down out of the windows. The terror returned: once I was trapped inside that Stuart house, I wasn’t getting out again.
“Home sweet home. You’re to be my bitch’s shadow.” The kidnapper stroked my hair like I was his doll.
No one had ever touched me in quite that manner before; I shuddered. So, the next time the kidnapper’s hand moved down to my mouth, I turned my head, catching his fleshy palm between my teeth.
And bit.
The bastard let out a roar like a bull as he shook me.
But I wouldn’t let go.
He dropped me to the muddy pavement, clouting me, until I saw stars. Gasping, I legged it. There were a few steps of intoxicating freedom…until the bastard tripped me.
The man boxed my ears as he hauled me inside, still fighting for all I was worth.
“Let go…” I snarled.
My kidnapper threw me to the tiled floor, and I hit my knees hard.
When I looked up through tear blurred eyes, I thought for a moment that I must be facing a looking glass, except…this other boy was dressed in a flimsy cotton shirt…and no trousers. His eyes were rimmed with kohl and his lips tinted with rouge, like some beautiful boy-girl.
Except, one of his eyes was purpled and he was ghost-white.
He was some posh gentleman’s fetishized fantasy.
Shocked out of my own distress, I pushed myself up, as I stared at my twin, whilst he studied me.
“Look what I’ve found, my little bitch, a twin Mary-Ann for you. Your shadow. The punters’ll pay a pretty penny for the two of you together.” The kidnapper pointed at my twin. “You train him up good and quick, you hear?”
I knew bad things, immoral acts, and unnatural crimes were going to be done to me, even if I didn’t know what they were. I tried not to show my fear, yet I knew that I was trembling.
“Those threads? Kid like him? He’s not workhouse or off the street. No foundling or orphan.” I don’t know why I was surprised by my twin’s soft Spitalfields accent, as if I was expecting to hear my own voice reflected back at me. “Where’d you get this one from then, Mr Dabs?’
Smack — I flinched, when Mr Dabs backhanded the boy across the mouth. “Never you mind where. He’s mine now.”
I bristled. “My papa—”
“Ain’t your papa now: I am.’ Mr Dabs grinned, before twirling in a circle. “This is your home.” I gazed around at the low-ceilinged room, which was hung with purple drapes and had a tatty chaise longue and oak cupboard. “And you…have been very naughty.” When he shook his sore hand, I was proud of the inflamed bite. “Little bitch, fetch the cane.” My insides froze. I stood still though, whilst the other boy reluctantly opened the cupboard. When my twin pulled out a long rattan cane with a crooked handle, which looked like it could thrash you half to death, I took a step back. “You, brat,” Mr Dabs pointed at the end of the chaise longue, “lower your breeches and bend over.” When I didn’t move, Mr Dabs sucked his yellowing teeth in irritation. The other boy was holding the cane like it was loathsome even to touch, which told me that he’d often felt its bite. Our gazes met; there was something dark and questioning in his that I didn’t understand. But he didn’t hand over the cane to Mr Dabs. “Come on, little bitch, or do you want a thrashing too?”
My twin startled, yet he still hesitated. Then I could see it: the moment that he came to a decision. He squared his shoulders. Then he gave me a cheeky half-smile, before he brought down the cane in a full swishing crack on Mr Dab’s sly face.
Mr Dabs howled and crumpled.
“Scarper!” The boy yelled, grabbing me by the arm and dragging me to the front door. “Go on, then.”
Shocked, I stumbled out into the light, expecting to see my twin behind me. But he was slamming the door…imprisoning himself with the enraged Mr Dabs.
I legged it as fast as I ever had, back to Regent Street and Bassano’s, and back to my distraught papa, who furious, grabbed me sharply by the shoulders.
When papa caught sight of my swollen face, however, he clasped me close, whilst I wrapped my arms around his waist. I no longer cared how much of a baby I looked, as I sobbed.
“You let go, Light,” papa said softly, allowing me to hold onto him, as the tears fell. “You let go of my hand.”
For me, that afternoon on Regent Street was only a brief glimpse of a dark world, before I twisted away. I don’t reckon, however, that my rent boy twin ever escaped. As if he were my whipping boy, he lived out my planned fate.
He saved me, simply because I had something that he’d long lost: family.
That memory didn’t come fresh re-lived to my mind, until I was slouched last night on a bench in the park under the plane trees, the scruffy crows shuffling in the branches, opposite a rainbow-bruised tramp.
I thought of holding your hand and that sparked those past ghosts.
All right then, so maybe my whipping boy lived out his First Life longer than I survived, although for his sake, I hope he didn’t. His best prospect was to have ended up as some rich man’s toy.
I guess that means I truly am his twin now, doesn’t it?
When the spotters came hassling to register me as homeless, I dived over the fence to find a 24-hour café.
I hunkered over a coffee with the cabbies, blood-splattered butchers from the markets, rickshaw drivers, whose vehicles were abandoned half-on, half-off the pavement outside and the hookers, who were knackered from a night of sucking and shagging. Outside a street cleaner swept past, clearing away London’s detritus:
pig heads, sycamore leaves, coffee cups, chip cartons, and chewing gum.
I’d bought myself a ciggie at a convenience store but threw it in the gutter after one drag. It felt wrong in my hand.
Your e-cig it was then.
I puffed and drank and in that café of night walkers, I thought.
I should return to you. I could feel the pull of dawn and could see the purple bruising to the night sky, which warned of the rising sun.
Yet I was crippled by sudden desperation.
I smoked my e-cig, as if stuck to that plastic chair, like I’d never get my arse out of it and back to you, even if the sun’s rays shone clear through the glass and melted me to the seat.
Haven’t you ever wanted to end it?
No memories to haunt. No guilt. Nothing to strive for or endure?
But I made a promise to Kathy before she died that afterward, I’d live.
Kathy had dementia, but the promise came early on, when we weren’t lost to each other. It looks like a bleeding stupid thing to have done now. But then, you didn’t think that you were condemning me to eternal slavery, did you, my Moon Girl? Just an eternity alone because that’s the thing about you First Lifers: you age and die. Yet you reckon you’re the superior species…?
Evolution wouldn’t agree.
Kathy left me alone in the dark, and I’m still here.
Crawling out of the black, Kathy once told me, would be my redemption.
I never thought redemption would be this much of a bitch.
Then I remembered that you needed me to hold your hand too, downed the dregs of my cold coffee and scarpered, the dawn at my back.
When you swung open the apartment door to my banging and hauled me in by my jacket, you were pale and anxious, wearing those fluffy pink check pajamas, which were never a good sign. “Where the frig have you been? I thought that you’d forgotten the dawn.”
I started. The only other person, who’s ever cared enough to say that to me — don’t forget the dawn — was Kathy.
I smirked. “I never forget the dawn, darling. It just forgets me.”
Rebel Vampires: The Complete Series Page 40