I kept my eyes lowered; I didn't dare look at the sun.
I ran up the stairs and knocked on Gil's door, calling out: ‘Gil, it's me. Let me in.’ Then I listened, waiting for him to shuffle across the floor to stand on the other side. At first, there was that same silence born of indecision, while he wondered whether he should pretend not to be there—but he knew that I knew that he was there, and in the end he came to the door.
'I'm not better yet,’ he called out.
'It doesn't matter,’ I said. ‘I've got it too.'
Again, there was silence, while he considered the implications of that reply. I knew that he was wondering whether I was just saying it in order to make him open up, and I was hurt by that. He ought to have trusted me, I thought. Given all that we were to one another, he ought to have trusted me not to tell him an outright lie.
'I've really got it,’ I told him. ‘Headache, sore throat. No sniffles yet, but I can sort of feel them building up. I don't think it's a local bug at all. Maybe you brought it with you, all the way from California. Maybe it'll run riot through the south of England.'
I was joking. I knew that viruses didn't lie dormant for that long. Not usually, at any rate.
He unlocked the door and let me in. I'd imagined that he'd be standing there in a dressing gown looking woeful, maybe even clutching a hot-water bottle, but he wasn't. He was fully dressed. He did look slightly off colour and his eyes were bloodshot, but his nose wasn't red.
'I'll make a cup of coffee,’ he said, offhandedly. He didn't seem pleased to see me. He looked anxious and wary. I thought that he ought to have made more effort, however bad he felt. I was his lover, after all, and he hadn't seen me for two whole days.
When he came back from the kitchenette with the coffee, he said: ‘Is there an epidemic on campus? Is everyone coming down with it?'
'Not as far as I know,’ I said.
I could see that he had mixed feelings about the reply, as if it might be bad news or might be good. I'd worked out by then what it was all about. ‘You are afraid that it's something from the labs, aren't you?’ I said. ‘You don't really believe it, but you decided to hole up just in case. Now I've got it too, you're worried in case it's escaped. You really think it might run riot, don't you?'
He shook his head. ‘The fact that you've got it too makes it even more likely that it's just an ordinary bug. That's the overwhelming probability. I know it, intellectually, but ...'
'I suppose men who work with dynamite jump out of their skins every time somebody pops a crisp packet,’ I said, meaning to be comforting by making light of it all. But we both remembered how vehemently he'd denied that his work would make him sensitive. He was ashamed that he couldn't take his own advice, and couldn't quite live up to his own expectations.
'Even if it were one of ours,’ Gil said, defensively, ‘it's still just a virus. The worst that could happen would be a few bad dreams. Have you had any bad dreams, Anne?'
'No worse than I'd expect on the night I started coming down with a bug,’ I told him. I didn't have a single pang of anxiety about Maldureve. I'd already done all my worrying about the possibility that he might only be a hallucination. He was solid enough, and he'd been around for far too long to be a product of some silly fever dream. I was more worried about the possibility that Gil had written off what had happened between us two nights ago as a symptom of his sickness. I wanted to show him that it wasn't, and I wanted his blood, too. But I knew that if I started on him now, he'd just be confirmed in his view that it was the virus that was responsible for his feelings, and not me at all.
As I sipped my coffee, though, I began to wonder whether that might be altogether a bad thing. Maybe, I thought, it would make it easier for him, in the short term. Maybe it was a way of getting him used to the truth while his guard was down, so that he'd find it easier in the long term to accept what was happening to him. I didn't want him to die, and I didn't want to have to desert him in order to go hunting other prey. I wanted him to choose to live, to choose to be a vampire, and I thought that it would be much easier for him to make that choice if he could be persuaded, one way or another, that vampires were real. While he was Gil the smart scientist, Gil the streetwise Californian, it wasn't going to be easy for Anne the wilted northern English rose to persuade him of that, and if there was any way that the common cold—or, more precisely, his anxieties regarding the possibility that his particular cold was by no means common—could be recruited to the cause, then I ought to do it.
'What if it is an epidemic?’ I said, while I thought about it. ‘What if something has escaped from your lab which will sweep across campus, and then across the world?'
'Even if it were something from the lab,’ he said, ‘which is a million-to-one shot in itself, the odds are still stacked against it doing any damage at all, even if it could spread—which it almost certainly couldn't. If it were something from the labs, it wouldn't be a common-cold virus, tailored by natural selection for maximum contagiousness, no matter what symptoms it produced. It'd be a weak and feeble thing, which probably couldn't pass from one person to another without very intimate contact. I haven't had intimate contact with anyone else but you. Not lately.'
He looked at me in what seemed to me to be a peculiar fashion, although it may have been just his bloodshot eyes. I couldn't help wondering whether he had his suspicions about my seeing someone else. I couldn't help wondering, either, whether Maldureve had any inbuilt resistance to the viruses of our world, or whether they might be as fatal to him as earthly bacteria had been to H. G. Wells’ Martian invaders. It was an authentically horrible thought, in its way, but it was comical, too, because I couldn't believe it for an instant. I must have smiled very faintly, suppressing a giggle, because Gil didn't seem to think that my reaction to his provocative remark was all that could be desired.
'Hell, Anne,’ he said, ‘we shouldn't be doing this. We're just winding one another up. I thought I was all ready to go in at the deep end and work with these things, but maybe I need more practice controlling my anxieties. I didn't know it would hit me like this the first time I came down with a bug. God, I'm so stupid.'
'Maybe you'd better ring Professor Viners,’ I said, ‘and make sure that he's feeling on top of the world.'
'No,’ he said, positively. ‘It has to stop right here, right now. We have to stop scaring ourselves with these macabre little jokes. Let's just see this thing through. Shouldn't you go home to bed?'
'It's not that bad,’ I said. ‘Don't you want me to stay?'
'I know it's a mite churlish,’ he said, ‘but when I'm not well, I really do prefer to be alone. If I could, I'd just crawl into a hole and zip it up behind me. It's not that I don't ...'
He stopped before he said, ‘love you'. He always did. I don't know why. It can't have been lack of practice in the gentle art of lying. He was five years and a few months older than me, and well-schooled in the theory that it's okay to say anything whatsoever to a girl if you have a chance of scoring with her. Why was he so reluctant to say that he loved me? I could have said it to him.
'I can make you feel better,’ I told him.
'I really don't feel up to it,’ he said.
'That's not what I mean,’ I told him. I stood up and went over to his chair, and looked down at him. I was scared, because I wasn't entirely sure I could do it, but I knew I had to try. I had to think of Maldureve—put myself in his shoes—and believe with all my might that my eyes had magical hypnotic power. I had to choose to be able to do what I had to do.
I looked him straight in the eyes, and I said: ‘Trust me, Gil. Don't do anything—just trust me.’ I didn't pose it as a question, but as a command. I didn't want any evasions, any hesitations. I stared into his eyes, and I tried to be a true vampire: a gaudy lamia; a charismatic femme fatale. I tried to catch him and hold him, in spite of his sickness, in spite of his reluctance. I tried to reach out, to summon all his young blood from the depths of his being, to take full pos
session of whatever vestiges of lust were in him.
He looked up at me, frowning in puzzlement. But then the frown began to fade away, to be replaced by a different kind of uncertainty. He looked into my eyes with awe. He didn't know what he was seeing, but he knew that I wasn't just Anne any more. He knew that I was something more than that, and I was glad. I hadn't quite realised how desperately I needed someone else to be able to see me, and to know that I had undergone a miraculous metamorphosis.
When Gil looked up at me with awe in his eyes, I knew that everything would be all right.
Then I bent down to kiss his neck. The mark was still there, the size of a fifty-pee piece, blue turning to purple and yellow. It was beautiful and tender, and I could almost see the flesh softening in anticipation of my caress.
I kissed him, and held the kiss long enough to be sure that he wasn't resisting, and then, very gently, I began to drink. I didn't know whether it would conjure up all the good feelings of which he was capable, given that I had to go ahead without any significant foreplay, but I knew that he was wide awake, and I knew that he could tell himself, if it made it any easier for him, that it was only a delirious dream, only a hallucination, only some stray psychotropic protein making merry amid the synapses of his deluded brain.
For me, it was better than the first time. My hunger was no more avid, but this time I knew what to expect. The anticipation of the taste added to the pleasure of consummation. I was able to relax more, to revel in the glorious sensation of his blood flowing into my mouth, into my inner being.
I suppose we weren't ideally positioned, with me standing up and him sitting down, but it didn't matter. The sensations associated with the flow of the blood drove out all others, and sent me soaring as high as a kite. It was utterly beautiful, infinitely satisfying.
Perhaps I drank too deeply. When I stopped and discreetly withdrew, his bloodshot eyes were glazed. The wound on his neck was angry and ugly, glistening with unspilled blood. He sank back into the armchair like a discarded doll. His eyes were still open, but he wasn't wide awake any longer.
For one dreadful moment, I thought he might even be dead, but then he started breathing again, raggedly but forcefully. I could see the wound fading, as if it were folding in upon itself. It was as if the practised flesh knew better this time how to go about the work of healing itself, obliterating the record of what had been done to it.
I felt dizzy, intoxicated, full.
All my life, I'd had difficulty because of my inadequate appetite. I'd never wanted to eat as much as other people wanted me to, because I'd never really wanted to be full. Being full, in the ordinary stomach-loading sense, had never seemed to me to be a pleasurable sensation; it had always been a kind of discomfort. This was different.
This was very different.
'Gil,’ I said, softly.
He heard me, but he didn't reply. His only response was to adjust his position slightly, to relax even further. He let his anxious, staring eyes fall thankfully shut. He looked as if he had drifted peacefully away to blissful sleep. There wasn't actually a smile on his face, but he was calm and serene. He had been possessed by pleasure; I had no doubt at all about that.
'I told you so,’ I said, wondering whether the quietly spoken words would sound like a disembodied whisper in his ear, spilling into his peaceful dream from the borderlands of existence. ‘I told you I could make you feel better. For now, you can think of it as a recurrent dream, if you want to. You can get to know it on those terms—learn to love it on those terms. Think of it as a lovely and precious hallucination, something better than vulgar reality could ever provide. When you've learned to love it on those terms, how very glad you'll be to find out that it's real after all! How immensely grateful you'll be to learn that there are more things in Heaven and Earth ... and you won't be frightened by the owls, Gil. Not you. You'll be able to deal with them. We'll tackle them together. We're one and the same, now.'
Then I licked my lips and left him to recuperate. I felt absolutely fine. My headache was gone and my throat felt perfectly okay. The whole world was in sharper focus, and I was walking on air.
I realised that I hadn't had a virus at all—that all I'd had was a lurking anxiety, which had brought on withdrawal symptoms far earlier than was necessary. Perhaps vampiric invulnerability, I thought, was adequate after all to repel such vulgar ailments as the common cold. When Gil made his choice, as I was determined that he should, he too could stop worrying about million-to-one possibilities. He too could be strong, and happy, and full.
Even though the sun was still out, steering an unsteady course through the passing clouds, shining down as though it were June instead of December, I didn't feel that the eyes of the owls were upon me at that particular moment, or that their tiny claws had any power to prick my heart and lacerate my soul.
13
That afternoon we had a lecture on Descartes’ first meditation. I expected it to be boring, and in a way it was, but I was taking such an interest in everything that I couldn't help getting involved in the argument. I suppose I was gradually turning into a philosopher, as a result of Dr Gray's incessant assaults on my stream of consciousness.
I couldn't believe that anyone could be so mind-bogglingly daft as Descartes, who had set out to doubt everything so successfully that he had reduced the realm of the indubitable to the mere fact of there being a doubting thought, and then had promptly put the whole damned universe back in place, as bonny and bright as ever, simply by jumping to the absurd conclusion that God wouldn't lie to him. Could this be the same God, I wondered, who ordered Abraham to sacrifice his son, and then said ‘Sorry, Abe—only joking'? Was this the same God who slaughtered the first-born of Egypt, innocent or guilty, just to make a point that all his other plagues and pestilences had failed to make? Was this the same God who moved in such mysterious ways that all the philosophers and logicians in the world couldn't make head or tail of what he was supposed to be doing, or how, or why?
Dr Chapman, of course, tried to let Descartes off the hook. It was, he suggested, just a way of dramatising the fact that there was a minimal act of faith involved in assuming that the world of appearances was intelligibly connected with things as they were. Descartes had to be diplomatic, Dr Chapman pointed out, given that he was living in a time when accusations of heresy could be dangerous to a man's health. I suppose Dr Chapman was right, but I wasn't in a compromising mood that day. I was full of myself, and full of Gil's blood. And I thought that I knew far more than Descartes or Dr Chapman about the reality behind the world of appearances, and what mighty follies might be concealed by little leaps of faith. Pride, as Dad would have reminded me, goeth before...
I'd never been able to believe in God, even though Mum and Dad—who weren't churchgoers themselves—had forced me to go to Sunday school until I was eleven. Sharon had just refused to go, but in my own more docile fashion I'd avoided the fuss, and simply refused to believe a single word I heard. I found it much easier to believe in that malevolent demon who might have designed the entire world as a crazy dream, just to fool poor old Descartes—and I couldn't find any sympathy in my heart for Descartes, who obviously hadn't felt the same.
Naturally enough, I didn't say anything to Dr Chapman. I might have made him lose his place in his yellowed notes, and he wouldn't have appreciated that.
In a way, I was still in Sunday school.
After the lecture I was buttonholed by Cynthia, who said that she wanted to ask me about the essay we were doing for Dr Gray's next tutorial. I suppose she did. She also, as it transpired, wanted to ask my opinion about all the lecturers, all the philosophers about whom the lecturers lectured, all the social problems currently afflicting the north of England, the south of England and the rest of the world, and anything else she could think of to keep the conversation going. She simply couldn't be shaken off. There was no way in the world I could avoid inviting her back to my room for a cup of coffee and a long conversation.
A
t first, I thought she might be trying to seduce me, and I wondered whether I ought to be amused, flattered or insulted, or a bit of all three—but I wasn't scared. Even though the possibility of being propositioned by lesbians had been too unthinkable to figure in the long catalogue of dire warnings which Mum and Dad had issued before they consented to wave goodbye to their darling daughter, I wasn't scared. I just wondered whether Cynthia's blood would taste much different from Gil's, and whether she might be a useful person to cultivate, given that Gil would one day turn into a vampire and become as useless to me as I was fast becoming—perhaps had already become—to Maldureve.
Eventually, though, I realised that she wasn't hellbent on going to bed with me at all. She was just lonely and uncertain. She just wanted someone to talk to, and be with. She was ten years older than I, but not that much different. Her self-assurance was as haphazard as the spare flesh which lay about her unslender person; it had simply grown there over the years, without any regard at all to whether it was attractive or useful or well designed. She felt out of her depth at the university. She was desperately afraid that she couldn't cope with the work, with the examinations which would one day loom up on the horizon, and with life itself.
I was astonished—not so much by the discovery that she was so screwed up, but by the fact that she'd come to me for reassurance and moral support. To me!
'You're clever,’ she said, defeatedly, and perhaps not meaning it sincerely. ‘I can see that. Cleverer than I am. When I was your age I was in a dead-end job and glad that I was six months pregnant, even though my boyfriend had disappeared, because it was a ticket out of the job. A ticket from the frying pan to the fire, as things turned out—not that I'd be without Janine now, you understand. She's all I've got, bless her. She doesn't mean to be awkward. It's just her age. It isn't easy being a single parent, and it didn't get any easier when I decided to stop pretending that I could form relationships with men and came out. I didn't realize how clever people were until I came here. Your essays are ten times better than mine, and Dr Gray doesn't begin to make a fool of you the way he makes a fool of me, week after week.'
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