Bloodtide

by Melvin Burgess

  I say, ‘If you want to love me, Conor, you have to win me. Nothing for free ever again. You must show me how much you love me.’

  ‘How? Tell me how…? Anything.’

  ‘Let me out of here,’ I say. And I watch his eyes widen. What did he expect me to ask for? Chocolates?

  ‘Not possible…’

  ‘Because you don’t love me.’

  ‘No! But there are powerful people. Enemies – the same ones who forced my hand to kill your father.’ He’s lying, of course. But he already thinks I’ll believe him because he’s half convinced himself. He thinks so much of himself he even believes his own lies.

  ‘I won’t have you put at risk, you’re too important to me,’ he says.

  ‘Then kill your enemies.’

  ‘No, I need them! Not yet, not yet, Signy. Give me time!’

  I don’t understand. Why does he keep me here? Is he scared of me? Or does he realise in his heart that I am his destruction?

  I nod at the door. ‘Let me know when before you come back.’

  ‘You don’t understand.’ Conor’s voice drops. And now, already, he begins to talk politics. He paints a picture of powerful associations, groups of men and women working against him – against us – people too strong to be defeated. Unlike Val, I suppose he means. These people have to be humoured.

  ‘For the time being,’ he begs. ‘Can’t you see that?’

  I sigh. I half nod my head as if I’m not sure whether to believe him or not, and poor Conor thinks I’m fooled. The only person he fools is himself. Of course it seems to him that half the world wants to destroy him. They do. They’re just not necessarily in the places he expects them to be.

  I nod, I listen, I nod some more. I frown. ‘You should have told me all this before.’

  Conor sighs and smiles apologetically. How lightly he passes over the lives of all my family!

  ‘One day, I’ll free myself of them,’ he promises me. ‘I’ll kill them, every single one of them. You’ll have your revenge. But it takes time!’

  Ah, Conor, my darling, your promises! So many promises made! But I’ll make sure you keep this one.

  ‘I’ll have their heads before I’ll have you,’ I tell him.

  ‘They will die; you will have your revenge,’ he repeats eagerly. We smile and nod at each other. The imaginary enemies have become real. They are why I have to stay trapped here in the tower. They are why my legs are hamstrung, they are the ones who destroyed our love. None of it was anything to do with Conor. On the contrary, he will help me take revenge.

  I have to look away. How can I keep up this agreement of lies? How long will it take?

  If it takes forever, I’ll keep it up forever. That’s how long.

  ‘Conor,’ I say. I say it sadly. ‘Oh, Conor, Conor. Don’t expect me to believe anything you say for a long, long, long time. Oh yes, I still love you…’ He looks up in pleasure at that lie which comes so easily to my lips. ‘Yes, I still do, despite everything. But I’ll have to trust you before you ever touch me again. These are the people who gave the orders for me to be crippled. The ones who forced you to destroy my father. You tell me how strong you are, but it seems to me that you must be weak for these people to bully you like this. You say yourself that you never wanted this. Very well; prove yourself. Bring me their heads.’

  He lost his temper then and stormed about, angry that I called him weak and accused him of being bullied, even though that’s what he’d just told me. Of course, Conor is anything but weak. He is the bully. Well, let him choke on his own lies. He flings a chair at the door, just missing me, and for a minute I think he’s going to rape me. Let him. I’ve survived worse than that. But strange to say he never lays a hand on me when I don’t want him to – not then, not ever.

  In the end he broke up a few more pieces of furniture and then stormed out. I thought, it’s started. My revenge. I will have those heads he’s promised me, the heads of innocent people, no doubt, but they’ll give him an excuse to free me. I will take everything back. Conor wants everything, to kill my father and peg my brothers out for the Pig, and then have me love him into the bargain. Mad! That’s his weakness. He truly believes he can have anything he wants. Even me.

  It’ll take time, but now it’s underway. The problem is Siggy. I’m strong, but he’s weak. How can I make my brother strong? Who is there to help him? Or make him?

  3

  This is a story that travels across years. It begins with children and ends with grown men and women. There are babies. The babies grow tall, some of them, at least.

  Conor had Val’s skeleton bolted to the high gates of the Estate. The words, ‘King of All He Surveys’, were cast in brass and screwed into the wall above him and there he stared blindly out over the world with weeds taking root in him and the rain weeping tears down his face. A robin nested between his ribs and for a while he had a heart fluttering again inside him.

  Signy couldn’t see it, but she heard about it. Conor had given orders that she was to know nothing of it, but the kids took to gathering outside the tower and jeering at her, ‘How’s yer father? How’s yer father?’ Signy closed her curtains and wept. Conor told her that the children were lying, put up to it by his enemies to torment her. Signy knew otherwise; Cherry never lied.

  One of the children got a jackdaw nestling and trained it to speak, ‘How’s yer father? How’s yer father?’ It sat in the eaves of the houses calling out its one phrase day after day. Signy had a word with Conor, and this time she wanted action. Both the jackdaw and the child disappeared and the woods around the tower became forbidden territory to the rest of the Estate. Signy’s isolation in her tower increased.

  In the world beyond, Conor’s campaigns continued with un-diminished success. The halfman lands were scattered with bizarre skeletons, pecked and gnawed as the famine dug deep. At the other end of their territory, the halfmen begged, stole and borrowed from their creators in Ragnor and the other towns and cities around them. These people beyond did not love the halfmen, but they didn’t love London either. It suited them to have Conor and the halfmen at each other’s throats. It saved them having to do it themselves.

  The halfmen organised, found leaders, fought back. The name Dag Aggerman became known – a terrorist to the ganglord, a bogeyman to the people of London, a freedom fighter to the halfmen. But Conor was unstoppable. Race after race of halfmen found themselves staring extinction in the face.

  Conor had planned genocide of the halfmen right from the beginning, but already he was suffering the madness of tyrants. His original military aims began to mutate into a philosophy of hatred, and finally into an act of faith. The halfmen were not just the enemy, they were abominations. Only the races the gods had made must walk the earth. Anyone with even the slightest trace of animal blood in them was all beast – dirty, foul and monstrous.

  For decades there had been interbreeding and secret traffic under the Wall and over recent months many of the more human-looking of the halfman races had crept in to try and escape the raids. Therefore the search moved closer to home, into London itself and down through the family trees. Appearances could be deceptive; the evil was cunning. Conor saw halfman blood wherever it suited him.

  Now no one was safe. Conor’s strange ideas about racial purity caught on like a disease with many people. Secret police were out on the streets. Ordinary people turned into spies – children against their parents, teachers against the kids. If you had so much as a cleft foot or a spotted tongue you were inhuman. More than half the population in areas close to the Wall were turned into animals overnight.

  *

  While Conor raged and fought the whole world, the greatest enemy was at home, and of the purest blood possible.

  Signy had Conor caught on a hook he neither understood nor believed in. She played him with a patience born of the certain knowledge of a lifetime’s captivity. One day she allowed him to kiss her and hold her; the next she wept uncontrollably when he came near. One day she
told him secrets she had only ever shared before with Siggy; the next she winced in fear when he lifted his hand to scratch his cheek. One day she allowed him to open her clothes and kiss her breasts; the next she attacked him when he tried to kiss her.

  Then the time came, over a year after she began her campaign, when her teasing him had its inevitable result. Signy allowed herself to get carried away, and they made love. Their pillow talk was of armies and generals, of surprise attacks and strategy. Conor was deliriously happy, he thought he had everything in the world he wanted, but on his next visit Signy was desperate with frustration, humiliation and fear.

  ‘Let me out of here,’ she wept, over and over.

  ‘I don’t dare. Our enemies…’

  ‘Bring me their heads.’ Over and over. ‘Bring me their heads. Destroy our enemies.’ Signy knew well enough that Conor’s enemies lived only in his imagination. Cherry reported everything faithfully; it had been years since there had been any useful dissent under Conor and his father Abel. The tyrant’s power grew daily, but so did his madness. The enemies that he told Signy about may have begun as useful lies to deny responsibility for what had happened, but they soon became real enough to Conor. They were like nightmares; the greater his control over the world around him became, the stronger they grew.

  ‘Just kill them. Kill them all,’ said Signy. ‘You’ve done it once. Why not again?’ Conor bit his lip and shook his head.

  He wanted Signy here, where he could keep his eye on her. She had already half convinced him that she loved him, but trust was harder. How could Conor trust anyone, when he didn’t even trust himself?

  Meanwhile, Cherry was everywhere. What a spy she made in her different shapes! Cherry sat under the chairs at conferences and committee meetings. Cherry hid behind the curtains or perched on the window sill while the security chiefs tried plan after plan, not to depose Conor, but merely to convince him of their loyalty. Cherry listened to the great men and the little men, and Signy was able to astonish Conor with her insights into what would happen, by whom, and when and how.

  ‘But how did you know?’ he’d cry.

  Conor was not just in love; he was also impressed. Signy had an almost magical grasp of affairs of state.

  Two years after Cherry had found Siggy in the market place, Signy and Conor were sleeping together regularly. One night, for the first time since the murder of her family, he fell asleep as he lay across her thigh. Or so it seemed. In fact, he was pretending. Signy held him as gently as a baby, and stroked his neck and watched with wet eyes as Cherry stood in the doorway of a neighbouring room with a sharp kitchen knife in her hand.

  She shook her head. Even if she hadn’t guessed that Conor was only putting her to the test, killing him was too easy. It would ruin everything. She wanted his whole world in her hand.

  When he opened his eyes he boasted, ‘See? I fell asleep. I trust you.’ But Signy sighed and shook her head, and told him that if he trusted her he would let her out of her prison.

  ‘One day,’ he said. And already he began to think that one day, maybe he really would.

  4

  siggy

  Muswell Hill’s a scumbag of a place to live. It suits me fine. We got this big old flat on the fourth floor of a tatty, ugly brick building overlooking the main street. We could have afforded better, but better attracts attention. I like Muswell Hill. The criminal fraternity is thick on the ground. I mean, you can get lost in the crowd.

  It’s all oil lamps and old dusty furniture, but there’s a great view out over east London and the market’s right down on the street below us. You can see it all – half the folk chewing cabbage leaves picked up from the gutter, the other half swapping videos. You can get some good stuff in Muswell market. The criminal fraternity, see? I spend a lot of time sitting up here with my binoculars, keeping an eye on things. In fact, that’s about all I do. It’s called being depressed. Melanie goes on at me. She’s always out and about, busy, busy. It scares me. I should go along with her, keep an eye on her. I love that smelly old pig. But I can’t. Bring myself to do it, I mean.

  About a year after Cherry found us I went along back to the City to see what Conor had left of our territory and you know what? It wasn’t there any more. All gone. He’d have changed the layout of the roads if he could have. It was stupid to go in the first place. Signy was on at me: there must be some people, you just have to dig deep enough. Well, I dug. I won’t be going back.

  Conor didn’t just defeat us in battle, he annihilated everything to do with the Volsons. It wasn’t just the family. It wasn’t just the generals and the gangmen. It wasn’t even just the merchants who had grown rich under Val, the importers and exporters, the smugglers, the big shopkeepers. It was everyone. It didn’t matter how little they were. If they were little under us, they were dead. Even the poor men and women who had nothing, even the children. Anyone who spoke fondly of us, anyone who admired us, anyone who was thought to admire us – they’d all been wiped out.

  It’s an industry out there. All along Moorgate they have continuous sacrifices to the AlFather. See… Conor’s even taken our god off us. I walked down there; I saw them. I knew them. Strung up by one foot, hands tied behind their backs, men, women and children dripping black blood from their mouths onto the pavements. Half a mile of them. They hung them on anything that came to hand – from lamp-posts, traffic signs, windows, from scaffold poles stuck from window to window or just nailed by a heel to the wall if there was nowhere else handy. Months after the defeat and Conor was still finding fresh victims every day.

  So much for any little hopes we might have left. The people were gone, you see. A territory isn’t land, it’s people. Me and Signy are about the only ones left.

  And still she wants me to fight Conor! What with? Melanie and Cherry armed with nail files? Yeah, well, Melanie goes on at me from time to time about ‘the resistance’. Which is what? A bunch of farmyard animals waving rusty guns in the air. Yeah. OK, I’ve seen enough of halfmen to know that they’re not the monsters everyone thinks they are, but that’s not quite the same thing as fighting an organisation like Conor’s. Melanie – her heart’s in the right place; look what she did for me. I love her, she’s all I have. But I wouldn’t trust her to lay the table, let alone the plans for an invasion.

  The thing that really does my head in, though, is Signy. How can she bear it? After all he’s done! She carries the wounds on her own body, hamstrung. And yet she lets her jailer in. They fuck – well, how else do you want me to put it? Making love? And why? For revenge, so I’m told. Well, listen; I don’t believe all that much in revenge. I mean, what’s it for? What’s it do? I don’t buy it. It’s an excuse. She’s not there for the sake our family. She’s there because she wants to be there. She could get out tomorrow. She could be with me right now if she wanted it, but she prefers to stay there with Conor. After all he’s done! I mean, forget about what he did to Val and Ben and Had. Forget about what he did to me. Look what he did to her!

  Sometimes it makes me want to vomit up my memories of her. But I can’t, I can’t. She’s my sis and I love her. Even when I hate her I still love her. That’s all.

  Well, she was tough, Signy, but she’s had a basinful, let’s face it. It was bad enough what I went through, but she really did fall for Conor. She loved him. She believed it and now she can’t let go. I guess it’s driven her mad.

  That’s what I keep telling myself. She’s crazy. It’s not her fault, it’s not even her doing it any more. That’s not my sister in there, that’s someone else. Conor took everything away, even her own mind. And now he can climb up that ladder and shag what’s left whenever he feels like it… and that… THAT… is the one thing I can’t forgive. And I tell you, if there was anything, anything that might convince me I had a chance of sliding a knife under Conor’s ribs, I’d do it. I’d do it tomorrow. I’d do it now. I’d die for it. I’d do it if it cost the lives of every soul in this town of London.

  But I can’t.


  That’s me, always the realist. Conor’s too strong and I’m too weak. Conor broke Signy, yeah. But he broke me too. We both got away with our lives, but what are we good for now? She’s a lump of meat Conor uses when the urge takes him. And me, I sit here looking out at the world and wondering what it’s going to do to me next, and all I have left to love and hold dear is a lump of fat pork with a big smile on its face called Melanie pig.

  5

  melanie

  This uman, my Siggy, e’s rich as kings and so’m I.

  I goes out every day down the market. Bargins… oinky, Bargins! Everythins a bargin if you got the money. I thought stealin outta dustbins was good shopping. Now I’m out all the time, buying grub, good grub, bad grub – it’s all grub, innit? If it ain’t no good fer me it’ll be good fer someone else. I oinky-buys dented tins o fruit and vegetables cheap, n then gets meself ripped off. Oinky-oinky, ha-ha-ha! Well, that’s what my Sigs thinks, but I’m too smart fer that. No, oinky, no-no. Groink. I beats em right down to a handful of pennies n then gives a fiver to some poor old thing or appen in a collection box for our Dag! Then I tell Sigs, ‘Ah, Sigs, oinky-oinky, oinky-oink, boo-hoo-hoo! I got ripped off agin!’ N e rolls is eyes n e says, ‘Ow much more is it gonna cost keeping you in tins, Mel?’ N then e goes, ‘An ow come you spends so much an the cupboard’s alway empty, then, eh, Mels?’

  N I says, ‘I jus need the practice, Sigs. Shoppin don’t come easy to old Mels, I needs a bit o practice, see, Sigs. Groink.’

  E don like me elping folks out, even though I elped im out. Where’d e be but fer me? Think e’s jealous I do, yus. Groink. Well, it’s a big flat, oinky, I’m an old old thing, I can’t change me ways. Oh, I’m allus bringing things back, wotever I can find.

  ‘S’ all rubbish, Mels,’ e goes.

  N I goes, ‘Yeah, n some of it’s alive, same as you was.’ But e don get it.