A lot had changed over the last two weeks.
It started when she woke one night to the sound of the shelter door squeaking open at some unearthly hour. Assuming it was Beth coming in to use the toilet, she really woke up when it was unmistakably Beth's father returning to bed. The two hadn't spoken to each other for so long, she wondered what could have happened for them to start at such an odd hour. But almost immediately the change was clear to see. After being so quiet and distant for so long, suddenly Beth was talking. Not much at first, but over the course of those two weeks she approached something resembling her normal self. Then she moved the blankets back into her own room, though she insisted on sleeping on the floor. But Mary could sense Beth was still hiding something. Nothing was completely back to normal, but for Mary it was good enough.
She never had confronted Beth about the wild adoption accusation, but to a degree she hadn't wanted to, thinking it would probably be best left alone. But she still found herself wondering if any of it might be true, especially considering how her father had reacted.
And most recently, Mary had received her first letter from Gibson. He was working on the farm up in York, not too far from Mary's own distant relatives. It sounded like his entry into the army was guaranteed, though not for another year. Her heart had seemed to skip when she'd read the words, and already she'd started composing a reply. She wondered if she'd ever see him again, and even wrote it in the letter.
Mary was still thinking about the letter not yet sent when they reached the school gates. Oliver joined his friends, and that's when Mary saw that changes were afoot at school, too. She spotted Susan Pullen. The tall girl walked over toward them but then passed without so much as a glance or infamous death stare. If anything, Mary noticed her look down at the floor as she passed Beth.
“Bloody hell, did you see her nose?” said Mary when Susan was gone.
“What about it?” Beth asked.
“It was all crooked. Looked like someone had walloped her. ‘Bout time if you ask me. I wonder who did it?”
“Yeah, I wonder,” said Beth, disinterested.
“They must've been pretty big to break her nose.”
Beth hummed in agreement. Mary decided to feel the satisfaction she thought Beth should be feeling, and smiled.
* * *
That afternoon, all three children returned home to find Mr. Wade walking around with a new wooden cane, the crutches nowhere to be seen. It seemed to have cheered him up, and he had more news at dinner. He announced that the Home Guard had welcomed him in an advisory role. It wasn't much, but at least it was something, and his first evening shift would be later that week. But his cheerfulness seemed to dampen slightly at something Mrs. Wade said.
“What's happened to Jeff, then?” she inquired.
“What do you mean?” asked Mr. Wade.
“He's not there anymore. There's a new chap in his place, Simon. I asked what had happened but Simon said he didn't know, only that he'd been asked to take over for a while.”
Mr. Wade had stopped eating, and Mary could see the confusion of missing knowledge in his frown. “Hmm, I'm not sure. Can't be anything too serious.” He looked at Beth, so Mary did too, seeing a similar look of confusion … or possibly worry.
THIRTY-THREE
JUST WHEN THINGS WERE BEGINNING to get better, they changed again. Jeff's absence from the butcher's was presumed temporary, but when he still wasn't back on the all-important Wednesday, Beth started to worry. Every day after that for the past eight days Bill made a visit. It was now Friday and the ninth day in a row that he would enquire as to the whereabouts of Jeff. It marked the sixteenth day Beth had gone without blood.
It was almost half-past two in the afternoon when it started to grip.
She had already been finding it hard not to snap at the smallest thing. The hole in her left sock was her mother's fault, the dental cream in the sink was Oliver's, her brush had Mary's blonde hair dangling from it, and Bill was the worst of them all for not getting her what she so desperately needed.
But that afternoon, barely an hour after the end of Bonner Street School's lunch break, Beth burst through the front door of her home.
“Elizabeth?”
Beth ignored her father who called to her from the sitting room. She ran up the stairs, bunched up the sheets and blankets from her floor, and then ran back down. Passing her mystified father who had risen onto his cane, she opened the backdoor and strode across the small yard, down the steps carved out of earth, and back into her own, not-so-private sanctuary.
By the time Bill had made his way down, Beth was sitting on the edge of a side bunk biting her nails with her left knee jumping up and down like a jackhammer.
“Elizabeth? What's wrong?”
“Where is he, Dad?” The name tasted sour, but it hadn't been forced, and Beth had no patience to struggle with what to call the man before her. “Where's Jeff?”
Her father shook his head. “I told you, I don't know. I've even contacted the Ministry, but everything's gone quiet.” He sat down opposite her. “What's happened?”
“I need blood. I don't know how much longer I can go without it.”
“But it's only been a couple of weeks. I thought you'd gone longer.”
“I have, but only when I didn't know what I was craving. Now I do and it's so much harder to ignore. It's all I think about.” She sniffed the air and looked into her father's eyes in shame. “I can smell yours.”
Her father sat silently and Beth heard him swallow at her observation.
“It's the worst time,” she said.
“I know.”
“No, you don't. My back's aching and my abdomen feels like it's in a vice. I'm about to get my period.”
Her father looked both confused and worried.
“That's over six weeks since the last one,” continued Beth. “And the last one was pretty bad. Can't you get some blood from somewhere else?”
Her father shook his head. “I've tried other butchers but they don't keep any, at least they say they don't.”
“What about the hospital? Can't we just tell Mum that I'm getting ill again? I'll get a transfusion.”
“We can't risk it.”
“Why?”
“It's complicated. There's a doctor there who thinks he might be on to something. Giving him an excuse to look into things any more than he already has would be a very bad idea.”
“What about a different hospital?”
“I'm sorry, but we can't risk exposing you. One curious doctor's bad enough; we don't need any more.”
“But Dad, I need some. Now. I'm afraid what'll happen if I don't.” She shook her head. “I can't sleep in the house. I won't. I don't think I should go to school either, not until I've fed.”
Her father looked at her with curiosity. “Has something happened?”
Beth shook her head. “Nothing I want to think about.”
“Elizabeth?” His tone demanded that she tell him.
“I ran out before I had the chance to do anything,” said Beth, catching a confused look of horror and concern in her father's eyes. He studied her, thinking. Beth didn't need a mirror to know that she looked desperate.
“Well,” said her father, letting out a lungful of air. “There is one way …”
Beth knew she wasn't going to like the suggestion. But she needed blood. “What is it?”
“All things considered, you'd have to do this sooner or later anyway.”
He was trying to sugarcoat it now and it made Beth uneasy.
“You're going to have to catch your own food.”
Beth's jitters seemed to vanish in an instant. “You're joking, right? Please tell me you're not serious.”
“You've done it before.”
“I can't even remember doing it. I'm still astounded it happened. And disgusted.”
“Still, you did it.”
Her father's words brought fabricated mental imagery of how she must've created such a mess. I
t made her want to heave. “Whatever happened at school today,” reasoned her father, “it sounds like it was bad enough that you should at least try.”
In an involuntary flash, Beth relived the hour after lunch break. She saw herself sitting in the classroom at her desk. She held her pen in her hand, but the nib was dry. It hadn't been dipped into ink since the lesson began. She liked school, but history bored her senseless and always had. And when she was bored, her mind drifted … and when her mind drifted and the thirst had begun, there was only one train of thought.
At the front of the room Mrs. Humphries talked away, but the words she spoke could've been jumbled up or said in a foreign language for all Beth cared. They seemed to slow down, as if the teacher were a record and someone pressed their finger on her vinyl; softly at first, but increasing the pressure to make her sound more like a man talking in slow motion. All the sounds around her began to fade, as did movements. Hands scribbling on paper, and arms being slowly raised into the air, all began to blur. Everyone may as well have been ghosts.
Everyone except for Peter.
Beatrice sat directly in front of Beth's desk, serving as a small shield from the teacher's sight if Beth slumped forward a little. With her head turned slightly to the left, toward the window, Beth furtively stared at the boy a year younger than herself. He sat as motionless as the rest, but something outside the window had caught his attention. Beth didn't know what it was, and she didn't care to look, because she was too fixated on him. Whatever it was proved to be a constant distraction for the thin, short-haired Peter. It was when he was first distracted that Beth noticed it. She stared as he turned his head to face the front, and she waited, hoping his distraction would occur again.
It did.
Peter turned his head and looked out the window. The thick tendon running from his jaw to the collarbone grew pronounced. The skin stretched and followed tightly the contours of ligaments, tendons and flesh beneath. In a small shallow, just above the collar and between two vertical tendons, the skin twitched at regular intervals.
A vein.
It throbbed a little faster than once a second as the boy's heart forced blood around his body.
Beth subconsciously sniffed the air. In an instant she sorted through the smells of unwashed clothing and dirty hair, her nose scrunching a little at the repulsive stench of shit that someone had failed to wipe from their shoe. She smelled through the ink, the wood and the paper and ignored the faintest hint of chalk, before settling on that sweet, rusty, metallic scent. It was slightly different than blood in a jar, masked by living flesh, but it was there.
Her insides twitched and an intense, localized ache erupted in her gums. On either side of her tongue Beth felt two sharp teeth protracting from above, and another pair pushing upward from below. She gasped. Her mouth snapped shut, sounding to her like a crocodile. Mrs. Humphries stopped mid-sentence and stared at Beth, waiting for an explanation.
Snapped back to the classroom with all the children staring at her, Beth felt her teeth slide back to their dormant position. While they did Beth frantically thought of what to say, before blurting out, “Miss! I'm gonna be sick!” She leaped from her chair, almost taking the affixed desk with her, and ran for the door. She didn't stop running until she reached home.
* * *
The early September sun had vanished, leaving in its place a blanket of stars that covered the sky from one end of the horizon to the other. The few clouds that had lingered during the day had thinned out and disappeared. Beth made her way to the wall that she'd jumped almost a fortnight earlier in her attempt to run away, walking beside her shadow cast by the brighter half of the moon.
A week earlier, the moon had been full and shone like a white sun. Tonight only half of that light was available to wash the leaves of the root vegetables with a white sheen, yet Beth was convinced she could see just as well. She sidestepped the mangle, walked around the tin bathtub and was even able to avoid a few twigs that may have invited unwanted attention. With the half-disc higher in the sky this time than last, Beth easily judged the pale pavement below. She was thankful for the difference it made when she was poised at the top of the wall.
It was around midnight, and Beth had been waiting for almost half a day to act on her father's suggestion. She'd begrudgingly accepted that he was right—again—and was now flooded with a variety of emotions. The first was comfort, of all things. When her father had first suggested this course of action, he'd said she'd have to do it sooner or later. That gave Beth a little solace that her life wouldn't be quite as short as she'd recently expected. But then came the shame and dread at the sound of the front door signaling the return of Oliver and Mary. It had reminded her of her temptation that day, and the requirement of another lie. Thankfully, her father took care of all of that with a simple exaggeration of the truth: she was feeling sick, her absence from the house explained away by the desire to keep the germs out.
Now, with everyone in bed and Beth having made her silent escape, she felt anxious, uneasy, and oddly excited. The thought of trying to catch a wild animal seemed like a bit of an adventure, a thrill ride, and it helped her overcome her settling fatigue. What worried her was what she'd have to do if she caught something.
Back in the shelter, her father had suggested how she might go about hunting, explaining wind direction and the need for slow and silent motion. While she tried to take it all in, she was constantly distracted by the obvious reasons as to how he knew all that he did.
Running through her father's advice in her head, Beth walked up the entirety of Cyprus Street. Normally she'd cut through to Old Ford Road, but after hearing the scraping shoes of a warden, she continued onward to the end to avoid detection. The nights had begun to get colder; she now wore a coat over her dress, though unbuttoned. By the time she entered Victoria Park, she was too warm for it, and hung it from a low branch of the first tree that lined the track.
She stood by the thick tree for a short while, hot and bothered with her familiar fatigue. The buzz of the generators in a distant part of the park floated on the air, Beth's ears picking it out more clearly than ever before. She took a second to appreciate her luck that it was the western portion of the park that was open to the public. It was due to all the woodland and foliage here, and that would also benefit her cause immensely. Then it hit her just how bizarre her cause was. She found herself rubbing her neck again, while she tried to come up with some idea of how to proceed; where was she supposed to start? Her father had suggested that her instincts would take over, that it would just come to her. She was still waiting for that to happen.
To her left was the open space where the sports day event had been held and which was lined by thick patches of trees. To her right was the lake, on the bank of which she'd woken that night so long ago. It seemed logical that animals would roam there to drink the water. She wondered if that was what had pulled her there in her sleepwalking state.
Walking across the grass, she headed for a large clump of trees around the corner. The more cover there was, the more chance of animals being there. That was her thinking, anyway. Her head dipped down as she chose her way, and with each step she began to crouch as she approached the edge of the trees. It was all subconscious. When she realized what she was doing, she almost laughed and straightened herself up.
For the most part, colors were lost in the moonlight, but Beth knew that leaves were browning. Fortunately, they weren't falling just yet, and the ground was still fairly soft. Moving from the grass to the soil remained crackle free. She weaved between tree trunks thick and thin, pushing past low branches and through small bushes. Slowly she felt herself becoming more relaxed, getting into the stride of things. She began to pick up faint scents of animals around her, detected over those of the trees and leaves and soil. A little adrenaline seeped into her system, and her fatigue faded a bit.
Her steps slowed, and without knowing it she began to use the balls of her feet more, lowering her heels under silen
t control. Every now and then she heard the patter of tiny paws scuttling over sparse fallen leaves and dried twigs, but for the most part her hearing was useless. The ground was so soft that what had aided her silent approach afforded the wildlife the same courtesy. She was surprised by how much she could see, however, even though the faint pain behind her eyes persisted. That she could see anything at all under the canopy of the trees where the moonlight struggled to reach was impressive to her. But she was unable to make out everything.
Suddenly, something close by made a noise.
Beth halted and squinted. The faint headache throbbed. Ahead was a furry ball of something. She leaned forward, but the tip of her shoe snapped a small twig. The sound was almost inaudible, but whatever she was looking at had heard it just as well as Beth had and it scampered off. Immediately she gave chase, dashing through the undergrowth and disregarding any notion of silence. She was almost upon the small furry creature when a stray branch gripped her around the arm and tugged her back. She easily broke free, but that split second was all the leaping animal needed to get ahead. Beth made a last-ditch effort. She dived to the ground, astonished when her hand found and grabbed the thing's tail. Skidding quickly to a halt in the undergrowth, the animal reared and Beth felt small teeth dig into the skin between her thumb and forefinger. Yelping in pain, she let go, and the thing scuttled off.
She rolled over onto her back and caught her breath, looking up through the gaps in the trees at patches of night sky, feeling a sense of déjà vu. Damn shoes, she thought, getting to her feet. Noisily, she made her way back out to the grass, not knowing where she was but not caring.
No Shelter from Darkness Page 25