by Matt Haig
Illness!
Condition!
A certain type of hunger!
Clara looks to her mother, missing something. “I don’t understand.”
“Wel , it’s this strange biological—”
Enough, Peter decides. He interrupts his wife and looks into his daughter’s eyes. “We’re vampires, Clara.”
“Peter.” Helen’s sharp whisper won’t stop him now, and he reiterates his point in a steady voice.
“Vampires. That’s what we are.”
He looks at both his children and sees that Clara seems to comprehend this better than Rowan.
After what she’s done, he knows she might even find solace in this truth. But it has just smashed Rowan in the face. He looks dumbstruck.
“That’s a . . . metaphor?” he asks, trying to cling to the reality he’s known.
Peter shakes his head.
Rowan shakes his head too, but in disbelief. He backs out of the doorway. They say nothing as his feet climb the stairs.
Peter looks at Helen, expecting her to be angry, but she’s not. Sad, anxious, but maybe slightly relieved too. “You’d better go and see him,” she says.
“Yes,” says Peter, “I’m going.”
Crucifixes and Rosaries and Holy Water
For seventeen years Rowan has been lied to continualy by his parents. This means, he realizes, his whole life has been one long il usion.
“That’s why I can’t sleep,” he says, sitting on his bed beside his father. “Isn’t it? That’s why I’m hungry al the time. And why I have to wear sunblock.”
His father nods. “Yes, it is.”
Rowan thinks of something. The skin condition he’d been told he suffered from.
“Photodermatosis!”
“I had to tel you something,” Peter says. “I’m a doctor.”
“You lied. Every day. You lied.”
Rowan notices there is some blood on his father’s cheek. In the mirror on the wal .
“You’re a sensitive boy, Rowan. We didn’t want to hurt you. The truth is it’s not as weird as people believe.” He points toward the mirror. “We’ve got reflections.”
Reflections! What difference did it make, when you didn’t know the person staring back at you?
Rowan doesn’t speak.
He doesn’t want to be having this conversation. Already, this night’s happenings could take him a century to absorb, but his father keeps on and on as if he’s talking about a minor STD or masturbation.
“And al that stuff about crucifixes and rosaries and holy water is just superstitious rubbish.
Catholic wish fulfil ment. The garlic stuff’s true, though, obviously.”
Rowan thinks of the nausea he feels every time he passes an Italian restaurant or catches garlic on someone’s breath, or when he once gagged on a hummus baguette he’d bought from the Hungry Gannet.
He real y is a freak.
“I want to die,” he says.
His father scratches his jaw and lets out a long, slow sigh.
“Wel , you wil . Without blood, even with the amount of meat we try and eat, we’re physical y quite disadvantaged. You know, we didn’t tel you this stuff because we didn’t want to depress you.”
“Dad, we’re kil ers! Harper! She kil ed him. I can’t believe it.”
“You know,” says Peter, “it’s possible that you could go your whole life just living like a normal human being.”
That real y is a joke.
“A normal human being! A normal human being! ” Rowan almost laughs as he says this. “Who itches and never sleeps and can’t even do ten straight push-ups.” He realizes something. “This is why they think I’m a freak at school. They sense it, don’t they? They sense that, at some subconscious level, I am craving their blood.”
Rowan leans back against his wal and closes his eyes as his dad plows on with his introductory lecture on vampirism. Apparently, a lot of great people have been vampires. Painters, poets, philosophers. His dad provides a list:
Homer.
Ovid.
Machiavel i.
Caravaggio.
Nietzsche.
Pretty much al the Romantics, except Wordsworth.
Bram Stoker. (His antivampire propaganda came during his abstinence years.) Jimi Hendrix.
“And vampires don’t live forever,” Peter continues, “but if they stick to a strict blood diet and keep out of daylight, they can last a very long time. Vampires over two hundred years old have been known. And some of the strictest ones fake their deaths at a young age, like Byron did on the battlefield in Greece, pretending he had a fever. Then after that they assume a different identity every decade or so.”
“Byron?” Rowan can’t help but be consoled by this piece of information.
His father nods, claps a supportive hand on his son’s knee. “He’s stil alive, last I heard. I saw him back in the nineteen eighties. DJing alongside Thomas de Quincey at some party at their cave in Ibiza. Don Juan and DJ Opium they cal ed themselves. God knows if they’re stil at it.”
Rowan looks at his father and realizes he is more animated than usual. “But it’s not right. We’re freaks.”
“You’re an intel igent, thoughtful, gifted young man. You are not a freak. You are someone who has overcome a great deal without knowing it. See, the thing is, Rowan, blood is a craving. The feeling it gives is very addictive. It takes over. It makes you very strong, gives you an incredible feeling of power, makes you believe you can do or create anything.”
Rowan sees his father seem momentarily lost, hypnotized by some memory. “Dad,” he asks nervously, “have you ever kil ed anybody?”
Peter is clearly troubled by the question. “I tried not to. I tried to stick to blood we could get hold of some other way. Like at the hospital. See, the police never official y acknowledged our existence, but they had special units. Probably stil do, I don’t know. We knew a lot of people who just disappeared. Kil ed. So we tried to be careful. But human blood is best fresh, and sometimes the cravings were so strong, and the feelings it gave us . . . the ‘energy,’ as they say . . .” He looks at Rowan, his eyes offering the rest of the confession. “It’s no way to be,” he says, a quiet sadness infecting his voice. “Your mum was right. Is right. It’s better the way we are now. Even if it means we die younger than we would, even if we have to feel pretty crap most of the time. It’s better to be good. Now listen, wait here til I get you something.”
Peter disappears out of the room, returning a moment later holding an old paperback with an austere gray cover. He hands it to Rowan, who looks at the title: The Abstainer’s Handbook.
“What’s this?”
“It helps. It was written by an anonymous group of abstainers back in the eighties. Read it. Al the answers are in here.”
Rowan flicks through the yel owing, dog-eared pages. Real words on real paper, making everything seem more true. He reads a couple of sentences.
“We have to learn that the things we desire are very often the things which could lead to our own self-destruction. We have to learn to give up on our dreams in order to preserve our reality.”
This has been hidden in the house al these years. Alongside what else?
Peter sighs. “See, we’re abstainers. We don’t kil or convert anybody anymore. To the outside world, we’re just average human beings.”
Convert? It made it sound like a religion. Something you were talked into and talked out of.
Rowan suddenly has one more thing he wants to know. “So were you converted into a vampire?”
He is disappointed to see his dad shake his head. “No, I’ve always been like this. The Radleys have been like this for generations. For centuries. Radley is a vampire name. It means ‘red meadow’ or something like that. And I’m pretty sure the red wasn’t anything to do with poppies.
But your mum—”
“Was converted?”
His father nods. Rowan sees he looks sad about something. “She wan
ted to become this, at the time. It wasn’t against her wil . But now, I don’t think she can forgive me for it.”
Rowan lies back on his bed and says nothing, staring at the bottle of useless sleep medicine he has taken every night for years. His father sits next to him in a wordless quiet, listening to the gentle creak of the pipes running toward the radiator.
Freak, Rowan thinks to himself, minutes later, as he begins to read the handbook. Toby is right.
I am a freak. I am a freak. I am a freak.
And he thinks about his mother. She actual y chose to be a vampire. It didn’t make sense. To want to be a monster.
Peter stands up. “Anyway, we’l talk more tomorrow. We’ve got to try to be strong. For Clara.
We don’t want to look suspicious.”
That’s all we’ve ever looked, thinks Rowan, as his father closes the door.
A Bit like Christian Bale
Toby Felt is on his bike swigging back the last dregs of vodka.
A garbageman!
Pathetic. Toby vows to himself if he ever becomes a garbageman he wil kil himself. Throw himself into the back of those green lorries and wait to be mashed up with al the other waste.
But he knows he won’t real y end up like that. Because life is divided into two types. There are the strong, like Christian Bale and himself, and there are the weak, like Eve’s dad and Rowan Radley. And the role of the strong is to keep punishing the weak. That’s how you stay on top. If you let the weak just be, then you’l end up being weak yourself. It’s like standing in the future Bangkok of Resident Evil 7 and letting the zombies come and eat you alive. You have to kil or be kil ed.
When he was younger he always fantasized about Bishopthorpe being taken over by something. Not zombies, necessarily, but something.
Time-traveling Nazis.
Refugee aliens.
Something.
And anyway, in this Xbox reality everyone had fal en to pieces, even his dad in the end, but Toby was always there, the last man standing, kil ing them al off. Like Batman. Or a Terminator. Or like Christian Bale. (He did look a bit like Christian Bale, people said. Wel , his mother said. His proper mother. Not that stupid tart he has to live with now.) Shooting them, torching them, hand-to-hand combat, lobbing grenades with his tennis racquet, whatever it took. And he knows he is one of the strong because he can get a girl like Eve, while a freak like Rowan Radley sits at home reading poetry.
He is approaching the vil age sign. He holds the bottle out, swings back as if getting ready to vol ey a tennis bal , and smashes it against the metal.
He finds this hilarious and looks at the remainder of the bottle in his hand. The sight of the broken glass gives him an idea. A minute later he is biking past Lowfield Close and decides to take a detour. He sees the crappy little Corol a Eve’s dad had been driving that night parked outside the flats. He looks around, then he smoothly gets off his bike and leans it on the road. He has the broken bottle in his hand.
Crouching down beside the car, he presses the sharpest bit of the glass into a tire. He saws it a little bit to cut through the rubber but gets nowhere. Then he spies a loose piece of stone beside a garden wal , picks it up, gets on his bike, and with his foot ready on the pedal throws it through the front passenger window.
The sound of the smash sobers him up rather than delivering the thril he expected.
He races away, pedaling home as fast as he can, before anyone has time to get out of bed and pul back their curtains.
Saturday
Blood doesn’t satisfy cravings. It magnifies them.
The Abstainer’s Handbook (second edition), p. 50
There Is a Rapture on the Lonely Shore
There are few things more beautiful than a deserted motorway at four in the morning.
The white lines and il uminated signs shine their instructions, as indifferent to whether humans are there to fol ow them as the Stonehenge standing stones are to the fates of the pathetic ancient abstainers who carted them across Salisbury Plain.
Things stay.
People die.
You can fol ow the signs and systems you are meant to fol ow, or you can sacrifice company and live a life true to your instincts. What was it Lord Byron said, only two years after he was converted?
There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
And somewhere else, in the same canto:
Oh! that the Desert were my dwelling-place,
With one fair Spirit for my minister,
That I might all forget the human race,
And, hating no one, love but only her!
Love but only her. That’s the curse of a lot of vampires. They seek many but truly crave only one.
No, muses Wil , you can’t beat Lord B.
Well, Jim Morrison comes a close second, he concedes, beating along to “Twentieth Century Fox” on the steering wheel (although Wil never bought the theory that Jim Morrison was Byron’s 1960s identity of choice). And Hendrix isn’t bad at it either. Or the other Morrison, around about the time of Astral Weeks. Or even the Stones, when the vampire was stil with them. Al that 1960s ego-fueled blood rock his and Peter’s father used to play when they were infants.
Wil hears the engine start to sound a little throaty and sees from the gauge he’s low on fuel. He pul s in at a twenty-four-hour garage and fil s the tank.
Sometimes he pays for fuel and sometimes he doesn’t. Money is absolutely nothing to him. He could have mil ions if he wanted, but what could they buy him that tastes as good as the stuff he takes for free?
Tonight he wants to breathe in some pol uted air, so he goes inside with his last twenty-pound note. (Three nights before he’d been at a speed-dating event at the Tiger Tiger bar in Manchester, where he’d met a girl with the right kind of neck and two hundred pounds fresh out of the cash machine.)
A boy is sitting in a chair behind the counter. He is reading Nuts magazine and doesn’t notice Wil until he is right there pushing the twenty toward him.
“Pump three,” he says.
“What?” the boy asks. He unplugs his iPod from one ear. Wil ’s blood-sharpened sense of hearing is strong enough to catch the fast, tinny noise of the house music the boy is listening to, like the secret buzz and pulse of night.
“Here’s the money for pump number three,” Wil says again.
The boy nods and chews, pressing the necessary commands into the til .
“That’s not enough,” the boy says.
Wil does nothing but look at him.
“It’s twenty pounds seven pence.”
“I’m sorry?”
The boy senses his own fear but doesn’t fol ow what it’s trying to tel him. “You went a bit over.”
“By seven pence.”
“Yeah.”
“I went over by seven whole pennies?”
“Yeah.”
Wil taps the Queen’s face on the note. “I’m afraid this is al I have.”
“We take al cards. Visa, MasterCard, Delta . . .”
“I don’t have a card. I don’t have any cards.”
The boy shrugs. “Wel , it’s twenty pounds seven pence.” He sucks on his top lip to underline this unshakable fact.
Wil looks at the boy. He is sitting there with his tracksuit top and his magazine and his iPod and his misguided experiments with facial hair as if he is something new, something he himself has created. In his blood, though, there would be the taste of ancient origins, the tough and long-fought struggle for survival over hundreds of generations, echoes of ancestors he’s never heard of, traces of more wondrous and epic times, hints of the primeval seeds of his existence.
“You real y care that strongly about seven pence?” Wil asks him.
“The manager does. Yeah.”
Wil sighs. “There real y are bigger things to worry about, you know.”
He wonders about this boy. There are some who know, who know what you are and subconsciously wil i
t on themselves. Is that what he is doing?
Wil walks away, watching the gray ghost of himself on the CCTV screen. He gets to the door but it doesn’t open.
“You can’t leave until you’ve paid the rest.”
Wil smiles, genuinely amused at the unblood pettiness on display here. “Is that seriously the value you put on your own life? Seven pence? What can you even buy for seven pence?”
“I’m not letting you leave. The police are on their way, mate.”
Wil thinks of Alison Glenny, the head of the police unit in Manchester who has wanted him dead for years. So, yes, he thinks to himself, the police are always on their way.
Wil walks back to the counter. “Do you have a little thing for me? Is that what it is? You see, I see this little quibble we’re having as representing something a lot bigger. I think you are a very lonely boy doing a very lonely job. A job which makes you start to crave certain things. Human company . . . Human . . . touch . . .”
“Piss off, you gay.”
Wil smiles. “Very good. Very convincingly heterosexual. One hundred percent. No messing there. Now, what scared you most? That I might kil you? Or that you might quite enjoy it?”
“The police are coming.”
“Right, wel , I suppose you’d better open the til for me then.”
“What?”
“I said open the til .”
The boy reaches for something under the counter, keeping his eyes fixed on Wil . He pul s out a kitchen knife.
“Ah, the knife. The phal ic weapon of intrusion and penetration.”
“Just fuck off, al right?”
“The trouble is, with someone like me you real y need something bigger. Something which wil go al the way through.”
Wil closes his eyes and summons the old forces. He transforms himself in no time at al and starts the blood minding.
The boy looks at him. Fear turns to weakness turns to empty submission.
“Now, you wil put the knife down and open the til and give me some of the little paper portraits of the Queen you keep in there.”