The Radleys

by Matt Haig

  “He’s no friend of mine.”

  Alison had noted a bitterness in his voice. She knew there was little loyalty among vampires, but she was stil taken aback by his evident contempt for Wil . “Okay, Otto, I just thought—”

  He cut her off. “Trust me, no one cares about Wil Radley anymore.”

  Sunday

  Don’t ever hint at your past to your unblood friends and neighbors or advertise the dangerous thrill of vampirism to anyone beyond those who already know.

  The Abstainer’s Handbook (second edition), p. 29

  Freaks

  It is perfectly possible to live next door to a family of vampires and not have the slightest clue that the people you cal your neighbors might secretly want to suck the blood from your veins.

  This is especial y likely if half the members of said family haven’t realized this themselves. And while it is true that none of the occupants of 19 Orchard Lane had ful y grasped who they were living next door to, there were certain discordant notes which had been struck over the years that had made the Felts wonder.

  There was the time, for instance, when Helen had painted Lorna’s portrait—a nude, on Lorna’s insistence—and had needed to rush out of the room only seconds after helping Lorna unclasp her bra with a “So sorry, Lorna, I have a terribly weak bladder sometimes.”

  There was another time at the Felts’ barbecue when Mark returned to the kitchen to find Peter avoiding the sports-themed conversations of his neighbors by sucking on a raw piece of prime fil et steak in the kitchen—“Oh God, sorry, it isn’t cooked. How sil y of me!”

  And months before Peter choked on Lorna’s garlic-infused Thai salad, the Felts had made the mistake of bringing their new dog, Nutmeg, around to meet the folks at number seventeen only for said dog to career away from the biscuit Clara was offering and crash headfirst into the patio doors. (“She’l be al right,” said Peter, with doctorly authority, as everyone crouched around the red setter lying on the carpet. “It’s only a mild concussion.”) There were the smal things too.

  Why, for instance, did the Radleys always have their blinds closed on sunny days? Why, for another instance, could Peter never be cajoled into joining Bishopthorpe Cricket Club or even into going with Mark and his friends for a nice round of golf? And why, when the Radleys’ garden was only a third of the size of the Felts’ vast, regularly mown lawn, did Peter and Helen feel the need to hire a gardener?

  Mark’s suspicions might always have been a little stronger than his wife’s, but they stil didn’t amount to much more than thinking the Radleys were slightly odd. And he put this down to the fact that they used to live in London and that they probably voted Liberal Democrat and went to the theater a lot to see things that weren’t musicals.

  Only his son, Toby, had an active distrust of the Radleys and always grumbled to Mark every time he mentioned them. “They’re freaks,” he always said, but would never expand on the reasons behind his prejudice. Mark just put it down to Lorna’s theory that his son wasn’t able to trust anyone since he and Toby’s mother divorced five years ago. (Mark had caught his then wife in bed with her yoga instructor, and although Mark hadn’t been too upset—he’d already started having an affair with Lorna and had been seeking a way out of his marriage—the eleven-year-old Toby had responded to the news of his parents’ separation by peeing repeatedly against his bedroom wal .)

  But this Sunday morning, Mark’s doubts begin to solidify. While Lorna walks her dog, he eats his breakfast leaning against the cold polished granite of the breakfast bar. Halfway through his toast and lime marmalade, he overhears his son get the phone.

  “What? . . . Stil ? . . . No, I’ve no idea . . . He went off after a girl. Clara Radley . . . I don’t know, he probably fancied her or something . . . Yes, I’m sorry . . . Okay, Mrs. Harper . . . Yes, I’l let you know . . .”

  After a while, the phone cal ends.

  “Toby? What was that about?”

  Toby enters the room. While he is built like a man, his face is stil that of a petulant little boy.

  “Harper’s gone missing.”

  Mark tries to think. Is Harper someone he should know? There were so many names you had to keep up with.

  “Stuart,” Toby clarifies sternly. “You know, Stuart Harper. My best friend.”

  Ah yes, thinks Mark, that monosyllabic brute with the huge hands.

  “What do you mean missing?”

  “Missing. He hasn’t come home since Friday night. His mum wasn’t too worried yesterday because he sometimes goes off to his gran’s in Thirsk without tel ing her.”

  “But he’s not at his gran’s house?”

  “No, he’s nowhere.”

  “Nowhere?”

  “No one knows where he is.”

  “You mentioned something about Clara Radley.”

  “She was the last person to see him.”

  Mark recal s Friday night and dinner at the Radleys’. The abrupt end to the evening. Clara.

  Teenage stuff. And Helen’s face as she gave him that information.

  “The very last person?”

  “Yeah, she’l know something.”

  They hear Lorna come back in with the dog. Toby heads back upstairs, as he often does when his stepmother appears. But he sees them at the same time as Mark does, standing behind Lorna. A young man and young woman in uniform.

  “It’s the police,” says Lorna, trying her best to offer Toby a look of maternal concern. “They want to talk to you.”

  “Hel o,” says the young male officer. “I’m PC Henshaw. This is PC Langford. We’re just here to ask your son a few routine questions.”

  Game Over

  “Dad? Da-ad?”

  Eve scans the room but her father is nowhere to be seen.

  The TV is on but no one is watching.

  There is a woman on the screen pressing a plug-in air freshener to release a shower of animated flowers into her living room.

  It is a quarter past nine on a Sunday morning.

  Her father doesn’t go to church. He hasn’t gone running since her mother died. So where is he?

  She doesn’t real y care except on a point of principle. He is al owed to go out without announcing the fact, so why isn’t she?

  Feeling justified to do so, she leaves the flat and walks through the vil age toward Orchard Lane.

  Outside the newsagent, two men are talking in hushed and serious voices: “They haven’t seen him since Friday night apparently” is al she manages to catch as she passes by.

  When she reaches Orchard Lane, she has every intention of heading straight to Clara’s house, but then she sees a few things that change her mind. The first thing is the police car, parked midway between numbers seventeen and nineteen, opposite an old camper van on the other side of the street. Toby is out on his doorstep as two uniformed police officers leave his house. Eve, dappled in shade and half-hidden by overgrown bushes, sees him point toward Clara’s house.

  “That’s the one,” he says. “That’s where she lives.”

  And the police leave, glancing over at the camper van before heading next door. Toby disappears back inside number nineteen. Eve stands dead stil . She is far enough up the lane for birds to be singing happily in the trees. She watches the police knock on Clara’s door and sees Clara’s mother answer with a look of deep concern. Eventual y, the officers are invited inside.

  Eve carries on walking and decides on a quick visit to see Toby and ask him what’s going on.

  She wants to talk to him anyway, before school, to apologize about Friday night and her dad dragging her away.

  Fortunately, Toby’s friendly stepmother answers the door, so she avoids having to talk about the rent with Mr. Felt. Mrs. Felt pul s back on the col ar of her red setter, who pants happily up at Eve.

  “Hel o. Is Toby in?”

  “Yes,” the woman says, in a way which seems quite breezy given that the police have just been here. “He is. He’s gone upstairs. It’s the first roo
m on the right.”

  Eve finds him sitting there with his back to her, grunting, and with his arms jerking violently away at something. An Xbox game, she realizes with some relief. He hardly acknowledges her presence as she goes over to sit on his bed. She sits there a while, staring at the gal ery of posters on his wal —Lil Wayne, Megan Fox, tennis players, Christian Bale.

  “Flamethrower! Flamethrower! Die . . . yes.”

  “Look,” says Eve, when she sees he’s between levels, “I’m real y sorry about Friday night. My dad’s just got a few issues with me being out late.”

  Toby gives a kind of affirming grunt from the back of his throat and continues to set walking lizards on fire.

  “Why were the police here?”

  “Harper’s missing.”

  It takes a moment or two for Eve to compute this properly. But then she remembers the two men talking outside the newsagent.

  “Missing? What do you mean, missing?” She knows the horror of this word only too wel .

  “He didn’t come back home on Friday. You know, after the party.”

  Harper is a lumbering brute, but he is Toby’s friend and could be in serious trouble. “Oh God,”

  Eve says. “That’s terrible. My mum went missing two years ago. We stil haven’t—”

  “Clara knows something,” Toby says, aggressively cutting Eve off. “Stupid bitch. I know she knows something.”

  “Clara is not a bitch.”

  Toby frowns. “Wel , what is she then?”

  “She’s my friend.”

  The door is pushed open and the energetic red setter charges into the room, wagging its tail.

  Eve strokes it and lets it lick her salty hand as Toby keeps talking.

  “No. She’s someone you hung around with because you were new here. That’s how it works.

  You move to a new school and you have to hang around the freaky geek girl with glasses. But you’ve been here months now. You should get someone, I don’t know, like you. Not some bitch with a freak of a brother.”

  The red setter moves on to Toby, nuzzling its nose into his leg, which he jerks hard to push the animal away. “Nutsack.”

  Eve looks at the screen he’s just been playing on. GAME OVER.

  Maybe it is.

  She sighs. “I think I should go,” she says, standing up.

  “You haven’t got long, you know.”

  “What?”

  “My dad wants that money. The rent.”

  Eve stares at him. Another selfish pig to add to her selfish pig back catalogue.

  “Thanks,” she says, determined to show no emotion at al . “I’l pass the message on.”

  Police

  It would normaly be rather scary for Clara Radley to be sitting on the sofa in her living room, between her parents, being interviewed by two police officers about a boy she is responsible for kil ing. Especial y when her next-door neighbor seems to have done everything in his power to incriminate her. But rather than being a stressful experience, it is strangely like nothing at al . It is about as nerve-racking as a trip to the post office.

  She knows she should be worried, and she’s even making an effort to share some of her mother’s anxiety, but she just can’t do it. Or not to the degree required, anyway. In a way it feels rather fun.

  “So, why did Stuart come after you, if you don’t mind me asking?” one of the police officers asks. The male one, PC Hen-something. He is smiling politely, as does the woman next to him. It is al very friendly.

  “I don’t know,” says Clara. “I suppose Toby might have put him up to it. He’s got a cruel sense of humor.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “I mean, he’s just not a very nice person.”

  “Clara,” says Helen, in a mildly reprimanding way.

  “It’s okay, Helen,” says Peter. “Let her speak.”

  “Right,” the police officer says. He stares intently at the oatmeal carpet as he takes another sip of coffee. “It’s a lovely house, by the way. Bit like my mum’s house actual y.”

  “Thanks,” says Helen, with a nervous chirpiness. “We had this room spruced up last summer. It was looking a little tired.”

  “It’s lovely,” adds the female officer.

  Hardly a compliment from you, thinks Clara, noting the woman’s terrible frizzy hair is scraped back into a bun, leaving a rectangular fringe jutting out from her forehead like a mud flap.

  Where are these bitchy thoughts coming from? Now everything and everyone seems worthy of ridicule, if only in her head. The falseness of everything: even this room with its pointless empty vases and tasteful y smal TV seems to be about as artificial as an advertisement.

  “So,” says the male officer, getting things back on track, “he went after you. And what did you say? Did he say anything?”

  “Wel , yeah.”

  “What? What did he say?”

  She decides to have fun. “He said, ‘Clara, wait.’ ”

  There’s a pause. The officers share a glance. “And?”

  “And then he said that he fancied me. Which was weird, because I don’t normal y get boys coming up and saying that stuff. Anyway, he was drunk and getting a bit ful -on, so I tried to let him down gently, but then he started . . . I feel bad about this . . . but then he started to cry.”

  “Cry?”

  “Yes. He was drunk. He stank of alcohol. But it was stil weird to see him cry because he’s not real y like that. I wouldn’t have real y had him down as a sensitive type, but then, you never know, do you?”

  “No. So, what happened next?”

  “Nothing. I mean, he cried. And I suppose I should have consoled him or something but I didn’t.

  And then that was it.”

  The female officer looks up from under her mud-flap bangs. She seems somehow sharper al of a sudden. “It?”

  “Yeah, he just went off.”

  “Off where?”

  “I don’t know. Back to the party.”

  “No one saw him at the party after you left.”

  “Wel , he must have gone somewhere else then.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know. He was in a state. I told you.”

  “He was in a state and he just left you. Just like that?”

  Helen stiffens. “Listen, she’s quite upset about poor Stuart going missing and—”

  “No!” says Clara, causing the officers to stop scribbling in their notebooks for a stunned moment. “No, I’m not upset about him going missing. I don’t know why people always do that, every time someone dies. You know, how we al have to make out they were this great saintly person when real y we hated them when they were alive.”

  The policewoman looks like she’s just tripped over something. “You just said ‘dies.’ ”

  Clara doesn’t quite get the significance of this at first. “What?”

  “You just said ‘every time someone dies.’ As far as we know, Stuart has gone missing. That’s al . Unless you know something different?”

  “It was just a figure of speech.”

  Peter makes a throat-clearing sound and reaches his arm around Clara to sneakily tap Helen’s shoulder.

  The officers’ eyes are scrutinizing Clara. A slight discomfort sets in. “Look, I was just making a general point.” She is surprised to find her mother suddenly stand up. “Mum?”

  Helen smiles grimly. “I’ve just got to go and sort the tumble dryer out. It’s beeping. Sorry.”

  The officers are as bemused as Clara. As far as anyone is aware, nothing is beeping.

  Wil is not asleep when Helen knocks on the van window. He is staring at the dried, old blood drops on his ceiling. A kind of star map charting his debauched history. A history that he is also lying on, detailed in the seven leather-bound journals under his mattress. Al those nights of wild rampageous feeding.

  Someone is knocking on his van. He pul s back the curtain to see an exasperated Helen.

  “Fancy a trip to Paris tonight?�
�� he asks her. “A Sunday night strol by the Seine. Just you, me, and the stars.”

  “Wil , it’s the police. They’re interviewing Clara. It’s going wrong. You’ve got to go in there and talk to them.”

  He steps out of the van, sees the police car. Even in exposed daylight this feels good. Helen asking him to do something. Needing him to do something.

  He decides to milk the moment for every drop of sweetness. It’s in his blood.

  “I thought you didn’t want me to come here.”

  “Wil , I know. I thought we could handle al this but I’m not sure we can. Peter was right.”

  “So you want me to go in there and do what exactly?” He knows, of course. He just wants her to say it first.

  “Talk to them?”

  He inhales deeply, catching the scent of her blood on the country air. “Talk to them? Don’t you mean blood-mind them?”

  Helen nods.

  He can’t resist. “Isn’t that a little bit unethical? Blood-minding police officers?”

  Helen closes her eyes. A little vertical crease appears between her eyebrows.

  I want her back, he realizes. I want to have the woman I made.

  “Please, Wil ,” she begs him.

  “Okay, let’s leave our ethics behind. Let’s do this. But you owe me, Hel. You owe me.”

  The police officers look surprised when Wil arrives. Peter nods though, even smiles at Helen, pleased she understood the shoulder tap.

  “This is my uncle,” Clara explains.

  Helen stands by Wil ’s side, waiting for things to begin.

  “We’re actual y in the middle of asking Clara some questions,” the male officer says, his eyebrows rising to reenact an expression of authority he’s noted from police dramas on TV.

  Wil smiles. He’l be able to blood-mind both of them quite easily, even at this time of day. Two young, obedient, little unbloods police-tutored in submission. It wil take him a sentence, maybe two, and his words wil begin erasing and rewriting their weak, servile minds.

  He gives it a go, just to show Helen he’s stil got the magic. A subtle slowing and deepening of his voice, the careful spacing between each word, and that simple trick of ignoring faces and talking directly to blood. And as he is close enough to smel the contents of their veins, he starts straightaway.