by Matt Haig
“The police?” asks Rowan. “So the police know about vampires?”
Wil shakes his head. “As a rule, no, they don’t. But there’s some in Manchester that do. It’s al very clandestine.”
Rowan seems perturbed by this information and he visibly pales.
Clara has another question. “So if we get on the list, the police wouldn’t be able to do anything?”
Wil laughs. “You have to be a regularly practicing vampire, with a good few kil s under your belt.
But maybe, yeah. I could introduce you to the right people. Pul some strings . . .”
“I don’t think so, Wil ,” says Helen. “I don’t think we need that kind of help.”
As the voices rise and fal around him, Peter chews away at some rare meat, which is stil ridiculously overcooked. Notices his wife’s trembling hand as she tops up her glass of merlot.
“Helen, are you al right?” he asks.
She smiles weakly. “I’m fine, honestly.”
But she nearly jumps out of herself as the doorbel goes. Peter grabs his wine glass and goes to get it, praying like his wife that it isn’t a return visit from the police. And so for once the sight of Mark Felt is almost a relief. He is holding a large rol of paper.
“The plans,” explains Mark. “You know. What I told you about. For the upstairs extension.”
“Right, yes. We’re actual y—”
“It’s just I’m away with work tomorrow night, so I thought now would be a good time to go through them.”
Peter is less than thril ed. “Okay, sure. Come in.”
And so, a minute later, he is stuck watching Mark unrol the architectural plans onto the counter.
Wishing he’d had more lamb.
Wishing he’d had a whole live flock.
Or just one single drop of Lorna’s blood.
In his glass is a sad little puddle of merlot. Why does he even bother with this stuff? Drinking wine is just another thing designed to make them feel like normal human beings, when real y it only proves the opposite. Helen insists they drink it for the taste, but he’s not even sure he likes the taste.
“We’ve got some wine on the go if you fancy any,” he says to Mark dutiful y, as he grabs one of the half-drunk bottles sitting next to the toaster.
“Okay,” says Mark. “Thanks.”
Peter pours the wine, cringing as he hears Wil ’s raucous voice carry through from the living room.
“ . . . drowning in the stuff! ”
Peter realizes Mark has heard this too, and that he seems to have something to say which has nothing to do with house extensions.
“Listen, Peter,” he starts, ominously. “We had the police around earlier. About that boy who went missing at the party. And something came up about Clara.”
“Oh?”
“Yes, and tel me if I’m out of place here, but I was just wondering, wel , what did happen to her the other night?”
Peter sees his own distorted image in the toaster. The eyes staring back at him from the curved chrome are large and monstrous. He wants, suddenly, to scream out the truth. To tel his neighbor turned amateur Poirot that the Radleys are bloodsuckers. He checks himself just in time. “She took something she shouldn’t have. Why?”
He turns around holding two ful glasses.
“Look, sorry,” says Mark. “I’m just . . . That man with the camper van. Who is he?”
Peter holds out Mark’s wine. “That’s my brother. He’s not staying long. He’s a bit eccentric but he’s okay. Family, you know.”
Mark nods, takes his glass. He wants to push the conversation further but holds back. “Oh, I thought you used to say you didn’t have a brother.”
He had, of course. He had told everyone that. “Wishful thinking . . . So, let’s have a look at these plans.”
And Mark starts to talk, but Peter only takes in snippets: “. . . want to build . . . of the ground floor area . . . extended back in the nineteen fifties . . . major risk of . . . knock out the existing wal . . .”
As Peter sips his drink, he can’t hear a thing. The taste is nothing like the wine he’s been drinking. It is as exquisite and as rich as life itself.
He looks at his glass in horror.
He realizes Wil has left a bottle half drunk on the counter. He wonders frantical y what to say in order to get the glass off Mark. But it’s already too late. Mark has already taken a sip and appears to love it so much he’s knocked back the rest in one go.
Mark puts down his empty glass. His face is transformed into a vision of wild abandon. “God, that was delicious.”
“Yes. Right, let’s see these plans,” says Peter, bending over the rectangles and measurements on the sheets of paper.
Mark ignores him. He goes over to the bottle and reads the label. “Rosel a two thousand seven?
Now, that is good stuff.”
Peter nods the nod of a knowledgeable wine buyer. “It’s Spanish. Type of rioja. Smal vineyard.
Low-key marketing. We order it online.” Peter gestures to the plans. “Shal we?”
Mark flaps his hand in a “forget it” gesture. “Life’s too short. Might take Lorna somewhere special. Been a while since I’ve done that.”
Might take Lorna somewhere special.
“Right,” says Peter, as jealousy burns like garlic inside him.
Mark pats his neighbor on the back and, with a huge grin, strides out of the kitchen. “Adiós amigo! Hasta luego! ”
Peter sees the paper on the counter curling itself back into a rol . “Your plans,” he says.
But Mark has already gone.
We’re Monsters
They have finished the lamb, but Helen isn’t clearing away the plates because she doesn’t want to leave the children alone with Wil . So she just sits there, a prisoner in her chair, feeling the power he has over her.
It is a power he’s always had, of course. But now it’s there as a raw and undeniable fact in front of her, made stronger by her actual y asking him to help with the police, and tainting everything. It infects the whole room so that every object—her empty plate, each glass, the Heal’s lamp Peter bought her some Christmases ago, every one of these things—seems suddenly charged with a negative energy. Like secret weapons in some invisible war against her, against al of them.
“We’re monsters,” she hears her son saying now. “It’s not right.”
And then Wil , smiling, as if it is a line he wants to be given. An opportunity to take another swipe at Helen. “Better to be who you are than to be nothing at al . Than to live so buried under a lie you might as wel be dead.”
He leans back in his chair after making this pronouncement, soaking up her scornful gaze as easily as if it were affection.
Then Peter enters, waving a bottle angrily in the air. “What’s this?” he asks his brother.
Wil feigns ignorance. “Is this charades? I’m stumped, Pete. Is it a film? A book?” He scratches his chin. “The Lost Weekend? First Blood? The Bloodsucker Proxy? ”
Helen has never seen Peter stand up to his brother, but as he carries on, she silently prays for him to stop. Each word a foot stamping on a trap door.
“Our next-door neighbor—a very respected solicitor—has just drunk a ful glass of blood.
Vampire blood.”
Wil releases a huge river of a laugh. He doesn’t seem remotely concerned. “That should loosen a few bolts.”
Clara giggles while Rowan sits quietly, thinking of Eve’s hand in his, of how good it felt.
“Oh God,” says Helen, realizing the significance of what her husband has just said.
Wil ’s humor is souring slightly now. “What’s the big deal? No one’s bitten him. He’s not going to be converted. He’l just go back home and make his wife very happy. He’s an unpire now.”
The thought infuriates Peter. “You should go, Wil . He’s getting suspicious. People are getting suspicious. The whole fucking vil age wil be wondering what the fucking hel you and your shitti
ng, piece-of-shit camper van are doing here.”
“Dad,” says Clara, from the sidelines.
Wil is genuinely surprised by Peter’s animosity. “Oh Petey, you’re getting angry.”
Peter slams the bottle down on the table, as if to prove his brother’s point. “I’m sorry, Wil . It’s no good. We’ve got a different life now. I cal ed you because it was an emergency. And the emergency is over. You’ve got to go. We don’t need you. We don’t want you.”
Wil stares at his brother, wounded.
“Peter, let’s just—,” Helen says.
Wil regards Helen now. Smiles. “Tel him, Hel.”
Helen closes her eyes. It wil be easier in the dark. “He’s staying til tomorrow,” she says. Then she stands up, starts stacking the plates.
“I thought you were the one who—”
“He’l be gone by tomorrow,” she says again, noticing Rowan and Clara’s shared glance.
Peter storms back out of the room, leaving the bottle sitting on the table. “Great. Fucking great.”
“Fathers, eh?” offers Wil .
And Helen stands by the table, trying to act as if she hasn’t seen the wink intended to seal his little victory.
The Night before Paris
They had done it in the van, the night before Paris.
They were both naked and giggling and feeling life’s sweet thril in the touch of each other’s skin.
And he remembers that first bite of her, the intensity of it, the sheer surprise at how good she tasted. It was like a first visit to Rome, walking along an unassuming side street to suddenly find yourself knocked out by the epic splendor of the Pantheon.
Yes, it had been perfect, that night. A whole relationship in microcosm. The lust, the gaining of knowledge, the subtle politics of drinking and being drunk. Draining then replenishing each other’s blood supply.
“Change me,” she had whispered. “Make me better.”
Wil sits out on the patio staring at the starless night. He remembers it al —the words, the tastes, the rapture on her face as blood dripped from the fang-sized hole in her wrist down into the bottle, as he fed her his own blood and recited Coleridge’s “Christabel” with a delirious chuckle.
O weary lady, Geraldine,
I pray you, drink this cordial wine!
It is a wine of virtuous powers;
My mother made it of wild flowers.
He remembers al this as he gazes out at the moonlit garden and the high wooden fence. His eyes fol ow the fence toward the rear of the garden, beyond the pond and the lawn, and the feathered silhouettes of two conifer trees. Between them he sees the soft shine of a shed window, peeping out like an eye.
And he is aware of something, of some living presence behind the shed. He hears the crack of a twig and, a few seconds later, catches the scent of some blood on the air. He sips on his glass of Isobel to sharpen his senses, then inhales the air slowly through his nose. As the scent is fused with greener, grassier smel s it is impossible to tel if it is merely generic mammal blood—a badger, maybe, or a frightened cat—or something larger, human-sized.
A second later he detects blood he knows. Peter’s. He is sliding the glass doors and stepping out onto the patio with his wine.
They swap hi’s and Peter sits down on one of the garden
chairs.
“Just, you know, sorry,” he says tentatively. “I mean about earlier. I overreacted.”
Wil raises his hand. “Hey, no, my fault entirely.”
“It was good of you to come. And you were a real help with the police today.”
“Not a problem,” Wil says. “I was just thinking about that band we used to have.”
Peter smiles.
Wil starts to sing their only song: “ ‘You look so pretty in your scarlet dress, Come on, baby, let’s make a mess . . . ’ ” Peter can’t help but join in, grinning at the absurdity of their lyrics. “ ‘Let’s leave our parents down here drinking their sherries, ’cause when I taste your blood I think of cherries . . . ’ ”
They let the ensuing laughter slowly fade.
“It could have had a great video,” says Peter.
“Wel , we had the T-shirts.”
They talk some more, Wil prompting Peter into remembering their early childhood on the barge.
How their parents always went that extra mile to make their infancy special, like the time they brought a freshly kil ed department store Santa Claus home for their midnight Christmas feast.
And then they talk a bit about the darker years, in that modern house in suburban Surrey, throwing stones at their abstaining foster father as he watered the tomatoes in his greenhouse, and biting into the terrified guinea pigs they’d foolishly been given as pets.
They talk about the flights to London to watch vampire punk bands.
“Remember the night we went to Berlin?” asks Wil . “Do you remember that?”
Peter nods. They had gone to watch Iggy Pop and David Bowie play a joint set at the Autobahn nightclub. He had been the youngest there by miles. “Nineteen seventy-seven,” he says. “Great year.”
They laugh as they talk about the 1980s vampire porn they used to watch.
“Vein Man,” says Peter. “I remember that one. About the autistic vampire who memorized everyone’s blood group.”
“Yeah, and what were the others?”
“Beverly Hills Vampire. ”
“My Left Fang. That was seriously misjudged.”
“Ferris Bueller’s Night Off was a fun one,” says Peter with a smile.
Realizing this could be the moment, Wil gestures to the bottle of vampire blood. “Old times’
sake? Forget the merlot.”
“Wil , I don’t think so.”
Maybe if he explained. “It’s not like it used to be, Pete. You can get VB anywhere. There’s a place in Manchester, actual y. A nightclub. The Black Narcissus. Went there last night. Bit gothy for me, to be honest, but it’s stil going. And the police don’t touch it because it’s run by the Sheridan Society. Twenty quid a bottle from the cloakroom attendant. Finest you can taste.”
Peter considers this, and Wil notes the wrenching strain on his face, as though he were pul ing a rope in an internal tug-of-war. Eventual y, Peter shakes his head. “I better go to bed.”
Bloodless Excuse for a Marriage
But once in his bed, Peter can’t stop thinking about it.
Accessible, guilt-free blood drinking.
You didn’t have to be unfaithful, or steal, or kil someone to get a fix. You just went to a place in Manchester and bought it and drank it, and you could be happy again, if happy is the word.
Things had changed so much since his day. Things seemed so much easier now. With that society Wil was talking about and its list of names the police couldn’t touch.
Peter lies there thinking this and wondering how Helen can read with al this going on around her. Okay, so she hasn’t actual y turned the page since she got into bed, so it’s unlikely she’s actually reading, but stil , she’s sitting up with whatever pale-blooded dirge she’s got to get through for next week’s book group meeting and trying to read. It just about amounts to the same thing.
He looks at Helen’s book. A tasteful historical novel, When the Last Sparrow Sings. The title means nothing to Peter. He has never heard a bird sing in his life.
Why, he wonders, is it so important to her? To carry on as if nothing had happened? To bother with a Sunday roast, the book group, putting things in recycling bins, having sit-down breakfasts and percolated coffee. How does she do these things when the stress is buzzing around her like electricity around a pylon?
To paper over the cracks, yes, but with cracks this wide, what is the point of bothering? It is a mystery to him. Just as it is a mystery why she has backtracked on the Wil situation. “He’s staying til tomorrow.” Why? It makes him bubble with anger, but he doesn’t know precisely what the anger is about, or why things are getting to him so much.
He decides to let some of his issues out, to air them in the bedroom, but it is a mistake.
“A nightclub?” Helen places the book down on the bed. “A nightclub?”
He feels exposed, and a little bit pathetic, but it is also a release, to talk so openly with his wife.
“Yeah,” he goes on, as cautiously as he can manage. “Wil says you can get it from the cloakroom attendant. I thought it might help, you know, us.”
Oh no, he thinks. I’ve gone too far.
Her jaw clenches.
Her nostrils flare.
“What do you mean help? Help what?”
No going back now. “Us. Me and you.”
“There’s nothing wrong with us.”
He wonders if she’s real y being serious. “Oh, and in which universe is that true?”
Helen puts the sparrow book down, shifts lower in the bed, lands her head on the pil ow, and switches off the light. He can sense the tension like static in the darkness.
“Look,” she says, in her stop-this-nonsense-immediately voice. “I’m not going to stay up discussing your midlife crisis. Nightclubs! ”
“Wel , the least we could do is taste each other’s blood once in a while. When was the last time we did that? Tuscany? The Dordogne? That Christmas we went to your mum’s? I mean, which century?”
His heart is racing and he is surprised at how angry he sounds. As always in a row, he is doing himself no favors.
“Tasting blood!” scowls Helen, tugging the duvet sharply. “Is that al you ever think about?”
“Yes! Pretty much!” He has responded too quickly, and he is forced to face the truth of what he’s just said. A truth that he echoes again, sadly. “Yes. It is.”
Helen doesn’t want to fight with Peter.
She hasn’t the energy, for one thing. And she can imagine her children in their beds, listening to every word. And Wil . If he is stil outside on the patio, he can probably hear too, and is no doubt loving every second.
She urges her husband to be quiet, but she doesn’t think he’s even heard. Either way, his rant continues and so does her own anger, which—like everything else that’s happened during this cursed weekend—she seems to have no control over.