The Radleys

by Matt Haig

  So she just lies there, cross with herself as much as Peter, as he carries on tipping table salt into the open wound that is their marriage.

  “I don’t get it,” he is saying now. “I mean, what’s the point? We don’t taste each other’s blood. It used to be fun. You used to be fun. But now we don’t do anything together other than go to the theater and see plays that never end. But it’s us, Helen! We’re the bloody play.”

  She can’t respond except to mention the pain pulsing around her head. This only seems to act as a prompt for another aggressive diatribe from her husband.

  “Headache!” he says, broadcasting at ful volume. “Wel , you know what, so do I. We’ve al got headaches. And nausea. And lethargy. And aching, aging bones. And a total inability to see the point of getting up in the morning. And the only medicine which would make it al better we’re not al owed to take.”

  “Wel , take it,” she snaps. “Take it! Go off with your brother and live in his bloody camper van.

  And take Lorna with you!”

  “Lorna? Lorna Felt? What’s she got to do with anything?”

  Helen is unconvinced by his mock surprise but manages to lower her volume. “Oh Peter, come on, you flirt with her. It’s embarrassing watching you.”

  She compiles a mental list, quickly, in case he wants examples.

  Friday, at the meal.

  In the queue at the deli.

  Every single parents’ evening.

  The barbecue last summer.

  “Helen, you’re just being ridiculous. Lorna!” Then comes the inevitable dig. “And what would you care anyway?”

  She hears the creak of a floorboard, somewhere else in the house. Some moments later, her son’s familiar footsteps are going by on the landing.

  “It’s late, Peter,” she whispers. “Let’s just go to sleep.”

  He is in ful rant mode now though. And she doesn’t think he’s even heard her. He just keeps on and on, making sure everyone inside the house can hear every syl able.

  “I mean, real y,” he says, “if we’re like this, what’s the point of being together? Think about it. The kids wil go off to university and it wil just be us, trapped in this bloodless excuse for a marriage.”

  She doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry. If she started either she knows that she would never stop.

  Trapped?

  Is that what he just said?

  “You real y don’t have a clue, Peter. You real y don’t!”

  And in the smal dark cavern she has made with her duvet, her uncontrol able self yearns deeply for that feeling she had years ago, when she had forgotten about al the problems in her life—work, the despairing visits to her dying father, and a wedding she didn’t know she wanted. By creating a new problem, an even bigger one, in the back of a bloody camper van. It hadn’t felt like a problem, though, at the time. It had felt like love, and it was a love in such excess she could almost bathe in it and wash away everything else, to step out into the pure comforting darkness and exist as freely as in a dream.

  And the worst thing is she knows the dream is sitting there, outside on the patio, drinking blood and waiting for her to change her mind.

  “Oh, don’t I?” Peter is saying, somewhere above the duvet. “Oh, don’t I? Is this another competition you win? The ‘feeling trapped’ competition?”

  She surfaces again. “Just stop being such a child.” She is aware of the irony as she says this, aware she is as much a child as he is, real y, and she knows being an adult can never come natural y for them. It wil always be an act, a suit of armor over their craving infant souls.

  “For fuck’s sake,” Peter says slowly. “I am just trying to be myself. Is there any crime in that?”

  “Yes. Lots.”

  He makes a kind of braying noise. “Wel , how can I be expected to live my whole life not being me?”

  “I don’t know,” she says truthful y. “I real y don’t.”

  Millennia

  As Lorna Felt feels the rough bristle of her husband’s face against her inner thigh, she wonders just what precisely has gotten into him.

  Here they are, beneath the pinks and yel ows of the tantric diagram of a right foot and its symbols of enlightenment.

  The little conch and the lotus.

  Here they are, naked in bed, and Lorna is enjoying Mark licking and kissing and nibbling her like he has never licked or kissed or nibbled anything.

  She has to keep her eyes open in order to make sure this is the same man whose pil ow talk normal y centers around his tenants’ overdue rent.

  He rises above her. They kiss brutal and primal kisses, the way people probably kissed mil ennia ago, before names and clothes and deodorant were invented.

  She feels suddenly so wanted, craved, as the warm, sugary pleasure rises with each beat of him. And she holds on to it—and on to him—with a kind of desperation, her fingers pressing into his back, clinging to his salted skin as to a rock in savage waters.

  She whispers his name, over and over, as he whispers hers. Then words end altogether and she wraps her legs around him, and they stop being “Mark” and “Lorna” or “the Felts” and become something as pure and infinite as the night itself.

  Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know

  Dehydration is one of Rowan’s major symptoms and he is suffering it now, despite having drunk a ful carton of apple and elderflower juice before coming to bed. His mouth is dry. His throat is sticky. His tongue is a piece of rough clay. And he is finding it awkward to swal ow.

  When his parents started to argue, he sat up and sank what remained of the Night Nurse, but it didn’t quench his thirst any more than it helped him sleep. So he is downstairs in the kitchen, pouring himself some water from the filter jug.

  From the hal way he notices the patio doors are open, and he finds himself heading outside in his dressing gown. It is a mild night, and he doesn’t fancy going back upstairs just yet, not while his parents are stil going at each other. He wants to talk to someone, take his mind off things, even if that someone is Wil .

  “So, what do you do?” Rowan asks, when the conversation is up and running. “I mean, do you have a job?”

  “I’m a professor. Romantic literature. The vampire poets, mainly. Although I had to touch on Wordsworth too.”

  Rowan nods, impressed. “Which university?”

  “I’ve worked al over. Cambridge. London. Edinburgh. Done bits and pieces abroad. Spent a year at the uni in Valencia. Ended up in Manchester, eventual y. It’s safe. For vampires. It’s got a kind of support network.”

  “So, are you stil there?”

  Wil shakes his head. A sadness glazes his eyes. “Began mixing work and pleasure, eventual y crossing a line with a student. A post-grad. She was married. Tess, she was cal ed. It went a bit too far. And although the university never found out the truth, I decided to give it up two years ago. I spent a month in Siberia getting my head straight.”

  “Siberia?”

  “The December Festival. It’s this big arts and blood-drinking event.”

  “Right.”

  They stare out at the dul pond water, as the angry voices continue above them. Wil gestures to the sky, as if the dispute they are hearing is between distant gods.

  “Do they always do that? Or is it especial y for me?”

  Rowan tel s him it’s quite rare. “They normal y keep it in.”

  “Ah, marriage.” He lets the word linger for a while and savors a mouthful of his drink. “You know what they say: if love is wine, marriage is vinegar. Wel , I say it. Not that I’m a great wine fan either.” He studies Rowan. “So, do you have a girlfriend?”

  Rowan thinks of Eve and can’t hide the pain from his voice. “No.”

  “That’s a crime.”

  Rowan sips his water, before revealing the embarrassing truth. “Girls don’t like me, real y. I’m pretty much off the radar at school. I’m the pale, tired boy who gets skin rashes.”

  He remembers what people told
him at school, about how he mumbles Eve’s name when he fal s asleep in class, and winces inwardly.

  “What, so you guys find it hard?” says Wil , with what Rowan reads as genuine concern.

  “Wel , Clara seems to handle it better than me.”

  Wil growls a sigh. “School, I tel you. It’s cruel.”

  He sips his blood, black in this light, and Rowan can’t stop himself from watching, wondering. Is this why he came out here? For blood? He tries not to think about it and carries on talking. He tel s Wil it’s not that bad at school real y (a lie) and that he could have quit by now but wants to finish his A levels—English, history, German—and go on to uni.

  “To study . . .”

  “English lit, actual y.”

  Wil smiles at him affectionately. “I went to Cambridge. And hated it.”

  He goes on to tel Rowan about his brief spel with the Midnight Bicycle Club, a scarf-wearing and rather nauseating clique of guffawing blood cravers who regularly met to listen to obscure psychedelia, discuss Beat poetry, recite Monty Python sketches, and share each other’s blood.

  Maybe he’s not so bad, thinks Rowan. Maybe he only kills people who deserve it.

  His uncle seems momentarily distracted by something at the other end of the garden. Rowan looks at the shed but he can’t see anything. Whatever, Wil doesn’t seem too bothered. He just carries on talking in a voice that is ageless and al -knowing.

  “It’s hard being different. People are scared of it. But it’s nothing that can’t be overcome.” He tilts the blood in his glass. “I mean, look at Byron.”

  Rowan wonders if this might be a deliberate hook for him to bite down on, but he can’t remember tel ing his uncle about his love of Byron’s poems.

  “Byron?” he asks. “Do you like Byron?”

  Wil looks at him as if it is a no-brainer. “Best poet that ever lived. The world’s first true celebrity.

  Mad, bad, and dangerous to know. Worshipped by men and desired by women the world over.

  Not bad for a chubby, cock-eyed, short-ass with a club foot.”

  “No,” says Rowan, smiling involuntarily, “I suppose not.”

  “ ’Course, at school they tore the piss. It was only when he was eighteen, when he was converted by a Florentine vampire in a brothel, that he turned things around.”

  Wil looks down at his bottle. He shows the label to Rowan. “ ‘The best of life is but intoxication.’

  Byron would have liked Isobel.”

  Rowan stares at the bottle and feels his resistance weaken. He is forgetting why it is so important not to succumb. After al , he is a vampire whether he drinks it or not. And Clara hadn’t kil ed someone because she’d drunk any vampire blood. If anything, the opposite. Maybe if she had drunk vampire blood in moderation, then none of this would have happened.

  Wil stares at him. A poker player about to lay down his best hand.

  “You want to fly,” he says, “then she can do it for you. If there’s a girl you want, at school, a special girl, you just taste Isobel and see what happens.”

  Rowan thinks of Eve. Of how it felt sitting next to her on the bench. And if she’s going to find out he’s a vampire, he might as wel be an attractive and confident one. “I don’t know . . . I’m a bit . . .”

  “Come on,” coaxes Wil , as seductively as the devil. “Don’t hate what you don’t know. Take her to your room, you don’t have to drink her now.”

  As he says this, the voices upstairs escalate again, Peter’s becoming distinct.

  “What’s that supposed to mean? ”

  And his mother: “You know perfectly well what it’s supposed to mean! ”

  Rowan reaches out and takes the bottle almost without thinking.

  Pride brims in Wil ’s eyes. “That’s the world. It’s yours.”

  Rowan nods and stands up, suddenly nervous and awkward. “Okay. I’l take it, you know, and think about it.”

  “Good night, Rowan.”

  “Yeah. Good night.”

  Panic and Pondweed

  Wil drains the last drop of Isobel from his glass and closes his eyes. Now that Peter and Helen have final y stopped arguing, the thing he real y notices is the quiet. He thinks of al the sounds that define his normal life. The smooth purr of the motorway. The car horns and pneumatic dril s of the city. The rough blare of guitars. The flirtatious whispers of women he has just met and, not long after, their howls of ecstasy and fear. The fast roar of air as he flies over the sea, hunting for somewhere to drop the dead.

  Silence has always troubled him. Even reading poetry, he has to have some kind of background noise—music or traffic or the babble of voices in a crowded bar.

  Noise is life.

  Silence is death.

  But now, just for this moment, silence doesn’t seem so bad. It seems like a desired ending, a destination, a place where noise wants to reach.

  The quiet life.

  He pictures Helen and himself on a pig farm somewhere, a couple of sweet little sirkers, and smiles at the idea.

  Then, as the breeze changes direction, he smel s the blood he smel ed earlier. And he is reminded of the living presence behind the shed.

  He stands up out of his chair and walks steadily past the pond, as the scent gets stronger. This is not a badger or a cat. This is human.

  Hearing another crack of a twig, Wil stands stil .

  He is not scared, but he knows whoever is hiding behind that shed is there because of him.

  “Fee-fi-fo-fum,” Wil says quietly.

  There is a total silence after that. An unnatural silence. The silence of tense limbs and held breath.

  Wil wonders what to do. Whether to go up to the conifer trees and satisfy his curiosity or just head into the house. He has little craving for the sour male blood he smel s, and eventual y he just turns and walks away. But not long after, he hears footsteps running toward him and then something swiping through the air. He ducks, catches a glimpse of the axe that’s been swung at him. The man nearly fal s from the forward momentum of the action. Wil grabs him, holding tight to his footbal shirt. He shakes him, sees his desperate face. The axe is stil in his hand, so Wil lifts them both off the ground to splash-land in the pond.

  Time to put the frighteners on.

  He pul s the man, whose face is covered in panic and pondweed, out of the water. A flash of the tusks, then the question: “Who are you?”

  There is no answer. But there’s a noise only Wil can hear coming from the house. He sees Peter and Helen’s light go on, and he dunks the man back under the water by the time the window opens and his brother appears.

  “Wil ? What are you doing?”

  “Fancied some sushi. Something that wriggles when I bite it.”

  “For God’s sake, get out of the pond.”

  “Okay, Petey. Night.”

  The man is starting to real y struggle now, and Wil has to lower him to avoid visible splashes.

  He presses a knee into the man’s stomach, pinning him to the pond bed. But then Peter shuts the window and disappears back into the room, probably worried their conversation would draw attention from the neighboring houses.

  Wil pul s the man back out of the water.

  He coughs and splutters but doesn’t plead.

  Wil could kil him.

  He could fly him out of there and kil him a thousand feet above this pathetic vil age, where no one would hear a thing. But something has happened. Something is happening. Right here, in the garden owned by his brother and the woman he loves, he is slower. There’s a delay. A space for thought before action. An idea creeping in, that if you act you have to face consequences. That this man is probably here now because of some earlier action, some spontaneous decision Wil might have made days or months or years ago. To kil him would only create another consequence.

  Al Wil craves is an answer. “Who are you?”

  He has seen those eyes before. Smel ed his blood. Noted that same cocktail of fear and hatred.

>   Something about this recognition weakens him.

  Wil lets go without getting the answer and the nameless man retreats through the water, then hurriedly pul s himself out of the pond. He backs away so he doesn’t lose sight of Wil , dripping a trail across the paving stones to the gate. And then he is gone.

  A second later, Wil is cursing his weakness.

  He scoops a hand back down into the cold water to feel the fast slither of a fish.

  He grabs it.

  Pul s it out.

  It flaps and struggles in the empty air.

  Wil presses the fish’s bel y into his mouth and, with his reemerged fangs, takes a bite out of its flesh. He sucks on the meager blood before letting it fal to the water.

  He steps out of the pond and drips his soggy way back to the van, leaving the floating fish corpse and sunken axe behind him.

  Saturn

  When he returns to his room, Rowan sits for a while on his bed with the bottle of vampire blood cradled in his hands.

  What would happen, he wonders, if he just took a sip? If he keeps his lips almost tight shut and lets only the smal est drop get through, surely he would be able to stop himself from drinking more.

  He doesn’t hear the commotion in the garden, at the other side of the house, but he does hear his sister’s footsteps leaving her room. As soon as he hears her, he speedily hides the bottle under the bed, next to the old papier-mâché puppet he made years ago when his mother made him go to a Saturday morning arts and crafts club in the vil age hal . (He decided not to make a puppet of a pirate or princess like the rest of the club, but to make one of the Roman god Saturn, depicted midway through eating his children. It made quite a strong impact on ten-year-old Sophie Dewsbury, who broke down in tears at the sight of Rowan’s imaginative use of red paint and crêpe paper. Later, the teacher told Helen it might be a good idea if Rowan found a new Saturday morning activity.)