by Matt Haig
His sister pushes open his door and eyes him quizzical y. “What are you doing?”
“Nothing. I’m sitting on my bed.”
She comes into the room and sits down next to him as their parents carry on quarreling.
Clara sighs and stares up at his Morrissey poster. “I wish they’d shut up.”
“I know.”
“It’s my fault, isn’t it?” She seems genuinely upset for the first time al weekend.
“No,” he says. “They’re not rowing about you.”
“I know, but if I hadn’t kil ed Harper, then they wouldn’t be like this, would they?”
“Maybe not, but I think it’s been building up. And they shouldn’t have lied to us, should they?”
He sees his words aren’t doing enough to comfort her, so he decides to pul the bottle out from under his bed. She looks at the half-drunk liquid with astonishment.
“It’s Wil ’s,” Rowan explains. “He gave it to me but I haven’t drunk any yet.”
“Are you going to?”
He shrugs. “Don’t know.”
Rowan hands the bottle to Clara, and there is a satisfying squeak as she pul s out the cork. He watches as she sniffs the aroma leaking out of the top. She swigs some back, and when her face comes back down it is free from worry again.
“What did it taste like?” Rowan asks.
“Heaven.” She smiles, the blood staining her lips and teeth. “And look,” she says, as she hands the bottle back to her brother. “Self-control. Are you going to try it?”
“I don’t know,” he had said.
And ten minutes after his sister has left the room, he stil doesn’t know. He inhales the scent, like his sister did. He resists. Puts the bottle on his bedside table and tries to focus his mind on something else. He makes another attempt at the poem he is writing about Eve, but he is stil stuck, so he reads a bit of Byron instead.
She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes:
His skin is itching and he struggles to concentrate, his eyes slipping off the words like feet on ice. He pul s off his T-shirt and sees an atlas of blotches spreading across his chest and shoulders, the areas of normal skin tone retreating like ice caps in a red-hot sea.
Robin Redbreast!
He thinks of Toby’s hateful voice and Harper laughing as if it were the funniest thing in the whole world.
And then he thinks of something that happened last month. He had been walking on his own toward the shade and solitude offered by the horse chestnut trees at the far edge of the school field when Harper had run up behind him for no reason except to jump on him and bring him to the ground, which he did successful y. Rowan remembers the vast remorseless bulk pressing him into the grass, suffocating him, his lungs about to burst, and the muffled laughter of other boys, including Toby, and Harper’s brutish Neanderthal yel above them al . “Dickweed can’t breathe!”
And as Rowan lay there, crushed, he hadn’t even wanted to fight back. He had wanted to sink into that hard earth and never come back up.
He picks the bottle up off the side table.
To Harper, he thinks, then swigs it back.
As the delicious taste floods over his tongue, every worry and tension floats away. The aches and ailments he has always known disappear almost immediately and he feels awake.
Wide, wide awake.
Like he has slept for a hundred years.
Pul ing the bottle away from his lips, he studies his reflection as the pink blotches disappear, along with the tired grayness under his eyes.
You want to fly, she can do it for you.
Gravity is just a law that can be broken.
Before he knows it he is floating, levitating, above his bed and above The Abstainer’s Handbook lying on the bedside table.
And he laughs, curling himself up with it in the air. He can’t stop rol s of laughter coming out of him, as if his whole life up to now has just been one long joke and only now has he final y reached the punch line.
But he isn’t going to be a joke anymore.
He isn’t Robin Redbreast.
He is Rowan Radley.
And he can do anything.
Monday
Confine your imagination. Do not lose yourself to dangerous daydreams. Do not sit and ponder and dwell on a life you are not living. Do something active. Exercise. Work harder. Answer your emails. Fill your diary with harmless social activities. By doing, we stop ourselves imagining. And imagining for us is a fast-moving car heading toward a cliff.
The Abstainer’s Handbook (second edition), p. 83
Mister Police Encyclopedia
York. The North Yorkshire Police Headquarters. Detective Chief Superintendent Geoff Hodge sits in his office wishing he’d had more for breakfast. Of course, he knows he could do with losing a couple of stone or so, and he knows Denise worries about his cholesterol levels and al that, but you can’t start a working week on a bowl of Fruit ’n Fibre with skimmed milk and a poxy little tangerine or whatever it was. She’d even banned him from having peanut butter now.
Peanut butter!
“Too salty and it’s got palm oil in it,” she’d told him.
Denise knew al about palm oil from her Weight Watchers class. You’d think palm oil was worse than crack cocaine the way Denise goes on.
And now, staring at these two useless uniforms, he’s wishing he’d ignored Denise altogether.
Although, of course, you can never ignore Denise.
“So, you’re saying that you interviewed Clara Radley but you didn’t write anything down?”
“We went round there and she . . . satisfied our inquiries,” says PC Langford.
They all speak like this nowadays, thinks Geoff. They all come out of training at Wildfell Hall speaking like little computers.
“Satisfied our inquiries?” Geoff snorts. “Chuffing hel , love, she was the most important person you had to talk to!”
The two PCs cower at his voice. Maybe, he thinks, if I’d had some bloody palm oil for my breakfast, I might be able to keep a lid on my temper. Oh well, a trio of cheese-and-onion pastries for lunch should do the trick.
“Wel ,” he says, turning to the other one. PC Henshaw—a useless, de-bollocked spaniel of a man, Geoff thinks to himself.
“Come on then, Tweedledee. Your turn.”
“It’s just nothing came up. And I suppose we didn’t press too hard because it was just a routine thing. You know, two people go missing every—”
“Al right, Mister Police Encyclopedia, I didn’t ask for statistics. And this is not looking quite so bloody routine now, I can tel you.”
“Why?” asks PC Langford. “What’s come up?”
“The lad’s body. That’s what’s come up. Washed up in fact, from the bloody North Sea. I’ve just had a cal from East Yorkshire. He was found on some rocks at Skipsea. It’s this lad, Stuart Harper. He’s been proper done.”
“Oh God,” both uniforms say, together.
“Yeah,” says Geoff. “Oh chuffing God.”
Control
Rowan spent most of the night writing the poem about Eve he has been struggling to get under way for weeks. “Eve, An Ode to the Miracles of Life and Beauty” turned into something of an epic verse, accommodating seventeen stanzas in total and using every last piece of paper in his notepad.
Stil , despite having no sleep whatsoever, Rowan is less tired than usual over breakfast. He sits there, eating his ham and listening to the radio.
While his parents bicker away in the hal he whispers to Clara. “I tried it.”
“What?”
“The blood.”
Clara is wide-eyed. “And?”
“It cured my writer’s block.”
“Do you feel different?”
“I did a hundred push-ups. I normal y can’t do ten. And my rash has gone. And my headaches too. My senses are so
sharp it’s like being a superhero or something.”
“I know, it’s amazing isn’t it?”
Helen enters the room. “What’s amazing?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing.”
Rowan takes the bottle with him to school and sits with Clara on the bus. They see Eve overtake them in a taxi. She shrugs and mouths the words “My dad” from the back seat.
“Do you reckon he’s told her?” Rowan asks his sister.
“Told her what?”
“You know, that we’re—”
Clara worries people are listening. She turns around in her seat. “What’s Toby up to?”
Rowan sees Toby on the back seat, talking to a crowd of eager listeners on the seats around him. The occasional face stares over at the Radley siblings.
“Oh, who cares?”
Clara frowns at her brother. “That’s just the blood talking.”
“Wel , maybe you should have a top-up. You seem to be waning.”
He gestures toward his school bag.
She stares down at it, part tempted, part scared. The bus slows. The pretty, cream-painted Fox and Crown pub slides slowly by the window. They reach the bus stop in Farley. Harper’s stop. The few pupils who get on seem excited by the drama of someone going missing.
Rowan has noted this before, two years ago, when Leo Fawcett died of an asthma attack on the school field. He’s always been sensitive to horror, he realizes—and its al ure. The kind of thril people get when something devastating happens, a thril they never admit to, but which dances in their eyes as they talk about how bad they feel.
“No,” says Clara. “ ’Course I don’t want any. God, I can’t believe you’ve brought it. We’ve got to be careful.”
“Wow, what happened to the Radleys?” says Laura Cooper as she passes. “They look so different.”
Rowan shrugs at his sister and stares out of the window at the delicate morning mist across the field, like motionless rain, as though the landscape is behind a veil. He is happy, despite everything. Despite his sister’s doubts and despite Toby and the other pupils. He is happy because he knows that within less than an hour he wil be seeing Eve.
Yet when he actual y does see her, on the row in front of his in morning assembly, it is almost too much. With his senses so sharp, the scent of her blood is overwhelming in its complex and infinite textures. Right there, one bite away.
Maybe it’s because Eve has her hair up and her neck on show, but Rowan realizes he doesn’t quite have the control he imagined.
“And so it is our great hope,” drones Mrs. Stokes from the raised platform at the front of the hal ,
“and a hope that I know is shared by every one of you sitting in this hal , that Stuart Harper wil come to his senses and return home safely . . .”
He can smel Eve’s blood. It is al there is, real y. Just her blood and the promise of a taste that he knows would surpass anything else in the world.
“. . . but in the meantime we must al pray for his safety and also be very careful when we are out and about after school . . .”
He can vaguely sense himself leaning closer and closer, lost in a kind of waking dream. But then he hears a sharp cough from the raised side platform of the hal . He sees his sister glaring at him, snapping him out of the trance.
The Three Vials
One of the things Peter had enjoyed most about living in a city had been the almost total absence of neighborhood gossip.
In London, it had been quite possible to sleep al day and drink fresh hemoglobin al night without ever seeing the twitch of a curtain or hearing disapproving whispers in the post office.
Nobody had real y known him in his street in Clapham and nobody had real y cared to inquire about how he chose to spend his leisure time.
In Bishopthorpe, however, things had always been somewhat different. He’d realized early on that gossip was something that was always around even if, like the tweeting birds in the trees, it often went quiet if he was near.
When they had first moved to Orchard Lane, it was before Helen’s bump was showing and people wanted to know why this attractive, young, childless couple from London had wanted to move to a quiet vil age in the middle of nowhere.
Of course, they had answers at the ready, most of which were at least partial y true. They wanted to be here to be closer to Helen’s parents, as her father was very il with various heart problems.
They found the cost of living in London becoming increasingly ridiculous. And chief of al , they wanted to give their future children a quiet, relatively rural upbringing.
Harder than this, though, were the inquiries into their past. Peter’s especial y.
Where were his family?
“Oh, my parents died in a road accident when I was a child.”
Did he have any siblings?
“No.” (A lie that had already returned to haunt him, via Mark Felt’s raised eyebrows.) So how did he get into medicine?
“I don’t know, I just acquired a taste for it, I suppose.”
So he and Helen met when they were students in the 1980s. Did they live it up?
“Not real y. We were quite boring actual y. We’d occasional y go out for a curry on a Friday evening or rent a video but that was pretty much it. There was a lovely Indian restaurant at the end of our street.”
General y, he and Helen had managed to bat away such inquiries successful y. As soon as Rowan had been born and once Peter had proven himself a valued asset at Bishopthorpe Surgery, they were treated as welcome members of the vil age community.
But he was always aware that, so long as the inhabitants of Bishopthorpe were gossiping about other people (and they were, continual y—at dinner parties, on the cricket field, at the bus stop), they could be gossiping about the Radleys too.
True, in many ways Peter and Helen had made themselves as anonymous and neutral as they possibly could. They had always dressed precisely how people expected them to dress. They had always bought cars which were going to sit quite inconspicuously alongside the family sedans of Orchard Lane. And they had made sure their political opinions always landed somewhere safely in the middle. When the children were younger, they went along to the Bishopthorpe church for the Christingle service every Christmas Eve and had usual y gone along to the Easter Sunday one as wel .
A few days after moving in, Peter had even agreed to Helen’s idea of going through their record, CD, book, and video col ections to cul al works by vampires, whether they were hereditary or converted, alive or dead, practicing or abstaining.
So Peter had reluctantly said good-bye to the VHS cassettes of his favorite Simpson-Bruckheimer movies (after watching the lush, blood-tainted sunsets of Beverly Hills Cop II one last time). He had to kiss farewel to Norma Bengel in Planet of the Vampires, Vivien Leigh in Gone with the Wind, Catherine Deneuve in Belle de Jour, and Kel y LeBrock in The Woman in Red. Gone also were his guilty stash of Powel and Pressburger postwar classics (which every bloodsucker knew weren’t real y about bal erinas or nuns at al ), and the al -time great vampire westerns ( Red River, Rio Bravo, Young Guns II: Blaze of Glory). Needless to say, he had to ditch his entire vamp porn col ection, including his long cherished but no longer watched Betamax versions of Smokey and the Vampire and Any Which Way You Fang.
Also going in the bin on that sad day in 1992 were hundreds of records and CDs which had provided the background noise to many a midnight tipple. How many delicious screams and wails had he heard over Van Morrison’s “Bal erina” and Dean Martin’s black market versions of “Volare”
and “Ain’t That a Bite in the Neck”? A particular loss to Peter had been the blood soul classics of Grace Jones, Marvin Gaye, and the only jazz album he’d ever owned—Miles Davis’s vampires-only classic Kind of Red (which the unbloods, hoodwinked by Kind of Blue, never found out about). Bookwise he had to throw out black market studies of Caravaggio and Goya, various tomes of Romantic poetry, Machiavel i’s The Prince, Wuthering Height s, Nietzsch
e’s Beyond Good and Evil, and, worst of al , Daniel e Steel’s Wanderlust. In short, the whole bloodsucker canon. Of course, they acquired and kept a firm hold of The Abstainer’s Handbook but made sure it was safely hidden under their bed.
To replace al these blood-fueled works of art, they went shopping and fil ed the gaps in their back catalogues with Phil Col ins, Sting, and Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, of which they played
“Spring” every time anyone came to dinner. And they got hold of books such as A Year in Provence and lots of upmarket historical fiction they had no intention of reading. Nothing too obviously lowbrow, high art, or close to the edge ever darkened their bookshelves again. As with everything else in their lives, their tastes remained as close to that of the archetypal, middle-class, vil age-dwel ing unblood as they could manage.
But despite every preemptive measure, certain things would inevitably let them down. There was Peter’s continued refusal to join the cricket club despite being pestered by fel ow residents of Orchard Lane.
Then there was the time the lady who used to run the post office came round and felt dizzy after seeing Helen’s painting of an open-legged nude reclining on a chaise longue. (After which incident, Helen put her old canvases up in the loft and began painting the apple tree watercolors.) It was their unknowing children, though, who let the most cracks show. Poor Clara’s love of the animals who feared her, and Rowan’s worrying his junior school teachers with his attempts at creative writing (Hansel and Gretel as incestuous child-murderers on the run; “The Adventures of Colin the Curious Cannibal”; and a fictional autobiography imagining his whole life lived trapped inside a coffin).
It had been painful watching their children struggle to make proper friends, and when Rowan began to be picked on, they had seriously considered homeschooling. This would have given him a life of constant shade and one free from bul ies. But in the end Helen had reluctantly put her foot down and decided against it, reminding Peter of the handbook’s plea for abstainers to “integrate, integrate, integrate” wherever possible.