The Radleys

by Matt Haig

  She feels no hypocrisy saying this. After al , Rowan has insisted he’l pay for her ticket tonight.

  “I haven’t got time for this.” He takes one last mouthful of garlic, then gets his coat. His eyes are manic. “Remember, stay here. Please, Eve. You have to stay in the house.”

  He is out the front door before Eve can respond.

  She walks into the living room and sits down. On the TV a L’Oreal ad is showing a woman’s face at various ages. Twenty-five. Thirty-five. Forty-five. Fifty-five.

  She glances at the photo on top of the TV. Her mother, age thirty-nine, on their last family holiday. Majorca. Three years ago. She wishes her mum were here, aging like she was meant to, not just preserved forever in photographs.

  “Can I go out tonight, Mum?” she whispers, imagining the conversation.

  Where are you going?

  “To the cinema. With a boy at school. He asked me.”

  Eve, it’s Monday.

  “I know, but I real y like him. And I’l be back by ten. We’l get the bus.”

  So what’s he like?

  “He’s not my normal type. He’s a good boy. He writes poems. You’d approve.”

  Well, okay, love. I hope you have a good time.

  “I wil , Mum.”

  And if there’s a problem, just call.

  “Yeah, I wil .”

  Bye, darling.

  “I love you.”

  I love you too.

  Curry Sauce

  The smel from the curry sauce is overwhelming Alison Glenny as she sits next to Geoff watching him eat chips dripping with the stuff.

  “It’s a good little chippy they’ve got here,” he informs her. And then he offers her the polystyrene tray and the fat, limp chips drowning in monosodium glutamate.

  “I’m al right. I’ve eaten, thanks.”

  Geoff looks with mild scorn at the little crumpled paper bag on the dashboard, which had contained a gluten-free quiche Alison had bought herself from the deli on the main street about an hour ago.

  “So, we’re just supposed to sit here vampire spotting,” Geoff says. “Is that the idea?”

  “Yes,” she says. “We sit here.”

  Geoff looks frustratedly at the camper van parked opposite number seventeen. “I stil think this is a setup, mind.”

  “Wel , I’m not forcing you to stay. Though if you leave and you tel anyone about this, wel , I’ve made it very clear what wil happen.”

  Geoff stabs his wooden fork through one of the last remaining chips. “I haven’t seen anything to tel , to be honest, have I, love?” He eats the chip, which flops in half before it’s in his mouth and has t o be retrieved from his lap. “And if he’s not in the van, why aren’t we searching it, getting evidence?”

  “We wil .”

  “When?”

  She sighs, fed up with the endless questions. “When he’s eliminated.”

  “Eliminated!” Geoff shakes his head with a chuckle. “Eliminated!”

  A few minutes later, she watches as he gets his phone out and starts to text his wife. “Back late,” Alison reads, checking he’s not giving too much away. “Up 2 neck in pprwrk. Gxx.”

  Alison is surprised by the double kiss. He doesn’t seem the type. She thinks of Chris, the man she nearly married ten years ago but who was put off by her continual late nights, her working weekends, and her inability to tel him anything about what went on at her work.

  Chris had been a nice guy. A soft-spoken, beta-male history teacher from Middlesbrough who loved hiking and who had made her laugh on a regular-enough basis for her to imagine they had a connection. After al , it had never been particularly easy to make her laugh.

  But it hadn’t been love. The giddy, mad love talked about in poems and pop songs was something that she had never real y understood, not even as a teenager. Companionship, though, was something she often craved, someone to be there and make her large house a little bit cozier.

  She focuses again when she sees the backup team pul up in their mini lorry, designed to resemble the delivery arm of an online florist.

  About time, she thinks, reassured at the knowledge that five members of her unit wil be in the back of the lorry, armed with protective clothing and crossbows, should Wil try and attack her.

  Geoff thinks nothing of the lorry.

  “Nice street this, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” she says, noting the wistful tone to his voice.

  “Bet houses go for a pretty penny around here.”

  He finishes his chips and, to Alison’s disgust, places the sauce-smeared tray at his feet rather than attempting to find a bin. They sit in silent calm for a little while before eventual y seeing something of interest. Rowan Radley, leaving number seventeen and heading to the camper van.

  “So, that lad’s a vampire, is he?”

  “Technical y, yes.”

  Geoff laughs. “Wel , I s’pose he could do with a suntan.”

  They watch him climb into the camper van, only to leave a little later.

  “Doesn’t look too chirpy,” Geoff comments.

  Alison watches in her wing mirror as Rowan Radley walks up the street and spies someone coming toward him, hidden by the laburnum tree. Eventual y, she catches the face.

  “Okay, it’s him,” she says.

  “What?”

  “It’s Wil Radley.”

  She has only seen him once before, from a distance, walking into the Black Narcissus. But she recognizes him instantly and her heart quickens as he gets closer to the car.

  It is strange. She is so used to dealing with notorious vampires that she rarely gets such a surge of adrenaline anymore, yet whether out of fear or another emotion, one she doesn’t recognize, her heart is pounding away inside her like a runaway train.

  “What a state,” says Geoff, under his breath, as Wil passes the car.

  Wil pays little attention to the car, or anything else, as he walks with steady determination toward the house.

  “So, you reckon that woman’s gonna handle herself against him?”

  Alison holds her breath, and doesn’t even bother to tel Geoff that gender plays little role in determining a vampire’s physical power. Perhaps she is worried, al of a sudden, about what she has arranged. An abstainer against a ful y practicing vampire is always a risky match, even when the abstainer has the element of surprise, forethought, and police pressure on their side. But it’s not that, real y, that’s troubling her. It is the look she remembers in Helen’s eyes, a kind of steadfast hopelessness, as though she had no actual control over her own actions or desires.

  They watch Wil enter the house and wait for something to happen, in a silence broken only by the nasal whistle of Geoff’s breathing.

  Imitation of Life

  Helen is slicing a whole wheat loaf vigorously, preparing sandwiches for her husband’s lunch tomorrow. She just needs something to do to keep her nerves in check because of the impossible task that awaits her. She is so absorbed in her thoughts, tortured by Alison Glenny’s cold, neutral voice playing over and over in her head, that she doesn’t realize Wil is in the kitchen, watching her.

  Could she do it? Could she actually do what she was asked?

  “Give us this day our wholemeal bread,” he says, as Helen places another slice on the pile. “And forgive us our sandwiches. As we forgive those who sandwich against us . . .”

  Helen is too agitated to hold back. She is angry that he is here, giving her the opportunity to fol ow Alison’s orders. But maybe there’s another way. Maybe Alison was lying. “It’s Monday, Wil .

  It’s Monday.”

  “Real y?” he says, feigning shock. “Wow! I can’t keep up with the pace round here. Monday!”

  “The day you leave.”

  “Oh, about that . . .”

  “You’re leaving, remember,” she says, hardly concentrating on what she is saying. She grips hard on the knife handle. “You have to leave. It’s Monday. You promised.”

  “Ah,
I promised. Isn’t that quaint?”

  She tries to look him in the eye but finds it harder than she thought. “Please, Clara’s upstairs.”

  “Ah, just Clara? So your men have left you?”

  Helen stares at the knife between slices, catches her distorted face in the shiny blade. Can she do this? Can she risk it, with her daughter in the house? There must be another way.

  “Rowan’s at the cinema. Peter’s at a meeting.”

  “I didn’t know Bishopthorpe had a cinema. It’s a real mini Las Vegas, this place.”

  “It’s at Thirsk.” She hears Wil hum a laugh.

  “Thirsk,” he says, stretching out the long syl able. “I love that name.”

  “You’ve got to go. People know about you. You’re jeopardizing everything.”

  She is back at the loaf now, slicing an unnecessary piece of bread.

  “Oh, right,” says Wil , with false concern. “Wel , I’m going to go. Don’t worry. Just as soon as you clear everything up, then I’l go.”

  “What? Clear what up?”

  “You know, with the family.”

  “What?”

  “The home truths,” he says, in a delicate voice, as if each word were made of porcelain. “You wil tel Peter, and Rowan, what the situation real y is. Then I disappear. With or without you. Your cal . What’s going to make the decision?” He points a finger to her head, lets the tip rest on her forehead. “Or?” He points to her heart.

  Helen is weak with desperation. Just his touch, just that smal piece of skin pressing against her, can bring it al back. How it felt to be with him, to be al he craved. It only makes her more frustrated. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m saving your life.”

  “What?”

  Wil is surprised she asks. “Peter was right. It’s a play. You’re in a play. It’s acting. An imitation of life. Don’t you want to feel the truth again, Helen? Don’t you want that rich red curtain to fal ?”

  His words swim around Helen’s mind and she doesn’t know what she’s doing. She slices maniacal y. The knife slips through the bread, causing her to cut her finger. He grabs her wrist. For a moment she offers only slight resistance as he places her finger in his mouth and sucks the blood. She closes her eyes.

  To be wanted by him.

  My convertor.

  Such a wonderful, terrible feeling.

  She succumbs momentarily, forgetting Clara, forgetting anything at al except him. The one she’s never been able to stop craving.

  But her eyes open and she is there again. In her own kitchen on a Monday afternoon, surrounded by al these objects. The filter jug, the toaster, the coffeemaker. Trivial things, but part of her world and not his. Part of the world she could lose or save by midnight. She pushes Wil away, causing him to stop joking and get serious.

  “You crave me, Helen. So long as I’m alive, you have to crave me.” She hears him take a deep breath. “You don’t get it, do you?”

  “Get what?” she asks, staring down at the bread board. At the crumbs charting an unknown galaxy. They blur into the wood of the board.

  She has tears in her eyes.

  “You and me,” he says. “We made each other.” He pats his hand against his chest. “You think I want to be this? You gave me no choice.”

  “Please—,” she says.

  But he ignores her. “Seventeen years I’ve been walking around that same night in Paris. I’d have come back, but there was never an invite. And anyway, I didn’t fancy leaving with a second-place rosette. Not again. But it took a lot, you know, to keep away. Took a lot of blood. A lot of slender young necks. But it’s never enough. I can’t forget you. I am you. You’re the grapes and I’m the wine.”

  She steadies her breath, tries to conjure strength. “I know,” she says, gripping the knife handle tighter. “I’m sorry. And it’s true. I do . . . I want you to bleed for me. I mean it. I want to taste you again. You’re right. I crave you.”

  He looks dumbfounded, then strangely vulnerable. Like a violent dog who doesn’t realize he’s about to be put down.

  “Are you sure?” he asks.

  Helen is not sure. But if she’s going to go through with this, she hardly wants to drag it out any longer. This is the moment.

  “I’m sure.”

  The Kiss

  The blood spils over Wil’s wrist and down his forearm, dripping onto the cream stone floor of the kitchen. Helen knows she has never seen anything so beautiful. She could gladly get on al fours and lick it straight off the floor, but she doesn’t have to because the leaking gush of blood from his wrist is now in front of her. Above her face and fal ing into her mouth, more satisfying than the flow from a water fountain on a baking hot day.

  She sucks hard, knowing the self-inflicted wound wil already be healing. And as she draws the blood into her, it is such a release, as though the dam she has built up over the years to protect her from her own emotions has burst wide open.

  Pleasure is cascading through her like a torrent. As she succumbs, she knows what she has always known. She wants him. She wants the rapture only he can give her and she wants to feel him enjoying what she enjoys now, so she pul s away and she kisses him wildly and feels her fangs scratch into his tongue as his cut into hers and the blood streams from their conjoined mouths. And she knows that any moment Clara could come downstairs and see them together, but she doesn’t want to hurry this pleasure, so she continues to kiss this delicious, monstrous man who has been part of her al these years, circulating through every vein in her body.

  She feels his hand touch the flesh inside her shirt and he is right, she knows he is right.

  She is him and he is her.

  Skin on skin.

  Blood into blood.

  The kiss ends and he moves down to her neck and bites into her and as the pleasure keeps flooding through her, fil ing the empty vessel she has been, she knows she is at the end of it now. It can’t get any better. And the pleasure has a kind of deathly gasping sadness to it. The sadness of a waning memory. The sadness of a creased photograph. She opens her eyes and reaches for the bread knife and holds it at a horizontal angle behind his neck.

  She inches the blade closer and closer, like the bow to a violin, but she can’t do it. She could kil herself a mil ion times before she could kil him, because every shard of hatred she feels for him only seems to fuel that deeper love, a hot red molten rock that runs underneath everything.

  But I must . . .

  I must . . .

  I . . .

  Her hand surrenders, goes limp, disobeys the orders sent from her brain. The knife fal s to the floor.

  He pul s away out of her neck, her blood smeared like war paint around his face. As he looks down at the knife, her heart drums away with anger and a kind of fear that she has betrayed not only him but herself too.

  She wants him to speak.

  She wants him to insult her.

  It’s what she needs. What her blood needs.

  He looks hurt. His eyes are suddenly five years old and lost and abandoned. He knows exactly what she has been trying to do.

  “I was blackmailed. The police . . . ,” she says, desperate to hear something in return.

  But he says nothing at al and leaves the house.

  Helen wants to go after him but knows she must clear up al the mess before anyone sees.

  She takes out the kitchen rol from under the sink and rips off handfuls of sheets. She pads them on the floor, and the blood colors and weakens the paper. She starts to convulse violently as tears flood down her face.

  At the same time, Wil is also on his hands and knees, in the back of the camper van desperately searching for his most prized possession.

  The whole and perfect dream of that long past night.

  He needs, more than anything, to taste her as she was then. Before years of lies and hypocrisy changed her flavor.

  With great relief he sees the sleeping bag, and he reaches for it. But the relief swiftly dies when
he slips his hand inside and feels nothing but soft cotton padding.

  He scrambles around, searching wildly.

  The shoebox is open. A letter lies on the floor, as if dropped from someone’s hand. A photograph too. Rowan.

  He picks up the photo and stares into Rowan’s eyes. Other people might see innocence, but Wil Radley doesn’t real y know what innocence looks like.

  No, when Wil Radley stares into Rowan’s four-year-old eyes, he sees a spoiled little brat, a little mummy’s boy using his cute smile as another weapon to win his mother’s love.

  Well, you’re Mummy’s boy now, all right.

  He laughs crazily, but before the laugh dies the joke has already soured.

  Right now, Rowan could be tasting a dream that doesn’t belong to him.

  Wil crawls like a dog out of his van. He runs up Orchard Lane, passing a streetlamp and not even caring that he can smel Jared Copeland’s blood somewhere very close. He jumps into the air and watches his own shadow stretch across a roof before shooting away toward Thirsk.

  The Fox and Crown

  Peter is safely sealed in his car, just sitting there watching couples head into the Fox and Crown. Al so happy with their lives. Just fil ing their time with nice cultural events and country walks and jazz evenings. If only he had been born a normal human and could stop wanting more.

  He knows she wil be in there, sitting alone at a table, bobbing her head to balding part-time musicians, already wondering if he has stood her up.

  Trumpets filter through the air, making him feel weird.

  I am married. I love my wife. I am married. I love my wife . . .

  “Helen,” Peter had said to his wife, before leaving the house. “I’m going out.”

  She hardly seemed to be listening. She’d just been standing with her back to him, looking down into the knife drawer. He had been quite relieved she didn’t turn around, as he was wearing his best shirt.

  “Oh, okay,” she said, in a rather distant voice.

  “That health authority thing I told you about.”

  “Oh yes,” she had said, after a bit of a delay. “Of course.”