The Radleys

by Matt Haig

  He knows it wil be hard in the future, keeping their true nature secret to the outside world, but he understands that certain things must always be hidden. Which is why the police never found the photographs of him as a child or the letters Helen sent to Wil in the early and mid 1990s. While Deputy Commissioner Alison Glenny and other members of the Unnamed Predator Unit had assessed and removed Wil ’s head and body from the Radleys’ pond, Rowan had disappeared from the house to enter the camper van for the second time that day.

  He’s not angry anymore about the secrets those photos and letters contained. Since he’d tasted his mother’s blood, it would have been impossible to feel too cross with her, as tasting her blood had given him a complete empathy. He understood that she had hidden these things away to protect him and now it was his turn to repay the favor.

  So, along with the box of matches he had last used to light the fire on Friday night, he got the letters and the photos, slipped through the gap in the bushes to the field behind Orchard Lane, and set fire to them. It had felt good. As though in doing so he could make Peter his father again. It felt strangely grown-up too, as though that’s what being an adult was—knowing which secrets needed keeping.

  And which lies wil save the ones you love.

  A Song He Knows

  The music is so loud, Helen and Peter can’t hear each other as they walk through the mass of dancing, sweating bodies. They are conscious of being looked at, clearly too middle-aged and respectably middle-class in their safe and conventional clothes from Boden catalogues and Marks

  & Spencer.

  It doesn’t matter though. In a way it’s even funny. Peter grins at Helen and she grins back, sharing the joke.

  They become detached from each other, but Helen doesn’t realize and keeps walking ahead, fol owing the signs to the cloakroom.

  A girl taps Peter on the shoulder.

  She is ravishing. Dark hair in thin plaits and inviting green eyes. She smiles to reveal her fangs, running her tongue over them. Then she leans in and tel s him something he can’t hear because of the music.

  “Sorry?” he says.

  She smiles. Strokes the back of his head. She has a tattoo on her neck. Two words: BITE

  HERE.

  “I want you,” she says. “Let’s go upstairs and slip behind the curtain.”

  Peter realizes this moment is the kind of thing he has fantasized about for almost two decades.

  Now that he knows Helen loves him again, the girl isn’t even a temptation.

  “I’m with my wife,” he tel s her, and walks away fast in case the she-vamp gets any ideas.

  He catches up with Helen as she reaches the stairs, and at that moment the DJ plays a song he knows from decades ago. The crowd goes wild just as they did in the 1980s.

  “Are you sure you want to do this?” Peter asks Helen, just loud enough for her to hear.

  She nods. “I’m sure.”

  And then eventual y it is their turn in front of the scrawny attendant, whose buglike eyes view Peter and Helen with suspicion.

  “Is this where you get the bottles of vampire blood?” asks Helen. “The VB?”

  She has to repeat the question before it is heard. Eventual y the man nods.

  “We’d like five!” She holds up five fingers and smiles. “Five!”

  Self-help

  Halfway home, Rowan notices something under his mother’s seat. A dul-looking paperback he recognizes instantly as The Abstainer’s Handbook.

  “What are you doing?” his sister asks.

  Eve looks at the book in her boyfriend’s hand. “What’s that?”

  “Open the window.”

  “Rowan, what are you doing?” Helen asks, from the front seat.

  Eve opens the window for Rowan to fling the book out onto the hard shoulder of the M62.

  “Self-help,” he laughs, before swigging back from his bottle to enjoy the heavenly taste.

  The Tiniest Drop

  It is never particularly easy, accepting the fact that the daughter whom you have looked after and worried about al her life has turned into a ful -blown, blood-craving creature of the night. But for Jared Copeland, who is more acutely aware of the horrors of vampirism than most, the knowledge of his daughter’s conversion has been especial y difficult to absorb.

  That she was converted by a Radley, a blood relative of the man—if man is the word—who couldn’t stop himself from taking for his own depraved pleasure the woman he had loved, has added to the terrible truths Jared has had to face.

  Seeing the way Eve has changed makes Jared deeply uncomfortable. Observing her suddenly pale skin, noting her radical y altered sleeping habits and vegetable-free diet, and having that boy Rowan Radley around most evenings are al things he would have rather done without.

  And yet—and this is a considerable, elephantine and yet—there have been changes even Jared himself has to admit he approves of. For instance, they actual y talk now. Not argue, or engage in their old power struggles, but actual y talk. About school, about Jared’s job application (“I don’t want to sort out rubbish al day long”), the weather (“Dad, is the sun always this bright?”), and also about fond memories of Eve’s mother.

  He is happy Eve is alive and has even acknowledged it is in everyone’s best interests if she drinks a bottle of vampire blood once a week.

  After al , he had stil been at the Radleys’ house when Deputy Commisioner Alison Glenny had told Clara that she should probably consume some blood from time to time, if only to stave off the risk of another attack of overwhelming blood thirst.

  “Because if you cross the line and kil again, there wil be no second chances,” she had told Clara.

  So in order to prevent his daughter from becoming a ful -blown kil er, Jared has agreed to the arrangement put forward by Helen Radley that every Friday night she is al owed to go on a trip to Manchester and get her fix of blood, so long as she never brings it home and drinks it in the flat.

  (And on the subject of the flat, it looks like they wil be staying there for some time, now. While emptying bins on the main street this morning, Jared saw Mark Felt stepping out of the deli with a gigantic sausage peeping out of his paper bag. Jared had apologized for being late with the rent and explained that now he had a job, it wouldn’t happen again. To his amazement, Mark had smiled and shrugged—even though the money Rowan intended to reach him had never made it past Toby. “No problemo,” he’d told him, and clapped him on the shoulder. “Worse things happen at sea.”)

  Yet it is stil hard for Jared, and he has found it very difficult to get any sleep with the cyclone of worries whizzing around his head. Indeed, these are the worries he has right now, as he lies in bed wide awake listening to Eve arrive home at gone two in the morning.

  He gets up to see her, to know she is safe. She is in the living room, drinking the blood straight from the bottle.

  He is disappointed.

  “Dad, I’m sorry,” she says, with an undeniable happiness gleaming in her eyes. “I just didn’t want to drink it al at once. I wanted to pace myself, you know.”

  He should be cross with her, he knows that, but he is fed up with being cross. To his own surprise he finds himself sitting on the sofa next to her. She is watching music videos at a low volume. Bands Jared hasn’t heard of. The Pains of Being Pure at Heart. The Unloved. Vampire Weekend. Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Liechtenstein. Eve stops drinking from the bottle and places it on the table. He can tel she doesn’t want to consume any more blood in front of him.

  They sit and talk for a little while, and then Eve stands up. “I’l save it for tomorrow,” she says, gesturing to the bottle, and Jared is comforted by her self-restraint even as he senses it is mainly for his benefit. Eve heads for bed, but Jared stays there, watching the TV as an older video comes on. “Ashes to Ashes” by David Bowie. He used to be a massive Bowie fan, back in his day, when he knew how to real y feel music. And as he sits there, watching the procession of harlequins walk across the screen, he
experiences an obscure, contented feeling, which seems to be related to the rich scent in the air. It is a complex, deeply intriguing scent, which seems to get stronger the more he thinks about it, although he soon finds himself wishing it were even more intense. He leans closer toward it, the smel , and realizes he is lowering his head in the direction of the bottle and the uncorked top from which the delicious aromas are leaking out, like spores of a heavenly pol en.

  He is holding the bottle in his hands now, and he places his nose directly above it, just out of curiosity. For five hours today his nose has had to suffer the smel s of household waste. Of masses upon masses of moldy fruit and sour milk and soiled nappies, al mushing together to create a stench so strong that it had stuck in his throat. He could actual y forget these smel s existed. The smel s of rot and wasting away that are the by-products of human existence. He could wash them away and taste their opposite. He could lose himself, or find himself, in this intoxicating, life-rich smel of hope.

  He debates with himself.

  This is vampire blood. This is everything I have told myself to hate. I can’t do this. Of course I can’t.

  But just a little sip. Just the tiniest drop. That couldn’t hurt, could it? Just to know. Before the song ends, the bottle presses against his lips, he closes his eyes, and he slowly—very, very slowly

  —tilts the bottle back.

  Myths

  Back home, Peter and Helen drink their blood in bed. They have decided to be civilized, so they are drinking it out of the wine glasses they bought from Heal’s just before Christmas last year.

  After a few tentative sips, Helen feels wide awake and ful of more life than she’s felt in years.

  She notices Peter is gazing longingly at her neck, and she knows what he is thinking, even if he doesn’t say it. Wouldn’t it be nicer to be tasting each other’s blood right now?

  He puts down his glass and nuzzles into her, planting a delicate kiss on her shoulder. She realizes she would love nothing more right now than for their fangs to appear and to lose themselves in the taste of each other. But it wouldn’t be right. It would be building on false foundations somehow.

  “Look,” he says, softly. “I’m sorry about the other night.”

  Helen says nothing and wonders for a moment what he is apologizing for.

  He lifts his head from her shoulder and leans back against his pil ow.

  “You know, going on,” he tel s her, as if reading her mind. “About drinking blood and al that. And I shouldn’t have said that about our marriage. It was irresponsible, and I didn’t mean it.”

  It feels, strangely, like she is seeing and hearing him for the first time. He is stil handsome, she realizes. Not in that dangerous way his brother was, but there is something rather lovely and comforting about just looking at him.

  It makes her sad, though. Sad for al those lost days, weeks, months, years she has missed him, even as she was sharing his life. She is sad also because of what she now must do if there is going to be any hope of a truly new beginning, free from lies and secrets.

  “No,” she tel s him, “you were right about quite a lot of what you said, actual y. The way I, you know . . . it has been like an act sometimes.”

  She thinks of the book by her bed. The one she had been reading for her book group. She hasn’t finished it yet, but she plans to if only to find out what happens to the man and the woman in the end. Wil he tel her that he is the one responsible for kil ing al the sparrows she loved so much on her farm, whose deaths were the trigger that caused her to have a breakdown? And if he does tel her, wil she forgive him for the total absence of birdsong around her?

  She wonders how much forgiveness Peter has inside him. Is it possible he wil eventual y be okay with it al , knowing as he did Wil ’s talents for getting precisely what he wanted? Or have there been too many lies over the years? Wil the news about Rowan be too much for him?

  “Wel ,” he says, “I suppose everyone’s life is an act to some degree, isn’t it?”

  He smiles, and she could almost fal apart knowing she has to push the moment on and turn it into something else. “Peter, there are things I have to tel you,” she says, her whole body tight with anxiety. “Things about the past, but which stil affect us now. About Wil , and about me, and about us. Al of us.”

  She notices his eyes flicker slightly, as though he is remembering something or having a doubt confirmed. He looks at her with a strange kind of intimacy, which makes her think of what Wil said on Saturday. He was always quite the blood snob, our Peter. Had he suspected, that first night of their honeymoon?

  Helen feels sick, wondering if he is making connections or if, actual y, they were there al along.

  “Helen, there is only one thing I care about. Only one thing I have ever real y truly wanted to know.”

  “What?”

  “I know it sounds like I’m a teenager, but I want to know that you love me. I need to know it.”

  “Yes. I love you.”

  It is so easy now, to say it out loud, this thing she hasn’t been able to say properly, with any conviction, since the night of her conversion. But now it is as natural as taking off a glove. “I love you. I want to grow old with you. I want it more than anything. But Peter, I real y think I should tel you everything.”

  Her husband looks at her with tender frustration, as if she is the one who doesn’t understand.

  “Look, Helen,” he says. “Most of the world can’t believe we exist. We’re myths to them. The truth is what people want to believe. Trust me, I see it every day at work. People take whatever fact they want and ignore the rest of them. I know it’s probably the blood talking, but I want to believe in us.

  You know, me and you. As two people who love each other and who always did, real y, underneath it al , and that nothing ever did or ever could get in the way of that. And it might be a myth right now, but I think if you are wil ing to believe in a myth hard enough, it becomes the truth. And I believe in us, Helen. I real y do.” He stops being serious and smiles at her, and it is his old smile. That wicked Radley smile which she had once fal en in love with. “You real y are bloody sexy, you know?”

  It probably is the blood talking, Helen thinks, but right now she is more than wil ing to believe they can be like they once were. Without, hopeful y, the kil ing. And a few hours later, after lying happily awake in the dark imagining the other is asleep, they hug and kiss in one mutual motion and their teeth change as natural y and unconsciously as in a dream. And before they know it they are tasting each other.

  For Helen, as for Peter, it is as if they have never tasted each other before. Not like this, free from fears and doubts. It feels beautiful and warm, a homecoming of sorts, but to a home they’ve always known but never truly felt. And as the first feathery traces of light filter through their curtains, they sink deeper into the darkness beneath the duvet, and Helen doesn’t think for a moment about the blood that might be leaking onto the sheets.

  An Abstainer’s Glossary

  abstainer

  a hereditary or converted vampire who is in the process—a continual process—of overcoming his blood addiction.

  blood addict

  correct term for vampire general y favored by abstainers.

  blood minding

  the blood-induced ability to temporarily gain control of an unblood’s mind; this immoral talent is the preserve of certain and general y the most malevolent practicing vampires only and is deeply frowned upon by the abstainer community.

  bram

  original y an acronym for blood resister’s animal meat, bram refers to the food of abstaining vampires and is possibly a reference to the author of Dracula (who was himself an abstainer who lived on a strict diet of horse steak and pig’s blood).

  CMS

  continual migraine syndrome.

  converted

  a born unblood who, with or without consent, is bitten by a vampire and then given his blood; fol owing this, the victim survives the bite, bu
t at the price of becoming a blood addict himself.

  convertor

  a hereditary vampire who has converted a human by replenishing the blood he/she has taken from the unblood with his/her own; the age difference between convertors and converted must be less than a decade for the conversion to be successful.

  cry-boy

  a male unblood in awe of vampire culture; see sylvie.

  georging

  faking your death in order to start a new life; possibly derives from the vampire poet Lord George Gordon Byron, who faked his death on a battlefield in Greece and then numerous times thereafter in order to keep practicing his bloodlust.

  instinct

  a misguided and dangerous impulse, given much lip service by unbloods who mistakenly believe they are stil in tune with theirs.

  OBT

  overwhelming blood thirst; a sudden and intense craving often triggered by denying the body valuable substitutes for human blood, to which vegetarian and vegan abstainers are particularly vulnerable; OBT may strike with little or no warning, rendering the abstainer powerless to resist.

  OVA

  Orphaned Vampire Agency.

  practicer

  practicing vampire; a blood addict who is unable and/or unwil ing to give up his immoral habit.

  red hour

  term used by abstainers and practicers alike to refer to the time of night, eleven p.m., when the most intense cravings begin, and typical y lasting until just after midnight.

  tusks

  alternative term for fangs and one which is preferred by practicers.

  safetooth desires

  physical lusts minus the blood craving.

  sirker

  an abstainer who dreams of lapsing but never does so; the term is thought to be derived from the wel -known director of film melodramas and abstaining vampire Douglas Sirk.

  sylvie

  female equivalent of a cry-boy.