New Moan

by Stephfordy Mayo

  He looked at his feet (I’m over here, dummy, not down there). ‘We finished playing the song, and then we performed “Here Comes the Sun”, “Keep on the Sunny Side” and “I Am the Black Gold of the Sun” to make sure they were incapacitated. And then, for an encore, I did “Stairway to Heaven”– not really relevant, it’s just a great song. Anyway, then we killed the vampires, and their pitiful goth hangers-on. And then … we brought you here. And that’s pretty much it.’

  ‘Oh, huh. I have the strangest feeling that something significant passed between us while I was out. I had this funny dream where you – oh, it doesn’t matter, my head hurts just thinking about it. You killed the vampires, though? I’m sorry to have missed that, I bet it was really exciting! How do you kill a vampire, anyway?’

  He looked puzzled. ‘With a stake through the heart, of course. How else would you do it?’

  I scowled. He could be so patronizing sometimes. It wasn’t my fault if Stephfordy was too lazy to think of any new twists on vampire lore, I was just trying to take an interest in my boyfriend’s hobbies.

  ‘Well, fine. I’m glad they’re dead, they were really horrible to me. They tied me to a chair, and they kept going on about something called The Reshuffle, and how I’d be useless in it, and they said that I’d make a pathetic vampire. You don’t think that, do you? That I’d be a pathetic vampire?’

  He wagged his finger at me. ‘You don’t get me that easily, Heffa Lump. You might not have completed “Nefarious Doings 101”, but I have; you can’t trick me. For the last time, you are not becoming a vampire, not now, not ever. First of all, I can’t let you lose your Eternal Cool, and secondly, look how many pages of the book there are left. All sorts of horrible things might happen to you yet, and if you were a vampire, you wouldn’t need me around to protect you from them, would you? I like keeping you safe, and I’m going to carry on doing it for ever and ever and ever.’

  That reminded me, what about the horde of zombies that lusted after my brains? And what exactly was The Reshuffle? And how was I going to convince Teddy to stop worrying and just turn me into a vampire?

  But these were questions for another day. Right now, I was happy to be alive and safe, and here with my darling of the undying, my Romeo of the revenants, Teddy Kelledy. I smiled at him indulgently, and looked out of the window. The rain battered against the glass as black storm clouds drifted across the sky. A bolt of lightning struck on the horizon, and I saw the tree it hit burst into flames. Another fine day in Spatula, my home sweet home.

  chapter 11

  * * *

  withdrawal

  Time, like a river, flowed onwards. Also like a river, it was wet and there were hidden hazards and whirlpools. Also like a river, you could go skinny-dipping in it. And before I knew it, it was our one-month anniversary and I’d just got a D in ‘Sense and Similes’.

  Naturally, I went straight to Miss Shirley and demanded to know what in the blazes was going on. I’d narrated over half a book, been in and out of mortal danger and found my true love, and I was still getting poor grades for style? It was unbelievable.

  I knocked on the cottage door. Miss Shirley looked up from where she was comforting one of the extras who’d failed her third ‘named role’ qualification exam, and sighed when she saw me, motioning the extra to fade into the background. ‘Miss Lump, what can I do for you today?’

  ‘A D in “Sense and Similes”? A D? Frankly, this mark is almost as ludicrous as the “dark mark”. I mean, why would you have a tattoo that told everyone you were part of an evil secret society?’

  Miss Shirley winced, causing her aged face to wrinkle even more unattractively. ‘Judging from that, I’m surprised you didn’t get an F. I’m somewhat concerned about your progress, Heffa. You seem to spend all your time daydreaming of late. I do realize that you had that hospital stay recently, but, really, you need to throw yourself back into the action, not just spend weeks without any narrative or emotional development at all. You’ve got to try something new, experiment a little.’

  I couldn’t believe what she was telling me. Everyone knew that true originality scared the life out of people. Far better to be a bit like everything else! Did she want me to move into post-modern fiction and lose all my ‘I’s or something? I’d rather die!

  ‘But I’m working really hard, I do all my homework, I’m trying to get Teddy to initiate adult relations, I’m just not sure what else I can do!’

  I broke into tears. That usually got teachers to increase my grades, at least those ones Teddy hadn’t already threatened into giving me straight As.

  ‘Heffa, my dear, I’ve been headmistress of this school for years. You’re going to have to do better than crying if you want to move me. I’ve seen it all before. You do have a lot of potential, but you’re just going to have to stop writing “Heffa Kelledy” on all your notebooks over and over again and do some actual work. You can’t coast on adolescent emotional confusion for ever, you know.’

  She smiled encouragingly at me, but it was far too late, my soul was crushed and my dreams ruined. I would never recover, and then she’d be sorry.

  She led me to the door gently. ‘Just try thinking through your reactions a little bit. If you immediately fall into despair at the least setback, I don’t see how we can help you.’

  How wrong could she be? I didn’t fall into despair at the least setback, only the really important things, like when Teddy failed to be exactly on time for our dates, or I found a freckle on my face, or my dad refused to buy me something: world-ending events like that. I was starting to feel that Spatula didn’t have everything I needed. If only Teddy would get over his adoringly selfless refusal to turn me, the two of us could just leave; we didn’t need anyone else.

  I emerged from the school to find Teddy waiting for me by the car. He was clutching a present in one hand and a bunch of red roses in the other. He really was the best boyfriend ever.

  ‘Are those for me?’

  ‘Of course they are – you left me that note this morning, the one that said, “Today’s our one-month anniversary, which means you need to get me red roses, another present of your choosing, and an outing somewhere special.”’

  I flung my arms around him. He’d remembered that today was our special day!

  ‘What’s the other present? Where are you taking me? I’m sure wherever it is, it’ll be perfect, just like you.’

  He lifted me into the car. ‘Heffa, you shouldn’t say these things. I’m not perfect, I’m deadly.’

  I loved how he tortured himself with worry over my well-being. It really showed me he cared, though it could also get a little repetitive. How many times did I have to tell him I’d rather be ‘taken’ by him than anyone – or thing – else? His vermillion eyes were like chips of marble, icy and stern, and I shivered. For a moment, I had a presentiment of doom. The last month had been perfect, apart from the zombies and vampires, of course, but how could it last? A girl and a vampire, surely that wasn’t meant to be? What if Teddy tired of me? It was unlikely, but it could happen. I didn’t know what I’d do without him. A cold wind swept through the car. Then Teddy wound the window up and we set off.

  ‘I hear you young folk like the moving pictures,’ he said. ‘I thought we could see what was showing at the Port D’Angerous Nickelodeon, how does that sound?’

  I thought it sounded like he hadn’t spent enough time researching the details of our date, but then he was new to all this, so I was prepared to let him off the hook this time. And a dark cinema, us in the back row, some popcorn … it might be a great way to get closer.

  We went to see Better Latte Than Never, the story of a grumpy independent-coffee-shop owner whose life is transformed when he meets a cheerful, borderline-insane young woman at a coffee convention. But it turns out she manages the nearby Starbucks and he can no longer talk to her, until she comes to work for him and their love blossoms amid open-mic nights and bean-counting.

  Teddy seemed fascinated by it. I
even caught him taking notes during the bit where Cassiopeia explains to Greg how love is like coffee: frothy on the surface, but full of dark intensity underneath.

  ‘Don’t you think Cassiopeia had some really good arguments about how age didn’t matter when true love was in the balance – true love weighed more, as she proved with the coffee-house scales and the muffins?’ I asked as we drove back. The film had been very educational. I wondered how other narrators coped when the world around them failed to provide parallel narratives that cast intriguing new light on their own situations. I supposed they would have to rely on original thought and intuition. Poor, poor lost souls.

  ‘Yes, indeed,’ Teddy said, ‘and about how big corporations are actually supportive of smaller concerns, and there’s room for everyone in this world of ours. I thought that was very inspirational.’

  Oh, Teddy, how intellectual he was, and how I wished sometimes that he would descend to the lower level of mortality, where the rest of us lived and laughed and occasionally got intimate.

  We snuck into my bedroom, barely escaping my father waving merrily at us to join him. Honestly, didn’t he know he couldn’t prevent our forbidden love? Teddy shyly revealed his other present, a piece of parchment covered in red writing.

  ‘Is that blood?’ I gasped.

  ‘No, blood is useless as ink, it clots so quickly,’ he said. ‘This is red biro.’ He went on: ‘I find it hard to express myself in front of you. You’re so eloquent, I know I cannot match your limpid prose. So I have used another medium, that of poetry.’

  ‘Oh, darling, give it to me!’ I sighed. ‘I mean, read it to me.’

  Teddy cleared his throat nervously. ‘“Taddeus and Heffala”, a sonnet by Teddy Kelledy.’

  Already I was in raptures; I was sure ‘Heffala’ meant me. I was starring in a poem for the first time since I was six – a dream come true!

  Teddy read aloud:

  Heffala was a blushing flower

  Whom Taddeus spied once from afar.

  She threw posies to him from her bower;

  He drove her ev’rywhere in his fast car.

  But oh! The rose will rot once it has bloomed.

  And oh! How soon is cut the fatal thread.

  Taddeus’s love he feared was doomed

  For Heffala would soon be dead.

  No matter, though – his love was pure:

  No thorn would harm his virgin bud.

  He would protect, adore and woo her,

  And swore not once to drain her blood.

  So here is Taddeus’s promise weighty –

  My love always, even when you’re eighty.

  Now I was the one lost for words at his moving declaration of eternal love. He’d be mine even when I was wrinkly and wizened! But I didn’t have to be wrinkly and wizened – why couldn’t he see there was another way?

  ‘Teddy, your words are the most beautiful things I’ve ever heard, but I fear for us. I’m ready to take the next step, can’t you see that?’

  As if to demonstrate that declaration, I took a step towards him, but my clumsiness came crashing back in as a plot device, and the next thing I knew, I had tripped and fallen, knocking my arm on the edge of the table and sending the vase of roses flying to the floor. I lay, bruised and wet, surrounded by broken glass.

  ‘You see!’ Teddy declared. ‘Merely being in the same space as me brings you close to losing your Eternal Cool, and puts you into mortal danger. I must depart!’

  ‘It’s only a bruise,’ I muttered forlornly, picking myself up from amid the shattered vase. I could only hope that this wasn’t some kind of metaphorical foreshadowing of other things breaking (i.e. my heart). Surely Teddy would not be so cruel, nor Stephfordy so darn obvious?

  But then he uttered the words that shattered my soul, just as the vase had foreseen mere seconds before. ‘I think I should stay away from you for a little while.’

  I jumped to my feet, unable to make sense of the words, and then, once they had filtered in, I knew there was only one appropriate reaction to news of this magnitude.

  Unfortunately, my body stubbornly refused to faint on cue, so I hyperventilated until blackness crept up on me – Teddy’s voice continued in the background, but nothing he could say would help. I was passing out … going … going … gone …

  REALLY

  REALLY

  BUMMED

  It was no good. My life was over. The past seemed so long ago, it was meaningless. It could have been years since Teddy had left me, or months, or days. Had I known happiness? It seemed I had, but that was just a flicker of a second in the face of this maelstrom of never-ending misery.

  Even his poem was gone, the one piece of evidence I’d had that he had loved me, apart from the memory of all the times he’d said he did. I would never recover, never move from this room, no matter how many years followed. It was like there was a hole in me, a gaping hole in my head, an open, bleeding wound that would never close or heal, and from which all of my brains would slowly leak out until I was a shadow of my usual feisty self.

  ‘Heffa?’

  ‘What is it, Dad?’ I answered hollowly.

  ‘You want some dinner? I’m worried about you; when’s the last time you ate a proper casserole?’

  How could I think of food when I was surfacing from eons of unending horror and despair? He was belittling my pain, how typical. He clearly hadn’t noticed the rain rattling the window or my black garb or the big sign on my door that said, ‘Do not disturb – grieving the loss of life itself.’

  Still, all this heart-rending mournfulness was hard work. I was a little bit hungry. I got up and went downstairs, and even the stairs mocked me, always descending evenly ever further into the gloom …

  Chump turned the lights on as I entered the kitchen, startling me. I had forgotten what brightness looked like. ‘Are you all right, Heff ?’

  ‘My life is over. I’ll probably kill myself, then Teddy will be sorry,’ I told him – I didn’t want him to worry about me, after all. He patted my hand awkwardly.

  ‘There, there – I know this seems like the worst thing ever, but trust your old dad, you’ll get over it. It only took me fifteen years to stop missing your mother, these things run their course.’

  ‘Honestly, Dad, how can you compare your wife of three years leaving you to this? No offence, but you and Mom were hardly the stuff Hollywood movies were made of. This is totally different, this was destiny!’

  Chump frowned. I could see his tiny little brain struggling to wrap itself around the truth and beauty of my words. ‘But if it’s destiny, won’t it all come right in the end somehow?’

  Oh, it was no use talking to a man as homely and down-to-earth as Chump. Of course it would be all right eventually, since Stephfordy was writing a romance and everything, but right now we were in the dramatic and conflict-ridden middle section, and there was no light anywhere to be seen (except for on the kitchen ceiling).

  I cast around for something, anything, I could do to make myself even more miserable, and thus drive home the point of my suffering even more forcefully. There was no point in being half-hearted about it all, this was THE END OF EVERYTHING and totally worthy of capital letters. Ah, I had it! I would go and visit Teddy’s home, walk the corridors he’d walked, sit among his abandoned possessions, kiss the light switches his hands had once touched … that would set me up for weeks more wallowing in pain.

  I grabbed Chump’s keys and drove out of Spatula. I’d never been to Teddy’s house, but he’d drawn me a detailed map in case I ever got attacked and needed to flee there for his protection. It was out of the town a little ways. I’d initially assumed this was so that people didn’t get too curious about the Kelledys and their strange nocturnal activities and hunts, but apparently it was just because Jack liked to play his music really loud to drown out the screaming of Joseph’s visitors.

  I pictured the Kelledy home as I drove up to it. It would be shuttered, lifeless and dark – no Bobbi tapping away
at the Internet, no Jack practicing the drums, no Joseph making videos in his basement. And no Teddy, no Teddy, no Teddy, a fact dire enough to make it worth repeating thrice. I thought about simply driving into a tree, but decided to be brave. The world still needed me and my supreme characterization, I couldn’t deprive it by taking the easy way out.

  The house was found at the end of a long and winding driveway, and was more of a castle than a house. Only fitting for the regal family that had once lived there. Again, my heart clenched, my mind froze, my body shivered as grief shook me, and the hole in my head throbbed for good measure.

  I climbed out of the car and went closer to the castle. From a distance, it looked grand and imposing; close up, it seemed slightly smaller than I might have thought. For some reason, I was reminded of Disneyland – my best ever holiday; I’d managed to disrupt the entire parade by insisting that I was the princess until they’d let me ride the float – and I knocked against the wall. It resounded hollowly.

  At first, I thought that even the inanimate stone was reacting to the gaping wound in all existence, but then I realized the explanation was much simpler. The Kelledys’ castle was made of fiberglass. One more deception! I didn’t think I would survive a further blow: first Teddy left, and now it was revealed that he wasn’t really a prince living in a castle. Was he even a vampire? Maybe I had been foolishly misled over everything; next, someone would be telling me that I wasn’t the most fascinatingly interesting person they’d ever met.