Talulla Rising

by Glen Duncan

  There were moments when I knew he was on the verge of telling me what had happened to him. He rolled right to the edge of it... then back, every time. Until at last one night in the small hours (he was never at the hotel for longer than two or three hours at a time) when we were lying side by side after sex we’d forced on fractionally too long, and I was thinking there couldn’t be more than ten minutes before Zoë woke up for a feed, something shifted or broke in the immediate atmosphere between us, and I knew before he spoke what was coming.

  ‘It’s quite something,’ he said – then stalled.

  Hollywood wouldn’t give up. On offer was the scene where the woman maternally cradled the man and silently absorbed his horror story and afterwards told him it was all right. I always found such scenes aesthetically sickly. I always ended up thinking less of the guy after he’d unburdened himself. I was very close to saying: Don’t bother. Whatever it is I don’t give a shit.

  ‘It’s quite something,’ he repeated, ‘that it can’t be anything other than minor to you.’

  The thing that had happened to him, he meant. The thing he’d wrought himself around.

  ‘Why don’t you just give me the facts?’ I said.

  Pause. Both of us were momentarily aware of the hotel’s sad essence as a thing always passed through, always left. Then the tension fell out of his shoulders, fell out of all of him, as suddenly as if it had dropped though a trapdoor.

  ‘I killed my father when I was seven,’ he said. ‘He was a cop. I shot him with his own gun. He was smashing my mother’s face into the television. Those are the facts.’

  If you’d asked me what I’d thought he was going to say I couldn’t have predicted it, precisely, but every word and image had the quality of a dream I was remembering now in a rush, vivid and inevitable: the little boy struggling to lift the weapon; the low-ceilinged room; the woman’s forlorn knees and the man’s mouth down-curled like the tragedy mask’s, like DeNiro’s, in fact, which was who I pictured his dad looking like. I could see the moment fixing the boy like a pin in a butterfly. I could see the assassin and the smile and the levity and the sex and the skin-shedding like speeded-up film of something growing out of it. There was a weariness in being able to see this, a deflation that came with understanding. I thought: All insight makes us sad. It reminds us of the perfection we used to think was our original state.

  ‘Did you mean to kill him?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m not sure. I meant to make him stop. Anyway, he died. My mother dialled 911 but he was dead before they got there. I’d shot him in the heart, it turned out.’

  ‘What happened to your mother afterwards?’

  ‘She went off the rails. We had two years of moving from place to place. I’d thought now he was gone she’d be okay, but she wasn’t. She’d never been okay. She died of an overdose three weeks before my tenth birthday.’

  I could imagine the story that followed. Child Protection Services. Foster care. Institutions. Too much experience, accelerated exposure, all the wrong shapes. At first I didn’t feel anything. Then when I thought of him saying, Easy there, tiger... easy, and how pure a relief it had been to me to laugh for a moment, I felt sorry for him. But almost immediately and seemingly involuntarily jerked myself out of it.

  ‘It’s minor to you,’ he said. ‘It can’t not be.’

  ‘Minor’ was hardly the word, but I knew what he meant. He was used to being the biggest deformity in the room. Now he wasn’t. It was a relief and a loss. Part of him resented it. Again the visibility of all this made me feel tired. Trying to find something to say was trying to escape from of a chamber with lots of open doors, each one of which slammed shut the second I got to it.

  ‘You know how it is for me,’ I said, eventually. I’d surprised myself. The way out was simply to state the truth, neutrally. He did know how it was for me. Me, the woman whose high-point to date was getting fucked by her werewolf lover snout-deep in their victim’s guts and whose low was watching indifferently as strangers kidnapped her son. The woman with a dozen-plus murders under her belt and ghosts yammering in her blood. You shot your dad in the heart? Impressive. My last beau killed and ate his wife and child. You know, I run with a tough crowd. Ask Delilah Snow.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, quietly, as if I’d said it aloud. ‘I know.’

  That was all. The exchange had left us both sad, as both of us had known it would. Someone with an early flight pulled a wheelie case down the carpeted hall. A belated surge of pity for Walker rose in me, so that for a few seconds I was balanced between the desire to turn to him and touch him in animal sympathy, and the knowledge that it wouldn’t, in the long run, help.

  At which point an odd thing happened. I thought of how my dad used to sometimes take my mom’s hand and make her press it on his face because he loved the feel and smell of her palm and because he was one of those men who was always ultimately looking to dissolve himself into a woman. And how my mom just accepted it. Why wouldn’t her palm on his face make him feel better? That image, of my mom carrying on a conversation with me while my dad took her hand and placed it over his face, tipped the balance (and reminded me with a sudden inner temperature drop of the other balance that tipped); I turned to Walker and kissed him.

  •

  I dreamed of Lorcan nightly now, with all dreaming’s shifts and superimpositions of identity, but always the same structure: desperation, obstacles, loss. In a recurring nightmare I was back in the house at Park Slope. I could hear him in one of the upstairs rooms. The place was busy with relatives preparing a meal, my dad drunkenly superintending, my mom talking on the phone. The atmosphere was warm and lazy, and it took a while for me to shift from calm curiosity (where is he, exactly?) to edgy self-ridicule (don’t be silly, he’s right there upstairs!) to slightly unhinged irritation (where is he, God dammit?) to full panic (oh, God, please...) as I went from room to room without finding him, until in the last room I opened the closet door to find not a closet but a sheer drop into black, roiling water that stretched away as far as the eye could see.

  •

  I wasn’t supposed to leave the hotel (aside from Walker’s injunction to lay low there was Cloquet’s default paranoia) but by the sixth day I couldn’t stand it any more. The rooms were suffocating me. A strangling pressure came up out of the carpets.

  At least that’s what I told Cloquet. The truth was someone walked over my grave wouldn’t leave me alone. Hadn’t left me alone since Hammersmith. It was with me now like a continuous sound. It grew in the suite’s deeper silences, crept into what little sleep I got, whispered and sometimes blared out when I climaxed. Wulf, normally entering her quietest time of the month (ten days since her last appearance, eighteen till her next), remained raw-eyed and awake, ghost ears pricked, ghost snout baffled. It was no good. There would be no peace. Whatever it was it was out there and I was sick of not knowing. I said nothing about it to Walker, who would have tried to stop me.

  Cloquet looked in on me just as I was pulling on the white-blonde wig. The suite’s windows, overlooking Hyde Park, showed high bright clouds and the trees with their remaining leaves shivering. Cold, softly threshing air I wanted to feel on my hands and face and neck.

  ‘You’re going out,’ he said. He was annoyed by the liaison with Walker, yes, but more because he thought he’d done irreparable damage to my trust in him. I hadn’t told him about someone walked over my grave, either. It wouldn’t have helped. He was tightly enough wound as it was. ‘I just came to see... I just came to see if you needed anything.’

  He just came for a little company, he meant. The last few days had pared our relationship down to its functional bones. It suddenly occurred to me how gentle he was with Zoë whenever he had to handle her, and I felt a great tenderness towards him.

  ‘Come here,’ I said. I was sitting on a pink velvet stool at the maple dresser. He crossed the room and quite naturally knelt and put his head on my knees. I ran my fingers through his hair and received, in his muscular s
urrender, how much he’d been starved of physical contact. There was an ache around his body. Unloved, uncaressed, the flesh developed a wrong microclimate that made it more unlovable, more uncaressable. I let myself imagine there would come a time when, my son restored to me and God in His heaven and all right with the world, I could order Cloquet to take some comfort in the arms of a woman, whether his libido was dead or not.

  ‘You’re exhausted,’ I said. ‘Do you know that?’

  He didn’t answer. The medic Walker had brought to check Cloquet’s shoulder had pronounced it infection-free and healing, but it was still a visible drain, a force that gnawed his energy and made him clumsy.

  ‘I’m going to go for a walk with the baby,’ I told him. ‘Why don’t you take a nap?’

  ‘I can’t sleep.’

  ‘Just try. Have a brandy and put a movie on and take your shoes off and lie down on the bed. Just do that. Just rest.’ I spoke calmly, running my fingers through his hair, thinking of the scar on his foot from where his mother had burned him with the poker. Again I felt the unjustifiable nature of our relationship. And again the obscure entitlement. Wulf knows its dues, and will have them. ‘Listen to me,’ I said. ‘I know you wanted to protect me. You think I don’t trust you? You’re the only person I trust. Don’t you know that?’

  He couldn’t answer. Tenderness upset him, having been so long absent from his life. When it appeared now it was like the return of a glamorous unreliable parent who’d abandoned him umpteen times before. He knew it wouldn’t last.

  And it didn’t. With gentle insinuation from my knees and hands I let him know it was time for him to get up. His shoulder pained him when he did.

  ‘How long will you be gone?’ he asked, quietly.

  ‘I don’t know. No more than a couple of hours. I’ll call you if it’s going to be more.’

  I added Zoë’s last layers, hatted and mittened her, stuffed a couple of diapers in the pocket of her carrier, then snapped her into place against my breasts. ‘This is what Dolly Parton must feel like the whole time,’ I said, straightening my spine against the weight. ‘I’m going to end up a hunchback lugging this critter around.’

  26

  God knows what I was hoping for. For whatever it was that was stalking me to be sufficiently provoked, I suppose, to stop all the sneaky stuff and walk right up to me and do whatever it was going to do. Not that I was sure I was being stalked. The feeling was more like the one I got close to transformation, that call of the wild that went from innocent to sly to vulgar to raging, the need for moonlight and the ground rolling under me and air streaming over my snout and the sudden exploded stink of a victim...

  Whatever I was hoping for, I didn’t get it. Hyde Park was green and wet and littered with red and gold leaves, but empty of supernatural signals. I bought a hot chocolate from the Serpentine Gallery and turned back on myself, northeast, towards Marble Arch. Zoë rested snug against me, stupefied by the world’s soft tumult and shifting odours. The temptation wasn’t a temptation now but a frail revolt, a forlorn rebellion against the hardened heart. Don’t. Don’t. Don’t. But there whether I wanted it or not was my daughter’s lethal particularity, that uniqueness that called up the too-late love that must fall away, atomising into nothingness, the same nothingness my mom saw between morphine doses, the same nothingness that was where I wanted Jake’s ghost to be, the same nothingness everyone glimpsed now and then, and denied. I pulled her hat down to cover her ears, inside still falling away, falling away. Serves you right, Aunt Theresa’s voice said. You had your chance.

  I took a cab to Leicester Square. Maybe whatever-the-fuck-it-was hid in crowds. Here were the crowds. Humans, woollen-hatted and scarved, raw-nostriled, frowning, jabbering into cellphones, wrapped in their own details. Christmas had already started to show in window displays, glitzy and merciless as Lucifer. The capital’s nerves were shot from the financial meltdown, and Londoners everywhere had the look of trying not to think about how bad things were going to get. I moved among them, struggling to block out regular perception and open myself to its twilight-zone counterpart.

  With zero success.

  I got nothing. Spent two hours getting nothing. If anything the signal dimmed. What had been a continuous nagging interference faded, sometimes disappeared altogether.

  Charing Cross Road. Soho. Piccadilly. Regent Street. Oxford Circus.

  Nothing.

  My back ached. My left eye watered in the cold. Zoë wanted feeding. She fed every two and a half hours, like clockwork, with a four-hour sleep between one and five a.m. My choice was find a mother-and-baby room in a store or hail a cab and go back to the hotel.

  I hailed a cab.

  Traffic was slow going west on Oxford Street. I took out the cell to let Cloquet know I was on my way home – then thought better of it: I didn’t want to tie it up and miss a call from Walker. Zoë wriggled and kicked her legs against me – then suddenly went still.

  I’d felt it too.

  One second of... of what? Something like forced intimacy. A lecher’s breath on the neck. Furious tingling in my legs and breasts and scalp. Then it was gone.

  ‘Please stop here.’

  ‘You don’t want to go to the Dorchester?’

  ‘No. Here, please. Stop.’

  Back on the sidewalk I turned slowly through 360 degrees. The street was tagged with globalised brands: McDonald’s; Nokia; Subway; the Gap. Light bounced off the flanks of cars. An open-topped bus went by with an enormous diesel yawn, tourists on the exposed top deck, freezing, taking photographs.

  Nothing.

  All but on tiptoe I walked back the dozen yards it had taken the cabbie to find a space to pull in.

  Cold. Colder.

  I turned again and walked slowly west. Zoë had her eyes closed against the flaring and subsiding light. She looked like a tiny ancient trying to recall something from long ago.

  A little warmer... Warmer...

  I stopped opposite Selfridges.

  Warmer.

  I crossed the road.

  Warmer.

  Moved towards the one of the doors – GO IN – and went in.

  Perfume counters. Prismic, noisy, jammed with scents in migrainy concentration. Bottles like science fiction objects d’art. Precisely made-up sales girls with glittering eyes and chignons you could see the effort it cost them to keep intact all day. Women and men bent, sniffed, frowned, debated as if the fate of the world was at stake. It made you wonder – the way a gridlocked freeway or heaving Burger King did – why we lived this way. Why humans lived this way, I mean.

  The store was hot and lit by too many halogens. I took off Zoë’s cap and mittens. She was quiet and alert. There was nothing to do but keep moving.

  Bags. Sunglasses. Jewellery. Menswear: a wall of ties like a paint colour chart. Odours of new leather and serge and talc. Very faintly... very faintly, a pull up the escalator.

  I was sweating by the time we reached the second floor. Womenswear. The familiar vibe or subsonic murmur of female concentration. Self-assessment, self-doubt, self-loathing, self-cruelty, self-love. The endless argument with shape and size. Some women stood in front of mirrors holding things up in front of themselves and evaluating the result the way a pathologist might a corpse. Others visibly willed themselves different – hips, thighs, belly, breasts – working through the finite range of minute adjustments to posture and facial expression that ought to but never did make any difference.

  I moved into the designer section.

  Warmer.

  Versace. Karen Millen. Armani.

  Much warmer.

  Dolce & Gabbana. Diesel.

  Hot.

  Prada—

  I stopped. Zoë tensed against me.

  It was in the changing room.

  And I knew without doubt, as the full impossible scent hit me, exactly what it was.

  My skin was wet and heavy, my head full of blood. I looked down at Zoë’s face. Her black eyes were wide open. Quest
ions massed. I had to ignore them, ignore them and think – think!

  ‘Madam?’ a woman’s voice said. ‘Madam? Are you all right?’

  I was leaning on the edge of the doorway to the dressing room. A young sales assistant with corkscrewy brown hair and hazel eyes too close together had her hands out towards me.

  ‘Are you not feeling well?’

  ‘I’m okay,’ I said, my face fat with heat.

  ‘Let me get you a chair. I’ll be two seconds.’

  ‘Really, it’s—’

  ‘I’ll be right back.’

  I stood, concussed, skin tingling. Zoë’s scalp was piping hot, her soft hair aloft with static. My legs felt empty. It’s not possible. It’s not possible.

  Then the door to one of the cubicles opened – and the werewolf stepped out.

  27

  It was a girl in her mid-twenties, blonde hair scraped back in a ponytail, lime-green eyes in a catty little face and a small body without an ounce of fat. She wore no make-up but you could see she’d be pop-kitten glamorous if she did. Men, without exception, would go: Yes. Absolutely yes. It was a huge part of her life, men looking at her. It was her aura, that was both a power and an irritant. She was dressed in a white roll-neck sweater, black leggings, oxblood leather knee-boots and matching satchel. She had a black frock coat over her left arm.

  For what felt like a long time we stood staring at each other. The air between us pounded with Jake’s first words to me at Heathrow: I know what you are and you know what I am.

  ‘Here you are, madam, have a sit down for a minute. Can I get you a glass of water?’ The sales assistant had returned with a plastic chair. ‘Any luck?’ she said to the blonde girl.

  Neither of us was capable of responding. Now that I knew what someone walked over my grave was it seemed it could never have been anything else.