by Anne Billson
He shifted his weight uneasily. 'I don't know. Have you?'
I opened my bag and pulled out the package. 'Look.'
'What's this?' He took the envelope and whistled as he saw what was inside. 'Tickets? Money? Hey, where'd you get this?'
'Tickets to Paris,' I announced triumphantly. 'To-morrow night. You and me.'
I waited for him to punch the air with delight. But instead of being pleased, he was wearing a gutted expression, as though somebody had punched him hard in the stomach. 'I... Dora, we... can't go. Not tomorrow.'
I couldn't see what the problem was. 'Why on earth not?'
'Work,' he said. 'I've got a whole load of work to finish.'
'This is more important than work. This is life or death.'
He shook his head. 'Well, I can't do it. Sorry.'
'I don't believe this.' I followed him as he went back into the living room and lit a cigarette. 'I don't believe it,' I repeated. 'You like Paris, don't you? Why don't you want to go there? Especially now, with all this shit happening. What the hell's the matter with you?'
He didn't reply. 'Or is it me?' I yelled. 'You just don't want to go there with me? You don't mind going with Lulu, or Alicia, or Francine. But I'm not stupid enough for you, is that it?'
I picked up the warning signs too late. He didn't raise his voice, but it took on a vicious edge. 'Well, maybe I'd have appreciated it if you'd consulted me first. Maybe I just don't want to go to fucking Paris. I'm fed up with you telling me what to do, Dora. I'm sick to death of you hanging around, and demanding explanations all the time, and sticking your nose into what doesn't concern you. Years and years of it. For God's sake give me some space. Let me get on with my life.'
There were some empty wine glasses on the coffee table in front of him. On the word life he snatched one up and hurled it across the room. It missed my head by a couple of feet and shattered against the wall behind me. I jumped back, stunned. There was glass all over the place. Everywhere I went these days, there was broken glass.
'Fine,' I said weakly. 'If that's what you want...' I snatched up my bag and jacket, and marched to the door.
As I opened it, he faltered, 'Dora, I'm sorry.' Without turning to look at him, I paused. 'My back's killing me,' he said. 'Look, give me a ring in the morning, OK?'
'Anything you say,' I snapped, stepping outside and slamming the door behind me. I stormed home, and if there were sinister figures lurking in the shadows they sensed my fury and kept their distance. Steam was coming out of my ears. Too late, I wished I hadn't stormed out. I wished I'd had the nerve to stay and yell back at him, but Duncan, when he lost his temper, was scary; I knew that better than anyone, and I didn't want to push my luck.
I wished I'd had the nerve to ask about his mother.
Back in my own flat, I took a long, hot bath, rinsed half a gallon of gel out of my hair, and swabbed my hands with antiseptic. I lay awake in bed, in a nest of garlic and crucifixes. I lay awake and stared at the ceiling, because I could hear the Krankzeits partying with a couple of guests upstairs. I watched the light-fitting sway from side to side, and presently I rounded up all the angry feelings in my head and put them on a shelf out of the way, and then I started to pick away at the edges of the evening, unravelling everything and trying to work out exactly what was bugging me about it. There was something not quite right, and it wasn't easy working out what it was, because the entire evening had been surreal from the very beginning. Surreal - that had been Lulu's word. But I ran through it all again, detail by detail, even though there were some things I already wanted to forget. I made myself sit through the Bar Nouveau again, and I relived the meeting with Patricia Rice, and the encounter with the man who had once been fat, and the feeling of his breath against my wrist, and the faces, and Grauman, and Violet, and Grauman, and the journey home, and Duncan. And Duncan. I replayed that last bit again and again.
I had started off drunk, but now I was lying there stone-cold sober. In my excitement over the tickets, I had missed it, but now his words came back to me in their entirety.
'And how is Andreas?'
It took a while for the truth to penetrate my thick skull. The truth was this: I had never before mentioned Andreas Grauman in Duncan's presence, not in the entire thirteen years I'd known him. I knew that for certain, because Grauman was a dark secret I'd been keeping to myself. As far as I'd been aware, Duncan had never even heard of Andreas Grauman.
My heart did a slow dive into an empty swimming-pool. All of a sudden, I knew why I had been plied with champagne at the top of the Multiglom Tower. Not waiting to be given a lift, but kept there for a preordained amount of time. Not a celebratory toast, but delaying tactics. And I remembered what the Double Image van had been doing in W11. Not just taking me home, but picking someone up. Now I knew why Duncan had taken such a long time to answer the door. He had been busy scattering garlic all over the flat, all over the dressing-table and the bed, replacing what had been removed so I wouldn't suspect anything - he wasn't going to make that mistake again - but overdoing it in the process. In my mind's eye, I replayed the scene of him picking up the empty glass and hurling it across the room. But there had been more than one glass on the table, and the rim of the other one had been stained. With lipstick.
I stared dry-eyed at the ceiling and listened to the Krankzeits until I heard a lot of screaming, and a great deal of thrashing around, and what sounded like heels drumming against the floor over my head. A little later on, I heard footsteps on the stairs outside, and then a voice I recognized shouting, 'Fuck you, Gunter Krankzeit!' Then a door slammed and I heard Patricia Rice go downstairs, and another door slammed as she went out into the street.
Sleep was beyond me. I got up, fitted a new blade into my Stanley knife, and stared out of the window until the darkness lifted.
Chapter 5
All those nights staring sightlessly at the ceiling, staring mindlessly at the light-fitting as it swayed from side to side, staring into my own soul and not liking what I found there. The slamming doors, the clumping feet, the sour nothings shrieked from one end of their flat to the other, any old hour of the day or night, and never mind who might be trying to get some shut-eye down below.
The Krankzeits were the first to go.
They kept their key exactly where a burglar might expect to find it - on a small ledge over the door. Just because Gunter and Christine had kicked the bucket didn't mean they'd all of a sudden turned Brain of Britain, and the Krankzeits were evidently somewhere near the lower end of the Chinese Whisper chain. They'd made an effort to reach a safe resting place before the sun came up, but it wasn't nearly enough. It was dark, but I found them couched in a pile of shoes and scarves and bags, at the back of the large cupboard they used as a walk-in wardrobe. Gunter was lying on his back with his mouth open, snoring. His teeth, apart from their unusually high metal content, were unremarkable. His girlfriend was snuggled up to him like a dormouse, fresh puncture wounds seeping on the side of her neck.
I wasn't going to waste precious bullets on these two. I didn't need to. I drew back the curtains and ripped down the black plastic bin-liners they had taped over the windows. Then I dragged first Gunter, then Christine, out of their hidey-hole by the feet.
Even before I staked them they were charring at the edges, curling slowly away from the light, like phototropism in reverse. Gunter's eyelids flickered as the sharpened point pierced his chest, and I thought I heard him say something German and obscene-sounding as I whacked it further in. The air filled with a fine spray of blood and foul-smelling gas, but all he could muster in the way of retaliation was a reflexive snarl. Christine was even less formidable; she did nothing but squirt gore like a punctured sauce bottle. Luckily I was wearing Lulu's pink plastic raincoat.
For a long while I stood and looked at the blackening bodies, which were twisting into foetal positions around their wooden skewers, like giant shrimps on a big barbie. Time was playing strange tricks; there were peculiar gaps in my
memory. I was always cranky for the first few days of my period, but it wasn't just that. I couldn't remember having had breakfast, for instance, even though I was sure I had had it, because there were small pieces of muesli lodged between my teeth. Gunter and Christine's flat took on a timeless, watertight quality, like an abandoned railway platform in the middle of nowhere. I wondered whether I'd dreamt the noises in the night; I had expected to find a pile of gnawed bones at the very least. But the only two corpses were my own handiwork. It was just as well they were decomposing; I would have had a hard time explaining them away.
Later, I found myself standing fully-clothed in the Krankzeits' bath with a shower attachment in my hand, hosing down the pink plastic until the water ran in thin red puddles at my feet, spiralling clockwise down the plughole in time-honoured Psycho tradition. When the raincoat was lightly streaked as opposed to thickly splattered. I clambered out, sloshing water all over the floor, feeling that surge of energy you sometimes get after an invigorating bout of physical exercise. I would need to consult a dietician about it, but I reckoned that staking vampires would burn off more calories than digging a ditch, swimming twenty lengths, or running a three-minute mile. Staking vampires would no doubt provide benefits of an aerobic nature, would keep you trim around the waist, would firm up the flab at the top of your arms - and would have the not inconsiderable side-effect of doing civilization an enormous favour as well. It had been rigorous physical exercise, but now the tough part was over, I found myself regarding it as fun, like squashing greenfly. I squelched downstairs, popped some Feminax, had a big toot of Ruth's sulphate, and wondered who was going to get it next.
Some of Weinstein's urban guerrilla enthusiasm had rubbed itself off on me. I drew the line at samurai headbands, but I dug out a khaki holdall and plundered Gunter's tool-box, which was better equipped than mine. To be honest, mine was little more than a biscuit-tin full of odd fuses and unstrung beads. From Gunter's, I took wire-cutters, pliers, a set of screwdrivers, wrench, hacksaw, nails. But I kept my own hammer; I'd chosen it carefully before buying and it was a hefty weight, with a rubber grip, nice and solid, good for driving nails into the wall or shattering the skulls of robbers and rapists. Even better for banging sharpened sticks through vampire ventricles.
Almost as an afterthought, I packed Grauman's gun as well, though there would be little point in wasting precious silver on opponents who were horizontal and hors de combat. I had a vague idea it might come in useful after sundown. What with time playing strange tricks, there was always a risk of the darkness sneaking up and catching me off balance. Squeezing the trigger would be easy, so long as I could stop my hands from shaking too much. They weren't shaking now, despite too much caffeine and not enough sleep. I studied them carefully; the skin was waxy, the nail-beds caked with dried blood, and the stump of my little finger was all puckered and dead. I wondered if these really were my hands; they could easily have belonged to someone else. It wasn't until I turned them over and saw the mushy palms that I knew for certain they were mine.
Lastly, I packed the envelope containing the air tickets and francs, and tucked my passport in beside it. I had rushed things yesterday. I had lost my head. I wasn't going to make that same mistake again today. Once I had presented Duncan with the facts, he was bound to see the light.
My vampire-hunting didn't go quite as smoothly as I'd planned. Next for the chop, I'd decided, would be the couple next door, the ones with a penchant for noisy all-night parties, but it wasn't till I'd forced the lock on their back door that I discovered they were out. Frustrated, I stalked up and down their living room, smashing small ornaments.
There were so many people who deserved to be staked, and I was beginning to realize I couldn't make more than a dent in their number on my own. There was the drug-dealer with the howling Alsatians. A few doors further down, there was the unemployed yob who spent his afternoons and evenings fiddling with the engine of his customized Ford Capri. Then there were all those people who wore leaky headphones on the tube. I didn't care whether they were vampires or not; I hated them all, and they deserved what was coming to them.
But they would have to wait. I headed west through the vegetable market, weaving between the heaps of rotting fruit as the stall-holders chanted their cauliflower bargains and two bundles of rhubarb for the price of one. Quite a few of the shops were boarded up, as though this were the aftermath of a ripping carnival weekend, but otherwise life seemed to be going on as normal, and I couldn't find any more vampires, not after Gunter and Christine. It was something of an anticlimax - all that carefully sharpened dowelling going to waste in my bag - but I couldn't work up much passion for the hunt when it was nothing personal. I'd been thinking it was an epidemic, but maybe they'd all upped and moved to the security of Molasses Wharf. I had no intention of going back there again, not without the protection of a Home Guard of Van Helsings.
I went past the end of Duncan's road. This was where I'd been heading all along, but I was putting off getting there, so I doubled back and tramped up and down the tree-lined crescents which forked off Ladbroke Grove, peering into windows and pressing doorbells willy-nilly. Whenever someone opened the door, I pretended to be a mail-order catalogue salesperson who had got the wrong address. One old lady insisted on taking a look at my catalogue and became quite angry when I confessed I didn't have one, though, unlike some of the other householders, she didn't seem at all perturbed by the streaky stains on my pink plastic raincoat. If no one answered the door, I cased the joint, unless there were bars on the windows or a visible alarm system. I must have broken into three or four basements in all, but they turned out to be a waste of time. No joy in the vampire department, none at all, but I left plenty of garlic strewed in my wake, and a lot of small ornaments got broken.
I kept an eye on the time. Or tried to, in between forgetting who I was and what I was supposed to be doing. The hour hand on my watch slipped nearer the bottom of the dial, and I found myself outside Jack and Alicia's flat. I gazed up at the windows, and saw that the curtains were drawn. Of course they were. I rang the bell, and waited. No answer, of course not, so I pressed all the other bells and said I had a package for Jack Drury, and one of the neighbours released the latch. I climbed up to the first floor and knocked. There was a long silence. I was wondering whether to take out a screwdriver and tackle the lock, when my ears picked up a gentle scuffling on the other side of the door. I rapped again, more insistently this time, and there was more scuffling, then a clunking as bolts were slid back, and the door opened a crack, and the security chain snapped taut across the gap.
Alicia peeped out over the chain. Her face was the colour of flour and there were dark smudges around her eyes. She looked rather like the somnambulist in The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, only not as well dressed: she was still wearing her Mona Lisa T-shirt and dance tights and grubby dressing-gown. Poor Alicia. First Roxy, and now this. I felt sorry for her.
'Dora,' she said in a flat voice. 'What do you want?'
'I've come to help,' I said in my best soothing voice.
'I don't need help.' Her speech was thick and furry, as though she'd been drinking.
'Come on, let me in.'
She mumbled something I didn't catch. I lost patience and drew out the wirecutters. She looked on uncomprehendingly as the chain fell apart. 'What are you doing?' she asked. I stepped in, shutting the door behind me, and her eyes widened as she spotted the raincoat. 'That's Lulu's.'
'There now,' I said, advancing into the living room. 'That's better.' She was still backing away, trying to fend me off with her skinny forearms, trying to make me disappear. As though I was the vampire. I glanced at my watch. It had stopped again, at a few minutes to six. 'What time do you make it?' I asked. She swivelled to consult the clock on the wall, but I had seen past her shoulder already. It was half-past.
'Half-past six,' she said, turning round to face me again, which was when I shoved her off balance. She crumpled against the table and banged the
back of her head, and slithered down until she was sitting on the floor with a puzzled look on her face. 'Dora?' she said. 'I can't see. Where are you?'
'I was hoping I wouldn't have to do this,' I said. And it did turn out to be even more difficult than Gunter and Christine, because I couldn't help remembering all the times Alicia had invited me to dinner, and so it didn't seem like squishing greenfly at all, not this time. I even found myself sniffling a bit, which took me by surprise because I'd never considered myself sentimental. I wished I'd brought Duncan round with me - he would have got on with it without snivelling. Duncan was a natural.
Alicia watched disinterestedly as I positioned the point of the dowelling on the left eye of the Mona Lisa. I hammered it in as gently as I could, apologizing as I did so. 'Whoops, sorry,' I said. 'Sorry Alicia.' There was a soft squelching as the sharpened end sank in, and the Mona Lisa cried real tears of blood. By the time I'd finished, she wasn't smiling any more, and neither was Alicia. She was still looking at me, though, watching as I attempted to clear up some of the mess. I closed her eyelids as best I could.
I turned to go, but then Abigail started to whine. Conscience prevented me from leaving a little orphan vampire on its own, unable to fend for itself when the whole world was about to erupt. The dowelling was too big, but I found the perfect substitute: one of Alicia's wooden knitting needles. I felt guiltier about dropping all those stitches than I did about turning the little nipper into shish-kebab, but then, I was doing it a favour. The baby teeth gnashed uselessly as its travesty of a life fled skywards with a tiny wheeze.
I arranged mother and daughter on the floor and pulled the curtains back. There wasn't even a wisp of steam, but the sky was already dark. The dawn would finish them off, even if Rotnacht didn't, but I tried to fix Alicia's hair so it didn't look quite so stringy, then sat down and had a cigarette. At least there was no longer anyone to complain about smoke polluting the baby's airspace. By the time I'd smoked two or three, and snorted the rest of the sulphate, I felt a whole lot better, not wobbly at all. I took off the raincoat, folded it up and slipped it into my bag. There hadn't been so much mess with these two. The baby had hardly bled at all, simply caved in like a dry meringue. My chief regret was that Jack wasn't around. It would have been neater to have nobbled the entire family in one swoop. I went downstairs slowly. I had all the time in the world, even though the sun had set, even though my watch had stopped and the limo would be arriving at Duncan's in less than an hour. There was nothing more to be done here. And by morning, we would be hundreds of miles away, in Paris.