The Vampire Sextette

by Marvin Kaye

  I already had a black silk shirt, which I'd bought under the mistaken impression

  that the creases wouldn't be so obvious if it didn't get ironed in an emergency, and

  a decent pair of black trousers. My gingery hair did let the ensemble down

  somewhat, but I wasn't ready to start dyeing it yet.

  I half expected Sheena to have gone the whole hog, but she hadn't. Her boots

  had only two-inch heels and her leggings only had a slight sheen. Her velvety

  jacket was cut like a Tudor doublet with a drawstring at the waist, but she hadn't

  done anything extravagant with her hair except for renewing the dye. Her mascara

  was almost conservative.

  "You're not quite ready for the real me," she told me when I told her she

  looked beautiful.

  "I'm working on it," I assured her.

  I figured that I'd have no difficulty at all beating her on the lane. Even if she'd

  played before, I reasoned, she couldn't have had much practice recently, and she

  was bound to feel bad about having to check her boots in favour of style-disaster

  flatties. It turned out, however, that she was every bit as neat and meticulous with

  a bowling ball as she was with a phone and keyboard, and I made the mistake of

  starting with a heavy ball. It wasn't until I put the black one aside and accepted that

  I was one of nature's reds that I got into a groove. Sheena won the first game by

  120-113, and I had to sweat to get the best out of three; I needed 160 to outscore

  her on the third and I only just managed it.

  "I knew you could do it," she said when I collected the necessary eight on a

  final-frame spare. "You're the sort who raises his game under pressure. Not many

  of those about in this town. Wasted in Phoneland."

  "It's just a stopgap." I said, revelling in the compliment as we reclaimed our

  footwear and gravitated towards the bar.

  "Course it is," she said. "According to the techies, it'll only be a couple of

  years before the whole place disappears up its own arse. The next-generation

  software will let them farm the work out to people's homes. I'll have to jack it in

  then, mind—no way I'm spending all day with Mum and Marty the brat. Lib says

  she can get me a job at Gap, but I wouldn't want to work in a mall, and I certainly

  wouldn't want a job where I was somebody's crazy little sister."

  "Maybe your singing career will take off," I suggested as I ordered a pint and a

  half of Dry Blackthorn.

  "I'll get these," she said. I let her; in a bowling alley, anything goes. "Davy's not

  ready yet," she added, as we made our way to a cubicle. "He gave me a tape last

  week, but he says it's only half cooked. I'll find the words, but I'll probably have

  to change them later. He says he's a perfectionist, but he's really just a ditherer."

  I wondered whether it had been a mistake to turn the conversation in that

  direction, but it seemed better to follow it through and kill it off rather than

  backtrack. "That's how you work, is it?" I said. "He does the tunes, then you fit

  words to them?"

  "I find the words," she repeated. "Davy finds the music; I find the words."

  "Why put it like that?" I asked. "Why pretend that it's not your own effort?" It

  had always seemed to me to be a peculiar form of false modesty when writers

  talked about their work having a life and logic of its own which they had no

  alternative but to follow—as if they were merely passive agents of fate, puppets in

  the hands of their own creations.

  "Because it's what happens," she said. "Don't you believe in muses?"

  I was more than ready for any sentence beginning "Don't you believe in… ?"

  "Of course I do," I said. "I'm intimately acquainted with the muse of

  sociology. She wasn't one of the original nine, of course, but they had to make

  concessions after the publication of the Communist Manifesto or there'd have

  been a revolution on Olympus. Which one's yours?" I hadn't been expecting

  muses, so I didn't have any names to drop; I was sufficiently grateful to have

  remembered that there were nine.

  "In seventeenth-century France," she said with a half smile that seemed to be a

  polite acknowledgement of my ready grasp of the game, "poets thought that their

  muses were vampiric—that they had to pay in blood for artistic inspiration.

  Geniuses paid so high a price that they wasted away."

  I figured that it was a test—maybe the crucial test that would decide whether

  she was willing to let me get closer. "In nineteenth-century France," I countered,

  "they thought the same about the clap—that because genius was close to

  madness, tertiary syphilis was the Ml to enlightenment." I said it lightly, so that she

  would know that it was the kind of put-down that was laid on to be picked up and

  run to healthy absurdity.

  "By that time," she said, "the art of dreaming had gone to pot, ruined by

  laudanum. If you know how to let yourself go when you fall asleep, you don't

  need dope. You only have to attract the right kinds of night visitors to make the

  connections you need."

  "Must be why I got only a two-two," I said. "The muse of sociology didn't

  come through when I needed her most. My mistake—I should have fed her

  better."

  "It's not just blood, of course," she said. "There are other bodily fluids that

  will do as well—and some which definitely won't."

  I got the joke immediately. "Muses never take the piss," I said.

  "Neither should you," she riposted immediately, in her very best telephone

  manner.

  I could take a hint. Sheena was telling me that if we were to devote ourselves to

  the game in earnest, I had to be careful to stay within the field of play—even if,

  like Elland Road dog track, it was too narrow to accommodate the sixth stall that

  the normal rules demanded.

  "So how do you find the words," I asked earnestly, "if you can't just make

  them up the way other lyricists do?"

  "You lose yourself in the music," she said, with equal seriousness. "You shut

  your eyes and you let it take over. It's like self-hypnosis—it's not really a trance,

  but it is an altered state of consciousness. Music's a natural language, with its own

  meanings built in. It speaks to the emotions. It's the purest magic of all, and the

  greatest mystery. And if you listen—really listen—you know what it's about. A

  piece of music doesn't mean the same thing to everybody, of course, because our

  emotional profiles are so different. Music resonates in different ways in different

  souls. If you want to understand your own meanings—the nature of your true

  self—you have to find your own music, and then you have to find the words that

  fit it. Otherwise, you might as well be taking calls at work, reciting crap from

  somebody else's script."

  It was a test, and I knew that it was a crucial one. If I couldn't take what she

  was saying seriously, it would all be off—but she didn't want it to be off. She

  liked me, at least enough not to prefer loneliness, so she'd warned me as gently as

  she could about the dangers of taking the piss. All I had to do was play ball.

  I nodded sagely and resisted the pseudo-intellectual temptation to quote Walter

  Pater about all art aspiring to the condition of music. "I see what yo
u mean," I

  said. "Our moods have musical reflections, and it goes much deeper than the ratio

  of backbeat to heartbeat. To produce the right lyrics, you have to find words that

  have the same emotional quality as the music. It makes sense."

  "No, it doesn't," she said quietly. "It goes way beyond sense, in either meaning

  of the term. It's supernatural."

  "And it costs," I added, trying not to sound too tentative. "In blood, sweat,

  and tears. It takes something out of you."

  "It takes everything out of you," she said. "Everything that isn't just waste."

  Jez's comments about the band she and her boyfriend had been in—and their

  living-together thing having broken up at the same time—took on new significance

  then. The one topic you should normally steer clear of when you're trying to

  charm a lass into bed is her ex-boyfriend, but I already knew that Sheena wasn't

  subject to the normal rules of engagement.

  "It must be difficult," I observed delicately, "to find the right words to fit the

  music of a guy you used to live with."

  "The sex was always a mistake," she said. "That wasn't the way we gelled."

  Under normal circumstances I'd have deduced from that remark that wee Davy

  must be queer, but in this particular instance I was prepared to believe that he

  might really be wedded to his vampire muse. In any case, that wasn't the important

  issue. "We all make mistakes," I said. "I never thought it was possible for sex to

  be among them, but that was before I met the Phoneland harpies. One night with

  them was enough to teach me that it really does matter whether or not you gel."

  "You could probably get used to it," Sheena informed me coolly. "After the

  third or fourth time they'd go easier on you. One or other of them would probably

  develop a soft spot for you and let you separate her from the pack. They don't

  really go in for pull -a-pig contests—what's the point of playing a game it's

  impossible to lose? They just resent the fact that lads do, and they know it puts

  the fear of God into lads to think that they might be victims of that kind of

  contempt."

  "Actually," I said, "I think the whole pull-a-pig thing's an urban legend."

  "No it's not," she said quietly.

  She was right; I'd never done it myself, but I'd seen the Polaroids. I'd even

  laughed at them, because that was what was expected, even though they weren't at

  all funny.

  "I wouldn't want to get used to it," I said. "And it's definitely my round. The

  next one, too."

  "In that case," she said, "let's go somewhere a little less naff. We've both made

  our points, haven't we?"

  We had. The only places within easy walking distance where the oak beams

  weren't plastic and there wasn't a trace of maroon were the downmarket Upin

  Arms and the upmarket Countess of Cromartie. I took her to the Countess, even

  though the harpies sometimes used it for girls' nights out. I figured that the risk

  was worth it.

  Afterwards, I saw her home. Sheena lived on what passes for the wrong side

  of the tracks in Cross Gates, north of the railway and east of the ring road, but the

  terraced street she lived in was neatly kept —what gran would have called

  respectable poor. It was obvious that Sheena wasn't about to introduce me to her

  mum or her big sister right away, so I left her on the doorstep—but that was okay,

  because we'd already fixed up another date. She had agreed to bring some of her

  tapes over to my place and let me cook her a meal. Nobody said anything about

  bringing an overnight bag, but it was tacitly understood that we liked one another

  well enough to find out whether or not we gelled.

  I don't claim to be much of a cook, but I'd felt the pinch of student poverty

  sharply enough in the previous three years to appreciate how much money you

  can save by peeling your own potatoes and sticking your own toppings on a pizza

  base. For Sheena I splashed out on steaks—from the butcher's, not Tesco—and a

  bottle of French red. I draw the line at attempted baking, though, so I bought a

  couple of slices of cheesecake from the Harehills Delicatessen to serve as dessert.

  I'd managed to acquire three more black shirts by scouring the local charity shops,

  and I took the best one up to Roundhay so Mum could pass the iron over it.

  "Not going into the church, I hope," Mum said wearily.

  " 'Fraid so," I told her. "I get my dog collar next week, but I'm not allowed to

  hear confessions until I've done the moral obstacle course."

  Mum only humphed, but I was proud enough of the quip to save it up to tell

  Sheena later.

  Sheena turned up fashionably late, but only by fifteen minutes. She was

  wearing the same mock-doublet-and-hose she'd worn at the Marion Centre, but

  her boots were longer and shinier and she'd gone all out with the makeup and

  silver-plate jewellery. Her earrings were bats, and her necklace looked like

  something out of an ancient Saxon tomb. Her eyes looked fabulous, like pale blue

  suns with black holes at the core, pouring all manner of strange radiance over her

  lids and lashes.

  She'd brought four tapes, but she told me to put them on one side until later.

  While I made busy in the kitchenette she inspected my bookshelves with minute

  care.

  "Research?" she said, when I popped my head around the door to check that

  she was okay. She was pointing a long black fingernail at the Freda Warrington

  paperbacks I'd picked up at Miles's—but I'd taken care to hide the books on

  Atlantis and past-life regression I'd borrowed from the Central Library. A

  conscientious bullshitter has a duty not to reveal his sources.

  "Sure," I said. "Have you read them?"

  "Oh yes. I could have lent them to you if you'd asked."

  "That's okay," I told her. "How rare do you want your steak?"

  "Somewhere between well done and ruined."

  That was a relief. If she'd felt forced to conform to stereotype and eat it

  bloody, I'd have felt obliged to do likewise, but she was obviously a Yorkshire

  lass first and a vampire second.

  "So what's your favourite past life?" I asked her, once we were tucking in.

  "Priestess, princess, or courtesan?"

  "Those sorts of existences aren't what they're cracked up to be," she retorted.

  "History being what it was, the most comfortable incarnations have usually been

  male—except for the really remote ones, back in the days when the Mother

  Goddess was all-powerful. Being a dryad in Arcadia was okay—satyrs put merely

  human males in the shade, equipment-wise—but being an Amazon was even

  better. The two lives I led in Atlantis were good, too."

  "I meant to ask you about that," I said. "Where exactly was Atlantis—Thera or

  north of the Azores?"

  "Malta," she said unhesitatingly.

  "Malta isn't underwater," I pointed out.

  "No," she admitted, "but it did get comprehensively drowned and scrubbed

  clean of all habitation during the disaster. It was an asteroid, I think, like the

  Tunguska object. The tidal wave wiped out the whole of civilization in the Middle

  East and Africa, thousands of years before the eruption that destroyed Thera."

  "It must have been painful amputating your left breast so that y
ou could use a

  bow when you were an Amazon," I observed. "I hope it didn't get infected."

  "Oh, we had anaesthetics and antibiotics in Arcadia," she said. "It wasn't until

  the Dark Ages that the last remnants of traditional female learning were wiped out

  by male doctors. Don't knock it— you'd love getting in touch with an Amazon self.

  Think of all that lesbian sex!"

  "You'll have to teach me to do the self-hypnosis thing," I said. "Not that I

  expect too much, of course. I realise that finding out I'd been Napoleon—or even

  Max Weber—would be the equivalent of winning the lottery on a rollover week.

  With my luck, I'd probably turn out to have been a eunuch in a Caliph's harem."

  "I was one of those once," she told me serenely. "Great singing voice. Every

  incarnation leaves its mark, but some are more welcome than others."

  "On the other hand," I said speculatively, "maybe it would spoil my enjoyment

  of the present to be always comparing it with the edited highlights of a thousand

  lifetimes. Don't you find that?"

  "Other way about," she came back, presumably having met the argument

  before. "The only way to get a true appreciation of what it means to be alive—or

  undead—is to have died a thousand times. Until you've lived and lost a million

  joyful moments, you don't realise how precious they are. Anyway, once you've

  had a glimpse of other worlds, this one can never be enough. If you don't learn to

  dream, you're letting most of life's potential go to waste."

  "Does the soul have any choice about its incarnations?" I asked, aware as I did

  so that my pretended curiosity was becoming real. "Does it simply get assigned to

  the baby whose birth coincides most closely with the extinction of the previous

  incumbent, or can it hang about and wait for a better opportunity?"

  "The more closely you're in touch with the sequence of your past lives, the

  more control you obtain," she assured me. "Some ghosts are just souls that get

  stuck, but others are exercising a precious skill. Vampires tend to be experts at

  hanging around—it makes it much easier to visit sleepers and take their blood. If

  necessary, you can get right inside the beating heart, bathing in the oxygen-rich

  flood from the pulmonary vein. In some ways, though, shed blood is better,

  especially if it's offered, as a kind of libation."