The Vampire Sextette

by Marvin Kaye

  I thought she might mean the pulmonary artery, but I'd dropped biology at

  thirteen so I wasn't sure, and it wasn't the kind of conversation into which one

  could insert an abrupt dose of pedantry.

  "Forgive me if I'm being stupid," I said instead, "but how is it possible to

  remember having been a vampire in a past existence? Do the memories of the

  undead impress themselves on the eternal unconscious of the wandering soul in

  the same fashion as memories of life?"

  "Yes, they do," she said. "And how. Once you've been a vampire, you never

  forget it. Of all the things that make their mark, that's the most powerful. It's not

  quite 'once a vampire, always a vampire,' but there's a definite predilection."

  "Like a curse, handed down from generation to generation?"

  "Some might think so."

  "Not you?"

  "Not me. All vampires aren't alike, Tony. Didn't the muse of sociology explain

  that to you?"

  "I forgot about the muse thing," I admitted. "It's all very well for poets to pay

  in blood for inspiration, but if it were just the blood, I wonder whether the vampire

  muse would bother with the trade-off. Why give anything in return, unless she gets

  more than she could have for free? On the other hand, maybe if I'd given more

  freely of my blood, sweat, and tears, the muse of sociology would have let me in

  on a few more secrets—like how to get a better degree and immediate

  employment. But I've got you now, haven't I?"

  "Have you?" she countered. She was making a tokenistic show of being hard

  to get. I reminded myself that it was all just a show, just an exotic lifestyle fantasy,

  but it no longer mattered. All lifestyle is fantasy, and there's no virtue in buying a

  mass-produced one off the peg in Gap if you have the wherewithal to design and

  make your own.

  We saved a little of the wine until we'd finished the cheesecake, so that we

  could carry our half-full glasses to the couch. It was difficult to tell how mellow

  Sheena was, because her veiled eyes and meticulous pronunciation didn't give

  much away, but I saw the tension in her limbs as she went to put one of the tapes

  on. This, I knew, was the final test—and I had a shrewd suspicion that I wasn't

  going to be able to fake it. If I couldn't relate to the music, no amount of bluster

  and empty flattery would cover up. She'd know. Although she still didn't know a

  damn thing about the real me, she would know enough, somehow, to see right

  through me in that one vital respect.

  I didn't really know what to expect, but if I'd had to guess I'd probably have

  opined that heartbreaker Davy's music would tend to the gloomy, the ethereal, and

  the tuneless. Sheena's remark about seventeenth-century French poets had given

  me an impression, although I'd never read a word of seventeenth-century French

  poetry in my life. I just assumed that it was dark, nebulous, and leaden.

  I was dead wrong, about twentieth-century Leeds if not about seventeenthcentury Paris. These days, with fancy keyboards, synthesizers and samplers, drum

  machines and computer software, one guy can pretend to be a whole ensemble, or

  even an orchestra. Davy didn't seem to want to be an orchestra, but he didn't want

  to be some morose bastard sitting in the dark with an acoustic guitar, either. The

  backing track on the tape was multilayered, replete with insistent percussion, but

  by no means unmelodious. It was dark and strange, but there was nothing in the

  least effete about it. If anything, it was a trifle too full -blooded for my popeducated taste.

  Sheena was so softly spoken, and so seemingly fragile, that I'd expected her

  voice to be thin, maybe tending towards falsetto or whispery, but it wasn't. The

  register was lower than I'd anticipated, but the notes were well rounded, not in the

  least hoarse. If her lyrics had been written out as if they were prose or blank verse,

  they would probably have looked clumsy, maybe even meaningless, but I could

  see right away what she meant about finding meaning implicit in the music and

  choosing words to echo and amplify it.

  I knew that I wouldn't be able to follow or remember the convolutions of the

  lyrics until I'd heard them at least a half dozen times, but certain phrases and

  repetitive refrains immediately stuck in my head. The dark romanticism of the

  music was reflected in images of night and death, but there was a lot more that

  obviously derived from Sheena's fascination with remote and probably imaginary

  pasts. There were no explicit references to Atlantis or Amazons, although

  vampires featured in such tracks as "Graveyard Love," but the half-whimsical

  conversation in which we'd touched on those subjects allowed me to catch

  references I might otherwise have missed—to the extent that I began to wonder

  whether I'd really been as much in charge of its subject matter as I'd thought.

  When Sheena sang about falling stars or the wings of time or the loneliness of

  castaways, she wasn't simply redistributing the standard pick-and-mix materials of

  teenage angst. I knew that I'd have to go a lot deeper into her fantasies if I were to

  get to the bottom of her lyrics, and that I'd have to put some work into solving the

  mysteries with which they'd been liberally salted. Because I had other things on my

  mind—well, one other thing on my mind—I didn't really make much effort to

  listen with more than half an ear, but that half ear was sincerely appreciative, and

  some of the couplets penetrated deeply enough to recur long after the tapes had

  run through.

  "I like that," I said, of one refrain which ran: "To kiss and sting through some

  emergent world / Reeking and dank from out of the slime."

  For the first time, she blushed.

  "It's Byron," she admitted. "I borrow, sometimes."

  If there were more misappropriations, I didn't recognise them—but I probably

  wouldn't have. One that seemed to me to be more than likely to be hers, though,

  was: "I need to be free, of myself, of myself / I need to be free, of myself."

  I hadn't a clue what it was supposed to mean, but it seemed to me to be

  heartfelt.

  First impressions don't always cut deepest, but if they stick, they stick hard,

  and Sheena must have known that before she selected the order in which she

  played the tapes. The couplets that wormed their way into my consciousness most

  avidly, and stuck most securely, were on the earliest tracks she played. There were

  other neat refrains, but the one I seized upon as if it were a key was "I want to be

  free, of myself." It didn't sound, in Sheena's voice, like a mere artifact or

  affectation. It sounded intensely personal, and somehow found a resonance in me

  that the more fanciful imagery didn't.

  Davy's compositions weren't the kind of music you'd ever hear on Top of the

  Pops, and I wasn't sure that they were the kind of alternative that John Peel would

  ever have championed before he turned into a comedy teddy bear, but they

  certainly weren't amateurish or inept. When the first tape clicked off I relaxed, no

  longer afraid that I was going to blow my chances with Sheena by being unable to

  take this aspect of her seriously—and when she saw me relax, she relaxed, too.

  She'd remained standing after putting the tape
on, but after three or four minutes

  of the second side she sat down.

  "I brought some earlier stuff as well," she said. "But that's more or less where

  we're up to. Davy says it's not right yet. It's partly the mix, he says, but bits of it

  need rethinking. When he's got the fundamentals right, he says, I'll be able to find

  the right words." Her telephone manner had cracked at last, and she was rambling

  slightly.

  "It's good," I said. "It works. It's weird, but it works."

  "Would you like to meet him? Davy, I mean."

  I hadn't been in any doubt as to her meaning, but I wasn't sure what the right

  answer was.

  "Not tonight, of course," she added swiftly. "Sunday, maybe, if you're not

  doing a shift."

  "Would he want to meet me?" I asked. I didn't want to be paraded before an

  ex-boyfriend as some kind of trophy, displayed in order to make him think again

  about the wisdom of casting her aside like a worn-out sock.

  "He wouldn't be jealous," she assured me, having recovered enough of her

  composure to read my hesitation. "He really wouldn't mind—and it would help

  you to understand." She didn't specify whether she meant the music, or her, or

  both.

  "Sure," I said. "Sunday. Why not? Not as if I'm due in church. Still have to

  pass the moral obstacle course."

  After I'd explained the reference, she said: "You've been hearing my

  confessions."

  "Yes," I said, "but you don't need absolution—and if you did, eating my

  cooking is penance enough for anyone."

  "It was good," she said. "I'm impressed."

  "Can't go wrong with meat," I said. "Stick it under the grill till it turns brown."

  "It only seems easy," she assured me. "The accumulated unconscious wisdom

  of a thousand unremembered lifetimes. Who knows? Back in the Stone Age, you

  might have been the caveman who first came up with the idea of cooking."

  "I think it was earlier than that," I said. "I seem to remember being an

  Australopithecus at the time. Weren't you the woman who came up with the idea

  of cutting up gazelle skins to make clothes? I thought we'd met before."

  I wondered briefly what the United strikers could have been doing since the

  days of Mitochondrial Eve to have so completely mastered the art of kicking a ball

  the size of a dead man's head into a rectangular goal. I drank the last of my wine

  and reminded myself that there was no hurry at all, and that the more tapes we

  played through, the later it would get. Within her lifestyle fantasy, Sheena and I

  had already had all the time in the world, and we could take that legacy to bed with

  us when the time came, even though I couldn't remember a single damn thing that

  had happened before 1984—by which time I'd already been five years undead for

  what still seemed to me to be the one and only time.

  "It is good," I said again, cocking an ear towards the music centre. "It's too

  weird to sell, but it's okay."

  "Weird is okay," she informed me, although there was no longer any need.

  "And there's no such thing as too weird, in this world."

  The sex wasn't terrible, which was good, for a first time. It wasn't weird either,

  which was also good, for a first time. Not that it was ordinary, of course, and not

  just because looking down at those fantasised eyes was almost as strange as

  looking up at them. No first time is ever ordinary, because it's all exploration.

  Maybe there'll come a day when I've experienced all the different shapes, sizes,

  and textures that lasses come in, but I can't believe that any more than I can

  believe that in the course of a thousand lifetimes I've already done it.

  There's no point trying to describe how Sheena felt, because even if I had

  anything to liken it to, I'd have no way of knowing whether anyone else could

  understand the likenesses—and in a way, I'd prefer to believe that nobody could.

  She was slim and silky, firm and flowing, but none of those words really signifies

  anything, because they're all mere measuring devices, which only operate in a

  world of common sense and common sensibility. Even the kind of perfunctory

  and dismissive sex that the harpies went in for can't entirely be reduced to that.

  Sheena would have said that even that was supernatural, and that sex with her was

  much further out, but she would have been speaking metaphorically, at least about

  the harpies.

  We were both nervous, of course. We both knew that it could be a lot better,

  and maybe would be, but we both took comfort from the awareness that it was

  okay. In fact, if I were honest enough to put the discretion of hindsight aside and

  try to recall how I felt at the time, it was much better than okay. We'd had only the

  one bottle of wine between us, so there was plenty of margin left for further

  intoxication. We went at it hard enough to exhaust ourselves, and if we hadn't

  been on such tenterhooks we'd probably have fallen straight into Dreamland. In

  fact, we were too uneasy to release each other from our mutual embrace in order

  to relax into sleep, and just uneasy enough to play one more round of the collusion

  game.

  "You didn't bite," I said, neither wonderingly nor accusatively.

  "Didn't have to," she said. She didn't mean that she'd had her fill of other

  bodily fluids; the vital ones were safely contained in a twentieth-century French

  letter. She meant something subtler.

  "If I don't feed you properly, how can you become my muse?"

  "I can't," she murmured, very softly. "But that's not what you want me for.

  Even if it was more than just one more notch on the bedhead, that's not what you

  need from me. Don't think you got off lightly, though. You can't escape

  unscathed—and if this goes on, you'll be changed forever. I don't need to bite to

  draw blood, and if you give me enough chances, I'll get right into the chambers of

  your heart and change you forever. You might be the kind of vampire who sinks

  blood like a pint of bitter, but I'm not. I belong to a rarer and more discerning

  kind."

  As the monologue went on the musical quality of her voice was enhanced, as if

  she were fitting her words to secret music—or finding her sentiments in some

  melody that only she could hear. The way we were entangled allowed me to feel

  the heartbeat behind her ribs—and I knew, even though I couldn't hear the secret

  music, that it had a greater surge and power than anyone would have realised who

  was only conscious of her slenderness and physical frailty.

  "A lamia," I suggested.

  "A lamia's a snake," she whispered. "I'm not a snake. Human through and

  through. A thousand times over, but always a human vampire. No curse at all, just

  lust for blood and every clever way to take it in. It won't kill you, but it will change

  you forever. Better make up your mind whether you want in or out."

  I wanted in. I wanted in again and again and again. I was in love, and not just

  with her fragile flesh. She was too weird for Jez and everyone like him, but she

  wasn't too weird for me. The best way to defuse a put-down is to pick it up and

  run with it, until you've transformed it into a way to fly, and I decided that I was

  with her a hundred percent when she said that there was no such thin
g as too

  weird in our world.

  I wanted in. Again and again and again. It only takes one psychotherapist to

  change a lightbulb, but the lightbulb has to want to be changed. I wanted to be

  changed. I wanted to shine, as brightly and as darkly as her paradoxical eyes. I

  had glimpsed new possibilities, and I wanted them actualised.

  If you fall asleep in that kind of mood, you can hardly be surprised if you

  dream. So I did, and I wasn't.

  In my dream, I looked at myself in a mirror and couldn't see myself. I asked

  Mum if she could see me in the mirror, and she couldn't, but she merely told me,

  in that no-nonsense Yorkshire way of hers, that it didn't matter, because she could

  see me in the flesh, and why would she ever feel the need to look at me in a

  mirror? I knew she was right, in the dream, but I wasn't sure that it was as simple

  as that, even though I used an electric razor and didn't need to see myself in order

  to shave. Perhaps Mum would need to see me in a mirror, I thought, if I became a

  gorgon when I changed, with snakes for hair and a gaze that could petrify people.

  Afterwards, in the dream, I did become a gorgon, and it was wicked. I went

  around petrifying people deliberately, and it gave me a real thrill to do it.

  Mercifully, Sheena—who was, of course, undead—wasn't affected by my baleful

  gaze, so we could still get together and wander through the frozen world like two

  playful demons, mocking the comical Polaroids that everyone else had become,

  lads and lasses alike. It was as if all the people in the world had become victims of

  our lust. Their clothes weren't petrified, though, and the mobile phones in their

  pockets kept going off, like the phones that escaped the Paddington train wreck

  unscathed, as the distant loved ones of the dead tried to find out what had

  happened to them. All the stupid customized ringing tones formed a crazy

  symphony that had far too much percussion in it to be plausible, and the beat went

  on and on and on until the only way to stop it was to wake up, and ease myself

  slowly away from Sheena's sleeping body.

  I woke up, but she didn't. She was sleeping very deeply indeed, as if her spirit

  really had fled her undead body to go wandering, as a blood-sucking succubus.

  She couldn't bite anyone if she were insubstantial, but I knew now that she didn't