by Marvin Kaye
have to. She didn't even have to suck semen into her cunt, or lick the tears from
grief-stricken eyes. For her, vampirism wasn't a matter of sinking pints the way
lads sup ale. It was authentically supernatural. She could leech the blood out of a
man's veins, the marrow out of his bones, the elixir of life out of his very soul,
with the most delicate touch of her purple-stained lips, or maybe even the hypnotic
gaze of her neutron-star eyes.
"I can do this," I said to myself, not quite aloud. It was the most joyful
discovery I had made in twenty-one years ten months and twenty-two days, or
maybe in a thousand lifetimes. I felt like the missing link who'd invented cooking,
or a newborn sceptic unexpectedly risen as a vampire from the coffin where he'd
fully expected to rot. I didn't just think I could do it—I knew. It's like that, being in
love; your powers of apprehension become supernatural.
I believed in the supernatural, at that moment. At least, I half believed—which
is fair enough, given that when I'd told myself "I can do this" without the slightest
shadow of doubt, I was really only half right.
It wasn't until we got out of bed the next morning that I saw the bruises on her
thighs.
"Christ!" I said. "Did I do that?"
"Not all of it," she said. "Maybe some. Don't worry about it. It comes, and it
goes. Sometimes I bruise really easily, other times hardly at all. No sense to it. It's
the same with my periods—one month it's red Niagara, the next it's almost a noshow. The pregnancy scares I had with Davy… well, I soon learned not to worry
too much. My legs get bad sometimes, and I have to live on aspirin for days. Had
to go to casualty a couple of times—but it's okay. I'm not as fragile as I look.
Honestly."
I knew that she hadn't put in the comment about the pregnancy scares to
remind me that she had a real history as well as a thousand imaginary ones. She
was preparing the ground for a lasting relationship. If I'd been a United player, I'd
have been over the moon or extremely chuffed, but as a conscientious avoider of
cheap footballing clichés, I was content to be very, very pleased indeed.
The rumour that I'd "slipped the ferret to the Queen of the Jungle" (as Jez so
ineloquently put it) went round the call centre like a dose of the flu. I hadn't said
anything to anyone and neither had Sheena—and neither of us wasted a moment
suspecting the other of so doing—but they knew anyway. It wasn't quite
supernatural, but it was a divinatory talent the harpies had by virtue of being
harpies, so it was the next best thing. If I'd been able to collect a quid every time
some red-lipped monster invited me to "show us yer love bites, then" I could have
quit the job, but I couldn't. We simply had to weather the jokes and shrug off the
cackling laughter.
"Of course I'm as weird as she is," I told Jez, playing the game with the zest of
a recent convert. "In fact, I'm weirder. Supporting United and voting Labour is
just camouflage. I have the heart of a psychopathic serial killer. I keep it in the
second drawer of my desk."
"Fucking sociology graduate," he observed glumly. "I never thought you'd pull
it off. Anyway, I'm going out with the girls tonight."
"Well, bully for you," I said. "If I run across you in the Headrow stark naked
and handcuffed to a lamppost, I'll call you a locksmith but I won't lend you my
coat."
Even Mum figured out that I'd got a girlfriend, although the fact that I took
round all my shirts and underpants to be ironed probably gave her enough of a
clue to save her from needing any uncanny powers of divination.
"Make sure you clean the lavvy," she advised. "Strong bleach, mind— and buy
a brush. Peeling your own potatoes won't impress her for long—lasses expect
more than that nowadays. And whatever else you do, don't get her pregnant."
"That's okay," I said. "She's a vampire. Vampires don't get pregnant."
"They do if you don't use protection, love," she said. "Believe me—I know."
Facing up to the petrifying leers of the Phoneland gorgons and the anxious
solicitations of my own dear mother wasn't the worst aspect of the rite of passage,
though. The worst of it, I knew, wouldn't be encountered until bloody Sunday,
when I had agreed to meet Davy, Sheena's partner in musical endeavour.
I'd expected another terraced house in lesser suburbia, but it turned out that
Davy lived south of the railway and west of the ring road, off Whitkirk High
Street. He lived in what had once been a single-storey detached cottage in the
long-gone days when Whitkirk was a village. It must have been worth nearly a
hundred thou. When I raised my eyebrows, Sheena explained, slightly
shamefacedly, that Davy rented it from his uncle.
"He's kind of the black sheep of the family," she said, "but they haven't
completely cut him off."
The incompleteness of that severance was equally obvious in the interior, not
so much in the cheesy 1940s furniture that wasn't quite old enough to qualify as
antique as in the equipment that Davy had installed to assist him in pursuit of the
vocation that his parents probably thought of as "Bohemian." He had a computer
with twice the clout of mine, three heavy -duty keyboards, amps the size of
sideboards, and various accessories I couldn't even put a name to.
The shock of Davy's surroundings was almost matched by the man himself. I
had somehow begun thinking of Davy as "wee Davy," perhaps as a subconscious
strategy to minimise the vague threat he posed to my future happiness, but he
turned out to be anything but wee. I don't think of myself as short, by Yorkshire
standards, but he towered over me by a good four inches, and his exceedingly
long black hair seemed to exaggerate the advantage. He wasn't exactly handsome,
especially with the bags under his eyes that made him look as if he hadn't slept for
a week, but he was imposing. He looked more like a young Howard Stern than
your average primped-up Goth-boy, and he moved with a stately unhurriedness
that suggested that he was seriously laid-back. I tried telling myself that he'd
probably smoked far too much dope since deciding to cultivate his black-sheep
status in earnest, but I knew that it was a hopeful invention. Somehow, he
reminded me of one of those spindly nocturnal proto-primates that you sometimes
see in zoos: a slow loris, writ large. He was probably a year or two younger than
me, although he certainly didn't look it.
"Tony," he echoed, when Sheena introduced us. His voice was a profound
baritone, which added a little more dignity to the name than it had ever possessed
in anyone else's mouth, but also a little more absurdity. Sheena immediately
retreated to the kitchen—a real kitchen, not a glorified cupboard like the one
bundled into a spare corner of my flat—to make coffee.
"Sheena's told me a lot about you," I said foolishly. "I liked the tapes."
"It's half cooked," he said apologetically, "but it's coming along. I think I'm
almost there. I hope you won't be too bored while Sheen and I get on with things."
Sheen! I thought. She told me that she was Sheena to everybody.
"No, that's okay," I said. "She warned me t
hat you'd be working. I won't get in
the way."
He leaned closer, exaggerating the looming effect. He seemed to be looking
down at me from a mountainous height. Knowing that it was just an optical illusion
didn't make it any more comfortable.
"There's no polite way to say this," he whispered, "so I'll just come right out
with it. If you're pissing Sheen about, and you don't stop right away, I'll come
after you and rip your fucking head off."
I'd heard of people's jaws dropping in amazement, but I'd never experienced it
until then. The only reply I could contrive was a strangled: "I'm not."
"Because," he added, without any evident change of mental gear, "you could
be really good for her, you know, if you're serious."
"Right," I said. It never even occurred to me to try to play the game.
Extrapolating to the surreal was definitely not called for in this instance. I knew it
was a man-to-man thing, although it wasn't like any man-to-man thing I had ever
encountered before. "I'm serious."
He nodded his huge-seeming head and politely retreated to the margins of what
we in Yorkshire consider to be a man's personal space. Then he retreated an extra
step, as if to emphasize that he needed more personal space than most.
"Everything okay?" said Sheena, as she brought in three coffee mugs, two in
her right hand and one in her left.
"Peachy," I said. "He says he'll rip my head off if I do you wrong, but apart
from that we're practically blood brothers already."
"He'll have to join the queue," Sheena said with perfect equanimity. "If it came
to that, I think I could persuade him to back off until I'd had my own pound of
flesh. Blood included, of course. After that, you probably wouldn't feel your head
coming off. A mere coup de grâce."
It was no good complaining that this was a side of her I hadn't seen before.
She had as many sides as I had new ideas to feed her extrapolative compulsion,
and I wouldn't have wanted it any other way. "Well," I said, "at least we all know
where we stand, future-mutilation-wise."
"You mustn't think it's jealousy," Sheena observed punctiliously. "Davy
doesn't do jealousy. He doesn't care who I fuck. He just needs my input into the
music."
"I care," said Davy. "I could do jealousy, too, if need be. Not the point. You're
happy, I'm happy, too."
The conversation was becoming tedious, and I was glad when it lapsed. I
remembered Sheena saying that I would probably like Davy, and that I'd decided
to reserve my judgement. It had been a wise decision; I didn't like Davy at all. But
when he started his back-up tapes running and began fingering his keyboards, I
had to admit that he had a certain style. He had the amps turned up so that the
music sounded far louder than it did on tape, and there was something about the
acoustics of the cottage's main room that made the produce of his drum machine
seem even more insistent than it ever had before. I felt it vibrating in my rib cage,
not unpleasantly by any means, but more intrusively than I could have wished.
I sat in a corner, already feeling like a spectre at a feast. I knew that the feeling
was going to get worse and worse. I was certain that Sheena had only the best of
motives for letting me into this part of her life, and I certainly wouldn't have felt
good about being left out of it, but it wasn't comforting to be made to see that
Sheena already had an intimate relationship that ours—however close it might
become—couldn't weaken or reduce. I was prepared to be convinced that Davy
genuinely didn't envy me any part of Sheena that was actually accessible to me,
but that didn't mean that I had to refrain from envying him the part of Sheena that
was accessible only to him. I could do jealousy, and then some. I couldn't help
myself.
I'd never seen musicians at work before, so I didn't know what to expect, but I
certainly hadn't imagined that it would be so fragmentary or so repetitive. Davy
would play a bit, then Sheena would supply a few words, and then they'd break
off—for no particular reason that I could discern—and start again. It wouldn't
have been so bad if they'd seemed to be building something that got longer and
longer each time they tried it, converging on completion, but every time they
seemed satisfied with the way one fragment was going they'd switch to something
else. They seemed to make such switches without any significant discussion, as if
by instantaneous common consent. The intensity of their communion increased by
slow degrees, until they both seemed utterly lost. I wondered whether they would
even notice if I got up and left, or if I started yelling at them, but I didn't want to
try it in case I was right.
It would have been horribly tedious and mildly annoying if the fragments hadn't
been so loud, but I found that the assault on my ears had a peculiar progressive
effect on my imagination. Even though I wasn't involved in the making of the
shattered soundscape, I was sucked into it regardless. The insistent beat didn't
lose its authority in being so frequently interrupted; in a curious fashion, the
incompleteness of the many repetitions began to create a kind of physical need in
the parts of my body that were reverberating, which gradually confused and
disoriented me—but as if in answer to that penetrating loss of focus, I thought that
I began to see the relationship between Sheena and Davy much more clearly.
They worked on the Byronic kiss-and-sting motif for a while, but not as long
as they worked on the ramifications of "I want to be free, of myself." Davy
seemed to know what it meant, or was at least prepared to pretend.
As I watched the two of them together, exploring esoteric fractions of some
vaster and inchoate scheme, I began to fancy that they were both serving as muses
for the other, each drawing the other out and each changing the other's
perceptions of their collaborative endeavour. I might once have thought of it as a
kind of symbiosis, but I'd heard and read too much of vampires in the last couple
of weeks. I couldn't help seeing it as a mutual parasitism that was taking a toll of
both of them rather than working to their mutual advantage.
I tried to put such ominous thoughts aside by letting my mind wander. As the
train of thought ran off, seemingly under its own steam, it got a little lighter—but it
never left the realm of the macabre.
How long could a vampire survive on a desert island, I wondered, if she had
only her own blood to drink?
At first, it seemed to me that her predicament wouldn't be much different from
that of other hypothetical castaways, who had nothing to eat but slices carved
from their own flesh and nothing to drink but their own piss, but then I
remembered the difference that Sheena had taught me. To a vampire, blood isn't
mere food. To a vampire, blood is life itself, and anyone who feeds a vampire is
profoundly changed in the process. So the vampire castaway drinking from her
own veins wouldn't simply be wasting away; she'd be embarked upon some
mysterious process of self-induced metamorphosis. But suppose that on this
desert island there was not one vampire b
ut two, who thus had the alternative of
sustaining themselves on each other's blood rather than their own. They, too,
would be in a situation very different from two castaways who attempted to dine
on each other's meat, or two snakes who tried to swallow each other's tails. They,
too, would be remaking the other as they fed, inducing mysterious metamorphoses
of flesh and spirit alike.
If a vampire muse needed nothing but blood, I remembered saying to Sheena,
she surely wouldn't bother trading inspiration for what she could have for free—
but if she, too, obtained her share of inspiration, of creativity, the trade-off would
be more understandable. Not necessarily fair and equal, of course, but
understandable. Even if it were a crooked game, you might have to play, if it were
the only game in town.
It was all a flight of fancy, of course. Davy and Sheena were just making
music, after their own conscientiously esoteric fashion. They weren't drinking each
other's blood. And yet, those bags under Davy's eyes made it look as if he hadn't
slept for a week, and Sheena was so slim that anyone who hadn't seen her eat a
well-done steak could easily have wondered whether she was anorexic. Now I'd
seen the bruises, I knew what a delicate flower she could be—but only could be,
because I had her assurance that there were also times when she hardly bruised at
all.
I could do jealousy, and then some. If anyone were feeding on the substance
of Sheena's soul, metaphorically or supernaturally, I wanted it to be me.
Obviously, I thought, Davy felt exactly the same way. He didn't mind my fucking
her, but if I upset the equilibrium on which her singing depended, he'd rip my head
off—always provided that he could get to the head of the queue in time.
Eventually, they finished. They seemed happy with what they'd done, although
it didn't seem to me as if they'd completed anything. Unfortunately, I wasn't like
Big Bad Davy. It wasn't enough for me to be happy that she should be happy. For
me to be happy, I had to be the cause of her happiness—and if that made me a
kind of vampire that neither of us could admire, I had to live with it.
I knew that I couldn't woo her away from the music, and I knew that I
shouldn't even try, but that didn't mean that I couldn't try to compete, to make my