In Gil's way of thinking, and of being, a girl was a necessary accessory, like a pair of brand-name trainers, only more so. It didn't really matter to him that it was me; it could have been anybody—except that once the anybody became his, he acquired certain responsibilities: to see that I looked nice for him to show off. It could really ruin a guy's image if his girlfriend got hospitalised with anorexia—it was the next worst thing to a suicide attempt. It would reflect on him, because not being able to save a girl from wasting away was just as bad, in its way, as driving her to slit her wrists. It was the kind of thing that reflected badly on the magical potency of a guy's prick, which was supposed to keep a girl happy as well as getting its regular exercise.
Gil cared, all right, but not really for me. I was only a little piece of the jigsaw, becoming too thin to fit the gap in his life.
To keep him happy, I went to the doctor. I let him do a blood test, and reported back for the results. I got a prescription for the lowest-dose Pill and for some iron tablets.
'I shouldn't really be giving you this,’ the doctor said, about the Pill. ‘It's not advisable for people with anaemia, and you are anaemic. Whatever your boyfriend says—and a Master's in psychology isn't exactly a medical qualification, especially when it's from an American university—I can't find any evidence of thyroid abnormality, but your red count is low. Are you sure you're eating properly?'
The university doctor saw a lot of patients. Most of the female ones wanted the Pill, and the university wanted as few pregnancies as possible. It was rumoured that you could go in with a broken arm and he'd still offer you the Pill, presumably assuming that you'd only broken your arm as a pretext to go in, but were still too shy to say what it was you really wanted. Having cleared me on the charge of thyroid hyperactivity, he wasn't really interested in anything else. He thought the real problem was solved, and that the iron tablets would take care of the trivia.
I wasn't at all surprised by the revelation that I was anaemic. I'd have been surprised if I wasn't. I wasn't absolutely sure that I wanted to be cured, at that point in time, but I was absolutely sure that the iron tablets weren't going to do the trick. I took them anyway. They were like coloured bullets. It might have been easier, and much more orally gratifying, to suck a nail, but they were useful as a kind of talisman to show to Gil.
'I'm anaemic,’ I told him. ‘I have to take iron tablets. That's why I look pale: common or garden anaemia. I've been to the doctor and he gave me these—a charm powerful enough to ward off the nastiest of all evil spirits. He's checked my thyroid, and it's perfectly okay. It's busy but stable, definitely not running amok. Are you satisfied now?'
'Anaemia?’ he said, sceptically. ‘Just anaemia? He didn't say what might have caused the anaemia?'
'No,’ I said, without further elaboration.
He sighed, and raised his eyes heavenwards.
Gil secretly thought that all doctors were quacks, and that his Master's in psychology was worth a dozen MDs. He was shy enough with me, but when he contemplated his own intellect his ego knew no bounds. Maybe he was entitled to think of himself as a future Nobel Prize winner. After all, he was certainly doing cutting-edge research. He spent half his life slicing up brains and doing all kinds of weird analyses which involved sheets of blotting paper mottled with purple splodges. And when he wasn't doing that he was doing mysterious things with cats and rats and rabbits that would probably have had animal rights activists daubing red paint all over the door of his flat if they'd only known about it. I'd seen him looking sinister, with his surgeon's mask and his white plastic gloves, and his curly hair bound up in something that looked like an oversized shower cap.
Even so, he didn't know anything at all about what was going on inside my brain and my body. If I'd told him the truth, he wouldn't have believed me. He couldn't have.
'Look, Gil,’ I said severely, ‘I've done everything you asked. I've let you watch me eat, so that you know I'm not starving myself to death. I've been to the doctor so that I could get a check-up and go on the Pill, and he says that all I need is a little extra iron to boost my red count. Let's make a deal, hey? I'll put the iron in my body if you put the iron in your soul. Stop nagging me about it. Stop worrying about it. If you don't, your hair will probably fall out.'
He had no alternative but to agree, but he shrugged his shoulders overdramatically, as if the gesture constituted some kind of Parthian shot.
'It's very rarely possible to win an argument by a submission, even if you can get a fall,’ Dr Gray once told us, in his usual picturesque fashion. ‘Even if you prove your point with all the majesty and inescapability of a Euclidean theorem, your opponent will want to make it clear that he's just ordering a temporary tactical retreat, and hasn't really been beaten. He'll fire Parthian shots at you as he gallops off into the distance. But a philosopher always knows that he's won—why else would anybody want to be one?'
The Parthians, Dr Gray had then explained, in answer to Daniel's request, were the first mounted warriors to perfect the art of firing arrows backwards from the saddle, so that they could continue to shoot at their enemies even while they were fleeing in disarray.
Dr Gray noticed that I was getting thinner, too, and once asked me to stay for a moment after a particularly boring tutorial, so that he could ask me about it gently, with all the pseudo-parental concern he could muster—which wasn't much.
'Are you poorly?’ he asked. ‘I'm sorry to be indelicate, but you really don't look well.'
'I feel all right,’ I said. ‘I went to the doctor, and he says I'm just anaemic. He put me on iron tablets.'
'Are you eating properly?'
'I don't have anorexia,’ I told him, with infinite patience. ‘I'm just thin.'
'As a philosopher,’ he said, ‘I'm bound to confess that I don't quite see the difference. I'm always slightly suspicious when people classify as diseases conditions which have no particular physical causes. When we didn't know about bacteria and viruses and cancers, it was understandably difficult to decide what could qualify as a disease and what couldn't, but now that we do it seems to me slightly irresponsible to force patterns of behaviour into the same medical frameworks as infections and biochemical malfunctions. There's something uncomfortably fuzzy about a concept of illness which can accommodate being depressed and not eating properly as comfortably as the common cold and the Black Death. The point is not whether you do or do not qualify for the label ‘anorexic', but whether you're receiving sufficient nutrition to maintain you in a reasonably healthy state. I suspect that you aren't, and if that's a matter of choice, I really think that you ought to examine your motives very carefully. You are, after all, a philosopher-in-embryo, and ought by now to have mastered the elementary principles of self-analysis.'
I had already come to the conclusion that Dr Gray was a world-class bullshitter. The day they established it as an Olympic event, I thought, everyone else would be competing for the silver. I didn't particularly like the way he was always trying to overwhelm me with floods of clever words, but I knew it was a game I'd have to learn to play, eventually.
'I'm all right, Dr Gray,’ I assured him. I knew better than to add anything about being a little ‘run down'. He wouldn't have been able to resist the opportunity to spend another five minutes dissecting and demolishing the cliché.
'I hope you are. We really wouldn't like to lose you. We have our staff/student ratio to think about, after all. Unlikely as it may seem, there are many other departments in the university who envy us our humble little niche in Wombwell House, and would love to turn this quiet little corridor into one more plasticated nest of computers. Dropping out is such a selfish thing to do, in these dark days of cutbacks and arguments about practical relevance.'
'I'm not going to drop out,’ I assured him. ‘I like it here.'
In private, of course, I wasn't quite so stubbornly reasonable. I did look in the mirror, as Gil asked me to. I studied my thighs and my tits, and every contour and
shadow of my face. Yes, I was getting thinner; yes, I was very pale—and the iron tablets made no obvious difference. I was careful to say nothing out loud to signify that I was worried, but in the privacy of my own thoughts I was free to entertain any and all possibilities.
I was free to ask myself: Am I prepared to die for love of Maldureve?
The idea of dying was strangely attractive, in some ways. I'd often had fantasies about it. I'd always been able to take a certain perverse pleasure in contemplating myself lying in my coffin, very pale and ethereally beautiful, surrounded by grieving relatives. There was a certain delicious sadness in imagining what the vicar might say about me at the funeral service—tragic death of one so young and all that stuff—and how the people listening would feel. Mum, Dad, Sharon, Gil ... everyone. My daydreams used to drift on until they became quite ridiculous. I couldn't help imagining how the nine o'clock news might report the funeral, and what my obituary in the Guardian might say, even though I knew perfectly well that hundreds of people died every day, maybe thousands, and that nobody was in the least interested or cared at all, unless the person had been on TV and had become a familiar face. But that kind of daydreaming was just playing around. Now, I had to make the effort to come down to earth, back to reality. I had to confront the real questions: did I mind dying, if dying was the price I had to pay for being loved by Maldureve? Was it worth it? Was it sensible to sacrifice forty or fifty years of ordinary life in exchange for a dozen nights of unimaginable bliss? I kept telling myself yes, but I couldn't help having doubts.
One night—I'd been taking the iron tablets for over a week—I said to Maldureve: ‘Is this killing me? I'm not afraid, but I need to know. I'm anaemic—I'm not regenerating the blood as fast as I'm giving it to you. Am I going to die?’ I didn't like to ask him what had happened in the past. I didn't like to think about the others who had preceded me, although I shouldn't have been so weak-kneed about it. Of course there had been others; maybe there still were. Should it have mattered so much?
'Anne, my beloved,’ he said, in that thrilling whisper that was right inside my head and yet seemed to come from a million miles away, ‘you don't have to die. There's another way.'
I'd known that, really. All along—maybe from that very first moment when he began to come out of the shadows, across the borderlands between the worlds—I'd known.
'How?’ I asked him, knowing that he knew what I meant, without my having to say it. I meant: How do I become a vampire? How do I save myself from dying by joining the ranks of the undead?
In some books I'd read, a vampire's victims have to drink the vampire's blood in order to become vampires themselves—otherwise, they just fade away and die. Some writers made that a rule because it wasn't logical to presume, as most of the older ones did, that all a vampire's victims would rise from the grave to become vampires themselves; if that were so their number would increase so fast—like compound interest—that there soon wouldn't be any victims left to feed the vast host of vampires. I suppose, because of what I'd read, I half expected Maldureve to offer me his own blood. But he didn't.
'The answer,’ he said, ‘is in your own heart. You must find the strength to live. If you accept death, you will certainly die—but if you're strong, you can live for ever.'
Dr Gray would have called that ‘impotent circumlocution’ or just plain ‘fudging', depending on his mood, but I knew better. Maldureve and I had an understanding. It wasn't that we didn't need words, but the words were only ever the smallest part of it. I trusted Maldureve then, far more than Gil or anyone else of his kind would ever trust me. I knew that Maldureve was telling me the truth, and that all I had to do was to decide not to die, and to find the strength to do what I had to do to stay alive. I knew that the choice was mine, and that if I didn't want to be a corpse, I could be a vampire. If I wanted to, I could be free to roam the borderlands between the worlds.
That was the beginning and the end of it. I could be free. All the world of shadows could be mine, if I were strong enough and unafraid.
'But I must warn you, my love,’ he said, speaking very, very softly, ‘that ours is not the life of angels in Heaven. We are like the bats which love the night, and darkness is our security, but there are others, which hide in light, sometimes invisible to our dark-accustomed eyes. Those are the staring ones, which screech like demons: the owls. You must be brave, beloved, if you join our company, for you will rediscover fear.'
I saw, then, why the choice was really a choice, and why it wasn't as simple as I'd thought and hoped. I understood that if I wanted joy, ecstasy and never to be afraid, then I would have to die. If I wanted joy, ecstasy and life, then I would have to take up once again that burden of fear which I'd so eagerly laid down.
I suppose it was only fair. Nothing in life is really free, even in the borderlands.
7
I didn't need to know what Dr Gray thought about vampires; I could easily have done without it. What he thought was bound to be irrelevant to my relationship with Maldureve because, when all was said and done, Dr Gray had no experience of vampires. His ideas were all hypothetical, and of course sceptical.
Even so, I could hardly help being curious, and I wondered about it, even when I thought I'd never be able to ask. But then the opening came up, quite by chance, and I was able to slip the question in without it seeming in the least out of place. I didn't even have to make it sound like a joke.
Daniel had been arguing with Dr Gray about the paranormal in general. He was trying to argue that there was as much statistical evidence on record for things like telepathy and psychokinesis as there was for a lot of ideas in physics that people accepted without a qualm. Wasn't it simple prejudice, he asked, that made people assume that the evidence for such things had to be corrupt, or that the people being tested were cheats, when no one would ever bother to wonder whether a physicist might have faked his results?
'Evidence doesn't exist in a vacuum,’ Dr Gray said. ‘One problem is that if our minds really did have the power to communicate directly with other minds, or act upon material objects at a distance, we'd expect them to be capable of much more than making hits when guessing Zener cards or bending spoons. We're entitled to wonder why, if psychics aren't simply dishonest conjurers, they only seem to be able to do the kinds of things that honest conjurers do.
'Then again, we can't just stop with evidence that something happens; we have to go on from there and ask how it happens—to find evidence of some kind of physical mechanism. We have to ask what, exactly, is happening when the mind supposedly communicates with another mind—and it's very difficult to come up with any kind of hypothesis about the means by which the information is being communicated that we could then subject to a test. Some of the things physicists have discovered are very peculiar, and not easy to fit into our way of thinking, but each discovery has led on to further ones, by pointing out new ways in which we might look for confirmatory evidence.
'Another thing to bear in mind is that it's really quite easy to account for the plausibility of ideas like telepathy and psychokinesis without having to concede their possibility. Because I can talk silently to myself, so that I seem to be hearing my own thoughts, it seems entirely reasonable that someone else might be able to eavesdrop on those thoughts. When I send out a mental instruction to my arm, I can't feel the electrical impulse which moves from my brain along my nerves. It's easy enough to imagine the action as an apparently magical response to a silent command, and if I do that my imagination has no trouble at all in jumping to the conclusion that if only I could get the hang of it I could raise external objects as easily as my arm. In a way, it's difficult not to believe in magical power, even though the notion is rationally unacceptable, and that's why such ideas have survived the decay of general magical belief, reappearing with a new supportive jargon which tries to accommodate them, however ineptly, to the scientific world-view.'
Daniel wasn't the kind to accept correction graciously, even though he h
adn't yet mastered the art of the argumentative Parthian shot. ‘Just because something's plausible doesn't mean to say it's not possible,’ he said awkwardly. ‘And anyway, lots of the things that people still believe in, in spite of all the scorn that scientists and philosophers pour on them, aren't at all plausible—astrology, for instance. I can't see any way to account for the illusion that people's personalities are influenced by their natal charts, so why shouldn't I believe the people who say they believe it simply because it works?'
'It depends what you mean by works,’ said Dr Gray. ‘We're all terribly dependent—and I mean terribly, because it's a frightening thought, in some ways—on our limited and fallible power to predict the future. Unless we can calculate what the outcomes of our actions will be, we can't rationally decide which action to choose. Unless we can anticipate how the situations which surround us will develop, we can't exert our admittedly limited power to manipulate and control those situations to our advantage. And yet, choice and manipulation are the very essence of human being—of rationality, of consciousness. We're always avid to discover a new procedure which will increase out power to foresee the future, or a new method which will enhance our strategies of choice. It's uncomfortable in the extreme to confront the vicissitudes of chance, knowing that your foresight is limited and your choices are gambles against the odds. Even false oracles, provided that they can disguise their falseness with vagueness and enigma, have the power to command our attention, and our unwary belief, simply because they serve a psychological function in allowing us to believe that we have more foresight, more control and more power than we actually have. Most magic, like most medicine, can make us feel better even when it has no real effect, but its power to make us feel better is unfortunately dependent on its power to convince us that it does have a real effect. Philosophy, which certainly makes us wiser, can also make us feel uneasy—that's why so many people fear it.'
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