Walking Shadows

by Narrelle M. Harris

  Great. Mayhem, murder, arson and secrecy were the new normal, and I was in fact fine. I'd probably fail to cope if my life ever looked like other people's.

  In due course, we got to our feet and I followed him across the rooftop, over abandoned tiles, lengths of wood, sheets of corrugated iron, bits of pipe and the occasional chair leg. While trucks and onlookers gathered on the street side, I made sure my bag was settled across my body and let Gary piggy-back me down into the alley side. We got to the ground without being seen and walked back to my place.

  First I collected my mail, then we went up in the lift and I opened the front door. Stepped through. Paused.

  It was a thing with Gary that I didn't specifically invite him in. Not since the first time he had made a choice to cross that threshold uninvited to be my friend. The few occasions that he visited me - invariably when Kate was not around - he would take a moment to steel himself, then step inside.

  Vampires were not supposed to be able to do that - enter homes uninvited. I don't know that he could have done it at any other house, or at churches or other places of communal gathering which were also on the list of places he couldn't enter. Vampires always liked to claim that they could go inside, if they really wanted to, but somehow that never translated into actually wanting to.

  Except for Gary and my home, and he stepped across that threshold, uninvited, on a semi-regular basis.

  Defying his nature looked deceptively easy, except that once over it he would shudder, head to foot. Like someone had stepped over his grave, as my Nanna used to say. I wondered if it hurt him, but he'd always blink then beam a pleased smile, and we'd get on with things.

  Things, in this case, consisted of giving Gary back his DVD, throwing the now empty esky bag in the bin and Gary putting the kettle on while I went to scrub myself raw-pink in the shower. The hot water didn't relax me so much as make me slightly less tense. I didn't think I could sleep. I felt simultaneously exhausted and wide awake.

  In the living room, Gary was fingering the splotches of blood on his jeans and layers of T-shirt and Hawaiian overshirt with distaste.

  "You should clean up too," I suggested.

  "Yeah." He made for the bathroom. A few minutes later I heard the shower running and shouted through the door that he could find a spare towel in the cupboard. Vampires don't sweat, but he was looking grimy. I suppose they accumulate dust. Like bookshelves.

  Track pants and a baggy T-shirt for comfort made up my fashion statement for the evening. Brushing my hair was an exercise in futility in the long term. For now I controlled it with an elastic tie.

  Then I sat on my bed and opened the mail - a large envelope from the university. The contents confirmed the doubling of my post-grad workload from one unit to two next semester. Returning to part time study late last year had been a good professional and personal step, one that Kate had enthusiastically encouraged. Anthony was helping me encourage her in turn to get back to her own interrupted legal studies.

  I was too fatigued by the evening's events to do the Excited Dance, but the sense of satisfaction the confirmation gave me went a long way towards calming me down.

  Back in the living room I found a cup of tea on the coffee table and the new DVD loaded into the machine. The TV screen and sound were both still off - Gary couldn't remember which buttons on which of the various remote controls activated what device. At his own place, he had the buttons labelled.

  Gary sat on the sofa with a slim, battered book in his hands, clad once more in his now damp-in-spots jeans and T-shirt, the Hawaiian shirt draped over the back of a kitchen chair to dry. The book looked like it had been jammed into his jeans pocket and had suffered the consequences. I refrained from giving him a lecture about the treatment of books. Normally he kept his reading matter in excellent condition. He even kept his shelves at home alphabetised and deweyfied without my prompting.

  "What's that?"

  He held up the book for me to see. Clearly second-hand, it was one of the long-running 'Sunny Meadows High' series aimed at tween-aged girls. This one had a ridiculous title and an even more ridiculous cover.

  "What on earth are you reading that for?"

  "There's a vampire in it."

  Of course. Gary collected any old tripe if it had a vampire in it. Films, books, magazines, comics, music. He had some good stuff in his collection, but a lot of it was bizarre.

  "Is it good? I mean, is it accurate?" I sat next to him.

  "Hell no. Look at this." He thrust the open pages at me and I read the offending paragraph, which mainly concerned an undead boy full of sad pain because he had a crush on one blonde twin sister and so had eaten the other's pet kitten in an attempt to curb his vicious killer appetites. A single tear had fallen from his black-as-midnight eyes before I decided I'd rather stab myself than read another word.

  "How about we watch this then?" I pointed at the DVD case. I wasn't willing to touch it yet.

  Gary gathered up the various remotes and thrust them all at me so I could get the film underway. That done, I tasted the tea. For a man who couldn't drink or eat, he made a good cuppa. He claimed the secret was in the time you gave it to brew, something he'd learned from his father.

  Gary made notes about the film on a sheet of paper he kept in the back of the 'Sunny Meadows' book. I tried to pay attention and failed. Perhaps I was dealing with all this crap spectacularly well. That didn't mean I could stop thinking about it.

  Magdalene and Mundy's certainty that Gary was taking blood from me was irritating but not for obvious reasons. They were right about him being different these days, and it annoyed me that it had taken their comments for me to really notice.

  Was he getting blood from somewhere else? And if he was, why did that thought make me feel both repelled and possessive? When had it started? Why hadn't I noticed? Maybe it had started so long ago that it hadn't struck me as notably different to how he usually was.

  "What's up?"

  I clinked my teeth in agitation against the hard lip of the tea mug. Maybe it was time for me to ask the bloody question.

  "What did Mundy and Magdalene mean about you being all emotional?"

  "Nothing." Gary dug the pen nib into an already emphatic full stop at the end of his notes.

  I was fed up with this game of don't-tell-Lissa-anything. "Are you drinking from someone?" I was almost certain that he wasn't, but not certain enough.

  "Um. No."

  "What does the 'um' mean?" It always meant something.

  "Um..." His attention to the full stop, already about four sheets of paper deep, was impressive.

  "You know you'll tell me in the end. You always do."

  He grimaced at the truth of this statement. Even this mysterious thing he was doing in Ballarat, he'd eventually tell me. I liked that about him, that he never lied to me and when I asked him a direct question he eventually gave me an answer. Even when he didn't really want to. Maybe that was my secret superpower. Effective harassment.

  "I won't be mad at you," I said. And I vowed not to be, whatever it was. It wouldn't be right if he was always truthful and I wasn't.

  The look he gave me was sceptical, but he sighed.

  "I tried it. Once."

  My brain blanked for a moment, and then slowly ground into gear again. "When?"

  "A couple of weeks after I asked you if I could - from you - and you said no. I thought it would help me think."

  Oh. The way that he could think after he had healed the bite in my throat and discovered how blood made him feel.

  "I see."

  He flinched and soldiered on. "Only it wasn't the same. It didn't feel right."

  Not the answer I expected, though it was anyone's guess what I had expected. "How so?"

  "It just wasn't. And it was embarrassing. Nobody wanted to come out the back with me. They don't think I'm cool like the others. Magdalene was really pleased though. She thought it meant I wanted to join the club properly, at last. Anyway, she made one of the regula
rs go with me. It was awful. I mean, it, we, I…"

  When he found the words he was fishing for, he couldn't look at me while he said them. "I hadn't bitten anyone before and I couldn't work out where to... to not hurt them, you know. Didn't know where I was supposed to bite and how hard or how long or anything. He gave up and told me to use his wrist in the end. I hurt him and he pulled back and the timing was all shot. There was blood everywhere and it was kind of humiliating."

  "Oh," I said. And, oh lord! Gary Hooper: Worst. Vampire. Ever. Poor sod, I thought, even as I felt grateful that the escapade seemed to have ended there.

  "I haven't done it again. It didn't really work for me. It faded so fast it was hardly any use at all. Besides, it's not like when I'm with you." Now that the whole story was out, he returned to his habitual matter-of-factness.

  "Me? There was just that one time, and you weren't actually biting then."

  "No. I mean like when we go to the flicks, or you visit me at home or like tonight. You make me feel like I've done blood when I haven't. I think better when I'm with you. I feel - more."

  Of everything that had happened this evening, this was what had rendered me speechless.

  "It's the invitation thing," he expanded as silence reigned, "What I've done. Do. At your place."

  I felt stupid. It had been happening for months without my recognising it. I'd known him for only a short time before that first uninvited step into my home, so I took it for granted. He had seemed so frustratingly dispassionate and emotionally clueless, when clearly these things were relative.

  Walking into my house uninvited had changed him. I'd kept saying I couldn't define how. Well, here it was, defined for me. Gary had defied his nature, and his nature had changed.

  It was my turn to be barely articulate.

  "So you... Do you? Is it...?" Well, that was getting us nowhere. "How does it feel?"

  "I don't know," he confessed. "I hardly knew what I felt most of the time I was alive. And now, it's weird. It's like it only gets so far and then it stops. But it's, you know, there."

  "Are you okay with that?"

  "Yeah." A lopsided smile.

  "You said you liked the not-feeling part of being a vampire," I recalled from a long-ago conversation.

  "I thought so too. I'm getting to like it better. It's not so bad. You explain things and help it make sense."

  "I do?" I would have thought I was the least helpful guide to being human on the planet.

  "Yeah. I can't make things add up. You're like... you're all the missing values in the equation and when I'm with you it makes sense."

  "Oh." What else was there to say? That maths-geek line was probably the nicest thing anyone had ever said about me.

  "So that's what it's all about," he concluded, "What they're saying. It's the threshold and being friends with you and all that." Gary waited for me to have something to say.

  Impulsively, I reached across and ruffled his hair, grinning. He pulled away and dragged his palm over his fringe. "You're messing my hair!"

  "As if you could tell the difference." I mussed his fringe again and he batted at my hands. Paul used to do the same, when we were teenagers, only he used to be much more annoyed and hit me a lot harder. Gary's hands simply darted around mine, barely making contact, then he ran his fingers through his light brown hair, yanking the front of it down.

  "You're a pest," he said. A grin played at the corners of his mouth.

  "Watch your movie."

  "Drink your tea."

  Later in the evening I ordered pizza. His keen sense of smell made the meal an olfactory delight for him, but one cruel twist of his condition was that he had almost no sense of taste, and he could ingest nothing except blood. Instead, Gary watched me eat while I gave him a running commentary on the pizza's flavours and textures.

  Anchovies were something of a mystery to him, though they were easier to describe than olives to someone who had grown up in the culinary wastelands of 1960s Australia. Who hasn't eaten kalamata olives? Seriously?

  And not just anchovies and olives; a whole world of edible delights were a complete mystery to him. Thai food. Avocados. Feta cheese. Hummus. Korean barbecue. He'd never even eaten a Golden Gaytime ice-cream. In the last few months I'd been making a point of trying cuisines he wasn't familiar with. Sushi had been fun, with that look on his face - half disgust, half wistful that he wasn't able to try it himself - when I explained that the fish was raw. He'd been the same about chicken's feet when I took him to yum cha once. I wasn't that keen on them myself, but he dared me to try them, so I did.

  I'm not sure when it stopped bothering me, this food voyeur thing he has going. The way he watches me eat, and asks for a blow-by-blow account, used to be very unsettling. Somewhere along the line it became fun. I wondered if he remembered the taste and texture of things, the sensation of heat or cold, the sting of spicy food, the salty satisfaction of hot chips.

  He told me the main food he remembered was his mum's Lemon Delicious. She used to make it for him on his birthday because it was his favourite. I suspected I would have liked her.

  Between flavour adventures with Gary and finally eating properly at home with Kate, I'd managed to put on a little weight, which accentuated my natural pear shape. That didn't bother me as much as it used to, when my ex-boyfriend had provided a daily critique on the things he didn't like about my figure, personality, habits and intelligence. I had long since concluded that being single was a significant step up from being with a jackass.

  I fell asleep on the lounge during a 1950s musical featuring someone improbable as the love interest and a glorious amount of tap dancing.

  CHAPTER 7

  Gary must have carried me to bed at some point. I woke up briefly as the bedroom door closed, then promptly burrowed into the bedclothes and fell back to sleep. Having done me a courtesy, he didn't really deserve the incoherent abuse he got when he knocked on my bedroom door at about 6am. He had to knock three times before I dragged myself, cursing, out of bed.

  I emerged, still wearing last night's clothes, and skulked past him into the kitchen. Kettle on. Coffee cup out. I didn't offer him one.

  My distorted reflection in the stainless steel kettle was woeful. My hair was all over the place, like I'd stuck my tongue in a live socket. To be fair, it looks like that most of the time. I also had creases on my face from my pillow. Great. Not even the undead should have to see what I look like first thing in the morning. A refreshing shower was in order.

  After a quick wash, I strategically squirted on a scented body spray, then dressed in jeans and a T-shirt. The shirt was dark red and had "Shhhhh!" written across it in big black letters, next to a picture of an index finger held in front of a pair of lips. A birthday present last March from my library colleagues.

  Lastly, I grabbed my voluminous satchel and considered throwing it in the bin. The bag had taken on gross-factor 10, having recently contained receptacles that had harboured a severed hand.

  On the other side of the scales, it was a fantastic bag. It had lots of compartments which nominally made it easier to find all the things I carried, like my wallet, headache tablets, lip balm, some old receipts, an MP3 player, my current reading matter, keys, pencils, notepad, unpaid bills and my mobile phone.

  The gross factor was trumped by the useful factor, and I kept the bag.

  I gulped down a glass of milk and a muesli bar while Gary waited quietly on the sofa, no doubt suppressing disappointment that I hadn't made something that looked or smelled more interesting for the morning meal.

  Ready to face the world, I turned to him. "Northward ho, Gaz!"

  Far from being energised, Gary simply began to put the teen-girl emo-romance back into his pocket. I held out my hand and he wordlessly passed it to me, along with his new DVD, so I could put them in my bag.

  "Ahh… You've got milk…" Gary wiggled his fingers vaguely to demonstrate where. I dragged the back of my hand across my lips, feeling unkempt, then he sniffed an
d said: "You smell nice. Is that jasmine?"

  "Yes." Both impressed and bemused.

  "My mum liked jasmine."

  Nice save, Gary. "Let's get to Ballarat."

  Despite the hideous much-too-earliness of the hour, there were plenty of people around. I wondered if any of them were on errands as mysterious as ours. Gary seemed marginally more relaxed this morning, but as the tram deposited us at Southern Cross Railway Station, his tension returned.

  The station is very spacious and the curved roof has a futuristic cathedral feel to it. Gary promptly got confused trying to find the ticket counter for rural destinations - the station had been totally rebuilt in recent years and he confessed he hadn't been near it since 1983.

  I reassured him that mere mortals also got lost trying to find the ticket counters. Between us we managed to buy tickets and find the platform. I considered teasing him about getting lost inside a train station before remembering that he'd carried me to bed last night, without banging my head on a cupboard or dropping me, and I gave him a break.

  As the train pulled out, I worked on my powers of effective harassment again. "This guy in Ballarat - what on earth could he want from you?"

  I shouldn't have asked. No lies came forth, but no answer either. Instead, he settled down with the curtain positioned to shield his eyes from the light. I was glad the myths were wrong about the effect of sunlight. Gary didn't know what it was about the sun that made him itchy and squinty, but it didn't burn him up like a magnesium flash, thank goodness. He had little enough of a social life as it was.

  "Hey," I said, "I've got some new songs for us to listen to." Gary collected songs the way he collected books and movies. He had bought whole albums on the strength of one song, or the group's name. It was fun trying to dig up things he hadn't heard before.

  For the rest of the trip, we shared ear buds on my MP3 player. After a while, I left Gary to study the player and shift randomly through song lists while I read his hilarious/dreadful novel.