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 you 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 you 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."
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 seventeenth-century 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 pop-educated 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 conversati
on 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.
The Vampire Sextette Page 17
