The Vampire Sextette

by Edited by Marvin Kaye

  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 thing 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 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 no-show. 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 that 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."