by Marvin Kaye
her, you bastard? Is that why Libby hesitated over telling me?"
"Wo!" he said. "At least, not in the way you think. Okay, I admit, it made a
difference when Libby told me. I got scared. Look at me! I'm twice her size. I'd
always felt like I was handling precious porcelain—how do you think it made me
feel when I was told that a bad bruise could kill her? Maybe I did overdo the
carefulness, and maybe she did begin to wonder whether I might be going off her,
but that wasn't it. It wasn't. We just weren't right, except for the music… and I
knew that if she didn't have time to spare, she shouldn't have to spend it making
do. I didn't dump her. We just… fell apart."
Maybe it was self-justificatory bullshit and maybe it wasn't, but that didn't
matter. It had been the right result, after all. Sheena and I had been right. If
anything was ever meant to be, we'd have been one of the things that was meant to
be—but whether we live a million lifetimes or one, nothing is ever really meant to
be. What isn't pure chance is what you make of the cards you're dealt, and Sheena
and I had made the most of each other once chance had thrown us together. No
one could have made any more of either of us than we'd made of each other, and
there was no use complaining about the unfairness of the ill-luck that had torn us
apart. It hadn't been cruel fate, or any god that any human had ever believed in.
Life never had been fair, even in Atlantis or Arcadia.
I couldn't blame Davy. I certainly couldn't hold it against him that he hadn't
told me what Libby and Mrs. Howell wouldn't, and I couldn't even rail at him for
not having told Sheena—because I knew that even if she hadn't heard the ugly
clinical details, Sheena had known everything she actually needed to know. She'd
always known, even if she'd never raised it to consciousness or connected it to
her absent father's premature demise, that she was living in mortal danger. Why
else would she have been so implacably determined to get in touch with her past
selves, to cram a thousand lifetimes into one horribly narrow span?
I had helped. I had to cling to that. I had helped.
The funeral was absolute hell. The crematorium was sterile, the reality of the
process carefully hidden by velvet curtains and passionless smiles, but it was even
worse at the house, afterwards. Libby and her mother kept giving me books,
pictures, CDs, and tapes, saying: "I think she'd have wanted you to have these."
She probably would have, but that didn't make it any easier standing beside a chair
piled high with the obscene loot of her brief life. Davy had already given me a
dozen spare tapes and had promised me faithfully that when the CD came off the
presses I'd get the very first copy.
On the other hand, I certainly wasn't going to turn anything down that had
anything of Sheena in it, even if it were just a secondhand paperback whose pages
had been turned by her black-painted fingernails.
I couldn't eat anything, and the tea was vile as well as weak. It wouldn't have
tasted any better even if I hadn't still been nursing the remains of the previous
night's hangover.
After hell, it was back to purgatory again when I turned up for work. A
dreadful hush seemed to have descended on the call centre, and the muted ringing
tones of the multitudinous phones were transmuted by the lack of competition into
a sinister symphony.
I got seven invitations to go out with the girls, and seven assurances that they'd
behave themselves if I did. I believed them. They'd have sat quietly in a corner,
with me in the middle, sipping their drinks. Although they'd all have made
themselves available, just in case I needed further comfort, they would have done
so with unprecedented discretion and sensitivity.
I said no seven times, very politely. Only five of them went on to say: "Well, if
you need to talk…"
I didn't. I needed to listen.
I played the tapes over and over, and when Davy arrived to make me a present
of the newly cut CD—from which "Graveyard Love" had been sensitively
omitted, although Byron's kiss-and-sting was still there—I played it over and over
and over. I wanted to be free, of myself, but hearing Sheena sing those words, far
less plaintively than seemed warranted, didn't do the trick. I wasn't free, especially
of myself, even though my true self was invisible. Every time I looked into a
mirror, I saw nothing but emptiness.
Davy told me that the songs on the CD were the best of her work as well as the
best of his, but they weren't. They weren't even the rest of her work, left over
when body and soul had fled, because I knew full well—although I could hardly
confide the truth to anyone else—that her soul hadn't fled at all.
Sheena was a vampire, and she knew how to remain disembodied. She was in
no hurry to be reborn, because she understood well enough how much future
remained for serial embodiment. The Earth had existed for four billion years, while
humankind had been around for a mere million; it would exist for four billion
more, and humankind stood a better than even chance of seeing far more than a
million of that, provided that the next falling asteroid was no bigger than the one
that had drowned Atlantis and scoured its relics from the soil of Malta. She didn't
need to rush for her own sake, and she knew that I needed her to linger. If she had
wanted to be free of herself when she wrote that song, she didn't want it now. She
had met me in the interim. Now she wanted to kiss and sting in an emergent world,
reeking and damp from out of the slime. Now she had a reason to remain,
suspended between death and life.
I played the songs over and over regardless of the fact that their message was
out of date, because I knew that music as the purest magic of all as well as the
greatest mystery, and I needed magic. I needed to go way beyond sense, into the
supernatural. I needed the music to take everything out of me that wasn't just
waste, because there was so much in me that was just waste, and I couldn't bear
it.
Sheena had been right when she told me that the only way to get a true
appreciation of what it means to be alive is to have died a thousand times, and I
knew that I didn't have that true appreciation. She had been right to tell me that
until I'd lived and lost a million joyful moments, I wouldn't realise how precious
they were. And above all, she was right to tell me that once I'd had the even
briefest glimpse of other worlds, this one would never be enough.
I knew that I had only to attract the right kind of night visitor, and feed her, to
make the connection I needed, to find the muse who would teach me the art of
living in a shattered and shambolic world.
Every night, I opened a vein in my forearm in order that Sheena could feed. It
wasn't strictly necessary, given that she could install herself readily enough within
the chambers of my heart, but I wanted her beside me as well as inside me. I
wanted to make an offering, an honest libation. I always had to lick the remaining
blood away, as if I were a vampire castaway on some desert island, driven to
desperate measures in the hope of sustaini
ng myself till rescue came, but the
nourishment it provided me was meagre by comparison with the need it filled in
her. For her, vampirism wasn't a matter of sinking pints the way lads sup ale. She
could leech the blood out of my veins, the marrow out of my bones, the elixir of
life out of my very soul, without requiring the delicate touch of her purple-stained
lips or the hypnotic gaze of her neutron-star eyes—but she needed the gift, the
demonstration of my love.
I tried my utmost to remember Atlantis and Arcadia, or even to dream of them,
but I couldn't. I could have made things up, of course, but I didn't. Fiction is all
about contriving happy endings in a world where the only real endings are fire and
the grave, but real comfort has to be found and not contrived, and if the
supernatural is the only place where real comfort can be found, that's where you
have to look for it. If you also find nightmares there, that's the price you have to
pay.
I paid.
You can't just make things up. You have to find what you need, even if that
makes you a puppet in the hands of your own creation. I knew where to look. I
knew how. I paid the price. But I couldn't remember. I couldn't even dream. I had
to be content with cutting myself, and watching the blood flow down my arm,
clotting with minutely judged alacrity, neither too quickly nor too slowly.
There was always time for Sheena to drink her fill, and she never took too
much. She knew the value of extravagance, but she knew the value of economy,
too. Her spirit had none of the inbuilt irresponsibility of her body and her blood.
She was a vampire—and how!
I talked to her, of course. Oh, how I talked! But I didn't talk about Atlantis or
Arcadia, because she no longer needed my help to recall her past lives. The
wandering soul remembers everything. Even Plato, who really didn't know the first
thing about Atlantis, knew that. I talked to her about the future, because the future
was unmade, and the future was where we'd meet again, if we ever did.
"In the future," I told her, "all things are possible. In the future, our
descendants will learn to see those two lost colours all over again, and they'll find
out how to sing again, in all the languages that ever were or ever will be, in true
harmony. It won't always be like that, of course, because the course of progress
never runs smoothly, and there'll be dark days when civilization all but vanishes
and even vampires starve, but as long as the sun shines there'll be new dawns, and
because light sustains life, it also, in the ultimate analysis, sustains all the forms of
undeath, even the photophobic ones. In time, of course, the sun will begin to fade,
reddening as it ages, always reaching for that other colour which is the better part
of the colour of blood. In the end, that colour will be all that's left, and even that
will fade as the sun shrinks and dies, until there's nothing left of it but the black
hole at its core and a surrounding chaos of strange energies. With luck, my love,
you'll survive even that; in four billion years even humans ought to be able to reach
the stars, and the undead will surely lead the way."
She didn't answer, but I didn't really expect her to. After all, her voice was the
one part of her that I still had in superabundance, and it was always there, filling
the space between me and the walls.
I want to be free, of myself, of myself,
I want to be free, of myself.
I didn't really need her voice, although I was very glad to have it, and in such
abundance. In the final analysis, I needed only her thirst. It would have been better
if I'd been able to remember, or even to dream, but life isn't fair, and you have to
play the cards you're dealt to the best of your ability. All I could give her was
blood, and for that, she wasn't obliged to be a generous muse.
But still, I had her thirst.
I knew she was there every time I cut myself. She was there the rest of the
time, too, day and night. She was with me when I slept, no matter how dark and
bleak my dreaming was, and she was with me when I went to work, to play the
puppet in my best telephone manner, always speaking softly and always following
the script with minute precision. She was with me in the Headrow and Harehills
Lane, at the Merrion Centre and Elland Road… but when I cut myself, I knew she
was there, because I knew exactly how thirsty she was, and exactly what she
needed to satisfy her thirst.
She'd have done as much for me.
In another life, she already had, even though it set her free upon the tides of
time, incapable for a little while of anything but drifting. I'd lost her then, but I
didn't have to lose her this time around, and I didn't. I clung on, and I clung hard.
The more blood I shed, and the more I consumed, the greater the change in me
became, but I didn't become the kind of vampire she had been. She'd never
promised me that. All she'd promised me was that I would be changed, and
changed forever, and I was.
In a way, it might have been easier to become a shadow of my former self, to
pine away and die of a broken heart, but I didn't have a broken heart. My heart
was healthy—a fit abode for the sickliest of disembodied vampire spirits—and I
didn't want to be a shadow while I still had blood to feed a shadow's thirst.
Sheena had needed me while she was alive, because nobody else could give
her what she needed then, and she needed me just as much now that she was
dead, because mine was the blood that she wanted more than any other. When her
body had been more than ash and dust, it had been my body that she had needed
to give her comfort, and now that there was nothing left of her flesh but ash and
dust, it was my blood that she needed for comfort. Any body might have done for
warmth, and any blood might have slaked her thirst, but for comfort, it had to be
my blood, exactly as it had to be my body. I offered it, as a testament of love.
It was for comfort, too, that I needed her. For me, nobody else would have
sufficed, even for warmth—but what I needed her for most urgently and most
ardently was comfort. That was why I cut myself, night after night after night, to
feed her and to try—crudely and hopelessly—to feed myself. She was always
satisfied, but I never was. I continued to thirst, because no matter how much I had
changed, I wasn't the kind of vampire who could sustain myself on a desert island,
with none but a ghostly spirit for company.
"Life goes on, love," Mum said—and she was absolutely right. She had no
idea how right she was. Life does go on, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't hurt.
"It could have been either of us," Libby told me, once when she came to the
flat to see how I was doing. "It could have been both, or neither. It could have
been me and not her. Maybe it should have been. I was the older one, after all. If I
said I wished I could trade places with her, I'd be a liar, but maybe that's the way
it should have been."
"No," I said, in my best telephone manner. "It shouldn't. You couldn't have
handled it the way Sheena handled it."
"We never even talked about it," she went on. "That was absolutely
the worst
thing about not telling her. We never talked about it. It's almost as if we weren't
sisters at all."
"It doesn't matter," I assured her. "She knew what she needed to know. She
said what she needed to say. She heard what she needed to hear."
"From you," she said. "What did I ever give her, apart from that stupid name?"
"It was what she needed," I pointed out. "If it hadn't been, she wouldn't have
taken it."
Libby went away happy that we'd shared a few confidences, genuinely pleased
that I was bearing up and doing well. She didn't offer me any more than her good
wishes because she was being loyal to her little sister. She knew, even though
she'd never be able to say so, that Sheena wasn't entirely gone. She might even
have known what Sheena was, even though she couldn't actually believe in ghosts,
let alone in vampires. Working in Gap and living at home had fixated her mind on
superficial things. Her mother was like my mother, full of common sense and welltried saws. I never heard Mrs. Ho well say, "Life goes on, love," but I expect she
did, even when there was no one in the room to hear her.
The first person to see my scars—inevitably, I suppose—was Mum, but she
didn't see them for what they were. "What have you been doing, love?" she asked.
I could have told her that I'd been out collecting blackberries and she'd have
believed it, but what I actually said was a far more blatant lie, even though it was
nearer to the truth.
"I've had them for ages," I said. "They'll be fine, as long as I never get scurvy.
Collagen dissolves when you get scurvy, apparently, and the wounds open up."
"You and your books," she said—which was a tamer version of fucking
sociology graduate. I kept drinking the orange juice, though. I didn't want to start
coming apart at the seams.
They say that time heals, but it doesn't. At best, time scars, and there's no
orange juice for the soul that will keep you safe from those occasional moments of
spiritual scurvy when the scars break down and everything pours out. Even though
I couldn't remember, or even dream, I still had those nightmare moments when
everything seemed to fall apart and it felt as if all the blood was flooding out of me
at once, inviting every supernatural carrion drinker for miles to fall upon me like a
