Sheena, page 4
“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 cliche’s, 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 divmatory 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 ran 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 Stem 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 grace.”
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.”
“You mustn’t think it’s jealousy,” Sheena observed punctiliously. “Davy doesn’t do jealousy. He doesn’t care who I fuck. He just needs my input into the music.”
“I care,” said Davy. “I could do jealousy, too, if need be. Not the point. You’re happy, I’m happy, too.”
The conversation was becoming tedious, and I was glad when it lapsed. I remembered Sheena saying that I would probably like Davy, and that I’d decided to reserve my judgement. It had been a wise decision; I didn’t like Davy at all.
But when he started his back-up tapes running and began fingering his keyboards, I had to admit that he had a certain style. He had the amps turned up so that the music sounded far louder than it did on tape, and there was something about the acoustics of the cottage’s main room that made the produce of his drum machine seem even more insistent than it ever had before. I felt it vibrating in my rib cage, not unpleasantly by any means, but more intrusively than I could have wished.
I sat in a corner, already feeling like a spectre at a feast. I knew that the feeling was going to get worse and worse. I was certain that Sheena had only the best of motives for letting me into this part of her life, and I certainly wouldn’t have felt good about being left out of it, but it wasn’t comforting to be made to see that Sheena already had an intimate relationship that ours-however close it might become-couldn’t weaken or reduce. I was prepared to be convinced that Davy genuinely didn’t envy me any part of Sheena that was actually accessible to me, but that didn’t mean that I had to refrain from envying him the part of Sheena that was accessible only to him. I could do jealousy, and then some. I couldn’t help myself.
I’d never seen musicians at work before, so I didn’t know what to expect, but I certainly hadn’t imagined that it would be so fragmentary or so repetitive. Davy would play a bit, then Sheena would supply a few words, and then they’d break off-for no particular reason that I could discern-and start again. It wouldn’t have been so bad if they’d seemed to be building something that got longer and longer each time they tried it, converging on completion, but every time they seemed satisfied with the way one fragment was going they’d switch to something else. They seemed to make such switches without any significant discussion, as if by instantaneous common consent. The intensity of their communion increased by slow degrees, until they both seemed utterly lost. I wondered whether they would even notice if I got up and left, or if I started yelling at them, but I didn’t want to try it in case I was right.
It would have been horribly tedious and mildly annoying if the fragments hadn’t been so loud, but I found that the assault on my ears had a peculiar progressive effect on my imagination. Even though I wasn’t involved in the making of the shattered soundscape, I was sucked into it regardless. The insistent beat didn’t lose its authority in being so frequently interrupted; in a curious fashion, the incompleteness of the many repetitions began to create a kind of physical need in the parts of my body that were reverberating, which gradually confused and disoriented me-but as if in answer to that penetrating loss of focus, I thought that I began to see the relationship between Sheena and Davy much more clearly.
They worked on the Byronic kiss-and-sting motif for a while, but not as long as they worked on the ramifications of “I want to be free, of myself.” Davy seemed to know what it meant, or was at least prepared to pretend.
As I watched the two of them together, exploring esoteric fractions of some vaster and inchoate scheme, I began to fancy that they were both serving as muses for the other, each drawing the other out and each changing the other’s perceptions of their collaborative endeavour. I might once have thought of it as a kind of symbiosis, but I’d heard and read too much of vampires in the last couple of weeks. I couldn’t help seeing it as a mutual parasitism that was taking a toll of both of them rather than working to their mutual advantage.
I tried to put such ominous thoughts aside by letting my mind wander. As the train of thought ran off, seemingly under its own steam, it got a little lighter-but it never left the realm of the macabre.
How long could a vampire survive on a desert island, I wondered, if she had only her own blood to drink?
At first, it seemed to me that her predicament wouldn’t be much different from that of other hypothetical castaways, who had nothing to eat but slices carved from their own flesh and nothing to drink but their own piss, but then I remembered the difference that Sheena had taught me. To a vampire, blood isn’t mere food. To a vampire, blood is life itself, and anyone who feeds a vampire is profoundly changed in the process. So the vampire castaway drinking from her own veins wouldn’t simply be wasting away; she’d be embarked upon some mysterious process of self-induced metamorphosis. But suppose that on this desert island there was not one vampire but two, who thus had the alternative of sustaining themselves on each other’s blood rather than their own. They, too, would be in a situation very different from two castaways who attempted to dine on each other’s meat, or two snakes who tried to swallow each other’s tails. They, too, would be remaking the other as they fed, inducing mysterious metamorphoses of flesh and spirit alike.
If a vampire muse needed nothing but blood, I remembered saying to Sheena, she surely wouldn’t bother trading inspiration for what she could have for free-but if she, too, obtained her share of inspiration, of creativity, the trade-off would be more understandable. Not necessarily fair and equal, of course, but understandable. Even if it were a crooked game, you might have to play, if it were the only game in town.
It was all a flight of fancy, of course. Davy and Sheena were just making music, after their own conscientiously esoteric fashion. They weren’t drinking each other’s blood. And yet, those bags under Davy’s eyes made it look as if he hadn’t slept for a week, and Sheena was so slim that anyone who hadn’t seen her eat a well-done steak could easily have wondered whether she was anorexic. Now I’d seen the bruises, I knew what a delicate flower she could be-but only could be, because I had her assurance that there were also times when she hardly bruised at all.
