Sheena, page 6
We managed to escape at half-past ten. Sheena made a show of having to see me home and muttered vaguely about getting a taxi back, although no one was really under the illusion that she had any intention of coming back. We could have stayed on the bus all the way into town and then got another outward-bounder practically to the door, but it was easier and a little quicker to get off opposite Rookwood Recreation Ground and walk up Harehills Lane, so that’s what we did.
By the time we got to my place it was ten past eleven, and I thought there wasn’t enough time for adventures in imaginary history, but Sheena had other ideas. She was happy enough to go directly to bed, but once there she didn’t want to pass Go without going all around the board, so we took refuge under the duvet and turned out the light.
Knowing that she’d have to do a little work to get me into the mood, Sheena started talking while I lay back and listened. It was standard stuff, at first.
Morgina was in the principal harbour of Atlantis-what would now, I guess, be Valletta-about to board a ship. The sailing ships of Atlantis were akin to dhows, but tended to be much larger than the Arab vessels that inherited their design. They often carried passengers to Atlantean colonies in Clarica-the modern Sicily-and the north African coast, and they often set sail by night if the tides and winds were favourable. Morgina was bound for the Clarican city of Avra.
Morgina was excited, because she had never left the Atlantean mainland before, and slightly frightened by the awful silence of the sea. The night was bright enough when the boat set sail, but the sky soon darkened as clouds gathered, overtaking the craft because the wind blew faster at altitude. It began to rain, but it wasn’t a storm, and Morgina didn’t take shelter down below. The raindrops weren’t cold, and they fell with an eerie gentleness, like sentimental tears-not tears of grief but the kind you shed at the end of a film when lovers are reunited after an interval of heart-rending separation and danger.
Belowdecks, some of Morgina’s fellow passengers began to sing, as if to shut out the rain and the loneliness, but Morgina resisted the inevitable temptation to join in, because she wanted to savour the rain. When she opened her mouth to take in the falling drops, she found it sweet, almost as if there were a trace of blood in every slowly descending drop …
We were touching all the while, caressing each other, slowly and unhurriedly. We were perfectly relaxed, all the more so for having escaped the tension and embarrassment of the family dinner. If I’d had to set my mind to the serious business of invention I would have had to concentrate, but even that obligation had released its hold. I wasn’t entranced, and I wasn’t drifting off to sleep …
But for the first time, I remembered. I really and truly remembered, with a certainty that would have instantly dismissed all doubts and confusions arising from the knowledge that there had, after all, never been any such place as Atlantis, had some such dismissal been necessary. As it happened, though, I didn’t remember being in Atlantis or any of its satellite states.
What I remembered was being on a tiny island, not much larger than a sandbar. The interior was covered with thorn-laden scrub, interrupted by a few scrawny date palms, but I’d already stripped the trees of their unripe fruit-at considerable cost to the integrity of my skin, which was scored all over with streaky scabs. I’d managed to squeeze a little moisture from leaves and a few inedible fruits, but there was no gentle rain to supply me with fresh water, and I was fearfully thirsty. I was lying on the thin strip of sand that separated the scrub from the breaking waves, and would certainly have been unconscious had it not been for the torment of my thirst, because I was very weak. My eyes were open, and I was staring up at the sky, desperately wishing that the clouds obscuring the stars would break, although I rolled my head from side to side occasionally, hoping that I might glimpse the lanterns of a passing ship.
I never said a word to Sheena. I was too startled, too amazed. I felt that if I spoke, I would break the spell, and I didn’t want the experience to evaporate like a dream. I wanted to examine every detail of the apparent memory, and the fact that it was painful only made it more fascinating, more intriguing. If I gave any indication at all to Sheena that I had been transported, it could only have been my body language that conveyed the hint. I said nothing-but she knew. Or maybe it was Morgina who knew. One way or another, the tale that Sheena was spinning changed, seamlessly, into an account of an errand of mercy.
“The ship is too slow,” Sheena/Morgina reported. “It’ll never get there in time, and I know it. I can’t go below to join in with the singing. I have to use magic. It’s dangerous, but it’s the only way. I have to fly, no matter what the risk or the cost. It’s very difficult, to sing my own song when I can still hear the other, but it has to be done, and the sound of the rain on the sea helps me. I sing my spell, and I know it’s going to work, even though I’ve never sung such a spell before, because the need is so great. I sing the spell, and I take wing from the deck of the ship. I fly so fast that I’m out of the shadow of the rain-clouds within minutes, although I can see darkness on the horizon again almost as soon as the moonlight touches me. The clouds on the horizon are different, high and cold, remote and uncaring, but they don’t matter.”
I couldn’t remember my name, but I didn’t think of that as strange, I was in dire straits, and names didn’t matter. Only thirst mattered, and the possibility of relief. I had known, once, exactly who I was and where I was bound and how I’d come to be marooned on that tiny strip of land somewhere between Europe and Africa, but all of that had been driven deep into my mind, to leave the surface of my thoughts free for desperation and hope. In another world, the hope would have died, and in due course the desperation would have died, too, as I shrivelled into a desiccated corpse, silver-grey upon the amber sand, fading by slow degrees to whiteness. But this was an age of miracles, and there was no need to die.
A winged shadow fell out of the soulless night, and metamorphosed into a human female. I had no idea who she was, and could not have recognised her had I known her name. There were no mirrors in Atlantis; for all Morgina’s skill in description, she could not describe her own face.
She was small and slender, and the pale features of her black-framed face were so perfect that I wished I could see their true colours. But I was also seized by a premonition that something was wrong, that my need had demanded something from her that was more than she had to give, no matter how clever or willing she might be.
She had no water, but she cut her forearm above the wrist and gave me blood to drink. The blood was sweeter and more intoxicating than wine, and it quenched my dreadful thirst, if only for a little while.
Having done that, my saviour sank down beside me on the sand utterly exhausted, and began to caress me with her fingers, and what had been memory faded by slow degrees into a dream, which extended in the way dreams sometimes do, rendering time elastic, so that the night went on forever… or would have done, had forever been a possibility.
But forever was not a possibility, and the dream was already faded, like a photocopy of a photocopy. It evaporated, as did the darkness of the night.
Morgina tried to pull away then, but I caught and held her.
Stay, I said, insistently but not aloud-and she consented to be held while the sun rose and the dark world filled with colour.
Newton only pretended that there are seven colours in our rainbow because he thought that seven was the appropriate number. In fact, there are five: red, yellow, green, blue, and violet-but Newton must have remembered fragments of past lives spent in imaginary histories, and must have known that there really were seven colours in the rainbows that shone in Atlantean skies. Two of them have been lost, and no longer have names, but I know now that they lay beyond red and violet, not within .like Newton’s invented colours.
The colour of the sun was yellow, and the sea was blue. The date palms and the thorn bushes were green-but Morgina’s face and costume were tinted with colours I had never seen before. I know now that we only think that blood is red because we have lost the ability to see the other colour with which the red is mingled, just as we have lost the ability to taste blood as vampires taste it, and draw that special nourishment from it for which vampires ceaselessly thirst.
Had I drunk more frequently or more abundantly of Morgina’s blood, I would have been more vampire than I was w hen the sun rose on that tiny island, forgotten even though it lay within the boundaries of the empire of Lost Atlantis.
Alas, I remained far too human.
As soon as the light hit her, she began to dissolve. I felt a terrible sense of betrayal, because I had always believed-always known -that vampires did not dissolve in sunlight, because that was the one aspect of the myth that really was a myth-but I stifled a scream when she tried to speak. I needed to hear what she was saying, even though her voice had already decayed to the merest whisper.
“The spell was too costly,” she told me. “But nothing really dies, and nothing changes its inmost nature. Don’t be afraid. I shall return with the night, and you will not go thirsty, no matter how long you remain here.”
I was already awake, as far as far could be from any mere dream, but it wasn’t until I opened my eyes that I found Sheena dead.
I was hysterical, of course, but I think I managed to do all the right things in the right order. I phoned an ambulance, and then I set about trying to resuscitate her. I breathed air into her lungs and I pummelled her chest until the paramedics from St James’s arrived and took over. It was only after their arrival that I actually lost control. I remember shouting “She’s only nineteen fucking years old, for fuck’s sake-how the fuck can she have a fucking heart attack?,”
but I don’t think the paramedics held it against me. That wasn’t why they wouldn’t let me accompany the corpse to the hospital. I was sufficiently coherent, in any case, to give them the address and phone number of her official next of kin, so that they could send someone else to deliver the terrible news.
I couldn’t stay in the flat, and I certainly couldn’t face Mrs. Howell and Libby, so I started walking eastwards, towards the rising sun, and I continued until I reached the urban wilderness ofWhitkirk.
Davy was already up and about, busy with noise. I leaned on the doorbell until it penetrated the wall of sound. When he opened the door, he seemed angry, but as soon as he saw me the anger metamorphosed into something else-something essentially unfathomable.
“Is she … ?” he asked, but couldn’t force the final word past his lips.
“This might be a good time to rip my head off,” I told him angrily. “You seem to have got to the head of the queue-but then, you always knew that you would, didn’t you?”
“It wasn’t your fault,” he said, standing aside to let me in, then closing the door to exclude the world from our private business. “However it happened, it wasn’t your fault.”
“If you weren’t so much bigger than me,” I told him, “I’d be seriously considering the possibility of ripping your head off. I must have been blind and stupid not to see it. First you, then her sister. I thought it was just run-of-the-mill protective-ness. Even when she spelled it out in letters of fire, telling me in so many words that there was something I didn’t know, it didn’t click. But you knew, didn’t you? Whatever the big secret was, you were in on it and I wasn’t.”
“We would have told you,” he said. “When the time … we didn’t expect… I’m sorry. We didn’t know … so soon.”
The message was clear even though the sentences weren’t complete. They hadn’t expected it to happen so soon-but they had expected it. They would have told me eventually, but they wanted to be sure that it was serious first. They wanted to convince themselves, as far as it was possible, that I was, in Libby’s phrase, “man enough to handle it.” I understood all that. The one thing I didn’t understand, and desperately needed to know, was why Sheena had been part of the conspiracy of silence. She had known me through and through, even if her sister and her ex-boyfriend hadn’t.
“So tell me,” I said to Big Bad Davy, “exactly how it comes about that a nineteen-year-old girl can have a heart attack.”
Davy sighed. “Do you know what protein C is?” he asked.
“No,” I answered sourly. “I’m only a fucking sociology graduate.”
“It’s one of the clotting factors in the blood. Do you know what homeostasis is?”
“Feedback,” I said. “Like a thermostat. If you’re talking about people, it’s the control mechanism that regulates body temperature. You get too cold, you shiver to generate heat. You get too hot, you sweat to lose it.”
“It’s not just temperature,” he told me. “All kinds of bodily processes have to be regulated by chemical feedback systems.
Blood clotting is one of them. If blood doesn’t clot readily enough, you can bleed to death from a trivial cut. If it clots too readily, clots form even when there isn’t any damage, and they get stuck-usually in the capillaries in the legs, but sometimes in more dangerous places. A clot in the brain can cause a stroke, a clot in a heart valve can cause heart failure. Nowadays, doctors can treat conditions like haemophilia with clotting factors like thrombin and protein C, and conditions of the opposite kind with warfarin and hirudin, but Sheena’s condition wasn’t amenable to any kind of continuous therapy. They didn’t even know it existed until ten years ago. Her father was one of the first people to be properly diagnosed-posthumously, unfortunately.”
“How can you have both problems?” I demanded. “It doesn’t make sense.”
“The level of protein C in the blood is controlled by a feedback mechanism,” he said. “Unfortunately, Sheena’s father had a bad gene which made a faulty version of the enzyme which is supposed to switch off protein C production when it reaches the right level. It wasn’t that the mechanism didn’t work at all-just that it was dodgy. Sometimes, his levels went way up, and sometimes they went way down. His children had a fifty-fifty chance of inheriting the dodgy gene, and that’s the way it worked out. Libby was clear, Sheena wasn’t. They didn’t actually have a test for the gene until a couple of years ago, when they finally managed to locate it, but the symptoms were pretty obvious. Given two or three more years of the Human Genome Project, they’ll probably be able to sequence the protein and identify the fault in the dodgy version, and that might open up the possibility of finding an effective treatment, but at the time Mrs. Howell and Libby got the diagnosis there was nothing that could be done except treat Sheena’s symptoms as and when they appeared, according to type, so …”
“So they decided not to tell her,” I finished for him, as enlightenment dawned. “Because they didn’t want her to know that she was living under a death sentence.” And then, as further enlightenment dawned, I said: “Is that why you broke up with her, you bastard? Is that why Libby hesitated over telling meT
“Nol” 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. / 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 Fd 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.
