Suzie and the Monsters (27 page)

‘Never gave it much thought. You know, maybe when I’m thirty and married.’

‘Thirty doesn’t have any meaning for you anymore.’

‘No. I guess. It’s strange to think I’ll look exactly like this forever.’

‘You won’t.’

‘Huh?’

‘If you look at me in Andy’s graduation photos from ten years ago, you’ll think there’s something strange about the lighting. If you look at me in Alia’s graduation photos from twenty years ago, you’ll be wondering if it’s even really me, whether maybe it’s my sister or mother. In my friend Isabelle’s graduation photos from forty years ago, the differences are unmistakeable, although the resemblance is still clear. The process of change is very slow, so that you don’t notice it on a day to day basis, but the change across a human generation is just enough that I can pass myself off to old acquaintances as the daughter of the girl they once knew.’

‘But how do you change? Can you control it?’

‘It’s not really a conscious thing. It’s to do with how you feel about yourself. When I was human I had a birthmark and moles and freckles, and my face was asymmetrical and my nose a little ugly, one tooth was squint, my hair was a nondescript brown. I’m not saying I was ugly, but it’s difficult not to notice and worry about imperfections. I didn’t notice anything until several years after... after being made into a vampire, but of course I wasn’t surrounded my mirrors in those days the way we are now. When I had a chance to have a good look at myself one day, I discovered that all these flaws I had been worrying about were gone. I realised they had disappeared gradually, I just hadn’t been paying attention. Even my nose was corrected, and my hair darker, more lustrous. Maybe I had been pretty as a human, but now I was starting to be beautiful.’

‘I hope that means my breasts will get bigger.’

‘There’s absolutely nothing wrong with your breasts, honey,’ I say, turning her so that I can grab them and feel the nipples beneath the fabric.

Cleo grins. ‘I’d love them bigger. Did, ah, your husband have, er, a huge...’

‘It was an impressive piece of equipment,’ I reply, making her laugh. We resume our walk. ‘The changing never stops. When I try to remember how I looked then, the face I see is so strange and alien. I don’t like looking at myself in photos, because the person I see there isn’t the person I am. But it’s not just me. Humans change as well. A person who looked normal, even beautiful, five hundred years ago would stand out as downright odd if transported to this place and time. I think that if I chose to live in Columbia for a hundred years I would end up as the quintessential Latina. Which I wouldn’t mind really, if it wasn’t for the sunburn. Still, I can’t wait to show you round Cali in September.’

‘September?’

‘The World Salsa Festival.’

‘Oh, right.’

‘I know you don’t share my enthusiasm for dance, Cleo, but it would really mean a lot to me if you let me teach you. I want to be able to dance with the girl I love. Besides, it’s a great way to exercise.’

‘What’s the point in exercise? I feel stronger and fitter than ever.’

I sigh, and pull her over on to the grass. ‘Try and hit me. And don’t be shy. If you can stick a knife in my heart, then you can hit me like you really mean it.’

‘Okay,’ she says, and hits me —

— or tries to anyway. She cries out as she somersaults onto the grass, and I pounce onto her back to pin her there, arms held painfully tight behind her back. ‘You have the potential to be so much more than you are,’ I tell her. ‘In choosing to be a vampire, you have chosen to be a hunter of the most dangerous animal there is. I told you before that you can’t rely on your strength and speed, but there will be times when you will need to fight, and times when you will need to run.’

‘Please let me go, Suzie,’ she begs, on the edge of tears, and after a few seconds of continued pressure I relent and release her. She sits up, glaring at me and rubbing her arms.

‘The good news,’ I say, ‘is that your body can adapt rapidly to the demands placed on it. If you’re willing to trust me and do what I say, I can have you ready to run the London Marathon by the end of today. In three weeks you’d be able break the world record, but I don’t think you’d enjoy the publicity if you did.’

‘And the bad news?’

‘It’s going to hurt like hell, and I’m going to be shouting at you all day long.’

She thinks it over for a minute. ‘It would be stupid not to, really.’

‘Yes.’

‘Okay, then, but I expect a nice reward tonight,’ she says sternly.

‘I’m sure I can think of something.’

*

The vampire body can feel pain, and the pain says, ‘You are damaging me.’ The vampire body, however, is very good at repairing itself. Don’t ask me how. I don’t like to believe in the supernatural, but I seem to be the proof of it. Alternatively, it could be nanites, brought to Atlantis by aliens from another dimension, a gift of immortality with unfortunate side effects. I’ve looked at my blood and skin cells under the microscope, without seeing anything that meant anything to me. I’ve never dared to ask anyone to do a full DNA study. I don’t really want to know the answer, but I do want to be prepared for it if someone else decides to study me. I dislike the way that blood and urine tests are becoming so routine.

So, yes, the vampire can feel pain. What’s left of the human mind reacts to this pain with fear and panic, and it is this reaction that needs to be overcome during training. This is what I keep telling Cleo, between instructions about breathing: ‘Keep saying to yourself, “Pain is real. Pain is good. Fear’s a lie. Peace. Peace.” You’re doing brilliantly. Let’s go again.’ And there’s plenty of shouting along the way as well. Cleo thinks she’s tired, but it’s mostly just more trickery of the human mind. Resting for a minute gives the body time enough to recover. I am impressed by her determination, though. She insists on rests more often than I like, and there’s a lot of angry glowering, but she doesn’t complain vocally.

The real problem with this kind of sustained exercise is dehydration, and an increasing hunger. We stop at the café from time to time for a rest and a drink of water, but the other can’t be appeased.

I phone Alia mid-afternoon. ‘Any luck finding out about Vauxhall Vicki’s?’

‘None.’

‘I feel a bit stupid. I just assumed it was a pub or club in Vauxhall called the Queen Vic or something.’

‘You’ve been watching too much EastEnders.’

‘Maybe.’

‘Anyway, no one’s heard of any place called Vauxhall Vicki’s. I even asked Ricky and your pal Ian. Maybe he made it up?’

‘I don’t think so. Okay. Are you busy tonight?’

‘Nothing I can’t get out of.’

‘Good. I’ll need someone to be a lookout, and I need a camera with a flash and plenty of batteries. I plan to take a lot of photos. And fake police ID if you’ve got any.’

‘Sounds like a fun evening.’

‘Could get very messy. Literally.’

There’s a long pause, then she says, ‘I see.’

‘The course of true love never did run smooth,’ I quote, echoing Alia’s confused justifications to me when she broke my heart once upon a midsummer night.

‘No,’ she agrees quietly after another pause. ‘What time?’

‘Seven at the hotel. Bring your car. Remember to fill up.’

‘Okay. See you then.’

It’s late in the afternoon when Cleo and I run the route I started with this morning, ten kilometres ending at East Finchley. She’s finally started to relax, and actually seems to be enjoying this. ‘Fantastic, honey,’ I say when we stop, and kiss her fiercely. There’s a dangerous glitter to her eyes that echoes my own need. ‘Let’s go shopping, and get dressed to kill.’

Cleo’s answering smile is joyous, and she grabs me for another demanding kiss.

*

Cleo and I leave the hotel wearing tracksuits again, but once we’re in Alia’s car we change quickly into our new bright pink and very skimpy party dresses, our new white satin elbow-length gloves, and our new cheap transparent stripper heels. We Drench our lips and Entangle our eyes with the Illamasqua we both love, and braid each other’s hair. When Alia drops us off near Brick Lane Market, Cleo’s long dark hair is concealed beneath pink waves, and my own longer darker hair by my tiered blonde Lola. We’re simultaneously elegant, sexy, and very slutty — barely decent, and decently bare. Cleo takes the camera, and has spare batteries and her phone in her small handbag; in my matching handbag I have my phone, and a police ID that’s obviously fake if you look closely.

‘Cleo, honey, listen to me, please,’ I say as Alia drives off and we walk along to Wentworth Street. ‘This is very important. We’re going to be very visible tonight. To police, prostitutes, pimps and punters. There are cameras on street corners, in shops, and then there’s people’s phones, of course. There may be people looking out of windows, spying through net curtains and Venetian blinds. Tonight we have to be especially careful because we’re going to make people see us, and it’s essential that they see this fiction we’ve created, two young, human girls. Harmless and unprotected.’

‘Okay.’

‘If we get into a fight, and we probably will, then take it away from public view. And be careful! Your body can heal damage but there are things it can’t do.’

Cleo laughs. ‘So even vampires have small print?’

‘I guess. Basically, don’t get shot in the head. It’ll knock you out, leave you completely vulnerable, maybe for hours, and you might experience significant memory loss.’

‘Has that happened to you?’

‘Not exactly. I haven’t been shot. But I have no memories of the years 1923 through to 1942, and my memories of the previous thirty years or so are fragmentary. My first clear memory after that blackout is staggering terrified through the rubble of London’s streets, starving and in excruciating pain, my clothes shredded and soaked in dry and drying blood, and absolutely nothing made sense. The city I knew and loved had been transformed by time and war into a place foreign and chaotic.’

A red car, an Audi, shiny and new, pulls up alongside us and a head with short blonde hair and an acquisitive face leans through the open window. Before he can speak, Cleo’s camera lights him up with a flash. He scowls and drives off hastily. Cleo takes a string of other photos, of the girls hanging around nearby, until they storm off, hurling abuse back at us. Several other loitering cars suddenly speed up, but not in time to escape Cleo’s itchy trigger finger.

‘So, what did you do?’ Cleo asks me.

I shrug. ‘Found somewhere to clean up and hide. Nothing very interesting. It helped that everyone else was really trying to do the same thing. What bothered me was not knowing who might know me, not knowing where I had been or what I had done for twenty years. That and the worry that it might happen again, whatever it was. Apart from anything else, I lost a lot of the property and wealth that I had been accumulating slowly over the centuries.’

Another car pulls up next to us, only to be chased away by Cleo’s camera.

‘What do you think happened?’

‘In the sixties, at uni, there was a girl — well, a woman I should say, since she must have been about forty then, and, as I learned later, married with two children, sons, who were at boarding school. Isabelle. I mentioned her this morning. Her husband was an MP. She remarried later, to a French diplomat, and lives in Strasbourg. We meet for coffee sometimes when I go on a shopping spree in Paris.’

‘Is she another of your exes?’

‘No need to get jealous, my sexy psycho,’ I say, and grab her to give her a kiss and run my hands over the delicate fabric of the dress, until she gasps and pushes me away. We’re both laughing. ‘In a hundred years,’ I add, ‘I’ll be teasing you about all your love affairs.’

‘I don’t want other lovers. I want you, Suzie.’

‘You have me for ever, Cleo. You will always be more important to me than any other lover or friend, and I hope that you will always know that. That was the commitment I made when I gave you my blood. We are one, you and I. But it would be senseless to deny yourself the thrill of new love. It won’t last for long.’ I take her hands in mine and hold them hard. ‘Just promise me one thing, and I promise the same: don’t turn anyone else into a vampire.’

‘You girls are seriously hot,’ says a voice. It’s another man in another car. ‘How much for both of you together?’

I wave my fake police ID in front of him. ‘WPC Stone. Please switch the engine off.’

‘Oh, shit,’ he mutters, turning the key.

‘We just need you to answer a few questions, sir, then you’ll be free to go. Do you know of any establishments, brothels, saunas, or perhaps flats or houses, where you can get a quick fuck for forty quid?’ He recoils in genuine disgust from this question, shaking his head violently. ‘I’m not suggesting that you frequent such places, sir, but perhaps you’ve heard something about them? Any information you give me will be most helpful, and we won’t mention your name in the paperwork.’

‘No, I’m sorry,’ he replies, still shaking his head frantically. But he seems honest to me.

‘Okay, thank you for your cooperation, sir. May I suggest you find other ways to relieve stress. By paying for sex, you’re supporting the illegal narcotic and human trafficking industries.’

‘Yes, okay,’ he mutters, bright red with shame, unable to look me in the eye.

As he starts the car, I add, ‘Plus it’s the Olympics soon. Do your bit for London and keep the streets clean. Have a good evening, sir.’ He drives away with that exaggerated care people have around the police.

From Wentworth Street we turn right into Thrawl Street which winds through the Flower and Dean Estate, which wouldn’t be a bad place to live if it weren’t located here so close to Whitechapel and Spitalfields, and thoughtlessly designed with many narrow walkways perfect for drug dealers, pimps and prostitutes. Then again, London has never been very good at learning from its history. In the 1890s the council decided to demolish one of London’s worst slums, just north of here in Shoreditch, and build cheap replacement housing. Of course, the rent for the new housing was four times higher than in the neighbouring slums, so in effect all that was achieved was that five thousand people were displaced from their homes to other slums, and tradesmen moved into the new area. It is amazing what conditions humans are willing to put up with. The slums were horrendous, people sharing seven or more to a room, the streets littered with excrement and dead animals. I read somewhere that life expectancy was sixteen. The slums had to go, but the council didn’t really care about the people who lived there. The same happened with all the railways being built in London. It was a lot easier for politicians to make hundreds of desperately poor people homeless, than upset a single rich landowner. It makes the current fuss about a new high speed railway through the Chilterns (Oh dear! I don’t think that’s quite our cup of tea!) seem absurdly comical.