The Radleys (9 page)

Rowan wil have fil ed the coal bucket up by now and be heading back to the house.

“Normal y it goes a little differently,” says Wil . “The dream.”

Helen knows she has to get through to him, has to stop it from happening. “We don’t need you.

It’s sorted out.”

He laughs, crackling the line.

She could col apse. She looks at one of her paintings in the hal way. The watercolor of an apple tree. It blurs and she struggles to bring it back into focus.

“I’m splendid, thanks, Hel. You?” He pauses. “Ever think of Paris?”

“It’s just better if you stay away.”

The shower stops. Clara must be getting out. There’s another noise too. The back door. Rowan.

And stil , the same demonic voice in her ear. “Wel , now you mention it, I’ve missed you too.

Seventeen years is a lot of lonely space.”

Her eyes are closed tight. He knows what he is capable of doing. He knows he can pul gently at a single strand and cause everything to unravel. “Please,” she says.

He says nothing.

She opens her eyes, and Rowan is there, with a ful coal bucket. He is looking at the phone, and at her, at the fearful prayer that is her face.

“It’s him, isn’t it?” says Wil .

“I’ve got to go,” she says and presses the red button.

Rowan looks half-suspicious, half-confused. She feels naked in front of him.

“Could you go and start the fire.”

It’s al she can say. But her son stands there, not moving or saying anything for a good few seconds.

“Please,” she says.

He nods, as if understanding something, then turns away.

A Certain Type of Hunger

The night moves at the speed of panic.

Peter comes home.

He burns his and Clara’s clothes on the roaring fire.

They tel Rowan the truth. Or half of the truth, and even that he can’t believe.

“She kil ed Harper? You
killed
Stuart Harper? With your
teeth
?”

“Yes,” says Peter, “she did.”

“I know this al seems very weird,” adds Helen.

Rowan groans in disbelief. “Mum, it’s over the hil from weird.”

“I know. It’s a lot to take in.”

Peter only has his trousers to go. He screws them into a bal and throws them on the fire, pressing the cotton fabric down with the poker to make sure there is nothing of them left. It is like watching a whole other life disappear.

And it is about this time that Clara decides to speak, in a smal but steady voice.

“What happened to me?”

Her parents turn to look at her, sitting there in the green dressing gown they’d bought her when she was twelve or thirteen but which stil fits her. She looks different, though, tonight. Something’s gone and something else has taken its place. She’s not as frightened as she should be. She lowers her glasses down her nose, then lifts them back up, as if checking her eyesight.

“You were provoked,” Helen tel s her, as she rubs a soothing hand on her knee. “That boy provoked you. It brought out something. You know, this is why you’ve been il . Not eating meat. You see, this il ness, this condition, we passed it on to you. It’s hereditary, and it brings out a certain type of hunger which has to be very careful y managed.”

The words jump to attention inside Peter’s mind.

Illness!

Condition!

A certain type of hunger!

Clara looks to her mother, missing something. “I don’t understand.”

“Wel , it’s this strange biological—”

Enough
, Peter decides. He interrupts his wife and looks into his daughter’s eyes. “We’re vampires, Clara.”

“
Peter
.” Helen’s sharp whisper won’t stop him now, and he reiterates his point in a steady voice.

“Vampires. That’s what we are.”

He looks at both his children and sees that Clara seems to comprehend this better than Rowan.

After what she’s done, he knows she might even find solace in this truth. But it has just smashed Rowan in the face. He looks dumbstruck.

“That’s a . . .
metaphor
?” he asks, trying to cling to the reality he’s known.

Peter shakes his head.

Rowan shakes his head too, but in disbelief. He backs out of the doorway. They say nothing as his feet climb the stairs.

Peter looks at Helen, expecting her to be angry, but she’s not. Sad, anxious, but maybe slightly relieved too. “You’d better go and see him,” she says.

“Yes,” says Peter, “I’m going.”

Crucifixes and Rosaries and Holy Water

For seventeen years Rowan has been lied to continualy by his parents. This means, he realizes, his whole life has been one long il usion.

“That’s why I can’t sleep,” he says, sitting on his bed beside his father. “Isn’t it? That’s why I’m hungry al the time. And why I have to wear sunblock.”

His father nods. “Yes, it is.”

Rowan thinks of something. The skin condition he’d been told he suffered from.

“Photodermatosis!”

“I had to tel you something,” Peter says. “I’m a doctor.”

“You lied. Every day. You lied.”

Rowan notices there is some blood on his father’s cheek. In the mirror on the wal .

“You’re a sensitive boy, Rowan. We didn’t want to hurt you. The truth is it’s not as weird as people believe.” He points toward the mirror. “We’ve got reflections.”

Reflections! What difference did it make, when you didn’t know the person staring back at
you?

Rowan doesn’t speak.

He doesn’t want to be having this conversation. Already, this night’s happenings could take him a century to absorb, but his father keeps on and on as if he’s talking about a minor STD or masturbation.

“And al that stuff about crucifixes and rosaries and holy water is just superstitious rubbish.

Catholic wish fulfil ment. The garlic stuff’s true, though, obviously.”

Rowan thinks of the nausea he feels every time he passes an Italian restaurant or catches garlic on someone’s breath, or when he once gagged on a hummus baguette he’d bought from the Hungry Gannet.

He real y is a freak.

“I want to die,” he says.

His father scratches his jaw and lets out a long, slow sigh.

“Wel , you wil . Without blood, even with the amount of meat we try and eat, we’re physical y quite disadvantaged. You know, we didn’t tel you this stuff because we didn’t want to depress you.”

“Dad, we’re kil ers! Harper! She kil ed him. I can’t believe it.”

“You know,” says Peter, “it’s possible that you could go your whole life just living like a normal human being.”

That real y is a joke.

“A normal human being!
A normal human being!
” Rowan almost laughs as he says this. “Who itches and never sleeps and can’t even do ten straight push-ups.” He realizes something. “This is why they think I’m a freak at school. They sense it, don’t they? They sense that, at some subconscious level, I am craving their blood.”

Rowan leans back against his wal and closes his eyes as his dad plows on with his introductory lecture on vampirism. Apparently, a lot of great people have been vampires. Painters, poets, philosophers. His dad provides a list:

Homer.

Ovid.

Machiavel i.

Caravaggio.

Nietzsche.

Pretty much al the Romantics, except Wordsworth.

Bram Stoker. (His antivampire propaganda came during his abstinence years.) Jimi Hendrix.

“And vampires don’t live forever,” Peter continues, “but if they stick to a strict blood diet and keep out of daylight, they can last a very long time. Vampires over two hundred years old have been known. And some of the strictest ones fake their deaths at a young age, like Byron did on the battlefield in Greece, pretending he had a fever. Then after that they assume a different identity every decade or so.”

“Byron?” Rowan can’t help but be consoled by this piece of information.

His father nods, claps a supportive hand on his son’s knee. “He’s stil alive, last I heard. I saw him back in the nineteen eighties. DJing alongside Thomas de Quincey at some party at their cave in Ibiza. Don Juan and DJ Opium they cal ed themselves. God knows if they’re stil at it.”

Rowan looks at his father and realizes he is more animated than usual. “But it’s not right. We’re freaks.”

“You’re an intel igent, thoughtful, gifted young man. You are not a freak. You are someone who has overcome a great deal without knowing it. See, the thing is, Rowan, blood is a craving. The feeling it gives is very addictive. It takes over. It makes you very strong, gives you an incredible feeling of power, makes you believe you can do or create anything.”

Rowan sees his father seem momentarily lost, hypnotized by some memory. “Dad,” he asks nervously, “have you ever kil ed anybody?”

Peter is clearly troubled by the question. “I tried not to. I tried to stick to blood we could get hold of some other way. Like at the hospital. See, the police never official y acknowledged our existence, but they had special units. Probably stil do, I don’t know. We knew a lot of people who just disappeared. Kil ed. So we tried to be careful. But human blood is best fresh, and sometimes the cravings were so strong, and the feelings it gave us . . . the ‘energy,’ as they say . . .” He looks at Rowan, his eyes offering the rest of the confession. “It’s no way to be,” he says, a quiet sadness infecting his voice. “Your mum was right.
Is
right. It’s better the way we are now. Even if it means we die younger than we would, even if we have to feel pretty crap most of the time. It’s better to be good. Now listen, wait here til I get you something.”

Peter disappears out of the room, returning a moment later holding an old paperback with an austere gray cover. He hands it to Rowan, who looks at the title:
The Abstainer’s Handbook
.

“What’s this?”

“It helps. It was written by an anonymous group of abstainers back in the eighties. Read it. Al the answers are in here.”

Rowan flicks through the yel owing, dog-eared pages. Real words on real paper, making everything seem more true. He reads a couple of sentences.

“We have to learn that the things we desire are very often the things which could lead to our
own self-destruction. We have to learn to give up on our dreams in order to preserve our reality.”

This has been hidden in the house al these years. Alongside what else?

Peter sighs. “See, we’re abstainers. We don’t kil or convert anybody anymore. To the outside world, we’re just average human beings.”

Convert?
It made it sound like a religion. Something you were talked into and talked out of.

Rowan suddenly has one more thing he wants to know. “So were you converted into a vampire?”

He is disappointed to see his dad shake his head. “No, I’ve always been like this. The Radleys have been like this for generations. For centuries. Radley is a vampire name. It means ‘red meadow’ or something like that. And I’m pretty sure the red wasn’t anything to do with poppies.

But your mum—”

“Was converted?”

His father nods. Rowan sees he looks sad about something. “She wanted to become this, at the time. It wasn’t against her wil . But now, I don’t think she can forgive me for it.”

Rowan lies back on his bed and says nothing, staring at the bottle of useless sleep medicine he has taken every night for years. His father sits next to him in a wordless quiet, listening to the gentle creak of the pipes running toward the radiator.

Freak
, Rowan thinks to himself, minutes later, as he begins to read the handbook.
Toby is right.

I am a freak. I am a freak. I am a freak.

And he thinks about his mother. She actual y
chose
to be a vampire. It didn’t make sense. To
want
to be a monster.

Peter stands up. “Anyway, we’l talk more tomorrow. We’ve got to try to be strong. For Clara.

We don’t want to look suspicious.”

That’s all we’ve ever looked,
thinks Rowan, as his father closes the door.

A Bit like Christian Bale

Toby Felt is on his bike swigging back the last dregs of vodka.

A garbageman!

Pathetic. Toby vows to himself if he ever becomes a garbageman he wil kil himself. Throw himself into the back of those green lorries and wait to be mashed up with al the other waste.

But he knows he won’t real y end up like that. Because life is divided into two types. There are the strong, like Christian Bale and himself, and there are the weak, like Eve’s dad and Rowan Radley. And the role of the strong is to keep punishing the weak. That’s how you stay on top. If you let the weak just
be
, then you’l end up being weak yourself. It’s like standing in the future Bangkok of Resident Evil 7 and letting the zombies come and eat you alive. You have to kil or be kil ed.

When he was younger he always fantasized about Bishopthorpe being taken over by something. Not zombies, necessarily, but something.

Time-traveling Nazis.

Refugee aliens.

Something.

And anyway, in this Xbox reality everyone had fal en to pieces, even his dad in the end, but Toby was always there, the last man standing, kil ing them al off. Like Batman. Or a Terminator. Or like Christian Bale. (He did
look
a bit like Christian Bale, people said. Wel , his mother said. His proper mother. Not that stupid tart he has to live with now.) Shooting them, torching them, hand-to-hand combat, lobbing grenades with his tennis racquet, whatever it took. And he knows he is one of the strong because he can get a girl like Eve, while a freak like Rowan Radley sits at home reading poetry.

He is approaching the vil age sign. He holds the bottle out, swings back as if getting ready to vol ey a tennis bal , and smashes it against the metal.