Sheena, page 7
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I played the songs over and over regardless of the fact that their message was out of date, because I knew that music as the purest magic of all as well as the greatest mystery, and I needed magic.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 sustaining 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 hi 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.
/ 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, / 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 El-land 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 well-tried saws. I never heard Mrs. Howell 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 flock of crows. The flock was sometimes so dense that my own guardian vampire had no chance to defend her territory-but such moments did pass as my spiritual clotting factors cut in, never more than a little too late.
I always got through the night, ready to return to puppet life in Phoneland, where even the harpies still touched me tenderly and the gorgons looked at me with naked pity.
“Actually,” I confided to Jez one night in the Countess of Cromartie, when I finally allowed him to bully me into letting him buy me a pint of bitter, “life doesn’t go on. We begin to die as soon as we begin to live. It’s death that whittles the embryo into human shape, death that clears out all the cellular compost day by day, as life takes its toll. Life doesn’t go on at all-it just flows away, bit by bit, emptying us out even though we were never really full.”
“Yeah,” he said wisely. ‘Too bloody right. That’s why you have to make the most of what you’ve got. Fight it, mate.
You might lose, but you’ve got to fight.” He couldn’t quite see that that was exactly what I was doing, far more cleverly than he could know. At least he had the grace to refrain from making observations about the number of pebbles on the beach or fish in the sea. He’d been out with the girls too many times to be under any delusions about any fuck being a good fuck. He didn’t know enough to envy me what I now had, but he knew enough to envy me what I’d had before.
“She was a grand lass,” he said. “A bit strange, but who can blame her? We take our health too much for granted.”
“Yes, she was,” I said. “And yes we do. Do you mind if I don’t get another round in-no offence, but I think I’d rather be at home.”
“No, mate,” he said. “Another time, eh?”
“Another time,” I echoed. That was where I was headed. I didn’t necessarily expect to get there that night, but I intended to travel hopefully. Contrary to proverbial wisdom, it’s far bet-ter actually to arrive, but the momentum of hopeful travelling does have its own compensations.
When I got back to the flat, I made myself eat. I had to “keep my strength up,” as Mum would have put it. I peeled and chipped my own potatoes, although the processed peas came out of a tin. It had been a while since I’d been to the supermarket and the skinless sausages were a couple of days past their sell-by date, but I knew it didn’t matter. English sausages have so much preservative in them that they keep for at least a week after they’ve supposedly given up the ghost-it’s one of the nation’s finest traditions.
While I ate I put on the CD Davy had given me, and filled the flat with Sheena’s voice. Afterwards, I put it on again, and then again. I wasn’t always that obsessive; some nights I didn’t play it at all, preferring other items from what had been Sheena’s Gothic rock collection and was now-thanks to the generosity of Libby and Mrs. Ho well-mine. Listening to the Fields of the Nephilim’s Elizium or Dreadful Shadows performing “Sea of Tears” or anything at all by Sopor Aeternus brought back tender memories of listening with Sheena as well as creating an appropriately heartaching mood. Most nights, though, I arrived home without having been sidetracked, and there was something about drinking in a pub with Jez that smacked ever so slightly of betrayal, so I felt that I needed to mainline the real thing, to go directly to the source. I had mixed feelings now about Davy’s decision to omit “Graveyard Love” from the album, because I had begun to think of that as the most prophetic and deeply felt of all Sheena’s non-Byronic lyrics.
Eventually, I put the kettle on to boil. Then I got the kitchen devil from the drawer and used the jet of vapour gushing from the kettle’s spout to sterilise the blade. It wasn’t for my own sake that I was frightened of infection, but I needed to preserve the purity of my blood.
The inner surface of my left forearm already had too many scars crisscrossing it, and the outer part was far too hairy, and I wasn’t sure I could make a neat enough cut with the blade in my left hand, so I took off my shirt before sitting down on the bed. There were hairs on my chest too, but they were mostly above nipple-level and I was pretty sure that I could draw a good line across my heart if only I could figure out exactly where it was hiding behind my rib cage.
By this time I’d read enough about the circulation of the blood to know that Sheena had been right and I had been wrong about the pulmonary vein, but I didn’t intend to cut that deep. Freshly oxygenated blood is undoubtedly the best kind-the vampire’s champagne-but as soon as you open up the meanest, bluest vein the outflow sucks life from the air and becomes pure scarlet, pure intoxication.
When I’d made the cut I lay back, closed my eyes, and listened. One day, I knew, I’d be able to lie back like that and keep on going: falling through the space-time continuum, across the fragile borderlands that separate our own universe from all the parallel alternatives, not merely to Arcadia and Atlantis but to venues even more exotic.
But not yet.
For the time being, I was still an amateur, still a hopeful fellow traveller, not yet an initiate into the brotherhood and sisterhood of blood. For the time being, I stood in need of guidance, of education, of moulding-but that, at least, I already had. I had the best teacher in the world, perhaps the best in all the worlds.
