The Radleys

  And this approach might have worked, to a degree, but it couldn’t guarantee complete insulation from gossip, any more than it could make sure none of the pupils their children mixed with were going to tempt or torment them into an OBT attack.

  And right now, on this Monday morning, the gossip is out of the trenches, coming closer and becoming more immediately dangerous. Peter is in the reception area, flicking through his mail and appointment sheets. As he does so, he listens to Elaine, a woman whose biological processes wouldn’t function without a bit of Monday morning misery fishing. She is in conversation with one of Jeremy Hunt’s patients in a hushed, eve-of-the-apocalypse kind of voice.

  “Oh, isn’t it terrible about that boy from Farley?”

  “God, I know. Terrible. I saw it on the local news this morning.”

  “He just disappeared.”

  “I know.”

  “They think it’s, you know, a murder.”

  “Do they? It said on the news that they were treating it as a missing—”

  Elaine is quick to interrupt. “No. From what I hear, the boy’s got no reason to be disappearing.

  He’s real y popular, you know. Sporty. On the rugby team and everything. My friend knows his mum, and she says he’s the nicest boy you could meet.”

  “Oh, it’s terrible. Horrible.”

  An ominous silence. Peter hears the squeak of Elaine’s chair as she swivels toward him. “Bet your kids knew him, Dr. Radley.”

  Dr. Radley.

  He has known and worked with Elaine for over a decade but he has remained Dr. Radley despite the many times he has told her it’s okay, preferable actual y, to cal him Peter.

  “I don’t know,” he says, maybe a little too quickly. “I don’t think so.”

  “Isn’t it terrible, Doctor? When you think it’s just the next vil age.”

  “Yes, but I’m sure he’l turn up.”

  Elaine doesn’t seem to have heard this. “There’s al sorts of evil out there, isn’t there? Al sorts.”

  “Yes, I suppose there is.”

  Elaine is staring at him oddly. The patient—a woman with long, dry hair who looks like an older, morbidly obese Mona Lisa in a faded rainbow-knit cardigan—is also looking over. He recognizes her as Jenny Crowther, the woman who used to run the Saturday morning arts and crafts workshop in the vil age hal . Seven years ago, she had phoned their house and spoken in concerned terms to Helen about Rowan’s Roman god puppet. Ever since, she has never said hel o in the street, only offering him the same vacant smile she is offering now.

  “Al sorts of evil,” says Elaine, underlining her point.

  Peter succumbs to a sudden claustrophobia, and for some reason thinks of al the fences Helen has been painting over the years. They are trapped. That is why she paints them. They are trapped by the smiling, empty faces and al this misinformed gossip.

  He turns his back on them and notices a padded envelope in a pile of mail to be sent out to the hospital. A blood sample.

  “Wel , it makes you want to keep your kids under lock and key doesn’t it, Dr. Radley?”

  “Oh,” says Peter, barely listening to what Elaine is saying, “I think you can get a bit paranoid about these things . . .”

  The phone rings and Elaine answers as Jenny Crowther lowers herself onto one of the orange plastic chairs in the waiting area, facing away from him.

  “No,” Elaine is saying, with smiling authority to a patient on the line, “I’m sorry, but if you need to make an emergency appointment, you real y need to cal us between half past eight and nine o’clock . . . I’m afraid you’l have to wait until tomorrow.”

  As Elaine continues talking, Peter finds himself leaning down to sniff the brown padded envelope and notices his heart quicken, not in heavy beats, but with smooth, bul et-train adrenaline.

  He glances over at Elaine, sees she’s not paying attention to him. Then he scoops up the envelope, as surreptitiously as he can manage, with the rest of his mail and carries it into his room.

  Once inside he checks the time.

  Five minutes before his next patient.

  He quickly opens the envelope and takes out the plastic vials along with the pale blue NHS

  form. The form confirms what his nose has already told him, that this blood does indeed belong to Lorna Felt.

  There’s a magnetic, almost gravitational pul toward her blood.

  No. I am not my brother.

  I am strong.

  I can resist.

  He tries to do what he has tried to do for almost twenty years now. Tries to see blood as a doctor should see it, as nothing more than a mixture of plasma and proteins and red and white cel s.

  He thinks of his son and his daughter and somehow manages to place the three vials back inside. He tries to reseal the envelope, but it peels open as soon as he sits in his chair. The dark thin opening is the entrance to a cave that contains either untold fear or infinite pleasure.

  Or maybe even both.

  Book Group

  On the first Monday of the month, Helen meets some of her nonworking friends in one of their houses for a book group meeting and a midmorning nibble designed to get the week off to a good start.

  This arrangement, or at least Helen’s involvement with it, has been going on now for the best part of a year and during that time Helen has only missed one meeting, owing to her being on holiday in a rented gîte in the Dordogne with the rest of her family. To miss a session today, at short notice, might ring a note of discord or suspicion, which would—on top of the ominous B-flat minor, which is the camper van parked on Orchard Lane—probably be best avoided.

  So she gets herself ready and strol s over to Nicola Baxter’s house, on the south edge of the vil age. The Baxters live in a large converted barn with a sweeping drive and an azalea-fil ed garden that seems to belong to a different era from the epic space inside, with its rural-futurist kitchen and armless, oblong sofas.

  By the time Helen gets there, everyone is already sitting down eating flapjacks and drinking coffee, with their books on their laps. They are talking more animatedly than usual and, to Helen’s bafflement, it soon becomes clear that the topic of conversation is not When the Last Sparrow Sings.

  “Oh, Helen, isn’t it terrible?” Nicola asks her, holding out a solitary flapjack on a gigantic crumb-scattered plate. “This Stuart Harper business.”

  “Yes. Yes, it is. Terrible.”

  Nicola is someone Helen has always quite liked, and they usual y share much the same opinion on the books they read. She was the only one who agreed with Helen that Anna Karenina had no control over her feelings for Count Vronsky or that Madame Bovary was essential y a sympathetic character.

  There is something about her that Helen has always related to, as though Nicola too had cut off some part of herself to live her current life.

  Indeed, sometimes Helen has watched Nicola, with her pale skin and quivering smile and her sad eyes, and seen so much of herself in her that she has wondered if they shared the same secret. Were the Baxters abstaining vampires like themselves?

  Of course, Helen has never been able to ask the question outright. ( So, Nicola, ever bitten into someone’s throat and sucked their blood until their hearts stopped beating? Nice flapjacks, by the way. ) And she has yet to meet Nicola’s children, two girls who go to a boarding school in York, or her husband, an architect who always seems to have some big civic commission going on and was continual y away working in Liverpool or London or somewhere. But for a long time there had been a grain of hope that Nicola might actual y sit down one day and tel her she’s been battling a blood addiction for twenty years and every day is a living hel .

  Helen knew it was probably just a comforting fantasy. After al , even in the cities vampires were a tiny fraction of the population, and the chance of one being in her book group was highly unlikely.

  But it had been nice to believe it was possible, and she’d held on to this possibility like a lottery ticket in her mind. r />
  Now, though, as Nicola is acting as shocked as everyone else about the missing boy, Helen knows she is on her own.

  “Yes,” Alice Gummer is saying, from one of the futuristic sofas. “It was on the news. Have you seen it?”

  “No,” says Helen.

  “It was on this morning. On Look North. I caught a bit of it at breakfast.”

  “Oh?” says Helen. At breakfast the Radleys had been half listening to the Today program as usual and nothing had been mentioned.

  Then Lucy Bryant says something, but her mouth is so ful of flapjack that at first Helen doesn’t hear. Something about a hobby? A bobby?

  “Sorry?”

  Nicola helps out, translating on Lucy’s behalf, and this time the words couldn’t be clearer.

  “They’ve found his body.”

  The panic, in that moment, is too much for Helen to conceal, it comes at her suddenly, and from every angle, cornering al hope. “What?”

  Someone answers. She has no idea who the voice belongs to. It is just there, swirling in her head like a plastic bag in the wind.

  “Yes, apparently it’s been washed up out of the sea or something. Near Whitby.”

  “No,” says Helen.

  “Are you al right?” The question is asked by at least two of them.

  “Yes, I’m fine. It’s just, I missed breakfast.”

  And the voices keep swirling, echoing and overlapping in the vast barn where sheep might once have bleated.

  “Come on. Sit down. Have your flapjack.”

  “Do you want some water?”

  “You do look pale.”

  Amidst it al , she is trying to think clearly about what she has just found out. A corpse with her daughter’s bite marks and DNA al over it is now in police hands. How could Peter have been so stupid? Years ago, when he dumped a body in the sea, it didn’t come back. It was far enough away from land for them not to have to worry.

  She pictures an autopsy taking place right now, with a whole audience of forensic experts and high-ranking police officers. Even Wil wouldn’t be able to blood-mind them out of this.

  “I’m fine. It’s just, I get a bit funny from time to time. I’m fine now, real y.”

  She is sitting on the sofa now, staring at the transparent coffee table and the large empty plate hovering on it as if suspended in space.

  As she stares, she realizes she would succumb, right now, to a taste of Wil ’s blood. It would give her the strength she needs to get through the next few minutes. But just thinking this makes her feel more trapped.

  The prison is herself.

  And the body that mixes her blood with his.

  Somehow though, and with nothing redder than sweet, sticky oats to eat, she manages to pul herself together.

  She wonders if she should leave and pretend it’s because she’s il . But before she has worked out what is the best thing to do, she finds herself sitting and watching and eventual y taking part in the discussion of the book she didn’t quite find the time to finish reading.

  When the Last Sparrow Sings was shortlisted for last year’s Booker Prize, a novel set in mid-twentieth-century China depicting a love story between a farmer’s bird-loving daughter and an il iterate farmhand carrying out Mao’s policy of kil ing the sparrow population. Jessica Gutheridge, whose handmade cards Helen always buys for Christmas and birthdays, saw the author at last year’s Hay-on-Wye Festival and is busy tel ing everyone how incredible the event was—“Oh, it was just marvelous, and you’l never guess who was sitting in our row”—while al the time Helen struggles to seem normal.

  “So, Helen, what did you think of it?” someone asks her at one point. “What did you think of Li-Hom?”

  She struggles to act like she cares. “I felt sorry for him.”

  Someone else, Nicola, leans forward in her seat and seems slightly put off that Helen doesn’t share her opinion on this. “What, after al he did?”

  “I don’t . . . I suppose . . .” The whole group is looking at her, expecting her to expand on this.

  She tries her best to stop thinking of autopsies and crossbows. “I’m sorry, I just don’t think he was .

  . .” She forgets the rest of the sentence she had in her mind. “I think I need to go to the toilet.”

  She stands up self-consciously, clipping her shin against the coffee table and hiding the pain and everything else as she makes it out the room to the Baxters’ downstairs toilet. She notices the ghost of herself in one of the shower’s glass wal s as she tries to calm her breathing amid her screaming thoughts— Body! News! Police! Clara! Will!

  She takes out her phone and dials Peter’s work number. As she hears the faint bleat in her ear, she looks at the neat row of organic, plant-based hair and body products and can’t help but imagine, for a fleeting second, the naked bodies that use them to conceal their natural scents. She closes her eyes and tries to get these dark,

  despair-fueled blood fantasies out of her mind.

  After about ten rings Peter answers.

  “Peter?”

  “Helen, I’m with a patient.”

  And then she tel s him in a whisper, with a hand cupped round her mouth, “Peter, they’ve found the body.”

  “What?”

  “It’s al over. They’ve found the body.”

  Nothing. Then: “Fuck.” Then: “Fucking fucking fucking fuck.” A moment later: “I’m sorry, Mrs.

  Thomas. Bad news.”

  “What are we going to do? I thought you flew out miles.”

  She hears his sigh on the other end of the line. “I did.”

  “Wel , obviously not far enough.”

  “I thought this would be my fault,” he says. “It’s okay, Mrs. Thomas, I’l be with you in a minute.”

  “This is your fault.”

  “Jesus. They’l get her for this. Somehow, they’l get her.”

  Helen shakes her head, as if he is in the room to see. “No, they won’t.” And she decides right then she wil do anything— anything—to make sure her words remain true.

  Preventing OBT: 10 Useful Tips

  Overwhelming blood thirst (OBT) is the single most common danger facing abstainers. Here are ten proven ways to avoid an OBT attack, should you feel one coming on.

  1. Get away from people. If you are around unbloods or vampires, move quickly away from their company and find a quiet space of your own.

  2. Switch on the lights. OBT attacks are more common at night, or in the dark, so

  make sure your surroundings are as bright as possible.

  3. Avoid imaginative stimulation. Music, art, films, and books have all been known to trigger attacks as they are all catalysts for your imagination.

  4. Concentrate on your breathing. Inhale and exhale for counts of five to slow your heart rate and calm your body.

  5. Recite the abstainer’s mantra. After a few breaths, say, “I am [YOUR NAME‘ and I am in control of my instincts,” for as many times as you find helpful.

  6. Watch golf. Watching certain outdoor sports on TV, such as golf and cricket, have been known to reduce the likelihood of an attack.

  7. Do something practical. Screw in a lightbulb, do the dishes, prepare some sandwiches. The more trivial and mundane the task, the more likely you will keep control of your blood thirst.

  8. Eat some meat. Keeping your fridge stocked up with animal meats will mean you have something to eat to help stave off involuntary cravings.

  9. Exercise. Buy a treadmill or a rowing machine so that you can burn off the excess adrenaline which is often symptomatic of OBT.

  10. Never be complacent. Our instinct is an enemy which is always inside us, waiting for the opportunity to attack. When you step toward temptation, remember it is easier to step forward than backward. The trick is not to take the step in the first place.

  The Abstainer’s Handbook (second edition), p.74

  An Unusual Thought for a Monday

  Peter sits in his chair and watches the old lady wince h
er way slowly out of the room as he thinks about the phone cal . He can’t believe the police have found the body. It washed to shore.

  He had been flying so fast, he had been convinced he was far out when he let go.

  But, he concedes to himself, it has been a long time. Maybe he can’t remember how far he used to go. He’s rusty. It’s not like riding a bike. If you stop for seventeen years, your feet are bound to be a bit unsteady on the pedals.

  “Okay, bye, Mrs. Thomas,” he offers, on autopilot as she leaves the room.

  “Bye, dear.”

  A second later and he is pul ing the envelope out of his drawer. He takes out the blood vials and unscrews the caps.

  This isn’t plasma and protein and red and white cel s.

  This is escape.

  He sniffs Lorna’s fascinating, wild blood and sees her and him standing in a wheat field in the moonlight. He is melting into the scent of her. He wants to taste her so badly, and this craving rises until there is nothing between him and it—the man and the pleasure he needs.

  I do not drink my patient’s blood.

  It is useless now.

  He craves it too badly.

  He knew he would succumb in the end and he is right. There is absolutely nothing he can do to stop himself slugging back the three vials in succession, like tequila slammers lined up on a bar.

  When he’s finished, his head stays back. He slaps his stomach. Notices that the cushion of fat that’s swel ed up over the years may now be in retreat.

  “Yes,” he says to himself, as if he is a smoky late-night radio DJ about to introduce Duke El ington. “I love live jazz.”

  He is stil slapping his stomach when Elaine enters with the list of emergency appointments for later today.

  “Are you al right?” she asks him.

  “Yes, Elaine, I am wonderful. I am forty-six years old but I am alive. And to be alive is an incredible thing, isn’t it? You know, to taste it, to taste life, and to be aware of tasting it.”

  She is unconvinced. “Wel ,” she says, “that’s an unusual thought for a Monday, I must say.”