He sighs. “I think we should tel her the truth.”
“What?”
He takes a deep breath of the stifling kitchen air. “I think it is the right time to tel the children.”
“Peter, we have to keep them safe. We have to keep everything safe. I want you to be realistic.”
He buckles up his briefcase. “Ah, realism. Not real y us, is it?”
The calendar catches his eye. The Degas bal erina and the dates crowded with Helen’s handwriting. The reminders for book group meetings, theater trips, badminton sessions, art classes. The never-ending supply of Things to Do. Including today: “Felts—dinner here—7:30—
Lorna doing appetizer.”
Peter pictures his pretty neighbor sitting opposite him.
“Look, I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m just feeling tetchy. Low iron. I just sometimes get fed up with al these lies, you know?”
Helen nods. She knows.
Noting the time, Peter heads down the hal way.
“The recycling needs taking out.”
Recycling. Peter sighs and picks up the box ful of jars and bottles. Empty vessels waiting to be born again.
“I’m just worried the longer she goes without eating the stuff she should be eating, the more likely it is she’l crave—”
“I know, I know. We’l work something out. But I’ve real y got to go. I’m late as it is.”
He opens the door and they see the ominous blue sky, gleaming its bright warning. “Are we nearly out of ibuprofen?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“I’l get some on my way back. My head’s bloody terrible.”
“Yeah, mine too.”
He kisses her cheek and strokes her arm with a fleeting tenderness, a microscopic reminder of how they used to be, and then he is gone.
Be proud to act like a normal human being. Keep daylight hours, get a regular
job, and mix in the company of people with a fixed sense of right and wrong.
The Abstainer’s Handbook (second edition), p. 89
Fantasy World
On the map, Bishopthorpe resembles the skeleton of a fish. A backbone of a main street with thin little lanes and cul-de-sacs threading off to nowhere. A dead place, leaving its young people hungry for more.
It’s quite big, as vil ages go, with various shops on its main street. But in the daylight they look like what they are—an eclectic mix of niche enterprises which don’t real y belong together. The very refined deli, for instance, is positioned next to Fantasy World, the novelty costume shop, which, if it wasn’t for the outfits in the window, could easily be mistaken for a sex emporium (and which does in fact have a room in the back sel ing “novelty adult toys”).
The vil age isn’t real y self-sufficient. It has no post office anymore, and neither the pub nor the fish-and-chip shop do the business they once did. There is a drugstore, next to the clinic, and a children’s shoewear shop, which like Fantasy World mainly caters to customers traveling in from York or Thirsk. But that is it.
To Rowan and Clara it feels like a half place, dependent on buses and internet connections and other escape routes. A place that fools itself into believing it is the epitome of a quaint English vil age but which like most places is real y just one large costume store, with more subtle outfits.
And if you live here long enough, you eventual y have to make a decision. You buy a costume and pretend to like it. Or you face the truth of who you real y are.
Factor 60
Out in the light, Rowan can’t help but be shocked at just how pale his sister looks.
“What do you think it is?” Rowan asks her, as they pass fly-clouded boxes of recycling. “I mean, the sickness.”
“I don’t know . . .” Her voice fades out, like the songs of the fearful birds sensing their proximity.
“Maybe Mum’s right,” he says.
She isn’t comforted. “From the boy who eats red meat for every meal, that’s hardly surprising.”
“Wel , actual y, before you go al Gandhi on me, I should tel you there’s no such thing as a true vegan. I mean, do you know how many living things exist on a single potato? Millions. A vegetable is like a microbe metropolis, so you’re wiping a whole city out every time you boil a potato. Think about it. Each bowl of soup is like a man-made apocalypse.”
“That is a—” She has to stop talking again.
Rowan feels guilty for winding her up. His sister’s the only friend he’s got. And certainly the only one he can be himself with. “Clara, you’re very, very white,” he says, softly. “Even by our standards.”
“I just wish everyone would stop going on about it,” she says, and has something lined up in her head about facts she’d found out via the forums on vegan-power.net. Such as how vegans live to be eighty-nine years old and don’t get as many cancers and how some very healthy Hol ywood women like Alicia Silverstone and Liv Tyler and the admittedly slightly sleepy but stil glowing Zooey Deschanel don’t let any animal product past their lips or on their skin. But it would take too much effort to get this out, so she doesn’t bother. “It’s just the weather making me feel sick,” she says, as the latest wave of nausea subsides slightly.
It is May, and summer is coming early, so maybe she has a point. Rowan is suffering himself.
The light is making him feel tender, like his skin is made of gauze, even under clothes and Factor 60.
Rowan notices the glistening bulb of a tear in his sister’s eye, which could be daylight exposure but could also be despair, so he decides to hold back on the antivegan stuff. “Maybe it is,” he says. “But it’l be okay. Honestly. And I think you’l look good in hemp. Natalie Portman does.”
“Funny,” she manages.
They pass the closed-down post office, and Rowan is depressed to see the graffiti stil there.
ROWAN RADLEY IS A FREAK. Then it’s Fantasy World, whose pirates have been replaced with mannequins dressed in skimpy Day-Glo disco wear under a banner saying “Here Comes the Sun.”
Comfort comes when they pass the Hungry Gannet, where Rowan glances in toward the soothing sight of the refrigerated counter glowing in the unlit room. The Serrano and Parma hams he knows wil be sitting there, waiting to be eaten. But a faint scent of garlic forces him to turn away.
“Are you stil going to that party tonight?” Rowan asks his sister, rubbing his tired eyes.
Clara shrugs. “I don’t know. I think Eve wants me to. I’l see how I feel.”
“Right, wel , you should only go if you—”
Rowan spots the boy ahead. It’s their neighbor from number nineteen Orchard Lane, Toby Felt, heading toward the same bus stop. A tennis racquet points out from his rucksack, like the arrow in a male gender sign.
He is a thin, weasel-bodied boy, who once—just over a year ago—urinated on Rowan’s leg after Rowan had stood too long at the adjacent urinal, urging himself to pee.
“I’m the dog,” he’d said, with cold and laughing eyes as he directed the golden stream toward Rowan. “You’re the lamppost.”
“Are you okay?” says Clara.
“Yeah, it’s nothing.”
They can see Mil er’s fish-and-chip shop now, with its grubby sign (a fish eating a chip). The bus shelter is opposite. Toby is already there talking to Eve. And Eve is smiling at what he is saying, and before Rowan realizes what he is doing he is scratching at his arm and making his rash ten times worse. He hears Eve’s laugh as the yel ow sun breaks free over the roofs, and the sound stings as much as the light.
Red Setter
Peter is carrying the empty jars and bottles over the gravel toward the pavement when he sees Lorna Felt walking back to number nineteen.
“Lorna, hi,” he says. “Stil on for tonight?”
“Oh yes,” says Lorna, as though she has just remembered. “The meal. No, we haven’t forgotten.
I’m doing a little Thai salad.”
For Peter, Lorna Felt isn’t a real person but a col ection of ideas. He always
looks at the wonderful shining redness of her hair, at her wel -kept skin and expensive pseudo-bohemian clothes and has the idea of life in his mind. The idea of excitement. Of temptation.
The idea of guilt. Horror.
She smiles, teasingly. An advertisement for pleasure. “Oh Nutmeg, stop it. What’s the matter with you?”
It is only at this point that he notices she is with her red setter, even though it has probably been growling at him for quite some time. He watches as the dog pul s back and tries helplessly to slip her col ar.
“I’ve told you before, Peter is a perfectly nice man.”
A perfectly nice man.
As he observes the dog’s sharp teeth, prehistoric and savage in their outline, he feels a slight dizziness. A sort of vertigo, which might have something to do with the sun, rising in the sky, or might instead have to do with the scent brought toward him on the breeze.
Something sweeter and more subtle than the elderflower infusion of her perfume. Something his dul ed senses can’t often detect anymore.
But it is there, as real as anything.
The fascinating scent of her blood.
Peter keeps as close as he can to the hedge, where it exists, to make the most of the limited shade available. He tries not to think too much of the day ahead, or of the quiet effort it wil take to get through a Friday that is practical y indistinguishable from the last thousand or so Fridays.
Fridays that have held no excitement since they moved here from London, to give up their old ways and weekends of wild, bloody abandon.
He is trapped inside a cliché that’s not meant to be his. A middle-class, middle-aged man, briefcase in hand, feeling the ful weight of gravity and morality and al those other oppressive human forces. Near the main street one of his elderly patients passes him on a mobility scooter.
An old man whose name he should real y know.
“Hel o, Dr. Radley,” the old man says with a tentative smile. “Coming to see you later.”
Peter acts like he knows this information, as he steps out of the scooter’s path. “Oh yes. Look forward to it.”
Lies. Always bloody lies. That same old timid tea dance of human existence.
“Cheerio.”
“Yes, see you.”
When he is almost at the clinic walking close to the hedge, a garbage col ection lorry advances slowly on the road toward him. Its indicator light flashes, ready to turn left down Orchard Lane.
Peter glances casual y up at the three men sitting on the front seat. Seeing that one of them, the one sitting closest to the pavement, is staring straight at him, Peter offers him a smile in the Bishopthorpe fashion. But the man, whom Peter doesn’t think he recognizes, just glares at him with hatred.
A few steps on, Peter stops. The lorry is turning down Orchard Lane, and he realizes the man is stil staring at him with those eyes that seem to know who he real y is. Peter shakes his head slightly, like a cat flicking away water, and walks up the narrow path toward the clinic.
Elaine is there, through the glass door, sorting out some patient files. He pushes the door forward to get another pointless Friday rol ing.
Day Glimmers on the Dying and the Dead
The exhaustion comes over Rowan in narcoleptic waves, and right now one is crashing down over him. He had about two hours of sleep last night. Above his average. If only he could be as awake right now as he is at three in the morning. His eyelids are getting heavier and heavier, and he is imagining he is where his sister is, talking to Eve as easily as an ordinary person.
But there is a whisper, from the seat behind.
“Morning, slo-mo.”
Rowan says nothing. He won’t be able to get to sleep now. And anyway, sleep is too dangerous. He rubs his eyes and gets his Byron book out and tries to concentrate on a line. Any line. Something right in the middle of Lara.
Day glimmers on the dying and the dead.
He reads the line over and over, trying to cancel out everything else. But then the bus stops and Harper—Rowan’s second-most-feared person—gets on. Harper is actual y Stuart Harper, but his first name fel off him in tenth grade, somewhere on the rugby field.
Day glimmers on the dying and the dead.
Harper heaves his gigantic body up the aisle, and Rowan hears him sit down next to Toby. At some point on the journey, Rowan feels something pat repeatedly against his head. After a few bounces he realizes it’s Toby’s tennis racquet.
“Hey, slo-mo. How’s the rash?”
“Slo-mo,” laughs Harper.
To Rowan’s relief Clara and Eve aren’t looking back yet.
Toby breathes against the back of his neck.
“Hey, freak, what you reading? Hey, Robin Redbreast . . . What you reading?”
Rowan half turns, his dark bangs flopping down into his field of vision. “It’s Rowan,” he says. Or half says. The “It’s” comes out as a whispery rasp, his throat unable to find his voice in time.
“Knobweed,” says Harper.
Rowan tries to concentrate on the same line.
Day glimmers on the dying and the dead.
Stil Toby persists.
“What are you reading? Robin, I asked you a question. What are you reading?”
Rowan reluctantly holds the book up, for Toby to grab it out of his hand.
“Gay.”
Rowan turns in his seat. “Give it back. Please. Just . . . could I have my book back?”
Toby nudges Harper. “The window.”
Harper seems confused or reluctant, but he stands up and slides open the narrow top window.
“Go on, Harper. Do it.”
Rowan doesn’t see the book change hands, but somehow it does and then he sees it fly back like a shot bird onto the road. Childe Harold and Manfred and Don Juan al lost in a moment.
He wants to stand up to them, but he is weak and tired. Also, Eve hasn’t noticed his humiliation yet, and he doesn’t want to do anything that might make that happen.
“Oh dear, Robin, I’m ever so sorry, but one appears to have mislaid your book of gay poetry,”
says Toby in a falsetto.
Other people on the seats around them laugh out of fear. Clara turns around, curious. So does Eve. They can see the people laughing, but not the cause.
Rowan closes his eyes. Wishes he could be in 1812, in a dark and solitary horse-drawn carriage with Eve in a bonnet beside him.
Don’t look at me. Please, Eve, don’t look at me.
When he opens his eyes again, his wish has been granted. Wel , half of it. He is stil in the twenty-first century, but his sister and Eve are talking, oblivious to what has just happened. Clara clenches the rail on the seat in front of her. She is feeling il , obviously, and he hopes she isn’t physical y sick on the bus, because much as he hates being the subject of Toby and Harper’s attention, he wouldn’t want them to start focusing on Clara. But somehow, through some invisible signal, they pick up this fear and start discussing the two girls.
Two months ago a new girl had arrived at their school. Tal , wisplike, with the kind of angelic beauty that makes even the most hard-core hip-hop fan hear harps when she walks past in the corridor. But she was clearly shy, and with no real knowledge of where she should be placed in the school hierarchy. How else could anyone explain why she would choose to gravitate toward Clara Radley, even if they did happen to live in the same vil age? A fifteen-year-old loner whose previous best friend had been her even weirder older brother?
“Eve’s mine tonight, Harps,” says Toby, nodding his head toward a girl who, in any rational universe, even he knows would be out of his league. But as this is a universe where Eve—a girl who turned every single head the day she arrived—can be friends with a geeky vegan nearly two years younger than her, Toby fancies his chances. “I’m going to wet that whistle, mate, tel ing you.”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t worry. You’l be getting yours. Shitstab’s sister is completely into you. I mean, gagging.”
?
??What?”
“S’obvious.”
“Clara?”
“Give her a tan, take her specs off, she’d be worth it.”
Rowan feels Toby lean in, to whisper. “We’ve got an inquiry. Harper’s into your little sister.
What’s her nightly rate again? A tenner? Less?”
Rowan’s anger rises up inside him.
He wants to say something, but he can’t. He closes his eyes, and what he sees shocks him.
Toby and Harper, sitting where they are but red and skinned like anatomical drawings showing muscle structure with clutches of their hair stil in place. The image is blinked away. And Rowan does nothing to defend his sister. He just sits there and swal ows back his self-loathing, wondering what Lord Byron would have done.
Photograph
It is only a photograph.
A moment frozen in the past.
A physical thing she can hold, something from the time before digital cameras, an image she has never dared to scan onto her iMac. “Paris, 1992,” reads the penciled writing on the back. Like she ever needed to put that there. She wishes the photo didn’t even exist and wishes they’d never asked that poor, unknowing passer-by to take the image. But it does exist, and while she knows it is there, she can’t tear it up or burn it or even abstain from seeing it, no matter how hard she tries.
Because it’s him.
Her convertor.
An irresistible smile shining out of a never-forgotten night. And herself, midlaugh, so unrecognizably happy and carefree standing there in Montmartre with a miniskirt and blood-red lips and danger glistening in her young eyes.
“You mad fool,” she tel s her former self, even as she thinks, I could still look like that if I wanted to, or almost as good. And I could still be that happy.
Even though the picture has faded from time and the warmth of its hiding place, it stil has the same horrendous, blissful effect.