Talulla Rising (7 page)

COME TO ME. NOW.

The three of them stared down at me. The young Bob Dylan smiled. The helicopter was close with its sound of monotonous urgency. Whisks of snow-cold air played over me. My legs were negligible, two scraps of chiffon. I tried to turn my head to see if Cloquet was alive, but it was impossible. The only two certainties were my helplessness and the weight of the child’s gory head in my hand. My heart still didn’t move. It was like a racehorse that just stands in the stall after all the others have gone: I didn’t feel anything about him (apart from curiosity) though he’d looked at me with such mesmerising nude wideawakeness. Maybe his heart was suspended too? There was that between us, the intuition that as yet there was nothing at stake. No love lost, as they said. There was leisure to consider all this. The emotional universe found room in a split-second for elaborate expansions.

FASTER.

With a glance at the redhead for permission, the young vampire jammed a third steel skewer through the upper part of my right arm, the hand of which was still holding my child’s head. The metal went through the long hairy bicep at an angle, missed the humerus, dragged at a knot of nerves. Pain jangled like a stumbled-into wind chime. Blood and oxygen frothed around the wound in my throat. It reminded me of a school biology experiment we’d done with bicarbonate of soda. Which in turn reminded me of a line from Jake’s journal:
I have lost, I thought, mental appropriateness
. My legs were afloat. I was a cripple tied to a post in a fast-flowing river. The redhead pulled a military knife from her boot and cut the umbilical cord. She was beautiful. Her lipsticked mouth worked slightly with concentration.

THAT’S IT. FASTER.

‘Grab it, Noah,’ she said.

The Bob Dylan youth, Noah, reached down for the child – and the child bit him.

Noah snatched his hand back, bloodied. ‘Ow!’ he said, half-laughing. ‘That fucking
hurt
.’

‘We’re wasting time,’ the grey-haired vampire said. ‘Give me the things.’

The woman had a leather satchel. ‘Here,’ she said. ‘Do it.’

There was a separate frail rage that I’d done all that exhausting work of getting this child out safely into the world and now here they were, erasing it. Separate, that is, from the overwhelming desire to close my eyes, turn my head away, let them take him. What did it matter? Why should I care? Did women getting raped suffer this profane indifference? Were some abuses so extreme it was easier to surrender the self than sustain it?

‘Watch that mouth,’ the redhead said. ‘Careful...’

‘The things’ were a cattle prod, a ketch-pole and a woven steel-fibre sack. They worked as a team and I got it all in dreamy detail, the prod’s dry zaps, my fingers one-by-one prised back, the child’s jerks and flinches, his high-pitched yelps and snarls showing white canines and a shrimp-pink tongue, the two-tone shimmer of the woven steel bag that reminded me of zoot suits or the iridescence of street oil, the redhead’s delighted absorption and pearly skin and pounding stink. She had no malice towards me. This was something valuable to her, that was all, a necessary object. Despite the cold coming in I felt as hot as a new-baked loaf. I watched my offspring lifted, throttled, jabbed, bagged, tied. The darkness closing over his head tore something between us.

For a moment all sound and movement ceased, as if someone had pressed a pause button on reality.

Then the helicopter’s whine and chop ripped through – and everything rushed back into motion. The aircraft was right outside, whisking-up snow and shooing-in freezing air.

KILL THEM! KILL THEM NOW!

There was a burst of automatic weapons fire, barely audible over the racket of the propellor blades, then the first of the wolves – last night’s black – was through the door.

The animal’s bite and slash tore a third of Noah’s face off. He went down onto his knees with a falsetto shriek and a violent shudder as if he was revolted. Simultaneously the grey-haired vampire, holding the sack with my child in it, shot straight up through the air and came to rest with his back against the ceiling and the wriggling bundle pressed tight to his chest. A second grey wolf sprang at the redhead. She got her left arm up and the creature’s jaws locked around it, its momentum knocking her backwards into the range. For a moment she looked like a woman at a bar resisting an insistent bad-breathed drunk. Then I saw the detail of her little round nostrils flaring as in complete silence and with a kind of delight she stabbed the animal repeatedly in its belly with the knife she was still holding from cutting the cord, until at the sixth or seventh puncture the big body slid from her to the floor, as if not dead but triumphantly passed out. Three more wolves ran in the door and a fourth appeared at the broken window. The warmth of them reached through the freezing air and went into me. I could feel my will in their shoulders and hind-quarters and necks. A kind of frantic joy raced back and forth between us. The black tore at flailing Noah’s throat. Shots fired. The wolf in the window fell with a yelp. My womb contracted. The grey-haired vampire was inching backwards on the ceiling to get his feet against a beam. Two grey wolves leaped and snapped under him, though it was obvious he was out of their reach. As he stared down at them, blinking, a big bullet-wound opened silently in his left temple without visible effect. I tracked the shot back: Cloquet, one arm useless, the other holding the Cobra, clearly without the strength to squeeze off another round. For a moment Cloquet frowned, struggling to haul himself into full consciousness, then with a confused scowling look of having been betrayed by something, collapsed. One of the greys had sprung onto the redhead in an exact replication of its brother’s move, except this time the jaws had locked around the knife hand. The vampire’s free hand – diamond-ringed, French-manicured – fumbled at her belt. A wolf the colour of burnt toast joined the attack on Noah, and after a queer, intense, concentrated moment, as if the animals were having difficulty holding still for a photo, the vampire’s head came off his shoulders with a wet crunch. Immediately the corpse’s capillary system began to darken, as if death had only a small window to stake its claim.

Outside, the chopper dipped and a cloud of snow shot in and swirled. I thought of TV feather-pillow fights. It was what TV girls did, in nightshirts, in panties, in men’s dreams. I’d never had a pillow fight in my life. The wolf on the redhead contorted as a spray of bullets struck its flank, then slid to the floor, tongue lolling. Two tall young vampire males with machine guns stood in the doorway, one facing in, the other out, laying down covering fire. I could feel wolves getting hit in numbers, a faint gunshot tattoo in my bones. The redhead, splashed and smeared with blood, ran to her friends at the door. Wolves were howling and yelping, jack-knifing, taking bullets. Three leaped in through the broken window and stood guard over me. Their good rich odour blotted out the vampires’ smell. I looked back up at the ceiling. The grey-haired one, crouched against a beam, stared down at me for a moment, the sack clutched tight against his chest, then sprang and swooped for the door, where the other three, as if choreographed, ducked down to let him, with his bagged captive, out over their heads.

‘
Au revoir
, Talulla,’ the redhead said. Then all of them ran for the chopper.

9

Clouds had come up from the south and covered the moon. Outside the darkness and the snow had a yellow tint. Cold air meandered through the wide-open door and broken window, ruffled the pages of
Moll Flanders
on the dining table. (Keep reading, Lu, Jake had advised. Literature is humanity’s broad-minded alter-ego, with room in its heart even for monsters, even for you. It’s humanity without the judgement. Trust me, it’ll help.) On the back of the dust jacket, I remembered, was a quote: ‘Moll is immoral, shallow, hypocritical, heartless, a bad woman: yet Moll is marvellous.’ That was the sort of character I was supposed to have become. That was the sort of character I’d failed to become. No, I thought, as two of my guard wolves struggled to get a grip with their teeth on the steel skewering my right hand, Talulla is not marvellous. Talulla is
fucking useless
. I kept seeing them prising my fingers back one by one. I kept feeling the distinctive weight of the child lifted from me. I kept groping in the void where my horror or rage should have been. I remembered reading a story about a woman whose ten-year-old daughter goes missing and is eventually found dead, having been raped and murdered. There’s this moment when the police come to the mother’s house to tell her they’ve found the body, and even as she’s hearing the words and understanding what’s happened she’s staring at the living-room floor where there’s a TV guide with Monica and Chandler from
Friends
on the cover and along with
I’m very sorry to have to tell you, we’ve found the body of a girl matching the description
is the thing about Matthew Perry being in a sex-addiction clinic and the two things are both in her head at the same time and it’s a disgusting equalisation and it must mean she’s evil or insane.

That was me. I was like that. Always had been. When I was nine I had a pet mouse and neglected it and it died. My dad had just said, very quietly, I’m so
sad
about this, Lulu. And my heart had filled up with panicky self-hatred to hear him say that and to see that he really was sad, but also there was a sensual thrill that I’d done this to him – me! My face had felt warm and soft, just as it had when I’d turned and seen Aunt Theresa standing there in the basement and my pants were round my ankles and she’d said, Talulla Demetriou, you are a dirty,
filthy
little girl
.

I’d expected emptiness in my womb, like the space left by a scooped out avocado stone, but it felt undelivered. The pains (I would have said contractions if the baby wasn’t already out) meant something was wrong. Something other than the blank where instant love should have been, something other than my dead heart, my failed motherhood, my third recurring daydream.

It was filtering through to the animals that they couldn’t grasp the spikes. I watched their long teeth slip and slash. Distress began to gather in them, my distress. I turned my head. Cloquet was still unconscious, for all I knew dead.

The only way to free my hand was to slide it up the shaft of the spike and off the other end, like a chunk of meat off a shish kebab. Three feet, give or take. It made me think how time must have crawled for Christ on the cross, a horse’s tail swishing, a centurion easing his leather cap, a boy drawing with a stick in the dust. That was the world: innocent vivid continuity, regardless.

My wolves lay down around me. There were a dozen of them in the room now, and others arriving. I wanted more than anything just to be able to turn on my side and curl up in a ball. I clamped my jaws together and began to force my hand up the spike, slowly at first, then when the scale of the pain registered, quickly, to get it over with. Three seconds with a white-hot circle in my palm – then it was free. The first moments of welling blood were worse than the impalement, but with a sudden disgust at the figure I cut – helpless, legs spread, choking – I willed myself through it, gripped the skewer in my throat and yanked it out. My left arm was still pinned, but I had the joy of being able to turn onto my left side and draw my knees up a little, as far as my still-big belly would allow. Blood pooled from my neck like a cartoon speech bubble. Cloquet coughed and groaned, then fell silent again.

I passed out.

When I woke the door was closed and there were at least twenty wolves lying in a circle around me. Their warmth quilted me but was spoiled here and there by the air from the broken window. I pulled out the last skewer and fresh blood oozed from the wound. Then another contraction came – and with it the realisation that the reason I felt as if I was still in labour was that I was still in labour.

10

My son, whom I’d lost the right to name, was born into violence and death. His twin sister, whom I named Zoë, was born surrounded by the warmth of wolves.

I fell asleep after delivering her. In spite of the conviction the vampires would return I dropped down into darkness and darkness closed over me. It was wonderful to surrender. The last thing I remember was licking her snout clean, turning on my side and holding her close to my chest. That and three of the wolves dragging the vampire’s body and head out into the snow.

•

Hard to tell how long I was out. It could’ve been minutes or hours. At any rate it was dim daylight when I woke. In human form.

With a human baby in my arms.

I’d slept through transformation.

I thought of how exhausted I would have to have been for that, how vulnerable I would have been if—

Wait. Her too: she’d changed back. No sign of trauma. She was awake, quiet, blinking dark-eyed out of her bloodstained face.

Then immediately there it was.

What they’d done.

Like a careful rape.

And I’d just let them.

I’d seen a news report a few years ago. A group of project-housing mothers in New Jersey who’d been charged with assaulting a neighbour when they found out he was on the child sex-offenders register. One of them had kept repeating: If you gotta kill to protect your kids then you kill. You got no right to call yourself a mother if you wouldn’t kill to protect your kids. You got no right to even
have
kids if you wouldn’t kill to protect them. The mob of women around her were ravished and pouchy-faced with righteousness. You
ain’t
no kinda mother if you wouldn’t kill for your kids.

I lay still. Molecular renewal tickled my wounds. My jacket partly covered me and the child. A grey wolf lay pressed up warm and soft against my back. Another lay close to my front, keeping the baby snug. The room throbbed with the pack’s consciousness and the heat of their bodies and the not-silence of falling snow. All the animal corpses had been removed and the lodge’s front door pushed shut. Peace had returned to my womb, which for a moment made me feel small and sorry for myself and grateful.