Talulla Rising (9 page)

Too many things jostled: images of London from my last time there, the kill just before I met Jake; the vampire helicopter unravelling the miles; the hot sack closing over the small head;
got her off, orally
; immediate practicalities – passports, identities, airlines, tickets; and in spite of myself a faint rush at the thought of Quinn’s Book,
The Men Who Became Wolves
, the possibility of answers.
Don’t bother looking for the meaning of it all
, Jake told me.
There isn’t one
.

‘Do you have a number for Merryn?’ I asked.

‘
Oui
.’

‘Why would he tell us anything?’

‘Because we make him. You’ll have to call him. He might recognise my voice.’

‘Call him and say what?’

‘We’ll think of something. You’ll have something to sell.’

Feeble. Both of us knew it. My skin was a settled swarm of flies. The hole in the fabric of everything was in this room, now, the window into pure nothingness I daren’t look through. It would be in every room I was in from now on, until I got him back. (You? Aunt Theresa’s voice in me said. Get him back? A dirty,
filthy
little girl like you, who just lay there, who just lay there and let them take him? And we know why, don’t we? Yes, we—)

‘I’ll go and get the stuff loaded,’ Cloquet said.

‘I’ll do it. You’re still woozy. Go lie down.’

He nodded, headed for the stairs – but he was back a few moments later. As soon as I saw his face I knew what he’d realised: we’d forgotten, both of us, Kaitlyn.

‘She’s gone,’ he said.

‘How?’

‘The pipe was loose. There’s water all over the floor. It’s my fault.’

She’d seen both of us.

‘I’ll go and look for her,’ Cloquet said. ‘Maybe she never made it to the highway.’

I put the last of the journals in the bag and zipped it up. It had stopped snowing. ‘Forget it,’ I said. ‘We don’t have time.’ It wasn’t that I believed she’d reached the highway safely, it was that if we found her we’d have to kill her, and for better or worse I couldn’t face it. Just couldn’t. I should never have pictured her feral bedroom and sad acceptance of the lousy demands guys made on her. ‘Go and lie down for a minute,’ I said. ‘I need to feed the baby before we leave.’

Which I did not want to do. I hadn’t fully admitted her existence. Even through the appalling intimacy of washing her I’d kept her in peripheral consciousness only, a trick of self-misdirection that had given me the emotional equivalent of eye strain. It hadn’t worked, either. There she was, small and clean and absurd in her plastic laundry basket, radiating power to recreate the world.
Every humble atom glorified
, Jake had written of Heathrow’s vivification when we’d met. Now here was the soft grey sky and the pink curtain and the oak floorboards and room’s smell of dust and mothballs and old linen all wondering why I wasn’t accepting their beatification.

I undid my shirt, tried to feel nothing, then raised her carefully to my breast.

The physical sensation was shockingly literal, once the tough little anemone mouth had found my nipple and latched-on: a living creature
sucking nourishment out of my body
. (
Essentials
said milk proper might take three days to come in; meantime colostrum, the pre-lacteal secretion rammed with antibodies and who knew what lycanthropic extras.) I went in and out of bearable horror, as if a six-pound parasite had attached itself to me, but also in and out of the feeling of having come bloodily into an inheritance. All those Madonnas with Child; my dad’s
Compendium of Greek Mythology
showing Hera’s breast-milk spurting out to create the Milky Way; connection to every female animal I’d seen with an offspring tugging at its teat (the dismal
word
‘teat’); Richard coming back from a visit to his sister who’d just had a baby and me saying So how was she? And him saying ‘fucking bovine’; the Polaroid of my mother breastfeeding me under the maple tree and you could feel my dad’s thrill and pride and fear of her through the photograph back into his hands holding the camera and his man’s beating heart that still held the awed and jealous little boy in it.

Meanwhile the baby stared at me like an emotionless deity.
That
was the Divine trace, if we carried one, a fragment chipped-off from God’s infinite capacity for neutral observation. Or so it seemed, as long as she stared at me – then she’d blink, long-eyelashed, or her face would twitch, and God would vanish, leaving a blank human infant, barely more than the instinct to suckle made flesh and blood. There was the seduction I’d read about, the rhythm of succor that lulled the glands, but there was revulsion too, and a riffle of pornographic breasts and silicone implants gone wrong, and the time in biology class when Mr Shaeffer said feeding babies was what breasts were
for
and Lauren said, Listen, mister, these are
my
boobs, which means
I
get to choose what they’re for, and Jennifer Snow’s pale breasts splashed with blood and a detached sadness at what a crucifixion by contraries the story of the human female had been so far. Followed by a little cheap self-pity, because I – of course – wasn’t even a real human female any more.

12

‘What do we do about the vampire’s body?’ I asked Cloquet. The baby, in her laundry basket, had been transferred to the couch. She was gurgling, quietly, pouring out the godlike recreative energy I had to keep ignoring. I had an image of Jacqueline Delon slowly inserting a wire into my son’s eye. There were dozens of similar images queuing up, bristling with detail.

‘
Rien
,’ Cloquet said. ‘Go and see for yourself.’

I opened the front door and looked out. At least a dozen wolves occupied the front yard. I knew there were more surrounding the house. Where the young Bob Dylan’s corpse had been was a declivity in the snow covered with a greyish residue and a few blackened strands of what looked like intestinal tissue. In another hour there would be nothing. I closed the door.
Wulf
set off a dozen tiny remnant firecrackers in my spine.

Cloquet was in no condition to drive, so I took the wheel, with the baby in the laundry basket wedged between us and the wolf on the back seat. Even with snow-tyres it was a tense, nosing crawl through the woods, but we made it to the highway without incident. We had a back-up car (plus a bagful of wigs and glasses and false moustaches, standard precautions) in a parking garage in Fairbanks. The plan was to change vehicles and get the first available flight out of Alaska.

A plan with a big problem: the baby. We might be able to get her on domestic without ID, but not international. And even for domestic I guessed she’d need a birth certificate. Which was one of those ostensibly simple things that would turn out to be incredibly difficult. No doctor, no midwife, no pre-natal care... How, exactly, could I prove she was my child? DNA testing? How long would that take? (And on immediate second thoughts: DNA? Not an option.) I imagined the authorities’ reasonable questions: if I knew I was having a baby what was I doing in the middle of the Alaskan wilderness? Was I crazy? On the run? Did I have a criminal record? Reasonable questions would become suspicion. Suspicion would become investigation. Investigation would become, eventually, horror.

So no bureaucracy. My forger was in New York. His had been the first name on Jake’s list of people I could trust:
Rudy Kovatch – DOCUMENTS/IDENTITY.
I knew his number by heart and I’d been trying to get cellular reception since we’d left the lodge. So far, nothing.

Twenty-five miles down the highway I pulled over. The road was bordered on both sides by soft-snowed forest. An avenue of fleecy grey sky above. No other traffic. Cloquet looked at me for explanation.

‘Edge of his territory,’ I said. ‘He has to go. Much as I’d like to keep him.’ I opened the back door to let the wolf out. Again the animal and I barely exchanged a glance. It wasn’t that there was no need for thanks, it was that thanks would be meaningless. I’d be thanking myself. As his being morphed back into separateness I felt it as a slight physical bereavement. He shook his coat, sniffed the ground, then made a low-shouldered dart into the shadows under the trees. Gone.

13

‘I can’t eat any more,’ Cloquet said. We were at the Grand Hotel in Anchorage, in a third-floor room overlooking the lights of the rail depot. It was just after midnight. Prussian blue sky with dark patches of cloud over the big cold sentience of the nearby water, the Knik Arm, which as the light faded had gone blue-silver, then slate grey, then black. ‘It’s making me feel sick.’

Staying in Fairbanks would have been asking for trouble, but in any case the thought of sitting still and doing nothing (Jacqueline’s scientists raring to go) was suffocating. So I’d driven three hundred and fifty miles to Anchorage, stopping only to feed the baby, while Cloquet, morphined, dozed on the back seat. I’d spent the journey in shock that made random mundane chunks vivid: a Texaco sign; red cattle in a field of snow; a crow taking four springy steps to get into the air; the giant wheel of a passing truck. I felt what a small detail my whole life was, how the planet had seen so much that now things like this didn’t even register. Only wars and earthquakes were still drowsily noted. When something happened that was everything to you you realised it was nothing to everything else. Meanwhile I kept feeling the younger interior versions of myself full of fascinated disappointment at what they’d amounted to. Me.
The modern adult
, Jake had written,
has really only one thing to say to its inner child: I’m sorry. I’m so fucking sorry
... And the same thing to say to its biological child, too, I thought. I bought disposable diapers and Vaseline from a gas station. Money. Items. Change. Have a good one. You too. It all still went on. Of course it did. Kovatch called. He could get ‘Zoë Demetriou’ and her half-dozen aliases birth certificates in twenty-four hours and overnight them. Fax no good, they’d want the originals, or rather what they took to be the originals. In two days we could fly to London. The number Cloquet had for Vincent Merryn reached an answering machine at V. M. Antiques and Fine Art in Bloomsbury, one of a dozen European dealerships that formed Merryn’s trading front. I rehearsed my message – My name was Lauren Miller; I had several items of significant value and would deal only with Mr Merryn directly – and left it. A plummy English woman, Althea Gordon, called back four hours later. All prospective vendors met with her in the first instance. Subject to her assessment (for which read assuming it could be established you weren’t undercover or a crank) a meeting with Mr Merryn might then be arranged. Was Mr Merryn in London? I was going to be there for forty-eight hours only. Yes, Mr Merryn was in London, but she must repeat, any meeting would be subject to her etc.

‘Drink the water at least,’ I told Cloquet now. ‘You need fluids.’ I’d changed his dressings and ordered him up food (poached salmon, french fries, tomato soup) since he hadn’t eaten in more than twenty-four hours, but he’d barely touched any of it. Bizarrely, I was beginning to feel hungry myself. Or maybe not bizarrely: I hadn’t fed. Was this what happened? Miss a
wulf
meal and your human appetite returned in a day instead of a week? I tried the corner of a buttered roll from the tray. Not straightforward. For a moment after swallowing I thought I was going to throw up. But a deeper register said, No, keep eating, for the milk to come. I took another bite. The monster’s ghost-teeth objected. Muted
wulf
outrage from the other dimension.

‘How is she?’

‘Sleeping. You should too.’

‘Her wardrobe’s improved.’

Earlier I’d been out with the baby – with Zoë; using the name gave me a feeling of sickening fraud – swaddled in blankets and my jacket, for essentials. Now she had clothes, more diapers, a bassinet and bedding, a carrier and, pointlessly, a small soft golden teddy bear. The department store had been hot and glittering and smelled of industrial carpet and I’d thought of the money at my disposal, all the things I could give her. And her brother. When I got him back. Except every cell in my body knew I wasn’t going to get him back. I kept remembering him – then feeling my scalp shrink because to remember you must have forgotten, and how could you have forgotten? How could it not be searing your heart every second of every minute of every day?

Total self-disgust is a kind of peace
, Jake wrote.

Total self-disgust was available, a sleep I could enter while still awake. Only the baby’s presence in the room kept disturbing it.

‘Did you book the flights?’ Cloquet rasped.

‘Yes.’

‘I wish I could have a flying dream. I used to have them all the time when I was a kid.’

‘Me too.’

‘Did you ever have a dream you were dreaming?’

‘What?’

‘You know. In your dream... In your dream you’re having a dream. Dreams are the nearest
univers parallèle.
Like the universe next door. So when you dream, you’re really entering the universe next door. But if you dream you’re dreaming, that’s the universe
next
to the universe next door...’

He fell asleep. His flesh heaved out its odours: stale tobacco, old sweat, greasy hair. A residue of his body’s recent efforts surrounded him like a subsonic hum. I fixed myself a cup of instant coffee and went, feeling slightly nauseated at the first sip, to look at the baby.

She was asleep with her warm face turned to the left and her hands closed. Her cheek was as soft and downy as the skin of a peach.
Until you have one of your own, you just can’t understand it
. Naturally I’d rolled my eyes at new parents’ fascination with their infants. I’d loathed the helpless shrug, the fatuous surrender. Well, here I was, and here
was
one of my own, and here, too late and vetoed by my deformed motherhood, was the same appalled fascination. Look at the fingernails, the eyelashes, the nostrils, the mouth. Look at the dark shimmer and winking lights of her future. It was obscene, the love-fee a child could pull down just by existing, just by being there. A fee I couldn’t pay now, late, having failed to pay it on time. Wouldn’t. Mustn’t. Daren’t.