I already had a black silk shirt, which I'd bought under the mistaken impression
that the creases wouldn't be so obvious if it didn't get ironed in an emergency, and
a decent pair of black trousers. My gingery hair did let the ensemble down
somewhat, but I wasn't ready to start dyeing it yet.
I half expected Sheena to have gone the whole hog, but she hadn't. Her boots
had only two-inch heels and her leggings only had a slight sheen. Her velvety
jacket was cut like a Tudor doublet with a drawstring at the waist, but she hadn't
done anything extravagant with her hair except for renewing the dye. Her mascara
was almost conservative.
"You're not quite ready for the real me," she told me when I told her she
looked beautiful.
"I'm working on it," I assured her.
I figured that I'd have no difficulty at all beating her on the lane. Even if she'd
played before, I reasoned, she couldn't have had much practice recently, and she
was bound to feel bad about having to check her boots in favour of style-disaster
flatties. It turned out, however, that she was every bit as neat and meticulous with
a bowling ball as she was with a phone and keyboard, and I made the mistake of
starting with a heavy ball. It wasn't until I put the black one aside and accepted that
I was one of nature's reds that I got into a groove. Sheena won the first game by
120-113, and I had to sweat to get the best out of three; I needed 160 to outscore
her on the third and I only just managed it.
"I knew you could do it," she said when I collected the necessary eight on a
final-frame spare. "You're the sort who raises his game under pressure. Not many
of those about in this town. Wasted in Phoneland."
"It's just a stopgap." I said, revelling in the compliment as we reclaimed our
footwear and gravitated towards the bar.
"Course it is," she said. "According to the techies, it'll only be a couple of
years before the whole place disappears up its own arse. The next-generation
software will let them farm the work out to people's homes. I'll have to jack it in
then, mind—no way I'm spending all day with Mum and Marty the brat. Lib says
she can get me a job at Gap, but I wouldn't want to work in a mall, and I certainly
wouldn't want a job where I was somebody's crazy little sister."
"Maybe your singing career will take off," I suggested as I ordered a pint and a
half of Dry Blackthorn.
"I'll get these," she said. I let her; in a bowling alley, anything goes. "Davy's not
ready yet," she added, as we made our way to a cubicle. "He gave me a tape last
week, but he says it's only half cooked. I'll find the words, but I'll probably have
to change them later. He says he's a perfectionist, but he's really just a ditherer."
I wondered whether it had been a mistake to turn the conversation in that
direction, but it seemed better to follow it through and kill it off rather than
backtrack. "That's how you work, is it?" I said. "He does the tunes, then you fit
words to them?"
"I find the words," she repeated. "Davy finds the music; I find the words."
"Why put it like that?" I asked. "Why pretend that it's not your own effort?" It
had always seemed to me to be a peculiar form of false modesty when writers
talked about their work having a life and logic of its own which they had no
alternative but to follow—as if they were merely passive agents of fate, puppets in
the hands of their own creations.
"Because it's what happens," she said. "Don't you believe in muses?"
I was more than ready for any sentence beginning "Don't you believe in… ?"
"Of course I do," I said. "I'm intimately acquainted with the muse of
sociology. She wasn't one of the original nine, of course, but they had to make
concessions after the publication of the Communist Manifesto or there'd have
been a revolution on Olympus. Which one's yours?" I hadn't been expecting
muses, so I didn't have any names to drop; I was sufficiently grateful to have
remembered that there were nine.
"In seventeenth-century France," she said with a half smile that seemed to be a
polite acknowledgement of my ready grasp of the game, "poets thought that their
muses were vampiric—that they had to pay in blood for artistic inspiration.
Geniuses paid so high a price that they wasted away."
I figured that it was a test—maybe the crucial test that would decide whether
she was willing to let me get closer. "In nineteenth-century France," I countered,
"they thought the same about the clap—that because genius was close to
madness, tertiary syphilis was the Ml to enlightenment." I said it lightly, so that she
would know that it was the kind of put-down that was laid on to be picked up and
run to healthy absurdity.
"By that time," she said, "the art of dreaming had gone to pot, ruined by
laudanum. If you know how to let yourself go when you fall asleep, you don't
need dope. You only have to attract the right kinds of night visitors to make the
connections you need."
"Must be why I got only a two-two," I said. "The muse of sociology didn't
come through when I needed her most. My mistake—I should have fed her
better."
"It's not just blood, of course," she said. "There are other bodily fluids that
will do as well—and some which definitely won't."
I got the joke immediately. "Muses never take the piss," I said.
"Neither should you," she riposted immediately, in her very best telephone
manner.
I could take a hint. Sheena was telling me that if we were to devote ourselves to
the game in earnest, I had to be careful to stay within the field of play—even if,
like Elland Road dog track, it was too narrow to accommodate the sixth stall that
the normal rules demanded.
"So how do you find the words," I asked earnestly, "if you can't just make
them up the way other lyricists do?"
"You lose yourself in the music," she said, with equal seriousness. "You shut
your eyes and you let it take over. It's like self-hypnosis—it's not really a trance,
but it is an altered state of consciousness. Music's a natural language, with its own
meanings built in. It speaks to the emotions. It's the purest magic of all, and the
greatest mystery. And if you listen—really listen—you know what it's about. A
piece of music doesn't mean the same thing to everybody, of course, because our
emotional profiles are so different. Music resonates in different ways in different
souls. If you want to understand your own meanings—the nature of your true
self—you have to find your own music, and then you have to find the words that
fit it. Otherwise, you might as well be taking calls at work, reciting crap from
somebody else's script."
It was a test, and I knew that it was a crucial one. If I couldn't take what she
was saying seriously, it would all be off—but she didn't want it to be off. She
liked me, at least enough not to prefer loneliness, so she'd warned me as gently as
she could about the dangers of taking the piss. All I had to do was play ball.
I nodded sagely and resisted the pseudo-intellectual temptation to quote Walter
Pater about all art aspiring to the condition of music. "I see what yo
u mean," I
said. "Our moods have musical reflections, and it goes much deeper than the ratio
of backbeat to heartbeat. To produce the right lyrics, you have to find words that
have the same emotional quality as the music. It makes sense."
"No, it doesn't," she said quietly. "It goes way beyond sense, in either meaning
of the term. It's supernatural."
"And it costs," I added, trying not to sound too tentative. "In blood, sweat,
and tears. It takes something out of you."
"It takes everything out of you," she said. "Everything that isn't just waste."
Jez's comments about the band she and her boyfriend had been in—and their
living-together thing having broken up at the same time—took on new significance
then. The one topic you should normally steer clear of when you're trying to
charm a lass into bed is her ex-boyfriend, but I already knew that Sheena wasn't
subject to the normal rules of engagement.
"It must be difficult," I observed delicately, "to find the right words to fit the
music of a guy you used to live with."
"The sex was always a mistake," she said. "That wasn't the way we gelled."
Under normal circumstances I'd have deduced from that remark that wee Davy
must be queer, but in this particular instance I was prepared to believe that he
might really be wedded to his vampire muse. In any case, that wasn't the important
issue. "We all make mistakes," I said. "I never thought it was possible for sex to
be among them, but that was before I met the Phoneland harpies. One night with
them was enough to teach me that it really does matter whether or not you gel."
"You could probably get used to it," Sheena informed me coolly. "After the
third or fourth time they'd go easier on you. One or other of them would probably
develop a soft spot for you and let you separate her from the pack. They don't
really go in for pull -a-pig contests—what's the point of playing a game it's
impossible to lose? They just resent the fact that lads do, and they know it puts
the fear of God into lads to think that they might be victims of that kind of
contempt."
"Actually," I said, "I think the whole pull-a-pig thing's an urban legend."
"No it's not," she said quietly.
She was right; I'd never done it myself, but I'd seen the Polaroids. I'd even
laughed at them, because that was what was expected, even though they weren't at
all funny.
"I wouldn't want to get used to it," I said. "And it's definitely my round. The
next one, too."
"In that case," she said, "let's go somewhere a little less naff. We've both made
our points, haven't we?"
We had. The only places within easy walking distance where the oak beams
weren't plastic and there wasn't a trace of maroon were the downmarket Upin
Arms and the upmarket Countess of Cromartie. I took her to the Countess, even
though the harpies sometimes used it for girls' nights out. I figured that the risk
was worth it.
Afterwards, I saw her home. Sheena lived on what passes for the wrong side
of the tracks in Cross Gates, north of the railway and east of the ring road, but the
terraced street she lived in was neatly kept —what gran would have called
respectable poor. It was obvious that Sheena wasn't about to introduce me to her
mum or her big sister right away, so I left her on the doorstep—but that was okay,
because we'd already fixed up another date. She had agreed to bring some of her
tapes over to my place and let me cook her a meal. Nobody said anything about
bringing an overnight bag, but it was tacitly understood that we liked one another
well enough to find out whether or not we gelled.
I don't claim to be much of a cook, but I'd felt the pinch of student poverty
sharply enough in the previous three years to appreciate how much money you
can save by peeling your own potatoes and sticking your own toppings on a pizza
base. For Sheena I splashed out on steaks—from the butcher's, not Tesco—and a
bottle of French red. I draw the line at attempted baking, though, so I bought a
couple of slices of cheesecake from the Harehills Delicatessen to serve as dessert.
I'd managed to acquire three more black shirts by scouring the local charity shops,
and I took the best one up to Roundhay so Mum could pass the iron over it.
"Not going into the church, I hope," Mum said wearily.
" 'Fraid so," I told her. "I get my dog collar next week, but I'm not allowed to
hear confessions until I've done the moral obstacle course."
Mum only humphed, but I was proud enough of the quip to save it up to tell
Sheena later.
Sheena turned up fashionably late, but only by fifteen minutes. She was
wearing the same mock-doublet-and-hose she'd worn at the Marion Centre, but
her boots were longer and shinier and she'd gone all out with the makeup and
silver-plate jewellery. Her earrings were bats, and her necklace looked like
something out of an ancient Saxon tomb. Her eyes looked fabulous, like pale blue
suns with black holes at the core, pouring all manner of strange radiance over her
lids and lashes.
She'd brought four tapes, but she told me to put them on one side until later.
While I made busy in the kitchenette she inspected my bookshelves with minute
care.
"Research?" she said, when I popped my head around the door to check that
she was okay. She was pointing a long black fingernail at the Freda Warrington
Atlantis and past-life regression I'd borrowed from the Central Library. A
conscientious bullshitter has a duty not to reveal his sources.
"Sure," I said. "Have you read them?"
"Oh yes. I could have lent them to you if you'd asked."
"That's okay," I told her. "How rare do you want your steak?"
"Somewhere between well done and ruined."
That was a relief. If she'd felt forced to conform to stereotype and eat it
bloody, I'd have felt obliged to do likewise, but she was obviously a Yorkshire
lass first and a vampire second.
"So what's your favourite past life?" I asked her, once we were tucking in.
"Priestess, princess, or courtesan?"
"Those sorts of existences aren't what they're cracked up to be," she retorted.
"History being what it was, the most comfortable incarnations have usually been
male—except for the really remote ones, back in the days when the Mother
Goddess was all-powerful. Being a dryad in Arcadia was okay—satyrs put merely
human males in the shade, equipment-wise—but being an Amazon was even
better. The two lives I led in Atlantis were good, too."
"I meant to ask you about that," I said. "Where exactly was Atlantis—Thera or
north of the Azores?"
"Malta," she said unhesitatingly.
"Malta isn't underwater," I pointed out.
"No," she admitted, "but it did get comprehensively drowned and scrubbed
clean of all habitation during the disaster. It was an asteroid, I think, like the
Tunguska object. The tidal wave wiped out the whole of civilization in the Middle
East and Africa, thousands of years before the eruption that destroyed Thera."
"It must have been painful amputating your left breast so that y
ou could use a
bow when you were an Amazon," I observed. "I hope it didn't get infected."
"Oh, we had anaesthetics and antibiotics in Arcadia," she said. "It wasn't until
the Dark Ages that the last remnants of traditional female learning were wiped out
by male doctors. Don't knock it— you'd love getting in touch with an Amazon self.
Think of all that lesbian sex!"
"You'll have to teach me to do the self-hypnosis thing," I said. "Not that I
expect too much, of course. I realise that finding out I'd been Napoleon—or even
Max Weber—would be the equivalent of winning the lottery on a rollover week.
With my luck, I'd probably turn out to have been a eunuch in a Caliph's harem."
"I was one of those once," she told me serenely. "Great singing voice. Every
incarnation leaves its mark, but some are more welcome than others."
"On the other hand," I said speculatively, "maybe it would spoil my enjoyment
of the present to be always comparing it with the edited highlights of a thousand
lifetimes. Don't you find that?"
"Other way about," she came back, presumably having met the argument
before. "The only way to get a true appreciation of what it means to be alive—or
undead—is to have died a thousand times. Until you've lived and lost a million
joyful moments, you don't realise how precious they are. Anyway, once you've
had a glimpse of other worlds, this one can never be enough. If you don't learn to
dream, you're letting most of life's potential go to waste."
"Does the soul have any choice about its incarnations?" I asked, aware as I did
so that my pretended curiosity was becoming real. "Does it simply get assigned to
the baby whose birth coincides most closely with the extinction of the previous
incumbent, or can it hang about and wait for a better opportunity?"
"The more closely you're in touch with the sequence of your past lives, the
more control you obtain," she assured me. "Some ghosts are just souls that get
stuck, but others are exercising a precious skill. Vampires tend to be experts at
hanging around—it makes it much easier to visit sleepers and take their blood. If
necessary, you can get right inside the beating heart, bathing in the oxygen-rich
flood from the pulmonary vein. In some ways, though, shed blood is better,
especially if it's offered, as a kind of libation."