birthday party for me, you have my permission to tell her to go jump off Wigan
Pier."
It wasn't hell, although it was a bit of an ordeal—more like purgatory, really.
No mention was made of the supposed anniversary, which had served its purpose
in getting us to turn up. The food was average and the canned lager Mrs. Howell
had thoughtfully but mistakenly laid in for me was drinkable in spite of the gas. I
probably put one too many away while Libby and Sheena shared a six-pack of
Strongbow. Little brother Martin had obviously been instructed to talk to me
about football, but he felt that his duty had been done once we had exchanged a
few ritualistic utterances about the leakiness of the United defence away from
home and the falsity of the assumption that a four-all draw at Everton counted as
"value-for-money entertainment," when all that really mattered was bagging the
three points. Libby was friendly enough, although her relentless campaign to win
Sheena away from Phoneland by extolling the virtues of Gap became rather
tedious once the cider had loosened her up.
We managed to escape at half-past ten. Sheena made a show of having to see
me home and muttered vaguely about getting a taxi back, although no one was
really under the illusion that she had any intention of coming back. We could have
stayed on the bus all the way into town and then got another outward-bounder
practically to the door, but it was easier and a little quicker to get off opposite
Rookwood Recreation Ground and walk up Harehills Lane, so that's what we did.
By the time we got to my place it was ten past eleven, and I thought there
wasn't enough time for adventures in imaginary history, but Sheena had other
ideas. She was happy enough to go directly to bed, but once there she didn't want
to pass Go without going all around the board, so we took refuge under the duvet
and turned out the light. Knowing that she'd have to do a little work to get me into
the mood, Sheena started talking while I lay back and listened. It was standard
stuff, at first.
Morgina was in the principal harbour of Atlantis—what would now, I guess, be
Valletta—about to board a ship. The sailing ships of Atlantis were akin to dhows,
but tended to be much larger than the Arab vessels that inherited their design.
They often carried passengers to Atlantean colonies in Clarica—the modern
Sicily—and the north African coast, and they often set sail by night if the tides and
winds were favourable. Morgina was bound for the Clarican city of Avra.
Morgina was excited, because she had never left the Atlantean mainland before,
and slightly frightened by the awful silence of the sea. The night was bright enough
when the boat set sail, but the sky soon darkened as clouds gathered, overtaking
the craft because the wind blew faster at altitude. It began to rain, but it wasn't a
storm, and Morgina didn't take shelter down below. The raindrops weren't cold,
and they fell with an eerie gentleness, like sentimental tears—not tears of grief but
the kind you shed at the end of a film when lovers are reunited after an interval of
heart-rending separation and danger.
Belowdecks, some of Morgina's fellow passengers began to sing, as if to shut
out the rain and the loneliness, but Morgina resisted the inevitable temptation to
join in, because she wanted to savour the rain. When she opened her mouth to
take in the falling drops, she found it sweet, almost as if there were a trace of
blood in every slowly descending drop…
We were touching all the while, caressing each other, slowly and unhurriedly.
We were perfectly relaxed, all the more so for having escaped the tension and
embarrassment of the family dinner. If I'd had to set my mind to the serious
business of invention I would have had to concentrate, but even that obligation
had released its hold. I wasn't entranced, and I wasn't drifting off to sleep…
But for the first time, I remembered. I really and truly remembered, with a
certainty that would have instantly dismissed all doubts and confusions arising
from the knowledge that there had, after all, never been any such place as Atlantis,
had some such dismissal been necessary. As it happened, though, I didn't
remember being in Atlantis or any of its satellite states.
The interior was covered with thorn-laden scrub, interrupted by a few scrawny
date palms, but I'd already stripped the trees of their unripe fruit—at considerable
cost to the integrity of my skin, which was scored all over with streaky scabs. I'd
managed to squeeze a little moisture from leaves and a few inedible fruits, but
there was no gentle rain to supply me with fresh water, and I was fearfully thirsty. I
was lying on the thin strip of sand that separated the scrub from the breaking
waves, and would certainly have been unconscious had it not been for the torment
of my thirst, because I was very weak. My eyes were open, and I was staring up at
the sky, desperately wishing that the clouds obscuring the stars would break,
although I rolled my head from side to side occasionally, hoping that I might
glimpse the lanterns of a passing ship.
I never said a word to Sheena. I was too startled, too amazed. I felt that if I
spoke, I would break the spell, and I didn't want the experience to evaporate like a
dream. I wanted to examine every detail of the apparent memory, and the fact that
it was painful only made it more fascinating, more intriguing. If I gave any
indication at all to Sheena that I had been transported, it could only have been my
body language that conveyed the hint. I said nothing—but she knew. Or maybe it
was Morgina who knew. One way or another, the tale that Sheena was spinning
changed, seamlessly, into an account of an errand of mercy.
"The ship is too slow," Sheena/Morgina reported. "It'll never get there in time,
and I know it. I can't go below to join in with the singing. I have to use magic. It's
dangerous, but it's the only way. I have to fly, no matter what the risk or the cost.
It's very difficult, to sing my own song when I can still hear the other, but it has to
be done, and the sound of the rain on the sea helps me. I sing my spell, and I
know it's going to work, even though I've never sung such a spell before, because
the need is so great. I sing the spell, and I take wing from the deck of the ship. I
fly so fast that I'm out of the shadow of the rain-clouds within minutes, although I
can see darkness on the horizon again almost as soon as the moonlight touches
me. The clouds on the horizon are different, high and cold, remote and uncaring,
but they don't matter."
I couldn't remember my name, but I didn't think of that as strange, I was in dire
straits, and names didn't matter. Only thirst mattered, and the possibility of relief. I
had known, once, exactly who I was and where I was bound and how I'd come to
be marooned on that tiny strip of land somewhere between Europe and Africa, but
all of that had been driven deep into my mind, to leave the surface of my thoughts
free for desperation and hope. In another world, the hope would have died, and in
due course t
he desperation would have died, too, as I shrivelled into a desiccated
corpse, silver-grey upon the amber sand, fading by slow degrees to whiteness. But
this was an age of miracles, and there was no need to die.
A winged shadow fell out of the soulless night, and metamorphosed into a
human female. I had no idea who she was, and could not have recognised her had
I known her name. There were no mirrors in Atlantis; for all Morgina's skill in
description, she could not describe her own face.
She was small and slender, and the pale features of her black-framed face were
so perfect that I wished I could see their true colours. But I was also seized by a
premonition that something was wrong, that my need had demanded something
from her that was more than she had to give, no matter how clever or willing she
might be.
She had no water, but she cut her forearm above the wrist and gave me blood
to drink. The blood was sweeter and more intoxicating than wine, and it quenched
my dreadful thirst, if only for a little while.
Having done that, my saviour sank down beside me on the sand utterly
exhausted, and began to caress me with her fingers, and what had been memory
faded by slow degrees into a dream, which extended in the way dreams sometimes
do, rendering time elastic, so that the night went on forever… or would have done,
had forever been a possibility.
But forever was not a possibility, and the dream was already faded, like a
photocopy of a photocopy. It evaporated, as did the darkness of the night.
Morgina tried to pull away then, but I caught and held her.
Stay, I said, insistently but not aloud—and she consented to be held while the
sun rose and the dark world filled with colour.
Newton only pretended that there are seven colours in our rainbow because he
thought that seven was the appropriate number. In fact, there are five: red, yellow,
green, blue, and violet—but Newton must have remembered fragments of past
lives spent in imaginary histories, and must have known that there really were
seven colours in the rainbows that shone in Atlantean skies. Two of them have
been lost, and no longer have names, but I know now that they lay beyond red and
violet, not within like Newton's invented colours.
The colour of the sun was yellow, and the sea was blue. The date palms and
the thorn bushes were green—but Morgina's face and costume were tinted with
colours I had never seen before. I know now that we only think that blood is red
because we have lost the ability to see the other colour with which the red is
mingled, just as we have lost the ability to taste blood as vampires taste it, and
draw that special nourishment from it for which vampires ceaselessly thirst.
Had I drunk more frequently or more abundantly of Morgina's blood, I would
have been more vampire than I was when the sun rose on that tiny island,
forgotten even though it lay within the boundaries of the empire of Lost Atlantis.
Alas, I remained far too human.
As soon as the light hit her, she began to dissolve. I felt a terrible sense of
betrayal, because I had always believed—always known—that vampires did not
dissolve in sunlight, because that was the one aspect of the myth that really was a
myth—but I stifled a scream when she tried to speak. I needed to hear what she
was saying, even though her voice had already decayed to the merest whisper.
"The spell was too costly," she told me. "But nothing really dies, and nothing
changes its inmost nature. Don't be afraid. I shall return with the night, and you will
not go thirsty, no matter how long you remain here."
I was already awake, as far as far could be from any mere dream, but it wasn't
until I opened my eyes that I found Sheena dead.
I was hysterical, of course, but I think I managed to do all the right things in the
right order. I phoned an ambulance, and then I set about trying to resuscitate her. I
breathed air into her lungs and I pummelled her chest until the paramedics from St
James's arrived and took over. It was only after their arrival that I actually lost
control. I remember shouting "She's only nineteen fucking years old, for fuck's
sake—how the fuck can she have a fucking heart attack?," but I don't think the
paramedics held it against me. That wasn't why they wouldn't let me accompany
the corpse to the hospital. I was sufficiently coherent, in any case, to give them the
address and phone number of her official next of kin, so that they could send
someone else to deliver the terrible news.
I couldn't stay in the flat, and I certainly couldn't face Mrs. Howell and Libby,
so I started walking eastwards, towards the rising sun, and I continued until I
reached the urban wilderness of Whitkirk.
Davy was already up and about, busy with noise. I leaned on the doorbell until
it penetrated the wall of sound. When he opened the door, he seemed angry, but
as soon as he saw me the anger metamorphosed into something else—something
essentially unfathomable.
"Is she… ?" he asked, but couldn't force the final word past his lips.
"This might be a good time to rip my head off," I told him angrily. "You seem
to have got to the head of the queue—but then, you always knew that you would,
didn't you?"
"It wasn't your fault," he said, standing aside to let me in, then closing the door
to exclude the world from our private business. "However it happened, it wasn't
your fault."
"If you weren't so much bigger than me," I told him, "I'd be seriously
considering the possibility of ripping your head off. I must have been blind and
stupid not to see it. First you, then her sister. I thought it was just run-of-the-mill
protectiveness. Even when she spelled it out in letters of fire, telling me in so many
words that there was something I didn't know, it didn't click. But you knew, didn't
you? Whatever the big secret was, you were in on it and I wasn't."
"We would have told you," he said. "When the time… we didn't expect… I'm
sorry. We didn't know… so soon."
The message was clear even though the sentences weren't complete. They
hadn't expected it to happen so soon—but they had expected it. They would have
told me eventually, but they wanted to be sure that it was serious first. They
wanted to convince themselves, as far as it was possible, that I was, in Libby's
phrase, "man enough to handle it." I understood all that. The one thing I didn't
understand, and desperately needed to know, was why Sheena had been part of
the conspiracy of silence. She had known me through and through, even if her
sister and her ex-boyfriend hadn't.
"So tell me," I said to Big Bad Davy, "exactly how it comes about that a
nineteen-year-old girl can have a heart attack."
Davy sighed. "Do you know what protein C is?" he asked.
"No," I answered sourly. "I'm only a fucking sociology graduate."
"It's one of the clotting factors in the blood. Do you know what homeostasis
is?"
"Feedback," I said. "Like a thermostat. If you're talking about people, it's the
control mechanism that regulates body temperature. You get too cold, you shiver
to generate heat. You get too hot, you sweat to l
ose it."
"It's not just temperature," he told me. "All kinds of bodily processes have to
be regulated by chemical feedback systems. Blood clotting is one of them. If
blood doesn't clot readily enough, you can bleed to death from a trivial cut. If it
clots too readily, clots form even when there isn't any damage, and they get
stuck—usually in the capillaries in the legs, but sometimes in more dangerous
places. A clot in the brain can cause a stroke, a clot in a heart valve can cause
heart failure. Nowadays, doctors can treat conditions like haemophilia with clotting
factors like thrombin and protein C, and conditions of the opposite kind with
warfarin and hirudin, but Sheena's condition wasn't amenable to any kind of
continuous therapy. They didn't even know it existed until ten years ago. Her
father was one of the first people to be properly diagnosed—posthumously,
unfortunately."
"How can you have both problems?" I demanded. "It doesn't make sense."
"The level of protein C in the blood is controlled by a feedback mechanism,"
he said. "Unfortunately, Sheena's father had a bad gene which made a faulty
version of the enzyme which is supposed to switch off protein C production when
it reaches the right level. It wasn't that the mechanism didn't work at all—just that it
was dodgy. Sometimes, his levels went way up, and sometimes they went way
down. His children had a fifty-fifty chance of inheriting the dodgy gene, and that's
the way it worked out. Libby was clear, Sheena wasn't. They didn't actually have a
test for the gene until a couple of years ago, when they finally managed to locate it,
but the symptoms were pretty obvious. Given two or three more years of the
Human Genome Project, they'll probably be able to sequence the protein and
identify the fault in the dodgy version, and that might open up the possibility of
finding an effective treatment, but at the time Mrs. Ho well and Libby got the
diagnosis there was nothing that could be done except treat Sheena's symptoms as
and when they appeared, according to type, so…"
"So they decided not to tell her," I finished for him, as enlightenment dawned.
"Because they didn't want her to know that she was living under a death sentence."
And then, as further enlightenment dawned, I said: "Is that why you broke up with