A Blood Condition

It was cold in the bus station waiting room.  The doors didn't close.  There was a rectangle of wall a different colour to the rest where it looked like a radiator had been removed.  I was alone.

Buses came and went outside, bound - it seemed - for everywhere except the place I was trying to get to.  Outside it got darker, the sky deepening from sulky grey afternoon to leaden evening to premature winter darkness.  The time dragged. 

I counted the cigarette ends on the floor for something to do.  There were twenty-three.  Or maybe twenty-four.  I counted twice and got a different answer each time.  Then I stared out of the glass partition that faced the road and watched car headlights streaking past, as I tried to ignore the smell of piss that permeated the waiting room, which I was starting to taste in the back of my throat.

I wished I had a book with me.  There was a plastic frame screwed onto the wall opposite me.  Behind cracked perspex, a poster advised me not to take drugs and offered the telephone number for a narcotics help line.  I read it three times, my eyes coasting over the letters without really taking in their meaning.  But it was something to look at. 

I'm not sure when she arrived.  I've no idea how long she'd been sitting there before she made her presence known: "Excuse me...  you got a light?"

Her voice drew me out of my near catatonic state of bored isolation, and I started patting down my pockets, searching for the cheap plastic lighter I'd bought earlier in the day and for which I now had no use, having since smoked all my cigarettes. 

It occurred to me, as I proffered the lighter and she leant her head down into the flame to take the light, that she barely looked old enough to be smoking.

She took a deep, lazy drag on her cigarette, closing her eyes for a moment, then started as though a thought had just struck her.  She pointed the open pack - some brand I'd never heard of - in my direction.   

"Cheers."  The smoke was strange-tasting: sweet and kind of heady, and it took me by surprise.

"Cloves," she said, as she dropped the pack back into the canvas bag slung over her shoulder, and zipped the bag shut.   

I nodded and drew in another lungful, getting used to the spiciness of it.  The smell reminded me of Christmases as a child.  I suddenly felt kind of sad.

"Been waiting long?" she asked. 

"Feels like it," I told her.  "I should've been there by now.  I was supposed to be taking a train, but they're doing maintenance on the rails or something, so I've got to get a bus the rest of the way."

"The joys of travelling on a Sunday," she replied.  "You’re stuck here for a while then?" 

I shrugged.  "The woman on the travel desk said something about a delay, but then she went off duty."

"Useful," the girl said.  She looked around, like she was checking for an ashtray, then flicked her ash on the floor.     

"Heading anywhere nice?" she asked.

I thought about the question for a while.  I was on my way to the tiny coastal village where I'd grown up.  My father had died earlier in the week, and I'd offered to go down and help my mother sort through his things; pack clothes away for the charity shops; decide what should be got rid of and what should be kept.  Then there'd be the will, carving up his possessions and the little money left after the hospital bills had been paid.  And at some point, the funeral, exchanging well-meant platitudes with black-clad relatives, not seen since my teenage years. 

"Not really," I answered her.  "You?"

"I don't know," she said.  "I hope it'll be nice." 

"You don't know?" I questioned.

"Not yet," she replied, and she shrugged and smiled.  "I'll go to Brighton for a few days - I've got a good friend down there, and I haven‘t seen him in far too long - and after that..." another happy shrug, "who knows?  I've been meaning to go to Amsterdam for a while, so maybe there.  Or Prague; Prague looks nice.  I've seen documentaries on it...  Discovery Channel and stuff." 

I thought about my job back in Derby, about the memos and meetings that had been involved in securing me the four days off work I'd needed to help my mother bury her husband.  The thought of just upping and leaving for a foreign city I only knew from cable TV...

"Have you got work lined up out there?" I asked her. 

She shook her head.  "I'll find something," she said, and she launched the butt of her cigarette in a graceful arc, to land on the floor and bounce away under the bank of metal seats opposite us.  Twenty-four, or possibly twenty-five.

There was silence for a while, except for the occasional drone of a car going past outside, and the steady rattle against the glass - rain that must have set in without me noticing.  The silence stretched, became uncomfortable.  Although I didn't see her move, I sensed her somehow drawing away from me, as if readying to leave.   

"My father died yesterday," I said abruptly.  I had no idea why I'd said it.

"Rough time."  I wasn't sure if it was a question or statement of fact. 

"Yeah."  I dropped my cigarette end to the floor, where it smouldered for a while and finally went out.  "He was sick for quite a while," I went on, still unsure why I was even saying it.  "About eighteen months.  I kept meaning to visit, but...”

It occurred to me that this was the first time I'd talked about it.  I'd sent memos to supervisors and accepted hollow, standard-issue condolences.  I'd strung together clichéed banalities of comfort and reassurance for the benefit of the bereaved.  But I hadn't talked about it. 

"We never got on,” I continued.  “He couldn’t understand that the life he wanted for me wasn’t the life I wanted for myself.  He always said I was an under-achiever.  I guess I just figured that when I grew up, things would change.  But instead I just didn't go back.  I left it too late.

”Anyway, that's where I'm going now." 

"My father died last year," she said.  "My mother this spring."

"I'm sorry," I offered. 

"It's okay," she said.  "People get old.  These things happen."  After a pause: "Look, I like you.  If we're going to talk, there's something you should probably know about me.  It helps it all make more sense."

I nodded at her, perplexed. 

She took a deep breath, and seemed to be trying to articulate what she wanted to say in her head.  A few moments later, she said: "I have a blood condition."

"A blood condition?" 

She nodded.  "It helps if you can think of it like that.  I'm the only documented case.  Others have been alluded to over the years, in different parts of the world, but there are never any real records to back the stories up.

"When I was born, I seemed normal.  Sickly, but pretty much normal.  In fact, other than coming down with every childhood illness that did the rounds, I was basically normal until I was about thirteen.   

"There'd been symptoms, I suppose, looking back.  I burnt easily in the summer.  I was always kind of anaemic-looking.  But it's not the kind of thing you actually think about.  Not really."

She tapped the bottom of the pack and shunted another cigarette out.  She put it to her lips and stared long and hard at the flame as I lit it for her. 

"When I was thirteen, I got really sick.  No one had a clue what was wrong with me: I just started losing weight, fast; I had to keep the curtains shut all day because daylight suddenly hurt, like really hurt, my eyes, my skin.  Everything just kind of hurt.  I got weaker and weaker - could hardly move or speak - spent about a month like that in hospital, just drifting in and out of consciousness. 

"They ran all sorts of tests, on my blood, my urine, my spinal fluid.  They took MRI scans, CAT scans, ultra-sounds: every procedure my parents could afford, which was quite a few.  My bloods showed up irregularities, but nothing consistent with anything anyone had seen before.  They flew in experts from Germany, America, all over the place, but no one could figure it out.   

“I don't remember much of the time myself.

"And then one day, a nurse was running a damp cloth across my face.  Her wrist brushed against my mouth and I..." her face contorted a little, "... I bit it." 

"Bit it?" I repeated.

She shrugged and nodded, exhaled a cloud of that strange-smelling smoke.  "Yep.  Straight through the skin, punctured the vein.  And I wouldn't let go.  It took four people pinning me down and prying my jaws open and an epic dose of tranquiliser to get me to release my grip.  I just kept my teeth sunk into her skin and drank down the blood. 

"And like that, I stopped being sick.  Turned out the blood was what I'd been needing the whole time, or something in the blood at least."

"So you..." I began. 

"That's right," she answered.  "I'm the world's first real vampire."

I wondered if the girl was joking, or maybe crazy.  Perhaps she was just bored and lonely, and this was just some fantastical spiel to make a dull life seem more interesting.   

"You don't believe me, do you?" she said.  "I can see why you wouldn't: it does sound like bullshit, but it's the truth."

"I never said I didn't believe you." 

"You didn't have to."

"Why are you telling me this?" I asked. 

"I don't know exactly," she replied.  "Because you seemed nice, I guess."  She smiled, and the effect was quite dazzling.  "And because you told me something you wouldn't ordinarily tell a stranger.  And maybe also" - her voice took on a slightly sad tone - "because I haven't told anyone in a very long time."

"But you still don't believe me," she continued, and she looked sidelong at me, for a moment seeming almost shy for the first time since we started talking. 

"It's a lot to take in," I admitted.  "So a vampire...  so garlic, sunlight..."

"The garlic thing is more like an allergy really.  I never liked the smell anyway, so it's not much of a sacrifice.  

"Sunlight...  with enough sun block and dark glasses and if I wrap up well, I can just about go out in the day if it's overcast, but I'd rather not risk it.  It wouldn't kill me instantly if I went out in the sun.  But it would blind me, at least for a while.  If I stayed out long enough, an hour or so maybe, well, I guess I'd probably burn to death."

"That must be tough," I offered, not sure what else to say under the circumstances. 

She shrugged.  "This time of year's easier," she said, very pragmatically, and she discarded the end of her cigarette.

"There's the good points too," she carried on.  "I haven't been sick once since we found out, so long as I can get blood when I need it." 

"You do actually drink blood then?"

She nodded.  "Not all the time.  I only need about a pint of it a week, and it's not like I rip people's throats out or anything like that.  It doesn’t even have to be human blood, so I just make a point of making good friends with butchers.  I tell them I grow roses and use it as fertilizer.” 

“And that works?”

“Has done so far.” 

I laughed a little at the image that had suddenly jumped into my head.  I had to ask.  “Sign of the cross?”

She laughed too, and it was a good sound.  “Doesn‘t seem to have any effect,” she replied, that warm, open, amused smile still playing on her lips.  “And no one’s ever thrown Holy water at me, so I can’t comment on that either.” 

I realised that without knowing it, I was coming to believe her.  Her story, while fantastical, no longer seemed so utterly implausible.

“Will you live forever?” I asked.   

She stared off into the middle-distance for a while, and when she spoke again the words seemed to be coming from a long way away. 

“I doubt it.  But then, would you really want to? 

“I’m sure I’ll die one day, and I’m kind of glad of that.  I do age, just very slowly.”

She seemed to be remembering something. 

“It was hell at school.  Watching all the other girls growing up and filling out, developing tits and hips and turning into women, while I was stuck as this flat-chested, pre-pubescent kid.  There was a boy in my class who had that ageing disease...  I don’t remember what it’s called.  He was no older than the rest of us, but he looked middle-aged, and would you believe I was jealous of him? 

“Funny: I hadn’t thought of him in years.  Craig Stotter he was called.  God, he must have died ages ago.” 

She trailed into silence for a while.

“It’s not so bad now,” she continued.  “In fact, I reckon I’m onto a pretty good deal.” 

She stared at me, head-on, and any remaining doubts I may have had about her story dissolved in the unwavering beam of her stare.

“How old do you think I am?” she demanded. 

I wasn’t sure how to answer.  To be honest, I’d never been abundantly confident in my dealings with women, but felt sure that some kind of etiquette was required when it came to the matter of a woman’s age.  Yet somehow I sensed that, in this instance, such formalities did not apply.

I took in the smooth, lineless face, the slight yet indisputably feminine body: “Seventeen?” I hazarded. 

“I’m forty-eight,” she answered, and looking into her eyes, I knew it was true.  And I’d thought her to be younger than me.  I felt irredeemably stupid.

"Not bad, huh?" she said to me, and all I could do was shake my head. 

"I move around a lot," she continued.  "Saves people wondering why I don't seem to age."

"Doesn't that get lonely?" I asked. 

She considered this for a while before finally answering, her voice soft and sad-sounding, as she absent-mindedly fingered another cigarette from her pack: "Yes."

"Mind if I use your lighter again?" she asked. 

"Mind if I bum another smoke?"

"It's bad for you," she warned me, but gave me one anyway, and once I'd got it lit, I told her she could keep the lighter. 

"I guess that's something you don't have to worry about," I mused.  "Lung cancer, I mean.  Shit like that."

"Not really," she replied.  "Good points, like I said." 

We sat and smoked our cigarettes, and everything went quiet, except for the traffic and the rain.

There was little more we could say. 

A bus pulled into the station, a laminated sheet in the broad windscreen declaring its destination to be Newquay.  The one I'd been waiting for.

I thought about my parents' home, about the Cornish village that seemed to be lagging some fifty years behind history.  I thought about the cliff-top cemetery where all my father's family were buried, remembered from trips as a child, taking flowers and weeding the graves of kinsmen I'd never known.  I thought about the slate grey of the sea in winter, the massive rocks that jutted through the waves, worn by the elements to gnarled timelessness.  I imagined salt winds blowing inland. 

And I didn't want to leave.  But I was already standing, bag weighing more than I remembered as I slung it over my shoulder.  I had to go.

She smiled.  "Good luck with... things." 

I nodded.  "You too," I answered, not just because it was the appropriate prescribed response, but actually meaning it. 

Then I got on the bus.  Only about a third of the seats were occupied, so I grabbed a space next to the drizzle-spattered window, and placed my bag on the seat beside me.  I didn't want anyone sitting next to me.  Not right now. 

I saw her wave, through glass that was misty with the breath of strangers.  I think I waved back, but I'm not sure.

The steady throbbing of the engine deepened and evened out as the bus started moving.  I realised, as she - along with the rest of the station - faded into damp obscurity, that I didn't know her name.   

I considered the scattering of passengers travelling with me, wondering about their stories and their secrets.  I somehow doubted any of them would seem very interesting at the moment, and felt disinclined to find out.

I may have slept. 

An uncle met me in Newquay and drove me back to the house where I'd grown up.  Nothing had really changed, except for my mother looking older, more tired, and the empty space in my father's armchair.

The funeral went well or, at least, it went as well as any funeral can be expected to.  The will was read, and currency, possessions and guilt were apportioned among the living.  Turned out he'd even left a little to me: some money, and a watch I don't remember ever having seen him wearing. 

I found myself in that strange situation of uncomfortably reversed roles, holding my mother while she cried herself dry. 

I phoned the office in Derby and told them I wouldn't be coming back, and an estate agent I never met in person arranged the sale of my flat.  A friend moved all the possessions I wanted keeping into storage for me, and one of these days, I might even get around to collecting them.  But to be honest, I'm not too bothered. 

I stayed with my mother for a while, sleeping in the bedroom where I'd spent almost every night of my childhood.  Then, once I was happy enough leaving her again, I went to Brighton, but I got the feeling I was already too late.

I went to Amsterdam for a while, and did a tour of the local butchers asking if anyone had seen a young woman with older eyes and a smile that made you believe... something.  But no one I spoke to seemed to know who I meant.  If they'd met her, I'm sure they'd have understood. 

So I moved on.  I'm writing all of this down in a café in Prague, and hoping that, once written, it will somehow make more sense. 

I've taken to sleeping in the days and coming out when it gets dark, trawling around the kinds of places you might expect to see on documentaries, searching for a flash of that smile, or the smell of smoke and cloves.   

It hasn't happened yet, but I can wait.  If it takes months, or years, if it takes all the time I’ve got left - even to catch just a single fleeting glimpse – it’ll be worth it.