By Blood We Live
Page 64

I got up and stretched my legs a little, lifted my arms above my head until the higher vertebrae cracked like a card dealer’s riffle. Caleb raised his recliner a few inches. He’d taken his shoes off. Odd socks, one blue, one black. His pale big toe poked through a hole in the right, like a button mushroom. He was at war with how much I fascinated him. I was thinking it would give me pleasure to make him and his mother materially comfortable. I’d give them the house at Big Sur, if they wanted it. It would be nice to have company there when I visited. Without warning my eyes filled with tears.
“Who made you?” he said.
I’d known he was going to ask, sooner or later. The young’s natural need for origins. I took the pack of Lucky Strikes from the countertop of the minibar and lit one. I remembered Justine standing here, mixing drinks for herself. She’d bought a book of cocktail recipes in Kuala Lumpur and worked her way through, getting drunker. She’d kept taking them up to the pilots and poor Veejay (who in any case didn’t drink) had had to keep politely saying no, thank you, miss, I have to fly the aircraft. I looked at the bar’s little horseshoe of bottles. Big jewels: green; gold; sapphire; diamond white. It was a sadness to me that I’d been Turned before the invention of alcohol. I’d watched the Egyptians loosened by beer. The slurred segue into familial warmth—and familial violence. I’ve many times worked the night shift in bars down the years (saloons, gin-joints, taverns) when things have got lonely. It’s always helped, the room’s wink and murmur, the conversation, the short stories blooming and fading as customers come and go. The comfort of strangers, as my darling Justine had learned.
“It was a long time ago,” I said, turning my back to him so I could dab my idiot eyes.
“You don’t want to talk about it?”
“It’s a long time since I’ve told that story. Maybe I’ve forgotten it.”
Caleb didn’t say anything. Mia came out of the bathroom, freshly cosmeticised and smelling of Justine’s coconut shower gel and Flex shampoo. I’d had Damien pick up clothes for her and her son en route to the airport. Now she was in crisp blue jeans and a white t-shirt. A new short black leather jacket and boots. Purple Converse for Caleb, who had refused a new leather jacket, kept the crash-scorched red one instead. I knew it was a friend to him, gave him a little feeling of fraternal comfort every time he shrugged it on. He’d had too much loneliness in his life already. Too much of thinking that he’d fucked things up for his mother.
“You need to take a shower,” Mia said to him.
Caleb lit a cigarette of his own, ignored her. There were these little battles between them. I sat on the high stool behind the bar and rested my elbows on the marble counter. There was a pretty red carnelian ashtray within reach, niftily bolted to the surface. I’d been at the lecture William Morris gave in Birmingham in 1880. “Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful,” he’d advised the designers. He’d found the maxim written on a piece of paper in the pocket of a blue serge jacket he’d been wearing a month before. Put there by me. I’ve always had a mischievous habit of planting messages on influential humans.
Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically.
Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.
Coke is it.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Fresh cream cakes. Naughty—but nice.
Yes, we can.
I ASKED HIM WHO MADE HIM.
Caleb’s gauche mental shield might as well have been cigarette smoke. Mia looked an apology at me. The jet dipped in and out of an air pocket.
“I was made by someone I never saw,” I said. “According to this little Oa around my neck, twenty thousand years ago.”
Neither of them spoke, though I could feel Caleb’s young mind tumbling back towards steamships and Native Americans and then plunging with a shock to movie cavemen, fires, spears, the world alarmingly uncluttered by pop songs and litter. It came as a shock to him, rocks and streams and forests and deserts, a nude world of natural objects curiously untouched by Mad Men and Twitter.
CAN’T BE. NO ONE’S THAT OLD.
“I was thirty-nine when it happened,” I continued. I put the cigarette down in the ashtray and began making a Manhattan. There would be no takers for it, I knew, but there’s comfort in the small ritual actions of the hands. “I’d been out hunting with five of my kinsmen. We knew we were close to the edge of another tribe’s territory, but we could smell the boar, and it had been too long a chase to go home empty-handed. There was only an hour or so of daylight left, and we had a ten-mile walk back to our people and the fires.”
“What were you hunting with?” Caleb asked. He’d brought his recliner all the way up, and sat now with his knees under his chin.
“Spears,” I said. “Bows and arrows. What you’d call slingshots. The ratio of projectiles to dead meat was pretty lousy most of the time. We had a phrase: ‘nuts and berries.’ It meant the less desirable of two options. It was what we ate when there was no meat.”
Caleb, I could tell, wanted Mia to sit down. It was spoiling the act of listening for him, to have her on her feet, implying potential interruption. It was taking a little part of his consciousness away from the story, and he wanted to be immersed. His childhood really wasn’t very long ago.
Mia felt it. Gave me a glance of complicity. Took the seat opposite her son, reclined it, laced her fingers on her midriff and crossed her long, slender legs. I felt Caleb relax. Aside from the pleasure of being told a tale he took his emotional cues from her. If she was at quiescent ease, so was he. Which added to her weight of responsibility. It was comforting to be getting all this so quick and easy from them, via mutually lowered guards. It had been a long time since I’d been among my own kind by choice—Justine’s recent species-shift excepted.
“We got a boar,” I said. “A big one. Probably two hundred pounds if you weighed it today. We trussed it and strapped it to the carry-pole. I can’t tell you how the feeling of warmth and goodness used to go between us when there was meat to bring home. Imagining the faces and the kids’ bellies stuffed and the women’s fingers and lips shining with animal fat in the firelight.”
I had to pause. Balance. The memory was the edge of a sheer drop through my time. The fall would be everything. You know, Juss, I sometimes think that if I remembered everything that’s happened to me …