Talulla Rising
Page 6
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‘Is that why we’re out here?’ Cloquet whispered.
‘Yes.’
‘Mon Dieu, he was big.’
‘You won’t believe this,’ I said, ‘but I’ve never seen one in real life before. Not even in a zoo.’
‘How did it feel?’
With the smile a few tears had welled, fallen, stopped. Not sentiment. Just the effect of respite from the pain, which, now the animal had gone, was returning. I blinked. It was a deep reassurance that he hadn’t really looked at me. He hadn’t needed to. His will had dissolved into mine, then out again.
‘I wasn’t quick enough,’ I said. ‘It’s like something going past in a fast-flowing stream.’
‘What?’
‘I could have controlled him.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes.’
The baby, who’d gone quiet, now kicked again. I jammed my jaws together, closed my eyes, rode it out. Cloquet was still looking at the place in the trees where the wolf had disappeared. ‘Do me a favour, chérie,’ he said. ‘Make sure he knows I’m on your side, okay?’
5
There was a TV ad for diapers I’d kept seeing. A succession of ludicrously cute babies laughing or gurgling or crawling or lying on their backs kicking and flailing to a soundtrack of fruity clarinets. The last frame dissolved to a pretty young mother, blonde and fabulously wholesome in pale blue cardigan and white blouse, holding her freshly diapered infant in her arms, while the clarinets harmonised on a surprising, tender, intense note, to signify the bond of love between madonna and child, who stared into each other’s eyes, sacrosanct and eternal. There was no doubt this healthy young woman full of American calcium would kill to protect her baby, nor that she’d be greeted with a righteous species cheer if she did. I’d kept seeing this ad, couldn’t get away from it. Every time I heard those first clarinet notes fear surged from my scalp to my fingertips and the baby inside me took on ominous mass. But there was no changing channels. I was compelled to watch, even in the days before I met Delilah Snow – though it was only after I met her that I understood why.
•
Two hours before full moonrise I sat with a stack of Jake’s diaries in my bedroom window seat, wrapped in a blanket, sweating and shivering and being casually picked up then dropped by pain and wondering how much worse than this giving birth could possibly be. My cousin Janine said it’s like taking a rock-hard shit the size of a baby, Lauren had claimed. Imagine that. And it could be a huge baby. I looked it up. In 1879 a woman had a baby that weighed twenty-three pounds. That’s like twelve bags of sugar all stuck together in a lump... As kids Lauren and I had loved our dolls. But we’d pulled their arms and legs off too, or stuck pins in their eyes, fascinated by their trapped sentience, their utter paralysis in the face of our will. And when we’d tired of torture we went back to caring for them as if the abuses had never happened.
Wulf adjusted its position, squeezed my spine, momentarily split my elbows. My teeth chattered, then stopped. I took one of Jake’s diaries from the pile next to me.
Meanwhile Bloomingdale’s and Desperate Housewives and Christmas and the government carried on, I read.
She was carrying on herself, in extraordinary fusion. I could see it in her tense shoulders and flushed face and the care with which she’d applied her make-up. It hurt my heart, the unrewarded courage of it, the particular degree of her determination not to fold in spite of everything. In spite of becoming a monster. It hurt my heart (oh, the heart was awake now, the heart was bolt upright) that she’d had to be brave all alone.
But she never believed she was all alone. She was enough of a romantic to suppose she couldn’t be.
And she wasn’t.
Now she is.
I had all the journals. Six weeks after Jake’s death my dad had called to tell me there was a letter marked private addressed to me at the restaurant. (My dad. The necessary lies. Obviously I couldn’t stay with him. Anyone close to me was in danger. So I told him I was going back to school at UCLA to finish my Masters. Sweetened it by giving him the job of finding a third restaurant, of which he’d be in sole charge. But the money, Lu, for Christ’s sake, where’s the money coming from? Two friends in Palm Springs looking to invest. What, those two gay guys? No, not them. You don’t know these two. I was at college with them... And so on, an ever-expanding fiction struggling to cover the mad truth that would otherwise kill him: Nikolai, your daughter’s a werewolf. Hair, claws, fangs, the whole B-movie deal. Twelve victims. You don’t want to know. Little Lula whose diapers you changed and whose rapt face listening to Facts About the Planets or Tales of Ancient Greece was one of your purest pleasures. Oh, yeah, and she’s got a bun in the oven. The father was a werewolf too, but he’s dead. He left her rich, mind you. That’s where the dough’s coming from...) The letter, which I sent Cloquet to pick up, was from Miles Porter, President of the Coralton-Verne International Private Bank on Fifth Avenue and 45th Street. Jake had left instructions: if, after a certain date, the bank had received no further instruction, Mr Porter was to contact me. I’d been authorised to access the safe deposit box held in Jake’s name. I had Porter’s direct line and, as per Jake’s instruction, ‘should call when I had the six-digit security code.’
Which I didn’t have. Which I had no clue how to get.
A vampire ruse? A WOCOP trap? During our first week in Manhattan together Jake had told me he’d made arrangements aside from the twenty million, but the subject was so morbid we never went into details. Now he was gone and I didn’t know what to do.
I called Miles Porter and told him I was travelling (in fact I was at a small overpriced hotel with too much dark wood in Cold Spring, having let my apartment go) but that I’d be in touch when I got back to the city. Then I hired a private detective to make sure ‘Miles Porter’ was who he said he was. He checked out. Unfortunately this guaranteed nothing. WOCOP used civilians and vampires used familiars. In any case, I didn’t have the six-digit code.
A week passed. I rang the new tenant of my old apartment to see if there were messages or mail as yet unforwarded. Nothing. Then Ambidextrous Alison called. St Mark’s Bookshop had telephoned the restaurant. My copy of Heart of Darkness was ready for collection. Ask for Stevie.
I hadn’t ordered any books.
‘Yes.’
‘Mon Dieu, he was big.’
‘You won’t believe this,’ I said, ‘but I’ve never seen one in real life before. Not even in a zoo.’
‘How did it feel?’
With the smile a few tears had welled, fallen, stopped. Not sentiment. Just the effect of respite from the pain, which, now the animal had gone, was returning. I blinked. It was a deep reassurance that he hadn’t really looked at me. He hadn’t needed to. His will had dissolved into mine, then out again.
‘I wasn’t quick enough,’ I said. ‘It’s like something going past in a fast-flowing stream.’
‘What?’
‘I could have controlled him.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes.’
The baby, who’d gone quiet, now kicked again. I jammed my jaws together, closed my eyes, rode it out. Cloquet was still looking at the place in the trees where the wolf had disappeared. ‘Do me a favour, chérie,’ he said. ‘Make sure he knows I’m on your side, okay?’
5
There was a TV ad for diapers I’d kept seeing. A succession of ludicrously cute babies laughing or gurgling or crawling or lying on their backs kicking and flailing to a soundtrack of fruity clarinets. The last frame dissolved to a pretty young mother, blonde and fabulously wholesome in pale blue cardigan and white blouse, holding her freshly diapered infant in her arms, while the clarinets harmonised on a surprising, tender, intense note, to signify the bond of love between madonna and child, who stared into each other’s eyes, sacrosanct and eternal. There was no doubt this healthy young woman full of American calcium would kill to protect her baby, nor that she’d be greeted with a righteous species cheer if she did. I’d kept seeing this ad, couldn’t get away from it. Every time I heard those first clarinet notes fear surged from my scalp to my fingertips and the baby inside me took on ominous mass. But there was no changing channels. I was compelled to watch, even in the days before I met Delilah Snow – though it was only after I met her that I understood why.
•
Two hours before full moonrise I sat with a stack of Jake’s diaries in my bedroom window seat, wrapped in a blanket, sweating and shivering and being casually picked up then dropped by pain and wondering how much worse than this giving birth could possibly be. My cousin Janine said it’s like taking a rock-hard shit the size of a baby, Lauren had claimed. Imagine that. And it could be a huge baby. I looked it up. In 1879 a woman had a baby that weighed twenty-three pounds. That’s like twelve bags of sugar all stuck together in a lump... As kids Lauren and I had loved our dolls. But we’d pulled their arms and legs off too, or stuck pins in their eyes, fascinated by their trapped sentience, their utter paralysis in the face of our will. And when we’d tired of torture we went back to caring for them as if the abuses had never happened.
Wulf adjusted its position, squeezed my spine, momentarily split my elbows. My teeth chattered, then stopped. I took one of Jake’s diaries from the pile next to me.
Meanwhile Bloomingdale’s and Desperate Housewives and Christmas and the government carried on, I read.
She was carrying on herself, in extraordinary fusion. I could see it in her tense shoulders and flushed face and the care with which she’d applied her make-up. It hurt my heart, the unrewarded courage of it, the particular degree of her determination not to fold in spite of everything. In spite of becoming a monster. It hurt my heart (oh, the heart was awake now, the heart was bolt upright) that she’d had to be brave all alone.
But she never believed she was all alone. She was enough of a romantic to suppose she couldn’t be.
And she wasn’t.
Now she is.
I had all the journals. Six weeks after Jake’s death my dad had called to tell me there was a letter marked private addressed to me at the restaurant. (My dad. The necessary lies. Obviously I couldn’t stay with him. Anyone close to me was in danger. So I told him I was going back to school at UCLA to finish my Masters. Sweetened it by giving him the job of finding a third restaurant, of which he’d be in sole charge. But the money, Lu, for Christ’s sake, where’s the money coming from? Two friends in Palm Springs looking to invest. What, those two gay guys? No, not them. You don’t know these two. I was at college with them... And so on, an ever-expanding fiction struggling to cover the mad truth that would otherwise kill him: Nikolai, your daughter’s a werewolf. Hair, claws, fangs, the whole B-movie deal. Twelve victims. You don’t want to know. Little Lula whose diapers you changed and whose rapt face listening to Facts About the Planets or Tales of Ancient Greece was one of your purest pleasures. Oh, yeah, and she’s got a bun in the oven. The father was a werewolf too, but he’s dead. He left her rich, mind you. That’s where the dough’s coming from...) The letter, which I sent Cloquet to pick up, was from Miles Porter, President of the Coralton-Verne International Private Bank on Fifth Avenue and 45th Street. Jake had left instructions: if, after a certain date, the bank had received no further instruction, Mr Porter was to contact me. I’d been authorised to access the safe deposit box held in Jake’s name. I had Porter’s direct line and, as per Jake’s instruction, ‘should call when I had the six-digit security code.’
Which I didn’t have. Which I had no clue how to get.
A vampire ruse? A WOCOP trap? During our first week in Manhattan together Jake had told me he’d made arrangements aside from the twenty million, but the subject was so morbid we never went into details. Now he was gone and I didn’t know what to do.
I called Miles Porter and told him I was travelling (in fact I was at a small overpriced hotel with too much dark wood in Cold Spring, having let my apartment go) but that I’d be in touch when I got back to the city. Then I hired a private detective to make sure ‘Miles Porter’ was who he said he was. He checked out. Unfortunately this guaranteed nothing. WOCOP used civilians and vampires used familiars. In any case, I didn’t have the six-digit code.
A week passed. I rang the new tenant of my old apartment to see if there were messages or mail as yet unforwarded. Nothing. Then Ambidextrous Alison called. St Mark’s Bookshop had telephoned the restaurant. My copy of Heart of Darkness was ready for collection. Ask for Stevie.
I hadn’t ordered any books.
