Sunday 24 June 2012

Billy Came, Chapter 8

8, Alone at Last, We Weep

The murmurings of Perveen’s court faded into silence as we traipsed alongside the tributary's towpath, still hand in hand, swinging arms from our shoulders like pre-adolescent boy- and girlfriend.  Nary a stray dog howled nor tomcat cried; the deliberate stirring and lethargic slopping of the sedentary waterway against its invisible banks was the solitary sound in the otherwise impossibly still night.

It was as if all of nature was humbling itself at Perveen’s approach, hanging on her next instruction.  More than that, it was like every element of the landscape on this side of the veil (which was how I was coming to think of this new world to which Billy had brought me) was alive with expectation, silently anticipating the outcome of this, our first—what—date? The atmospheric tension bore down like a yoke across my shoulders, a yoke balancing buckets of some mythical precious liquid at either extremity, which I must not spill at whatever cost.

We followed the path of the river inlet for a way in complete silence, which only increased the sense of some self-imposed burden.  Perveen had not demanded anything of me since we set out on our walk, nor seemed to be in a hurry to force whatever critical issue it was I was imagining.

Billy had already opened my mind to possibilities incalculable over the course of the two days we'd spent together.  Even so, in this new and bizarre setting beyond the veil, a screen that eradicated the facade with which humanity was masking itself, my mind was exploding with questions.  The answers to some seemed more obvious than others, although not at all apparent.

I didn't want to make a fool of myself by asking the rudimentary.  The answers, having thought more about each question, I thought I ought to already know.  Perhaps I did, but nerves were keeping them locked inside whatever box they'd snook into to hide.

Then, there were also questions that seemed to have their base in the ridiculous, but all the more urgent because of that.  Each question floated up from somewhere deep and hidden in my subconscious, begging to come to the surface for air.  Other creatures—impossible to identify, but somehow having evolved from my mind—were stalking those questions in the deep waters of my psyche, my id, snapping at them, gulping them down.

Finally, there were the questions I feared asking most of all: what had happened to make us grow apart during senior school?  When had she been turned to the vampire life?  Would she be a vampire at all if I'd been there for her at school?  Had she sent Billy to court me alone, or were there others?  And, perhaps the most pertinent, was she aware that I was not the same gregarious, carefree, barrier-pushing idiot I'd been back then?

Those mind-creatures were leaving these last questions alone, when I really wouldn't have minded them becoming part of this evolving aquatic-synaptic food chain.

Back outside my mind, the landscape had been changing to our left as we'd strolled in silence, the urban sprawl giving way to hedges of bramble and bushes of varying genus.  Horticulture was not my thing; a bush was a bush: sticks, branches, leaves, sometimes berries and if you were really unlucky, thorns.

If it didn't have thorns or berries, great: you could forge a shortcut through it somewhat safely.  If it did have thorns or berries, you took your chances: walk the long way around and get home in one un-juiced, untangled piece, albeit later; or, if your alcohol intake had been sufficient, run the fauna gauntlet, indubitably coming out second best on the other side, your clothes looking like Jackson Pollock had designed them whilst blindfolded.

But no such dilemma tonight. The bushes soon changed for fields, running away to mountains on the horizon.  Exactly where was I? Low wooden fences bordered the fields, keeping pace with our every step, pocked here and there by leafless, algae-and moss-covered trees whose bare branches clawed at the lightening sky in the east like arthritis-gnarled, soot-blackened fingers.

Time was against us, or me, at least.  Dawn wasn't quite imminent, but if I was going to get answers, I dared not dally much longer. Resolved, I prioritised the questions in my mind.

However, as I formed just the concept of a question, let alone how to frame it, its answer, at least in concept, formed before my third eye.  Was this knowledge inherent in my new being or through what Billy had imparted, the correct question unlocking the mystery from within?  Or was Perveen playing games, somehow pre-empting this Q&A session and implanting the answers as soon as my inquisitive mind raised the query?

I looked down upon her (hard not to, given the almost foot difference in our height), fearful of another glimpse of that gagging love I had felt in her eyes earlier choking me once more.  She was simply staring at the pebbled path that preceded each imminent footstep, as if examining her shoes with every pace.

Then, without warning, she burst out laughing and squeezed my hand, before skipping a pace ahead.  Perveen spun 90 degrees to her left and grabbed both my hands in hers, pulling me close, gazing up into my eyes.  And there it was, that tenacious love reaching through my eyes and around my heart. Her laughter split the ailing darkness; it seemed like an aeon since I'd heard any sound other than the susurration of the river tide.

"Okay," she said. "I'll quit messing with you.  Ask me what it is you're dying to ask; I know you want to.  I won't bite.  Promise. Billy's already beaten me to that privilege, anyway."

"That's a good place to start," I jumped in.  "Why Billy, and not you?"

Her smile would have melted a Polar ice cap, had we been in its latitude.  That's not to say we weren't, but I had a feeling we were in England, or a version of it, at least.

"Come with me," she began, quickening her pace, never letting my hand go, indeed, gripping all the more tightly; I was duty bound to follow.  That said, wild horses could not have stopped me tracing her steps.  She continued, "to a place where we can be alone," nodding to a bridge a way up the towpath, our next destination, distant in the darkness.

She accelerated without warning, pulling me in her wake with impossible speed.  It was as if our feet did not even scrape the ground, the cool night air chafing our faces as the landscape blurred past in strafing streaks and strips of light and shadow. Somehow, I managed to keep pace.

We arrived at the foot of the bridge in the popping of a corn, which was coincidently the sound that ended our journey as we came to an abrupt halt.  The rest of the world seemed to carry on a yard or two before it realised she'd applied the brakes and had to bounce itself back to align with us.

Her grip tightened around me to ensure that our momentum took me no further, otherwise I fear I too would have overshot the stop and had a very wet landing in the nonchalant tributary.

I phewed.  I mean, really said "Phew!" - I thought that was reserved for comic books, but it's there, waiting for an abrupt enough occasion to use it.  This outburst genuinely amused her, so much so she couldn't speak; once again, I felt she was toying with me.  Perhaps she was; perhaps I deserved it.

For all the world it seemed as if she'd thrilled on every lingering moment of my uncertain equilibrium, eventually raising a hand by way of apology.  I returned the smile, although not at all certain I fancied remaining so fully at her mercy.

Upon reaching the apex of the bridge, she said candidly, "I want you whole," picking up our prerun conversation, which I struggled to recall for a second.

She sat herself on the bridge wall and, as she turned to face me, our eyes now almost level, had turned all serious.  It was as if she'd passed a flat palm down over her face and a different person had emerged above, "Your mind, body and soul."

I waited for more, but she went silent for a while, mulling over something, looking to her swinging feet as if for fortitude.  I was just about to move on, when she added, "You and Billy, you had a connection.  The moment he began to make you Brotherhood, that connection just disappeared, right?"

"Not entirely," I said.  "The way we communicate now.  He sends pictures, concepts—word clouds, if you like—into my mind."

"Billy's always been able to do that.  He's a natural psychic, you know?  He's from a native American tribe—Navajo, I think—that goes back further than even they know. No one, not even Billy, knows how long he's been around.

"He was rogue when The Master found him," she continued.

"So, you're not The Master, then?" I interjected, finding a way to frame one of my questions without feeling stupid.  But then she laughed, anyway.

"Me?  The Master?" she spluttered/laughed/choked/giggled.  "Oh, no.  The Master's ancient.  I've only met him a couple of times.  He lives, if you can call it that, in the depths of Subterranea.  But I'll tell you all about that another time.  Back to Billy's history, just so you've got the full picture, as far as I can tell you, anyway.   You may even know some of it, depending on what he wanted to share with you."

It struck me that I had erred there, then.  Perhaps Billy had been more in control of his emotions than I'd given him credit for during his drawing of my blood.  Or perhaps there was something in me that Perveen didn't possess. which disarmed his resolution.  Before I could get too drawn into melancholy, Perveen continued.

"He, The Master, was hanging around the mid-South in the mid-19th Century," she said.  "Easy pickings for vampires as the Americans, Mexicans and indigenous tribes raged war with each other.

"That's when He found Billy, wandering around the Bonneville Salt Flats and the Intermountain West region of Utah, just where the Rocky Mountains begin, so I believe.

"Billy had an uncanny knack of going to where the bloodiest battles in the American-Mexican war would happen, waiting to pick the spoils.

"He couldn't speak, even then.  But he knew how to sign.  Plain's Signing it was called, something like that.  But The Master picked up on the images Billy made in tandem with his signing and, well.  They understood each other on a level that transcends brotherhood.  They've been together since," she said.

I was mulling this over, when she said, "Do you know, he 'made' me, too, Billy?"

This was another question I wanted answers to.  Was she putting me out of my misery, prompting me so I didn't have to find the nerve to ask about when she'd become vampire?  Or why?  I thought so, but nonetheless, didn't want to spurn the opportunity.

"What happened to you, then?" I asked.  "You look only a little—if any—older than the last time I saw you, on our Prom night.  What, 13, 14 years ago?"

"Ah, I've stopped counting.  Time means nothing, here," she started.

I felt a huge urge to jump in with 'Where's here, exactly?', but she raised my hand to shush me.  I obeyed.  I got the sense she wasn't finding this retelling easy.  If I interrupted now, I might not get the opportunity to hear the story again.

"After our Prom night," she began, "I mean right after the Prom, you were with Louise.  I knew I'd lost you; you looked so much in love, so right together.  But I couldn't bear it," she choked, a veil of a shimmer reflected the waning moonlight from across the harbour, glinting tiny stars in her eyes.

Was it me, or had the moon set no further than it had when we last looked its way, which seemed hours ago?  I was distracting myself, I knew.  Just as difficult as it was for Perveen recalling this anecdote, hearing it wasn't easy for me.

On some level, it was my fault, abandoning her without ever looking back.  But to have any sense of peace in this new life, I had to listen, no matter how painful, for either of us.

She sighed, took a deep breath, then continued, "I left Steven at the disco, making my excuses.  You remember the bridge that ran over the unfinished dual carriageway, connecting the two halves of our school?"

I nodded. "We used to go there at breaktime to smoke," I answered.  "It was like my own little corner shop, tucked into that tight curl where the base of the bridge bent back in on itself," I recalled, reminding myself as much as answering Perveen.

"Well," she continued. "I walked over the bridge and down to that corner, remembering all the times I'd seen you selling individual cigarettes, hookie sweets and didn't you even sell homework?"

I nodded, remembering how I'd been driven by commerce, even as a teenager, perhaps even before that. What a waste! was how I thought of those endeavours, now, recalling them from out of the blue like this.

"Anyway," Perveen continued, "those memories, they were raw right then.  I walked through the hole in the fence that was supposed to stop us going onto the road, the hole which the Billingshall kids used to use to skive off or to take shortcuts home.

"Do you remember, there were random huge crumbling blocks of concrete along both sides of the reservation to stop joyriders, although they weren't called joyriders, back then.  It looked like a scene from an '70s Dr Who, as if it had rained cylinders of beige concrete and just been abandoned.  That's what I'll always remember it like, anyway," she said, drifting off.

I knew what she meant.  The stretch of road was all of 400 yards, stopping short of the junctions it was supposed to connect at both ends by some distance.  It was as if the council had come up with a great idea, but had got the decimal point in the wrong place at the budget meeting and just left it to rot, unfinished.

I was about to tell her that they'd eventually incorporated that stretch of land into a main thoroughfare and that our old school now only resided on one side of the bridge, but thought better of it.  Half the size now than it was in our day, the school.  Was that a sign of the Catholic parishes' returns diminishing or had the board members' eyes lit up when the developers had told them how much the land the one half of the school sat on was worth?

Even for me, it was gut-wrenching to think that the place where so much of our adolescence had played out, the place that was still part of our living, breathing (well, not breathing, not any more) personality, was now bulldozed over and housed an entirely new housing estate.  I thought it best not to tell Perveen; preserve this memory for her, at least.  I looked at her to see if she was reading my thoughts, but she was still back in the land of Prom night, I could tell.

"Perveen?  You were on the dual carriageway?" I proffered.

"Yes, I was.  Anyway, I marched right onto that strip of disused tarmac. For all my life, I remember wishing that the road was a-buzz with traffic and that I could just walk out in front of a juggernaut and it would be all over," she said, looking into my eyes to gauge my reaction.  I guess the waning moonlight was probably glinting across my pupils, too, building up a dam ready to burst down my cheeks at any second.

"That's when Billy came," she said.  "One minute I was alone, sitting on a concrete lump that I had had to jump up onto to get on.  I didn't care about my dress, by then.  The next minute, Billy was there sat next to me.  You have no idea how he made me jump.  But, do you know, I was never scared?"

"I do, actually," I answered.  "At times, I don't like him much.  But, in hindsight, have I ever feared for my life in his presence? No, not in any real sense."

She nodded, understood implicitly. "Anyway," she began again, "you probably have an idea of the rest, given what's happened to you.  He began by telling me, in his own sign-and-pictorial way, that he could take me to a place that would make me forget all my heartache.  Then that, one day, I could have you all to myself. Maybe.

"The price, he told me, was high, the highest!  But if I was prepared to pay that price, he'd show me how I could make you mine forever," she said.

"Things transpired.  I proved to be a boon to the Brotherhood.  Was it spite driving me? I don't know.  Maybe. Probably. Anyway, one day The Master held court, calling for Billy and me. Quite unprecedented, I was told, for one so new to the Brotherhood.

"He announced that, thanks to my efforts thus far, Billy could scout you as a potential mate," she said, "but not just you, others. Just in case you proved unworthy or unequal to the task, y'know? But I never really doubted you.  The only question was 'when?'.  Now, we know the answer to that, too."

"Did you ever consider the morality of that decision?" I asked, as that last statement permeated; not in anger, just curiosity.

"Not then.  But I have done since.  Especially when I thought about you and Louise. The problem was, in the heat of my pain, I wasn't thinking straight.  I set the wheels in motion, getting you here with me, without thinking about either the consequences or implications.  It was soon out of my hands, though, so I stopped worrying about it.  You kinda get like that, here, after a while."

She sensed my agitation and turned to watch my face as I pondered her, what had it been, confession?  This had been painful for her to recount on two levels: not just the memory from all that time ago, but also not knowing how I'd react when she came clean.  Being Mr Selfish, I felt some of the burden of that yoke suddenly lifted; I was not proud, but there you have it.

The sheer depth of love that beamed from her iridescent eyes was blinding.  Even so, I felt there was something she was still holding back, that little glint in the corner of her eye that wasn't as true as the rest.

"Are you happy with the outcome, now that you've had time to dwell on your decisions?" I asked.  I could have asked more, wanted to, but what was the point?  Everything that had happened before this new future was moot, and would only raise doubts by dwelling on it.

"100%" she said, without blinking.

"Then that's all there is to it," I said, offering her my crooked elbow, into which she placed her arm.

She nodded, then slid off the wall to stand next to me, turning to face up-river by my side.  As if wiping an invisible window beyond which stood the world, Perveen waved her hand.  What happened next was magical.


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1 comment:

  1. Updated and published 13th May, 2020 - huge update, w/new dialogue

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