The Mammoth Book Of Vampire Stories By Women - cast of thousands

'So what are they going to do, bust me and your father? Joe doesn't live here any more. I wouldn't stand for him using this place as a shooting gallery. He stole. Took money out of my purse, took things and sold them. Like we don't work hard enough for anything that we can just let a junkie steal from us.'

I didn't say anything. It would have been the same if he'd been staying with me. 'I know, Ma.'

'So?' She was gripping the back of a chair as though she didn't know whether she wanted to throw it or pull it out and sit down.

'So what,' I said.

'So what do you want with him?'

'He asked for me, Ma.'

'Oh, he asked for you. Great. What are you going to do, take him to live with you in your dorm room? Won't that be cozy.'

I had an absurd picture of it. He'd have had a field day with all of Marlene's small valuables. 'Where's Aurelia?'

'How should I know? We're on notice here — she does what she wants. I asked you to come home and talk to her. You wouldn't even answer my letters.'

'What do you think I can do about her? I'm not her mother.'

She gave me a dirty look. 'Eat your sandwich.'

I forced a bite and shoved the plate away. 'I'm just not hungry.'

'Suit yourself. You should have told me if you wanted something else.'

'I didn't want something else. I didn't want anything.' I helped myself to a cigarette. My mother's eyebrows went up but she said nothing. 'When Aurelia comes home, I'll talk to her, okay?'

' If she comes home. Sometimes she doesn't. I don't know where she stays. I don't know if she even bothers to go to school sometimes.'

I tapped ashes into the ashtray. ' I was never able to get away with anything like that.'

The look she gave me was unidentifiable. Her eyelids lowered, one corner of her mouth pulling down. For a few moments I saw her as a stranger, some woman I'd never seen before who was waiting for me to figure something out but who was pretty sure I was too stupid to do it.

'Okay, if she comes home, I'll talk to her.'

'Don't do me any favours. Anyway, you'll probably be out looking for him .'

'I've always been closer to him than anyone else in the family was.'

My mother made a disgusted noise. 'Isn't that sweet?'

'He's still a human being, Ma. And he's still my brother.'

'Don't lecture to me about family, you. What do you think I am, the custodian here? Maybe when you go back to college, you'd like to take Joe and Aurelia with you. Maybe you'd do better at making her come home at night and keeping him off the heroin. Go ahead. You're welcome to do your best.'

'I'm not their mother or father.'

'Yeah, yeah, yeah.' My mother took a cigarette from the pack on the table and lit it. 'They're still human beings, still your brother and sister. So what does that make me?'

I put my own cigarette out, picked my bag up in the living-room and went to the bedroom I shared with Aurelia. She had started to spread out a little in it, though the division between her side and my side was still fairly evident. Mainly because she obviously wasn't spending a lot of time here.

For a long time, I sat on my bed fully clothed, just staring out the window. The street below was empty and dark and there was nothing to look at. I kept looking at it until I heard my parents go to bed. A little later, when I thought they were asleep, I opened the window a crack and rolled a joint from the stuff in the bottom drawer of my bureau. Most of the lid was still there, which meant Aurelia hadn't found it. I'd never liked grass that much after the novelty wore off, but I wanted something to blot out the bad taste the evening had left in my brain.

A whole joint to myself was a lot more than I was used to and the buzz was thick and debilitating. The smoke coiled into unreadable symbols and patterns before it was sucked out the window into the cold and dark. I thought of ragged ghosts fleeing a house like rats jumping off a sinking ship. It was the kind of dopey thought that occupies your mind for hours when you're stoned, which was fine with me. I didn't want to have to think about anything that mattered.

Eventually, I became aware that I was cold. When I could move, I reached over to shut the window and something down on the street caught my eye. It was too much in the shadows close to the building to see very well if it was even there at all. Hasher's delirium, or in this case Grasser's delirium. I tried to watch it anyway. There was a certain strength of definition and independence from the general fuzziness of my stoned eyesight, something that suggested there was more to it than the dope in my brain. Whatever it was a dope exaggeration of a cat or a dog or a big rat — I didn't like it. Unbidden, my father's words about a new element moving in slid into my head. Something about the thing made me think of a reptile, stunted evolution or evolution reversed, and a sort of evil that might have lain thickly in pools of decay millions of years ago, pre-dating warmblooded life. Which was ridiculous, I thought, because human beings brought the distinction between good and evil into the world. Good and evil, and stoned and not stoned. I was stoned. I went to bed.

But remember, said my still-buzzing mind as I was drifting into stupor-sleep, in order to make distinctions between any two things like good and evil, they first have to exist, don't they.

This is what happens when would-be intellectuals get stoned, I thought and passed out.

The sound of my father leaving for work woke me. I lay listening to my mother in the kitchen, waiting for the sound of bacon and eggs frying and her summons to get up and have a good breakfast. Instead, I heard water