“I’m new to the town,” he said to her. “Would you mind coming round the fair with me?”
So even for a man of God, she thought later, he wasn’t backward at coming forward. She’d be delighted, she said, and they left the amusements behind, to walk through the busy fairground. When he grinned at her she saw he had very pointed wolfish teeth. “My vampire teeth,” he said, smiling, when she pointed them out and she thrilled at this.
Elsie found that she could talk to him easily. He was an interesting man, he had travelled, he knew many sorts of people, he had studied and he knew a thing or two. She loved to hear him talk and the way his sentences had fewer gaps and mistakes than hers. She wanted to ask, Do you make up what you’re saying beforehand? There was something fluid and easy about him. She felt led around and light on her feet and she found that his arm was at her back, urging her along. Then she shamed herself by hoping that they wouldn’t bump into Craig. She didn’t want to have to explain — not just yet — to Tom that she had a son of twelve. She imagined Tom looking her son up and down. Craig at twelve was chubby and his clothes ill-fitting. He covered his mouth with both hands whenever he smiled and he walked slump-shouldered, which only drew attention to that foot of his. Elsie was ashamed of herself, but she didn’t want Tom to see Craig yet. First she wanted to get used to this new feeling of lightness, of swishing through the fair with all its crowds and its black mud. She was wearing a long, flowery cotton frock, which billowed round her in the breeze. They came to the edge of the crowd. Diana Ross blared from the distant carousel. As Tom led her round the back of a chugging generator, they had to step gingerly over the brightly coloured cables that wound through each other in the grass. He kissed her long and deep and pressed himself up against her. She was surprised. He’d already told her he did something like Sunday school for the bairns. Things had changed since she was a bairn, of course.
“Can I be your vampire?” he asked, and laid his head on her breast. She was taken aback. Then she thought, He’ll have that hairgrease on my frock.
“Lets see your teeth again,” she said.
He grinned at her and they were really frightening.
“I have a son,” she said.
“You hardly look old enough.”
“He’s twelve.”
“Never!”
“I’ve had a life already, Tom.”
“Good.” He kissed her again.
“You’re not really a vampire, are you?”
He hugged her and she felt the bones down her back — was it vertebrae? — she felt them click, one at a time, not unpleasantly. “I am, I am,” he said.
This time there was definitely something different, something wrong. They had to go to see the woman in charge of the hospital. Elsie seemed to go inside herself as they entered the smart, book-lined office. She stared at the heavy green lamp on the woman’s desk. Fran had to do the talking. The woman in charge had neatly cut hair, no make-up, a dark jacket and skirt. Fran thought she looked like a woman in control, like a woman off a Lynda La Plante TV show. The woman smiled pleasantly and explained that she had been trying to contact Elsie all day.
On the way up the stairs, up the green carpet that was so soft you felt obliged to save it by walking on the edges, Elsie had been chuntering away to herself. She had said, “The thing I couldn’t stand would be that he’s dead. That he’s gone and done himself in, like he always said he would. He always threatened me with doing himself in. I even hid the scissors from him. But the last time I saw him he was so angry he ran away from me. I’d be so guilty if that was the last I saw of him.”
Now Elsie stared past the woman in charge at the black tree through her window.
The woman said, “The thing is, he’s vanished.”
What a draughtsman he was! He could draw you anything. He used to draw all the time, on whatever was to hand. If you left an old envelope lying about, the leccy bill or a magazine, you’d find it again with a little doodle on. He always had a pen in his hand. Like I said, he should have been an architect. “Draw me! Draw me!” I’d say, and strike a pose. If I was being too demanding, he would quickly draw something hideous, like a monkey, and tell me that’s what I was. He would do that to make Craig laugh, and sometimes Craig would. Other times Tom would spend hours drawing me carefully, with pen and ink, with pencils, with coloured crayons and everything. Careful hours staring at me and I would let him, imagining what he was setting down. One of them drawings we’ve got framed on the wall. Me in my white blouse. It was the one that looked most like me. I watched him work and he did it biting his bottom lip, so you could see his pointy teeth as he concentrated. They were digging into his skin and I could feel myself melting just looking at that.
Some
