The Last Werewolf

All the ID documents were crisp, to my eye flawless, but once Harley had tossed them to me where I sat on the bed we didn’t mention them. They’d been his last hope, talismans to bring the dead magic back to life. He’d done everything he could—and proved that nothing he could do was enough. For what felt like minutes we remained in silence, me on the edge of the bed with nyloned legs crossed, him in profile by the window, all but silhouetted by London’s milky grey afternoon light.

“What will you do?” he said.

“Go to Wales. Snowdonia. I never have been back, you know.”

He opened his mouth to say something—an objection reflex—then closed it again. Both of us had imagined there would be things to say, that we’d find things to say, but Harley stared out over the shivering roof-lakes and I knew he was getting the first true flavour of his life without me in it, an effect like the rubbery antiseptic taste of a dentist’s surgery. All those people Marlowe killed.

“The vision I have of you,” I said, “is in South America. White cotton pyjamas. Mango trees. A dusty courtyard. Hot blue sky and half a dozen static pure white clouds. You go where there’s beauty. You think God will never forgive you, but the only God is beauty and beauty always forgives. It forgives with its infinite indifference.” I lit a Camel, watched myself in the mirror, a noirish unattractive woman, sitting on a bed, smoking. Somewhere in the back of our minds had been the belief that my being in drag would leaven the horror. And if I laugh at any mortal thing / “ ’Tis that I may not weep. It had failed in the way that comic music at a funeral can fail. He sat down on one of the blue corduroy couches and set the walking stick between his knees and abstractedly lit a Gauloise and slowly scratched the big dome of his forehead.

“I can’t believe this,” he said.

“Harls, come on.”

“A parent doesn’t expect to bury his child.” Cigarette smoke swirled as if struggling to form a representation of something. The room’s memories were of masturbating sales reps and adulterous couples.

“I’m sorry,” I said. Saying it gave me my first inkling of how sorry, of how exhausting this leave-taking had the capacity to become. It was as if the decision to die had taken the energy required to get me to death.

“I’m leaving too,” Harley said, then with satirical brightness: “A month’s holiday. Don’t want to be here when they cut your head off, do I?”

“Where are you going?”

“Caribbean. Barbuda. A Ballardian enclave. The bored wives of neuro-surgeons. Retired astronauts. Pharmaceuticals executives. The brochure looks like a virtual world. White concrete and ultramarine sky. A pristine end point of modernity. I imagine silence that’s really the low hum of air-conditioning and humidors.”

“Well, you’ve got the wardrobe for it. I still think you should go to Brazil. For the boys if nothing else. You’re not dead, Harls, so live.”

“Yes, well, physician heal thy fucking self.”

A silence began to solidify between us. Unaffordable. I stood up, with a wobble on the high heels, saw him immediately thinking not yet, not so soon, not like this, wait.

“Nothing’s going to be the right thing to say,” I said. He stared at the carpet. Cigarette ash fell on his trousers. “We’re hanging around waiting for this not to seem so painful when the fact is it’s only going to get more painful the longer we hang around.”

He didn’t move. His eyes were filling. He took an aggressive drag on the Gauloise, exhaled through his nose. A tear fell, with an audible putt onto his lapel. The moment demanded action and all we had was paralysis. The heart of standing is you cannot fly.

“I’ll just ask you this once,” he said. “So I know I did ask.”

I waited. Someone pushed a cleaning cart past the door. Outside, London was set in frowning concentration, dourly focused on getting through the economic migraine. Heavy on me was the weight of the world’s ability to keep going, producing day after unique day, heaving up wars and conversations, bloodily popping out babies and silently swallowing the dead. The collective human unconscious can’t stand it, the thought of stuff going on forever, so has decided (collectively, unconsciously) to bring the planet to an end. Eco-apocalypse isn’t accident, it’s deep species strategy.

“Don’t do this,” Harley said. “Don’t leave me to myself. I haven’t got what it takes for suicide. You know that. What’s another decade to you? I’ll be dead by then. Just stay.”

“I can’t.”

“You’re a selfish cunt, do you know that?”

“Yes.”

Again he opened his mouth, saw the futility, let it go. He pulled out a wrinkled white hanky and dried his eyes. Very slowly put the glass down and stubbed out the cigarette. When he looked at me I saw his fear of everything beyond this moment. The future held a horror—himself—and he wouldn’t look until he had to, until he had no choice, until I was gone. His face shivered like the water on the flat roofs.

“So what?” he said. “We just say good-bye?”

“We just say good-bye.”

“You’ve got another week. You’ll change your mind.”

“Come here.”

He felt like an old man in my arms, skin and bones in a baggy suit, thinned hair and the smell of scalp. Something medicinal too, tiger balm or Vicks. Out of habit I searched my feelings, turned up sadness, regret, something like loss but also undeniably boredom and a kind of impotence of the heart. My inner voice repeated, enough, enough, enough.

At the door I turned and looked at him. He had nothing to say, or too much. He just stared, wet-eyed, hands heavy, filling as I watched with the sand of his future. Every act of leaving feels like a victory. The thrill of this one was tiny, faint, dud, almost nothing.

Harley remained still, unblinking. Leaving him alone with his conscience was like leaving a child alone with a paedophile.

“You’ve been a good friend to me,” I said. He didn’t respond. I turned, opened the door, stepped out into the hall and closed it behind me.

18

I HAD IMAGINED, crossing the border into Clwyd under a low sky of dark cloud, that finding the exact spot I was attacked a hundred and sixty-seven years ago wouldn’t be easy. I’d pictured hours poring over Ordnance Survey maps and picking local octogenarian brains, flailing in bogs, getting lost in the woods. But this is the twenty- first century. I simply hired a car and drove north from London, then west through Snowdonia National Park to Beddgelert (the dd pronounced as a voiced th in Welsh), a village some five miles south of Snowdon and a comfortable three-mile walk from Beddgelert Forest, where after only a single afternoon exploring I found the clearing in which Charles and I had made our camp all those years ago. From there the twenty paces to the stream, the site of the attack, the line the Hunt or Servants of Light had ridden. I sat on a rock by the bank and smoked a cigarette. That’s all there was to it.

Beddgelert hasn’t much to offer so I booked myself into the Castle Hotel in Caernarfon, a half hour’s drive northwest of the forest, overlooking the unsavoury waters of the Menai Strait.

Five days to kill before dying.

All the practical work was done long ago. The companies pass under the control of their boards. A percentage of profits stream to the charities. Real estate sale proceeds likewise. Personal wealth (I’ve off-loaded the art, the trinkets, the antiquities over the last fifty years) will be divided among certain individuals known to me (though I’m not known to them) by virtue of some outstanding quality: compassion, talent, kindness, humour, conscience. Some of it will go to ordinary folks I just happen to have met and liked. None of it will go to the families of people I’ve killed and eaten for the simple reason that finding out where the money came from (a possibility, no matter how many precautions) would drive them insane, since they wouldn’t want to part with it but would have to and would end up hating the dead person.

There are probably a dozen things you could think of to do if you only had five days left to live. I doubt they’d include visiting the Inigo Jones Tudor Slateworks, or the Caernarfon Air Museum, or Foel Animal Park, or the Sea