Silk Over Razor Blades (12 page)

So was Lenina. Aloud she said,
‘Sorry. I’m a bit tense.’

‘I’ll say.’ Ramona brushed
crumbs from her hands. ‘Let’s go for a walk then.’

‘Now?’

‘Aye. It’s gorgeous out there,
blue skies, gold leaves. Fresh air will do you good.’ Enlivened and
comforted by her new role of mother hen, she stood and clapped her
hands. ‘Chop, chop. Get dressed. We’ll talk about why you suddenly
hate your beautiful dress.’

All the talk in the world
couldn’t fix Lenina’s real problem. Just the same she sighed,
turned and trudged up the stairs.

Lenina kicked a pine cone. It
skidded across the pavement before balancing on the edge of the
kerb. The slipstream from a passing car dragged it into the road
where a second car crushed it. She felt much like the pine
cone.

‘Isn’t this nice?’ Ramona clung
to her arm like a limpet, chubby cheeks rosy in the cold. She wore
a woolly hat crammed over her red curls, giving her the look of a
fluffy, upside-down ice-cream cone.

‘It’s okay.’

‘Moody,’ she chided. ‘It’s good
to be out of the house. Stop whining.’

‘I’m not whining; I’m tired. I
have a headache.’

Squeezing her arm in what she
probably thought was a comforting way, Ramona pointed to the coffee
shop across the road. ‘Let’s get a latte.’

‘I don’t want a latte.’

‘I do.’

Narrowing her eyes against the
watery sunlight, Lenina slouched through the doors and searched for
a seat away from the windows.

She reached a seat near the
back half a pace behind another woman who was balancing a
cappuccino in one hand and a laptop in the other. With a defiant
tilt of her head, the woman sat, opened her laptop and took a sip
of coffee. Lenina closed her fingers over her palms. They felt
itchy but she knew the urge to slap this woman was merely a
reflection of her poor mood.

Another search revealed a table
near the front, still littered with debris from the last user. It
faced the window, but the outside awning offered shade. She raced
towards it, weaving around tables, knocking her hips against chairs
to slam her rear into the nearest seat just as a weary-looking man
with a mullet and a stack of folders approached from the right.

He looked at her, then at the
spare seat.

‘My friend is at the till,’ she
said.

His eyes widened. ‘Guess I’ll
go downstairs then.’

Lenina folded her arms and
glared out the window.

The faceless masses streamed by
in unending procession, most with their heads down against the
wind. One woman, with a massive Alsatian on the end of a chain,
fought to calm the creature outside a large department store. She
tied the chain to a loop in the doors and slipped inside, leaving
the dog to watch her through the glass.

A man with his face wrapped up
to the eyes in a thick red scarf weaved through the crowds like a
slalom skier with a pushchair out in front. The baby inside bawled
and kicked, tiny hands waving from the depths of woolly
blankets.

Two men in their middling
twenties laughed and pushed each other as they crossed the road,
sharing a cardboard box of fried chicken. One of them dodged to the
side, steering clear of a shuffling form in grey approaching from
the other direction.

The man in grey paused and
turned to watch them, fingers twitching in his tattered gloves. He
followed them for a step or two before the blast of a car horn
pulled him up short. Shaking a fist, he hurried back on to the
pavement and kept walking.

Lenina nerves fired with a rush
of adrenalin. She stood, pressed her face to the window and watched
the man continue on his way, scratching the back of his head with
one grubby hand. A nest of ginger curls protruded from beneath his
hat.

Lenina slumped back into her
seat. She felt lightheaded and clutched the arms of the squishy
green chair while trying to think. It couldn’t be the same man,
could it? She leaned forward again and watched his progress. When
he turned, exposing his face for the first time, she knew.

Ramona returned with two mugs
and two slabs of chocolate cake on a tray. ‘I bought you one
anyway. You need to counteract all that bloody running.’

Lenina gazed at her friend
without really seeing. Her hands shook as she brought them to her
mouth.

‘What? You look like you’ve
seen a ghost.’

Her stomach clenched. Lenina
pushed herself off the chair, biting her lip.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘I need to go,’ she said.

‘What? No, I’ll eat the stupid
cake. You don’t have to leave.’

She shook her head and stumbled
from the coffee shop, scrunching her jacket into an untidy bunch
over her chest. Once again assailed by the bright autumn sunlight,
she angled left, away from the main road to the indoor market.
Beneath the sloping roofs, surrounded by the call of fruit and
vegetable vendors she felt safer. Calmer. The headache began to
recede. Head down she threaded through the stalls, dodging prams,
yapping dogs and young student types struggling to secure their
five-a-day.

‘Strawberries, madam? Two
punnets for a pound.’

Lenina shook her head, shying
away from the sweet-smelling selection.

Her handbag buzzed. Even
through the noise of the market she could hear the hip-hop jingle
that was Ramona’s ring tone.

The thought of answering, of
dealing with her friend’s incessant questions, made her stomach
writhe. Tucking the bag beneath her arm she ploughed through to the
other side. Here the goods changed from fruit and vegetables to
mobile phone accessories, second-hand clothes and books with a
fusty smell. She dodged past all of them and paused on the side of
the road, one hand pressed to her forehead. Cold sweat slicked her
palm.

The phone rang again.

Lenina snaked one hand into the
bag to retrieve it, licking her lips as she worked on what to say.
‘Hi.’

‘What the hell? Is this about
the wedding? The dress? There’s nothing wrong with it.’

Lenina sighed. ‘It’s not the
dress.’

‘What else could it be?’

She thought of all the other
things she’d told Ramona that day and felt a pang in her chest.

Am I really that shallow?

‘I’m going home.’

‘No, no, wait for me. We’ll go
together.’

She hung up without speaking,
shoved the phone into her bag and marched through a narrow passage
of shops. On the other side she saw the stranger again, gazing
through the window of a vintage boutique. He leaned against the
glass watching a cluster of men fiddling with bowties, bowler hats
and walking canes.

She backed away, gaze pinned to
his back. As she watched, the man stiffened, straightened and
tilted his chin. He sniffed. She heard the sound as if he was
standing right beside her. And the growl that followed.

Lenina turned and walked the
other way, peering back over her shoulder. She reached the end of
the row just as the stranger appeared at the start.

Cold fingers of fear crawled
down her back.

Faster now. Back into the
market. Past the books and clothes. Into the food section. Out the
other side. Through a narrow passage between two banks, a favoured
resting place of the city’s many homeless people. Empty today, the
small recess in which they often sat filled instead with a small
pile of vomit. The ginger stranger loomed into view on the other
side, blocking the exit. His smile was crooked and yellow.

Lenina froze, staring into his
eyes. Her knees buckled.

‘Why are you following me?’ he
whispered.

‘I’m not, I—’

‘I’ve seen you before. Tell
me.’ He stepped into the passage with her, using his bulk to edge
her towards the gap in the right hand wall.

Lenina backed up until heels
touched the brickwork and she brought her feet close together to
avoid the puddle of vomit. ‘Please, I’m not following you.’

His hand touched her throat.
The tips of his fingers brushed the bandage where he’d set his
teeth the night before. His nostrils flared and his breath hit her
face; a hot, stinking billow of old meat and cigarettes. ‘You wanna
die?’

She looked into his eyes again.
Fell into the smoky grey of his gaze and felt darkness creep in
around her. ‘Not again— please— I can’t.’

The menace in the man’s eyes
winked out like a snuffed candle. He frowned and peered close,
searching her face, as if seeing clearly for the first time. When
his gaze fell on the scratch on her cheek his hands jerked back.
‘You should be dead.’

Lenina sucked in a breath of
air and tried not to move. ‘What?’

The man’s voice took on a
tight, rasping quality. ‘You can’t be here. You’re dead. I saw
you.’

She waited.

The stranger backed off.
Tendons on his neck stood out like ropes. He stared so intently
that she imagined his gaze boring a hole through her skull.

It gave her time to look at his
face, better light giving away more detail.

Thick grime caked his skin.
Four pale scars marred his cheek in stark relief against his
scrubby ginger beard and hair. Grey eyes, round and wide, showed
white all the way around. His lower lip trembled.

He sniffed again, leaning
forward as if to catch the air near her face. Whatever he smelled
made him close his eyes and emit a low, keening moan. His face
paled. ‘She’ll kill me— the Kiss— I didn’t mean to— you should be
dead.’

The tremble in his voice made
Lenina stand straight. She stared at this man’s face and the
shaking of his hands and realised that he was scared.

No, terrified. Of her.

He shied away, pressing his
back to the wall as though he meant to sink into it. ‘You only got
a drop.’

‘A drop of what?’ she
whispered.

‘Blood.’

Then she felt it. A niggling
tug at the back of her mind. A tickle. A stroke. It was a feeling
she had no name for, but she recognised it as clearly as the warmth
of sunlight on her face. She knew it because the man in her dream
had experienced the same thing on the field of battle and in
private with his lovers. Shivering in that narrow passage, Lenina
felt the grey-eyed stranger in her head and knew his thoughts. His
fear.

‘Jason,’ she murmured. ‘Your
name is Jason.’

The man shrieked and covered
his face. He seemed to be whispering something, the same words over
and over, but his fingers muffled them.

‘What did you do to me?’ she
demanded. ‘You did this, didn’t you? You understand it. How can I
know your name? Is that a vampire thing?’

The word slipped free of her
mouth before she could catch it, but the change in Jason was
dramatic. He stood straight, gazing at her with such horror in his
eyes he might have witnessed the end of the world.

‘Vampire,’ she repeated. ‘But
they’re not real. That can’t be right.’

Lips ringed with crimson.
Bright white fangs. Bare throats littered with teeth marks. Lenina
cringed beneath the onslaught of images and clutched at the wall.
‘Is that what you did? Did you give me the nightmares?’

His fear and confusion reached
a tsunami-like peak then crashed down on her thoughts, drowning her
emotions until she felt nothing but him.

In her mind’s eye, Lenina saw a
child with olive-dark skin and flowing dark hair. She had brown
eyes, but they darkened rapidly until the whites disappeared and
became black. Fangs peeped from between her lips.

Lenina whimpered. ‘Who is that?
What are you doing? Stop it!’

The man – Jason – shoved past
her, dashed out of the alley and back into the market. He managed
only three steps before crashing into Ramona. His charge knocked
her flat and he fell with her, the pair of them tumbling over the
pavement like scattered bowling pins.

Ramona shrieked and called out,
‘Rape!’

He scrambled upright and took
off at a run.

Lenina stumbled back into the
open.

‘Nina,’ her friend exclaimed.
She stood and rushed forward to grab her shoulders. Her eyes were
big and shiny, face pale beneath the liberal dusting of freckles.
‘Are you okay? Who’s that man? What happened?’

Several curious onlookers
stopped to stare. Some even pulled out mobile phones to record it
on video.

Closing her eyes, Lenina
concentrated on the steady thud of Jason’s fear still filling her
mind. It ebbed but only a little, seemingly a product of the
growing distance between them rather than a lessening of the
emotion itself.

When she opened her eyes she
saw Jason vanish around a corner, along with all the answers.

She took a deep breath through
her nose. It came out through her mouth slow and steady.

‘Nina, talk to me.’

But Lenina didn’t talk. She
ran.

Gaze fixed on Jason’s back, she
followed him through the market and out on to back streets.

Far ahead, he pounded along the
pavement ducking and diving around others moving in the opposite
direction, jacket flying behind him like a cloak. Such speed and
agility made Lenina doubt her assumptions about his age. More
startling was the fact that she was slowly gaining on him.

‘Wait!’ she bellowed. ‘We have
to talk.’

He shook his head, holding his
fists over his ears as he ran. Without looking, he darted into the
road.

Car horns filled the air
followed by the squeal of brakes.

Like a gazelle he dodged
through the first lane, narrowly avoiding a horrible, crushing
death.

In the next lane, a car
screeched to a halt directly in front of him but he never paused,
simply bounding over the bonnet like an Olympic hurdler.

By the time Lenina reached the
road the traffic had stilled, drivers leaning from their windows to
stare and curse. She weaved through them, gaze fixed on Jason’s
back as he left the city centre and dashed past the cluster of
buildings making De Montford University.