Anne Billson - Suckers

'You OK?'

'We need black bags,' I said, trying to be practical. 'We have to dispose of all the pieces separately.'

'Honestly, I don't think that's necessary.'

'Did you get it right this time?'

He looked at me coldly and said, 'No.' I limped towards the doorway and my knees buckled and gave way. He stopped me falling. 'You're not OK at all, are you?'

'Yes,' I said. 'I mean, no. To be honest, I'm not sure.' Then I felt myself going all floppy, and told him, 'I think I banged my head.'

When I woke up I was no longer wearing the soggy pink bathrobe but wrapped in a large quilt, on the bed, surrounded by damp towels and bloodstained tissues, and my hands were stinging like crazy. Duncan had one of them wedged between his knees and was peering closely at it through his spectacles, picking the glass out with tweezers. The sensation of the steel tips foraging under the skin made my eyes water. By the time he'd finished, my palms looked as though they'd been flayed. He applied TCP and wrapped them in bandages. They didn't hurt so badly after that, so long as I kept my fingers bent.

He lay down beside me. I closed my eyes and breathed in the smell of salt and blood and perfume. The first thing I saw when I opened them again was the bite on his neck. The skin was broken in two places, and the wounds were moist and leaking. 'What about this,' I said, prodding it with a bent finger.

He winced. 'It's OK. I'm fine.'

I wasn't so sure. 'You might turn into one of them .'

He sighed and sat up and gingerly probed the wound. 'It's sore.'

'It's all puffy,' I observed.

'It'll take more than one lousy bite to turn me into a vampire.'

This was true, but there was no need to take chances. 'We should put something on it. Salt? Alcohol?'

We looked at each other. 'How about the Lord's own logo?' he suggested, and fetched a glass of brandy and dunked I my cross in it.

'Here, let me,' I said, making him lie back with his head to one side. Then I knelt over him and pressed the crucifix against the bite. There was a sizzling noise, and he tensed and said 'Ouch.' I thought of the way Lulu's skin had hissed whenever the metal had touched it, and perhaps he was thinking of it too, because I could feel him getting stiff. It was the best erection he'd had of late, so I parted my bathrobe and worked myself down on to it, trying not to use my hands, so that it reminded me of those pass-the-banana party games. Then we bounced around for a bit, trying and utterly failing to synchronize our loin movements. The throbbing behind my eyes diminished, then returned with renewed force until I thought my head was going to explode, like the man in the Kuroi commercial. But it didn't. I collapsed and tried to get my breath back.

After a while Duncan asked if I'd finished. I thought he was talking about the sex and felt vaguely insulted, but then realized he'd been referring to his neck.

'Let me check.' There were blisters on the skin. This time when I applied the cross there was no sizzling, nor was there another erection, though he said ouch again. He put his arm round me and we stayed like that, not speaking, until I said what I really fancied was the cocoa he'd promised me earlier — light-years ago, it seemed now.

'Me too,' he said. 'I'll do the bathroom in the morning.'

'She'll crumble in the daylight,' I said. 'No problem, never had a chance to toughen up, not like Violet. The older ones are trickier.'

I hadn't meant to be insensitive, but there was an acerbic edge to his voice as he said, 'Don't I know it.'

'Duncan…'

'Yes?'

'She said you'd know what to do.'

'Who said?'

'Lulu. She was told that you would know what to do when she got here. So what do you suppose that was all about?'

"Well, we all know what I did,' he said bitterly. 'I stuck it to her real good.'

'Maybe that's it.'

'What?'

I shook my head. 'Sorry.'

'Yeah,' he said. 'I should never have let her go.' He made a feeble joke about how he ended up murdering all his girlfriends. I laughed and said I trusted him not to murder me. 'Well you should be all right,' he said, 'since you're not my girlfriend.' Had I not been so exhausted, the remark would have stung almost as badly as the broken glass.

I fell asleep while he was in the kitchen preparing the cocoa, and woke later to find a mug of cold pale liquid stagnating on the floor. I stayed awake long enough to notice the other half of the bed was empty. Duncan was sitting in the wicker chair by the window, gazing out at the first streaks of daylight in the east. Before I drifted back to sleep, I thought I could hear him snuffling very softly to himself. But I might have been mistaken.

It was nearly lunchtime when I woke up. Duncan had already popped out to buy the Sunday papers. We sat on the bed and went through them. Nothing, not the slightest hint of our story in any of them except the Sunday Sport , which had plastered the headline LONDON SHAKEN BY VAMPIRE EPIDEMIC across its front page, with a fuzzy reproduction of one of Dino's photographs dwarfed by a large colour shot of a busty blonde with fangs. 'Great,' I said. ' 'Now we'll never get anyone to take us seriously. What on earth possessed you to send the photos to the Sport? '

'I didn't,' Duncan said testily. 'I thought it was you.'

'Well, we're screwed now anyway,' I said, holding up the business section from one of the broadsheets. There was a big announcement at the top of the page, MULTIGLOM BID FOR ICI, and further down a photograph of two men shaking hands. One was fat and balding and horribly familiar; he was smiling at the camera and showing his teeth but this time there was nothing unorthodox about his dental work. Out loud I read, 'Under the new chairmanship of Mr Ferdinand Drax, the Multiglom takeover looks set to win additional support from the upper echelons of the business community.'

The whisper of a suspicion tiptoed into my mind. I riffled through the rest of the newspaper until I found the letters page and checked the address at the top. Readers were instructed to send their letters to Multiglom Tower. In all, we found three readers' letters pages with the same address.

'I think we may be too late with the newspapers,' I said.

The bathroom was a mess. Duncan had left the window wide open and drained the water away and the body in the bath now resembled the remains of a large Chinese takeaway regurgitated by a team of drunken rugby players. It smelled almost as bad, but at least it had decomposed so thoroughly there was nothing left to remind us of Lulu. This was just bad meat.

'What now?' I asked, one of my hands clamped over my nose to block out the stench. 'Can you just flush it down the plughole?'

Duncan made a face. 'I'll wait. It's coming apart quite nicely.' We had made an unspoken pact to refer to the corpse as 'it'. Vampires were things, not people, and it would have been dangerous for either of us to start thinking otherwise.

My head still ached, and there was a small soft lump on the temple where I'd banged it. I felt hungover and bloated and extremely depressed. It was past two when I finally summoned the willpower to get up and get dressed. Duncan said he'd put my red dress in the washing-machine because it was all trampled and stained, so I helped myself to the contents of Lulu's wardrobe. She wouldn't be needing them now.

I wondered what would happen between Duncan and me, now she was gone for good. Everything might have been perfect if it hadn't been for the hovering presence of Violet. But then again, if it hadn't been for Violet, Lulu would still have been with us, and I would still have been confined to the outskirts of Duncan's life. There were pros and cons whichever way you looked at it.