By Blood We Live Read Free Page A

off down the drive after him.
    But there was a delayed effect, apparently of his non sequitur, because after a few paces I stopped. I’m not sure why. A feeble but comprehensive intuition—that following him was not a good idea.
    Instead, throbbing, delicate, afraid, I turned and went back to the house.

3
    J USTINE WAS STILL out. I spent a wearying time locating my cellphone, which for some reason she’d locked in the study desk drawer. The phone had been switched off. Waiting the few seconds for it to power-up exposed the raw fact of my existence, terribly, as does standing waiting for an elevator with strangers. I had the feeling of just realising I was the subject of a reality show, imagined an invisible audience of millions thinking, Poor bugger, he hasn’t got a clue … 
He lied in every
 …
    Huge relief when I got the power symbol, the AT&T bars, the home screen (Botticelli’s
Primavera
, which in spite of everything—things of beauty, joys forever—still stole a vivid second to beguile my 24/7 aesthete). I called her cell.
    Voicemail. She’d changed her greeting. Gone was Bette Davis saying:
I’ve been drinking all the way from California—and I’m
drunk! Replaced by Justine herself, sounding remote: “You’ve reached Justine Cavell. Leave a message.”
    It occurred to me, as it has countless times before, that you can’t take your eye off this world for a moment. Smoke signals. You blink. Cellphones. Six thousand years of foot messengers—now this: instant access, everywhere. FaceTime. I wish they hadn’t called it that. Face Time. I can’t help seeing it as an implacable
instruction.
    “For fuck’s sake, Justine,” I said. “Call me, will you? It’s important. Something’s going on. I’m a bit … Just call me as soon as you get this.”
    It calmed me, slightly, to be under my own roof, but the house felt subtly altered. I’d left in such a rush three hours ago I hadn’t noticed. Now here were my sweet walnut floors and high ceilings, the study’s amber lamps and red velvet drapes and twenty thousand books (one for each year of my life, I quip to after-dark guests) the hallway’s green and gold Persian runner and the kitchen’s copper splash-backs and black slate tops—but all possessed of a taut sentience, as if they didn’t know whetherto let me in on what they knew, whatever the hell it was they
did
know. Justine had tidied the TV room since our movie double bill. She’d washed and put away the glasses, got rid of the spent bottles, emptied the ashtrays, plumped up the cushions. Incredibly, it looked as if she might have vacuumed. My nostrils said recent frangipani incense and Pledge floor-wax. Why? Had she thrown up somewhere? Were it anyone else I might have supposed a lover’s visit, room-hopping sex, stains to mop, odours to expunge. But this was Justine, therefore that wasn’t a possibility.
    There was nothing to do but wait for her. I took a consolation shower in the vault. Not very consoling, since the dream leftovers wouldn’t stop burgeoning and vanishing in my head, with a little more—but no less maddening—detail. On the empty beach we’d walked until we’d found a small wooden rowing boat in the shadow of a wall of black rocks, blistered and barnacled and half-covered in sand and sun-dried seaweed. (We? Me and whoever was with me. The liar in every word, presumably.) When we found the boat I said: “It’s happening. Just as in the dream. I know what it means. Of course. I know now what it means.”
    Yes, well, I didn’t know
now
what it meant.
    Naked, towelled dry, I stood in front of the full-length mirror. (Reflections? Yes. We show up on film, too, don’t let anyone tell you different.) Courtesy of the blood booze-up on Randolf’s tab I looked ludicrously healthy. My skin, currently the colour of a double-shot latte, was tight and smooth. I used to be darker. Much darker, long ago. I reached up to touch the little carved stone Oa that hung on a