By Blood We Live Read Free Page B

chain around my neck. Its small weight was a comfort, as was the image it conjured, of my father’s hands working it in the light of the cooking fire, his dark eyes full of calm knowledge, the smell of roasting meat, my mother digging a hole nearby for the offering …
    It’s a terrible thing to see yourself start to cry, as I did, just then. Not least because in spite of your misery there’s how funny your face looks. But here were the tears—dear
God
—again, and the feeling of something big and obvious infuriatingly just out of view—
    At which point I heard the door upstairs open and close. Justine was back.

4
    I T ’ S MY NATURE to move silently. Therefore she got an almighty fright. She was standing in the study by the desk with her cellphone in her hand, staring into space with the look of someone trying to assimilate a shock. She was dressed in a short black suede jacket, red t-shirt, tight white jeans and red suede clogs. It’s taken her years to wear anything on her feet other than running shoes. Naturally. Her world being for so long a place where she had to be ready to run.
    “Jesus
Christ.
”
    “Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to startle you. You’ve had your hair cut.” The centre-parted jaw-length bob had been replaced by something short and snazzily chopped. She looked like the world’s prettiest schoolboy.
    “Oh my God,” she said. “Fuck.”
    “What’s wrong?”
    She sat down in the desk’s swivel chair, a cream leather ergonomic thing that would’ve been at home in the cockpit of the
Millennium Falcon.
The room was lit only by the Tiffany desk lamp, a delicate trapezoid of stained glass in green, gold and peach that threw a soft light on her pale hands and face. Turquoise nail polish. A big amber ring I didn’t recognise. She smelled, deliciously, of cigarette smoke and booze and dry ice. She’d been to the club, TCOS, three floors on Sunset Boulevard, which I’d given her as a twenty-third birthday present five years ago. The world having nothing better to do, there was endless online speculation about what TCOS stood for. Only Justine and I knew. The Comfort Of Strangers. Her choice.
    “You look different,” I said to her. “It’s not just the hair.”
    She let out the breath she’d been holding. “Yeah,” she said. “I would … Fuck.”
    “Will you for the love of Thoth tell me what is going on?”
    Pause.
    “Have you fed?” she asked.
    “Yes. Something’s wrong with me. I don’t … How come you vacuumed?”
    “What?”
    “The place has been cleaned since last night. How come?”
    She sat back in the chair, which received her with a maidenly sigh. Three floor-to-ceiling walls of books attended in silence. A little bubble of Randolf burst in me: him six years old, falling for the tenth time off a bike he was trying to learn to ride in the yard. His father’s big beer-flavoured mouth laughing. I had a feeling of something catching up with me.
    “That wasn’t last night,” Justine said. “That was two years ago.”

5
    A CONFESSION: MY memory isn’t exactly the Rolls-Royce of memories.
Memory full
, the computers say, managing with machine pathos to make you feel you’ve force fed them, like those poor
foie gras
geese. But my memory’s never full. My memory goes in for violent clear-outs. My memory self-harms. It also makes wild boasts and risible claims, sends me absurd snapshots and improbable clips: the bodies of Amenhotep’s murdered tomb builders in a moonlit heap, for example, a poignant assembly of nipples and feet and grinning faces, covered in dust. Or Niccolo Linario on a red damask couch looking up at me and saying in Latin:
They’ve arrested Machiavelli. Did you hear?
Or my own hands, darker-skinned, thicker-fingernailed, winding gut around a worked flint. Oh yes,
flint.
I don’t expect you to believe it. For myself I’m beyond believing or not believing. For myself I just—as my darling and religiously commercial Americans