I grabbed his loose jaw. You could pick that up with one hand. Punch through that. Pull that off like a button. When I yanked it came away from his head. I held it up for a moment, felt him not believing it, not believing what was happening—then dropped it on his chest. His tongue, left behind, looked huge hanging there, like an ox tongue on a meat counter.

He rolled onto the floor at my feet with a soft thud. He was trying to work out where the gun had gone. He got up onto his hands and knees. I let him move a couple of feet because I was hypnotised by the sight of it.

Then suddenly I was impatient and I reached down, took hold of his throat, lifted him to his feet—felt his hands on my wrist like nothing, like butterflies, like paper bracelets—and dumped him back onto the bed.

I wasn’t thinking. This was something else. Time wasn’t passing. Instead it was just Now … Now … Now, like a flower opening wider and wider.

He tried to speak again, but it was just soft sounds and dark blood. It made me feel peaceful that he couldn’t speak. Then he tried to grab me, and as soon as he did that the impatience and disgust rushed back up in me and I smacked him hard in the middle of his chest. The big bone there cracked. I felt it. Heard it. I pictured the bone like a white wall protecting his heart—but now with a huge crack in it. I imagined myself pulling the two broken halves apart and seeing his heart, like Jesus’s in the Sacred Heart painting our neighbour Mrs. Clemence had in her hallway. Bless Our Home. It always made me think of our home. Jesus watching everything that happened in the living room, with the big, uneven blue curtains drawn and the bare overhead bulb lighting everything too much, the hair on their shins, their thick toenails, my mother’s face shiny with sweat.

Gasping and making a gargling sound, he struggled up again onto his left elbow. He reached for the nightstand. Missed. Tried again. It exhausted me even more, that he was still trying to come up with something, trying to help his situation. It made me angry because I knew he’d keep on trying to stay alive. It made me angry because a part of me was standing to one side saying it’s not enough it’s never going to be enough it’s too small it’s too ordinary ordinary bones and falling on the floor and his tongue hanging like that and how can it ever be enough?

Without thinking about it, I slashed my fingernails across his throat.

Blood sprayed my face.

Touched my eyes, my lips.

My tongue.

Which changed everything.

43

YOU WON’T NEED to feed till Saturday.

Wrong. The flower that had been opening all this time turned into a black red hole that sucked me in, head-first, a long fall that ended when I felt the bump of my teeth in his throat and the first warm spurt of his blood going into my mouth.

At first there was …

I felt myself thinking: I’ve never had to use this word before …

Joy.

Joy. This is what joy is. Like those flying dreams the moment you first realise you can do it … At first it was simple. Three, four, five seconds the blood was just goodness. The goodness was immense and nothing to do with him. He was just a funnel for the blood that was coming from somewhere else, from the universe, and the blood went into me and forced delicious warmth through my shoulders and face and breasts and belly and legs and feet. It was as if the blood was in a mad rush to map every part of me, to get all of me. And from the first swallow I was in a mad rush to get it in me, all of me. We were like two animals, me and the blood, two animals who loved each other but had been kept apart for years.

Then on the third or fourth or fifth swallow it turned into his blood—and I saw him, maybe eight years old, and a basketball hit him full in the face and broke his nose (I felt some tiny echo of the bone going in my own nose) and the kid who’d thrown it laughing and the force of the blow knocked him onto his ass and they laughed harder because he sat down in a shallow puddle on the uneven court and I could feel his face hot and big and his heart full of something like shame. I thought: You can’t stop. Once you start drinking you can’t stop. You don’t suck the blood, the blood sucks you. Video-game footage raced, trolls and marines and things that looked like they were made of mud and it gave him not peace but took his memory away for the hours days months years that the explosion graphics and death screams filled him though it was also a kind of boredom like too much food. There was a girl and the two of them in a bar that looked like a ski-lodge but it was hot and I could feel the air like soup because the air-conditioning had gone and he was feeling that it was going okay with her (I saw her moist, big face and heavy blonde bob like a helmet and her hands were a little cracked with eczema but with fat red fingernails) and she’s laughed a couple of times but then time speeds up and he’s holding her elbow and trying to force her away from the bar and people are looking and she yanks her arm free and knocks a pitcher of some red cocktail from the counter and it hits the floor and bursts. The familiarity of this is like more heat on him, as if someone’s holding an electric fire close to his face on top of how hot it is already in the bar. It’s so familiar to him, this moment when it goes from going well to them not wanting his hand on them and one minute they’re laughing the next it’s get your fucking hands off me and they’re all the fucking same fucking cunts and it’s like a bored relief for him to have this thought, fucking cunts, and it is a relief because the truth is he doesn’t want them and I wanted to stop but I didn’t want the blood to stop it was so good so good and then I knew what was coming, what was coming through the blur of surfed channels and image after image of children’s small half-undressed bodies and confused or terrified faces and each image brings the same claustrophobia, the space they’re trapped in and the big heat of unfamiliar bodies and someone shouting orders or silently positioning them with a focus and farawayness that’s more terrifying than the shouts and slaps. Oh please let me stop but I couldn’t. Every ounce given over to the rhythm of the sucking, the gulping, the swallowing in time with his heartbeat—which brought the other heartbeat, his beating into my back and I saw myself from his point of view and when I saw the back of my head and the yellow t-shirt and felt myself through him crying I tried to shut my eyes shut my eyes block it out but I couldn’t because the blood kept coming and it was in my head whether I shut my eyes or not and it broke my own chest like I’d broken his and I felt all the time I’d lived since then and was saying sorry, sorry, sorry to the little girl I was as if she was someone I’d abandoned and never gone back for and it wasn’t her fault it wasn’t her fault it was mine.