The Mammoth Book Of Vampire Stories Written By Women

"The weak are here to justify the strong," says Sheridan, stroking a drop from another insect with a pointed grassblade, to show how easy it is to milk this crop.

"Jesus," says the little girl, peering intently. "If they were bigger, it would be like a horror movie." She sighed. "Yez knows a lot. It's like talking to the Internet."

"Shall I take your picture now?"

The little girl thinks maybe she ought to run. But she doesn't.

Camilla and Noreen walk by the shore, Noreen pushing a stoutly built tartan upholstered buggy ahead of her. It's what passes for a fine summer day on the west coast of Ireland. There are cars ranked in the car park, battalions of windbreaks; very few foreign tourists. Camilla's thinking of her glimpses of native life before this providential halt. Shovel-faced young women marching along lanes where only tractors and tourists ply, with the baby in the buggy: and you wonder, where is she going? You wonder what kind of life is it she leads. You want to touch her. Now Camilla is in the picture . She has penetrated to the heart of the alien world, It's always a thrill, however often repeated.

She has seen Noreen's husband briefly. A kitchen monster, sitting at the table, knife and fork in either fist, red impassive slab of a face. My God, to lie under that , while it silently prods children into you ! But she keeps such thoughts to herself, tucks her arm in Noreen's arm and recounts her adventures as a world traveller, long-haul traveller. The pyramids at Giza, the restaurants of New York. Wise insights. "In West Africa, in the market in Foumban, beside the earth-walled palace of the sultans, did you know you will only find Dutch printed cotton?"

"Is that a fact? Would there not be any native handicrafts there?"

"Noreen, it's a big lie that the colonial powers went to Africa and Asia to plunder the natural resources. That was an afterthought. They went to force new markets for their goods. To sell, not to buy. It's the same with tourists, did you ever think of that? They don't come to see , they come to be looked at. Did you ever think of that?"

"I did not!" said Noreen, blinking in bewilderment. "Oh, but I could never call you a tourist , Cam. Ye're much more than that to me." Shyly, she clasped Camilla's arm to her well-nourished flank. (The pleasure lies in knowing that it will go no further . There will be no consequences, because Camilla isn't staying. Tastes and smells, moments of intensity, never a bill presented.)

They walked on, Noreen silenced for a little by her own outburst. "You know," she said, after a moment or two, "I'm worried about this bug that's going round. Some folk are keeping the children in. D'ye think I should keep them indoors?"

"Them?"

"The kids?"

"Ah." Camilla frowned, and looked away. "Don't worry. Your kids are safe."

She didn't explain the emphasis.

The steel-blue waves rushed in and out, the mothers sat behind the windbreaks, a somewhat depleted cohort of local boys and girls jumped and splashed in the water. "I suppose all your children are grown up and gone," sighed Noreen, shoving the buggy over recalcitrant tidewrack and compounded this faux-pas by adding hurriedly, "Och, I mean, you must have been married very young!"

"Married?" Camilla dispelled the idea with a laugh, slightly put out that her dark hint has been ignored. "Sheridan and I have been together so long we're almost like brother and sister, but we've never been, ah, officially married ."

"Not married?" gulped Noreen.

"I've never been married. I like my independence."

"But yez said, you was like, a a kept woman?"

"That was my joke."

Never married! The buggy gave a jolt that made Roisin wail. Among the family portraits so readily on display in the Guests' Lounge and TV Room, there are several women who have never married, holding ugly babies against their bolster chests. Noreen's astonished gaze is comparing Camilla with those crewel-working great-aunts, finding a place for her among the failed huntresses, old maids

"You look so young!" she gasped, as if unmarried bliss was in her mind inextricably linked with spinster middle age. "You look like a fashion model!"

Camilla squeezed the housewife's arm more tightly, and leaned close to rub her cool pale cheek against Noreen's warm, rosy one. "I've been young for so long," she murmured, "I can't remember being anything else."

"Ah!" sighed Noreen. "For two pins I'd"

What would she do? Take Camilla away from all this? The blushing ploughboy, the sophisticated older woman, the configurations are endless; and pity may play a part. It's all grist to Camilla's mill. It's like a transfusion of fresh blood, without any of those ugly, depressing emergency-room details.

Love is the hunger on which we feed.