Thicker Than Water

In England it’s not biology that’s destiny, it’s geography. London rules the roost and runs the show not because there’s something aristocratic and splendid in the Cockney g–s nene pool but because the Thames flood plain provided the geographical trifecta of rich, fertile soil, a navigable river and a billion acres of forest to make ships out of. Spread your sails and sell your surplus to the world, then come home and throw together the mother of parliaments on your days off. Before long you’re not only ahead of the game, you’re making the bloody rules.

Taking the Richard Branson Express from Kings Cross up to Liverpool, you go out through a whole string of towns that were never in with a chance of becoming the capital of England because they could never get over the accidents of birth: inland, becalmed, bucolic, they surrendered their produce and then their souls to the great maw of London: went straight from farming communities to dormitory suburbs without a protest or a qualm. Now they’re trying to bottle nostalgia and sell it to the tourist trade, but it seems like fewer and fewer people are buying. Stands the church clock at ten to three? Well, that’s bloody British workmanship for you.

Then again, maybe I was just feeling jaundiced because the pain in my ribs wouldn’t go away even though I was popping ibuprofen like Smarties. And because the guy sitting just down the carriage from me was a werewolf.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean he was making a big thing about it. He wasn’t hairy and slavering and going for my throat. In fact, he was just a young guy in an FCUK tee-shirt with a spiked haircut that was black at the roots and blond at the tips. He didn’t look like anything out of the ordinary, apart from the impressive upper-body musculature rising out of a dancer’s waist. But my death-sense spiked into jangling chords whenever he looked at me, which was often, and having to run for the train had left a faint film of sweat on his forehead, so he wasn’t a zombie. That meant he was either carrying a passenger of his own, like Rafi, or else he was a loup-garou. Odds favoured the latter.

He’d boarded the train at Bedford, along with a very striking young woman in salwar kameez who got out her laptop straight away and never once looked up from it, two gloomy, overweight guys in painters’ overalls, a half-dozen suit-and-tie grunts and a couple of amorous teenagers. He’d brought a four-pack of Tennent’s Extra by way of a picnic lunch, but once he realised he was sharing his space with an exorcist he forgot about the beer and fixed his state on me with feral fascination. I’ve never even got close to working out why this is, but the death-sense thing cuts both ways: we know when we’re in the presence of the risen, and they know when they’re looking at someone who can send them down again. Once Mister FCUK had reached that conclusion his gaze never left my face.

I’d have been very happy to pretend I’d seen nothing. He wasn’t hunting and neither was I. But something told me it wasn’t going to be that easy. The loup-garou held up one hand to me in what looked like a wave, all four fingers raised and spread. Then he popped a can of beer and drained it in a couple of swigs.

When it was empty he held up three fingers. Then he opened and polished off a second can, at a somewhat more relaxed pace. A countdown. First I’ll take my refreshment: then I’ll take you.

I pretended to take an interest in the scenery while the loup-garou worked on beer number three and I tried to make up my mind how to handle this› to"3" unfortunate situation. I felt like shit: if anything, even stiffer and wearier than I had the night before. My dreams had been full of Kenny’s feeble, shrieking plea, and I’d drifted between sleep and waking with no clear sense of the boundaries.

Finally I got tired of calculating the odds.

I stood up, exaggerating my movements slightly like a mime artist doing ‘I’m going to take a little stroll now.’ I took my tin whistle out of the inside pocket of my coat, laid it down on the seat and walked away with my hands in my pockets.

I made a sortie to the dining car to buy a styrofoam container full of coffee-coloured beverage. Then instead of going back to my seat I loitered by the door in the little non-space between the carriages, leaning against the wall and looking out through the open window at the fields and trees strobing by. I had one hand on the window frame, the other holding my coffee cup.

After a few moments the door at my back hissed open. The ontologically challenged youth stepped through, the door sliding closed again behind him, and stood watching me, at the edge of my field of vision.

‘The whistle is your thing?’ the loup-garou snarled. His voice had a dry rasp to it, so loud that it sounded as though he had a skiffle board in his throat.