‘The Stuff of Life’ by Nicola Harlow
Cats: Vampire Fiction|Meeting Veronica for the first time is like coming face to face with a flesh-and-blood icon. She could be the Veronica who wiped the face of Christ, or, with her titian hair and creamy throat, the one who graced movie screens of the Forties and Fifties.
We meet at her cellar flat in Leeds. It’s one of those trendy makeovers of derelict canal-side warehouses and reeks of new money and clubland chic. I’m a hack on the Leeds Gazette – a free weekly, offering local news, ads for jumble sales and the odd press release for some carpet warehouse owned by an Eighties backing singer hoping to diversify. People say I lack ambition. The money here is crap and the working conditions less that any EEC directive would contemplate. But we all have to work somewhere and I’m not doing too badly. In the two years I’ve worked for the Gazette, I have risen from telesalesman in the classified ads section to the lofty heights of Local Hero interviewer.
Hence my run-in with the stunning Veronica Cardineau. Winner of the National Society for the Care of the Elderly prize of Carer of the Year and a local girl to boot, she must be worth, ooh, a four column inches at least. Subject”s a bit drab for a picture (winners of stuff like this are normally middle-aged matrons who stink of cabbage and piss) but she”ll get her the mandatory fifteen minutes.
My first sight of her puts paid to any preconceptions. I should have turned up with a photographer. She’s cover-girl material and the way that long white shroudy dress thing She’s wearing sets off her hair, she’d have to be in full colour.
“Wine?” she offered once I’d introduced myself.
I nod enthusiastically. Wine makes me gag but I want her to like me.
Hell, I want her to love me. There’s a bottle of claret on a wildly fashionable driftwood coffee table and she pours us both a glass. It tastes thick and rich and faintly metallic. Not half bad. The flat is in semi darkness with only the odd glitter of moonlight reflecting from the filthy canal water outside. Despite its clutter-free Zen serenity, it smells foul, of garbage and earth and decay. I open my notebook.
“So how long have you worked with old people?” I perch awkwardly on one of the pale coloured easy chairs and hope there isn’t any mud on my trousers.
“Almost twenty years.” Her voice is scarcely a whisper and I have to lean forward to hear.
“You don’t look -”
“Old enough? Looks can be very deceiving.”
“Sure.” Her complexion is flawless. I’d have put her at twenty-five, tops.
She sits opposite me in a matching chair. Above the white frock, it seems that her youthful head floats alone in space, like one of those disembodied angels you get blowing the four winds in the corners of medieval maps. “So how old are you?”
“Old enough. A lady never confesses. A gentleman never asks.”
I gulp the wine. The Gazette likes to date and categorise its subjects. “Troubled Toddler 2″,”Beleaguered Binman 34″ and Pining Pensioner 89″ were a few of my recent offerings.
“I have to put something,” I mutter, pathetically.
She smiles; I grimace, worried that the wine has stained my teeth. OK. Calm down. I’ll think of something to get over the age thing. It’s a bugbear of the ed’s at the moment. Probably because he’s going through his midlife crisis and everyone suddenly seems younger than him.
“Look, Mr Burrows -”
“Daniel, please.”
“Mr Burrows, I have nursed the dying for a long time. It is my job. Frankly the prize is an insult. Caring for people is a pleasure, a privilege. I have learned so much from them, about -”
“Death?” I lean forward eagerly.
She shakes her head vigorously; the lustrous hair seems to shower refracted moonbeams across the room. “Life. The dying can teach us much about life.”
The wine sings through my limbs. I feel nauseous and excited and fearful all at once.
“So you don’t think you deserve the prize?”
She flinches. Shutters come down over those fathomless black eyes.
“No more than anyone else who holds a hand as a spirit slips away, who calls a priest, who drops vital liquid into a parched mouth. It is my job, my livelihood, Mr Burrows, the vocation for which I have been chosen.”
I tap my pen on the edge of my pad. Ink floods out. The hair on the back of my arms rises as a cool aquatic breeze filters across me. The fabric of her dress ripples and lifts.
“Do you ever… Miss Cardineau, do you ever want to hasten a death? Your patients must be in some pain.” I know the interview has taken a wrong turn but can’t stop myself. There’s something about this old young woman that is drawing me on, something too good, too bloody saintly to be true.
“Euthanasia, Mr Burrows, is against the law. Even a journalist should know that.”
“But…there are ways, drugs, means … You wouldn’t put a dog through the kind of agony some people have to suffer.”
Veronica shakes her head slowly. A small knowing smile plays across her bloodless lips.
“I nurse the dying. I help those in my care enter the next world by succouring them in this. Food, water, shelter, love. The stuff of life is my business. I cherish, I do not kill.”
My head is reeling. The dank stench of the canal seems to be increasing. I feel sick. Perhaps the wind has changed direction. I’m hungry and should never have accepted wine on an empty stomach.
“Then you must be an angel,” I whisper, scratching in my pad to appear busy. Dark ink oozes onto my jeans.
She laughs and a thousand needles seem to stab at my eyes.
Perspiration beads and drips down my forehead. Salty drops of it hit my lips and I lick them up greedily. A raging thirst sears my throat. Maybe I’m coming down with something.
“More wine?” she asks.
I nod as she refills my glass; I shrink away when she places a cool palm on my shoulder. Her touch is like lightening. No one ever warns you of situation like this when you start work.
“Mr Burrows, how long have you been a journalist?”
I tell her of my fast-track career at the Gazette.
“And before that?”
I blink miserably. Interviewees never usually give a shit about me. They all want to talk about themselves.
“Oh, this and that. Bar work, apple picking. I did a bit of travelling after uni.”
“I see. And before that?”
I shake my head. “School – usual stuff.”
She laughs derisively and moves towards the window. Although the moon is now hidden behind a silver-edged cloud and the room is dark, I can still see her clearly. She has a kind of luminescence, an inner light. She turns around and her gaze is terrible.
“But surely your particular talents are wasted on such trivia. What have you learned from your experiences?”
I cower. “Learned?”
She smells of honey and new-mown hay.
“Let me explain, Mr Burrows. You are on record for holding down a total of two thousand, eight hundred and twenty five jobs to date and yet you have never risen above the post of under manager. Let’s see now, what is there? Oh yes, shepherd, sweetshop assistant, sewer worker … and those are just a few under S! You are a failure, Mr Burrows and I have been sent to relieve you of your duties.”
Unable to face her heavenly brightness, I screw up my eyes and grope blindly for the door. My hands find only soft, thick feathers and the perfumed tresses of her hair. She holds me in a preternatural grip.
Desperate now, I try to reply but my mouth is too dry to operate.
“You see,” she continues, “God wants the best for all. Yes, even you are part of His Grand Design. He wants you to use the gifts He has given you to better yourself. But what have you done? Dallied in endless shops and farms and factories, frittered away your valuable time by remaining as ignorant as the day you were born. I have nursed ordinary mortals who were born crippled, blighted impaired and yet they have overcome their difficulties to make great things of their lives. You, with all your talent and time have achieved less than most people do in ten miserable years. You have never read the bible or taken a degree, you have never saved a life or attempted to understand the way the world works. For God’s holy sake, you even believed all that nonsense about garlic and crucifixes, so your diet, both carnal and spiritual has been dull to say the least! You’re immortal! Why didn’t you even test the theories out? I’m afraid, Daniel or Obadiah, or Elizabeth, or whatever you call yourself these days, that, after just over four centuries, your time has just run out.”
I am a wreck now. If only she’d leave me alone. I know I could have done better but there was always something standing in my way. My animal nature for one. All that bloodlust and having to go out in the dark is rather limiting, you know. Not having a reflection in the mirror means I cut my own hair, and being no Vidal Sassoon, I usually end up looking like some unemployable layabout … And to be honest, I’ve never been bothered with book learning. I’ve always meant to get down to it – start with the Greek and Roman classics, even read the Torah and the Koran, but somehow, it never happened. The day-to-day business of just living seems to use up all my time.
The angel stretches up to her full height and flexes her wings.
“You know, the others like you have managed a lot better,” she says.
“Why, they all have their fingers in scientific pies. Most of the major drug and research companies working with synthetic blood are owned by your kind. The old days of scrabbling round in dark alleys is long gone. Their whole existence is entirely humane – which was the way God always intended. You, however -”
“My kind?” I screech. “I’ve never met anyone … I thought I was the only one. Left over from some Balkan massacre.”
“There are over thirty million of you. You meet them every day. It’s just that you were always too lazy or too stupid to find out.”
“So what are you going to do to me?”
The apartment is freezing suddenly. Veronica provides only the cold light of an operating theatre. The sickening stench now surrounds me, choking, enveloping.
“I specialise in care of the dying and that is why you have come,” she says softly, stroking my contorted face with marble smooth fingers.
“Thought you said you never kill,” I mutter.
She smiles graciously.
“I don’t.”
“Angel Of Mercy wins Care Prize”, reads the caption of a two-column piece on page sixteen of the Gazette. I hand in my notice once I’ve written it up. I did toy with putting down the real story for posterity, but who the hell would have believed me, anyway. Now I work in a soup kitchen for the homeless and do a part time B.A. in philosophy. I read a lot and have joined a local history group. It’s weird how much stuff has happened over the years without me noticing. I’m aging quickly now, mortally fast. People say I do too much but I just laugh at them. You’re only here once, I tell them.
(c) Nicola Harlow, All Rights Reserved
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