The Book of Apex: Volume 1 of Apex Magazine Read online

  “We’re not that type of bookshop, honey.”

  Isabella hurried me out of the door, her book rustling in its brown paper bag.

  “Now for the beach!”

  We made our way down to the seafront for a walk. It was quiet with just a handful of children playing amongst the rock pools, searching for crabs or other monsters left behind by the retreating sea. Isabella kicked her shoes off to run in the sand and I watched her dance, the breeze coming in off the water to whip her hair up around her face. I couldn’t stop myself from smiling. I couldn’t believe my own luck.

  The drive home took three hours and Isabella fell asleep in the passenger seat.

  It started to rain and the windscreen wipers on the old Fiesta creaked and moaned like a metronome as we made our way along empty roads, the twilight and the misty rain leaving me with the impression that we were driving through our own private universe, a pocket world of our own devising.

  When we finally pulled up outside her house, I shook her gently awake. She unbuckled her seatbelt and sleepily nuzzled my shoulder. Her hair smelled of vanilla.

  “Is it still raining?”

  “No, it stopped about half an hour ago.”

  “I’ve had a lovely day. Thank you.” She planted a kiss on my cheek.

  “Go on, go and get yourself some sleep. Call me.”

  She clambered out of the passenger seat, her bag slung easily over one shoulder, and made her way up the little red steps at the front of her house. She stood and waved from her front door as I pulled away, the car radio blaring an old, fuzzy version of The Who’s “My Generation.”

  The following weeks passed by in a heady frenzy of conversation, laughter and sex. Basking in each other’s company, we spent all our free time together. We took trips to visit old country houses, shared secret laughter in the solemnity of a portrait gallery, ate greasy pizzas at her favorite fast food restaurant, had rough sex up against a tree in her childhood park. We strolled the streets together long after midnight, watching the patrons stumbling out of the clubs, vibrantly alive in the neon glow of the city. We took a slow walk by the riverside, our fingers and hearts entwined, the rain thrumming down all around us, hiding us behind its thin veil, secreting us away from the outside world. Our orbits changed; we circled each other like gravity wouldn’t let us come apart. I had time for nothing else in my life.

  It was during those days that I often found her working, hunched over her microscope in the little laboratory at the back of her house, or else receiving samples through the post, tiny vials of red blood that she would set to work on immediately, decoding their new enigma, solving their puzzle as if it meant she were saving the world. She threw herself into her work as though it somehow redeemed her, made her whole. For my part, I was due to start lecturing again at the nearby college and so, after nearly a month of living in each other’s pockets, it was with a heavy heart that I retired to my flat on the other side of town to begin preparatory work for the course. I found it difficult to concentrate on Shakespeare, though, when every word reminded me of Isabella, every passing car made me think of those long hours spent lying beside her in her bed, every song on the radio somehow relevant to how I felt. She was a siren, and I was the sailor caught up in her spell.

  Three days later I received a call.

  “Can you come round?”

  “What, now? I thought you were working?”

  “I’m finished. Look, I have a present for you.” She sounded nervous, full of energy.

  I laughed. “In that case I’ll be round in twenty minutes.”

  In truth, it was nearer to an hour. The bus was late, and I shivered underneath the shelter, my only company a squat, grey pigeon that fluttered about the street pecking at abandoned cigarette ends.

  When the bus finally arrived it was empty. I took a seat toward the front, pushing myself up against the window. Dirty rainwater lined the rubber seals around the window frame where the edges had perished. I shifted to avoid getting wet. Moments later, a man hopped up onto the platform with two small boys in tow. I watched them push and pull at each other’s clothes as their father dropped his change into the ticket machine.

  “Won’t be a tick, I’ve got the change in here somewhere.” He fished around in the pocket of his jeans and then fed some more money into the machine. One of the boys pushed the other onto the floor. The man pretended not to notice. He hesitated for a moment, and then the ticket machine emitted a stream of gaudy paper.

  “Come on, get up off the floor! We’ve got to go and find a seat.”

  I closed my eyes and tried to pretend I was asleep.

  The boys hurtled up the stairs faster than their father could keep up; I could hear their feet pounding on the upper deck, the sound of it creaking underneath their weight. And then: “Pack that in! Now stop that!”

  The bus rolled slowly away from the pavement, the driver gunning the engine to try to stir some life from the ancient machine.

  A few minutes later, we pulled up by a stop a couple of doors down the street from Isabella’s house. As I clambered down from the bus and gave my thanks to the driver, I caught sight of Isabella peering out from behind the curtains of her living room window. I smiled and waved. She pressed her hand against the glass in brief acknowledgment, then disappeared from view. I made my way quickly along the road, passing the dreary façades of old houses which seemed to loom out at me like tired, care-worn faces. My breath steamed in front of my face in the cold. I had the feeling it was going to rain again.

  Moments later, I tried the handle of Isabella’s front door and found it was already open. I stepped inside and drew myself into the warmth, rubbing my hands together to restart my circulation.

  The house seemed quiet. “Hello?”

  “I’m in the back, come on through.”

  I slipped out of my overcoat and dropped it over the arm of the rickety old chair that served as Isabella’s telephone seat, then made my way through to the rear of the house, passing through the dining room on my way to the kitchen. There was a lingering odor, like scented-candles that had long since burned themselves out to leave a cloying, opium-like quality to the air.

  Isabella was standing in the kitchen doorway, her lab coat draped around her shoulders, her hair tied back severely from her face. She looked up as I came into the room and smiled at me coyly. I moved to step forward and embrace her. Laughing, she turned about deftly on her heel and disappeared through the side door into the other room.

  Her voice trailed behind her. “I’ve been working in the lab. Come on in.”

  “I thought you had a present for me?”

  “I do!”

  “Well what...”

  “Patience...”

  I stepped into the laboratory, my nose bristling at the stench of formaldehyde and bleach. Isabella had her back to me, fiddling with something in a refrigeration unit on the back wall. I admit I’d found it odd that someone so clearly talented, with such a demanding specialization, would work from home, but times continued to change and, with technology developing as it was, she’d been able to set up an entire cottage industry here in the northeast of England. Her little laboratory was an extension to her house, a small side room off the kitchen with gleaming clinical surfaces and banks of daunting computer equipment, their screens flickering in the stark glare of the overhead lights.

  I fidgeted uncomfortably and glanced out of the window. Two tiny birds danced around each other on the lawn, fighting over a worm they had managed to extract from the flowerbed. I glanced back at Isabella.

  “Isabella, can’t you just explain...?”

  “In a minute!”

  I waited.

  A few moments later she turned around to face me, smiling like she was about to reveal a secret, and ceremoniously placed a package on the table before me. I looked into her eyes, seeing myself reflected in their glassy surface, noticed how her lips were slightly parted, how the soft skin around her eyes seemed so smooth, so even, so perfect.
I looked down at my present, already full of trepidation over what it might be.

  It was a large plastic sachet filled with a dark red, gelatinous substance. Condensation beaded on its surface like rainwater on tarpaulin. Isabella rubbed her hands together nervously. I pulled a face.

  “There.”

  “This is it?”

  “Your present, yes.”

  “But what...?” I didn’t know what to say, what it was supposed to represent.

  “A pint of your blood.”

  “My blood!” I started, and then stuttered something incoherent. Isabella was smiling expectantly. I must have seemed confused. She pulled out a chair from behind one of her workbenches and guided me to sit down. I looked up at her, speechless.

  “Remember when you cut yourself? Well, you know what it is that I do.”

  I shook my head. “Yes...but why?”

  “It’s not just a replica of your blood. It’s been adapted, tinkered with...improved, I suppose. I’ve bonded the platelets with tiny nanomachines. They ride on the red blood cells, hitching a piggyback through your system. When the adrenaline in your bloodstream reaches a certain level they become active, triggering the pleasure receptors in your brain to generate a natural high. It’s particularly effective during sex. Packets of this stuff fetch thousands of pounds on the black market. Yours even more so. O-Negative is fairly rare.” She looked at me pointedly. “All we need to do is give you a small transfusion...”

  I glanced back from Isabella’s smiling face to the package on the table, then back again, incredulous. I felt violated, disgusted. Abruptly, I pushed myself up from the table, sending the chair skidding across the floor, and struggled past Isabella into the kitchen. The stench of the laboratory was beginning to make my head spin. I heard Isabella returning the chair to its rightful position by the door. I felt like I couldn’t breathe, like I needed to get some air. I couldn’t understand what she’d done.

  It was only then, as I stood in the kitchen rubbing my face in my hands, that I realized I’d brought the sachet of blood along with me. It felt cold and damp against the warmth of my palm, the plasma inside it sloshing around like putrefying jelly. My stomach heaved. My mind went blank. Isabella was calling my name from the doorway. Something inside me snapped.

  I reached out for one of the kitchen knives from the block upon the windowsill and pressed its serrated edge against the bag of blood in my fist. At first the plastic gave a little under the pressure, but then it burst with an expressive pop and showered the worktop with little red droplets, a patter of crimson rain. The smell of iron replaced the odor of bleach, and I almost retched as I drained the fluid away down the kitchen sink, watched it swirl and gurgle as it was swallowed by the hungry maw of the drain. Isabella stood expressionless throughout.

  Now, when I look back on those moments with the clarity of hindsight, I can’t help thinking that a small part of me was also washed away down that hole in the sink, that this one simple act has come to define me, to set out who I am. It is as if, by committing this transgression, this spurious rejection of my own bodily fluid, I displayed my frailties to the world and embarked on a course from which there would be no return, stumbling down one route without properly considering another.

  I had turned to Isabella, angry, emotional and unsure of myself, the hairs on the back of my arms matted with speckles of my own blood. I didn’t know what to say, or how to give voice to my feelings of violation. I didn’t know how to tell her I still loved her, still wanted and needed her, still clamored to hold her and tell her everything was going to be okay. I simply stared at her, my hands covered in blood.

  She hung her head, refusing to look up, as if she couldn’t bear to meet my eyes. As if she were judging me, like I’d let her down in some way. As if everything was my fault, that I’d failed some obscure test she’d prepared for me. As if something had broken between us that could never be repaired.

  She uttered only one further word, which seemed to stick in her throat as she spoke it: “Go.”

  It was terrifyingly firm and hollow.

  I could do or say nothing more. I left.

  It took me a further two days to pick up the telephone.

  “Hi. Isabella? It’s me.” I offered hesitantly to the receiver. I could hear her breathing softly in the background and thought of her as she had been when we had lain together in bed, listening quietly to the cars rolling by in the street below.

  “Isabella? Hello?”

  I was met with only the bubbling sound of static as she returned her handset to the cradle.

  A week later, as I lay half asleep on the sofa, a bottle of cheap Italian wine drained and empty by my feet, I thought I heard the sound of someone rapping on my door. I hesitated, and by the time I made my way along the hall and pulled drunkenly at the latch, they had gone. A gust of frigid air swirled in and hit me like a wall; I felt dizzy and inebriated and returned myself to my makeshift bed.

  The next morning I convinced myself it had been her. I resolved to lay my hands on the Fiesta and drive round that afternoon, to apologize for my reaction and explain that I had misunderstood her intentions; that I had failed to appreciate the implied intimacy and trust in her gesture. I still felt uncomfortable, violated, even, but felt also that I’d come to an understanding of Isabella and her emotional needs. Blood was her livelihood, her life. By rejecting her gift of blood I was, in essence, rejecting her, rejecting everything she stood for. By the same token, if I could only make her see why I had reacted the way I did…. I played the scenario over and over again in my mind’s eye, saw her reaction in a thousand different ways. In some of my fantasies she embraced me earnestly as soon as I stepped through the door, having been through a similar revelatory process, the whole sorry affair helping us to achieve an even greater level of intimacy than before. In others she would look at me awkwardly, chewing her bottom lip and taking her time to come round as I offered her platitudes, before the curl of her lips would betray her true feelings and she would jump to her feet, laughing brightly, clasping my hand and dragging me off to the bedroom where transfusions were unnecessary and the exchange of bodily fluid came in forms less macabre and indecipherable. At the time I had no idea which—if any—of these myriad scenarios would come to pass yet, regardless, I knew I had to find out.

  I took a shower, and then afterwards sat for nearly half an hour on the edge of the bath, drying in the cool draught from the open window. I cut myself shaving, and laughed at the sheer irony as blood spattered stark against the white porcelain of the sink. It seemed almost obscene that something as vital as blood could run so freely, so easily, and that at the same time was so easy to re-engineer, to tinker with, to reconstruct.

  I put the thought out of mind as I attempted to gather myself in preparation for the afternoon’s encounter.

  It was with a knot tied firmly in the pit of my stomach that I drew the car up to the curb alongside Isabella’s house later that afternoon. In my mind I ran through the events as I had planned them, and appraised myself in the rearview mirror. I felt tired and anxious. I had no idea how she was going to react.

  I sat there for a while, willing myself to get out of the car and walk slowly up the path toward her house, to mount the little red steps and rap confidently on the door. There was no sign of her at any of the windows. I waited.

  Finally, I got out of the car, slamming the door shut behind me. I could have been any pre-pubescent schoolboy or condemned man; my heart was hammering wildly in my chest and my palms were clammy with sweat. I knew it was foolish to feel so nervous, but in confronting Isabella I also knew that I was bringing the situation to a head. Whilst the words were left unspoken there was still a chance that everything could be redeemed; once she opened the door there was no turning back, and all the answers would be revealed.

  I brushed myself down and made my way slowly up the steps to the door. I cleared my throat and then rapped the knocker. Standing back, running my fingers nervously through my
hair, I took deep breaths and shuffled my feet on the top step.

  There was no reply.

  I waited for a moment longer, and then tried again. A minute passed like an hour. I peered through the curtains into the living room. It was empty, the TV switched off, a plate of half-eaten food on the floor by the sofa. It looked like the debris of a microwaved lasagna. A magazine lay open on the windowsill. I could just make out the headline at the top of the article, printed on cheap paper in large, lurid fonts: “One Hundred Ways to Impress Your Man!” I shook my head, feeling a brief pang of remorse.

  When I was sure that nobody was going to answer, I decided to try the handle. To my surprise, it turned in my hand. The door creaked open with an expectant sigh. I peered into the hallway. There was no sign of Isabella.

  “Hello?”

  No response.

  “Isabella? It’s me. Can I come in?”

  The silence was eerie, like an absence of something familiar punctuated only by the measured ticking of her old grandfather clock, monotonously counting away the seconds, crawling steadily toward the future. I wondered if she’d gone out and accidentally forgotten to lock the door. Feeling awkward and uninvited, I slipped inside, clicking the door shut behind me.

  “Isabella? Are you home?”

  Nothing.

  Unsure what else to do, I decided to see if she was working in the lab at the back of the house where she may not have heard me come in. I made my way down the hall, through the dining room and into the kitchen. There was a smell of over-ripe fruit and burnt toast. I felt a sharp stab of guilt at the sight of the kitchen sink, this time full of dirty pots and pans, as if I were a criminal returning to the scene of his crime. I called her name again, just to be sure. This time I heard a sound of movement from within the laboratory. My heart lurched.

  “Isabella?”

  The door between the two rooms cracked open a few inches and suddenly she was peering out at me from around the edge of the frame.