I fell in love with a red-head on the bus.

Her eyes were sparkling windows of blue, glassy and serene. Her hair was a shock of amber that fell in waves about her shoulders. Sometimes she wore it tied back in a taut ponytail. When I think of her, I see a pair of skinny trousers, cut short, in black and white pinstripe, and an old cream jumper wrapped around her body, pulled up underneath her chin. It was winter. Our breaths made steaming clouds in the night air; fogged up the windows on the inside of the old Leyland bus. We watched each other with cautious eyes.

Her name was Isabella.

She spent her time making blood. Later, she would talk to me about the nature of blood; show me her little laboratory that smelled of formaldehyde. She would hunch for hours over her enormous electronic microscope, rearranging plasma, synthesising the fluid of life. She would smile to herself at little triumphs; rub the back of her aching neck with her left hand. I never quite grasped the complexities of those hours, the nuances that made the blood of one person so different from that of another. Still, now, I have difficulty understanding the allure, the reasons she did what she did. Looking back, with the benefit of hindsight, I think she saw it as a failure on my part, this lack of comprehension, and it undermined our relationship from the very start. But at the time we were full of hope and optimism, and all things were new. If I showed my ignorance she would simply smile at me knowingly, and then kiss me brightly on the forehead, her lips leaving a cool, damp impression on my skin.

When I first saw her she was poring over the pages of a scientific journal, her lips carefully following the words of some difficult passage, silently committing them to memory. The bus shelter curved in a protective arc over her head, its dirty plastic barrier holding off the snowflakes of yet another miserable English night. They tumbled gently around me, catching every now and then on my cuff or sleeve, only to wink silently out of existence like tiny stars.

I smiled.

She didn’t even notice me.

I took my place under the shelter and willed the bus to come around the corner.

Beside me, an ancient, careworn woman was standing hunched over the figure of an elderly man, lecturing him on the benefits of having turned up the sleeves of her cardigan.

“I just cut them off about here,” she said, indicating with her finger, “and then turned them up to here. I did one the same for little Violet, you know.”

“They just come down to me knuckles, these do, these sleeves.” He looked up at her plaintively.

“Just pop round one afternoon Tom, I’ll do anything, me.” A pause. “I’m up at the cemetery tomorrow mind, about twelve o’clock. Shan’t stay long, be home for quarter-to.”

“Aye. I’ll be at the bookie’s, meself.” He looked up at me and winked.

I turned away quickly, embarrassed. Two eyes peered up from the pages of the journal, momentarily lost, as if the sudden segue-way between theory and reality had left her disorientated, out-of-sorts. She looked over. I held her gaze. She smiled. I smiled back. The bus came around the corner.

It skidded to a stop about three feet from the shelter, causing a wave of dirty water to slop up onto the kerb. The doors slid open with a pneumatic hiss. We clambered on board. Noisily, the driver gunned the engine and we headed off into the night, surrounded by the odd, uncomfortable bustle of disparate strangers trying to make their way home.

The next day I was surprised to find her take a seat beside me. I shuffled up to make room and pulled my headphones away from my ears, unsure of her intentions. I glanced over. She was smiling at me expectantly, wanting to talk.

“What are you listening to?” Her voice was soft and sugary, perfect.

“The Throwing Muses.”

“I love their University album.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, I’ve got it at home somewhere. Haven’t listened to it in years though. Too busy with, well…” She indicated her reading.

I smiled. “I know that feeling.” I rubbed my hand over my chin, the rough, unshaven bristles like sandpaper against my palm.

“Sometimes it just feels like the whole world is conspiring against you, and you only wish you could step back for a moment to take a breath.”

I stared at her for what seemed like an age. “Do you fancy a drink?”

The pub was cosy and out of the way. Snowflakes spattered on the windowpanes, rolling across the wet glass like tiny beads. An open fire flickered in the grate, casting dark shadows across the faces of the other patrons, exposing their sinister sides to anyone who cared to look. Couples whispered to one another in hushed tones. I spilt her drink.

“I’m so sorry. I’ll just get you another.”

“No, please, let me.”

“No, really.”

We laughed at our awkwardness. I bought the drink.

Later, when I thought she wouldn’t notice, I watched her breathing, the little bird-like fluttering in her chest as she formed her words, the gentle pursing of her lips as she exhaled. I was exhilarated. She caught me watching and smiled at me inquisitively. I looked away, embarrassed. Her blue eyes flashed with amusement.

It wasn’t long before we found ourselves back at my place.

I never got past putting the kettle on. We tugged at each other’s clothes, awkward and still unfamiliar. She wrestled me to the ground amongst a pile of magazines and old wrappers, planting kisses over my face and hands. I followed the contours of her delicate body with my fingertips, enjoying the curve of her hips, cupping her small, round breasts in my palms. Her skin was warm and soft and smooth.

Quietly, gently, her lower lip clasped tightly between her teeth, she reached down and pulled me inside her.

In the morning I woke to find she had gone. A little yellow Post-it note was stuck to the alarm clock, flapping gently in the draught from the half-open window. Light filtered through in hazy streams, picking out the dust motes that swirled and danced in the air all around me. I reached over and tugged at the message. It came away in my hand.

Tomorrow night, 56 Westbrook Ave, 8pm
Isabella xxx

I smiled to myself and clambered out of bed. I could hardly wait.

Fifty-six Westbrook Avenue was a crumbling old Victorian townhouse; enormous, with large red steps leading up to the front door and a little iron railing that ran parallel to the road. Inside the front yard, huge leaves flapped like elephant’s ears in the cold breeze and moss poked up inquisitively through the cracks between the paving slabs. A lamp glowed dimly from behind the curtains in the downstairs living room. I rapped the knocker briskly and drew my coat up around my neck to fight off the chill.

After a few moments the door creaked open and Isabella was smiling at me from within. The sight of her face filled me with a sudden sense of well-being and relief.

“Hi.”

“Hi.”

I handed her my coat and struggled to find something to say as she hung it over the banister. A tall grandfather clock ticked ominously in the corner. “Nice place. How was your day? Isn’t it cold tonight?” I mumbled incoherently.

Isabella laughed, and, stepping closer, touched her finger against my lips. I relented. Her face gleamed in the low light of the hallway. I took that face in my hands and kissed it. Twice.

Afterwards, she clasped my hand tightly between her own and led the way to the dining room. Candles spluttered, arranged in a random fashion upon the large table. The flickering shadows they cast on the walls and ceiling reminded me of tiny butterflies darting to and fro, dancing in myriad patterns and shapes.

She handed me two glasses and smiled.

I cut my hand opening the bottle of wine.

“Bugger!”

“Oh, I am sorry, have you…?” She never finished her sentence, but took my proffered hand and held it still for a moment. Tiny beads of red blood swelled to the surface of my fingertip before trickling down across the back of my knuckles in little tributaries. I shifted slightly to stop them from dripping. Isabella had a strange look in her eyes. I wondered for a moment if she was exasperated with my constant clumsiness around her.

“Stay there for one second.” She dashed out of the room. The blood felt warm and sticky against my skin.

“Here you go.” I heard her voice from around the doorway before I saw her hurry back into the room. She held out a swab of cotton wool and I took it gratefully, dabbing at my sticky hand. She kissed me sympathetically on the cheek.

After I had finished she took the cotton wool and showed me to the bathroom. The old stairs creaked and heaved as I presented them with my weight. I rinsed my hands and found a plaster in the mirrored cabinet that hung on the wall above the sink. I rubbed some of the cold water over my face, judging my reflection in the mirror. I felt like a buffoon.

Isabella’s towels were flung haphazardly over a chrome rail that ran along one wall; they were soft and pink and smelled of her. Cursing myself for being so clumsy, I dabbed myself dry and found my way back down to the dining room.

Later that night, as we lay together in bed, warmed by the soft glow of candles and each other, she stroked my hand as if to apologise for the violation of the broken glass. I held my breath and listened to the sound of cars passing beneath her window, to her gentle exhalations as she quietly fell asleep. Just then, at that point, the future seemed so welcoming; a bright, exhilarating place filled with opportunity and promise.

The next week I borrowed my brother’s car–an old, blue Ford Fiesta with patches of powdery rust over each of the wheel arches–and drove us up to Whitby. We stopped on the way by a quiet patch of moorland and bought an ice cream from the back of a makeshift stall. The old man behind the hatch had smiled at us warmly, and Isabella, trying to catch each tiny tributary of melted vanilla as it ran down the side of her cone, managed to end up with smears of it all over her chin. She drew herself up to me and laughed, trying in vain to keep a straight face. As I wiped her clean with the edge of my thumb, her eyes shone, and I think I’d never felt so happy. Her fingers trailed in mine as we made our way back to the car, the man on the ice-cream stall watching us, amusement flashing in his eyes.

We arrived in Whitby just after noon; I swung the Fiesta into a car park immediately outside the town centre and we walked in along the water’s edge. We ate fish and chips on the docks, sitting on little benches and huddled against the spray, and watched the fisherman unloading their hauls in large crates full of ice and silvery scales. Isabella pointed to the Abbey high on the cliff top, sticking out against the horizon like a jagged, broken tooth. It seemed ominous to me, a brooding ruin facing out towards the sea, warding away all unwanted visitors.

After lunch she dragged me into a little bookshop next door to an amusement arcade.

“Come on. I have to get a souvenir!”

I sighed theatrically but was disarmed by her childlike glee.

Isabella bought a copy of Dracula; the elderly woman behind the counter looked expectant and tired, as if worn down by the constant repetition of her day. She perked up for a moment when I asked her for a copy of Titus Groan, but then sighed and shook her head.

“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 favourite 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 towards 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 odour, 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 specialisation, 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 North East 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 realised 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 odour 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 clamoured 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 apologise 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 kerb 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 rear-view 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 towards 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 lasagne. 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 towards 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.

“Oh.”

I stepped closer. She opened the door a little wider.

She looked disheveled, in disarray. Her hair was unkempt and her clothes were crumpled as if she’d been wearing them for a number of days. There was a disturbing, almost forlorn look in her eyes and her face was drawn and pale, pasty, even. She looked tired, unravelled, as if she were starting to come apart at the seams. I had to fight the urge to suddenly gather her up in my arms and hold her, to try to save her from the world, from herself. Behind her, the laboratory was a riot of noise: the sound of a pump, gurgling with fluid; a printer spewing out a data file; a radio insistently hammering out an unfamiliar dance tune. I understood why she hadn’t heard me calling her name from down the hall.

I tried to get her attention, but she seemed distracted, keen to get back to the lab, or to get away from me.

“How have you been?”

She shrugged. “Okay.” Her eyes flicked back and forth nervously as though it made her uncomfortable to look me in the eye.

“Look, can we go somewhere to talk?”

Her reply was drowned out by the insistent droning of the pump from the other room. I pushed on the door, trying to see over her shoulder. I raised my voice above the clamour. “What are you doing in there…?”

Isabella shuffled awkwardly, blocking my view. “No. Not now.” Her voice was firm. I realised she was responding to the first of my questions. “You need to go.”

I wasn’t sure what to do, what to say. I reached out to put a hand on her shoulder, to try to reassure her that I only wanted to make things right between us, but she winced and twisted away from me as if the simple act of me touching her was enough to cause her pain. Her elbow struck the door as she shifted around and it bounced open, banging loudly as it clattered against the wall. I caught a view of the inside of the lab. A naked male corpse was lying prone on a trolley in the centre of the room, wired up to a host of elaborate medical machinery. Cables snaked from the man’s chest in a web-work of plumbing and bags of unidentifiable fluid hung on intravenous drips from a metal framework over the bed. It looked like a scene from a cheap horror movie; the workshop of a latter-day Frankenstein, a crazed scientist in the process of creating a monster. I pushed past Isabella, forcing my way into the room. Electric light gave everything a clean, clinical sheen. The radio continued to hiss with the pounding of drums and static.

“What the hell?”

The pump was thumping noisily as it sucked blood from the body, feeding it through long coils of piping. I could see it sloshing into a large glass bottle by the foot of the trolley red and dark and syrupy.

I wheeled on Isabella, confused and a little scared. “Where did you get a human corpse?”

She stared at me, a stern, emotionless expression on her face. “It’s not a corpse.”

I looked again. The body, although emaciated, was still breathing, its chest rising and falling to a slow, soft rhythm, in time with the laboured wheezing of the apparatus that was slowly alleviating it of its lifeblood.

She shifted closer. Her voice was gentle in my ear. Her breath felt warm against my cheek. “Look closer.” And more quietly: “It’s you.”

I gazed down in abstract horror at the man lying on the trolley before me. It was true. He had my face.

For a moment everything seemed to stop. The noise was gone; replaced only by the roar of blood rushing through my ears. I stared down at the body before me in grim fascination. His eyes were closed, his face unshaven and covered in a burr of fine black bristles. He had the same long, equine nose and the same square chin that faced me in the mirror every morning. Yet he was thin, painfully so. His cheeks were hollow and drawn and his ribcage was clearly visible through his translucent, papery skin. His lips were dry and cracked. It was clear he was both severely undernourished and dehydrated. His blood was flowing freely through the fat tubing, sloshing into the glass demijohn with every beat of his weak heart, assisted by the pump that was inexorably drawing him closer to his death. I wanted to feel sick but, instead, I felt simply numb. He wasn’t me, couldn’t be me, but he was a part of me, somehow.

I turned to Isabella, unable to speak. She could see the question in my eyes. She took a moment to fiddle with the volume on the radio, then turned to me and began to explain.

“Accelerated cloning.” She shrugged, her face still an emotionless mask, unreadable. She hesitated and I thought for a moment that she wasn’t going to continue. I think she was as numb as I was, shocked by the confrontation, the need to relive everything all at once. Then: “I grew him when I thought you weren’t coming back.” A pause. “I wanted to be close to you. I needed to be close to you.” It sounded like she was pleading for forgiveness. I couldn’t believe her, couldn’t understand how she could do this, how she could go to these incredible lengths. I shook my head.

“Then why this?” I waved at the jar of blood on the floor and the tubing coming out of the man’s–out of my–chest. My voice was a hoarse whisper. “Why?”

“It didn’t work. He’s got no mind. He’s not you. He’s just a body, a bag of blood and bones. I didn’t know what to do.” I realised now that she was weeping, tears running in sparkling tributaries down her cheeks, splashing her clothes. “And then it hit me. O-Negative blood. Anyone can take a transfusion of O-Negative blood. If I drained him I could sell it on, make a fortune. I’d already seeded him with nanomachines, the moment he was fully formed. All I had to do was bag it up…” She sobbed, coughing back on the tears. I think my face must have betrayed my horror, my judgement. “What else could I do!” She broke down, collapsing to her knees, her face in her hands.

I looked back at the body on the table before me. “It was never me, Isabella. It never could have been.” And then I did the only thing I could. I couldn’t let it live like this. I grabbed for an implement from a nearby tray–a sharp, surgical scalpel–and thrust it deep into his throat. It was soft and offered little resistance. The body shuddered and began to spasm, but his eyes remained closed and no sound escaped his lips. I pulled the scalpel out and thrust again, channelling all my anger, my frustration, my fear into those blows.

“No!”

I heard Isabella scream behind me and turned, realising too late that she was rushing me from across the room. She fell against me hard, sending us both sprawling to the floor. I jarred my elbow sharply on the trolley and cracked my head against the tiles.

For a moment, the world turned upside down. I lay there, dazed, the pressure of Isabella on top of me like a dead weight. My head was spinning with pain. I tried to speak, but the weight of her on my chest made it difficult to breathe. Gasping, I pulled my arms free, then pushed her to one side, before rolling over and scrabbling up onto my knees.

“Isabella? Are you okay?”

She was still, unconscious. Her hair had spilled out across the floor and her face looked slack and peaceful, all the tension, the concern, the confusion drained out of her. I blinked, trying to get my bearings. One of the medical monitors was screaming, a howling alarm to warn us that the man on the trolley had arrested, his heart failing, the remaining blood draining out through the gaping hole in his throat. I turned to Isabella; shook her gently to rouse her. She remained still. Confused, I looked her up and down. Then I saw it: the scalpel sticking out of her chest, surrounded by a growing Mandelbrot of blood. It was stark and red against the clean white of her lab coat. The knife had struck her straight through the heart, like a stake, so forceful in the fall that it had buried itself almost halfway along its shaft. I fumbled, unsure whether to pull it out or not. My mind went completely blank. I became aware of a terrible, animal keening sound and, for a moment, thought the clone on the trolley was still alive before I realised that the sound was coming from me.

I gathered Isabella up in my arms, rocking her from side to side, telling her everything was going to be okay. Only, in truth, I knew that was not the case. She was already dead, and, in more ways than one, so was I.

There was no panic, no call to the police. For some time I sat with Isabella, the world in tattered shreds around me, the red ruin of the laboratory and the spilt blood a mockery of everything her life had been. I couldn’t forgive her for what she’d done to me, her strange, exotic form of vampirism. She had taken the very essence of what I was and toyed with it, made it something alien, turned it into something it was never intended to be. But all the same, I never wanted this. I smoothed her hair back from her face, closed her eyelids with my fingertips.

After a while, sitting there in stunned silence, the sounds of the medical equipment still loud and insistent around me, my remorse began to give way to a strange kind of shocked relief. There was a sense of peace, of closure. It was over. At least, this way, I had my answer.

In a haze, still numb from the shock, I took the corpse from the trolley, disconnecting the myriad pipes and wires, and laid it beside her on the laboratory floor. Then, after cleaning myself up as best I could, I fled the house, leaving the two of them together, peaceful, as if sleeping. I hoped they were happy in their dreams.

Outside, night had fallen and the world existed only in the impassionate glow of the streetlamps. I made my way back to the car. Behind me, the house was silent, still.

I dropped my jacket onto the passenger seat, running a hand over my face. I clambered into the driver’s seat. My heart was pounding in my chest. I looked back at the house, thinking of her there, in the lab, her eyes tired and glazed, her smile fixed and unmoving. It was as if there had been only one inevitable outcome of our dark and passionate affair, only one possible resolution, and there had been nothing I could have done to stop it. Now, finally, it was over.

I knew the police wouldn’t come looking for me; as far as their forensic tests would show, I was dead, lying on the floor beside my lover, murdered in bizarre circumstances, in a strange laboratory at the back of an old house. The clone and I had changed places, adopted each other’s roles. Now, like him, I was new to the world. A world without Isabella. Somehow I had to find my place in it, had to start again. I had no idea where to even begin.

I turned over the car engine and crawled slowly away from the kerb. I could hear Isabella’s voice, echoing around in my thoughts:

“Sometimes it just feels like the whole world is conspiring against you, and you only wish you could step back for a moment to take a breath.”

A moment later, I flashed the car headlamps at a pedestrian making his lonely way home, and moved off into the anonymity of the night.

END

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George Mann is the Consultant Editor of Solaris Books, the SF/F imprint of BL Publishing. He is the editor of The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction and The Solaris Book of New Fantasy, and the author of The Human Abstract (Telos), Time Hunter: The Severed Man (Telos), Time Hunter: Child of Time (Telos, with David J. Howe) and The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (Constable Robinson).

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