Scarborough Fair

Me: :)

Have you been to Scarborough Fair?

Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme,

Remember me from one who lives there,

For he once was a true love of mine.

Oliver

My pillow felt especially good this morning. Not really sure why, as I was pretty attached to my pillow at the best of times, but this afternoon was the first in a long time that I actually felt vaguely refreshed after sleep. Even after my few years as a vampyre, I still looked for the crack in my curtains to show my how bright it was, and therefore what time it was roughly, and then I realised that my window was shuttered down, and so it was completely dark all the time. I rolled over and looked for my alarm clock. Wiping my eyes so that I could look into the bright green light of the clock display, I turned the thing around so I could see it properly.

Oh fuck no...

Six thirty pm?

I threw the duvet off me and realised that I still had yesterday's clothes on – how the fuck did I sleep through my alarm clock? I never did it, even when I felt like death! And I slept until six fucking thirty? Shit shit shit shit shit!

Had the kids even been to school today? Had they eaten? Had anyone fed the fucking horse?

I took the stairs six at a time and flung myself into the kitchen, and suddenly I was face to face with Anastasie, fully dressed in a striped shirt and jeans, alert, tidy, long hair tied up in a ponytail, an apron loosely tied around her waist.

"Anastasie!" I almost yelled, "Why didn't you wake me up?"

"I picked them all up from school." She said, "Dinner's just in the oven."

I closed my mouth as thought struck me like a slap around the face. First of all, it took me a few seconds to realise that my car had blacked out windows, so she would have been able to drive in the daylight if she covered up between the house and the car, and then it also struck me that she wasn't insured on my car. I would have to talk to her about that later.

I looked around, almost like I was looking for hairs out of place. Everything was quiet, the kids were sitting around the kitchen table, some had homework out, some of the younger ones who didn't have any homework were sitting in front of the TV. I could smell something nice cooking, and finally I could relax. I grasped the side of my head – what was wrong with me to oversleep like that? "Er, thanks." I said, "Thank you." I had another flash thought, "Did you feed the horse?"

I always left the feed ready the morning before so that it saved time for me of an evening, and hay and water and mucking out wasn't rocket science.

"She's fine." She said, "I gave her the food you left out and James helped me loads."

I sighed internally. "You've done a great job Anastasie but, why didn't you wake me?"

She looked sheepish for a moment. "Well..." she said, twisting her fingers around her hands, "I, er, I kinda, turned your alarm clock off."

What? "What?"

She walked forward out of the kitchen and into the hall, pushing the door, which had about a million coats on it, to. She turned to face me. "Um..." she said, "Oliver, I saw you yesterday, when you came upstairs – you were nearly collapsing..."

I rolled my eyes at her like a severely and genuinely disappointed parent. "Anastasie..." I moaned.

"I know I know but you were so tired..."

"Anastasie!" I said, "You, can't just muck around like that!"

"I didn't mean..."

"I don't need any more people thinking that I can't handle all of this." I said sternly, throwing my hands in the air, "Because I can. Please don't do it again."

I pushed the door back and kicked the doorstop against it, and walked back into the kitchen, trying desperately to calm myself down after apparently getting worked up over nothing. My stomach grumbled violently, and I realised how hungry I was. I closed my eyes for a second, before going to sit down at the kitchen table, trying not to let her or the kids see that I did it because I thought I might fall any second. My throat burned – food alone wouldn't give me the strength I needed.

Yianna

I received a letter that morning. I had decided that I was going to travel back to Scarborough today, instead of yesterday, when the trial ended. We weren't allowed to know the outcome of the trial at the time, we just had to make our votes and leave. As I sat in my pyjamas, coffee in hand, and read the letter, I sighed. There were four of us that had made our thoughts quite clear, even to each other, myself, Spiridion, Sandra the dragon in Dragon's Den, and Adrian, the vet. The result was four against eight. I could come to my own conclusions. The children stayed with the mother, and the father gave 75% of his salary to her. When I thought of that vile woman, that evil cow I realised just how deeply wrong some things in this world are. The mother gets custody of the children, because the mother is always the victim.

Spiridion's phone, whenever I rang it, always went straight to answer phone, so when I rang it and prepared to leave a message, I was surprised when he picked it up.

"Hello?"

"Spiridion?"

His enthusiasm was shocking. "Yianna." He said dryly, "What is it?"

"She won." Was all I could say, my throat dry.

"I know." He said matter-of-factly.

"What are we gonna do?"

He laughed sarcastically. "What are we going to do? Yianna? We? There is nothing to be done."

Even though I knew he was right, I couldn't help but want to throw my phone at the floor. "That's it? That's all you're gonna say?"

"And you wondered why I took an Atheist Oath."

"What?"

"You're slow today." Came the snide remark.

"One lost court case isn't a reason to give up on Nyx Spiridion."

He laughed merrily. "Oh isn't it?" he said, "I would have thought it was more than enough."

Oliver

Later on I found Anastasie sitting in the living room, after the kids had gone to bed, cup of tea in hand, her knees curled up in front of her and covered by one of the blankets we kept draped over the backs of the sofas. I went and sat down in the armchair nearest the sofa she was on – I was fairly sure I owed her an apology.

"You cold?" I asked. Ask a stupid question – the girl was thin that she had nothing to insulate her, even though it wasn't that cold in here.

"A bit." She said, sipping her tea. She was tired now. "How do you do this every day?"

"I'm used to it." I said, "Hey um..." I began, "I just wanted to apologise, for being sharp with you earlier."

"Don't have to apologise." She said, looking at the dead fireplace.

"Since my parents died..." my words stuck whenever I said that, I couldn't help the pause, "And I've been taking care of them, people look at me and shake their heads, and they don't believe that I can do it on my own." I said, and finally she looked at me, "And it happens so much, even now, and it makes me so fed up, that, I just have to prove these people wrong." I sighed, "I'm sorry, you didn't know."

"Was just trying to let you get a bit of rest." She said, "If we can get something sorted, then we can share the work and we can both get rest."

"Hm..." I nodded, "But I will always be fatigued, to an extent. It's just something I've gotta live with for now."

"Why's that?"

"I'm an adult vampyre Anastasie. Doesn't matter how much food I eat."

"You need blood."

"I need blood to be at full strength." I explained to her, "And drinking blood means having a significant other."

"And you don't have time for a significant other." She finished my point for me. I justified it with a nod. "The House had donors, doesn't it?"

I knew what she meant – she meant live human donors. "I uh, I don't like using them. I have very little respect for people who are literally willing to sell themselves to us."

"Well maybe you'll have time for a significant other now." She said, "I'll babysit or something, you can, go out on the town!" she joked.

I laughed. "Thanks!" I said,

She smiled. "Just because you're basically a parent doesn't mean you should be lonely."

"I'm not lonely." I smiled back, "Just weak. I'll live." There was a pause, "Anastasie, I want to be a parent, but I never will be." I said, "And neither will you."

The thought seemed to hit her softly. "I hadn't even thought about having kids." She said quietly.

"I never did." I told her, "Until I became one by default." It was a strange feeling, talking about this, "But now that I am..." I paused for breath, "I've never been happier."

She looked at me with a curious expression. "Really?"

"I've always liked kids." I said, smiling to myself, "It's why I wanted to become a teacher. But, like you, I never thought about having kids of my own, even if I were still human I'd still be too young to even be starting think about it so it never crossed my mind. And then, when I started looking after my brothers and sisters, I started wondering if my own kids would be like them." I said, "And then I realised what I was..." I sighed, "A vampyre. And sterile."

"Why are we sterile?"

"Pff, ask Ameliya."

"I never liked Vamp Anatomy." She said, "I don't know why I was sifted into that class in the first place. Guess I should pay more attention to it."

"It's not something you ever think about..." I said, "Because for humans it goes without saying, 'I'll have kids one day', and then you realise that it's one more bit of normality gone from your life. It's hardwired into humans that they have to reproduce and it's a bit of hardwiring that you never lose even when you become a vampyre."

There was a pause again. "You really wanna be a dad don't you?" she said gently, her voice soft.

I looked down at my lap. "Yeah."

She smiled at me. "That's great."

"Huh?"

She blinked, her lips tense like she was trying to stop herself from crying. "My dad never wanted to know me..." she said, sniffing, "When I see people like you and what you do for your brothers and sisters I see that there are good fathers in the world."

Looking at her almost made me want to cry. Here was a girl whose parents didn't want her, whose life was cold and bleak, and all she needed to flourish was a little care. "I'm sorry..." I said, "You deserved better."

She nodded, avoiding my eye-contact. "I know." She said, "I know."

"Don't worry about me." I said, "I'm happy. I don't care how hard I have to work, how tired I have to be, I'm happier now than I've ever been in my life."

A tear dropped from the corner of her eye and she wiped it on her sleeve before she thought I would see it. "Okay." She said, sniffing again.

"I'll take care of you." I reassured her, "Don't worry."

"Thank you." She said, looking at me in the eye again, "For being so kind to me, when I was horrible to you."

"Forget it." I told her, "You've had a rough time."

"I dig holes for myself."

"What I never understood about you..." I said, "Is how, to staff you're, kinda normal." She held in a chuckle, "But with people your own age you become this wreck." I said, "I'm sorry, but it's the truth, you are."

"Maybe I'll tell you one day." She said, finishing her cup of tea, "Sometimes I wonder..." she rested the mug on her lap, "What my life might have been like if someone like you had been my dad, I could have got away from my mum a bit more, had somewhere to go, maybe I'd have found Marie."

"Your step-sister right?"

She nodded. "My mother had a very brief marriage with another man from church." He said, "He had a daughter, also from a previous marriage. I only met her a few times, she was eighteen and I was six, but she was the nicest anyone had ever been to me. She took me out for shopping, and pizza and stuff, gave me a taste of normality. Her father hated it but she didn't care."

If Anastasie was eighteen now, what did that make Marie? Thirty? "She's still out there." I said, "You could get in touch with her if you wanted to."

"I lost contact with her after her father and my mother split." She said, "I think she might even have changed her surname, she mentioned always wanting to do it."

"What's her dad's surname?"

"Jones." She said, and I frowned. "Yes, precisely. Not exactly a distinctive one."

"We can try and find her if you'd like. It can be your Easter project."

"How would I even begin to do that?"

I blinked. "What, you don't have Facebook?"

Yianna

The trip to London was bad enough. Trains, that were normally one of the ways that I preferred to travel, this time held hardly any joy for me. Tubes were not interesting either. If you were bored, you couldn't even look out the window, and you couldn't look at other passengers for love or money, so you had to content yourself memorising the tube map and counting the threads in the little 'Tube or False' advertisements. Some of which I would have to google when I got home. Some people were fairly sure that Covent Garden station was haunted by an actor called William Terriss, who had been stabbed there in 1897, and he wasn't the only ghost down here. There was the inspiration for Moaning Myrtle and something about an Ancient Egyptian, but even so, I could never find any sense of the paranormal when I came down here. I had arrived at Paddington and taken the central line to Gloucester Road. Put it this way, I would have "Mind the gap please' and the incessant bleeping of the doors closing rattling around in my head for the rest of my life.

The air on the platform was cool and sharp, I wrapped my coat around me, the echo of my heels bouncing off the golden walls. Tubes were scarce at night, and people even scarcer, especially in this area of London.

Gloucester Road was one of the tube stations that served the Kensington area. Pieces of blue artwork between the arches of the platform were dimly lit by ground level torches, in front of the arches sat a series of benches. It was one of the more modernly decorated stations, with the greatest amount of space around you, one of the less claustrophobic ones. At least that made the experience marginally more bearable. Quite why I had come here, I wasn't sure, but I felt like if I didn't, I was chickening out of something.

Approaching one of the benches towards the middle of the station, I shoved my hands into my pockets, annoyed.

"You told me to meet you at Gloucester Road." I said, shifting my weight from my toes to my heels.

Spiridion looked up at me, and silently, extended his arm towards me, a plastic wallet with pieces of paper inside in his hand.

"What's this?" I asked him, taking the wallet and sliding the papers out of it.

"These are the correspondence between myself and Anastasie Parisien." He said, not looking at me and swallowing a non-existent frog in his throat, "Of course I didn't keep copies of the ones I wrote."

I skim read them silently. Whilst I expected them to be full of sexual clichés and innuendos, I was pleasantly surprised. Here was not a single one in which anything more than teacher-pupil relationship was implied. You might go so far to say it sounded like two close relatives who lived far away keeping in touch and talking about their lives, one supporting the other through writing.

"So, why didn't you want me to see them before?" I asked him,

"I wanted to keep them." He said, "So I wouldn't forget how heartbreaking it was to read them. Hopefully she did the same. So she can look at them every day and be reassured every day." He said, "Spoken words last less than a second, but written words last forever."

This proved nothing, I still hadn't seen what he wrote to her. I rolled my eyes. "Is this how long it took you to edit them?"

"I haven't edited them, as you well know." He said, "Why is it," he asked me, "that you feel ill-disposed towards me simply because we are different?"

"Because you have displayed unacceptable behaviour, I have not."

"So I groomed one of my tutees, the proof of the falsity of which is sitting in your hand, I took an Atheist Oath, as opposed to swearing on a goddess that I have never yet seen physical proof of, and I refused to jump into a river because of an irrational fear of water?" he said, "What do you want from me?"

"I want you to be a man!"

"I am a man, Yianna!" he said, his eyes flashing, "And guess what? We aren't perfect! Do you want me to be a fearless warrior, a faultless person, a mindless set of armour? I'm very sorry for this cruel awakening Yianna, but I am as much a man now as I was the day my mother threw me in the Thames!" he shouted, "And you? You're perfect are you? Ye who hath such a faith in the system that you can't differentiate between when it's right and when it's wrong? You expect us all to be robots, following this system, and not to have our problems, our quirks, our exceptional circumstances? You fired me for no good reason, because you couldn't be bothered to look further, you isolated a girl from the world because you thought she was mad when she's just hurting! And what have we done Yianna? Anastasie and I? All we have done is prove that the perfect little Nyx-filled, bubble world in which you live out a dally daydream every day isn't real!"

And with that I walked out, leaving him on his little seat at Gloucester Road tube station.

R&R!