Page 56 of A Good Heart is Hard to Find
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Rover’s Return
I have recently learned, to my complete surprise, that the sister of the accomplished poet Jane Leigh is none other than Cass Leigh, author of such extreme examples of the horror genre asGrave Concernsand the very disturbingTwisted Sister.
No greater contrast could exist between the exquisitely honed haiku of the former and the dark, warped fiction of the latter…
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No word from Max saying whether he was definitely going to come and see me, let alone what time and for how long. As usual he just took it for granted that I would hang about the house all day waiting for him.
Clearly nature intended him to be a delivery man, not a university lecturer.
Under the circumstances it hardly seemed worth getting his stuff out of the attic, which wouldhave felt like dressing a stage set where the main actor might or might not turn up and there was, unfortunately, no understudy.
Not that I didn’t understand that he’d had the funeral and its attendant rites to contend with, but I needed to see himtoo. And you’d think, after so long apart, that he’d be pretty desperate to see me.
I was sure all this worry and stress was subconsciously affectingmy book, because it seemed to be developing strangely: Sylvanus was turning into a blond, blue-eyed monster, while Vladimir, the supposed villain of the piece, was evil but darkly attractive, with a clever if warped logic and moral code.
Keturah was fighting the bad in both of them at the time, but since her near-vampire experience she seemed to find a little evil quite sexy, so she had to fightherself too. She wasn’t sure what effect biting either of them would have, if any … and I decided to just let her go for broke and find out.
It was all getting quite complicated, but I was sure she’d sort something out in the end, now she’d got over being such a wimp. I couldn’t think what had got into her, apart from Vlad, and that was just a Lite Bite.
It would be interesting to see whichway she jumped.
Jason popped in during his lunch hour to confess that he’d been flirting with Jane the night before in the hope of making me jealous. He didn’t confess that he’d also quite fancied her too, but then, the poor old thing didn’t realize he was as transparent as a jellyfish.
He’d been mulling things over among his bits of antique tat, and what he really wanted was for me to swearI would end the Max affair on Friday and take up with him instead, but I managed to smooth him down a trifle and send him off in a happier frame of mind without actually promising anything at all.
Later I phoned up Orla for a chat, during the course of which I managed to ask her casually if she’d ever really, really fancied a man while realizing that he was not only infinitely alien in all waysto her, but dangerously scary somehow with it.
‘All the time,’ she said promptly. ‘Hell’s Angels, mostly.’
‘Hell’s Angels? Orla!’
‘Middle-aged ones, with pony-tails and all that black leather … and maybe sunglasses. You know?’
‘Well yes, but—’
‘And Lemmy, out of Motörhead. Part of me wouldn’t mind meeting him down a dark alley!’
‘You can’t be serious?’ I said incredulously.
‘Yes I can,and you did ask! Dante’s got a touch of the dark, intense, scary side about him too, don’t you think? I don’t know what it is, but he’s got it, while Jason, who hasterrificrages, hasn’t. Were you thinking of Dante?’
‘No, of course not! I wasn’t thinking of anyone in particular, just struggling with the villain-vampire in my book, Vladimir.’
‘Yeah, right,’ she said.
‘Perhaps Iwasthinkingabout him a bit,’ I admitted. ‘Objectively – some aspects of his character have interesting possibilities.’
‘They certainly do,’ she enthused. ‘I’d like to research them for you.’
‘I think I’ll invent some, thanks, but go ahead and research on your own account.’
‘I wish!’
There was no sign of Dante at the pub that evening, which I was extremely glad about, because I did not want him gloweringdisapprovingly at me on a nightly basis. (Ithinkit was disapproval.) He seemed very moody, and most of the moods were shades of deepest gloom, but I expected a lot of it was due to his awful experiences.
