EMINENTLY FORGOTTEN

At first, the creature came across as a real person – but that was cold comfort. Stella was the first amongst us to notice that the thing that called itself Alan was no such person. Indeed, too alien even to be called nobody. You see, vampires do not exist.

But I am racing ahead of myself. When we originally met Alan he was a persona ex gratia. He even possessed a reflex reflection in Stella’s bedroom mirror. She had in fact fallen for his charms. Charms to which none of us other members of the group could even begin to aspire. Charms that held her locked by the eyes, whilst her heart was gripped by his icy fingers which would have been invisible if they had not been within her chest.

When I was a child – longer ago than I care to remember – pictures in storybooks stored up memories for the future: the future when television screens would coldly flicker while reminding us, sometimes, of books we once read. Indeed, while TV screens cannot smell like books, the books themselves were often redolent with an aura of endless summer holidays, of childhood pranks and of mother’s lap. The book’s illustrations resonate with yarns of adventure and with remembrances in the making; some of the aroma, trapped, like dead memories as motes, within the spine, where pages are stitched and folded between black end-papers.

That creature – the one I once knew as Alan – was one such memory, as if he had always haunted me since my exploration of a forbidden illuminated book in my father’s library. It was as far from mother’s lap as it was possible to go, that library.

Yet, none of this will mean much, unless I describe the other members of the group who – if nothing else – gave Alan a context of existence. An invisibility only exists by contrast with the visible.

Well, there was Susan. A nice woman – by all accounts – but someone I found dull and untitillating. And eminently forgettable.

Bob – as handsome as the best of young men in those days. A film star in the making, if a bookish one. Claude – well, Claude, you know Claude already, and Claude’s Claude. And, of course, Stella. Now you’re talking. I even found myself fancying her. And, finally, there was me – and my appearance was nothing to write home about.

Stella was obsessed with her living-room stove which she needed to keep fed with anthracite small nuts. When she left the house – along with us others, for instance – she always worried whether she had sufficiently banked it up so that the fire could slumber with a low knottage of under-air, ready to be stirred back into flaming life upon her return. Indeed, when she rattled the riddler device upon refuelling with anthracite, I often speculated upon her requiring a fire-sitter (as opposed to a baby-sitter) if she happened to leave for longer than a normal outing. I laughed. Perhaps, there were back-stokers in the house – crawling along a tunnel behind the stove – who “saw” to it . . . by sliding the throat-plate aside and poking things through a door in the chimney-wall. I glanced at Alan, and I guessed he was laughing, too. Stella, if nothing else, was a source of amusemnt. Stella and her stove.

Claude and Bob never saw the funny side of anything, however. They were leafing through crusty old books with frowns on their faces.

There was a peculiarity about Stella’s stove which may have been true of all such stoves: its unpredictability. For days on end, it would burn brightly – heating the boiler with great efficiency and casting cosy warmth through the stove’s door of glass-strips – with several nights of being banked up and riddled back into life each morning – and would blaze healthily, clean-limbed and smokeless. But, then, abruptly, it would fade into a corpse-fire, fizzle to an ash-choked, barely smouldering mound, as if its spirit was departed. And when Stella cleared out the remains from the fire-pit, there would be much clinker and muck, together with a coagulated substance that reminded me of kiln-hard excrement. The amount of such waste which she dug from both above and beneath the bars was so voluminous, one wondered how only a minute before it was possible for the blaze to be such an inferno – with baking hot pipes and radiators feeding off it to make her abode a hothouse even for cold-blooded creatures. A seed-bed of passions.

And, indeed, she soon re-set the fire with the use of what looked like white wooden chalk under the anthracite; the flames ate into the cobbled black with the raging fever of disease.

I felt Alan smile at me knowingly. And I smiled back, without understanding. In hindsight, I suppose, he intended to draw a parallel with existence itself. Like a human body. One minute in scissoring fitness. The next a nest of crimson maggots.

It is a wonder – after all the trouble with the stove – that Stella was the first to draw attention to Alan’s nonexistence. I assume Claude and Bob had their noses in books – and me . . . well, I was too much in unrequited love with Stella to have noticed her own erstwhile love for Alan. Love is blind, they do say. Love is often so blind you don’t even know that you are in love. Love-sickness is the inability to recognise any faults in the person you love; the inability even to recognise their fault of cancelling out your love for them even before you were consciously aware of it.

So, yes, it was Stella who – one day – stood up from tending to the stove, turned round – poker in hand – and smashed at the empty air as if she fought off the invisible monster that her madness had become. Claude and Bob placed markers in their books – everything dead silent except for a desperate tampering noise which I illogically thought must be back-stokers and the crumbling of anthracite as flames faded outwards from the seat of the fire. I felt tears reaching my eyes, as I later saw that the ash-pit – upon being scraped out from under the bars – was full of a sludgy black substance . . . as if some jellyish fluid had accidentally mingled with the solid fuel.

The pair of purple incisions that appeared on Stella’s neck – which I later showed her by means of her bedroom mirror – she blamed on the fire’s scorching, an explanation which she believed even when the holes seeped stuff along with the weeping.

Bob and Claude had already left the room in gloomy silence, but promising never completely to abandon us. They would never be able to believe what they read in the smelly books they still carried, they said.

Stella and I spent the rest of our lives emotionlessly rubbing warmth back into each other’s bodies in front of the glass window of the fire. And, indeed, that constantly riddled stove was just another attempt to keep night’s icy fingers at bay. But someone seemed to keep sitting between it and us, judging by the shadow of coolth. And the broken promise of back-stokers.