(1914)
Ben.
“Not sure who I am speaking to now, maybe it’s just to myself, but I dare to believe there is someone else out there listening and so I speak for their ears now.
My name is Ben and I am a vampire.
The first few weeks of my existence were hard, as I learned to control my bloodlust and come to terms with my new powers. I can’t begin to describe how different the world appears, with these eyes. I can view the fibres of my clothes on a molecular level and confess after the bloodlust passed it took another day to be bored with studying every fabric and surface in my new world.
Yes being a vampire is everything I thought it would be and more, apart from one thing, I miss the family I once knew. I say once knew because that family is no more. That family now consists of a widow and her child. They don’t know it yet, they still cling to hope, but I know it. Soon that Telegram with come, a scrap of paper to deliver the news that both her husband and son were killed in action. That I know will be the biggest test of my turning, not to run to the frontline and prevent that fate from playing out.
So many times I tried to tell them, tell my mother that neither of us would return. Forewarn my father of the event that would lead to his death. Yet the words became lost to my lips and then Darcy’s sympathetic whisper would enter my mind and tell me it had to be this way.
My father’s work was laborious and the work environment embraced the strong and mocked the weak. Many years of being a logger had made my father distant to his emotions. That said he had his ways to show he loved us, although firm with his words, very rarely did he lift his hand to us to discipline us.
In the summer months when the evenings were still light my sister would sit on the wall at the end of the lane and wait for his return. My father would lift her on to his shoulders and grunt his replies to her onslaught of questions. It was always my mother who scowled her, not he. My mother would tell Heather to let her father be. Saying he had worked hard that day and deserved some peace in his own home. My parents hid their emotions behind their fierce Scottish frowns, yet my sister and I always knew we were loved, and felt their love ran deep in the privacy of their bedroom.
As the weeks to my father’s and my departure drew closer cracks in the emotionless void seemed to appear. One morning I heard my mother sobbing as she pegged out the sheets on the line, before I could act, I saw my father wrapping his arms around her from behind. He rested his cheek against hers and whispered something as he pointed out across the hills. I caught the looks across the table, heard their low whispers as they lay in bed at night.
Now the day was drawing closer, the brave act of going to war had lost it shine. All that was left was the fear of what lay over the seas for us men, what life would be like for the families left behind. No one said it, but the puffy redness of every one’s eyes said it so painfully. Death lay over that ocean and these days might be the last we would spend as a family.
Heather would creep into my bed each night, saying she had a nightmare. In the past I would have carried her back to her bed after she had dropped off. But I took comfort from her little damp cheek resting on my chest. I knew she hadn’t been asleep yet, tears hadn’t allowed her to dream. But I allowed her to keep her pride and I kept mine and we just hugged and would finally drift into sleep.
A couple of nights before I left she tiptoed into my room and slipped beneath my covers. She rested her icy feet against my leg and even though they were cold I found comfort in them.
“I heard father crying tonight Ben.” A shiver ran through her body as she said that. For neither of us had even seen my father even shed a tear in our lives. To hear the great man sobbing must have been a very alien and scary thing for my sister of just eight. She buried her face in my pyjama shirt. “Things are never going to be the same again are they Ben?”
I just wrapped my arms around her and began to sing the lullaby I had heard mother sing to her when she was small.
Dreams to sell, fine dreams to sell
Angus is here wi' dreams to sell
Hush ye my baby and sleep without fear
Dream Angus has brought you a dream my dear.
I kept singing it until I felt her little body become heavy with sleep and then I allowed myself to weep. If it had just been the fear, the sadness of leaving my family going to war, I think I might have fallen asleep soon enough. But the painful knot of guilt in my gut, wouldn’t allow me to sleep. I knew that once my father and I left, Heather’s and my mother’s world would never be the same again.
Even when the war ended, they would watch as other husbands returned and watch the families struggle back to normality. Whereas my mother would be left a widow and eventually just be another forgotten casualty of war. I had the fore knowledge that my father would never return and I was doing nothing to prevent it. Even worse I was planning to chicken out of fighting at his side.
