'S-something like that,' murmured the boy, slipping into his seat. He pulled out a crate for Joseph to sit on, then grinned at his loneliness. 'Pretty boring job. Not many people to t-talk to. You find yourself k-kind of talking to yourself.'

'I feel the same way usually, even if I'm talking to my girlfriend. Especially then.' Joseph smiled as he talentlessly steered the conversation.

The boy flinched a little at his inadequacy, averted his eyes to a ruined, still warm place somewhere within him. 'Wasn't like that with one girl I knew, not so long ago. She'd say something, and you'd have to l-listen, and you'd almost want to believe it just to make her happy, y-you know?'

Joseph nodded neutrally.

'And then you would believe it, until you w-were alone and you wondered, Why did I think that then? But you thought it because - well, because she was so beautiful and you wanted to think like she did, to make yourself k-kind of the s-same, you know? It was like s-some spell she had you under, or s-something.' He looked away redly, stupidly, inexpressively, and didn't see that Joseph did the same. He didn't know why he was saying this, but he didn't stop. This was the most he'd ever spoken, and he couldn't tell why. For Joseph it was like watching a person coming to the gallows and realising how much they have kept back, realising how much they still have to say in the shrinking period left to them. 'But you'd never be like she seems,' the boy went on, 'whatever you did, because even she isn't what she seems. Cold, you know, but beautiful. Incredibly beautiful, but - c-cold.' Again the inadequacy, the sense of meaning trapped behind an inarticulate tongue. 'L-look, I'm sorry. I don't know why I've been r-running on like this...'

'That's okay,' said Joseph.

'I suppose she's stuck in my head because she just vanished...'

Joseph rose. 'Look, I've got to go.'

'Okay, but doesn't that s-s-s-s-strike you as odd?' His head shook with the struggle against his stutter. 'She just disappeared one day.' An awkward silence, humming like a violin. 'Someone told me - accused me, really - that she was pregnant... But I don't -'

'I - look, I need to be somewhere right now,' said Joseph, standing, can in his hand, backing towards the door.

'I mean, I'm n-not sure if she - I mean, I can't -'

'I have to -'

'I didn't know, for God's sake. I don't know, I still don't know. You see how it is. You see, don't you? You see.'

Joseph shifted uneasily, feeling an infant stutter in his own voice when he said, 'I s-suppose so. I don't know. But I have to leave, really.' Why won't he just let himself be killed? Joseph wondered. Death to Joseph did not seem so bad, then; it required so much less energy, was so much more certain and easy than continued existence after what he was steeling himself to do.

'Does she expect me to l-live with her for the rest of my life? Does she expect that? We're not all as strong as her God is. B-b-but she told me once that I-I- even I was made in His image. D-does she w-worship this? Huh?' The arms convulsively outstretched, and he did a pitiably accurate mime of nothingness. 'How can I give up my whole life to her because two s-s-cell nuclei happened to meet when we were messing around? Take responsibility, that's the phrase. Well, I-I-I'm a child, okay? I a-admit it. But I c-can't do it. Even Jesus didn't have to nail himself to the Cross.' He inhaled like something broken. 'I can't do it, I just.'

Joseph didn't want to find out more. The more he learned, the more the girl's arguments would fail him, and he would weaken and buckle and wouldn't be able to go through with it. But the passionate need to go through with it, do it quickly, was there right now, and was god above all else in his mind - above reason or morality or pity or his own withering soul.

So that was what she was, then. The girl, he knew at last, was simple passion - his anger, his rage, his inspiration: she could incite them all, but only briefly - and so he wanted to let whatever else the boy had to say about her, to warn him about her, go up in flames, for he could not face it.

They say that those who first burn books next burn people, and history has proved that true; well the inverse is also true, that those who burn people burn books, burn truths. For what truths the boy might have written, having looked so deeply into the dark girl herself! But all he could think to say, after he tamed his stutter and reined in the temporary confessional trust he had given to Joseph, as Joseph stepped towards the door, was, 'God, you must think I'm weird or something.'

'No. I understand.'

Contentment suffused the boy's sallow face for an instant, before he began to believe once more that no one understood. Still, there was friendship if not understanding to be won, and he desperately wanted Joseph to stay. 'You know, I'm not usually...'

As the words purled and spluttered on, Joseph pictured the skeletal body burning inside the petrol-doused garage, hot and orange and feverish and angry in death which robbed the chance of him ever doing something worthwhile, ever saying or doing anything to affect anything. The boy's warnings about the girl for whom Joseph was acting insanely and heartlessly - paradoxically because he felt he loved her - seemed laughably like the old sailors' stories about fantastical sirens. But the girl could not be viewed as a simple temptress, the sweet face above the jagged rocks; that at least had a kind of honesty. She was sleeker than that, a sophisticated aspect of the modern world like bubbling soft drinks and sulphurous nicotine. But an inescapable snare all the same.

He left the boy in his bare wooden room, but took the can.

As he lit the long line of petrol and ran to the car, not turning, Joseph was for a brief flash struck with a fantastic image of abortion: the interior of a womb, the life-sustaining liquid draining away, a suction tube humming and a foetus being ripped to pieces. And it was awful, not just for the blood and the death, but because here was innocence blasted out of existence: the only crime that seemed unbearably unjust. As a foetus grows into an infant, then a child, then an adult, innocence tarnishes rapidly - from the first horrified squealings in the midwife's arms the taint begins - but as it was the mangled heart hopping up the suction tube was appallingly pure and perfect. The boy and his stutter and his irresponsibility had struck Joseph as the closest things to innocence and purity that could exist in the world, and he felt now the private guilt of the abortionist.

And he longed to slink back to the womb and forget himself.

Bright fire crawled in the cracks of doors and windows, cast like a net around and through and over the place, gutting it, emptying it; and come the morning there would be just a pure nothingness where once there had been something - however inept, however ugly.

As the light flared up inside the petrol station and a pink glow seeped through the back window of the car, lending their faces a softness they no longer had, Joseph and the girl drove on without talking, reflections a flat white blended smudge in the window. He directed the car woodenly, the tic in his lip the only sign of terror. Suddenly the girl turned to him and smiled, the first spontaneous feeling in their odd relationship. Her teeth flashed; proud like the showily sharpened teeth of distant savages who never need to put them to serious use. And then her hand crawled tenderly to his on the gear stick and rested easily, certain of control without any more effort on her part, and terror leapt like a tortured animal in the hollowness within him - a feeling of sudden stupid dread, as when you wake up and feel a repulsive alien spider resting on your cheek, where you expected only clean sheets or another's breath or just cool fresh air.

He drove on, unflinching. Suddenly he had vast self-control to balance his disgust - with her and her beauty and himself and his emptiness - and there was just the crackling of the dead radio and the sound of her shallow breath and the road spinning out grey behind them.

This was what forever was like, wasted with passion. The words, 'To have and to hold' would seal their eternity one day, but what would Joseph have to hold really, except the boy and his stutter and the flames on the road behind? He would wish even to be the silent man in the roadside restaurant with his three cloned children, for pity and love must stir at least a little in even him... And remorse must seem a pointless thing.

But there came the future, smooth and grey.

The orange bulbs of the streetlamps in the middle of the road shone above Joseph and the girl, behind them, and barely lit a gently descending blackness ahead. And from here the empty road went mercilessly on, and the artificial splendour of golden light flying above in two tireless columns would never be enough to let them see its barrenness. Something like remembrance stirred in Joseph as he stared at the shining golden spheres in the night sky, and in the sick vacuum between falling and dying, he caught brutal mocking glimpses of his soul.

The image he saw now was not the dead boy burning, but himself blazing beautifully and ecstatically in a posture not quite of prayer. And then he saw her, his idol, old and wasted and skeletal, eyes sunk into her sockets, hair a wearied grey - this was what would be, because beauty exists only as fuel for itself and is consumed in time, like bright coals in a fire. Right now the play of her dying beauty was like hot sun on his face, but he could see the whole awful tragedy of trust in something so doomed, especially when it framed only the terrible core of the girl. He saw how he would worship her more and more as there was less and less of what he'd initially admired, and he saw how they would both rage against the decay until there was just some insubstantial wisp of humanity left at the centre of it all to cling to. And he wondered what he might become in all of this.

There he sat, there sat she, her free hand clasping her womb as though a tumour were growing within her. They had Dr Furlong's number still, and he knew they would need it. He knew suddenly that it had been a simple ploy of the girl's - allowing the embryo to live a little longer - to get him to kill the poor boy. And the chain of the crucifix was coiled around her neck like a snake eating its own tail, leaking slowly towards him. And worst of all, he didn't mind any more, minded even less than he would have before. He accepted her self-consumption and her selfishness, her cruel cunning and manipulation, appreciated them even - and suddenly he knew why. He knew what he had become.

They were so alike, those two, as they drove onwards, and the flat grey road just came and came. Yes, Joseph thought again, the girl was passion, but she was tired now, and the flat grey life lay ahead once more. But he could face it, because he had been hardened by passion. And he only realised his eyes had drifted shut a little when they widened at the sound of her startlingly sweet voice.

'Thank you,' she said, resting her head lovingly on his shoulder.

The End

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The Blooding of Amelia-Rose is a romance thriller. When Amelia-Rose finds herself without a husband, she retreats to an idyllic country cottage where she discovers strange country customs, dangers but also romance lurking in the valleys and moorlands of Exmoor...
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