It wasn’t long before I found myself just watching her for hours. Usually when she was sat in front of the TV, which was something she always did with all the lights off.

She would sit there in the darkness of my living room, the cathode rays making her so-very-pale skin glow as luminously as some dashboard Virgin Mary’s. Sitting ramrod straight, despite the fact that she was in an easy chair. Her delicate, cool hands folded neatly in her lap. Her pale blue eyes hardly blinking at all.

The expression on her face? It never altered, whatever she might be watching. A sit-com. A science documentary. An action movie, or a news broadcast on starvation in Africa. It never got the smallest of responses from the tiniest of the muscles in her face.

There was nothing at all haughty about the way that Cheryl looked. About the way that any of the Risers looked. Nothing supercilious or aloof.

Just ... detached.

Perhaps ‘disconnected’ would be the slightly better word.

And – after a long while of this – she would realise that she was being watched. Her face would turn towards me. Her incredible, ethereally-beautiful face, like the visage of an angel.

She would take in the fact that I was there, and submerged in observing her. She’d blink.

But her expression did not alter. Not a touch.

Those first few weeks, the idea grew up in my head that she really was smiling, but inside.

 

*

 

I’d first seen a living human being actually out with a Riser about a year back.

‘Out’? As in ‘stepping out’.

As in dating.

It had been at a bar on the far fringe of Soho, fashionable enough to attract clientele like us, but not so trendy as to be packed full to bursting. I’d been there with my then girlfriend, Lois, her younger sister and her sister’s handsome boyfriend, and another couple that I knew through work. That last pair? They would realise the dynamics of this particular evening after another hour or so. Look at each other, and silently admit that they had no wish to join in. Turn uncomfortably quiet on us, make their excuses a while later, and depart. Leaving us last four to finish up our drinks and head back to my pad nearby, where we could get more intimate.

Lois’s sister was gorgeous, even prettier than her. I was already looking forward to it. But – this early in the evening – it was simply trendy cocktails at a marginally trendy bar. Just that, on the surface.

Till the door swung open, and the middle-aged woman stepped in with a tall Riser on her arm. You can spot them immediately, thanks to their utter paleness and the noticeable way they move.

“Oh my God, Geoff !” Lois immediately whispered, in the kind of sotto voce you can hear across an entire room.

The woman didn’t bat an eyelid, however, although she must have heard it. She was obviously quite used to reactions of that kind.

We’d all read about this phenomenon, of course, the living hooking up with the walking, risen dead. Just last month, for instance, Cosmo had run a piece entitled Cool Boyfriend: The Pros and Cons of Dating Risers. But we’d never actually seen it until now.

The couple chose a small table about a dozen feet across from us. One of the bar staff came over to them, rather stiffly, and the woman ordered wine and food.

Then gazed back at her companion almost rapturously.

She was one of those women in her mid-forties who seemed to have aged badly through circumstance rather than self-neglect. Too much of a stoop to the shoulders. Too many lines etched into what had once been an attractive face. A permanent down-turn to the corners of her mouth, and a watery sadness to the eyes that could never be blotted away.

Decades of disappointment, then, written into her leathery features. Faithless husbands? Careless children? Younger boyfriends who had used her and then left? You can never know what people’s histories are unless they, or someone, tells. But you can take an even guess.

And her companion ... must have been in his late twenties when he’d died. He was slightly over six foot tall, with the build of a rugby-player. Short-cut, curly, sandy-coloured hair. Emerald green eyes. Dressed like something out of a good catalogue – had she dressed him, or was that his natural instinct?

And how good-looking?

I’ll get to that subject later.

Anyway, the wine turned up. He poured, with utter smoothness and precision. She raised her glass towards his, and they clinked.

Her gaze hadn’t left his face, almost the whole while they’d been in here. And what exactly was she seeing there? I wondered at the time.

Lois screwed her features up. Her sister ducked her head and made that finger-down-throat gesture.

I just watched.

When the food turned up, the Riser took a little of his own on his fork, held it out towards the woman to taste. Again, had she trained him to do that, or did he do it naturally?

But I can still remember her expression, to this very day. She looked as though brilliant sunlight had just rushed straight through her body. As though she had momentarily been brushed by the wing of an angel.

After another while, the six of us forgot about them, or rather managed to ignore them. Got back to the business in hand that evening.

But I can still remember the expression on that woman’s face.

I can remember something else as well, now that I think about it. Shame I didn’t think about it sooner.

The way that she stared deep into the Riser’s eyes. It was not simply adoration. It was more as though ... she were trying, very hard, to find something in there.

And, when I look at Cheryl’s face these days, is my own gaze the same?

SOLD OUT