Angels
- Edited by Michael Hamway -
I hadn’t given much thought to the concept of Angels before I first saw one.
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I essentially had two points of reference. The first was a version my Irish grandmother had introduced me to at age nine. She would sit on my mother’s aged sofabed, smelling of cigarettes and coffee, and tell stories of her various woes. My dad would sit in careful silence nearby, pretending to read the paper to avoid involving himself in the story. The creatures she spoke of seemed more like helpful spirits than angels. They helped her find things, like the key to that window she’d lost months ago, or the photograph that might help add colour to the anecdote she was halfway through telling. They’d tell her to go home early the night a dangerous brawl erupted in the local bar. They gave her hope after her mastectomy.
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She wasn’t ever heavy on details – no descriptions of white wings, billowing gowns and floating halo coronets. They mostly just seemed like mythical, incorporeal friends that would give her life the occasional nudge in the right direction. A kind of spectral life coach. They’d apparently been behind her decision to move away from Ireland when her stubborn Catholic entitlement was telling her to fuck the Prods and stay.
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“I tell ya, son,” she’d say, mouth half-closed around the lit cigarette, as she tried to pocket her lighter in the many folds of her loose, cream cardigan, “If I had never had an Angel placing a hand on my shoulder, I’d have been strung up by paras. He placed that ticket in my hand, and I’ve never looked back.”
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I liked those ones. They felt like guardians, or the ancestors I’d seen in the Mulan film. They felt safe and protective, but I couldn’t help but roll my eyes whenever she thanked them for a seemingly unremarkable event. Firstly, it sounded like a lot of the things the angels had been credited with were things that she had actually accomplished herself. For example, her decision to move to England from Ireland had, my father revealed later, been mostly fuelled by them being the only Catholics left on a now entirely Protestant Street. Only a week prior to their move, a rock tied with the British Flag had smashed through their front window. I wondered if the Angel was the one to have placed it in the hand of the Protestant that threw it.
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But these things were harmless. It was not their presence that troubled me, but rather, their absence. Particularly in times when the appearance of Angels would have been a great help. My grandmother, nesting in her faded quilts, bullish and gregarious, would often thank Angels for guiding her through minor day to day inconveniences, but never seemed to blame them for their sudden vanishment when her husband would come home drunk and beat her and my father senseless. Or that time when he had been caught in an “affair” with a college girl from Kilkenny, who would later press charges of rape. It seemed the Angels of her stories dealt mostly in the things over which she actually had control, rather than the things she truly feared.
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My second encounter with the idea of Angels wasn’t until secondary school. After a year 8 RE lesson where Ms Hepworth had set homework on the appearance of the messenger to Moses, Marcus was waxing lyrical at all the things his father, a Vicar, had informed him about the Bible, that Ms Hepworth had been too negligent to mention.
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“They actually don’t look like that, you know,” he said loudly to the group, wiping orange Wotsit dust officiously from the corners of his mouth, “People with wings. My dad said that they are actually huge wheels with eyes that make you so scared you just want to die. They called O something. Oliphants?”
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They weren’t called that. Marcus, I discovered, embellished quite a few of his father’s stories. He was also getting confused with the Elephant creatures in The Lord of the Rings. The word he meant, I discovered more recently, after the first Angel appeared over London. ‘Ophanim’ was Hebrew, meaning wheel. They were a class of creature that guarded the throne of God – not Angels specifically.
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He did get one part right, though. The part about wanting to die when you saw them. It was the one thing the Bible got right about them, too. It’s the last thing I read before I died. I circled it many times. Exodus 33:20. The passage refers to God, but after seeing the Angel, I wonder if there is much difference.
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“You cannot see my face, for no one may see me and live.”
***
I remember it being a Saturday. The divorce papers had arrived that Friday and, embarrassingly, I had put the wrong address on the form. I had to spend Friday journeying to the house I had shared with my wife, for her to hand me the forms herself. Thankfully, she spared me the trouble of interacting with her by leaving the forms on the front porch. I found them weighed down by all the first drafts of my book which she presumably never got round to reading. I took the forms but left the drafts. I don’t think I had the heart to open them, given that her dedication would have been the first words I’d have seen. I didn’t see any sign of her, or him, but as I dared a glance through the window into the front room, I spied a man’s shirt draped over the back of the sofa.
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I don’t remember the journey home. Only that an older lady stopped to ask me if I was okay, if I was lost and (I think) offered me a lift anywhere I wanted to go. I’m not sure I remember what I said to her. I remember parts of a seedy looking Irish pub I found myself in until the early hours, where a drunk Irishman in a blue tracksuit, with stale breath and rosy cheeks, tried to convince me that things were better for men in the 50s, and women actually preferred to have their freedom limited. I was rescued by Eric at about 4am, and taken back to his place, where I cried into his shoulder until I fell asleep.
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I didn’t even notice the light, at first. I’d woken at about 8am to vomit in Eric’s spare bathroom and passed out again with my back leaning against the boxes I had still yet to unpack. When I eventually came to, it was to the sound of soft knocking at the door.
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“Dude, are you seeing this?”
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The voice was Eric’s. I murmured some incoherent response and heard the sound of the door opening. I felt arms under my armpits, and me being hoisted back onto the bed.
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“You okay, man?”
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My eyes opened to a room flooded with light. At first, I thought it was the hangover making my eyes sensitive, but then I realised that Eric was just as transfixed as I was. We both stared in silence at the light streaming through the window.
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It seemed like the morning sun at first, but the more I stared into the shaft of light pouring into the room, the more it seemed like the shaft itself was emitting more light that pervaded the space around us. What’s more, it was such a thick stream of gold, it looked almost tangible. Thick, as though you might feel resistance if you were to run your hand through it.
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“They think it’s an eclipse or something,” Eric said, tying his long hair behind his head, and trying to angle his body to get a better vantage point through the window. “But NASA said there isn’t supposed to be one. Put your hand in it.”
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He did so to demonstrate, and his eyes softened. “God, it’s fucking amazing.”
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I reached out my hand. It did feel thick, somehow. But more like moving your hand through strands of fabric than honey or putty. As soon as my hand pushed through the layers of light, like strands in a loom, it no longer looked like my own. It seemed to sparkle and shimmer, and all at once, it was like the most perfect hand that I had ever seen. The feeling was addictive. My muscles felt warm, and there was a kind of soft yearning in my chest that seemed to welcome me into it.
But as my one hand was held in the light, I glanced at my other. The one that rested against my leg. Feeble, I heard my mind say. The dark knot of hair, the muscle that looked like old meat greying on the bone, fetid skin stretching over it. I seemed to notice every imperfection; the scum and dirt I’d yet to clean from my fingernails, the blue knot of veins that crawled up my wrists like the branches of a withering tree, the spots and pimples that seemed so sparse before, now seemed to litter my hands like an infectious rash. I felt impure
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With a nauseous feeling, I pulled my hand back but noticed that Eric did not do the same. I called out his name once.
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“What?” he said, “What even is that?”
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He’d moved so his bare chest was now bathed in gold. His skin radiated light, and his muscles flexed luxuriously in the glow of it. I said his name again.
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“Don’t say that name,” he said, “I don’t fucking like it. My dad gave me that fucking name and… oh fuck…”
He had removed his tracksuit bottoms and now stood there naked. I could see his skin ripple with gooseflesh as he took a further step towards the window.
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“It’s amazing, dude. You should be in here. Look at you, though. Look at the fucking state of you.”
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I think I shouted at him to get away from the window, but he seemed barely able to register me anymore. He took a step forward, and the light crept up his face and into his eyes.
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“Oh my god…” I heard him sigh, as he fell to his knees, “Wow, no I can’t. I’m not, I’m not afraid. Please, show me, fucking show me. I want to see your face …” Tears were streaming down his face into his beard. He was deaf to anything I said as he began clawing at his chest. “What is this shit… what is this?” he said, as his nails made a thick gouge into the flesh of his stomach. “Fuck this, I can’t. I can’t!”
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I leapt at him and together we tumbled out of the light and into my desk. There was a moment of stillness as we lay there, gasping for breath, a soft stream of blood running from his abdomen into the carpet. I regret not holding him longer, until I was sure he’d recovered, but I let him go. By the time I’d caught up with him in the kitchen and wrested the knife from his grip, he’d already sliced most of the skin off his chest and had plunged the knife into his stomach several times. Based on the wound itself, it seemed like he was trying to use the knife in a kind of lever motion. I thought he was trying to scoop out his heart.
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***
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Nobody answered the phone when I called the emergency services, but I kept ringing anyway. I had somehow convinced myself that this might have been an instance of a sudden mental breakdown, and that the light in my room had triggered some latent memory my friend had been wrestling with privately for some time. There was plenty of evidence that this was not the case, of course, but it was an easier truth to contend with. It meant my primary focus was on getting him the help he needed. I was as blind to the inconceivable truth that he was dead as I was to the bodies that had begun to litter the pavement outside the kitchen window. I didn’t look at them. I didn’t look at the pale outline of their nakedness, or the blurry red streaks of where they had clawed at their bodies, limbs and eyes. The frosted glass provided enough ambiguity to allow me to pretend it could have been an overturned bin, or roadkill, or a drunk.
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I tried to watch TV to take my mind off it, but the internet was down, and I was finding it hard to stay focused on fixing it with Eric’s lifeless eyes staring at me from the sofa, so I decided to move him to his room. By now, much of the blood had left his body, which did mean he was a little lighter (although not by much), but it also meant I had to peel him from the sofa where the blood had congealed.
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With some effort, I managed to heft him onto my shoulders, but by the time I reached the door I realised that it would be too challenging to get him to the top floor. I also noticed that he was still dripping blood and, for reasons I still cannot comprehend, I was worried about staining the carpeted stairs.
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So, I placed him against the banister and fetched some jogging bottoms and a hoodie that I zipped up gingerly over his open chest wound. Then, shouldering him again, I moved him towards the patio doors that led to the garden.
The blinds were still closed, but not quite enough to prevent a trickle of the light from seeping through the gaps. The shafts of it were as thick and shimmering as they had been in my room, and the dining table adjacent was patterned with thick gashes of light, like the bars of some celestial prison. Something about seeing it again made my senses return to me, and, placing the body delicately on the table, I went to the cupboard by the front door and pulled out a long, waterproof rain-mac and an old, dust-covered Akubra hat I’d been given when I’d been travelling in Australia. I caught myself in the mirror and decided I looked like a budget Gunslinger from the Stephen King novels.
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It was then that I collected the Bible from the spare room and circled the passage in Exodus, and indeed any other mentions of Angels. I don’t know why. I’m not religious, but Eric’s final words had reminded me of that passage in particular, and the thought that it might have been Angels entered my mind. At that moment, part of me was still hoping for the spiritual guardians my grandmother had told me about. I knew I wouldn’t find them. Tucking the Bible into my pocket, I shouldered the body again and pulled the blinds open.
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The garden had been unremarkable even on the rare occasion Eric and I had bothered tending to it. A small square of dull, celadon grass, a weathered patio with mismatched concrete slabs, strewn with patches of moss. A tired tree leant against the back fence, as though it was only one more storm away from joining the meagre log pile that lay damp and putrid next to it.
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But the moment I opened the blind, the place seemed to have been reinvented. The previously dull, green grass looked fuller and fresher, and what once had been dank heavy rainwater that seemed to weigh the garden down, was now glistening dew that elevated the lawn into something almost cartoonishly picturesque. The tree’s once weary attitude seemed in this light to be more an expression of its vivaciousness, like a kind of Gatsby figure leaning coolly against a banister. The streaks of gold, I now noticed, were almost spear-like, and penetrated the air, like how light might stretch in long shafts to reach the ocean floor. I stood there, transfixed, for what felt like an hour, before a pain in my shoulder reminded me I was still holding Eric’s body.
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I pulled on a pair of sunglasses, pushed the cap down low, and told myself I wouldn’t look up. Whatever had happened to Eric hadn’t happened until he looked up.
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The moment I pulled open the door, I heard them.
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Do not be afraid, they said.
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The voices seemed to be coming from everywhere, though I was sure they were above me. Their words repeated over and over, and the voices themselves sounded genderless, but eerily human, like they were reverberating from a Tannoy. The words were clear, their diction sharp but the vowels long and soft, almost comforting. But it was undeniably a command. I was not to fear. Strangely, in that moment, I found that I wasn’t afraid.
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I stepped carefully outside and was hit almost instantly with an overwhelming desire to look up. The voices seemed to plunge into my chest and will my face to raise itself to the full glow of the sun. The world around me suddenly felt dark, dismal and monochromatic, and every inch of me yearned to embrace the warmth of whatever it was that hovered over me. Thankfully, the weight of Eric’s body was heavy enough that I was forced to put him down, giving me a moment to push my hat further over my face, and to pull the collar up on the raincoat.
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I stood there for a few moments, taking deep, calming breaths. I didn’t notice the face in the fence until I turned around to go inside.
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My breath hissed sharply at the sight of her. Through the hole in the fence, a girl’s face was peering curiously. I knew her. Eric had told me her name, but I had forgotten it already. I’d caught her peeking through the fence gap a few times when Eric and I had popped outside to chat and smoke. I noticed that she was not wearing a coat or hat. She wore what appeared to be pyjamas with little cartoon donkeys on, and her feet were bare. She can’t have been older than 7 or 8. Her little hands were holding the splintered edges of the fence hole, and she looked at me with a mixture of curiosity and amusement, obviously intrigued by my ridiculous costume.
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“Hello,” I said, cautiously.
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She waved back, appearing to decide I wasn’t crazy.
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“Are you – what’s your name?”
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She rocked back on her heels shyly. “Lila.” She crinkled her nose. “What’s wrong with your friend?”
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I remembered Eric. I found myself trying to find a way to describe death to an eight year old, before realising it probably wasn’t helpful to avoid honesty at this point.
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“He’s dead.”
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She nodded. “So is my Mummy.”
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I glanced at the house behind her, just visible over the top of the fence. Quiet.
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“I’m sorry,” I said, stupidly. “Did she… Did she look up?”
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To my horror, the girl looked up. Her face shimmered for a moment. Then she looked back. “At the Angel, you mean?”
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I was about to correct her. To tell her that we didn’t know what it was, and that it could have been anything – a solar flare, some strange military experiment, aliens. But the more things I listed like that, the more I realised that “Angels” was just as acceptable a hypothesis at this rate. It wasn’t as if I didn’t have a previously unread Bible in my coat pocket.
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“Yes, at the Angel.”
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“Yeah, she did. She said she wasn't a good Mummy, and that I wasn’t a good daughter. And she kept on saying the Angel was perfect, so I came outside to see. And she was right, it is.”
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“You don’t sound very sad about that. Your mum, I mean,” I said, because she didn’t.
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“I was very sad this morning when she died,” Lila said, talking about it as though it was a traumatic event she’d lived through as a teenager, but had since come to terms with in her mid-thirties. “But then I came outside, and I haven’t been sad since.”
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She smiled and sat cross-legged. “Are you going to look at it?”
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I was sure it wasn’t meant as a challenge, but it sounded like one. The way she rested her head on her hands seemed like a kind of morbid curiosity.
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“I don’t think I should,” I said.
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She glanced up again. “I think it wants you to.”
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I felt the warmth of the light send shivers along my arms, as though in agreement with Lila. I could not deny the feeling of a presence suspended above me; it’s eyes boring holes in my Akubra. I balled my fists tightly.
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“What does it look like?”
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Lila seemed confused with the question. “Like an Angel. It’s like something perfect, that you could never be. It makes me think about how great I could be, one day, but I think it reminded Mummy that she would never be like that. She kept on talking about why my dad left. She thinks she got chubby after having me, so he ran off with someone not that chubby. That’s why she cut her tummy off, I think.”
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I knelt down, slowly. Somehow, it was Ellie’s voice in my head now. It seemed far louder than the Angel. It was telling me things that she’d never said, but the vision was so clear. It felt like a memory. She told me I was nothing. That I was so far beneath the man she thought I’d be. That I was weak. My body was misshapen, bulbous and laughable. That I had failed in my duties as a breadwinner – I hadn’t saved nearly enough in the years we’d been together. That I would fail as a father – that’s why she’d never wanted kids. She knew how ineffectual I would be. I could see her eyes in my mind; drenched with the ghost of what once had been contempt and derision but had now faded into disappointment as her love for me had faded. I watched her fall back with a smile into the strong arms of another.
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“I don’t want to look up. I don’t want to die.”
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“Then don’t,” she said, simply. “Or at least, if you do, try not to say nasty things about yourself.”
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I looked at her through the fence. “But what if it reminds me of everything I’m not? Like my friend, and your mum?”
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She shrugged and pulled a long blade of grass from my garden into hers. “Just because something else is beautiful, doesn’t mean you’re not.”
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I listened to the quiet of the garden and the rustle of wind in distant trees. I looked at Eric’s body next to me, and decided, more quickly than I thought I would, that I was ready to die.
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I reached up and removed my hat and turned my face to the sky.
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Do not be afraid, they said, and I began to weep.