by Michael Foot
“Congratulations” said Freddy. “You’ve got further in two months than I have in 5 years. But, if you’re me, you get used to that. Anyway, it has its compensations, including my being able to come round this morning with the gear you’re now going to need – and to answer any questions you may have.
Gear first. From what I see in Chloe’s blog, the first thing you need is this” – he held out 2 fairly thick armbands made up of green and yellow bands twisted together. “One for you, one in case Chloe doesn’t have one already. This is the band you need to display so that other Angels know that you’re hooked up with another Angel. The others you’ve been wearing can get put away for now. Some couples go in for bands with each other’s initials woven in. But most people think that’s rather OTT; and anyway, nearly all the people who need to know about you will already know that you’ve hooked up with Chloe.
Now, the gear – basically a mobile with a few Angel-friendly elements – I’ll explain those in a minute – likewise a special tablet ditto. And, most importantly this wrist watch which you ought to wear permanently now. It tells the time, which I guess is no surprise. But more importantly, it is the way another Angel will get hold of you in an emergency and the way critical messages are transmitted to you.”
Freddy then took about half an hour to take Andrew through the gadgets. None of the features was surprising in itself; but Andrew could now see better how it was that Angels seemed to keep so closely and quickly in touch with each other. “With the phone and the tablet, you can now keep an eye on all the blogs around you; if you want you can easily trawl through and find exactly what it was that that the girls said about you when you first got ‘acquainted’ with them – though it’s bad form to refer to it subsequently. But it would be my advice that you leave well alone and certainly don’t go trawling in Chloe’s past.” Freddy eventually ran out of things to explain. “Just experiment and you’ll quickly find your way around. Now is there anything else you need help with or answers on?”
Andrew had a high regard for Freddy’s encyclopaedic knowledge of things angelic and quickly took up the offer. “Well, at least two things” Andrew said. “First, last night Michael said I had been brought into the Seraphim. Now I’ve heard of Cherubim and Seraphim; but what exactly is the ranking within the movement. Where do I fit in?”
Freddy laughed but not unkindly. “I’ll give you the short version. At the top, or the centre if you’d rather, are Michael and the Archangels I told you about last time. I guess you’ve probably seen a bit of Gabrielle and perhaps our environmental guru but little of the others. Anyway 7 of those in all. Then nobody can be bothered with all the divisions and sub-divisions the Catholic Church used to get excited about. No ‘Dominions’, no ‘Powers’. Instead we have an Inner Group who are called Seraphim – SCs for short, which stands for Seraphim and Cherubim – and that is amazingly what you are now. Not surprisingly there was almost no lobby wanting people called Cherubs. These SCs have greater access to Michael than us other poor mortals; you have more command over resources – someone else will provide you with a credit card and tell you what you can now spend on our behalf; it’s quite a lot. That’s above my pay grade. Oh, and of course, in an emergency, you can now tell me what to do.”
“Right, thanks, that much I understand” said Andrew. “Now, second question. Last night, Chloe said she didn’t want to be a Watcher. What did that mean?”
Again, Freddy smiled. “You don’t ask many easy questions do you? The short answer here is the Book of Daniel and the Book of Enoch. You’ll never have heard of the latter – it’s part of what’s usually called the Apocrypha – the books of the Old Testament that are a bit ‘iffy’ in terms of their provenance. According to Enoch, Watchers were Angels who came down to Earth and were supposed to help look after the human race. However, they were male and some of them fell for human women. They bred with them and produced a race of humanoid giants – see what I mean about ‘iffy’. Now again none of us have any interest in any of that. But the term ‘Watcher’ has come to be used for any Angel who sleeps with or gets involved with a non-Angel. There’s no law against it – I know quite a few Angels who have actually gone through formal marriages with non-Angels and live with them as a married couple. But quite a few of the Angels don’t want any such distractions. Chloe will have meant that she couldn’t contemplate a relationship with you until you became an Angel.”
22
The next few weeks passed in a blur for Andrew. Almost without discussion, Chloe moved into his flat; and within a week, Andrew could not imagine (or, rather, did not wish to imagine) any other way of living. She, herself, seemed nearly always cheerful, certainly always calm. And the only downside of that was that she insisted on a couple of short spells a day for what she called yoga. Now, Andrew would not have called himself moody. But, like most normal people, he had mood swings; and Chloe seemed incredibly adept at sensing his mental state. She cheered him up when he needed it; she ensured that his occasional exuberance and feelings of well-being did not carry him too far. As a lover, she was beyond any woman he had ever been with before. But, more importantly in many ways, she was also his friend and a good one at that.
For Andrew, perhaps the only cloud on the horizon was that, sooner or later, she was bound to find out about the Colonel and Andrew’s other life. But he consoled himself that it was only thanks to leading this double life that he had come into contact with her in the first place. And, if he imagined the worst, that there might come a time when the Colonel demanded something of him that would hurt his relations with Chloe? In that case, he had little trouble in assuring himself that the Colonel could ‘go hang’. In any case, Andrew could not see that such a circumstance was particularly likely.
Andrew did raise the point with the Colonel when they next met. The Colonel had listened in silence to Andrew’s description of his last labour and his acceptance into the Seraphim. He had then offered Andrew another sherry – it was early evening again – and leant back in his chair; “I’m not likely to queer your pitch, Andrew” he said. “I think you’ve done brilliantly; and, while I shall ask you to go on reporting back, I can’t see any reason why you shouldn’t be able to continue meeting any obligations you may pick up as an Angel. I don’t suppose it will be likely; but I really would like to meet this young lady who has so grabbed your heart. For now, though, just keep doing whatever it is that Michael or other senior Angels ask you to do; and only get in touch with me if you hear something that seems to threaten public law and order.
And, by that, I don’t mean things like your punitive expedition up to Manchester – I agree, it sounds as though the young man got less than he deserved. I mean anything that sounds like some huge public disobedience, a coup or something like that. Everything you’ve told me doesn’t make any of that sound likely. Personally, I should be delighted if the Angels can shake up the next Election and offer some kind of alternative to the current ghastly options. ”
Andrew had had no problem slipping away to see the Colonel. Chloe had made clear early on that their relationship of total trust must mean that, if it were necessary, either could say to the other ‘I have to be somewhere’. They wouldn’t need to speak about it or explain themselves if they didn’t want. In any case, Chloe knew he had these Middle East ‘students’ to train up and accepted readily that, from time to time, he would be away with them.
The weeks slipped very quickly by. Chloe seemed to have a huge range of Angel friends – Andrew wondered about the 150 limit that Michael had talked about. And both enjoyed enough of the kind of music that the Angels arranged gigs for that, several times a week, there was one – often free – they could attend in London.
Chloe’s current Angel task seemed to be checking up with and reassuring a number of Angels in and around the South East. They were embedded in one or more of the social programmes – like the women’s housing projects – that the Angels were increasingly ma
joring on. For Andrew, he received the odd request to help, the only one of which that took him away from Chloe for a few days was the need for him, after all, to go and help deliver an ‘environmental special’ on plastics. He did at least avoid what he heard afterwards had been a dreary few days scavenging for plastic in Bristol and around South Wales. But he did have to go down to the South Wales coast and help present – to several admiring TV anchor people – the benefits incorporated in the new plastics sorting plant.
This in turn had required several days of preparation, brushing up his schoolboy physics and getting to know his way round the small but (he was assured) extremely expensive new processing plant. The programme that resulted was an immediate and huge hit with viewers when a TV channel ran it; and, just to make sure no-one who mattered had missed it, the Angels – who Andrew discovered indeed had their own TV channel putting out about 6 hours of shows a day (mostly recorded gigs) – ran it several times on that.
Chloe had enjoyed sitting watching with him – Andrew had by default become the Angel’s spokesman for the relevant interviews though Uriel had also been heavily involved. For just a few days, Andrew had become able to download chunks of erudite physics in a way that sounded both coherent and as though he had been doing it for years. For some reason, Chloe particularly enjoyed the passage where Andrew had explained the four main types of plastic and how the new process sorted between them. After a few viewings she could even recite the main text. “There are four main types of plastic. One is PET, polyethylene terephthalate, used to make bottles for beverages. The second is High-Density polyethylene for milk bottles. A third is Polyvinyl Chloride, PVC, used in cling film; and the fourth Low Density polyethylene for grocery bags.” The first time she had done that, he had chased her around the sofa, caught her and they had fallen in a heap on the sofa kissing frantically. Andrew regretted that his physics lessons had never been such fun.
During this period, Andrew also came to realise just how careful the Angels had been in setting up this exercise and how they pointed the way forward to what would need to be done – by implication after they had become the Government. Another passage that Andrew had learned (and, though he said so himself, he delivered very well) was a good example. “People need to understand that over 80% of global plastic rubbish comes from Asia. We can clean up our act. But what it’s really going to take is making the technology and the money available so that countries like India and Bangladesh can do this themselves; and, more importantly want to. We think China will get the message and will have the ability to do that work itself – we will just make the technology available to them. For the others, an Angel Government in the UK would be making such technology available as part of its Aid Programme. Without that, this initiative you see here today would be pretty meaningless, just like a lot of the UK Aid given in recent years has been.”
23
Not all the Angel initiatives – and there seemed to be an inexhaustible number as the months moved towards the Election – went quite so smoothly. Andrew saw one, the public pledges of political support for the Angels from leading figures, take shape and blossom. The footballer whom he had helped to cajole was just one of many from around the country, from the professions, the Arts and public life. Obviously, Andrew had no insight into how many of these were genuine statements, rather than drawn under pressure as in the case of the footballer. But most sounded heartfelt and were often backed by convincing summaries of why the individual had concluded that the present political machines were broken. They certainly seemed to achieve their purpose – of changing the public mood.
Independent journalists appeared mostly to reach a similar conclusion – that the statements were heartfelt – when they delved into some of the pledges. Likewise, press efforts to research the social programmes that the Angels had been running also failed to dig up any dirt. In fact, the opposite. By April as a result, there could have been few young mothers around the country who didn’t know – and think well of – the Angel hostels for young women and families. They also knew that it was a key Angel pledge that these would be rolled out across the country if the Angels won the Election. Likewise, anyone who had ever tried dieting should by April have known that, while the Angels had no magic bullets here, they did have a programme of life change and improvement that had had a marked and lasting impact on many. And, again, that this would be tried more widely if the Angels came to power.
However, Andrew discovered too that the Angels were just as capable as anyone else of screwing up, though it wasn’t common.
Somewhere, an Angel had come up with a bizarre idea for showing how mass dieting – if supported in the right way – could make a huge difference to individuals’ weight and, over time, to their health and life expectancy. This Angel had started with the fact that the average female elephant weighed around 4,000 kilos. That person had also found zoo scales that allowed individual elephants to be weighed – great metal plates in the ground on which the animals could stand. And this Angel had also worked out that the various clinics like the one Andrew had been to in his second labour, for ‘prize giving’, were currently taking in several hundred new recruits a quarter. The Angel had obviously known about the ‘secret ingredient’ of diet loss – the restoration of taste buds – and wanted to show how, in an overall programme, this could work.
Andrew suspected that what followed had been dreamt up in an alcohol-fuelled evening by a group of Angels in a university. But, nevertheless, Michael had been approached and, somehow, had given the OK.
The idea was this. Take 200 recruits – male and female – who, these bright sparks had worked out, weighed around 90 kilos each on arrival. Put 10 candidates in reserve for drop-outs. The rest – the 190 – would weigh around 17,000 kilos in total, give or take – or, if you chose the right elephants – 4 adult females. The idea? Weigh both groups at the beginning of the new courses. Weigh them again at the end of the courses when many of the participants would have shed perhaps 20 kilos; and, with luck, you could find the whole 190 balanced by 3 elephants not 4. Great visual, great TV. The fact – Andrew thought – that it was in very poor taste and open to all kinds of risk in the delivery seemed to have got brushed too readily aside.
Andrew got involved only about seven weeks into the hare-brained scheme, when a message from Michael came to ask if he could take charge of the project and, if possible, save it. The idea had been launched – with one of the southern zoos providing enthusiastic support to find four female elephants and weigh them; and the same equipment had been used to weigh (in batches!) the course newcomers. Andrew quickly discovered that the only good thing that could be said was that nearly all these people had been enthusiastic supporters at the outset; and they were tickled by the idea that, between them, they could lose an elephant’s weight in three months. Andrew also found that almost every professional involved in dieting and weight control thought the idea was both gross and crazy. However, there would be no problem in finding doctors who would agree that the results, if maintained, would greatly improve the health and life expectancy of those involved. The stunt was now so well established in the public mind that there seemed no prospect of just quietly burying the idea and moving on; so Andrew had little choice but to make the best of it.
Andrew not surprisingly found something of a shambles on the first morning he turned up at the clinic from which the whole operation had been run. There seemed to have been no senior Angel in charge up to that point, certainly no-one who could cover the country (the clinics were spread around) or who had any real PR expertise. Andrew found it easy to take over –no-one there wanted responsibility for what was shaping up to be a disaster. And he had already taken the precaution of involving one of the central Angel team of PR experts, Georgia, with whom he had already discussed what could perhaps be done.
The first step was to organise a check on how the groups in the various clinics were actually shaping up. How many of the 190 had drop
ped out? The answer proved to be a very encouragingly low number; he would not need the 10 ‘reserves’. Then, the key question. They were nearly halfway through the course. Had the average weight of the course members fallen by anything like the 10 or so kilos per person that was going to be needed by that stage? The answer here was a little less reassuring – about 8 kilos a head from the sample that he arranged to be weighed over his first couple of days. But the good news was that nearly all of those involved claimed to be enjoying the exercise and were determined to hit their personal (and the collective) target.
Over the next month, Andrew travelled round all the clinics involved. Chloe volunteered to visit many of them with him; and he found that she had great empathy with those on the courses. This she put down to her own much earlier recovery from drug addiction on an Angel-financed course. Andrew decided that the atmosphere had to be made one of ‘competitive fun’. These people had signed in to a programme, focusing on their own problems, their own need for life-style changes. Now they had found an additional element, a distinctly odd competition in which each of them could play a part.
Andrew instructed that the courses should continue as normal – i.e. there should be no extra emphasis on weight loss as opposed to the life-style change programme and the additional skill sets being taught. He guessed that, even if they met the challenge, some journalist 6 months later would track down participants and see if many of them had immediately started to regain weight at the end of the course. What the Angels knew was that the key to continued weight loss was the changes wrought in the participants’ self-esteem through the addition of new life and professional skills. To skimp on these elements of the courses would be self-defeating.
Andrew also spent quite a lot of time with Georgia gaming how the final ‘weigh-off’ could be handled on air. The independent TV company involved had come up with that name – ‘the Great Weigh-off’, no doubt a play on a much earlier TV ‘bake-off’; and the company was clearly intent on making it seem just that, the last round of a competition being viewed live by (they hoped) several million people.