Bad Angels

by Rebecca Chance

  Aniela didn’t understand all of this, but she hadn’t expected to. In her experience at the Canary Clinic, comparatively famous people always assumed that you were aware of every detail of their lives and careers, and became disproportionately upset when you weren’t. In any case, the bones of the story were perfectly clear. Stirring the tea, dunking the bags so that they released every last drop of dark golden liquid, Aniela said over her shoulder:

  ‘That’s good, isn’t it? He kissed two girls. One is maybe serious, but two is just fun.’

  She could tell by the arrested quality of the silence that Melody was thinking this over.

  ‘I suppose so,’ she said doubtfully.

  ‘You left him alone, and now it’s Christmas,’ Aniela said, removing the tea bags and spooning plenty of sugar into Melody’s mug. ‘He has a party, he kisses some girls. Big deal, as you say here. If there is only one girl and no party, then you should worry.’

  She set the mug down in front of her patient.

  ‘Drink it all,’ she said firmly.

  Melody sipped it and grimaced. ‘It’s really sweet...’ ‘You need sugar. For the shock. And yes, there are calories,’ she added, amused, sitting down opposite Melody. ‘Who cares? You are thin. Drink it.’

  Melody obeyed, cowed into silence.

  ‘You should ring him,’ Aniela said. ‘Not tonight. Not tomorrow morning, he will be sleeping if he had a party. Maybe tomorrow evening, to wish him happy Christmas. Then you should tell him you want to meet him, and when you meet him, you tell him you still love him. Then you will know if he still loves you too.’

  Melody gaped at her.

  ‘You make it sound so simple,’ she said feebly.

  ‘It is simple,’ Aniela said. ‘When it is love, it is simple.’ ‘I always thought that too,’ Melody said softly. She drank some tea. ‘You seem like you have everything all worked out,’ she observed.

  ‘Me?’ Aniela’s pale blonde eyebrows shot up. ‘No! Not at all! My life is a big mess.’

  I hate where I live, she thought, and I hate my boyfriend. I sent all my savings to my family and they spent them on drink. I kissed a patient who I don’t know. And I don’t even like my job that much.

  She caught her breath; this was the first time she’d ever thought that.

  Maybe I’ve just been working too hard. Day and night, double shifts, anything to get out of the flat, avoid Lubo. Once I kick him out, I’ll be able to relax. It’s not like he was helping with the rent. And I have to kick him out. I just can’t do it over Christmas, that would be too cruel. First thing in the New Year, though, he’s out.

  ‘What were you doing down by the river?’ Melody asked suddenly, her dark blue eyes fixed on Aniela’s face. ‘Walking,’ Aniela said. ‘Thinking.’

  ‘About what?’ Melody persisted.

  Despite herself, Aniela smiled. It was the first proper smile she’d ever given a patient, she realised; she was always controlled, professional, friendly but not a friend. But here she was, relaxing in her chair, picking up her mug, sitting back, no longer observing Melody with careful attention, but thinking about her own feelings, her own wants and needs.

  Something’s changing, she realised. I’m letting go of things I clung on to before.

  ‘Just like you,’ she answered Melody, and her smile was wry now, ‘I was thinking about a man.’

  ‘Really?’ Melody’s eyes widened. ‘Someone you like?’ ‘Two of them. Someone I don’t really even know,’ Aniela said. ‘And someone I need to say goodbye to.’

  ‘Sounds complicated,’ Melody said. ‘But you like the one you don’t even really know, right?’

  Aniela nodded. ‘There’s something about him,’ she heard herself say to her own surprise. ‘Something very quiet. I like that. Quiet,’ she quickly added, ‘but not boring.’

  Melody managed a smile as best she could, with her sore lower lip.

  ‘Well,’ she said, finishing her tea. ‘Here’s what I think you should do. You should tell him you want to meet him, and when you meet him, you should tell him that you like him. Then you’ll know if he likes you too.’

  ‘Very funny,’ Aniela said, unable to suppress a grin at having her own words turned back on her.‘You should do more comedy.’ ‘Oh,’ Melody said, irony in her voice, ‘I just starred in a comic film. It’s only I didn’t mean Wonder Woman to be unintentionally funny.’

  Aniela heard herself start to giggle. It sounded strange to her ears; she never giggled.

  ‘Your breasts were funny,’ she said, remembering Melody wobbling up and down above the tight corset of the skimpy costume. She caught herself. ‘I’m sorry!’ she said in horror. ‘I shouldn’t—’

  ‘No!’ Melody was laughing too, holding her hand up to her mouth to try to stop the cut in her lip from reopening. ‘They were funny, you’re right. I don’t know what I was thinking!’ The image of Melody spinning around, her boobs bouncing, filled both of their minds, and they laughed harder and harder, until what they were laughing about wasn’t Melody and that tacky Wonder Woman costume at all; it was just an excuse, a release from tension after Melody’s rescue from the icy waters of the Thames; her distress at seeing James apparently happy and surrounded by beautiful girls keen to throw themselves at him; Aniela’s confusion about Jon, her extreme attraction to him, his rejection of her, the fact that she was unable to stop thinking about him despite his backing away from her, despite the fact that she knew he had had the kind of surgery that was pretty much the province of drug dealers and gangsters...

  He’s not a drug dealer or a gangster, she told herself firmly. I know he isn’t.

  But then what is he?

  Melody’s laughter had dissolved into an exhausted yawn.

  ‘Ow,’ she said, wincing, holding her fingers against her mouth to stop it stretching. ‘That hurt.’ She yawned again despite herself.

  ‘Good,’ Aniela said, standing up. ‘You are tired. You will sleep now.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have thought – after all that sugar—’ Melody yawned yet again, helplessly. ‘Ow!’ she exclaimed, half laughing.

  ‘The sugar just cancels out the shock,’ Aniela said. ‘Now you are balanced, and you realise how tired you are. Come on. I will take you back to your flat.’

  Obediently, Melody rose to her feet. She looked down at them, one in an Ugg, the other in a damp sock, and managed a little grimace, but Aniela was already handing her a pair of disposable paper flip-flops.

  ‘Better than nothing,’ she said. ‘Give me your boot.’

  She retrieved Melody’s cape and hat, took the Ugg that Melody obediently handed her, and headed off to the corridor that led to the Limehouse Reach lobby, Melody slip-sliding after her. They crossed the atrium, the doorman staring after them curiously, but too well-trained to say a word. Melody, overcome by everything she had been through that evening, was as knocked out by the aftermath of extreme emotion as a person in a normal state of mind would have been by two Ambien: which is why I haven’t given her any, Aniela thought. Camomile tea and sugar, and she’s gone down like a bowling pin.

  She slipped her arm back around Melody’s swaying waist as they exited the elevator, and unlocked the door with her own key. Melody’s eyes were already closing, almost all her body weight leaning on Aniela now. She trusts easily, Aniela noticed. This is why she made a mess when she went to Hollywood, because she trusted what people were telling her. She helped

  Melody take off her sweater, the paper flip-flops, the socks, and then guided her to the bedroom, folding back the covers as Melody climbed into bed.

  Aniela had tucked the coverlet under Melody’s chin, and was about to slip from the room, when, quite unexpectedly, Melody’s hand snaked out and gripped Aniela’s wrist. The room was dark, just one bedside light sending a warm, diffuse glow of light over the silky coverlet. Melody’s face was in shadow, and the fading bruises, the swelling, were barely visible; Aniela looked down at her patient’s wide blue, black-lashed eyes, the heart-shaped
face and symmetric bone structure, and drew in her breath at how beautiful Melody was.

  Melody gazed up at the nurse.

  ‘It’s Christmas Eve!’ she said drowsily. ‘I can’t believe it, really! What about you, Aniela? Can you believe it’s Christmas tomorrow?’

  Aniela found herself sitting down on the side of the bed.

  ‘No,’ she admitted. ‘Not really. It’s strange here. We are out of time. I don’t say it right, perhaps...’

  ‘Suspended in time,’ Melody said, still holding onto Aniela. ‘I know what you mean.’ She yawned again. ‘We’re up here, in this tower, high above the rest of the world. It’s unreal. Like a fairy tale.’

  ‘I hope it is a happy fairy tale,’ Aniela heard herself say, surprised at her own words: I only ever say positive things to patients. Why did I just suggest that there might be the possibility of an unhappy ending?

  But Melody smiled, a lovely, sweet smile, her hand sliding up to slip its fingers through Aniela’s.

  ‘Me too,’ she said, her voice heartfelt. ‘Me too. Aniela?’

  Her eyes were fluttering closed.

  ‘Yes?’ Aniela said.

  ‘What would you be doing if you were home in Poland?’ Melody asked. ‘With your family? They must be really missing you.’

  Aniela grimaced, but Melody didn’t catch the fleeting expression. It was clear, from things Melody had said, that her family was warm, loving, supportive; this was not the time to enlighten Melody about the realities of Aniela’s considerably less happy family situation.

  ‘I will tell you about some of the traditions my grandmother, my babcia, used to tell me of, years ago, when I was little,’ she said instead, squeezing Melody’s slender fingers affectionately. ‘She came from eastern Poland, and there they think that girls must grind poppy seed on Christmas Eve, if they want to get married soon. And she said that after dinner on Christmas Eve, her mother told her to leave the house, in the cold and the snow, and to listen for a dog barking. The first bark she heard was the direction of where her future husband will come from. It was a small village, you understand. Not in the town.’

  Aniela smiled.

  ‘I always thought, so you must go and live in a house where there is an annoying dog who barks all night. It made no sense to me.’

  ‘I was just thinking that,’ Melody said drowsily, her long lashes lying in semicircles on her cheeks now.

  ‘And the women would have to clean the house, all day, on Christmas Eve, sweeping and dusting. Because evil would stay all year if anything was dirty at the end of the day. Only the women, of course,’ Aniela said dryly. ‘So they are all inside cleaning, and they must not leave, because the first person to enter a house on Christmas Eve must be a man. If it is a woman, it is a bad omen, because then only heifers would be born on the farm for the whole next year. No bulls.’

  Oh dear, she thought. This is all a little sad. Babcia always liked to tell gloomy stories.

  ‘They would make twelve dishes for supper on Christmas Eve,’ she said. Everyone likes to hear about food. ‘My grandmother would always cook the twelve dishes for us. And you must try them all, for good luck. The last one is kutia, which is wheat, raisins, nuts, honey and spices. It’s very sweet, the children love it. You eat the kutia, and then you turn out all the lights and blow out the candles, and you look at where the smoke from the candles goes. If it goes towards the window, the harvest will be good. And if it goes towards the stove, there will be a marriage...’

  There should be a candle to blow out now, she thought. Like telling bedtime stories, where you blow out the candle when the child has fallen asleep.

  Melody’s hand was limp in hers now, warm, soft, slightly damp; Aniela slid her fingers out, very gently, and laid her patient’s hand down on the coverlet. Melody huffed out a breath and rolled onto her side, her breathing steady and rhythmical, a little stertorous, because of the recent surgery on her nose. Aniela stood up and leaned over to turn out the light, padding softly from the room.

  She was closing the bedroom door, so that daylight wouldn’t filter in and wake Melody early; it creaked slightly as it moved, and the noise made Melody stir.

  ‘Aniela?’ she mumbled, her voice heavy with sleep. ‘Thank you. You saved my life tonight.’ She drew in a long, slow breath. ‘You’re my guardian angel. Like in It’s A Wonderful Life. You’re like Clarence...’

  Melody’s voice tailed off; the words faded, and the breathing turned to a soft, bubbling snore.

  Good. She will sleep very soundly, Aniela thought as she closed the door. I envy her. Tomorrow she’ll call her family, and they will come to see her. And maybe the boyfriend will come as well. If not – well, she is beautiful and sweet and talented and nice. She will meet someone else soon.

  But me – I am not beautiful or sweet, and I am not a talented actress. I am not the guardian angel Melody just called me. I’m only a nurse, with no family left that I can trust, and a boyfriend I can’t wait to see the back of. And I am stupid enough to be obsessing about a man whose real name I don’t know, who hasn’t even got a face yet, who kissed me and then pushed me away...

  She left Melody’s apartment, double-locking the door behind her. The music playing in the corridor, piped through the building, was Judy Garland singing ‘Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas’, that beautiful, rich, poignant vibrato seeming to work itself inside Aniela’s soul, making it vibrate, making her yearn for things that she didn’t have, might never have.

  I am not nice, either. Not as nice as I pretend. I don’t deserve all Melody’s kind words. I brought her back here, to her apartment, not just to make sure she was safely in bed, with the door locked properly. I came back because I wanted to have an excuse to be in the building, to be close to Jon.

  Aniela found herself wishing desperately that the Canary Clinic had bought its apartments for recovering patients next to each other, or at least on the same floor. That way, maybe, perhaps, if Jon were up for some reason, up late on Christmas Eve, he might, perhaps, hear the women coming past his door, look out through the peephole, see Aniela and wait for her to come back, alone...

  It was ridiculous. Pathetic. Obsessive. But instead of the button for the lobby, she pressed the button for Jon’s floor, four up. When the doors opened, she told herself not to get out, to wait for them to close again; but there she was, stepping out of the lift, Judy Garland still singing, beautiful and melancholy. Aniela walked down the corridor, taking the turn that led to the other occupied Canary Clinic apartment, wondering, crazily, if she could come up with any sort of excuse for ringing the bell at – she checked her watch – nearly midnight.

  No. You can’t, she told herself, coming to a halt in front of Jon’s door. You can’t ring his bell. You can’t say you were checking up on him, or thought he’d paged you, or anything at all. Because you’ll seem like an insane, psychotic stalker, chasing after a man who’s just had major surgery – for God’s sake, what is wrong with you, Aniela Jasicki, standing outside a man’s door, yearning for him like you’ve never, ever, yearned for anyone in your life!

  She heaved a deep sigh and turned away.

  Behind her, the door swung open, and Jon said hesitantly:

  ‘Aniela? Is everything okay?’

  She had a moment of such utter embarrassment that she wished the floor would open and swallow her up. If she could, she would have kept walking, pretended she was someone else, made her escape and denied the whole thing tomorrow – but I can’t, I’m still in my uniform. What am I going to do, tell him he must have been hallucinating?

  She turned round, guilt plastered to her face; she felt as she had when the teacher had caught her misbehaving at school. And then, looking at Jon, that guilty expression dissolved into something even worse; a giddy, silly smile. Just as young, just as stupid.

  He was wearing a long-sleeved white thermal shirt, the kind that buttons in a placket down the front, and almost all the buttons were open, the soft cotton fabric straining acr
oss the spread of his pectoral muscles, silky red-gold hairs twining around the buttons, the V of the open placket drawing Aniela’s eyes down, down to the plain khaki boxer briefs that clung to his narrow hips and stopped mid-thigh. His legs were lean and strong, his calf muscles hard; his skin was pale and freckled, and the light from the corridor glowed on the coppery hairs on his legs, which looked just as soft and silky as the hair on his chest. Aniela imagined herself winding those chest hairs round her fingers, stroking them, feeling his skin, running her hands over his perfect body, and her mouth went so dry she couldn’t say a word.

  He was staring at her, one hand on the doorjamb, the other scratching the back of his head, his lips parted.

  ‘I heard someone outside,’ he said eventually. ‘Stopping, outside my door.’

  ‘I was bringing back my other patient, from the Clinic,’ Aniela managed to say. ‘I just thought I’d check on you. Then I realised how late it was. I’m sorry I woke you up.’

  ‘It’s okay,’ he said. ‘I’m a light sleeper.’

  ‘You must be,’ she said disbelievingly.

  ‘It’s quiet as the grave here,’ Jon said. ‘You can hear a pin drop.’

  And then they stared at each other, conversation exhausted.

  Well? Aniela said to herself. It’s up to you now. You can’t tell Melody to be brave and then not follow your own advice. He must know why you’re really here, after all. And he’s still standing there, waiting...

  Slowly, Aniela stepped towards him. She found herself wishing, fervently, that she wasn’t dressed in her unflattering nurse’s uniform; but then, what could I wear that would look better on me? I’m pear-shaped, so I don’t look good in jeans – I don’t like my legs very much, so skirts aren’t much better... at least if I were in a nice pair of court shoes, my feet wouldn’t look so big—

  She was close enough to him now that their bodies were almost touching. She could smell his natural scent, warm and musky, with that clean soap smell overlaying it. There was no point looking up at his face; how could she read his expression when he didn’t have one? So, feeling as if she were taking her life in her hands, she reached out and touched his chest, something she had been longing to do from the moment she saw him.