Flora opened her eyes. Why was the sun so slow in coming? It seemed a thousand years since she was well.
Alison was making baby music in her milk-thickened voice, the happy singing with which she began every day.
So it was morning.
Flora closed her eyes. ‘Oh, Connie!’ she thought. It was so funny, the way he gave away his real ambition every time he called the audience ‘the audience’ instead of ‘the mob’. Connie always loved to say that, for the audience, it was the story that was the thing, whether crafted by a novelist, or thrown together by a newspaper copy boy or an opera librettist. Connie and his ‘story’. Flora remembered him, in the middle of one of his expositions of his method, saying to Xas—also party to some of those discussions—‘Pretend you’re in the story.’ Of course Connie hadn’t known that that’s what Xas was always doing, and that the pretence pained and embarrassed him. Xas was always more comfortable off to one side and serving other people’s stories. Always happier providing some business in the background, keeping moving, like a fake multitude, the column of soldiers that seem to go on forever but are only marching around behind the live area to enter the shot over and over. Xas was like that. He was back there, behind things, a thunder and shining that made everything seem real.
Flora opened her eyes. The room was still dull. Perhaps it was an overcast day.
Alison was lying against Xas, her head on his chest, sucking her fingers. She stared at her mother, sleepy and solemn.
‘When I go into hospital, if I do say anything odd, they’ll put it down to the psychosis,’ Flora said.
‘You’ve been reading my book,’ Xas said. Then, ‘Would you like to hold the baby?’
‘No. I can see her,’ Flora said. She stared at her daughter.
‘Tell me what to do,’ Xas said. ‘Tell me the rest of it.’
Flora closed her eyes. She couldn’t understand what he meant. ‘The rest of it’—as though she was halfway through telling him a story. Then she heard him say, ‘I mean—tell me what you want for her. For Alison.’
‘I can’t imagine,’ Flora said. Then, ‘It’s all right, Xas, sweetheart. Pretend you’re in the story.’
The world turned peach-coloured. The sun was shining on Flora’s eyelids. O’Brien was shaking the bed with his purring, Xas was weeping, while Alison’s puzzled complaints came and went in counterpoint.
Flora opened her eyes.
Xas went with Flora in the ambulance. The specialist had a room ready, a private room, so Xas could sit by her bed.
She’d lost consciousness shortly before the ambulance came, and didn’t revive. Her admission form said, ‘Uraemic Coma.’
Xas sat beside her and held her hand. Flora’s fingers were so swollen they felt rigid and boneless at once.
He had phoned Avril and she’d come, with her chauffeur. Flora had rallied enough to squeeze her friend’s hand, but hadn’t been able to find words. Then, once Avril and Alison had gone, Xas called an ambulance. He’d left O’Brien lying on the coverlet. Perhaps the cat would be too tired to stir again, but the back door was open, just in case O’Brien’s animal needs drove him out again into the wasteland, to whatever bush he’d been hiding under before he was called. The ambulance had arrived, and the attendants were very gentle with Flora. They’d moved with dispatch, but without urgency. Flora had gone behind her body by then, was unreachable beyond her own face.
Xas didn’t take his eyes off her face. He hoped she might surface. He didn’t even blink. He sat by her stretcher in the ambulance, then by her hospital bed. He raised his voice over the sound of her laboured breathing to sing her the songs they’d both loved.
The nurses heard him singing—the young man with the much older wife. They looked in from time to time and did the little they were able to, took the patient’s pulse and made notations on her chart.
At these times some spouses would watch all such activity with resentment or anxiety, while others were reassured. The young husband seemed oblivious. He seemed to notice no one but his struggling, comatose wife. One nurse thought this touching, another thought it rude.
They advised him to rest, to have something to eat. But he wouldn’t stir. They didn’t know how he managed it. For twelve hours he kept his seat and held his wife’s hand. The doctor was in twice, at nine in the morning, shortly after the patient was admitted, and again at six in the evening, before going home to his dinner.
Then, at two in the morning, the young husband appeared at the ward sister’s desk and said, ‘She’s dead.’ Just that. He followed the ward sister and a duty nurse back to the room, stood against the wall while, for a minute, they were busy by the bed. They whispered to one another, in deference to him, not the poor woman, the patient who, comatose on arrival, was a blank stranger to them. They closed the patient’s mouth and drew the covers up under her chin, the sheet rolled to hold her jaw in place. Later they’d cover her face. The ward sister moved the chair—its rubber feet squawking on the polished linoleum—to suggest to the husband he sit again. Sit awhile longer.
Xas resumed his seat. He put his palm on Flora’s forehead, felt her cooling, but still elastic skin. Her soul was invisible to him. Invisible on earth. On earth—he thought—it was easy not to believe in souls.
The nurses had gone and he sat in silence. Time passed and, in time, he saw the bridge of Flora’s nose sharpen, become stark. She was immobile, but sinking somehow, sinking perceptibly.
The noise in the corridors gradually increased. A cart was wheeled by. It paused at the door then went on, leaving behind it the smell of steamy unsalted eggs, butter and bread.
After a good while the doctor came in and said some practised, apologetic things. He glanced at Flora’s chart, and made out a death certificate.
The muscles on Flora’s face were firming up again. She looked starved, but resolute.
The ward sister returned and she and the doctor conferred quietly. Then the doctor bent over Xas.
Xas said to the doctor, ‘She didn’t wake up again.’ But he was thinking, ‘Who was she? Who was she after all?’ The question expanded to fill all the space around him. All the space and all the time.
The doctor slipped a hand under Xas’s elbow and helped him stand. The ward sister took his hand and they led him to the door. She said, ‘There must be people you need to call.’
Xas turned, wrenching the sister’s arm, and scraping her hand against the sharp bevels of the doorframe. He looked back at the figure in the bed. This was it—the last time he’d see her.
She peeled an apple, washed her hair, chewed a pencil, fiddled with the tuner on the wireless, rolled an orange against her cheek, patted O’Brien, peered into her Moviola. She always left the kitchen light on when he was coming home late.
The face on the pillow was as closed, still and secretive as Alison’s had been the moment she arrived in the world. This wasn’t Flora; it was a relic. But Xas wanted to stay with the relic. Shouldn’t he stay? Shouldn’t he stay and see what could be done?
They were coaxing him—the doctor, the ward sister, the nurse who’d come hurrying along the hallway. ‘Mr Hintersee,’ said the doctor. ‘There must be people you need to call.’
Mr Hintersee hesitated and, to the doctor, it seemed that everything paused with him, the noises of the world, the dust in the air. Then he said, ‘I’ll call Doug Madill, who is an undertaker.’
It appeared that the young husband had anticipated this moment after all. For some reason the doctor found this shocking. He released Mr Hintersee’s arm. The nurses did too. Their hands shunned him.
Mr Hintersee asked, ‘Where is the phone?’ And the ward sister pointed the way.
Flora’s Paper Road
November, 1941
On a crisp fall night, two years after Flora had gone, Xas heard a subtle but unmistakable sound, a deep, soft crack of wings braking the descent of a winged body through the air above the house. He left the couch, where he’d been sprawled, wearing pyjamas a
nd reading by the rosy light of a lamp draped with an old silk scarf. He hurried through the house, and out the back door. Beyond the back gate he saw the archangel’s bulky shadow.
Xas went to his brother and took his hand. ‘You came,’ he said.
‘You asked me to come,’ said Lucifer, and produced a folded and sand-chafed copy of the bill Xas had had printed seven weeks earlier.
Xas said, ‘The printer was happy to be paid, of course, but was unhelpfully helpful about the size of that “XAS”. He said the letters couldn’t be read once the bill was wrapped around a power pole. He imagined I was printing something to paste on power poles and billboards.’
‘So—you used Jodeau’s method of communicating with me. Very clever. What do you want?’
‘My friend Flora is dead these two years,’ Xas said. He released his brother’s hand and stood poised.
The archangel remarked that he looked like someone about to levitate.
‘Highly unlikely, without wings,’ Xas said. Then, ‘You wait right there. I have to get candles and a torch.’ He eyed Lucifer’s wing hands. ‘I’ll only be a minute. There’s something I want you to do for me.’
‘Something which requires illumination?’
‘It’ll help,’ said Xas, then reached out again and stroked the archangel’s forearm softly with the backs of his fingers. It was all he could think to do, it was instinct, it was what he’d do to calm his daughter or call her attention to him.
Lucifer simply stood still, looking down his nose. He raised one eyebrow.
‘Wait,’ Xas said. He hurried back to the house. He found several paraffin candles, a box of matches, and a torch. He pulled the rug from the sofa, and went back out.
‘That’s a lot of paraphernalia,’ Lucifer said. ‘I can’t think what you plan to do with it.’
Xas spread the rug on the ground.
The track had been narrowed in the hollow by the profusion of self-seeded flowers, and the blanket lay humped over lupin bushes and canterbury bells, daisies, and wild mustard. Xas lay down on the rug and rolled till the foliage was flattened. Lucifer stood by and watched. ‘I’m intrigued,’ he said.
‘We’re very lucky it’s a windless night. These candles should stay lit, so long as you take care not to make any sudden gestures with your wings.’
‘I’ll bear that in mind,’ Lucifer said.
Xas thrust the candles upright in the sand, and lit them. The flames soon stood tall, little spires of light that turned, at their tips, from threads of flame to threads of smoke.
‘Have you been following this war?’ Xas asked.
‘Yes. I don’t like it.’
Xas straightened and met Lucifer’s eyes. He had been very relieved that Lucifer had come—in time to do the little good he was able to—but when he looked at the archangel Xas felt more than mere relief; much to his surprise he found he felt pleased to see Lucifer, pleased to look into that grave, arrogant face. Xas smiled at the archangel—who waited, unsmiling, then prompted, ‘Yes, Xas?’
Xas put the torch down. He adjusted one candle, the only one making any noise, a fiery whisper, perhaps chewing its way down past some impurity in the paraffin. As he did so Xas talked. ‘I have a correspondent, August Hintersee, a man of substance and influence in Germany. And I had a subscription to a German newspaper, though I cancelled it several years ago.’
‘Because you didn’t like the war?’
‘Because it wasn’t really possible to work out what was going on from what was reported. Cancelling my subscription was something I could do. And I gave up August. But when I filled out my census forms, I had to write that I was a German citizen. Apparently my marriage was of too short duration, or—I’m not sure—I’ve been talking to a lawyer, but he’s prevaricating. Then the there’s the Alien Registration Act. I had to register. I was photographed and fingerprinted.’
‘You married her?’
Xas stepped away from the candles and took off his pyjama jacket. He balled it up and tossed it through the gate and onto the lawn. He said, ‘I’m interested to hear you say that you don’t like the war.’
‘Why? Do you expect me to like it?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Xas?’ Lucifer said, ‘Why have you taken off your shirt?’
Xas turned away from Lucifer, then looked back over his shoulder. ‘I want you to pull these feathers out,’ he said. ‘Only you can do it. I can’t reach, and no human can alter an angel. I just want to be able to pass a bit more than casual scrutiny. Say—if a doctor wants me to remove my shirt so that he can put his stethoscope to my back to listen to my lungs.’
‘Are you planning to enlist?’
Xas bit his lip. He didn’t want to sound irritated. He looked down at the candle flames which were all standing straight again, though he had the impression that a cold breeze was playing on his bared skin. He said, ‘I want to take whatever precautions I can not to be separated from my daughter.’
‘Oh,’ said the archangel. ‘I see.’ Then, ‘So you want me to pluck you?’
‘Yes.’
Lucifer raised his wings, slowly, so as not to blow the candles out. He lowered himself onto the ground at the edge of the blanket. His huge top wings made a pavilion above them, and he stretched the bottom pair out before him, between the candles, so that they formed a kind of ramp. The middle wings he closed, so that the pinions folded behind him, and the top joints bent before him. He reached up to Xas and pulled him down onto the ramp of his joined wings, turned him over using the four hands he had free.
Xas held his breath. He felt the calloused fingers, two hands softer and bare-skinned, and two finely feathered and tipped with hard nails. Lucifer’s fingers sifted through the down, tracing the channels of the scars. Xas took a deep breath—smelled warm anise, and cold apples—and his mind went away from him for a time.
There were several tugging sensations, beneath his shoulderblades, and on either side of his spine. Tugging, then sharp, specific pain. Lucifer’s hands smoothed the stinging spots. ‘There’ll be some blood,’ he said. ‘And it’ll take time.’
‘That’s all right. Just try to get them all.’
Lucifer leaned forward and one of his gritty plaits slithered across the back of Xas’s neck. The tugging resumed. ‘Tell me what happened,’ Lucifer said.
Xas told Lucifer what had happened to Flora. By the conclusion of his story the candle flames had almost crept into their sockets of sand. Xas’s back felt hot and flayed. Trails of blood were drying on his sides. The tacky, pulling sensation of his own blood was as unfamiliar and uncanny to him as the pain. Lucifer had listened to his story, but hadn’t made any comments or asked any questions. And he hadn’t asked about Alison. He did, however, ask about Cole—and then said, as if explaining his interest, ‘I keep reading about him. He’s an interesting character.’
‘I stopped seeing him,’ Xas said. ‘But it wasn’t one of those rational estrangements where someone decides that they’re just not themselves any more in the other person’s company.’
‘You mean that’s happened to you in the past?’
‘No. But I’ve seen it happen to other people.’
‘Other people,’ Lucifer said. ‘So you’re people now?’ He dug his fingertips into a channel of scar to pull the stubborn feathers there. ‘I’ve always supposed you were more tenacious than people.’
Xas gritted his teeth and breathed through his nose. When the worst had passed he said, ‘I was so sad about Flora that I forgot to be sad about Cole. And I’m not entirely sure why I gave him up.’
Lucifer said that he’d seen Cole’s western, Miscreant, which had been released earlier that year, then withdrawn shortly afterward because—Xas knew—Cole wanted to recut it. Miscreant was Cole and Crow’s last joint project, a movie Cole fired Crow from.
Cole was practically nocturnal by 1940, and filmed most of Miscreant in interiors, or outdoors taking night for day. If, in the film, a door was open, showing supposed day
light, that daylight was icy, false.
Lucifer said, ‘I saw it at an ozoner in Arizona,’ using the slang for drive-in to make his rhyme. Xas could hear the smile in his brother’s voice, could hear Lucifer enjoying the idiom. ‘It’s an odd film,’ Lucifer said. ‘With its hero and heroine who smoulder at each other from different corners of rooms, their romance made of looks, and dumb double entendres. And the camera keeps tracking in toward their faces—in reverse shots—first him, then her, then him, then her, till it’s impossible to tell who the camera is standing in for, who it wants. The actors seem clumsy and sulky. They look like they’re immersed in clear oil. And I was particularly struck by the way the hero talked, in a drawl, but his voice light, with a slight quizzical lift at the end of each statement and, at times, a passive, almost narcotised delivery.’
‘Uh-huh,’ said Xas.
‘I decided he was playing you—that actor, Birch. Cole obviously gave it a lot of thought. And then there was the way Cole chose to light Birch, to get that spectra, that solar halo look, where everything is darker around the source of light.’ Lucifer sounded intrigued and amused. ‘Odd film,’ he said again. ‘Within the censor’s limits, but still beyond the bounds of good taste.’
He was down to the last few feathers now. These were slippery with blood. He was having to pinch them between his nails, to get any purchase. It was delicate work and he was concentrating. Xas could hear his brother holding his breath for minutes at a time, then, when he exhaled, he blew white down everywhere. ‘Do you want to know what this looks like?’ Lucifer said.
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