by Heide Goody
Nerys sat up in the armchair, shook the muzziness from her head and looked about her flat. She had had the dream several times in recent days. That she should dream of Molly, less than two months after her aunt’s death, was unsurprising but the other elements were just plain odd. She had barely known the lady vicar, had no idea what the teenage warrior represented and as for Jeremy Clovenhoof as Satan, the idea was simply –
There was a knock at the door. Twinkle, the Yorkshire Terrier, barked underneath the pouffe.
"Crazy," she said to herself.
Nerys opened the door.
"I’m bored," said Clovenhoof.
"Ah, Old Nick himself," said Nerys.
"What?"
She shook her head.
"Just a dream. Come in. Cuppa?"
"Depends what it’s a cup of."
"Coffee."
"Or?"
"Tea."
"No third option?" suggested Clovenhoof.
"Such as?"
"Whiskey. Brandy. Schnapps. Lambrini. Cider. Stout. Meths."
"No. Tea or coffee."
"Tea then," said Clovenhoof, shuffling into the room. "What’s all this crap?" he said and kicked a stout cardboard box.
"I’m finally packing up Molly’s things, the stuff I don’t want to keep."
While Twinkle growled menacingly at his hooves, Clovenhoof poked around in a box, uncovering some ugly ceramics wrapped in newspaper.
"These are your Aunt Molly’s Toby jugs," he said.
"Yes."
"I sold them on E-bay."
"I know. And I bought them back before she realised what you’d done."
"But now you’re getting rid of them. Why did you buy them if you didn’t want them?"
"To keep her happy, doofus," she said, going into the kitchen to put the kettle on. "I’m sure you do things just to keep people happy, to keep the peace."
"Absolutely not," said Clovenhoof. "Two sugars, remember."
"Tell you what," called Nerys. "You help me pack up the unwanted stuff and get it down to the charity shop and I’ll stand you a glass of something girly and alcoholic at the pub on Sunday night."
"Sounds good," said Clovenhoof. He picked up the still-growling Twinkle, dumped him in a cardboard box and covered him with a layer of newspaper. The little dog scrabbled around angrily. Clovenhoof sealed the box and put another on top to muffle the sound.
"Hey, you’re not throwing this out, are you?"
Nerys poked her head through the door. Clovenhoof had a chunky black mobile phone in his hands.
"Molly’s pay-as-you-go phone," she said.
"It’s cool," said Clovenhoof.
"That thing is a brick," said Nerys. "I think it’s older than me."
"I’ve never had a mobile phone," he said.
"You want it?"
"I want it."
Nerys shrugged.
"I’ve no idea what credit’s left on it. There’s a charger in there somewhere. God knows if there’s any instructions."
"I bet he does," said Clovenhoof.
Nerys had made a pile of documents and papers on the dining table. Aunt Molly had clearly left a lot of admin behind when she died.
He could see that Nerys had made a small start in sorting through the papers, redistributing some and creating small peripheral piles around the central one. Clovenhoof rooted through all the piles in search of some instructions for his new phone. He peered at some papers and cast them aside. Eventually, he found something that looked like instructions and, tired of having to read things, just stuffed them in his pocket.
Nerys emerged with two mugs of tea. She eyed him suspiciously.
"Don’t go messing with my intricate filing system."
"Wouldn’t dream of it," he said, taking a sip of hot sweet tea.
Nerys frowned.
"Is that box moving?" she said as Twinkle tried to escape from the cardboard box.
Clovenhoof looked over. "It’ll stop eventually," he said.
~ooOOOoo~
The Archangel Michael watched as Ben Kitchen struggled with the cables under the desk. Ben huffed and groaned and then gave an ‘a-ha’ of victory.
"And that’s your printer connected," he said, emerging from beneath the desk and wiping his hands on his jeans.
Michael concealed a little shudder. It wasn’t just that Ben was the kind of man who would wipe his hands on his jeans or on one of his many ancient T-shirts. It wasn’t just that Ben’s jeans were threadbare and unshapely. No, it was also Ben’s unspoken implication that something – anything – in Michael’s flat was dirty enough to need brushing from his hands. Michael had seen Ben’s second hand bookshop, Books ‘n’ Bobs. It was a place where the dust had gathered for so long that it probably contained mammoth DNA.
Ben stepped back from the large walnut desk and nodded approvingly at the computer set up.
"All done. I’m afraid I’ve got to shoot now. War-gaming night at the Jockey."
Michael understood that Ben did this war-gaming thing and that it involved tiny toy soldiers, gambling dice and other men with their own unique range of dubious habits. He chose not to enquire any further, fearing that the whole business was thoroughly sinful.
"Well, thank you, Ben," said Michael, opened his wallet and looked for a suitable tip for the fellow.
"Hey," said Ben, waving Michael away genially. "Just being a good neighbour. Buy me a pint sometime okay."
"If you say so," said Michael and showed him to the door.
Michael was inwardly pleased that Ben had to go. His computer was set up and ready to go and he wanted to put into practice all that he had learned that day.
Having seen that some foul miscreant had discovered his written diary, drawn lewd anatomical pictures in its margins and, strangest of all, spattered his bed sheets with specks of some yellow gloop, Michael had decided that a physical diary was both antiquated and unsecure.
Sitting at his PC, Michael opened Word, arranged his margins and indents and began to type, slowly at first but then with increasing speed.
Day eleven of my mission among the people of Earth.
O Lord, I am making great progress in fitting in with the humans. Today, I attended a course entitled Computers for Beginners at the Paradise Street Adult Education Centre. I feel that if I can get to grips with the hi-tech core of modern human life, everything else will fall into place.
The tutor has deplorable taste in cardigans but seems to know his subject. Quite quickly he had we students (grey-haired ladies for the most part, many of them shameful divorcees) logged into the Windows and opening the Word and the Excel.
I must write a letter of congratulations to Mr Gates who is not only, I understand, a generous philanthropist but also the most amazing of inventors. Whilst the human world lacks order, grace, and subtlety, Mr Gates has created the most divine order in his operating system and applications. Though the world of documents and spreadsheets and databases may be small, its menus, its clipboards, its fields, style sheets and document version control represents the closest thing to perfection I have seen since my arrival.
Our tutor opened the door to learning, lifted the veil of mystery from my eyes and the whole workings of Mr Gates’ wondrous tools became almost instantly known to me.
Half an hour after logging on, I asked my tutor whether a graph inserted from Excel into Word would update automatically even if the spreadsheet was not open and he gave me the most remarkable look and asked how long I had been using computers. I told him it was my first time and he professed disbelief (although the actual words he used were both colourful and quite unrepeatable). Before the end of the training session, many of the grey-haired divorcees were coming to me to ask how to format this or align that. I believe the tutor was pleased to have me helping him; there was certainly something that looked a bit like a smile fixed on his face.
On the way home, I visited the shops. Yet again, I searched the super market for suitably heavenly foodstuff. I bought an a
ngel cake but am not convinced it will serve. However, I was able to call in at the electrical retailers and pick up the Personal Computer I had ordered. Also, on an unlikely whim, I purchased a stuffed toy bear with large button eyes from a greeting cards shop. I do not know why I did that. The stuffed animal has the name Forever Friends sewn to its foot but I have already christened him Little G.
Michael re-read and reflected on what he had written, decided to delete the last three sentences and saved the document.
He spent several hours working on a Curriculum Vitae document. It was both exciting and a challenge, exciting to be able to use all manner of fonts, styles and formatting options, challenging in that he wanted his résumé to be impressive, truthful and yet reveal nothing of his angelic nature to the ignorant people of Earth. He tinkered with it, rewording this and rephrasing that, and idly wondered how one went about applying for the job of Prime Minister.
Afterwards, he went onto the internet and created a user login for his bank account. A bank account had been set up for him at the moment of his arrival on Earth and the appropriate debit cards were in his wallet the first time he looked. Heaven had been as thorough and as considerate as it had been detached and silent in the arrangements for his transition to life on Earth.
Michael looked at his bank balance in the browser window and noted the regular yet modest payments that Heaven’s agents had paid into it. The Computers for Beginners course at the adult education centre had opened his eyes to the powers and capabilities of Information Technology. He imagined there must be a way to trace those payments, find out where they had come from, perhaps even find Heaven’s agents on Earth and then talk to them, reason with them, plead with them to take him back…
No. Michael silently chided himself. Heaven had sent him – The Almighty had sent him – to Earth for a reason and in His ineffable wisdom there must be a greater purpose to that relocation. Michael reminded himself to stay strong and to serve His mission with a glad heart.
He then discovered that he could use the internet to search for images and, on a curious whim, search for ‘thing’. This, bizarrely, produced pictures of what appeared to be a wrestler with skin like a dried riverbed. A search for ‘penis’ produced unhelpful images that ran from the medical to the zoological. Michael attempted to recall some of the colourful synonyms he had heard Clovenhoof use and eventually hit on search for pictures of ‘cock’.
Two hours later, Michael had gazed at hundreds of cocks, was none the wiser and suspected that he had been struck with cock-blindness from staring too long. And yet, he felt that his time had, inexplicably, been well spent.
It was growing dark outside already. Michael got to his feet and turned on all the lights in the flat. In his previous life as an archangel, he had visited Earth during the nighttime but had never been forced to endure it in its entirety, from dusk to dawn. There was no night in the Celestial City; there was always the glorious luminescence of His holy glory. Night was the reminder that, on Earth, Michael was far, far away from the Almighty.
In his bedroom, he smoothed down the edges of his freshly changed sheets and repositioned his teddy bear, Little G, by the pillows. In the bathroom, he once again inspected the handiwork of the day, the new shower, the boxed in section where the toilet had once stood, and the thick white shag-pile carpet that had been fitted throughout in the afternoon. In the kitchen, he contemplated the contents of the fridge and, finding nothing that he wanted to eat, opened a bottle of water and drank it.
Back at the PC, further browsing revealed that the supermarkets all had their own websites and he could order his groceries on-line. He searched for some foodstuffs that might properly and appropriately sate his hunger. The pots of ambrosia in his fridge had turned out to be nothing but a slop of milk, sugar and unnatural colours. The angel cake was moist, sticky and unpleasantly sweet. Neither lived up to its promises. He tried all manner of key words in his search for something appropriate but none of the results seemed promising.
There was a sudden shifting and gurgling in his gut and, with an unholy raspberry, something gaseous parped from his fundament. Michael gave a little shriek and leapt to his feet.
"No!" he shouted. "Back! Get back!"
The vile emission might have been tiny but, oh, it stank. It was like the filthiest mire of Hell itself. But it wasn’t the gas that he feared the most. He could feel something brewing inside him, something solid that yearned to break free.
"What devils are growing within?" he whispered in horror.
He knew he could not let them free. If he, an archangel, one of the most powerful beings in creation, could not hold back the forces of evil and debasement, then how could he be an example to mere humans? Michael clenched his buttocks and, straining internal muscles that he wasn’t even sure existed, directed his entire will into sucking the foetid taint back up into his system. There was a tiny bugle pip of complaint and then all went silent.
"Not good," he said, shaking his head wearily.
He prepared for bed, carefully re-hanging his suit in the wardrobe and laying out a shirt and tie for the following morning. Dressed in his pressed pyjamas, he sat on the edge of his bed and carefully buffed and polished his shoes before kneeling at his bedside to pray.
"Lord, creator of all, guide me on this mission amongst the poor in faith. Reach out your hand and show me where I must go. I thank you for this opportunity to show my worth to you. I accept all the trials you place at my feet: the mysteries of human life, the Adversary in flat 2a, the flux in my belly, the frankly poor range of food items available for the angelic connoisseur. I accept them all. My faith in you is without measure."
Michael pressed his forehead against his clasped hands and tightened his grip until his knuckles were white. He stayed like that for a long time.
"Please take me back," he whispered. "I’m sorry."
He waited for a reply but God remained silent.
Michael cleared his throat.
"Amen."
With no response from the Big G, Michael had nothing else to do but climb under the bed sheets with the lights still on, cuddle Little G very tightly and cry himself to sleep for the eleventh night in a row.
~ooOOOoo~
On Sunday, Michael woke from dreams of cock to see the sun’s early rays peeping through the window.
He got up, turned off all the lights again, offered his daily devotional prayers, showered, dressed, ate a banana for breakfast, set up a web-based e-mail account for himself on both his PC and his phone and then went to church.
The subdivided pre-war house that Michael shared with the earthbound Satan and several unsuspecting humans stood in Boldmere, a leafy neighbour of Sutton Coldfield which was a benign suburban tumour growing on the side of the one-time industrial city of Birmingham. The closest thing to a compliment he had ever heard anyone pay Birmingham was that it was in the middle of the country so you could at least run away from it in any direction you wanted.
The sub-suburb of Boldmere had a long high street of pubs, curry houses, bakeries and charity shops. And halfway between the house and the high street was St Michael’s Church. Michael had selected it as his own place of worship, not just because it bore his name (and had a huge tapestry of his greatest triumph hanging on the back wall), not just because it was five minutes’ walk from his home but principally because he felt the rector, Reverend Zack Purdey, could do with all the help available.
In church, Michael found a pew next to an obese man in a hand-knitted jumper and a tiny old woman who fussed over him with such persistence she must have been his mother. Michael greeted the pair of them, dusted the wooden pew with his handkerchief and sat down.
Throughout the service that morning, Michael did his best to focus on praise, worship and Reverend Zack’s sermon but involuntarily spent the entire time building up a mental checklist of things he would have sorted out if he were in charge of the church. For one, the floral displays in the transept were deplorably amateur and uncoor
dinated. The stained glass windows were clearly overdue a clean. The choice of hymnals seemed random and unstructured. Reverend Zack’s sermon on the faith of early Christians erroneously interchanged the words ‘apostle’ and ‘disciple’ willy-nilly as though they meant the same thing. Also, the rector’s stole, while the correct green for the post-Pentecost season was edged with an abstract design in red and yellow, which was, in Michael’s incredibly humble opinion, wholly inappropriate. The standards of dress and personal presentation among the congregation were even worse. Very few people had made the effort to dress smartly for the most important day of the Christian week. A young girl over to the left wore an offensively short skirt. The large man’s knitted jumper had a brown and pink crucifix motif across it. It might have been religious but Michael seriously doubted that woollen representations of the Lord were respectful, especially with the dangling stigmata tassels.
After Reverend Zack’s final blessing, Michael stood and looked at the tapestry at the back of the church in which he, Michael, with a sunburst halo around his head and a golden lance in his hand, stood in victory over the defeated form of the Great Dragon, Satan. How could these people live with themselves in the presence of such divine excellence? Weren’t the faithful supposed to aspire to perfection? To be flawed was to be human but to wallow in it, in bad knitwear and miniskirts was just wilful decadence.
Michael did not like the ‘fellowship’ coffee morning held in the church after the service – he found it poorly organised and spiritually dubious – but, intent on bettering his fellow Christian through example, stayed to help out. He found himself at the kitchen hatch, pouring teas from a battered tin pot and listening to the prattle of the old women either side of him. While they dished out cups and saucers and slopped milk into the teas he poured, they kept up a running conversation in which neither of them paid attention to the others. Between one going on about problems with her central heating and the other discussing ‘dodgy plumbing’ of a different sort, Michael swore he heard one of them say that she was going to have a hysterectomy in the spring and the other reply that she ought to get it replaced with a combi-boiler.