Visitants-Stories of Fallen Angels and Heavenly Hosts

by Stephen Jones (ed)

  Gillie was shaking with a genuine feeling of grief. Her eyes filled with tears and they ran down her cheeks into her tartan scarf. Alice! They’ve taken you away! They never let you live! She had thought of Alice so often that she even knew what she looked like, and what they were going to play together, and what they would talk about. But now there was no Alice, and there never would be.

  “Gillie, what’s the matter?” her father asked her. “Are you feeling all right?”

  Gillie’s throat felt as if she’d swallowed one of Mrs. McPhail’s humbugs without sucking it. “I bought—” she began, and then she had to stop because her lungs hurt and every breath was a painful sob. “I bought—I bought her a dress! I spent my birthday money on it!”

  Her father laughed and gave her a hug. ‘There now, don’t you go worrying your wee head about that! We’ll go back to the shop and swap it for a romper-suit, or maybe some trews! How about that? Come on now, this is such a happy day! No more greeting now, you promise?”

  Gillie sniffed and sniffed again and wiped her eyes with her woolly gloves.

  “Girls of that age,” said Mrs. McPhail, sagely. “She’s been good today, though. She didn’t eat much of her lunch, but she’s an angel.”

  They crossed Clerk Street in the whirling snow. Her father had parked outside the Odeon Cinema and already the car was beginning to look like an igloo on wheels. The Odeon was showing Alice in Wonderland and Gillie could almost believe that it wasn’t a coincidence at all, but that the cinema management had arranged it with her parents in order to mock her.

  They drove back toward the center of the city. Above Princes Street, the castle rock was scarcely visible through the blizzard, and last-minute shoppers trudged along the gritty, salted pavements like lost souls struggling through a dream from which they could never wake up.

  A year passed and it was winter again. She sat in front of her dressing table mirror with a tablecloth on her head and wondered what it would be like to be a nun. She liked the look of herself as a nun. She was very thin, very small-boned for fourteen, with a pale complexion and large dark eyes—eyes that were rather soulful and droopy the way that some Scottish eyes are. She could work among the sick and homeless, selflessly bandaging their sores and giving them drinks of water.

  The only trouble was, nuns had to give up men and she was very keen on John McLeod in the lower sixth, even though he had never noticed her (as far as she knew, anyway). John McLeod was very tall with raging red hair and he was the captain of curling. She had gone to watch him play and once she had given him a winter-warmer. He had popped it in his mouth and said, “Ta.”

  The other trouble was that becoming a nun was a very Roman Catholic sort of thing to do and the Drummond family were Church of Scotland through and through.

  She stood up and went to the window. The sky was the color of pale gum, and the gardens of Charlotte Square were filled with snow.

  “What do you think, Alice?” she asked. Alice was still alive, somewhere in the back of Gillie’s mind, somewhere dark and well-protected. She knew that if she ever forgot about Alice, then Alice would cease to exist, completely, as if she had never been thought of.

  You want to become a nun? Alice replied. Do it secretly. Take your holy orders without telling anybody.

  “But what’s the point of that? What’s the point of becoming a nun if nobody else knows?”

  God will know. Devote your life to serving God and honoring the Virgin Mary, and to helping your fellow human beings even if they’re drunk in doorways, and you will be rewarded in Heaven.

  “But what if John McCleod asks me to the pictures?”

  In that case you may renounce your nunly vow, at least for one night.

  She was still looking out of the window with the tablecloth on her head when her father unexpectedly came into her bedroom. “What’s up with you?” he asked. “Are you playing at ghosts?”

  Gillie dragged off the tablecloth and blushed.

  “Your mother wants you to feed Toby his lunch while she gets the washing done.”

  “Do I have to? I’m supposing to be finishing my homework.”

  “Where? What homework? I don’t see any homework. Come on. Gillie, mum’s awful busy with the house to keep and Toby to take care of. I do expect you to lend a hand.”

  Gillie reluctantly followed her father downstairs. They lived in a large four-story house in Charlotte Square which they had inherited from mum’s parents when they died and which they could barely afford to keep up. Most of the decorations were still unchanged from granny and grandfather’s day: brown floral wallpaper and brown velvet curtains, and large gloomy paintings of stags at bay. About the most cheerful picture was a view of Ben Buie in a thunderstorm.

  Her mother was in the large, yellow-tiled kitchen, strapping Toby into his highchair. She was slender and slight, like Gillie, but she was fair-haired rather than dark, with very sharp blue eyes. Toby had inherited her fairness and her eyes, and he had a mop of curly blond hair as fine as cornsilk, which her mother refused to have cut. Daddy didn’t like it much because he thought it made Toby look like a girl; but Gillie knew better. Alice would have been gentle and dark, like her, and they would have spoken together in giggles and whispers.

  “His hotpot’s ready,” said mum, and gave Gillie the open jar, wrapped in a cloth because it was hot. Gillie drew up a chair at the large pine kitchen table and stirred the jar with a teaspoon, Toby smacked his fat little hands together and bounced up and down on his bottom. He was always trying to attract Gillie’s attention but Gillie knew who he was and she didn’t take any notice. He was a cuckoo. Dear dark Alice had never been allowed to see the light of day, and here was this fat curly thing sitting in her place. He even slept in Alice’s crib.

  Gillie spooned up pureed hotpot and put it up against Toby’s lips. The instant Toby tasted it he turned his head away. Gillie tried again, and managed to push a little bit into his mouth, but he promptly spat it out again, all down his clean bib.

  “Mum, he doesn’t like it.”

  “Well, he has to eat it. There’s nothing else.”

  “Come on, cuckoo,” Gillie cajoled him, trying another spoonful. She held his head so that he wouldn’t turn away, and squeezed his fat little cheeks together so that he had to open his mouth. Then she pushed the whole spoonful onto his tongue.

  There was a long moment of indignant spluttering, while Toby grew redder and redder in the face. Then he let out a scream of protest, and hotpot poured out of his mouth and sprayed all over the sleeve of Gillie’s jumper.

  Gillie threw down the spoon in fury. “You cuckoo!” she screamed at him. “You horrible fat cuckoo! You’re disgusting and I hate you!”

  “Gillie!” her mother protested.

  “I don’t care! I hate him and I’m not feeding him! He can die of starvation for all I care! I don’t know why you ever wanted him!”

  “Gillie, don’t you dare say such a thing!”

  “I dare and I don’t care!”

  Mum unbuckled Toby from his highchair, picked him up and shushed him. “If you don’t care you’d better get to your room and stay there for the rest of the day with no tea. Let’s see how you like a bit of starvation!”

  It started to snow again. Thick, tumbling flakes from the Firth of Forth.

  “They really believe that I don’t know what they did to you, Alice.”

  You must forgive them, for they know not what they do.

  “I don’t want to forgive them. I hate them. Most of all I hate them for what they did to you.”

  But you’re a nun now. You’ve taken holy vows. You must forgive them in the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit amen.

  Gillie spent the afternoon lying on her bed reading Little Faith, which was a novel about a nun who started a mission in the South Seas and fell in love with a gun-runner. She had read it twice already, but she still loved the scene where the nun, who has fasted for five days and five nights as a penance f
or her passionate feelings, is witness to a miraculous vision of St. Theresa, “incandescent as the sun,” who forgives her for feeling like a woman.

  At five o’clock she heard her mother carrying Toby upstairs for his bath. At half-past five she heard mummy singing to him in his bedroom, across the corridor. She sang him the same lullaby that she always used to sing for Gillie, when she was small, and the sound of it made Gillie feel even more depressed and left out. She turned her face to the wall and stared miserably at the wallpaper. It was supposed to be roses, but it seemed to have a sly hooded face in it, medieval-looking and misshapen, like a leper.

  “Dance to your daddy, my little babby. Dance to your daddy, my little lamb. You shall have a fishy, in a little dishy. You shall have a fishy when the boat comes in ...”

  Not long after her father opened her door. “Are you ready to say that you’re sorry?” he asked her.

  Gillie didn’t answer. Her father waited at the door for a while, and then came in and sat on the side of the bed. He laid his hand gently on her arm, and said, “This is not like you. Gillie. You’re not jealous of Toby, are you? You don’t have to be. We love you just as much as ever. I know that mummy’s busy with Toby a lot of the time, but she still cares for you, and so do I.”

  But what about me? said Alice.

  “How about saying you’re sorry, and coming down for some tea? There’s fish fingers tonight.”

  You never cared about me.

  “Come on, Gillie, what do you say?”

  “You never cared about me! You wanted me dead!”

  Her father stared at her in disbelief. “Wanted you dead? What put such a thought into your head? We love you; we wouldn’t have had you otherwise; and if you want to know the truth you would have stayed our only child, and we would have been glad of it, if only Toby hadn’t been conceived by accident. We didn’t mean to have him, but we did, and now he’s here, and we love him. Just the same way that we love you.”

  Gillie sat up in bed with reddened eyes. “Accident?” she said. “Accident? Try telling Alice that Toby was an accident!”

  “Alice? Who’s Alice?”

  “You killed her!” Gillie screamed. “You murdered her! You murdered her and she never lived!”

  Alarmed, angry, her father stood up. “Now, come on, Gillie. I want you to calm down. Let me call mummy and we’ll have a wee chat.”

  “I don’t want to talk to either of you! You’re horrible! I hate you! Go away!”

  Her father hesitated for a moment. Then he said, “The best thing for you to do, my girl, is to have your bath and get yourself to bed. We’ll talk some more in the morning.”

  “I don’t want your stupid bath.”

  “Then go to sleep dirty. It makes no difference to me.”

  She lay on her bed listening to the noises in the house. She could hear her mother and father talking; and then the bath running. The cistern roared and whistled just above her room. She heard doors opening and closing, and the burbling of the television in her parents’ bedroom. Then the door was closed and all the lights were switched off.

  Outside the window, the city was so thickly felted in snow that it was totally silent, from Davidson’s Mains to Morningside, and Gillie could almost have believed that everyone was dead, except for her.

  She was woken by a bright light dancing on the wallpaper. She opened her eyes and frowned at it for a while, not quite sure where she was, or whether she was sleeping or waking. The light quivered and trembled and danced from side to side. Sometimes it was like a wide squiggly line and then it would suddenly tie a knot in itself, so that it formed the shape of a butterfly.

  Gillie sat up. She was still fully dressed and her leg had gone dead because she had been sleeping in a funny position. The light was coming from under her door. First of all it was dazzling and then it was dim. It danced and skipped and changed direction. Then it retreated for a while, so that all she could see was a faint reflected glow.

  Oh, no! she thought. The house is on fire!

  She climbed off her bed and limped dead-legged to the door. She felt the doorknob to see if it was hot. The Fire Brigade had come to the school to give them all a lecture on do’s and don’ts, and she knew that she wasn’t to open the door if it was hot. Fire feeds on oxygen like a babby feeds on milk.

  But the doorknob was cold, and the door panels were cold. Cautiously, Gillie turned the knob, and opened the door, and eased herself into the corridor. Toby’s room was directly opposite; and the light was shining from all around Toby’s door. At times it was so intense that she could scarcely look at it, and it shone through every crevice, and even through the keyhole.

  She sniffed. The odd thing was that she couldn’t smell smoke. And there was none of that crackling sound that you normally get with a fire.

  She approached Toby’s door and dabbed the doorknob with her fingertip. That, too, was quite cold. There was no fire burning in Toby’s room. For a moment, she became dreadfully frightened. She had a cold, sliding feeling in her stomach as if she had swallowed something really disgusting and knew that she was going to sick it up again. If it wasn’t a fire in Toby’s room, what was it?

  She was just about to run to her parents’ room when she heard an extraordinary noise. A thick, soft, rustling noise; and then the sound of Toby gurgling and giggling.

  He’s laughing, said Alice. He must be all right.

  “I wish it had been a fire. I wish he was dead.”

  No you don’t; and neither do I. You’re a nun now; you’re in holy orders. Nuns forgive everything. Nuns understand everything. Nuns are the brides of Christ.

  She opened Toby’s door.

  And Holy Mary! cried Alice.

  The sight that met her eyes was so dramatic and so dazzling that she fell to her knees on the carpet, her mouth wide open in disbelief.

  In the center of Toby’s nursery stood a tall white figure. It was so blindingly bright that Gillie had to shield her eyes with the back of her hand. It was so tall that it almost touched the ceiling, and it was dressed in swathes of brilliant white linen, and it seemed to have huge folded wings on its back. It was impossible for Gillie to tell if it were a man or a woman. It was so bright that she couldn’t clearly see its face, but she could vaguely distinguish two eyes, floating in the brilliance like chicken embryos floating in egg-white; and the curve of a smile.

  But what made Gillie tremble more than anything else was the fact that Toby was out of his crib, and standing on his cribside rug, standing, with this tall, dazzling creature holding his little hands for him.

  “Toby,” she whispered. “Oh God, Toby.”

  But all Toby did was turn toward her and smile his cheekiest smile, and take two unsteady steps across the rug, while the dazzling creature helped him to balance.

  Gillie slowly rose to her feet. The creature looked at her. Although it was so bright, she could see that it wasn’t staring at her aggressively. In fact there was something in its eyes that seemed to be appealing for understanding; or at least for calm. But then it lifted Toby up in its arms, right up in the air in its brilliant, flaring arms, and Gillie’s composure fell apart like a jigsaw falling out of its box.

  “Mum!” she screamed, running up the corridor and beating on her parents’ bedroom door. “Mummy there’s an angel in Toby’s room! Mum, mum, mum, come quick! There’s an angel in Toby’s room!”

  Her father and mother came bursting out of the bedroom ruffled and bleary and hardly knowing where they were going. They ran to Toby’s nursery and Gillie ran after them.

  And there he was, tucked up in his blue-and-yellow blanket, sucking his thumb. Content, curly and right on the edge of falling to sleep.

  Dad turned and looked at Gillie with a serious face.

  “I saw an angel,” she said. “I’m not making it up, I promise you. It was teaching Toby to walk.”

  Dr. Vaudrey laced his fingers together and swung himself from side to side in his black leather armchair. Outside his wind
ow there was a view of a grey brick wall, streaked with snow. He had a dry pot plant on his desk and a photograph of three plain-looking children in sweaters that were too small for them. He was half-Indian, and he wore very thick black-framed glasses and his black hair was brushed back straight from his forehead. Gillie thought that his nose looked like an aubergine. Same color. Same shape.

  “You know something, Gillie, at your age religious delusions are very common. To find a faith and to believe in its manifestations is a very strong desire for adolescent young women.”

  “I saw an angel,” said Gillie. “It was teaching Toby to walk.”

  “How did you know it was an angel, what you saw? Did it say to you, ‘Hallo, excuse me, I am an angel and I have just popped in to make sure that your baby brother doesn’t have to scurry about on his hands and knees for the rest of his life?’”