Given that the real Millennium was only ten months away Molly would have thought that even the down-and-outs would have wanted to put on a bit of a front while the eyes of Heaven were upon them, but no. The alkies had long since given up on propriety—and, she supposed, everything else.
The third time Molly saw the angel he was sitting at a two-seater table crammed into an alcove in the public library. He was reading the Independent. Of his wings there was now not the slightest trace, and his raincoat, although it couldn’t have been cheap—if, in fact, he’d purchased it instead of miraculously spinning it out of some mysterious utility fog—was stained, as if he’d been sleeping rough. His hair was mousy brown, just beginning to thin at the back. In spite of all this, there was no hesitation in her recognition. She’d seen him twice already, and she hadn’t forgotten the finely-sculpted lines of his face. Three days’ worth of stubble couldn’t hide the fact that he was the most beautiful man presently in the world. Elvis would have wept in envy, even before the immortal worms got to work on his insides.
Molly looked away as soon as she saw him, but she’d already taken note of the fact that the only empty seat left on the entire ground floor was the one opposite the angel, and she knew before she went up the stairs to REFERENCE that there wouldn’t be any room up there because of all the kids from the college filling in their free periods. When she got to REFERENCE she went over to the encyclopedias. She hesitated over the Britannica and the Catholic Encyclopedia, but in the end she took the Encyclopedia of Fantasy off the shelf. It seemed, on the whole, to be the most sensible place to look up ANGELS.
She read through the article, committed a handful of names to memory, and then went back down to the card catalogue to check whether the books were in the lending stock. She always used the card catalogue instead of the computer because it felt nicer. She’d hoped the library might at least have The Revolt of the Angels or The Wonderful Visit, but they didn’t. Out of print, out of mind. What they did have back in REFERENCE, however, was a two-volume edition of Old Testament Apocrypha and Pseudoepigraphia, so she went upstairs again and hauled out the unwieldy volume containing the Book of Enoch. Then she took it downstairs, planted it on the table at which the angel was sitting, and plonked herself with almost-equal emphasis in the vacant chair.
It didn’t occur to Molly to wonder whether the angel might be reading the Independent as a matter of choice. She’d spent enough time taking advantage of the free central heating to know that no one came into the library because they were keen to find out what was happening in the world. The ones who were so desperate to get in that they would be queuing up at opening time always grabbed the Sun, the Mirror and the Mail first, then the Express and the Guardian. Then the ones who were pretending hardest that they were really earning their Jobseeker’s Allowance would grab the Times, the Telegraph and the local rag. The Independent was always the last to go, left for the attention of the poor sucker who had no choices left.
She had opened her own book and read the first four pages of Enoch, including the footnotes, before the angel finally condescended to lower the Independent sufficiently to let his eyes peep over. She waited a full three seconds before raising her own head so that she could meet his curious but mildly suspicious gaze. The angel’s eyes were the bluest she had ever seen. They were bluer than the bluest sky on the brightest summer day there had ever been. They were the only thing left that would have immediately informed the most casual observer, seeing him for the first time, that their owner was, in fact, an angel.
To show off her erudition, Molly had already prepared an apposite quote. She wasn’t entirely sure which James Bond book it came from, but thought it was probably Goldfinger. “Once is happenstance,” she said. “Twice is coincidence. Three times is ... are you looking for me, by any chance?”
“No,” said the angel, too bluntly to allow her to savor the music of his voice.
“Oh,” said Molly, wondering whether she ought to be relieved or hurt. “ Well, if you’d care to tell me who you are looking for, maybe I can help. You don’t seem to be having much success on your own.”
“I’m not looking for anyone,” the angel said. He didn’t seem particularly well-spoken.
“No message to deliver?” Molly queried. “No mission to carry out?”
“No,” said the angel.
“You’re just not playing the game, are you?” Molly said. “What’s the matter—don’t you have TV in Heaven?”
The angel lowered the Independent and displayed the entirety of his incredibly beautiful but unshaven face. He seemed to be trying to formulate a question. Molly guessed that she was the first human being he’d talked to, and figured that she ought to help him out.
“Well,” she said, “if you haven’t come to deliver a message, and you aren’t here to befriend and redirect some poor unfortunate who’s on the brink of making a morally disastrous decision, what are you doing way down on terra firma?”
The angel didn’t even blink. “I fell,” he said.
It wasn’t what he said that bowled Molly over but the way he said it. She’d spoken lightly, as if the whole thing were a joke, not because she thought it was but because that was the only way she knew of dealing with a situation she’d never encountered before. He could have said exactly the same words in that sort of way and it would have been funny. It could have been pure stand-up, the kind of thing that got Eddie Izzard a big laugh—but it wasn’t. It was deadly serious. Even though Molly was sitting there with the Book of Enoch open on the desk, its pages well-nigh tabloid size, it didn’t even occur to her to connect “I fell” with the war in Heaven or Paradise Lost or the angels that had begat the Nephilim on the lucky daughters of men. She had heard “I fell” spoken in exactly that manner, in exactly that tone, by neighbors in the bedsit, by companions in group and by fellow shelf-stackers on the very few occasions when the temp agency managed to get her work in spite of her record, her history, her lack of a proper address and her general Oxfam-dressed appearance.
Oddly enough, she couldn’t quite remember whether she’d ever said it herself. She’d certainly sported the bruises more than once in the hectic days when she’d copped for the kids, so she knew it wasn’t a lie. It never was a lie, although everyone always thought it was. Even when you got a push in the back, or a fist in your face, it wasn’t a lie. The fact that an angel could say it certainly proved that, even if it proved nothing else.
A few more minutes passed before Molly recovered herself sufficiently to say: “When you say fell, you do mean from Heaven, I suppose—not from the Land of Dreams, or any cop-out along those lines.”
“From Heaven,” the angel confirmed. Nobody with eyes like those could be capable of copping out, any more than he could be capable of copping for a couple of kids.
Molly took the angel round the corner to The Greasy Spoon, whose proprietor hadn’t quite got to grips with the concept of irony when he’d changed its name from The Bistro. She offered to buy the angel something to eat, but he told her that he didn’t need food as such. She ordered the all-day breakfast and a pot of tea for two.
“I shouldn’t really have to do this,” she explained to him, figuring that he had to be pretty innocent in the ways of the world if he’d had to make do with the Independent since his arrival. “Being in a B&B, I ought to get breakfast included. That’s what the second B stands for, after all—but standards have slipped down here. On the other hand, it’s better than a lot of places. The girls on the game are very good about only doing it in alleyways and cars, for the sake of the kids, and we’ve all got our own sinks and electric kettles, and the loos aren’t that bad, considering, and the TV in the sitting room is always replaced the day after it gets nicked, and we’ve got cable. I’m in the smallest room, of course, but you could say that I’m in the lap of luxury compared to most, because my kids are still out to foster. Unfortunately, just about the last way you can score any points when you get that close to the bottom is to get your
kids back, so I’m actually reckoned to be not yet off the mark, even though I’ve kicked everything but the Prozac and the over-the-counter tranks disguised as antihistamines. Some would say that my brain chemistry is fried anyhow, but I don’t think so—and at least I’ve got guts, to say that to an angel. I have the breakfast at lunchtime because it’s cheaper than anything actually called lunch and if you only have one real meal a day it’s better to have it in the middle. Can’t cook in the rooms, you see, except for cup-a-soup and other just-add-boiling-water crap, and who can stomach that? What’s Heaven like, exactly?”
“It’s not like anything,” the angel said, unhelpfully.
“Nice gardens? Pleasant weather? Bright light?” Molly prompted, figuring that any hint at all would be better than nothing, and that she really ought to try to bring the angel out of himself a little. If he hadn’t been sent to deliver a message, the fact that he had accepted the lunch invitation, even though he didn’t need food as such, suggested that maybe he had been sent as some kind of test.
“None of that,” he said.
“None of it! What about singing? Surely you were in the choir. Doesn’t it get boring, just bathing in the presence of God, century after century?”
“No,” he said. “There’s no time in Heaven.”
“No time?” Molly hadn’t been expecting that. “What keeps everything from happening at once then?”
“Nothing,” he informed her, calmly. “Everything does happen at once.” He sipped his tea but it was still too hot, and probably too sharp for his celestially-softened palate.
“You’d better put some sugar in it,” Molly said, passing him the thing that looked like a giant salt cellar with a chimney. “That’s a bit rotten, don’t you think? The preachers promise eternity. Don’t you think the dead might be a little disappointed when they get there and find that their stay is considerably shorter than a split nanosecond? If Saatchi and Saatchi tried that the Advertising Standards Authority would be down on them like a ton of bricks.”
“It’s not shorter than anything,” the angel said. “You have to set aside that whole way of thinking. Paradise isn’t a place at all. The human imagination is too narrowly attuned to mere existence to encompass its essence.”
Molly couldn’t help but wonder whether she’d first caught sight of him just too late to see the clipboard and blue pencil disappear.
“So what did you do?” she said.
“We don’t do anything,” he began—but she immediately saw that he’d got hold of the wrong end of the stick.
“I said what did you do,” she reminded him. “I’ve given up fishing for descriptions. I mean, what did you do to qualify for the drop. With Lucifer it was pride, with the fathers of the Nephilim it was presumably lust. That still leaves five deadly sins untapped by angelkind. Please don’t tell me it was sloth.”
The angel made a face. He’d obviously put too much sugar in the tea. “I fell,” he repeated, in the same stubbornly heart-melting fashion. It wasn’t a lie. Whatever he was covering up, whoever he was protecting, it wasn’t a lie.
Molly sighed, but she didn’t have the heart to be sarcastic. “So what are the other fallen angels doing these days?” she asked. She was genuinely interested. “According to Enoch, they taught mankind the fundamentals of technology and civilization, but the skills they passed on must have become obsolete ages ago. Unless, of course, they got more out of government retraining schemes than I ever did.”
“I don’t know,” he said.
“But you’re hoping to make contact, right? Or maybe not. I mean, if the fallen angels are all in Hell, you’d probably rather stay here. Always assuming, of course, that this isn’t Hell and that I am out of it. That’s Mephistopheles, you know.” She felt slightly ashamed of showing off, especially as she’d only seen the Dr. Faustus movie with Richard Burton, way back in the days when she’d had the falling habit herself. At least she’d always had her own TV in those days; the only way to keep a TV was to have a bloke around who could nick someone else’s when your own got burgled. Sometimes, she wondered whether there were any real victims anymore, or whether there was just a vast population of knocked-off TVs that were kept constantly in circulation by the beating heart of larcenous intent. The ones that kept reappearing in the sitting room certainly hadn’t come from Comet.
“I don’t know anything about Hell,” the angel said, stuffily, “but I know this isn’t it.”
Molly could see that it was going to be hard work getting any more out of him. She was half-inclined to drop it and go back to ignoring him, just like everybody else. Hadn’t she already told herself that it was the sensible thing to do? But she couldn’t rid herself of the nagging suspicion that even if Elvis hadn’t been what she needed to get year zero off to a flying start, the angel might be.
“If you’re not going to drink that tea,” she said, in the end, “you might as well give it here and sod off.”
There was a long pause while the angel considered his options. In the end, he decided not to give her the tea. He forced himself to drink. After two or three further sips he seemed to get used to the sweetness. The color of his eyes was like a sky looking down on someplace as far away as Molly could imagine—and she was not an unimaginative person.
“Well,” Molly said, even though she knew it would make her sound like a social worker, “if it’s nectar you want, you’ll have to get up again, won’t you? It’s the only way to get over the falling habit—believe me, I know. Stick around here, and it isn’t just the tea that will go from bad to worse. It won’t be just a matter of losing the wings and your raincoat turning into something a flasher would be ashamed to open up. I saw what happened to Elvis when the serum got to work, and it wasn’t a pretty sight.” She figured that it was safe to mention Elvis to the angel. If you couldn’t trust an angel not to shop you to the moral guardians of society, who could you trust?
The angel still didn’t reply. He was now so deeply absorbed in the tea that he was at risk of becoming obsessed, and Molly began to wonder whether it had really been a kindness to tell him to sweeten it. Fortunately, she was spared the temptation to offer him a sausage or a bit of fried bread. She’d been hungry. Conversation always gave her an appetite—real conversation, that is, not the kind of chatting that the women in the B&B went in for.
“Of course,” she said, figuring that if she were going to come on like a social worker she might as well go the whole hog, “you have to want to get up again. Nobody can help you if you won’t be helped. Maybe you’d be happier down here on Earth. There’s not much to recommend it, I suppose, but we do have time—all the time in the world. Places, too, though rumor has it they’re not as various as they used to be. Look, you’re not exactly making this easy for me, are you? I mean, I’m trying to do you a good turn here. Who knows—this may be my last chance to qualify for Heaven? You could at least pretend that you’re interested. Think of it as an episode of Touched by a Human. I can only do so much—at the end of the day, it’s up to you.”
“Yes,” he said, betraying a hint of positivity for the first time. “I can see that. But it’s hard for me, too.”
The tone of his voice melted her heart all over again. The words I fell echoed in her mind, and echoed and echoed.
“It’s okay,” she said. “If you guys really did teach us the fundamentals of technology and civilization, we owe you one. Like they say in America, if you can’t pay back, pay forward. Between the two of us, we’ll get it figured out. You lucked out—hardly anyone around here spends more time in the library than me, and I don’t just pretend to read. You can come back to the B&B with me if you like, but you can’t stay the night. It’s the rules, and I can’t afford to get chucked out, for the kids’ sake.” She was telling the truth about not pretending to read. She loved the Penguin Dictionary of Quotations, where Oscar Wilde had observed that it was better to be beautiful than good, but better to be good than ugly. If the beautiful angel wasn’t going to cuddle her,
she could at least pretend that it was her decision, her choice, her ruling.
“I understand,” he said, although it wasn’t at all clear what he understood—or was prepared to pretend that he understood, given that he probably didn’t know anything at all about anything outside of a Heaven that wasn’t a place and didn’t even have time.
“Okay,” she said. “Let’s go.”
The alkies didn’t say a word when Molly and the angel walked past the old Salvation Army Temple, but that was probably because the cider had taken the edge off their wit. There was no sign of Saint Luke or his boozemobile but the down-and-outs had obviously experienced a visitation. They weren’t as blissful as crackheads blessed by Saint John, but they weren’t as mean as they were when they had hangovers.
There were five pre-schoolers playing on the stairs at the B&B, and a couple of the mums popped their heads out to make sure that the visitor wasn’t an obvious child molester, but neither passed any comment on the unlikelihood of Molly keeping company with an angel. They just stared, with eyes the color of dirty dishwater—eyes incapable of reflecting anything but the dullest winter sky.
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