“The strangest thing,” I said aloud. It was like waking up slowly. When you were lying in bed in the middle of the night and you realized you were awake, not asleep, but you’d been lying on your hand and it was numb and it felt as if it belonged to someone else and you had to lie still and wait for it to belong to you again. I felt like that. But I felt good, too, warm inside and comforted.
And I knew what it was. I’d just met an angel.
Colin
Vaughn called me at work this afternoon to tell me that Audrey was at her mother’s.
Fortunately I stopped short of asking him why he thought this information might be of interest to me. I’d finished work for the day and packed up, and was almost ready to leave when he’d called. I was in a hurry to get to the Co-op before going out to the college, and so I found I was standing there with my coat on, talking into the telephone receiver and feeling mildly annoyed.
“She wasn’t at home,” he said, with boyish enthusiasm. “She wasn’t ignoring me at all; she’d just gone to stay with her mother. She said she’d told me about it, but that I clearly hadn’t been listening.”
“Or you’d forgotten,” I added helpfully, thinking that it was entirely possible that he really was slipping into some kind of early dementia.
“Anyway, I thought I’d give you a call to let you know,” he said. “I knew you’d be worried.”
I ignored the slight hint of sarcasm around this last comment. “And did you find a ring?”
“Yes,” he said. “I’m thinking when the best time to propose might be. What do you think?”
Of all the people to ask. As if I would have the faintest idea about such matters.
“You could take her away somewhere,” I said. “For the weekend. Or something like that.”
“Weston-super-Mare?” he said.
“Not Weston-super-Mare. Somewhere romantic. Paris, or Bruges. Or maybe even Rome?”
“Rome?” he echoed, as if I’d suggested going to Siberia. “Surely I should be saving somewhere that exotic for the honeymoon?”
“Vaughn,” I said. “I’ve really got to go.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, dear chap. Am I holding you up?”
“Yes, you are rather.”
He hung up, and I went home via the supermarket to buy small essentials. And after that, one of those delicious coincidences happened that make me occasionally consider that some higher power is guiding my hand in my enterprise. I came out of the Co-op with the intention of waiting outside, to see if I could see any new subjects, any looking promising among the recently bereaved. And there she was—the woman I’d seen at the checkout on Tuesday evening. And, while she hadn’t appeared to be ready just two days ago, she certainly looked it now. Observing her, I felt a particular thrill of affection and excitement that convinced me more than anything else that she is the next one.
She had a bag, a kind of canvas satchel in a grubby shade of brown, the strap worn across her body. It looked heavy. I wondered why it suddenly gave me a jolt, the sight of that bag, and then I realized it was because Helen had had one just like it. It was her schoolbag—covered over with notes and signatures and drawings in felt-tip pen, a peace sign button, another, larger button with FREE MANDELA on it under which some wag had written “with every purchase.”
In my last year at Gaviston I acquired a friend, of sorts. She had joined the school our senior year. For the whole of the first semester, I barely noticed her. She was one of the confident ones, a girl who had no problems making friends. She blended in with them all, the ones who went out every weekend and spent the rest of the week talking about it.
I survived without such complications.
I was walking home from school on a Friday, and it was already dark so it must have been winter. Helen was walking home, too, about fifty yards ahead of me, and I paid her no attention. I think for part of it she was walking with another girl, and then at some point her companion took one of the side roads and they said their good-byes. Helen kept walking and I slowed my pace a little to allow for the brief interruption in her stride, not wishing to narrow the gap between us.
At the top of the hill she crossed the main road and then took the alleyway that ran behind the Leisure Center and would emerge again on Newarke Street. The alley was lit by a single streetlight halfway along its length.
She was slowing down, which was annoying me. I slowed my pace to avoid catching up, not just infuriated because of her pace but also that the very thought of it was taking my concentration away from what I’d previously been thinking about, namely the difficulties in maintaining resonance frequency with a minimum electrical current.
We were about a quarter of the way up the alley when I realized there was someone walking in front of her, someone who had also slowed their pace. A few moments after that, Helen stopped walking. She was about to step into the pool of light created by the streetlight; in fact she was partly illuminated by it, her hair a bright orange halo around her head. She looked back, and saw me, then back the other way.
Clearly I must have seemed less threatening than what lay ahead, because she turned then and started walking in my direction, her step quickening. I tutted with annoyance, not wanting to have to stand to one side in the narrow alley to let her pass with enough room between us, not wanting to have to smile or nod or whatever one was supposed to do in situations like this one.
Despite all this, I had a jolt. That’s the only way I can describe it. I don’t even think it was the expression on her face—which was strange. It was that I was looking at her properly for the first time, and she was looking at me, and her mouth was forming the word: “HELP.”
She came up to me and behind her was another of the sixth form girls, another of those whom I preferred to have nothing whatsoever to do with. I couldn’t even have told you her name. She was striding in our direction and Helen was behind me, not moving farther away, just behind me as though I was expected to do something—stand in between them? Act as some kind of physical buffer so we could all continue to walk home in the same direction?
It was such a peculiar situation. I felt uncomfortable with the whole thing. Not afraid, that would be the wrong word for it.
And I was more uncomfortable with Helen sheltering behind me than with the girl striding toward us both.
She had a knife in her hand. I remember thinking, What’s she got that out for? As though everyone carried knives around with them every day, but to have one out on display was somehow completely inappropriate.
“Hiding behind Creepy Colin, are you?” the girl called. “Think he’s gonna help ya?”
I had stopped walking and stood at ease, my legs hip-width apart. I felt something else now—excitement. It was the thought of a confrontation, something I usually avoided, but this one had a context that gave me permission to behave in a certain way. I was being threatened, after all. Even if the knife was meant for Helen, it was now pointed at me.
“She’s got a knife. Be careful!” Helen said from somewhere behind me.
“Yes, thank you, I can see it,” I said.
It took one punch to lay her out. I had no idea it was going to be that easy, and if I had realized I would have taken it a bit more steadily so I could make the most of it. I suppose she just wasn’t expecting me to hit her. It wasn’t okay to hit girls, even girls who were coming toward you with a knife in their hand, and of all people she probably wasn’t expecting me to cause her any trouble.
Behind me, Helen squeaked with surprise.
The girl, whoever she was, had landed in a heap against the brick wall that marked the boundary with someone’s yard. Somewhere nearby a dog was barking. The girl didn’t move. I looked around at Helen. She was breathing fast, her chest rising and falling, her mouth open with shock. To my surprise, in the light from the streetlight, there were tears on her cheeks. I nearly said, “What are you crying for?”
But she just looked from the girl to me and then started to walk away, in the direction
of home. Her steps grew faster and faster and then she was running, running fast.
I looked down at the white legs of the girl on the floor. She was stirring, making a noise as though she was winded, a kind of drawn-out uuhhhhh as though she were struggling to get her breath. The knife was on the dirty tarmac where she’d dropped it.
There were many options laid out before me, many. Any one of them I could have taken and it could have changed my life from that point on. But I was not ready for it, then. I often look back at that evening, the nights already drawn in ready for winter, the air chilly but not yet bitter, the sound of Helen’s running feet echoing down the alleyway, the sight of the girl with her legs splayed, her head smack against the bottom of the wall, her face in the glass and litter and dog shit that lined the edges of the path.
What I did was kick her. I didn’t look where the kick landed, but it was only one, and it was to make sure she was still alive. I didn’t say anything to her. I just walked away, following Helen but with a gait no faster than a purposeful saunter. I didn’t even look back.
When I got home I went straight upstairs to the bathroom. My mother was in the kitchen preparing dinner. I wasn’t even sure if she heard me coming through the door; either way, I made it to the bathroom and locked the door. There was blood on the sleeve of my school shirt, and my knuckles were red and swollen, although they didn’t hurt. I had no idea where the blood had come from. I ran the sleeve of the shirt under the tap and scrubbed at it with the nailbrush until it was clean, then hung the shirt over the radiator to dry. I was aware of my own arousal, but only in an abstract way until I undressed and got in the shower. Was this what violence prompted in me I wondered. Or was it because I’d punched a girl? And then the image of her lying there, lying in the dirt and the crap on the tarmac, barely moving—her white legs against the ground, open—and the sound of Helen’s feet, Helen running away. And Helen’s hair like a halo around her face, the shape of her mouth when she whispered that word to me: “HELP.” I had probably misinterpreted the whole situation; I had most likely got it all wrong. But none of that mattered as I relieved the arousal in the shower, thinking of all those things in combination, and the fact that it might not be what the world thought of as normal never entered my head.
Helen acted strangely toward me after the incident in the alleyway. She stared at me at school. When she was with her friends she would say hello to me and they would all dig her in the ribs and laugh at her. She would sit next to me at lunchtime and start talking to me about what she’d seen on television the night before. I fended these approaches off as best I could, but as much as they were unsolicited they were not unwelcome. Every time I saw her I had that same jolt, the one in the alleyway as she’d walked toward me with that word silent on her lips.
The girl I’d punched—I assumed she made a full recovery. I never heard anything more about it and I never saw her again.
Helen didn’t refer to the incident in her monologues, which made her approaches to me even more odd. Her friends all seemed to think she had gone completely nuts in talking to me. But it continued into the summer term, our last term, when we were all busy with the pressure of finals and the heat and the hay fever seemed to grow worse every day.
Helen’s last exam was on the Thursday; mine was on the day after. She went to the pub with her friends right after the exam, and by the time I finished my afternoon’s cramming in the library she was walking home. I caught up to her because she was walking unsteadily, smiling and singing at the world in general.
“Colin!” she said when she saw me. “It’s all over. Isn’t it wonderful?”
“Not for me. I have my last physics paper tomorrow.”
“Pfft, physics.”
She swung her bag around her ankles and we walked to the alley. We’d walked this way—together—most days since that incident in the winter, but no word about it had passed between us. Today, though, she seemed to hesitate as we entered the path, even though it was brightly lit by the sun overhead.
I’d never felt comfortable with a girl before Helen, and it had taken many months of her smiling at me and talking to me to get me to this place of trust. But in the last couple of weeks, just in that tense, hot summer full of study and pressure and intense concentration, I had started to wonder if she was attracted to me. Once I’d got the idea into my head it wouldn’t leave again, and I started to try and interpret everything she said, all the little comments, the laughs, as maybe her way of trying to flirt with me.
It made no sense to me, the complicated system of interaction between the sexes. The way the girls stood, the way they moved. Apparently you could tell if someone liked you by the way they behaved toward you when you were near.
It was Helen’s last day at school. Exams ended, she had no reason to be there anymore and the rest of her summer would be filled with lazy days sunbathing and shopping, going away with her parents and going out in the evenings with her girlfriends. This would be our last walk home together. And my last chance to decide whether there was anything in it.
“You should call me,” she said, as we walked along. “We could get together, you know. If you felt like it.”
“Or you could call me,” I said, already knowing she wouldn’t.
“Write your number on my bag,” she said, fishing a black marker out of her canvas satchel and pulling off the lid with her teeth. I had no choice but to comply. There was a small unadorned patch of canvas on the inside of the flap and she flattened her palm beneath it to provide support while I wrote my phone number, followed by my name in neat capitals. The ink bled into the canvas and I wondered whether she would be able to read it. Her head was close to mine, the sunlight shining on her hair. I gave her back the pen and we continued walking.
“Helen,” I said, as we got toward the end of the alley.
“Mm?” she said, stopping too. She looked sleepy, her eyes half-open, shading them against the bright sun with one hand as she tried to look at me.
There was nothing I could think of to say, so I kissed her. I pushed her gently back against the wall and kissed her. Even now I don’t know what I thought it was going to be like, but I was unprepared for her to respond, and when she did I made a sound that seemed to alarm her and she pulled away from me.
“Colin? It’s all right.”
So I kissed her again, and this time it was still uncomfortable. I was much taller than she was and my neck was bent at an awkward angle to facilitate the kiss.
When it was over I remember walking home feeling—not elated, not at all, but disappointed. Was that all there was to it? I remember thinking. That hot, slimy feeling of someone’s tongue against yours? The taste of spearmint gum and the beer she’d been drinking. It was all I could do not to shudder.
The final paper was the one that pulled my grade down from an A to a B, and effectively lost me the chance to enjoy an Oxbridge place. I never saw Helen again. She never phoned me, of course, and possibly this came as something of a relief.
As I talked to the woman earlier this evening, standing outside the funeral place, I looked down—just once—at the satchel she carried and wondered whether, if I lifted the flap, I would find my name printed there in felt-tip pen, along with a phone number, faded into the canvas.
Anyway—Vaughn has had contact with Audrey, so all’s well in his little world. I don’t know if he’s made the decision about proposing to her. I find it amusing, however, trying to picture them in different situations and which one he might select to do the deed—on one knee, in the cinema? Scuba diving? Watching television with a microwaved meal on a matching set of his-and-hers fold-up tables?
I’m being unkind. The meal they served was perfectly acceptable, and I am really glad for them both, despite Audrey’s flirtatious boldness with me that evening. She was, as I believe they say, a little minx.
I am looking forward to reading tomorrow’s edition of the Briarstone Chronicle. I am planning to collect a copy on the way to work, and the
n hope I can make it to work after reading it in the car. I suspect I shall find it quite—diverting. After that, of course, I have my new subject to tend to. I must make sure I’m not so distracted by the newspaper that I miss out on the chance to watch this new one transform.
I do wonder, briefly, if I said something a little bit—amiss—to Audrey and she’s decided to go the same way as the others. It wasn’t my intention, not at all. But I wonder sometimes if I’m not just a little too good at this. Maybe I’m not fully aware of how exceptional these powers are. Or perhaps I am getting so comfortable with them that I am starting to blur the edges of what is acceptable and what is not.
In any case, as I say, I’m glad she turned up safe and well. Audrey lives to fight another day. And who knows—proposal or no proposal—I might get an opportunity to have another go at her one of these days. Maybe I should return the invitation and invite them both to dinner at mine. What would they make of it, I wonder, this big old Edwardian villa? I expect they would be surprised that I can afford a place such as this. And no mortgage on it, either, of course: all my salary is mine to do with as I please. And, when my mother finally decides to take up her place in the realm of eternal damnation, then it will be my name on the deeds, too.
BRIARSTONE CHRONICLE OCTOBER
Two Bodies Found Following Tip-Off: Police Hunt Killer
Briarstone police have confirmed they are launching a murder investigation following the discovery of two more bodies in the borough on Tuesday night and early Wednesday morning, a police spokesperson today revealed. Dana Viliscevina, 30, originally from Serbia but more recently living in Hawthorn Crescent, Carnhurst, was discovered after the Chronicle received a tip-off phone call from a woman who claimed to know where more bodies were. The woman hung up without leaving her name. A police source said yesterday that a second body had been found. The second victim has been named locally as Eileen Forbes, 45, of Oak Tree Lane, Briarstone. It is understood that Ms. Forbes died only hours before being found, but our source confirms that her death is being closely linked to the investigation.
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