AN ANGEL
I knew her name before I saw her face. Even in the darkness He brought into my life I could see it burning. I could see it when I closed my eyes, indelible, like it was the only light I had ever seen. The name He chose for her.
“Angel”
“An Angel”
“Angela”
A joke, surely? His laughter echoes through the cruelty, through the ages, that awful guttural squawk. She would be no angel; she would never be an angel, coming from where she did. From such atrocities. How could she ever hope to ascend? No, she would endure the same slow slide underground that I did, and my mother before me. How far back did it go, this curse? Who had let Him into our blood?
I’ll never know, He keeps me alone down here, but when I breathe, when I breathed, I felt not blood in my veins but his dark flock.
Let it end.
Let it end with her.
SHE IS SUSPENDED
A new day. She was up with the birds and saw the first light through the branches of the dead tree that forked out of the front lawn. Her sleep had been short but thorough and she had woken with a rare resolve, and a new realisation. The boss that would be so mad when she got into work had no power anymore, she had left it all over that dirty little bathroom floor, and when she whisked Angela off to the meeting room for what would no doubt be a disciplinary meeting regarding her sudden and unexpected absence on the previous day, Angela would drop her bomb, and a new order would begin. One in which the Formica tables had turned, and one in which Angela would finally, finally have the upper hand.
She arrived at 8:17 am and she was first, as always. She made up her desk, returning the incomplete reports she had abandoned the previous day to the Pending file, then sat with her coffee and a crooked smile, and waited for the game to begin. Here came Veronica, walking stiffly into the room, her coat pulled tight around her and her bag held closely to her body. The coat was new, Angela noted. Where did she get it? Was it from Marks? Angela let herself picture Veronica on that bathroom floor, glistening and shameful. It was no wonder she walked funny, Angela thought, and bile rose in her throat, acrid and astringent.
“Morning,” Angela said, but Veronica just removed her coat and bag and walked away from her desk in that clipped, nervous manner that Angela had seen so many times leading up to the termination of someone or other. Her belly flipped at the prospect but she settled herself with the knowledge that she had the upper hand here. She would only have to hint at what she had seen in that dusty department downstairs and Veronica would be as helpless as a bird in a cage. She loved her family so much; Angela had listened to it so many times. They were her world. He was her rock, the boy her little soldier. She would do anything to keep them. Anything.
The others had begun filing in, one after the other they walked by, their eyes flicking over her, wondering what happened yesterday; bored, hungry minds picking over carrion for scraps.
“Can I see you in the office please,” came Veronica’s voice from behind her.
This was it. She stood up and followed the aged harlot to the cold back office where she would take one more telling off, then get everything she’d ever wanted. She tingled in a V shape, down into a point at the bottom of herself. On the long walk to the back of the building time stretched away from her, like a wave retreating from shore. Angela planned her attack. She would let Veronica do her spiel, list all the things she had done wrong, and then, when she passed her the document to sign, just before her ink stained the paper, Angela would ask Veronica if she enjoyed her “new position” in HR yesterday.
Angela grinned her thin grin and realised she was salivating. She wiped her chin.
The door swung open and what she saw hit her across her ruddy face. Rather than the cosy little scenario Angela had pictured in her mind she was presented with a committee. Senior Managers all in a row, each with an identical piece of paper and with their faces twisted into expressions of concern, with varying degrees of success.
“Please, take a seat Ms Hanrohan. It is ‘Ms’ isn’t it?”
What was this? This wasn’t what she usually…
“Angela,” said the one wearing the most convincing mask, “How are you today?”
“Fine,” said Angela, trying to find her feet on shifting sands.
“Good, That’s good to hear” replied the suit. His eyes narrowed into a smile for a child.
“We take the well being of the staff very seriously, as you know, especially those that have been with us as long as you have.”
He nodded. She nodded. What else could she do?
“But we have some concerns Angela. Concerns about your conduct, and your reliability. Does that come as a surprise to you?”
Angela blinked and shook her head. Because it didn’t, but...
“Can we talk about yesterday,” said Nicola from Finance. What was she doing here? Why would…
“Angela, after lunch you were seen coming back into the office and you sat for a while at your seat like everyone else, but according to reports from your colleagues you appeared to suddenly become angry. It says here,” her eyes flicked over a stack of shuffled papers, “…that you banged your hands on your desk and were heard swearing to yourself. Can you explain what the matter was?”
“No I didn’t,” said Angela, her wide white forehead gridded with lines and beaded with sweat as her mind showed her pictures. Maybe she did hit the desk but…
“I was just wondering where she was,” Angela said, pointing a crooked finger at the woman that had deceived and abandoned her in ways she couldn’t face.
“She was late and I was worried…” but she couldn’t go on. To say more would be to expose her secret and sacrifice the only thing she had left. If she said those words to these people they would lose their power, and despite her predicament, that power was still the only thing she cared about.
“Why should you be worried where Veronica is? What concern is it of yours?” said a suit with a man in it that Angela didn’t recognise. Who was he? Was he from another site?
“Well I just wondered and...”
“You “just wondered” where your line manager was and thought you’d leave work for the day?” said the man, all air quotes and cocked brows.
“Angela this is most concerning. As far as we can tell you came back from a perfectly normal morning at work, flew into a rage for no discernible reason then left the building, leaving your jacket and handbag, and then didn’t answer our phone calls, or the door when Veronica called at your home after work…”
“What?!” she said, “she didn’t come to my house…”
“Yes I did,” said Veronica meekly and without meeting her gaze, “at six fifteen. I knocked and knocked and you didn’t answer. I could see the TV on.” She was lying, and both women knew it. Angela hadn’t had the TV on. Veronica was hedging her bets. She must have been with him again, that angry white devil. Defiled twice in one day... my God she was a filthy little bitch, she thought. Filthier than Angela had dared dream.
“No!” said Angela, shouting now, unsure where to start, unsure how to defend herself. “I was, I was sick and I, I hadn’t slept well, I don’t sleep well, the birds keep me up and…. I’m on my own you see...”
“Angela, calm down, please,” he said, and all their eyes sang along, birds on a wire.
“It’s not just yesterday is it? This is the second time in two weeks that you’ve left early without explanation and quite aside from these unauthorised absences we’ve had growing concerns about your conduct for a while now, documented here in your private meetings with Veronica, who, by all accounts has really struggled with you Angela.”
Bitch.
“I’m afraid we really have no choice but to suspend you for a period of six weeks to allow you time to rest.”
Angela could feel herself start to ice over. No. No, she couldn’t be alone for six weeks.
“No, please,” she started, but they just looked down at their papers.
&n
bsp; “And furthermore we must demand that you do not make contact with the office nor your colleagues during this period, even if you are pretending to be someone else.”
Veronica caught a snigger in her throat and busied herself scribbling.
Ok.
Ok. Angela saw what was happening. She dropped her defence and let her face hang loosely from her soft bones. She signed a paper with an angry spike, turned on a callus heel, and left the room. She took her bags and jackets from the silent office then left the place as laughter began to build like a tidal wave behind her.
Angela sat at home in a kind of terrible waking dream, with an image in her mind’s eye of her desk and her phone and her workstation at the bottom of a black and white pit. She brought in an old office chair from the garage and sat at the kitchen table and tapped at imaginary keys with variable degrees of accuracy and despite her best efforts her thoughts drifted upstairs, to the rook in the second bedroom. He had grown so big, so quickly and the larger he got the darker his greasy wings became until it seemed like there was no light left and the birds that he didn’t kill spoke of nothing, but their empty eyes said they had no more hope to lose.
She is eight. There is nowhere else for her to go because I left her so alone so she lives with her uncles. My brothers. Twins. They were all that was left. They never married. They had our father’s eyes, and his fists. They call her “burd gurl” because of her strange little nose; turned down and sharp like a beak. She didn’t ask for that beak, but she had it. Her mother had it too, but I could never tell her that. I never spoke of that woman because some secrets are to be whispered, like these I am whispering to you, and some are for the void, never to be spoken, even in our final moments. Even at the end of everything I would never say those things.
FROM THE HEDGEROW
The darkness rolled over her and she hid in it. The birds in her brain sang their maddening song and, as the last lights blinked out in the street she lived on Angela grabbed her black mac and, wrapped in plastic, made for the night.
She zigged and zagged over puddle and cobble and they reflected her back as she stamped on her own warped image, and by two in the morning she was out of town and at the bottom of the winding lane that lead up to Veronica's house. Even from the bottom of the lane she could see that one downstairs light remained on. The kitchen light. The same kitchen Angela heard so much about every day at work. The kitchen where this woman played out what Angela now knew was just pretence of perfect domesticity. Button the shirt. Glaze the pastry. Pretend to be happy. Fool us all, you bitch. Well now here they were, with one comfortable in her shadows and the other exposed in her prison. The light came through the bushes into Angela's little black eyes, which darted around the scene. She was looking for something, hints or clues to this dirty hidden life that both fascinated and appalled her. And she missed her company, the scent of petals that emanated from her. She wanted more of her. More secrets. More power. A reason to end it. And there she was, in her shabby pink dressing gown, sat half on a tall breakfast barstool taking big glugs from a glass of pink wine and propping her rose tinted glasses on the end of her nose, tapping out texts, all fingers and thumbs. No prizes for guessing to whom, Angela thought, and gagged.
It was late now, maybe 2:30 am, and she was moving. She was leaving the house! Still in her dressing gown too.
“What kind of madness was this? What kind of maniac goes out at this time?” Angela questioned, wiping tears from her eyes.
An engine purred up Veronica’s lane and Angela began to understand. It died in the night and two shadows met on the black lane, then went together through a hedge and up over a field into the deep blue night. Angela knew only too well the scene that would play out over that copse and she had no desire to see that again. She had stolen enough secrets. She made her way away from another agony, past the dark blue Mondeo that had arrived while she squatted in the bushes. The car window was open and the air moved toward her, bringing with it the smell of men, of leather and diesel and sweat. She stuck her arm in and tugged the handbrake sharply up and down. The hunk of steel lurched backwards a little, moving slowly at first but getting faster and faster, churning up gravel and verge. She took the next left and walked back towards town, and as she did she heard the car tear through the bushes and drop down the embankment, crashing into the river, metal and glass meeting rock and water, elements fighting in the night. The sound wrapped itself around her and she smiled for the first time in weeks.
A plan began to form in her mind.
Yes, said the rook in her head.
Yes.
IT BURNS LIKE AUTUMN
Autumn encroaches into her vision. Cell by cell the world around her starts to die and she finds comfort in it. Summer vibrates at too high a frequency for her, it is too unstable, too unpredictable, all that heat and light. She is better surrounded by its charred remains. She was born in them after all, on this day, in a graveyard, in autumn.
She takes a walk through it, through the death, through the decay. The leaves burn in the trees then flake away, falling in spirals, giving shape to the wind, leaving their branches alone and complex and beautiful.
Skeletons.
Varicose veins.
She stops on an overpass and leans over the barrier, looking down. She can feel the sky at her back, feels like the end is near, and it is. A crow sits on the power lines that slice across the sky with something squirming in its beak. It drops an infant rabbit on the Tarmac. Cars zip over the body, crushing its bones and oozing its purple tubes out of it, onto and into that nasty black highway. The bird jerks its head left and right then hops down off the bridge and into the open entrails, picking and eating the spoils between all that metal danger.
I remember her birth, in that burning ring of fire. The chanting, the awful chanting rang through me for years. Whenever it was dark, it was there. I only had to close my eyes. I knew not the words but the intention was only too clear. In the end I jumped from a bridge to stop that evil hum and yes, the sticks and stones hurt her mother, I saw the wounds and welts as they formed on her pregnant belly, but none hurt so much as those words, forged in fire and ungodly ritual.
I can still hear them now.
The way they cut her out, held her up to His face…
No father should… I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe.
No father should let that happen.
I see Him. I see HIM through the back of my head! He’s behind me!
Oh Lord, He’s behind me!
My God it’s so dark here.
My God….
THREADBARE
Time blows through us, leaves us threadbare. It echoes across the cracked earth, a God and a monster. A prison and a desert.
Three, six, nine, twelve. All those wasted moments thrown into that booming black hole, a black eye wide in the dark. Loneliness replicates, creating more of itself, her reflected solitude birthing cogs and numbers.
Her hands spin backwards. She’s aching and creaking, then she breaks. The sands blow out of her shattered hourglass. She mixes it with the saline that streams from her face, kneading and fisting with broken arms. Chemicals react. A structure forms. A church. The heat of her wasted love cracks its fine walls and screams at me across the plains of this Other Place and I reverberate forever in its stinging wind.
Now you are nowhere in a cathedral of your own loneliness. The wind carries your song to me over time’s scorched veined terrain and, yes, it reminds me of you, but more than anything it reminds me of me. A version of me. A terrible version of me.
And though no one else ever did, and though it’s too late to save either of us now, for all it’s worth, I loved you Angela.
LET US PRAY
Suspended in time Angela's life became a spiral, a curling downward movement that forced the blood away from her brain and loosened the ties that bound her, setting her adrift. She had never had company, but she had never been this alone. She missed Veronica and work and sleep’s blind embr
ace, and the time and solitude they left behind ate into each other, becoming an echoing cathedral, a place to worship my legacy, and the madness I left her.
Beyond the voile curtain that webbed the front window the lights in the houses that lined her street blinked out one by one, then, once the last had been extinguished Angela rid herself of her clothes and went outside, into the night, down to the bottom of the garden to the dirty earth beneath the big tree. She fell onto her knees and took it into her hands, smearing and pressing into herself the very earth she came from. The stars above winked while the moon looked away and when she went back inside she was wild eyed and alive and infused with the power of the negative light. In the second bedroom she pulled the door shut and fell once more to her knees. The big black bird bounced from foot to foot, ducking and weaving his head, His dark wings taking so much light from the room Angela could barely tell if He was there at all.
ANGELA Page 4