If This is Paradise, I Want My Money Back

by Claudia Carroll

  ‘Sorry about this.’ She smiles at us apologetically. ‘Bit of an urgent situation I just need to troubleshoot, then I’ll be right with you!’ And back she goes, talking to thin air again. ‘Gabriel, before this escalates, I think you may need to step in. Number 742 is at his wits’ end here, this really is a code red . . .’

  I throw a ‘huh?’ glance at Dad, who just looks ahead, as impassive and expressionless as ever.

  ‘Did she just say Gabriel?’ I whisper at him, unable to shut myself up. ‘Like, as in THE Gabriel?’

  No response.

  ‘Dad! Is she talking to the Archangel Gabriel?’ I hiss at him. ‘I mean, I doubt very much if she’s having a chat with Gabriel Byrne . . .’

  He makes a tiny, ‘shhhh’ frowny gesture, but otherwise just stays focused straight ahead. Bloody hell, he’d have cleaned up as a poker player.

  ‘. . . no, no, his charge is now sitting in his car at the end of a pier contemplating, well, let’s just say, he’s at his lowest ebb and I think we may need urgent backup . . .’ Then smiley lady flashes a big ‘don’t worry, all under control’ professional smile at me and Dad.

  ‘Oh yes, I have all the files here in front of me, his charge is going through a very acrimonious divorce at the moment, in fact that’s exactly what started all this . . . no, go ahead. I’ll hold,’ she says, top of her voice, before whispering back to us, ‘So, so sad. Lovely man. His wife went to work part-time in a garden centre and ran off with someone else she met there. The fella in charge of the water features. She worked in aquariums, and one fine day their eyes met across the faux rocks and the lily pads. Like something you’d see in one of those Sunday evening sitcoms with Robert Lindsay, isn’t it? Tragic. But sure, what can you do? That’s what comes of giving mortals free will. Don’t blame me, I didn’t vote for it. Anyway, what the poor deserted husband doesn’t know is that his whole life is about to take a turn for the better in ways he can’t even begin to imagine . . . hello? Yes, Gabriel, I’m still here . . . yes, that’s lovely. Fine, well, let’s hope that does the trick, and I’ll call you again shortly with an update. Copy that. Over and out.’

  Copy that, over and out? I think. I’m half-wondering if I’ve wandered on to the set of a cop show when smiley lady stretches out her hand to introduce herself.

  ‘Regina Angelorum is my full title, but everyone around here just calls me Regina,’ she says warmly, whipping off the pink glasses, which manages to make her look slightly less marshmallow-like.

  ‘Lovely to meet you, I’m Charlotte Grey . . .’

  ‘Oh, yes, we know all about you, love. In fact I’ve a full dossier here somewhere on you,’ she says, waving vaguely at the big mound of files on the desk in front of her. ‘Now, wait till I see, where did I put it? Oh yes, here we go. Be a good girl and fill in that for me, will you?’ she says, passing me over a biro and a very official-looking form.

  ‘Car crash, wasn’t it, love?’ she asks sympathetically, and I nod. ‘Don’t bother with page one, we have all that information already. Just fill out page three and that’ll be grand. Oh, if you only knew the amount of road fatalities I’ve seen in my time, and do you know it’s getting worse every single year? I’m hoarse saying it . . .’

  Regina chatters on to Dad about speed-limits and the general uselessness of penalty points and drink-driving laws while I wade my way through the paperwork trying to find page three. God Almighty, it’s like applying for a passport. The form is headed AWE and it’s only when I look closely that I see what that stands for.

  Angelic Work Experience.

  OK, now I’m starting to feel like I’m stuck in a Harry Potter movie, and am almost half-expecting to see flying owls and kids playing Quidditch fluttering past the window any minute.

  ‘Excuse me, emmmm . . . Regina?’ I interrupt her in full flow about road-death statistics. ‘Am I seeing things? Or does this really, honestly say angelic work experience? Like . . . for real?’

  ‘Ye-eeeeessssss, dear.’ She smiles, looking at me as much as to say, ‘What the hell else did you expect?’

  ‘So, I’m going to be . . . like . . . an angel?’

  ‘Just fill out question three, paragraph two, dear and we’ll see how you get on.’

  I flick ahead to the right page, my hands trembling, half with excitement and half with total disbelief. No, I definitely am not seeing things. There it is in bold type.

  Q3. TAKE TIME TO OUTLINE, IN YOUR OWN WORDS, YOUR REASONS FOR WISHING TO PARTAKE IN THE AWE PROGRAMME. ANY UNFINISHED EARTHLY BUSINESS SHOULD BE CLEARLY SUMMARIZED BELOW.

  Oh my God, this is unreal. If I wasn’t actually sitting here, I’d never believe it in a sugar rush. Here I am, about to become a bona fide actual angel. Me, that made such an almighty mess of my time on earth, and now look at me! Suddenly, I think about Mum, Kate and Fiona. What they must be going through. But then I think of how much more I can do for them from where I am now. I mean, I’m sure I’ll get to look in on them and work all sorts of miracles for them all. ’Cos everyone knows angels have, like . . . powers, don’t they?

  Ooh, I just thought of something. Bet I could help Kate to get pregnant. And Fiona to get her face out of that computer, start spending time among the three-dimensional people and then maybe find a gorgeous man who’ll treat her like a queen. I’ll help her to make her life work. The way that mine didn’t. And I could get Mum through that list of hers, although how I’ll arrange for her to meet George Clooney is another thing. Then there’s all the actors at the agency. Bet I could make all kinds of fabulous things happen for them, too. Apart from Miss Helium Voice, that is. But otherwise I’ll be a perfect model of angelic behaviour.

  I will completely reinvent myself, just like Madonna. Or Carla Bruni.

  For the first time in ages, I’ve got the biggest beam spread across my face. I grab the biro and, honest to God, once I start writing, there’s no stopping me. Under ‘reasons for wishing to partake in the AWE programme’ I write two full pages about how, although my own life didn’t exactly work out the way I’d imagined, now I want to devote myself entirely to helping others. I must sound gushier than a contestant on Miss Universe, and am only short of writing ‘have deep, burning desire to promote world peace’.

  Anyway, I must have done something right, because after Regina reads over my answer she smiles, winks at Dad, and tells me I’m clear to go.

  To a classroom, to be exact. As if things couldn’t get any more bizarre. The old-fashioned type, with wooden floors, and an actual blackboard, and an overwhelming smell of chalk dust. Kind of reminds me of the time myself and Fiona signed up for a night class called ‘Screenwriting for Beginners’ in the local adult education centre. I was all up for it because I thought it would help me in work; Fiona thought it would be a good way to meet fellas. Anyway, we were both disappointed: the course was total rubbish, and the one and only guy in the class happened to be gay. But I digress.

  There’s two other people here: an elderly man with a goatee beard wearing what looks like an ancient Victorian frock coat, and a middle-aged woman, very attractive in a pale, hollow-eyed, Mary Pickford way, with shingled hair and bright red nail-varnish.

  ‘You’re Miss Charlotte, aren’t you?’ says goatee man politely, not even a raised eyebrow about how I just managed to . . . I dunno, beam into, or somehow get landed wherever it is that I am now. Just like in a dream; I haven’t a clue how I physically got from A to B, all I’m sure of is that I’m here now.

  ‘Emm . . . yes, but the thing is . . . emm . . . I don’t mean to be rude or anything, but emm . . . I don’t suppose you know exactly what’s going on here, by any chance?’

  ‘Motoring accident, wasn’t it?’ says shingle-haired woman, mildly curious.

  ‘Emm . . . yeah . . . but . . .’

  ‘Yeah,’ goatee man repeats after me, pondering. Honestly, the more I look at him, the more he’d put you in mind of Gladstone or Disraeli or some other Victorian frock-coated, elder statesman type.

 
‘I could never get used to that abbreviation. A little like “OK”. One hears it so often nowadays, and it never fails to amuse me. Well, I do hope your accident wasn’t too painful, my dear?’

  ‘Ehh . . . no, actually, never even felt a thing, really, it was all over so fast. I think the shock must have numbed me. There was a storm and I was, well, I was . . . I was . . . emm . . . really upset about . . . something. One minute I was trying to overtake a car in front of me, but I didn’t see that there was a truck coming towards me on the opposite side of the road, till it was way too late, then, next thing I was in hospital . . .’

  Funny, though, the little things that, bizarrely, do stick in my mind about the accident. Watching the bonnet of my little car crumple like an accordian in slow motion as the truck struck it full-on. Remembering too late that I forgot to put my seat belt on. Feeling my head crash forward through the windscreen at full force, shattering it as easily as if it were made of icing sugar. Then opening my eyes and seeing the panicked truck driver, standing on the road beside me in the pelting rain, screaming hysterically down his mobile phone for the ambulance to hurry the f*ck up, that this could be a fatality.

  But I’m grand, I thought looking over at him. Just can’t move, that’s all. Then I remember feeling a hot, oozy slime dripping down my face and into my open mouth. It was only when a bit of it dropped on to my tongue that I realized it was blood.

  Then nothing. Blackness. Peace. ‘What was it that happened to you, Charles?’ asks shingle-haired woman in an English accent so cut-glass you’d swear she just stepped out of an Agatha Christie whodunnit.

  ‘Typhoid.’

  ‘Typhoid?’ I can’t help repeating after him, stunned. In fact, I couldn’t be more stunned if he’d just said ‘the Black Death’.

  ‘Yes, dear. Perfectly common in 1849. How about you?’ he asks shingle-head.

  ‘Influenza.’

  ‘Flu?’ I blurt out. Sorry, couldn’t help that, either, I’m too busy thinking, do people really die of flu?

  ‘They certainly did in 1919,’ she replies curtly, reading my thoughts. ‘More people died of influenza than did in the whole of the Great War, you know . . . ah, here’s Minnie now.’ She breaks off as a little girl of about ten or eleven comes in, with long brown hair tied in a ribbon, wearing hobnail boots and a kind of smock dress. She’s adorable and looks a bit like one of the Railway Children, and I’m just about to ask her to come and sit beside me when she strides up to the top of the class and, in her sweet little-girl voice, tells us that today we’re going to be learning about giving signs, communication through dreams, and guiding without interfering with free will.

  ‘But she’s only a kid!’ I whisper to shingle-head on my left.

  ‘Oh, don’t make that mistake, dear. Minnie’s an older soul than any of us. She’s had over two hundred earthly charges to date you know.’

  Bloody hell.

  We learn so much I can barely take it all in. And let’s remember that up till this intensive crash course, my knowledge of the spirit world was pretty much derived from movies like The Sixth Sense and Ghost. Then something that Dad said comes back to me, about how he sends little signs to Mum all the time. And now I’ve learned how to do exactly that. At least, I think I have.

  My head is swimming, and all I really want to do is rush back to Dad and fill him in on everything. But things don’t seem to happen like that here. No sooner has Minnie wrapped up, than I’m whooshed back to Regina in her bank-manager’s office, where she looks like she’s been sitting alone, just waiting for me.

  ‘All right then, love? Minnie is really something, isn’t she? I remember when she first came here, oh, must have been in Queen Victoria’s day, but she really is a wonderful spirit, and a very gifted teacher . . . now, my dear, I’ve got quite a challenging assignment for you. I haven’t just been pulling strings for you, I’ve been pulling ropes. Wait till I see, where on earth did I put that file? One of these days I am determined to clear this desk, once and for all . . .’

  I’m on the edge of my seat, all excited now. This is just like in a Bond movie, when Judi Dench tells 007 what his mission will be. Minus the gadgets of course, but . . . hmmm . . . wonder if I get issued with a set of wings?

  ‘Oh yes, here we are,’ she goes on. ‘Hmmm. Interesting. This charge’s last angel only left a few days ago. Wrote it off as a hopeless case. So why don’t we see if you can do any better, dear?’

  ‘Bring it on,’ I beam brightly, half-wondering if there’s any more training to come before I’m dispatched. Maybe some kind of angelic boot camp. Where they give lessons in, I dunno, flying and general miracle-working techniques.

  ‘Now, you do know that if the going gets too rough, you can come back here at any time?’ Regina asks, peering at me over the pink glasses, the big marshmallow face looking a bit worried. ‘No one would blame you a bit. It’s not everyone who’s cut out for angelic work experience.’

  Not likely, I think, a bit smugly. I was a total failure on earth, but by God, for once in my miserable life, I am going be a success. I’m going to put my mind to this task, totally apply myself and really impress everyone, myself included, at just how well I can do. I’ll wholeheartedly devote myself to spreading joy and happiness, a bit like an Irish version of Amélie, minus the subtitles.

  I’m going to spend my time here doing good on earth. People down there will probably light candles to me, and whoever this hopeless case is, I’ll completely turn them into an honest, upstanding, kind to stray dogs/ doing meals on wheels at weekends/volunteering at soup kitchens/charity-giving-type person . . .

  ‘Just remember the golden rule, dear. We never, ever interfere with free will. Keep that to the front of your mind, and you’ll be just grand. Yes . . . here we are, I have the charge’s name here. You know, we generally assign to people that you already knew in the mortal plane, makes things so much simpler, really.’

  How fab is this? I’m thinking . . . Mum? Kate? Fiona? Someone I don’t know all that well, but whose whole life I’m now about to transform for the better?

  ‘Right then. I see you know this person intimately, so that should help you a lot. It’s a Mr James Kane.’

  Oh F******************************CK . . .

  Chapter Four

  JAMES

  I have never been so totally and utterly shocked in my entire life. Sorry, death. What’s worse is, I can’t even do what I’d normally do, or what any normal person would: i.e., go straight to the nearest pub, order a double vodkatini, then knock it back in a single wrist flick. Because before I’ve even had a chance to a) splutter or b) hurl myself out the nearest window (sure, what the hell, I’m dead anyway) . . . I’m back at home. Bloody hell, I’ll tell you one thing. There is absolutely no arsing around on the angelic plane, that’s for sure.

  Sorry, did I say I was back home? I meant back in James’s house, she sez through gritted teeth. In our bedroom, to be exact. I mean his bedroom. In my defence, though, can I just point out that, in the five years since I first moved in here, I’ve poured a lot of my own blood, sweat and tears into the place, so you’ll excuse me for sounding a bit territorial. So would you if you knew the sheer amount of man-hours I spent decorating/scrubbing Dulux’s Himalayan Blush off my clothes/waiting in for hours on plumbers whose entire work-schedule seemed to revolve around the FA Cup Premiership/guarding a ten-tonne skip at the front gate from kids setting fire to it.

  You name it, I was that soldier.

  I know, I know, technically it is James’s house; he’d bought it not long before we met, mortgaged up to the back teeth, but I was project manager on it because he asked me to be, both of us swept up in the romance of transforming what was then a semi-derelict shithole into a gorgeous period house, close to town, close to the sea, yadda, yadda yadda. Phase one in the taming of James Kane, was my reasoning. OK, so his sole contribution was to put in a Bang & Olufsen TV then leave the rest up to me, but I was more than happy to do it. I mean, everyone knows the di
rect mathematical correlation between buying a house and spending less time in nightclubs and more in Woodies DIY looking at outdoor decking, don’t they? We’ll be like a couple in a Homebase ad, I blissfully thought.

  ‘You and me could be so happy here,’ he used to say. ‘We’ll get engaged/exchange vows on a beach some-where/try for a baby really, really soon,’ he’d say.

  ‘Any idea how soon?’ I’d say, not really caring about which particular order these wondrous miracles would happen in, but understandably anxious to put some kind of time frame on it, without sounding too impatient.

  ‘Just as soon as this movie gets off the ground/right after I get the green light for this TV series/once I get investors on board/when the LA trip is out of the way,’ he’d say.

  Always the dangled carrot, always the magical ‘when’, but there was absolutely no doubt in my mind what he really meant. That as soon as things settled down for him, at some unforeseen date, this would be our permanent home. So, I happily figured, no harm to put my own stamp on the place while I’m at it, sure, it’s an investment in the future, isn’t it? I can’t even explain my rationale: maybe that by picking out soft furnishings, curtain poles and tablecloths that matched the napkins, I’d somehow seal the deal for him and me. That the Cath Kidston catalogue was all it would take for him to commit to me.

  And now I’m back.

  I catch my breath and nervously look around the bedroom, not having the first clue what to expect. Nope, everything looks just the way I left it when I was last here, God knows how long ago. The last time I remember everything being normal. Which, given what’s happened in the meantime, is beyond weird. So funny to think that I would have hauled myself out of bed that morning as usual, hopped into the shower, got dressed, gone out the door, worried about a contract that should have arrived at the office the previous day but hadn’t, wondered if I’d be home that night in time for The Apprentice, debated about whether or not I’d cook that night or else leave it to James, who fancies himself as a bit of a Gordon Ramsay in the kitchen, right down to all the effing and blinding. All the normal thoughts and cares and worries that go through our minds every day. And then in the space of one short afternoon, I managed to lose everything. Boyfriend, lover, home, job . . . life. Unbelievable.