The Blood of Angels

by Stephen Gregory

  Harry felt giddy. The sun was heavy on his mop of ginger hair. He reeled, swaying on the loose boulders of the rockery, with the heat on his head and the vividness with which he’d conjured the presence of the girl. At last he could no longer bear the prickling on his foot. He blinked his eyes open and looked down to see what the ant was doing.

  It wasn’t an ant; it was the natterjack toad. It had stopped on the path, confronted by a strange object near the entrance to its crevice in the rocks. The object, Harry’s foot, was long, bony and white, soiled and sweaty. It was warm, with a strong animal scent. So the natterjack paused to inspect it, instead of manoeuvring past. It reached its fingers into the springy red hair on Harry’s instep and gently pulled. And Harry, confronted by such warty, pre­historic ugliness after his vision of the golden girl, cried out and instinctively flipped the toad away with a sudden straightening of his leg, feeling it horribly soft on his bare foot, like a wrinkled, deflated party balloon. He saw the toad rowing its arms and legs in the long grass, struggling on its back, unable to right itself, and he knelt down and lowered his face to examine it, as Sarah had done. He put his face so close to the toad that he could almost have touched it with his nose or slipped out his tongue and licked the soft, white skin on its belly.

  Then, overcoming his squeamishness with an enormous effort, he picked up the toad . . . as Sarah had done. To be like her, simply to touch and hold something that she had touched and held, he picked up the toad. It squirmed in his hands. It could feel that he loathed it, and it reacted as the girl had said it would. It began to swell, puffing itself up, so that, having been so flaccid and dull, the skin tightened and gleamed like the leather of a boxing glove. Inflating in Harry’s hands, as he knelt and watched the remarkable transformation, it brewed the poison in the glands on the sides of its head. An acrid fluid oozed to the surface of its skin, until Harry’s hands were stinging as though he’d torn up a tall green nettle. He bundled the toad into the bracken. Straight away, tiny white blebs stood up on his palms and fingers. Seeing that the toad had deflated, scurried and vanished, mouselike, into a hole in the rockery, he picked up his boots and socks and went inside. His hands were itching furiously. His picture of Sarah had entirely gone.

  He dropped the boots and socks, flung off his shirt and trousers and pants in the kitchen, put down his glasses and went into the bathroom. For a minute, he stared at his face in the mirror. It was a nice face, a face that women found oddly appealing, a smooth, freckled face with clear eyes, a head of thick, red curls: a nice face but a puzzled face, which looked as though it had been punched a few times and was half expecting a few more punches. Even the toad had stung him, the toad that the girl had been so thrilled to find, that she’d nuzzled and stroked, that she’d described as lovely and wonderful. When Harry Clewe had picked it up, it had stung him. So the eyes in the mirror were apprehensive.

  Harry reached for both the washbasin taps and gripped, intending to bathe his tingling hands. A powerful electric shock surged through his body. As his fingers clenched in spasm and couldn’t let go, as his right knee jerked sharply upwards and cracked against the underside of the washbasin, the face in the mirror opened its mouth and let out a stream of incoherent, jabbering yells. The eyes bulged. After what seemed like minutes, but was probably no more than five seconds, Harry wrenched his hands from the taps. Still shouting, he hobbled out of the bathroom and flung himself onto the living-room sofa.

  He lay there, mewing. He was stark naked, bruised and dirty. His arms tingled with electricity, from his fingers to his shoulders. They were numb, although he could clench and unclench his fists. His right kneecap was hurting terribly from its violent impact on the basin. As the feeling returned to his fingers, he massaged his forehead and his neck, trying to rub the tension out of them. He looked down at his body and explored all the bruises on it: the gash on his thumb, his throbbing kneecap and the tingles and aches in his arms. Worst of all, when he squeezed his eyes shut, he saw sparks. ‘Please, no!’ he whimpered. ‘Oh, God, please, no . . . not now!’ He rubbed and rubbed with his fingers to try and make the sparks go away, hoping they’d been caused by the electric shock and would soon disappear. Oh, God, he thought, anything but the migraine, please, anything but that!

  Enraged by the prospect of the kind of headache he’d dreaded since puberty, he ground his teeth together and stopped mewing, determined to tackle the problem in his bathroom. He strode into the kitchen, stepped into his Wellington boots and went into the bathroom again. He had the vague idea that the rubber boots would protect him from electric shocks.

  He touched the taps with his fingertips. There was a tingle of current. Gingerly, he gripped one of the taps. There was a surging of energy, even in the soles of his boots. His fingers curled, his right knee jerked, but there was no bruising impact with the sink. He breathed out and relaxed. His fingers unclenched. His face in the shaving mirror looked uncomfortable.

  Nevertheless, Harry decided to run the bath. Somehow or other, he must get clean. Handling the taps with a dry towel, he let the bath fill to a depth of three or four inches and then he stepped in. The water hardly covered the instep of his Wellington boots. Squatting on his haunches, he found that, if he dipped both his hands in the water at the same time, he received an unpleasant electric shock, despite the rubber boots, right through his arms and chest and into the back of his neck. He had to wash himself single-handedly. It was the most strenuous and least successful bath he’d ever taken. Deciding not to risk kneeling forward and submerging his head, he managed to rub some wet soap into his hair and rinse most of it out again with splashes of grey water.

  It was worse than Sudan. There, he’d quickly grown accus­tomed to bathing from a tin bucket he carried from the Nile. It was simply a matter of practice. Perhaps he would adjust to the electrified bathwater, find better and less painful ways of using it. When at last Harry emerged from the bathroom and dried himself, his towel was streaked with the soap and dirt that had remained on his body. After dressing in clean clothes, he returned to the garden with a basin of clean water, where he sat on the rockery, took off his boots and washed his feet. The blebs on his fingers had stopped itching. When he squeezed his eyes shut, he was enormously relieved to find that the dancing sparks had gone.

  The natterjack watched from within its cave. It solemnly blinked, licked its lips with a long, grey tongue and rubbed its little hands together.

  Chapter Four

  Harry was sitting on the wall outside Sarah’s uncle’s restaurant at two o’clock the following afternoon.

  Unlike the previous few days of brilliant sunshine, the sky was overcast. He’d spent the morning high up in the hotel garden, hid­ing from the manager, doing nothing to justify his wage. Getting out of bed, he’d found that his right kneecap was swollen and puffy and the joint was painfully stiff. In the garden, it hurt him when he attempted the climb to the bonfire with more rubbish to be burned. So he sat down and reached for the pile of out-of-date newspapers. Instead of repeating the journey, he made sure that the fire maintained a trembling plume of smoke through the branches of the trees, and he read. He wanted to keep as clean as possible; there would be no opportunity, between finishing in the garden and meeting Sarah, to go back to the cottage and have a wash; even if he could, it would be another hazardous and tiresome experience in the electrified bathroom. He sat with the newspapers, so preoccupied with the prospect of seeing the girl again that the pages flickered meaninglessly before his eyes like the faded frames of a silent film. The morning passed in a pall of smoke from the bonfire, in the cryptic conversation of jackdaws.

  Sarah came out of the restaurant. She was wearing the same purple tie-dyed T-shirt she’d been wearing when he’d first met her, a pair of sheer red slacks, and a neckerchief knotted at her throat, red with white polka dots. Seeing Harry on the other side of the road, she smiled a seraphic smile which made his heart thud and his mouth go suddenly dry. But she didn’t cross over. Instead, she skipped
into the restaurant car park, where she started to rap on the rear window of a battered blue van. Harry stayed where he was and watched her.

  The back door of the van opened. Sarah jumped inside and the door slammed shut. The springs creaked. There were shadowy movements behind the windows, then silence and stillness for a minute or two.

  She was rather flushed when she stepped out again, and the spotted neckerchief was gone. She beckoned to Harry to cross the road. He did so, in such a daze that he was barely aware of a car which braked hard to avoid him. The driver shouted an unlovely word, and the car accelerated away.

  ‘Hello, Harry,’ she said. Like a child, she leaned upwards and brushed his cheek with her lips, flicking her hair on his face. His hands went to her waist, but she spun away to the door of the van. ‘Come and meet Patrick,’ she said. ‘I think he’s capable of receiv­ing visitors.’

  Harry peered inside. The van was so spectacularly untidy that at first he couldn’t see anyone. There was bedding strewn about; blankets, pillows and sleeping bags. The air was stale with dirty clothes, pungent with the fumes of patchouli and marijuana. Ropes, belts and harnesses were tangled together; hammers and picks and all manner of aluminium clips and brackets dangled from the roof. A loaf of bread and a jar of marmalade lay in the rumpled clothes. A voice said, ‘Good afternoon’, before Harry made out the man who was sprawling there.

  ‘I’m Harry Clewe,’ Harry said, spelling his name, offering his hand.

  The man ignored the hand, waving it away with the bread knife he was holding. ‘I know,’ he replied. ‘I’m Patrick. Sarah told me about your scene in the restaurant, how you rescued her from the ogre. Rock-climbing should be pretty easy for you, compared with that.’

  ‘I’ve never tried it before,’ Harry said. ‘But I’ll have a go. My knee’s a bit buggered at the moment.’

  This provoked an arpeggio of laughter from Sarah. The man snorted. Harry couldn’t tell whether they were amused by his eagerness to mention his injury before the climbing began or by the awkwardness of his expression. He’d never been able to swear properly; there was something in his face and the cadence of his voice that made even the mildest oath sound wrong.

  Patrick untangled himself from his ropes and blankets and sprang, barefoot, into the car park. Like Sarah, he was wearing slacks and a T-shirt, and Harry noticed, with a swooping in his stomach, that the man had the spotted red neckerchief around his throat. He and Sarah looked as lithe as a pair of otters, while Harry felt slight and shabby in the cheap tennis shoes, old flannels and tennis shirt he’d been used to wearing in Sudan.

  Patrick cleared a space in the back of the van and Harry climbed in, wincing at the pain in his knee. Patrick and Sarah got in the front, slamming the doors so loudly that a pair of pigeons clattered from a nearby sweet-chestnut tree. The man started the van and manoeuvred it into the road, making a great play of fumbling for Sarah’s thigh instead of the gear stick. Laughing together, they continued their horseplay until the van was humming rapidly out of the village.

  They drove for a quarter of an hour along the Glaslyn pass, in the direction of Porthmadog. Patrick, intrigued that a school­teacher should be working as a hotel gardener, asked Harry to explain his presence in Wales. He laughed at Harry’s account of his year in Sudan, how he’d gone as a volunteer to one of the poorest countries in the world and bought a Mercedes-Benz with the proceeds. That was all there was time for. Harry had a closer look at Patrick, with a rising sense of anxiety at this familiarity with Sarah. In his thirties, Patrick had a tangle of blond hair, curly and long at his ears and the back of his neck, and a bristly, blond beard. He twinkled in the driving mirror, a puckish, self-confident bantam, speaking with the rising lilt of a Birmingham accent. Harry was inclined to like him, despite his earlier gesture with the marmalade-smeared knife and the way his hands wandered towards Sarah’s right thigh.

  They drew up in a lay-by opposite Tremadog cliffs. Harry rolled out of the van when Sarah ran round to open the back door, and then she pointed with a naked brown arm at the wall of sheer rock which rose from the woodland. There were climbers everywhere: they strolled along the road, with coils of rope hung over their shoulders, with jangling aluminium paraphernalia clipped to their belts; high above the trees, knots of them stood talking, gesturing expansively to explain the problems they’d encountered before achieving the clifftop; and silently, painstakingly, tiny figures on the cliff-face crept like insects on the wrinkled bark of a tree. They swung on their ropes like spiders; they stepped delicately on tiptoe and felt with their fingertips.

  Patrick and Sarah unravelled the ropes from the van, preparing the equipment. To make up for his uselessness, Harry started to talk; he heard himself talking very quickly, too quickly, fidgeting his fingers in his pockets, adjusting and readjusting the glasses on his face because he was nervous about trying to climb the high, steep rock. Quite a lot of the local Welsh people, he said, liked to claim that the towns of Porthmadog and Tremadog had something to do with the great man Madog ap Llewelyn, who’d led a rebellion against the English and sacked Caernarfon castle in 1294 . . . but in fact the towns were named after an Englishman called William Madocks, who’d built the harbours for the exporting of slate in the nineteenth century.

  Patrick glanced up and said, ‘Is that so?’ Then he bent to the ropes again.

  Sarah said, ‘Shut up and relax, Harry. We’ll be ready soon. You know, if you relax you might actually enjoy it.’ And, seeing from his expression that he’d been hurt and was expecting to be hurt again quite soon, she stroked his face with her grubby brown hand.

  They crossed the road and went into the woodland at the base of the cliffs. There was a wreckage of huge boulders, overgrown with brambles, nettles, garlic and dock. A blackbird fled noisily as Patrick, still bare­footed, led the way through the rocks and stopped in a cool, green glade. Looking upwards, shielding his eyes from the sun which was beginning to break through a layer of grey cloud, Harry saw the dappled branches move slowly in the breeze; then the slabs of rock towered to the sky. Against the shifting clouds, the cliff seemed to move as well, bulging and beetling, so that Harry blinked and looked down again.

  Again he was superfluous, as Patrick and Sarah rearranged the climbing equipment. Patrick would go up first, followed by Sarah. The man was helping her into the harness, making her ready to climb once he’d reached the top and secured his lines. Trailing a length of rope, Patrick began his ascent. He wiped his hands on his slacks, smeared his feet in the grass to clean off some mud, and moved easily up the rockface.

  Harry was impressed. On the very tips of his toes and fingers, the man seemed to dance on the cliff. Quickly and gracefully, he moved higher and higher. Sarah was watching him, so that she might know the route.

  Glancing from her upturned throat to the climber again, Harry said, ‘He certainly seems to know what he’s doing, doesn’t he? How on earth does he do it barefoot? How can he grip the rock like that?’

  ‘Patrick’s one of the best,’ she answered, without looking at Harry. ‘He’s climbed all over the Himalayas and the Andes. At the moment he’s instructing at the centre in Capel Curig, the place you gave me a lift to. A couple of months ago he was climbing in Yosemite, in California, and that’s where he started this barefoot thing. He’s adopted it as a sort of personal trademark this summer. He hasn’t worn any shoes for weeks, not just for climbing, but even around the town and in the pub. He’s a bloody show-off. Anyway, this is a dead easy route, for beginners. Patrick can run up and down this bit of cliff all day without breaking a sweat.’

  They both stared upwards, following the trailing rope. The man had disappeared.

  ‘Looks like it’s my turn soon,’ she said. ‘You stay here, Harry. Patrick will come down when I’ve finished and fix you up with the gear. Wish me luck! You’re not the only one who’s nervous, you know. This is only my second go at it – I’m a beginner, too!’

  She tugged at the rope. There was an answering tug
and a cry from above. She applied herself to the rock.

  There was no sound in the woodland apart from the rub and knock of Sarah’s feet on the cliff wall. The birds were silent. Rays of sunlight fell through the branches in columns of golden dust. The girl grunted, stretching for handholds and footholds, and Harry could see the spreading, darkening stains of sweat under her arms and in the small of her back. Her fingers burrowed for a grip in the folded rock. She splayed her legs apart, scrabbling with her toes. In this way, Sarah negotiated the cliff-face. When she was as high as the highest trees, the sunlight struck her, so that her hair shone like a helmet. And then she was gone, as the lizard in Harry’s Sudanese garden had gone, leaving a dull, grey space on the rock.

  For a quarter of an hour, Harry waited for Patrick to come down and help him begin his climb. The woodland came to life as he sat quietly on a boulder. He watched a flock of long-tailed tits, black and white and pearly grey, swinging their flyweight bodies like gymnasts. They disappeared when a jay beat through the trees, cocking a zany head, shouting an ugly shout, raising its tail to squirt a branch with a bright yellow mute. Harry moved to a spot where a sunbeam landed, and he wondered how long he’d be waiting at the foot of the cliff. He would have been happy to sit all afternoon, alone with the nuthatch and wren . . . except for the thought of Patrick with the girl in the long grass at the top of the cliff. He imagined, with giddying dismay, how the rock-climber’s fingers might be stroking the small of her back or teasing her nipples inside the purple T-shirt.