The Blood of Angels

by Stephen Gregory

  No wonder the girl didn’t want him. His face was a palimpsest: imprinted, smudged, imprinted, smudged, with nothing brave or original of its own. No trace of heroism. With dismay, he remem­bered the touch of the girl on his fingers, the sweat on her flanks and her belly, how hot and smooth she’d been . . . Automatically, he reached for the taps of the washbasin.

  The electricity flooded his body. It lit the blackest corners of his mind with a sizzling magnesium flare. It ground his teeth together. It rolled his eyeballs backwards until he could see into the dazzling, floodlit hole in his head. His right knee jerked up and cracked on the bottom of the washbasin. Gibbering, wailing, chattering like a chimpanzee, he wrenched his hands from the taps and fled into the garden.

  He collapsed on the tumbledown rockery. Everything that was Harry Clewe, inside and outside, was bruised. No part of him, concrete or abstract, had survived the day intact. Naked, mewing, wringing his hands, chewing his lips, he sat on the rockery and shook his head to try and shift the sparks.

  Then he felt something gently tugging the hair on his instep.

  A toad. It had emerged from its cave into the sunshine of the late afternoon. The long tongue flicked out and caressed the silken skin on his ankle. Its eyes were open, fixed in a golden stare.

  Harry leaned forward with his arms on his knees and looked at the toad between his feet. It was the natterjack that the girl had found, that she’d handled and stroked. It wasn’t swollen; there was no threat, no poison triggered in the glands of its head. But, remembering how it had nettled him before, Harry was loath to touch the toad with his bare hands.

  He found that he wasn’t quite naked after all. He was still wearing the spotted red neckerchief that the girl had given him. He unknotted it from his throat and took it off. Spreading it in his hands, he dropped it loosely over the toad’s pimpled body and picked it up with the creature wrapped inside. He carried it with him, back into the cottage.

  There, he pressed the toad to his forehead and tried to soothe the pain that was blooming in his skull.

  Chapter Five

  So, Harry Clewe wasn’t at all surprised to find a toad in the palm of his hand when he woke up. He felt at his cheek which had struck the rock when he’d fallen from the cliff. The graze had hardened into a scab. The swelling had gone down.

  It was dawn, the beginning of September. Harry was cold. As the room became lighter and lighter, he lay in his narrow bed with the blankets pulled up to his chin and cupped the natterjack toad on his belly. It was warm there, like a little hot-water bottle. Thankful that his migraine was over, he stared at the ceiling and let the shreds of sleep drift away.

  For a week, he didn’t see Sarah. But he had his landlord come in, to investigate the problem with the electricity.

  Touching the taps in the clammy, dingy little bathroom, hold­ing his hands in the running water, the man agreed there was a tingle. That was as far as he would go: a tingle. He smiled when Harry described the shocks he’d had. He smiled when Harry rolled up his trouser leg to show him the bruises on his kneecap. The man was sympathetic but disbelieving. Looking with interest at the scabs and bruising on Harry’s face and the starburst crack on his glasses, he must have thought that the Englishman was simply accident-prone. Harry went on to describe his efforts in the bath. The man guffawed at the idea of wearing Wellington boots in three inches of lukewarm water. It was clearly impossible to make him appreciate the seriousness of the situation. All he could feel was a tingle.

  But at least he explained the reason for the shocks: rats.

  Previous tenants had complained of hearing rats in the roof of the cottage and in the floor space of the living-room ceiling. The landlord suggested that the rats had been gnawing at the wiring. He promised to call in the pest control to put down some poison, and he would check the wiring himself when he had a free weekend. He said all this with a smile trembling on his lips; he was looking forward to telling his wife about the carroty, bewildered Englishman who was renting the cottage, who wore Wellington boots in the bath. Meanwhile, he pointed out the switch which governed the separate electricity supply to the kitchen and bathroom, the lean-to extension to the back of the cottage . . . yes, there was a switch beside the bathroom door, and the landlord rec­ommended that, for the time being, until the wiring was fixed, Harry could heat the water in the immersion and then always turn off the power just before he got into the bath. No more tingles, with or without his boots on.

  Harry had heard the rats in the roof. Lying in bed, he’d listened to the plodding of feet and the slither of tails inside the ceiling. He could follow their runs from one side of the roof space to another, hear the animals sniffing into the corners of the dusty darkness. He hated the rats, shuddering at the thought of them so close to his head, only separated from him by a sheet of plasterboard. He hated them more and more, now that he knew they were responsible for the shocks he’d had in the bathroom.

  At least the switch by the bathroom door made it safe to touch the taps and the water. Browsing in a reference book in Caernarfon library, he’d been horrified to learn that a leakage of ordinary domes­tic current could be fatal to someone immersed to the neck in the bath when the charge passed through the water.

  ‘Fibrillation: the uncontrollable, irregular twitching of the mus­cular wall of the heart, interfering with normal rhythmical contractions’ . . . This could kill. Even the youngest and fittest, stunned into unconsciousness, might drown in the bath. So much for the tingle.

  While he was in the library, Harry decided to investigate the natterjack toad as well. He’d carried it with him, wrapped in the spotted red neckerchief, tucked inside his shirt. In a quiet corner of the reference library, he took out the bundled neckerchief and spread it on the table. The toad began a grovelling exploration of the books that Harry had stacked up.

  It was undoubtedly a natterjack, Bufo calamita as Sarah had said. The distinctive yellow line ran from its forehead and down the middle of its back. It was about three inches long from its snout to the nub of its body; twice as long when it stretched out its long hind legs. The dull brown skin was pimpled and wrinkled and blotched as though the toad was in the last stages of a horrible disease; but the books said this was camouflage, so that the creature would look like a clod of earth. Apparently, the natterjack could even change colour to match its surroundings, like a chameleon. Harry picked it up and turned it round when it reached the edge of the table. He could see the bumps, the parotid glands on the sides of its head, containing the stinging poison; but the toad hadn’t stung him since the first time he’d handled it in the garden, even when he held it to his belly. Not very agile, toads had developed another means of defence, the book said, the ability to swell themselves up to be half as big again, by inflating their lungs. But the natterjack was more mobile than the common toad: it was nicknamed the ‘running toad’ because of its scurrying, mouselike movements.

  There were some splendid photographs of toads copulating. This always happened in the water, an element which transformed the toad from a cumbersome oaf into a graceful, balletic swimmer. In the sexual embrace, ‘in amplexus’ as the book called it, the male sat on the female’s back and clasped his forearms around her. The water buoyed them up and gave them the necessary freedom of movement to carry out their mating. Locked together, they swam dreamily around their pool, the male kicking away the advances of other interested males if they came too close. And then the female ejected her eggs just as he released his seminal fluid: strictly speaking, the act was not copulation, since the toad had no copulatory organ. Finally, the male would distribute the eggs with more movements of his hind legs, three or four thousand eggs in threads of jelly up to six feet long.

  It was the expression on their faces that fascinated Harry. The female was frowning like a duchess, with the male’s fingers entwined around her throat; the male creased his mouth in the widest of smiles, as though he was having more fun that he thought he was going to. To Harry, there was some
thing perfectly idyllic in the idea of making love in the water, floating weightlessly on its silken cushion. He’d never tried it.

  And he found the story the girl had mentioned in his garden: the legend that ‘the foule toad has a faire stone in his heade’ . . . According to superstition, it was a stroke of the greatest luck to find a toad, and most unlucky to kill one: deep in its pimpled, poisonous head, there was a jewel, the toadstone, which gave power over women and horses and was effective against snakebites and ratbites. The application of a living toad to the back of the neck would staunch nosebleeds and soothe headaches. The toadstone was magic.

  Now, in a quiet corner of Caernarfon library, Harry Clewe smiled, took off his broken glasses, picked up the natterjack and pressed its belly to his forehead. It was cool and dry and as soft as velvet. It felt good. It felt wonderful. The power of the toadstone filled him with strength and peace.

  Closing his eyes, he sat like that for a long time, until the lady librarian came to his table and screamed very loudly. Then he bundled the toad into his shirt, picked up his glasses and ran outside.

  From that day onwards, he carried the toad with him all the time, folded in the spotted red neckerchief. It was important to him. He’d been bruised and wounded. The toad made him feel safe.

  Chapter Six

  Harry had had the headaches since he was seven. The first time he’d seen the cluster of dancing sparks, he’d told his mother that an angel had come for him. It was an angel he dreaded, one that brought him pain and wretchedness. His eyesight deteriorated as the headaches became more frequent and more crippling. He grew into a gawky, freckle-faced, red-haired teenager. Odd, introverted, nice-looking in a bewildered sort of way, he bumbled good-naturedly through public school and emerged from university with a gentleman’s degree in English literature.

  Schoolteaching was hard for him. His pupils liked him, for he was gentle and kind; for the same reasons, they took advantage of him. When he fled from the disorder of his classroom, he found comfort in the arms of the headmistress, a big, handsome, forty-year-old woman who took him aside, at first, to try and help him through his probationary year; and then, seeing that her encour­age­ment and professional advice were making no difference to Harry’s performance as a teacher, she took him to her bed. She would settle on top of him like a great, white, broody goose. With her eyes squeezed shut, she would rock and rock, shouting his name through tightly clenched teeth, until at last she would shudder and collapse, smothering him with her heavy, hot breasts. Eventually the school governors found out and objected. Harry had to go. To save her own job, the headmistress wrote a good enough reference to ensure his acceptance as a volunteer with the Sudanese ministry of education, and he left.

  Sudan was hard for him, too.

  He was posted to a girls’ school in the deserts of the northern province. His head seemed to blaze with heat. His skin was dried by the baking sunlight, so that his knuckles split and bled. His pale eyes were dazzled by a glaring emptiness of sand and sky. He tried his best in the classroom, where sixty girls shared twenty desks, twenty books and twenty pens. Aged between fifteen and nine­teen, the girls were lovelier than anything Harry had ever seen: impossibly slim, with perfect white teeth and gleaming, velvet-black skin. They made life a misery for him, giggling and hooting and chattering from the start of each lesson to the end. They cheated in the most blatant, outrageous ways when he tried to set tests, concealing notes in the folds of their dresses, whispering and signalling and even shouting in the overcrowded room to get the answers from their friends.

  Lovely, sleek, inaccessible girls . . . Some of them were in love with Harry Clewe, the tall, white-skinned, flame-headed, foreign teacher whose lessons were so noisy. They would run round behind him, to reach up and touch his hair; they’d never seen anything like it before.

  When the school was closed by strikes, Harry travelled on the Nile steamer. With no alternative, he drank water straight from the river, a gazpacho of faeces, mud and globules of diesel oil. Coming ashore at riverside villages, his stomach in cramp and his head ablaze, all he wanted was to squat in the shade of a palm tree and void his gut in a torrent of brown liquid. But what happened? Children crowded round him, grabbing his hands, touching his face, jumping to stroke his hair. They laughed and sang, they loaded his arms with oranges and grapefruit and smooth golden pebbles from the riverbank. Why? They led an old man to him, a blind man who gripped his shoulders and stared blankly into his eyes before leaning forward and planting a kiss on Harry’s forehead. Why? The children clapped, the women burst into tears. Why? In Port Sudan, ghastly beyond imagination, there were teenage soldiers goose-stepping on the Red Sea beaches, their boots all split, their uniforms too small, their rifles burst and broken. Swedish sailors from the supertankers bought boys in the marketplace and fucked them in shuttered hotel rooms.

  Why was it all so ugly? Why were so many things smashed and discarded which could have been mended and used? Why was the desert strewn with bones?

  Sudan was hard for Harry Clewe. The angel followed him there. Whole days slipped by as he lay on his rope bed, closeted from the sun, his senses obliterated by migraine. Then he spent evenings by the river, awakened to exhilarating sleeplessness by an infusion of tea and marijuana. The long, cool nights were a blessed relief for him, when, having driven off the pariah dogs by flinging handfuls of sand at them, he would sit by the Nile with a torch and a book of star maps and lose himself in study of the brilliant constellations. The stars were his asylum. So the months passed until the end of his contract. Released from school and the torture of teaching, he travelled on trucks to the barren lands in the west and south of the country before reporting to the ministry of education in Khar­toum, returning at last to Wales with a dose of salmonella poison­ing, a hepatitis hangover and a Mercedes-Benz.

  And now, the natterjack toad. He carried it with him all the time, bundled in the spotted red neckerchief. The girl, Sarah, had found it in his garden. She’d touched it and stroked it, declaring it precious. It was precious to Harry Clewe. The toadstone was big magic.

  Chapter Seven

  Harry applied the power of the toadstone to his immediate domestic problems.

  Firstly, the shocks in his bathroom.

  He dropped the toad into his bath, flopping it from the neck­er­chief into the water. He was thrilled to see it swimming; it was indeed transformed in this new element. The natterjack strode through the water, propelled by powerful thrusts of its hind legs, sleek with muscle, quite altered from its previous pustular ugliness. The skin on its belly and flanks, which had hung in unhealthy folds when the toad was dry, became taut. When it bumped its nose on the side of the bath, it tumbled round and swam purposefully in the other direction. The golden eyes shone like searchlights on the bridge of a minesweeper. The toad’s forearms were exquisite; it pulled through the water with its tiny translucent fingers. Transformed, the natterjack was a marvel, a fossil come back to life.

  Harry knelt at the bath and watched for a few minutes. Then he stood up, reached through the door and felt for the switch outside the bathroom. He switched on the power, turned round and knelt at the bath again.

  The natterjack was still moving through the water. But not swimming.

  Every few seconds, the hind legs convulsed and thrashed so that the toad surged forward. Then it was still. The forearms stretched out, rigid and useless; the spasms sent the toad banging into the white enamel or spiralling under the water in a nose dive. In the centre of those brilliant eyes, the pupils were no longer elliptical: they’d grown big, suffusing the gold with a glistening black. The toad was drowning. A string of pearly bubbles belched from its mouth. It sank to the bottom of the bath, where it lay on its back and quivered. Harry plunged his hand into the water. There was a jolt of power the length of his arm, a blow like a rabbit punch at the back of his neck. But he had the toad. He bolted to the living room and fell onto the sofa.

  In no time at all, more quickly than
Harry did, the toad recov­ered. It settled comfortably into the red neckerchief, apparently relaxed after its exercise in the bath. Its pupils resumed their original shape and size. Harry rubbed at the ache in his shoulder and jaw. He lifted the toad to his mouth and pressed his lips to the bumpy, brown head.

  The magic would work for him. Switching off the power again, he took off all his clothes, including his Wellington boots, and slipped into the bath. The natterjack sculled around his legs. It reassured him to see how smoothly and gracefully it swam, as though this were greater proof of his safety than the switch by the bathroom door. When he lay in the lukewarm water, the toad climbed onto the islands of white flesh and sat there, blinking and resting. It rowed through the grey, soapy water and pulled itself onto his slippery skin. Padding along an exposed thigh, tugging at the springy red hairs with its fingers, it nestled in his groin. It aroused him. He felt his belly stirring and his throat go dry. The toad swarmed on him, clasping with its forearms, just as he’d seen in the library-book photographs. It smiled blissfully. Harry smiled too. The toad held on. It butted its face on him, it pressed with its velvet belly, it fluttered the delicate fingers . . . until Harry arched from the water, shouting the name of the girl he hadn’t seen for a week but whose face and sweet golden skin he couldn’t forget for an instant. The toad swam away, trailing a thread of silvery slime.

  Secondly, the rats.

  The rats were increasingly noisy at night. As it grew colder out­side, they were more and more inclined to come into the cottage roof and warm themselves on the chimney stack. Harry would lie awake and hear their plodding footsteps a few feet above his head, separated from him by a sheet of plasterboard. Sometimes they would play like puppies, two or three of them, throwing a nail or a crumbled piece of brick across the roof space and wrestling for it. So the game went on, in the dust and rubble and the warm, dark shadows. Where there was a crack in the board or a gap around a light fitting, Harry could actually see the quivering pink snouts, sniffing the air of his bedroom. Showers of dust cascaded through. Then, exasperated and frightened, he would stand on his bed and hammer his fists on the ceiling, listening with satisfaction as the rats fled to the roofspace elsewhere in the terrace.