The Blood of Angels

by Stephen Gregory

  ‘I know they don’t really look like or feel like the things they’re named after,’ he told her, pretending to be cross, scuffling with her in mock exasperation. ‘They’re ancient names. They’re characters from legends, old stories that people used to tell one another hundreds of years ago. We’ve got to call them something, Zoë, so that we can learn to recognise them. So yes, a bear! Yes, a lion! Try again, and let your imagination go free! After all, you found Orion’s willy pretty quickly, didn’t you? But you can’t go renaming the whole sky – not with that sort of name, anyway.’

  ‘Can’t I?’ she said, with an expression of such wisdom on her face that he could only shrug and look away.

  Another wall was completed in August. She ridiculed Hercules, who seemed to be flailing with panic at the proximity of the Serpent. ‘Not much of a hero!’ she sniffed, feeling the shells, her eyes tight shut. ‘He’s terrified!’

  ‘And down a bit, Zoë, down to the Crown,’ Harry whispered. ‘How lovely that is!’

  They came to Boötes, supposedly the Bear Driver. ‘Well, I can just about make you out,’ she muttered to the wall. ‘But I’m afraid your bear’s gone missing. I couldn’t find it anywhere when me and Daddy were looking for it on the other wall. Just a few bones, that’s all. . . .’

  As she knelt on the floor, she could feel the head of the Scorpion emerging; and she humoured her father by fleeing in a pretence of terror, cuddling to him on the easy chair, where he reassured her that the sting in the tail was safely out of sight below the horizon, buried by the distant dunes.

  Through November, the final map was built: the flattened W of Cassiopeia, in which the demon Algol lurked, and close by, the spiral nebula of Andromeda. To Zoë, this extragalactic system, more than two million light years from the Ozymandias, was a dusting of the tiniest periwinkles, as fine as sand on her fingertips. She could touch it. The Swan beat across the heavens, its long neck outstretched, exciting her to an agitation of hopping and clapping which wasn’t entirely devoid of sarcasm: for this was a creature on her shell maps that she could truly identify.

  ‘Just like the swans on the estuary, Daddy!’ she cried, imitating their flight by thrusting forward her head and holding out her arms. ‘Great big wings making that whistling noise with every flap, and then landing on the water with a whoosh! That’s a good one, Daddy! No need to think of another name for that one!’

  Saying this, she fell suddenly quiet, dropping her vigorous and noisy beating, and she returned to the wall.

  ‘Go on, Daddy,’ she said. She knew that her father was watching her instead of looking through the telescope. ‘Where shall we go next?’ she asked him. ‘This way?’ She fingered the Eagle and flashed him a broad smile. ‘I suppose it’s a bit like an eagle,’ she conceded, ‘if it’s gliding with its wings wide open. Yes, Daddy, let’s call this one the Eagle, shall we?’

  Harry blinked at her magnanimity, her empty, invincible stare. ‘Yes, let’s,’ he said.

  And back into Taurus, towards the Pleiades, which signified that the year had changed, that the sky had rolled around them and was once more stretched vast and silent above the Ozymandias, just as it had been when the first shell map was fixed into place. . . .

  The whole cabin was painted blue-black, from floor to ceiling, and was studded with seashells. That year of star-gazing had quickly passed. There’d been no visitors; no Frank, no Dewi, no Helen. Zoë and Tycho presided. The night skies were captured, brought inside, painted and glued on the walls. The room was dark, the shadows relieved only by an encrusting of shells: winkles of different colours and sizes and shapes, more lustrous as the days and nights slipped past because of the polishing of Zoë’s fingertips and the heat of her breath on them. She’d said that the Ozymandias was a spaceship. Harry watched her as she read and reread the maps, over and over again.

  Past her eighth birthday, the little girl, blind and brilliant, moved silently around the cabin, her lips working soundlessly as she continued her exploration. Sometimes, when she paused and she could tell that he was watching, she would turn to her father with that smile, with her fingers to the wall, holding her breath, whispering to herself. And he wondered what she was saying, what words she was mouthing. . . . She held a secret of her own, which she wasn’t prepared to divulge. He didn’t ask, lest she refuse to answer.

  Instead, afraid, he turned his face from hers and from the beady glare of the crow. What was her secret? What did the constellations mean to her, that she should retrace them so many times and smile like that?

  Chapter Sixteen

  The star maps continued to enthrall Harry too. He grew more expert with the telescope, with the result that more and more details were added to the walls of the cabin. Where there’d been empty space between the skeletons of the constellations, he put clusters and clusters of shells. For him, the heavens had become ever more fascinating; the cabin of the boat was the universe en­cap­sulated, its vastness brought within reach. For Zoë, the room was densely encrusted with winkles, like a rock pool, every corner and crevice studded with barnacles. She continued to explore.

  But Harry couldn’t judge how she really felt about their star­gazing. Was the Ozymandias just a kind of playhouse for her, which she enjoyed as any eight-year-old girl would do? Or had she really transformed it into her starship? Had she the imagination to let herself fly, through the agency of her sensitive fingertips? Harry couldn’t tell.

  However, enigmatic as she was, she didn’t disguise her misgivings. They’d laughed about the constellations, the discrepancy between the shapes and the names. As the walls filled up, she laughed less and frowned more.

  ‘What’s the problem, Zoë?’ he asked one evening, sensing her exasperation. ‘Is it getting too difficult, too cluttered?’ He squinted at the map. ‘It’s getting harder to make out the major star groups, isn’t it? I could take some of these off again, if you like, to keep it simple. What do you think?’

  ‘No, Daddy!’ she giggled. ‘It’s not too difficult. I can see more and more now!’

  She stood in front of the wall. With arms outstretched above her head and then down to her waist and knees, she ran her fingers fast and nimbly over the accumulated shells.

  ‘So many!’ she murmured to herself. ‘So many and so far away! Light years away, hundreds of light years away!’ She turned to him, very serious and grown-up. ‘But they’re really not like this at all, are they?’

  Harry knelt before her. His stomach fluttered as though it were gnawed hollow. ‘What do you mean, Zoë?’ he said softly.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘they might look like this in your telescope, but . . . I mean, do they really look like this? Do they, really?’

  ‘Yes, they do,’ he answered. ‘Just like this.’

  ‘Well. . . .’ She turned to the wall again, her teeth and tongue glistening. Her smile quivered. Her eyes beamed past him, to all the corners of the cabin.

  ‘Well, Daddy,’ she said at last, ‘they might look like this and feel like this. But isn’t it just a sort of joke you’ve made for me? Sticking them on the wall? All flat?’

  She took a huge breath, which sucked the breath from him and left him giddy.

  ‘That’s what I mean!’ she went on. ‘They’re really not like this at all!’ She gave a squeal of a giggle. ‘You told me that all these stars are whizzing around at top speed, at different speeds and in different directions. Didn’t you? And of course they’re all at differ­ent distances from us. Whizzing around all over the place! So, you’ve done it all wrong! Haven’t you?’

  She put up her hands to his face, stroking him as though he were a daft old dog.

  ‘Poor Daddy!’ she laughed. ‘You’ve stuck them all! You’ve stuck them all flat! They’re all stuck!’

  Harry managed to laugh too, gulping for air at the same time. Her fingers were burning his cheeks.

  ‘But how else could I have done it, Zoë?’ he said. ‘There isn’t another way, is there? This is how they look to us, from
here. We can’t fly up there, among them, and see them any differently, can we?’

  ‘Can’t we?’ she said.

  She drifted from him, creating a space between them which was suddenly cold. She spoke quietly to herself, excluding him.

  ‘So that’s why the names are all wrong!’ she was whispering. ‘Of course! The names make everything stuck! The stars, stuck on the wall with glue!’

  Her snorted laughter, full of contempt, made Harry shiver.

  ‘Maybe I can. . . .’ She was whispering too quietly for him to catch her words, moving more rapidly around the room, from wall to wall, caressing the clustered seashells with the flats of her palms. ‘Yes, maybe I could. . . .’

  She’d forgotten her father’s presence on board the Ozymandias. With a rattle of its claws, the jackdaw sprang from the telescope and onto her shoulder, where it nuzzled the home-made beak into her silvery hair. Harry was superfluous. Zoë and Tycho floated together from one constellation to another. She fingered the shells, muttering to herself and to the bird.

  From this time, the cold distance between Harry and his daughter grew bigger and bigger. Her claim to the stars would sap his strength. Perhaps soon, he would know how Lizzie had been drained, until she was broken and dead. Or perhaps he would be able to resist. He sensed that the end must come quite soon . . . that one of them, Zoë or himself, must be lost.

  Zoë was the blind astronomer. She could see more than he could. She could fly, while he was earthbound.

  A few nights later, he discovered her in flight and saw how high she flew.

  He woke from a deep and dreamless sleep. Accustomed to the rhythm of the boat on the tide, or its stillness on the mud, he was woken by the child’s footsteps. He sat up in bed. The cabin was very dark; the fire was almost out. Zoë was a dim figure who paced from one wall to another, where she paused and murmured, running her fingers over the clustered seashells.

  He lay back and watched her for a while, thinking that she’d got up to come to his bed for the rest of the night and had stopped briefly for the pleasure of touching the maps. However, something in the jerkiness of her movements, the stopping and starting, the feverish shaking of her head, made him uneasy.

  ‘Zoë,’ he called softly, careful not to frighten her. ‘Zoë, get to bed now. It’s the middle of the night.’

  She ignored him. It was only when he stood with her, when he put his hands on her shoulders and had no response to his whispers in her ear, that he realised she was still asleep.

  ‘Zoë? Can’t you hear me?’

  She moved from him to another wall. Following her, he knelt to catch something of her mutterings.

  With wide sweeps of her arms, encompassing two or three of the constellations whose shapes and names were so unshakably fixed in Harry’s mind, she ran her hands over the shells. He could hardly make out her words, because she whispered and hissed them; and, having only just woken up, he couldn’t yet grasp what she was doing. She stepped lightly sideways and let her hands stray across the wall. She gave a little chuckle, standing away from the maps and staring at them, her eyes moving from the floor and to the ceiling, open and unblinking. With a sigh, she stepped close again, so close that she could touch the shells not only with her fingers but by laying her cheek on them, leaning her body on the wall so that the shells pressed into her chest and stomach and thighs. She caressed them with her lips, licking for the tang of salt, muttering as though she were praying . . . she held herself harder and harder to the wall. She whispered as she eased herself along. The shells rasped and tugged at the material of her pyjamas. She stretched as high and as wide as she could until her hands were deep in the clustered constellations, until her face and body were more and more a part of the wall’s maps. She was flying, in her sleep. . . .

  Retreating from her, Harry sat on the bed. He remained there for an hour, for two hours, while Zoë continued her flight. She reinvented the sky from one end of the year to another, from one corner of the Ozymandias to another. She was among the stars, flying. Meteoric, she was the shooting star he’d seen on the night of her birth. She saw the stars from different angles and perspectives and from ever-changing distances. What had seemed to be a belt of stars, neatly equidistant from Earth, was exploded into the vast­ness of space. There was no belt. Of course there wasn’t. No bear. No swan. No scorpion. Of course not. She’d pierced that plane. She was through it and beyond it.

  Flying . . . so that the stars might also fly, their patterns shifting, the image altering. The sky was a kaleidoscope. The bones were there, but the skeletons shifted and blurred and could never be fixed, could never be named for more than a moment. Could never be stuck!

  Zoë careered from wall to wall. Harry sat and watched, dazed into torpor. Sometimes he caught a word, when the child glimpsed something so new and exciting that she stepped from the shells with a cry of surprise. What did she see? The berry bunches of ivy, the flock of redshank, the cuttlefish, the dogfish, the jellyfish . . . the ray with a whiplash tail. Snowdrops drooped in a bed of nettles, a blackbird shuffled the dead leaves. Harry caught the name of Tycho, the jackdaw whose ragged, excitable flutterings she’d glimpsed in deep space. Viper’s bugloss, sticky willie, no longer entwined in the hedgerow, had their places in the sky.

  Zoë reinvented the constellations, drawing her images from the seashore and the nearby lanes. The stars were no longer stuck. She flew, a blazing meteorite. Harry Clewe, who couldn’t fly, watched her and listened. Zoë was the blind astronomer; her blindness re­leased her imagination. His was clenched tightly shut.

  Eventually she grew tired. But there was one more discovery to be made. She leaned wearily on the wall. Her hands groped every­­where. She was searching for something and becoming exas­perated at not finding it . . . for it was a rare thing, seldom found except with luck and perseverance.

  ‘Where? Where? Oh, where?’ she was muttering, frowning, rearranging the infinity of shapes and permutations that came to her mind’s eye through the touch of her fingers and body and lips on the seashells. ‘Oh, where is it?’ Then she smiled. She whispered with a bubble of saliva on her mouth. ‘The brittlestar! Among all the other stars!’

  Exultant, rapt, her eyes ablaze, she turned and came padding past Harry, barefoot on the rugs and floorboards. There was blood on her pyjamas, constellations of blood, because she’d pressed her body so hard to the shells. There was blood on her mouth. She clambered into his bed, where she was accustomed to sleeping, and snuggled among the blankets. Asleep. Still asleep. As she’d been sleeping in her dream flight to the stars. . . .

  Harry moved aside. She hadn’t acknowledged him at all, although she would come to this warm place he’d made. He went to the stove, which he refuelled with wood. In the flamelight, as he felt the heat on the back of his legs and balanced himself to the lift of the swell, the cabin was extraordinary. All the walls were black, decorated with seashells of white and silver and the loveliest, palest blue. On every shelf or ledge, among his precious star books and poetry books, were more shells; feathers and bones; bottles of different colours and shapes; driftwood, gnarled and salted and cast up; seaweed, black and brown and green, hung from the beams. The telescope, a scaffold where the jackdaw perched and fidgeted, the claws like needles on the gleaming gunmetal. . . .

  An extraordinary place, the cabin of the Ozymandias! And out­side, the sea and the sky, a huge black night which rumbled with the thunder of a distant surf!

  Extraordinary . . . except that Harry Clewe was stuck. Stuck, like the shells on the wall. Was that as far as he could ever see? No wonder Zoë had snorted with contempt. He’d stuck the stars on the wall with glue! She’d asked him: do they really look like that? Do they really look like that in the telescope? And he’d said yes! Oh, Christ!

  Now he snorted with contempt for himself. He could spout a bit of poetry. He could play a bit of music. He could spot birds. He could poke into rock pools and stare at the stars. He could identify things, label them and file
them away in the museum of his mind, all dead and dry in a dusty darkness. That was all he could do. That was the accumulated expertise of Harry Clewe.

  The telescope mocked him. It told him nothing about the stars. While the crow unfolded its head from under one wing and glared at him, Harry found himself pacing the cabin. He riffled the pages of his poetry books, remembering the messages he thought he’d found there. He reached to the beams, where the wood was deeply scored. He stared around at his ultimate folly: the walls on which the stars were stuck with glue . . . the prison of his paralysed imagination.

  In dread of waking Zoë, lest she stare at him and smile and mock him more, Harry crawled under the blankets. He didn’t think he could tolerate her eyes on him.

  Chapter Seventeen

  From then on, Zoë flew nearly every night.

  It followed the same pattern. Harry would be woken by the girl’s soft, barefooted movements in the cabin; he would watch her effortless, ecstatic star flights; and, an hour or two hours later, she would brush smilingly past him, to occupy the warmest part of his bed.

  And he remembered, with a laugh so bitter that he could taste the bile in his throat, how he’d worried, long ago, about the effect that the presence of the telescope might have had on the blind child . . . that Zoë might have felt excluded, that Zoë might have felt disabled, disadvantaged in the shadow of the telescope. He’d thought of constructing a false map, to deny her access to the stars . . . and of course his maps were false, all of them. When he stared into the barrel of the sophisticated, handmade machine, he saw no more than a wall. It was all flat. There was no distance. So much for mystery. So much for wonder. Where was the wonder in a wall studded with seashells?

  Harry knew the answer to that question. The wonder and the mystery were in Zoë’s head.

  Nevertheless, she persisted with the charade of conventional star-gazing, as they’d done for weeks and months before her pro­gression to space flight. During the long evenings which had once been so comfortable, father and daughter in a cosy conspiracy, he endured her mockery. Because, in wakefulness, she reverted to the old scheme of things, as though to humour him. Sweetly childlike, the smiling child whose hair was gleaming and silver, who padded from chart to chart as softly as a kitten, who smelled of soap and shampoo and of white, clean skin, Zoë would urge him to the use of the telescope, reversing the roles so that it was she who led him from one constellation to another, naming them and their com­ponent stars: the old names, without a flicker of dissent.