The Blood of Angels

by Stephen Gregory

  ‘And close the curtains, Daddy!’ she said. ‘Let’s just have the two of us and the candles, and have the curtains shut! Our little secret place, for Zoë and her daddy!’

  In this way, on a sweltering afternoon in July, the man and the child were shut inside the candlelit cabin. Zoë moved from flame to flame, cupping her hands around them to feel the heat, as though to tap as much of the energy as she could. The candles cast an orange glow on her white face. She looked exhausted.

  ‘I think you ought to be in bed, Zoë my love,’ Harry said after a while. ‘I know it’s a shame, on your birthday, but you must have picked up a bug or something in school. What do you think?’

  She consented to this, too wasted to object. As Harry undressed her, helped her into her pyjamas and tucked her under the blankets of her own bed, he felt the chill in her. It filled the cabin. He was shivering too. She lay with the sheet right up to her chin: that ineradicable smile, that unblinking stare.

  ‘Poor Zoë,’ he whispered to her. ‘Poor poorly Zoë, poorly on her birthday. Sleep a bit, my little love.’

  She nodded. He didn’t know it would be the last time he’d ever see her awake.

  Yes, the cabin was cold. Harry left the curtains closed and the birthday candles lit, and he decided to light the fire in the stove; for Zoë had seemed so sickly, her breath had smelled so stale, like a draft from a damp cellar. He used the brightly coloured wrapping paper from her present, crushing it into a ball inside a handful of twigs, and the flames blossomed straight away. With the hatchet, he split some driftwood and fed it to the fire, and he sat on the bed with his face to the blaze. Even so, there was a cold in his back. The candles guttered in a breath of icy air. He cuddled himself closer to the stove.

  Reaching for the book he’d bought for Zoë, he leafed through its pimpled pages; it was a mystery to him, quite meaningless, just as the smooth pages of his own books would be meaningless to her. He put it on the shelf, slipping it among the others, where the child might find it in the morning and be pleased that it had a place among her daddy’s poetry books. To make a space for it, he took out another book. The pages fell open, yellowed, wrinkled, where something wet had been.

  So he reread the poem by Robert Frost about the star-splitter, in front of the stove where the cello had gone, beneath the telescope for which the cello had been destroyed. Nine years before, when he’d found the fragile limbs of the brittlestar impressed upon the poem, he’d thought he’d read it carefully and understood the message. But he’d got the gist, that was all. He’d made the begin­ner’s mistake, which applied to poetry as much as it applied to the stars, which he’d explained to Lizzie so long ago: the trick was to look askew, ‘to look at a star by glances, to view it in a side-long way’. Dazzled by the narrative, the simply told tale of a man who’d perpetrated an insurance fraud in order to buy himself a telescope, Harry had missed the nub of the poem . . .

  ‘We’ve looked and we’ve looked, but after all where are we? Do we know any better where we are and how it stands, how different from the way it ever stood?’

  Over and over, aloud and silently, Harry read these lines, while Zoë was asleep, oblivious of the words. The telescope had taught him nothing: it had sent him on a wild-goose chase around the heavens, culminating in nothing more imaginative than the sea­shell charts he’d stuck on the walls of the cabin. . .

  ‘We’ve looked and we’ve looked, but after all where are we?’

  He repeated this question time and time again. And the answer? He was stuck. Harry Clewe was stuck, like the winkles on the wall, as much inclined to soaring into space as a barnacle was inclined to swimming.

  ‘Do we know any better where we are?’

  No, he didn’t. Although he had Zoë, in whose blindness was the gift of a limitless vision.

  The telescope towered above him. The fire roared inside the stove. He held the book open a little longer, until, slipping deeply into desolation and bafflement, he leaned forward and slung it into the flames. The book was consumed in seconds. And then he was still more downcast, cursing himself for the pointlessness of the gesture. He shuddered with cold, got up and crossed the cabin, where he stood and looked at the child.

  More horror, more madness. . . . In the candlelight, it was a face he’d seen before, a cold, white, puffy, vacant face: the dead Lizzie, laid out in a hospital morgue, with the sheets up to her chin so that the terrible damage to her throat shouldn’t be seen. The dead Lizzie, who’d swung from the beam with the wire cutting deep, and the sleeping Zoë, who’d burned so hot and was now cooling. . . . Their faces were the same.

  Teetering on the brink of nightmare, he flung himself onto his bed and pressed his wet eyes into the pillow. But no escape. He heard the fire fizzing, and it was the fizzing he’d heard nine years ago, on this day, each time Lizzie’s dangling, blood-wet legs had touched the stove. The smell of the burnt book was a nauseating memory of what he’d seen. He pushed his face harder into the pillow.

  So, in the twilight of that evening, he didn’t hear the arrival of a car on the gravel track by the sea wall; he didn’t see the arcing of headlamps through the curtains of the cabin. He was unaware of footsteps on deck. He didn’t realise that someone had come down the steps and was standing in front of the stove. When he felt the touch of a hand on his hair, he mumbled without looking up, ‘You should be in bed, Zoë. I’m all right. Get back into bed now, Zoë . . .’

  When the hand remained, he emerged from the pillow and saw Helen.

  The woman touched his cheeks and his lips. Without speaking, she slipped off her jacket and sat on the edge of the bed. Her per­fume filled the cabin; she smelled of drink, too. When she leaned down to him, her mouth was open and hot and he felt his bones dissolve with the softness and weight of her body on him. He wanted to push his face into her blouse, where the perfume was so strong it made his head swim, where he could feel the deep womanly warmth of her in contrast to the unnatural chill of the boat. She smothered the firelight with the swinging of her sleek, dark hair . . . and this was all he wanted, to stop himself from remem­bering, from thinking, from shivering. . . .

  ‘Thought I’d come and see you, Harry,’ she whispered. ‘I was all on my own in that big, empty house. I got a bit pissed, to tell the truth.’

  She made him look at her, lifting his face up from where he was burying it into her breast. ‘Hey, what’s the matter, Harry Clewe?’ she said. ‘You crying or something?’

  ‘Nothing!’ he replied. ‘Nothing!’ His throat ached with tears. ‘But I’m so glad you’ve come, Helen! You’ve no idea how glad I am!’ She rocked him gently, as though he were a child who’d had a dreadful nightmare, and he sobbed uncontrollably, stifling the noise against her. She held him very close.

  ‘Glad I’ve come?’ she said, as Harry became calm again. ‘You haven’t seen me for months and then you burst into tears the moment I step into the room! Funny sort of glad, that is! Well, maybe you can show me how glad you are . . . soon.’

  She slid off the bed and was back again in a swift, rustling movement, with a bottle she’d picked up from under her jacket.

  ‘Let’s get you a drink first of all,’ she said. ‘Looks as though you need one. Come on, get some of this down you!’

  She promptly upended a bottle of gin in the direction of his mouth. He’d swallowed several gulps before he realised what it was, while a great deal more slopped over his face and into his clothes. As he choked it back, Helen was glancing about the cabin, at the candles and the cake.

  ‘Looks as though I’ve missed a party,’ she said. ‘What was the occasion? Zoë’s birthday or something?’

  She slapped her hand over her mouth, too late to retract her words. ‘Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit . . .’ she mumbled for a moment, and then she leaned down to Harry and kissed him very softly on his eyelids and his cheeks, over and over and over again, as though she could make amends by sipping away his tears.

  ‘I’m sorry!’ she whispered, kissing
him until his eyes were dry again. Squirming with embarrassment, she hid her face from him. ‘Forgive me, Harry! Zoë’s birthday! When your wife died! Oh God, what an awful anniversary for you!’

  She sat up and slid away from him, to the edge of the bed. ‘Well, now that I’ve blundered in like a clumsy great cow,’ she said, ‘do you want me to blunder out again? Do you want me to clear off and leave you to it?’

  Harry smiled at her. The heat of the gin and the warmth of the woman had revived him wonderfully. On impulse, he said, ‘She wasn’t my wife, Helen. Lizzie wasn’t my wife. We weren’t – ’

  ‘Whatever she was, I’m sorry,’ the woman said, leaning over to silence him with her fingers on his lips. ‘I wouldn’t have come if I’d known what day it was and how wretched you must be feeling. It’s none of my business whether you and Lizzie were married or not. I’d assumed you were, like everyone else must have done. I suppose that’s why Lizzie took your surname. Anyway, whatever the reason for her doing that, you loved her, she loved you, and you’ve got Zoë to show for it. . . . Now, tell me straight, Harry. Do you want me to stay, or shall I clear off and leave you alone?’

  Driven to confide in her, to bring this hot, fragrant woman even closer to him, he blurted, ‘But Lizzie didn’t take my surname, Helen! That was her name! Her real name was Lizzie Clewe! She was – ’

  To stop him from talking, Helen upended the bottle again, more accurately this time. Harry swallowed his words with a mouth­ful of gin. Indescribably grateful, he succumbed to it and to her.

  The gin and the perfume went straight to his head. Indeed, they flooded his body with a sudden heat. Amid gusts of muffled giggling, the bottle held up by one for the other to drink, while they stifled their laughter by holding their faces against one another’s clothing, Harry and Helen tumbled more vigorously on the bed. They drank, they giggled, they whispered, they fumbled at buttons and belts. The smothering of laughter made them mad. The candlelight, the firelight, the giddying perfume, the splashing of gin, the excitement of trying not to waken Zoë . . . it made their lust more wonderfully furtive. Soon, most of their clothes were on the floor. Noisier and noisier, they were past caring, too engrossed to notice that Zoë had got out of bed. Until, as Harry appraised the smoothness of Helen’s naked shoulders, he saw the child’s stealthy movement in the corner of the cabin.

  ‘Helen! Sssh!’ he said sharply. ‘Hang on a moment! It’s Zoë!’

  The woman rolled off him. Out of breath, they lay and watched as the child emerged from behind her curtain and moved from wall to wall, her fingers on the blobs of glue. Harry sighed with relief.

  ‘Good,’ he said. ‘She’s asleep. She’s sleepwalking. She does it quite a lot.’ He wriggled away from the woman and stood up. ‘She’s miles away. I’ll put her back to bed.’

  The child froze in the middle of the cabin. She was sniffing like a rat, her nostrils twitching. With some difficulty, Harry manoeuvred her, so small and soft in her cotton pyjamas, through the curtain and onto her bed. Sitting her down, he swung her legs up and covered her with a blanket before she could resist. She relaxed and lay still, exhaling noisily, although she wrinkled her nose and frowned before she was settled again. And she was Lizzie, the dead-cold Lizzie, as soon as Harry pulled the sheet to her chin. . . . He was shivering when he rejoined Helen.

  ‘What the hell was she doing?’ the woman asked him. ‘And what the hell have you done to this place, with all this gloomy paint and bits of stuff stuck on the walls?’

  Before he could answer, she pulled him close and shook her head so hard that her hair flicked on his face.

  ‘No, don’t tell me, Harry Clewe!’ she said. ‘Some crazy scheme or other, I suppose! More importantly, what were we doing? Let’s get out of all these things . . .’

  They threw away the rest of their clothes. She sat astride him, spread all her body on his and dangled her breasts on his face, dancing her nipples on his mouth and his eyelids. She lowered her lips onto his lips, touched his tongue with hers. Then, stretching to the floor beside the bed, she felt for her handbag and took out a tube of lotion. She squeezed it onto the palm of his left hand and massaged it into his fingers, his palm, his knuckles, until his entire hand and wrist were lubricated.

  ‘Will you, Harry?’ she whispered. ‘Like you used to?’

  So she rolled off him and lay back, with her head on the pillow. Harry leaned over her. Gently at first, pushing harder and harder, he eased his hand inside her. After the initial penetration of the fingers, there was a resistance until he timed his pushes to the woman’s breathing, and he slid into her. She closed tightly on his wrist. He watched her face, how she grimaced, how her eyes squeezed shut, how her mouth worked fast and silently. He bunched his fist inside her. That was all he had to do. He waited. It excited him enormously, the clench of her muscles, so hot and strong and gripped, as though she must crush his hand. With the flames of the fire on his back and buttocks, he leaned over her and waited for the beginning of the contraction which would start a sudden, slippery expulsion.

  At the same time, the woman gave voice. A moan broke from her lips, became a rhythmic grunting. Her breasts and her belly were beaded with sweat, and, as Harry put down his tongue to taste her, her cries grew louder and louder. ‘Oh yes yes yes. . . . Oh yes oh yes oh yes . . . !’ At last, she forced out his hand with a spasm which arched her body from the bed.

  For a moment, the man and the woman were blinded by the emotion of that climax. They shuddered together. His hand lay on the inside of her thigh, steaming and sticky and quite newborn. But only for a moment, as Helen’s ecstatic ‘Yes yes yes!’ was echoed by a yell from the other corner of the Ozymandias.

  ‘No no no! No!’

  Zoë sprang across the cabin. She lunged with all her weight and butted her father in the back. As Helen leaped up, her breasts wet and hot on Harry’s face, the child rammed her into the wall on the further side of the bed. Harry tumbled onto the floor. Zoë flew at the woman, who was winded by orgasm and stunned by the unexpectedness of the attack. There was a bedlam of shrieking and spitting.

  Catlike, Zoë raked with her claws, tearing at Helen’s eyes and hair. The child screamed a torrent of guttural gibberish, fragments of ugly words and harsh noises. Helen shouted, as she parried the blows and lashed out with her hands and feet, ‘Get her off me, Harry, for Christ’s sake! What’s the matter with her? She’s crazy! Get her off me!’

  But, befuddled by drink and the soporific aftermath of Helen’s climax, Harry watched as though it were a dream he was having, a dream of flamelight and flailing limbs. He stood away from it, away from the bed, and he could feel the warmth of the stove on his legs. It was an extraordinary spectacle. In the flickering of nine birthday-cake candles, there was a fight going on, on his bed: a little girl in pink pyjamas was biting and punching at the full, white, shining body of a naked woman . . . the woman was yelp­ing, welted with blood which smeared on the child’s pyjamas . . . a tiny, silvery head was butting and banging into the woman’s face . . . the woman was yelling, slick with sweat; the child was spitting and snarling. . . .

  To Harry, it seemed like an hour, a long, long dream he was having, but it must have been seconds before Helen was on top of Zoë, straddling her in the same way she’d been straddling the man a few moments before. She heaved, streaked with blood. Her breasts lifted and shuddered over the pinioned girl. Woman and child remained in a panting silence, the conflict halted.

  Zoë lay still, unable to move. She stared up at Helen. She laughed without making a sound.

  ‘Christ! Is she crazy or something?’ Helen spluttered. She turned to Harry. ‘Well, she’s your fucking daughter, for Christ’s sake! What are you going to do with her? Or am I going to sit like this for the rest of the night?’

  The moment she eased her grip on the child, Zoë writhed a claw in the direction of the woman’s face. Helen recoiled from it and then bore down with all her weight.

  ‘See?’ she shouted. ‘She’s
poison! No wonder Lizzie took one look at what she’d got and then strung herself up! Who’d want a fucking monster like this one! Don’t just stand there, Harry! Come and help me!’

  Another commotion broke out. As Helen released her grip so that Harry could take over, Zoë landed a blow on the side of the woman’s head, drawing blood from a long scratch, tearing out a fistful of dark hair. The three of them, man and woman and child, wrestled across the cabin. Helen, sobbing with anger, returned a slap on Zoë’s cheek, so that at last Harry was roused from his dreamy appraisal of the scene and was himself enflamed with anger.

  ‘You don’t bloody hit her!’ he bellowed at Helen, dragging her and his daughter in the vague direction of Zoë’s bed. The child screamed high and loud and stared wildly around her, her face marked red with the slap. She lashed and kicked indiscriminately. Helen wept, her body scored with scratches, her eyes smudged with tears. Harry cursed the child, who was quite hysterical, and he cursed the woman as well. In this way, two naked, sweaty adults manoeuvred a screeching, writhing, blind nine-year-old girl from one corner of the cabin to another.

  ‘Now what?’ the woman shouted. ‘Now what, for fuck’s sake?’

  Having no idea what else to do, Harry blurted the first thing that came to him. ‘The telescope! Let’s get her to the telescope! I’ll hold her! Get your tights, Helen! Quickly now! Get them!’

  Helen groped on the floor, while Harry restrained the child. Zoë’s strength was phenomenal. The energy blazed inside her, although her skin was so cold. Unravelling the tights which he’d so tenderly peeled from the woman a few minutes before, Harry bound them as hard as he could around the little girl’s wrists, knotting her to the mounting of the telescope. It was a nightmare. The man and the woman were drunk, dazed by candlelight and orgasm. Zoë was insane. They secured her to the telescope and stood back, panting.