The Blood of Angels

by Stephen Gregory

  He’d picked up the knife because the gleam of the windsurfer’s black rubber suit had reminded him of an unusual find he’d made on the fields that morning: a porpoise, the biggest and most beauti­ful of all the dead things washed onto his land since the flood tides had begun. He’d flensed it with the butchering knife, so that the dogs could gorge on the rich, lean meat, and he’d cut a huge steak for himself to fry on the griddle. The gulls and the crows would have the rest of the carcase.

  Now he sucked at the blood which welled on the ball of his thumb. The flex of the windsurfer’s suit had reminded him of the way in which the knife had sliced cleanly through the porpoise, the way that the flesh fell away from the blade. Thinking of this, with his thumb in his mouth, Harry got up and went to the window. But the purple sail had gone.

  Chapter Eight

  Harry was still in bed the next time the beachcomber came to the house.

  Waking in the darkness of early morning, he’d heard the sea downstairs and the wind moaning at his window. He’d peered from under his blankets to see nothing but the tiniest golden spark in the ashes of the fireplace. He’d turned over, huddled more deeply under the covers, and slept again until first light at eight o’clock. It was the only way he could tell that midwinter was close, by the lateness of the morning light and the earliness of dusk: the shortest, dreariest days of the year.

  At dawn, he got out of bed for a few minutes, to see from his window that the tide was ebbing from his fields, and he trod down the stairs to piss into the sea in the hallway. Yes, the tide was going out, leaving a scum of foam as high as the seventh step; at the same time, as though drawn by the same forces of gravity which were draining the house, a hundred starlings whirled out of the living room, beat around the hall and funnelled like a swarm of angry bees out of the front door. The water was falling fast. It eddied around the piano and swirled into the yard. In another hour, where the sea had been six feet deep in all the downstairs rooms, there would be tidal pools, boulders and weed and banks of gravel. Harry pissed into the water and then he went painfully up the stairs again, where he lay in bed and watched the sky lightening at his window.

  The dogs told him that someone was coming. They’d left their rug in front of the cold grate, padded downstairs and outside to scavenge whatever the sea had dropped around the house. When he heard them barking, Harry detected the note of menace in their voices which they used whenever trespassers were on his property; but then the note softened. Without getting out of bed and looking from the window, he knew that the visitor must be someone the dogs recognised and had learned to accept. It could only be the beachcomber . . . Christine, she’d said her name was.

  He lay still, heard the dogs fall silent, heard footsteps in the shingle of the yard and then the splash of boots in the hallway. Swearing, quite unaccustomed to anyone coming into the house, especially while he was still in bed, he struggled from under the covers. He didn’t need to dress: he kept all his clothes on at night. He simply stepped into his shoes and stomped from his room onto the landing.

  ‘Don’t just bloody walk in!’ he bellowed.

  Through bleary, sleep-reddened eyes, he could see the figure in boots and jeans and khaki jacket at the foot of the stairs.

  ‘Just because the door’s gone and the windows have gone and the bloody sea comes in and out without bloody asking,’ he roared, ‘it doesn’t mean that you or anyone else can just wander in and out as you bloody well please! Does it? Knock next time! Knock on the bloody piano and wait for me to invite you in!’

  He spun round and back into his room. From there, throwing himself down in his armchair and dragging a blanket from the bed to wrap around his legs, he called out, ‘Well? What are you waiting for? Are you coming upstairs or not?’

  It seemed to take a long time for his visitor to arrive at the landing and turn into the bedroom. Harry could hear splashing in the hallway, going in and out of the living room and the drawing room and the dining room . . . a good deal of splashing, as though the beachcomber were nosing around downstairs, wading from room to room with the dogs in tow. He drew an enormous breath and shouted again, ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing down there? Get yourself up here or bugger off and don’t come back! You’re on my property!’

  Suddenly the figure appeared at the doorway. Without saying anything, before Harry could say anything, Christy came into the bedroom and held out a brown paper parcel. The boy’s cheeks were flushed, his eyes were gleaming, his breath was short, his face gleamed with excitement. He’d seen writhing, silvery creatures in the cavernous downstairs rooms: in the flooded, boulder-strewn caverns where the sea had been spouting and foaming and had left all kinds of wonders behind . . .

  ‘Fish!’ he blurted, so thrilled at what he’d seen that he forgot the apology he was going to make for walking uninvited into the house . . . so thrilled that he thrust the parcel into Harry’s hands and spun back onto the landing to stare down at the pools at the foot of the stairs. ‘Fish!’ he said again, as he whirled into the bedroom. ‘There’s fish, Mr Clewe! Great big ones! In all the rooms! Come and have a look, Mr Clewe! Come on!’

  Without thinking, without fear, the boy seized Harry by the hand. He tugged him from the chair so that the blanket fell to the floor, stood him up, pointed him at the bedroom door and dragged him onto the landing. ‘Look, Mr Clewe! Look!’

  Harry was speechless: not as much at the sight of a shoal of fish surging this way and that in the diminishing pool in the hallway – although that was impressive enough in itself – as at the touch of the warm, young hands on his hand. He hadn’t touched another human being for years. No one, no human being, had touched him in all that time. And now, this little blonde beachcomber, whom he’d met as a trespasser on his land just a fortnight before, was squeezing his hand very tightly, leaning against him, hopping from foot to foot beside him. He felt the heat and strength in the slim, young fingers. He felt the warm breath on his face. He felt such joy as he’d never felt for years and years and years.

  ‘Look at them, Mr Clewe!’ the boy cried. ‘I’ve never seen them as big as that before, except in a fish shop! Look at them dashing about!’

  The fish, stranded in the house as the tide went out, wriggled and flapped in the shrinking pools. They were bass, fine, fat bass, some of them over two feet long. They surged about the hallway, a dozen or twenty of them, struggling on the shingle where the water was so shallow that they bellied and writhed like great, mus­cu­lar snakes. They lay on their metallic, scaly sides, heaving and gaping and staring, mustering the force to slither from the sandbanks and into the water again, and then they surged in a seething, silvery shoal across the hallway until they banged their snouts on the piano and turned back into the house.

  A grand sight, not often seen in the living rooms of country houses. Hand in hand, the man and the boy stood on the landing and gazed down at the thrashing commotion. They remained like this for a long minute, until Christy prised his fingers from the man’s grip and, glancing quickly upwards, saw that Mr Clewe wasn’t staring at the fish but straight into his own face. There was a strange smile on the man’s mouth and a curious twinkle in his eyes.

  ‘Another fine present you’ve brought me!’ Harry whispered. ‘What are you? Some kind of an angel? Or a mermaid perhaps, washed ashore with the big tides? Sausages one day, and gleaming, fat fish another!’ Then he boomed with laughter. ‘Bass! Ever eaten bass? Well, they’re here for the taking! And what else did you bring?’

  Quickly, urgently, because he could hear the fish flapping down­stairs as the tide drained out of the house, he inspected the con­tents of the parcel his visitor had given him in the bedroom.

  ‘Good girl, good girl!’ he said, examining the torch batteries. ‘Yes, these are the ones! And bread and cheese as well!’ He pressed the food to his face, inhaling noisily with his eyes closed. ‘Well done!’ he whispered. ‘You can come as often as you like if you keep on bringing wonderful gifts like these! Well? What
are we waiting for?’

  The boy drew a deep breath, to shout his name as clearly as he could, to put the man right. Too late again . . . another moment passed. Tossing the parcel onto the rumpled bed, Harry spun out of the room and onto the landing. He stomped down the stairs, chuck­ling with glee, bellowing, ‘Come on! Come on!’ and the boy was left behind in the bedroom, opening and closing his mouth like the fish stranded in the hallway. When Christy turned to follow him, Harry was already at the foot of the stairs, kicking off his shoes and socks, rolling up his trouser legs, splashing into the shallow water, glancing up at the landing with such a gargoyle grin on his face that the boy forgot what he’d meant to say, grinned back and skipped down the stairs as well.

  Side by side, banging and barging together, the man and the boy waded after the fish. They drove the shoal this way and that by beating the water with their hands and churning it with their feet. They laughed, the crusty, arthritic widower and the institutionalised orphan, the first time for a long time. Harry’s was a hooting laugh which started in his belly and rattled hoarsely in his throat before bursting out; the boy’s was tinkling and high-pitched. It was glorious sport. Treading after the gleaming fish, they flung water at one another’s faces. They whooped, as though they were herding bullocks, and the bass shimmied to avoid capture. From time to time, the man or the boy would grasp a fish and, roaring triumphantly, hold it aloft in a spray of sea water and slime-slippery scales; but the fish, with an arching thrust of its muscular body, would wriggle free and fall into the pool again.

  At last a fish was taken. Separated from the rest of the shoal, beached on a bank of shingle, the biggest of the bass lay panting, heaving, gaping a mucous mouth, staring a jet-black eye. The man and the boy crouched in the water beside it. Careless of the cold and wet because they’d so thoroughly splashed one another already, they knelt in silence and steadied their own breathing after the mad exertion of the chase. The fish flexed and flapped. Drowning, dying, it opened and closed its jutting lower jaw.

  So that the boy blurted, once he had the breath to speak, ‘Do something, Mr Clewe! Bash it with your hook or something! Or shall I put it back in the water?’

  Harry snorted. ‘Don’t be daft! We didn’t go to all this trouble to catch it just so that we can put it back again. You stay there and make sure it doesn’t flop away.’

  Harry heaved himself upright, groaning at the pain in his hips, and picked his way carefully, barefooted, across the hallway into the adjacent living room. The boy watched him. He saw the man go to the mantelpiece and lift down a big, black, strangely coiled stone, turn round and tread gingerly back again.

  ‘Ammonite,’ Harry said, as he knelt beside the fish. ‘A fossil. Very useful for this kind of thing. In fact, the only thing it’s ever been bloody useful for. Here, hold the fish still!’

  Christy gripped with both his hands so that the bass was pressed onto the shingle. Only its tail twitched. Harry knocked it on the head, a single blow which made a crunching sound and left a stove-in, oozing bruise where the eye had been.

  The fish didn’t move any more. There was another silence as the man and the boy knelt in the pool.

  ‘A shame to waste the rest,’ Harry said at last, looking around at the other fish in the hallway. ‘They’ll all die when the tide goes out of the house. The water won’t be deep enough for them, and then they’ll flap and flap and the dogs will mess with them and there’ll be an almighty bloody stink with what’s left behind. Here’s an idea! While I go and light the fire and get this beauty ready for frying, this is what I want you to do . . .’

  Christy did as he was told, once the man had hooked the dead fish by the gills and carried it upstairs. He rinsed the ammonite and lugged it into the living room, where he heaved it up onto the mantelpiece. He paused for a moment to look at the photograph of a woman in a summer dress, who was smiling at the camera and holding the same black, spiralled rock in her hands . . . and then, as the man had told him to do, he used the shovel which was leaning by the fireplace to clear away the shingle and sand in the middle of the flooded room until he could see the ring and bolt of a trap door in the shallow water. It took all his strength to heave the trap door open. He stood back as a good deal of water poured into the hole with a loud sucking noise as though a big bath were being emptied, and then he stepped forward again and peered down.

  The water looked very deep and very cold. It was black. It lapped and glistened as though it were breathing, a gigantic eel coiled beneath the floorboards or a whiskery catfish with a huge, gaping mouth. He leaned closer. A blast of icy air came up from the water and slapped him in the face, and he thought he could see some pale and shapeless thing come floating from the deepest, darkest place and bobbing towards the surface . . .

  The boy fell backwards and sat in the water. He shuddered with the cold from the flooded cellar and the cold in his wet clothes. His neck prickled. Eager to do what the man had said, so that he could slam the trap door and get upstairs to the fire as quickly as possible, Christy went into the hallway again, found the shoal of bass struggling in a shrinking pool, and he stampeded the fish back into the living room. It was easy, then, to flop them one by one into the cellar, where they disappeared in the black water with a powerful flick of a tail. When they’d all gone, he lifted up the trap door and let it fall shut with a great splash. He bolted it firmly. He hadn’t liked what he’d seen down there.

  Before he was halfway up the stairs, the sound of crackling wood and a sizzling pan came to him . . . and the smell of frying fish. The dogs must have heard and smelled the same things, because Gog and Magog sprang into the hall from outside, where they’d been gnawing at the bones of the porpoise, and overtook the boy before he reached the landing.

  Still barefooted, with his trouser legs rolled up to his knees, Harry was kneeling in front of the fire. The fish head and tail and its tumbled innards lay on a piece of newspaper beside him. There was a blaze of driftwood, burning blue because of the salt, and Harry had put the frying pan on top of the griddle, where the flames could reach up and lick the sooted bottom. Cut into four fillets, the fish was sizzling in the dark, rich oil left in the pan from the porpoise steak. It smelled delicious. The room was wonderfully warm. The dogs flopped by the bed, claiming the blanket that the man had dropped when the boy had tugged him to the landing.

  ‘Come to the fire,’ Harry said over his shoulder. ‘We both got bloody wet, fooling around like that. Cut some of the bread. Here, use this knife. Be careful, it’s very sharp.’

  He handed Christy the butchering knife from the mantelpiece. The boy wiped the fish scales from it, drawing the blade across his thigh, and sliced the bread with it.

  Soon the fish was ready. The man and the boy knelt on either side of the fire and ate in reverent silence. Words were unnecessary to acknowledge the flavour of freshly caught bass fried in whale oil. Harry glanced at the boy and grunted. Christy looked at the man and nodded. The dogs panted, without daring to beg for a taste, although the smell was so good and so strong; years ago, they’d been taught not to scrounge, learning from the number of times they’d had their heads cracked together. Now, they sighed very loudly and eyed the pan on the griddle. Harry and the boy ate all the fish without speaking a word; then, wedges of bread dipped in the sweetly combined juices of porpoise and bass.

  A fine feast. When it was finished, Gog and Magog were allowed the head and tail and the pungent entrails. Only a scrap of the fish remained: the scales, like sequins, on Christy’s jeans.

  ‘What are you doing out here this morning?’ Harry asked, break­ing the silence, wiping his mouth with the palm of his hand. ‘Why aren’t you at school? I was still in bed when you arrived.’

  ‘It’s Sunday, Mr Clewe,’ the boy replied. ‘We don’t have school. We can have permission from Mrs Bottomley to come out all day if we want to. I pinched the torch batteries from her room and the bread and cheese from the kitchens and came down here because I could see from the hillside
that the tide was going out.’

  ‘Makes no difference to me what day it is,’ Harry said. ‘I can tell it’s December by the shortness of the daylight, that’s all. Other­wise I’ve lost track of time completely. The batteries in my radio went dead about the same time the torch batteries did. I used to listen to the radio quite a lot, to get the news about the floods and so on. What’s the date, anyway?’

  Christmas was three weeks away, the boy told him. He knelt so close to the fire that steam rose from his wet jeans. When he shook out his long blonde hair, he saw that Mr Clewe was watch­ing and holding his breath at the same time. This made the boy uncomfortable. He knew from the previous visit that the man’s patience was short, that his hospitality in the storm-wrecked house diminished once his appetite for food was satisfied. So, to keep the man sweet and to avoid the looks which lingered on his hair and his mouth and the fish scales on his thigh, Christy got up with the plates and moved to the door.

  ‘Shall I rinse these, Mr Clewe?’ he asked. ‘Are the taps still work­ing in the bathroom?’ And he went onto the landing, as Harry nodded and turned his fire-reddened face to the flames.

  Intrigued by the size and state of the downstairs room, the boy was eager to see what wonders he might find upstairs. He’d decided he would give up waiting for an opportunity to tell the man that his name was Christy and not Christine. What did it matter? What difference did it make if the cantankerous old fool was so hard of hearing and so short-sighted that he’d taken him for a girl? The visits to the dilapidated house would be even more exciting. The misunderstanding might add the spice of danger. . . .