The Blood of Angels

by Stephen Gregory

In a split second of startled awareness, Christy could smell the man before he heard him and saw him. The whiff of stale clothes wafted down the corridor and made the boy whirl around in a moment of gasping terror. Harry lurched onto the landing, dropping the blanket he’d been holding at his belly. He’d only been going to the bathroom; but when he saw the boy turning the door handle and pressing the door and then spinning, open-mouthed, wide-eyed, to face him, he flew into a terrible rage.

  It was a short and nasty scene, over in less than a minute. Harry moved faster than he’d moved for years, as though all the arthritis and cramps had fallen from him. Nimble as a bear, and just as fierce, he sprang the length of the corridor. Before Christy could duck away, he seized the boy by the hair, yanked his head backwards and forwards and banged his face hard on the locked door. With each word, he banged the boy’s face on the door.

  ‘My house! My doors! My rooms! Locked! Keeping . . . nosy . . . bitches . . . out!’

  He flung the boy to the floor. Hearing the noise, the dogs had lumbered out of the bedroom, away from the fire, and now they joined in the commotion with a volley of barks which boomed in the long corridor. As Christy crawled to the top of the stairs, as blood burst from his nose and his eyes stung with tears, Harry pursued him and kicked him with his slippered feet. One of the kicks landed so heavily that the boy tumbled from the landing and cartwheeled down the first few stairs before arresting his fall with an instinctive grab at the banisters.

  ‘A guest in my house!’ Harry bellowed. ‘Nosing around! Trying the doors! Peeping through keyholes! There are things in this house you don’t want to know about! For your own good! Now bugger off, you nosy bitch! Bugger off and don’t come back!’

  Christy rolled down the rest of the stairs and scrambled to his feet in the hallway. Through bleary eyes, he could barely see the man and the dogs on the landing; the shouting and the barking were a welter of nonsensical noise. He caught some of the words the man was bellowing, but not all of them, and the ones he heard were a meaningless blather. Smearing the blood and the tears with the backs of his hands, he felt for the piano in the doorway and fled from the house.

  For a long time, Harry remained on the landing. He heaved with breathlessness, after the shouting and banging and kicking. His head hurt. The pains in his chest were so bad he thought he might retch. With all the strength he had left, he seized the dogs by their collars with his hand and his hook and he banged their skulls together; they slunk back to the fire in the bedroom. Then he sat on the top step of the staircase, stared down into the hallway and listened as a great, cold, empty silence fell on the house.

  No, not quite a silence. A tiny, tinkling noise, like the tinkling of splintered ice or the ringing of cut glass . . .

  Harry heard it. He shook his head to clear the pounding and he held his breath to catch the sound. It was coming from the locked room, the room the beachcomber had been trying.

  He got to his feet, slowly and painfully, and tiptoed into the bedroom. At the fireside, the dogs bared their teeth as he reached over them and felt for something he’d hidden behind the clock on the mantelpiece: something he’d put there and never touched for years and years. It was a key. He took the key and went out of the bedroom, crossed the landing and tiptoed down the corridor . . . hardly breathing, because he could hear the faint, cold tinkling and wanted to keep it inside his head.

  Before he fitted the key to the door, to delay the moment of unlocking and opening, he did what the beachcomber had done, creaking to his knees and putting his eye to the keyhole. He felt a draught of stale air. He tasted a whiff of musty dampness. A little louder, he heard the chiming of cut glass.

  Gripping the door handle, he heaved himself to his feet. He rattled the key into the keyhole. It turned stiffly, grating in the rusty lock. Then he turned the handle, pushed the door open and took a step into the room.

  It was the room he’d shared with Helen. Since then, it had stood empty, its heavy curtains drawn. The darkness was dead and cold, but the smallest of draughts was stirring the chandelier on the high ceiling so that the cut glass tinkled very faintly. After a minute, as Harry blinked his eyes and sipped at the air, he could just make out the bulk of a big, wide, four-poster bed and a huge wardrobe. He crossed the room to the dressing table, whose mirror was so deeply furred with dust and blurred with cobwebs that his reflec­tion stirred like a ghost.

  No light. Harry strained his eyes. As he groped on the dressing table, he felt and fumbled before he closed his grip on a hairbrush: a woman’s hairbrush, silver-backed, soft-bristled, entangled with fine, dark, silken hair. He inhaled through his mouth and he shiv­ered. He could taste the staleness of long neglect. He threw the hairbrush down, recoiled across the room and into the corridor, where he slammed the door with a bang which made the chandelier tinkle more loudly. His breath was short and hoarse. His fingers shook so violently that when he tried to lock the door he dropped the key three times before he could fit it into the keyhole and turn it. At last, swearing horribly, spitting cobwebs, he stumped back into the spare bedroom and flung himself into the armchair.

  He squeezed the key in his palm. He stared at the blazing fire. He remembered with a shudder of regret how he’d knocked the pretty blonde head on the door and booted the beachcomber down the stairs. He felt the key in his cold, stiff fingers, and, as he bent forward to put it back behind the clock on the mantelpiece, he did what he customarily did to relieve his anger or frustration: he kicked the dogs as hard as he could until they got off the rug and limped out of range. Then he kicked them onto the landing and shut them out.

  Dusk fell and turned to night. The fire died. Harry Clewe sat on his own. He heard the sea come into the house, the slapping and boom of breakers in the downstairs rooms.

  Chapter Eleven

  He was on his own the following day, the day after that, and the day after that. And the day after that.

  He waited for the crunching of Wellington boots in the yard. He listened for the voice calling from the foot of the stairs. No one came. He cursed himself for a vile-tempered fool. He realised, after years of solitude, how much he missed the beachcomber’s visits.

  The house was alive with the noises it had always had: the whir­ring of a hundred starlings which roosted in the living room; the shuffle and flop of the dogs; the roar of the wind and the move­ment of dark, deep water; the slither of rats in the chimney, the flitter of bats in the roof, the scuttle of toads and the snoring of hedgehogs in the bathroom woodpile . . . but for Harry, a cold and lonely silence filled the long, long days.

  Sometimes he switched on the radio, but he only half listened, because his ear was tuned to the sound of a splashing footstep across his fields, the welcoming bark of the dogs, a shout from the hallway. So he switched the radio off, tired of the news, bored by the voices.

  Once, he took off his shoes and socks, rolled up his trouser legs and went splashing through the scummy pools downstairs, feeling blindly for the bass and the bream which were stranded there. But it was no fun on his own. It was silly. He got thoroughly chilled and very angry as he stampeded the fish out of the hallway, past the piano in the front door and into the yard, where the gulls and the rats could have them.

  Moping in the empty house, he would wade to the mantelpiece in the living room and stare at the photograph of Helen. He would press his eyes close to it and whisper her name: no, not his wife’s name, but ‘Christine, Christine, Christine’, hissing the word over and over again. Then he would pick up the ammonite and test the familiar weight of it in his hand, the smooth, cold stone that the beachcomber’s warm, strong hands had held.

  Sometimes he went shooting on the foreshore, but he banged and banged and often missed; even when he hit, Gog and Magog were uselessly apathetic. They yawned and sniffed instead of lum­ber­ing after the wounded bird. Indoors, they fidgeted on the landing or wriggled by the fire, unable to settle, because they were listening too, as Harry was listening, pricking their ears in case they might
hear approaching footsteps.

  In this way, the house was wrung to a higher state of tension. Harry and the dogs held their breath for the spark of laughter and life they craved.

  But it didn’t come. If, for a short time, the house had seemed like a great ship riding a steel-grey ocean, now the ship was a hulk whose crew drifted hopelessly on a dead calm.

  As for Christy, he’d staggered across the fields with blood and tears streaming from his face. Reaching the road, he’d washed himself in a rain-filled gutter before walking back to the home. Shocked but unhurt, he’d made an excuse to Mrs Bottomley about his wet and muddy state and why he was late for roll call, and he’d resolved never to go back to Ynys Elyrch. Never.

  For the next few days he attended his lessons, went in and out of school on the bus, settled to the ordered routine of the orphanage.

  But he thought about Mr Clewe. He thought about Gog and Magog. He thought of the dilapidated house with the piano wedged in the front door, where the sea rolled through the down­stairs rooms and left tidal pools, banks of shingle, barnacled boulders, mattresses of weed and all kinds of leaping, flapping, silvery fish.

  At night, lying awake in his dormitory bed, he remembered the conger eel they’d found coiled in the living room, the struggle to net it and drag it to the shore; he remembered the sea monster’s skeleton, the biggest bones he’d ever seen in all his life; the bang of the gun that made his ears ring, the stink of smoke that made his nostrils sting, the plummeting duck that splashed in the flooded fields . . .

  So much to remember! Such strange and secret things! The joyous dance on the landing, the smell of the man’s embrace and the triumphant whooping, once the windsurfer had been knocked into the water with a well-aimed potato! The gleam of the hook where the hand should have been! The fireside feasts! The jellyfish and dogfish and thornback rays, the crabs and urchins and squids, all the washed-up treasures that he and the man had found! The silver Jag, or whatever it was, lined with walnut and leather and used as a sort of tool shed!

  With a shudder of fear as he lay in the softly snoring, moonlit dormitory, he remembered a thing he thought he’d seen in the cellar, floating in the black water . . .

  He remembered the tiny tinkling noise through the keyhole of the locked room . . .

  He brooded on the extraordinary way in which Mr Clewe had lost his temper. What was the man hiding, to react with such violence? What had he been shouting from the landing? Christy, confused by the bellowing and barking and the fall downstairs, had caught a few words, that was all. What sort of nonsense was it? What was floating in the cellar? What was the man hiding upstairs? What was the big secret?

  Christy pondered for a week. Fourteen years old, he’d been institutionalised since he was three. His curiosity for the eccentric, the bizzarre and, above all, the forbidden, was highly developed. The more he thought about the house on the seashore and the man who lived in it, the more he was intrigued. Until he realised that, however he’d been abused and terrorised on his last visit, he must go back. He had to. How could he not go back?

  Of course he was frightened. He would have to appease Mr Clewe. The day he determined to visit again, he sneaked into Mrs Bottomley’s bedroom and took something, as he’d done on previous occasions: this time, a tiny thing that the matron would never miss. He went to her dressing table, unscrewed and upended a bottle of perfume and dabbed the stuff behind his ears.

  So he arrived at the house, trembling with nervousness. He paused in the hallway to catch his breath. He combed his long, blond, silken hair and shook it loose around his ears.

  Then he knocked on the piano and called out, ‘It’s me, Mr Clewe! It’s me! Christine!’ before he went up the stairs, giggling softly to himself.

  Chapter Twelve

  There was a happy reunion.

  The dogs, which had been sleeping so heavily in front of the fire that they hadn’t heard the visitor splashing across the fields and crunching in the yard, hurtled onto the landing and flew down the stairs to meet Christy halfway. They lolloped around him, slobbering at his hands with their soft, wet mouths, lunging as high as their arthritic haunches would allow to try and lick at his face. Harry sprang from his armchair and crossed the bedroom as though he were on fire, stopping short to compose himself at the doorway, before emerging onto the landing and greeting the visitor as off-handedly as he could. In reality, his heart had leaped as he’d leaped from his seat, and still it lunged in his chest.

  ‘So it’s you,’ he said flatly. ‘You came back. You must be stupid. Well, since you’re here, you might as well come to the fire. There’s tea but no biscuits, unless you bothered to bring some.’

  Neither of them said much as they sat at the hearth. They were both nervous. The boy occupied his hands by patting the dogs’ heads; Harry was busy with mugs and teabags, powdered milk and boiling water. They eyed one another, stealing surreptitious glances. Harry frowned and sniffed and glared at Christy, sniffed again as he caught a whiff of the perfume. Christy blushed, look­ing away, pushing his hair behind his ears and folding his hands in his lap, and the next time he glanced up, he saw that Mr Clewe was smiling, his face glistening because he’d been kneeling at the flames to attend to the kettle.

  ‘Your head’s all right then?’ Harry said, hedging as closely to an apology as he could manage. ‘I can be a bad-tempered old goat, sometimes. It’s nearly got me into trouble once or twice, in years gone by, but I’ve just about got away with it . . . so far, anyway. Well, it’ll teach you to mind your own business. I don’t mind you coming out here as long as you keep your nose out of things that don’t concern you. That’s a rule of the house. I suppose you have rules at the orphanage? Of course you do. And doesn’t Mrs Wigglebottom, or whatever she’s called, punish you if you’re naughty? Of course she does.’

  Christy smiled and said yes, of course she did, stopping himself from adding that Mrs Bottomley had never slammed his face against a door until his nose was bleeding. As he nodded his head in polite acknowledgement of what the man was saying, as his hair swung around his ears, he could smell the perfume he’d put on. He could smell it on his fingers, too.

  Harry leaned closely and sniffed when he passed the tea he’d poured out. ‘That’s nice!’ he said, smiling softly. ‘That’s nice!’

  So the relationship resumed, guarded, wary, precarious: pre­car­ious because its foundations were built on the secrets that the man and the boy kept from each other. Harry was as crusty as ever, although a vein of schoolboyish good humour seemed to open in the presence of his young companion. Christy was coy, unsus­pecting so far that the man found this coyness provocative. The boy liked the perfume, because it masked the smells of the stale, unwashed bedding and the rancid, unwashed man, and because it made him feel nice to be wearing it: as simple as that. It made him feel different. Slightly, minutely, it altered the way he moved: the way he angled his head and swung his hair, the way he smiled, the way he moistened his lips with his tongue. He noticed these differences in himself, each time he came to the house. And Harry Clewe noticed too.

  They relished their isolation, as though the house were a desert island and they were delighted to be marooned on it. Gloriously alone, the man and the boy and the dogs hunted and fished and feasted, walking the shore, wading the fields, sifting the infinite treasure that the sea brought up. No one disturbed them.

  Then the windsurfer came back, and everything changed.

  Chapter Thirteen

  It happened like this. The boy had been caught in the house again as the tide rose. It was a Sunday; he was allowed out of the orphanage all day, as long as he reported back by late afternoon. When he’d crossed the fields to the house, he’d seen that the sea was already very high and still rising, and he’d known that, by mid-morning, he would be marooned at Ynys Elyrch. Really he was looking forward to it, that he and Mr Clewe and the two dogs should be cut off by the swirling sea. Harry was glad, too. In the same way, he was excited by the prospect of being m
arooned with his young visitor.

  So, that Sunday morning, once the two of them were cosily established by the fire, with tea and crumpets, with their feet warm­ing on the backs of the great, snoring hounds, they would glance out of the bedroom window and pretend they hadn’t noticed how the sea came closer and closer, how it crossed the fields, filled the ditches, poured through the hedges and the tumbledown walls, how at last it reached the house. They pretended they hadn’t heard it slither through the front door and flood the hallway. From time to time, they looked at one another over the rims of their tea mugs, and they smiled. After a while, going to the bathroom to fetch an armful of wood from the bath, Christy saw that the water was slapping at the staircase. It was grand to gaze from the landing window and see nothing but chopping, white waves lit by a clear, cold sun . . . a swollen brown ocean. The house was in the sea! The sea was in the house! Grand!

  ‘Looks as though you’re here for the day,’ Harry muttered, as he stumped out of the bedroom and joined Christy on the landing. ‘You stupid girl! Didn’t you see the tide coming in? What if I decide to throw you out? Can you swim? Eh? Didn’t you say you were a bloody mermaid or something? Looks as though I’m stuck with you all bloody day . . .’

  But his grumpiness slipped, for once, and his face split into a wide grin. Christy grinned too. They stood together on the landing and surveyed their watery isolation.

  Then, hundreds of yards away on the flooded horizon, a vivid purple shape appeared . . . unmistakable, a splash of gorgeous colour against a grey sky. Christy saw it straight away: Harry saw it a few seconds later, where it danced and fluttered like a brilliant spark. But neither of them said anything. They stiffened and stared as the sail raced towards the house.

  Sensing a tension in the atmosphere, the dogs came out of the bedroom too. They peered out of the window, forcing their heads between the man and the boy, and when they caught the zigzag and flutter of the purple thing, and heard the snapping and the slapping of it, they started to bark. There was pandemonium. Harry bellowed at the animals and booted them off the landing; they skidded down the stairs, slithered to a halt when they met the sea in the hallway, turned round and clambered back up again, still barking as loudly as they could. Hooking the window open, Harry reached for the sack of potatoes which was leaning at the top of the stairs and prepared to hurl his missiles as soon as the target came in range. He shouted and shouted, a blather of meaningless threats which echoed up and down the landing with the booming noise of the dogs. The louder he shouted, the louder the dogs barked; the louder the dogs barked, the more noise the man made. And when the windsurfer veered within a few yards of the house, grinning a dazzling grin and tossing his golden hair, Harry lobbed the potatoes feebly out of the window.