The Guardian Angel

by Liam Livings

  “They said I’d be ready for a manager’s job in the next year or so.”

  “That’s positive.”

  “Is it? Is this what I thought I’d be doing when we started working there as a Saturday boy and girl at the start of uni?” She huffed. “If someone had told me I’d still be working there four years later, I wouldn’t have believed them. I’d have said ‘No way, I’ve got plans.’ There’s much better things I can do with my science degree.”

  “Like what?” It always made me smile to myself when she reminded me what she’d studied at uni.

  “Oh, how about helping to find a cure for cancer, or AIDS maybe? Or even working on how to make processed food less processed and better for you. Or making cars more fuel efficient?”

  “So you’ve been thinking about it a while, then?”

  Our food arrived, and we both tucked in.

  “See this cheese.” Amy pointed to a string of cheese from her pizza slice.

  I nodded. “Cheese, yes.”

  “There’s something they use in some processed food that isn’t actually cheese, it’s called ‘analogue pizza cheese’ because it’s cheaper, but still feels like cheese. Clever, eh?”

  “Isn’t that a bit sad, that cheese is too expensive for a ready meal, so they make something up instead? I think that’s sad.”

  “I’m talking about how science can be used in so many places in everyday life, all around us. And instead, what am I doing? Aiming to be a manager of classical music and popular films.”

  “You don’t have to aim to do that. You can aim a bit higher.”

  “I know that, I understand. But I think there’s this bit of me that’s scared to use the science I’ve learned because really I don’t believe it. I know it’s all just a big cover-up by governments to mask what’s really going on.”

  This was a well-rehearsed argument we’d been having since we first met. Amy had chosen science at uni because she believed it would lead to better job prospects. However, ideologically she was against science because it completely and fundamentally disagreed with all her other belief systems: crystals, fairies, angels, chi, ley lines, reiki, yoga…. I could go on, but won’t. Her standard reaction, when I asked how she could disagree with something as self-evident as gravity or evolution would always be “But that’s what they want you to think. Even non-science people know the world’s not flat. And we know there were dinosaurs because we found the remains. But what no one thinks about is who put the remains there? And why can’t we find any skeletons of unicorns or fairies?”

  Every time this had stumped me. On the tip of my tongue was “Because they don’t exist, you lovely kook.” But instead I would always shrug my shoulders with a smile, not wanting to hurt her feelings because, kooky or not, I loved her.

  “Because they knew if we found them, it opens up a whole other box of questions no one’s got time for in the science world, but which everyone else just nods and winks about its existence.”

  Now I asked what was stopping her from doing science as a career.

  “What, apart from the ideological conflict?” She examined the string of cheese from her pizza to her mouth.

  “Of course, apart from that, yeah.”

  “I worked out that if I carry on at the same pay I’m on now, I will have paid off my student loan in fifteen years. Fifteen years, and I’m debt-free.”

  “But you could earn a lot more if you crossed over to the dark side and sold your science knowledge every day. You know you could.”

  “But I just don’t know if I’m ready for that yet. Who knows if anyone’s going to want my science knowledge? Have you thought of that, eh?”

  “I didn’t think anyone would have me on their graduate scheme, but one did. I didn’t think I’d get a job after that awful area branding company, but I did. I could have played safe and stayed, but I knew a little part of me would die every day when they spent two hours talking about whether the logo should be that shade of blue, or that particular shade of off-grey.”

  “So what are you saying? What should I do?” she asked, but I sensed she really knew the answer, but just wanted to hear it said out loud.

  “Do the CV, application thing I did. You could find out the main places hiring these sort of jobs. Is there a sciencejobs dot-co dot-UK or something?” I offered.

  “Might be.” She shrugged.

  “Well, then, you know I’d help you.”

  The waiter returned to ask if we wanted dessert. We both did, so he handed us menus. “What about him?” Amy asked. “What you gonna do about him?”

  “We don’t even know if he’s straight.”

  “We’ve not asked him, but I do know every time he comes to the table, he asks you the questions first. Every time he stands here, he’s next to you at the table. And I’ve noticed him looking at you, when you didn’t see it.”

  “Doesn’t mean anything. They’re quite misogynistic, these Mediterranean types.” I refused to believe her theory.

  “Give it a go. What have you got to lose? Look, he’s back now for our orders, go on, ask him.”

  After dessert we exchanged phone numbers. His name was André, or Mario, or Luigi, something like that. He called me the following night, after we’d had a bit of text banter; some light flirting between us. I suggested a drink in Soho, but he wanted somewhere nearer to his place. We ended up in a café on the Holloway Road. It had yellow stained walls from when people smoked; the nicotine had left its mark.

  “I used to work here,” he said, chinking his chipped mug against mine.

  “Right,” I replied, for want of anything nicer to say. We both looked around the café, as if that would summon some conversation between us.

  It didn’t.

  Taking a risk, I asked, “Do you believe in angels?”

  “What, like the ABBA song?” He smiled.

  That immediately gave him five gold stars for knowing the lyrics and that it was from an ABBA song. Especially impressive since he was not a child of the seventies or eighties. I’d say, he was probably born in the mid-nineties, a few years after me.

  “Sort of,” I replied. I tried to arrange all the thoughts and knowledge I had about guardian angels, all the things Sky had told me, into something manageable, something I could put into a sentence, to explain it all. “Guardian angels?”

  He nodded.

  “They look after us, make sure our life goes in the right direction, give us luck. But sometimes when we have bad luck, that means they’re not doing their job right. They might have looked the other way or gone on a sabbatical.”

  “What’s a sabbatical?”

  “Like work experience with another angel, to help them learn new skills, new emotions, so they can look after us better.” Like it was that simple. Like it was that believable. Even as the words left my mouth, I cringed. He would think I was mad. Completely bonkers.

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  Now, I thought of it, I realised it was hard to explain. I hadn’t even told Amy about it, and here I was telling a complete stranger. Was it to see how mad it sounded when I said it out loud? To remind myself of what I now knew about it all? Or just to have something to talk about with this pretty yet stupid man sat in front of me?

  When I thought about it, it was probably a combination of all three. I wanted to go on to explain the bit about the temps that Sky had already told me twice, but then I realised even I didn’t really believe that.

  If only I could ask Sky more. He’d know. And however he explained it would make much better sense than my half-arsed attempt at an explanation and conversation here now.

  I noticed someone tapping my right arm as it lay on the table. That means he’s left-handed.

  “Hello, Richard. Do you want to go now? My flat is just round the corner.”

  Simply because it meant I didn’t need to talk to him any longer, I nodded, and we left.

  At his building—a large wooden-floored couple of rooms in what would have once
been a grand Victorian terraced house, now split into six or more flats—I noticed numerous doorbells on the wall of the intricately tiled porch.

  Mario-Luigi-André walked through the flat and into the bathroom, where he stepped out of his jeans and figure-hugging underpants, pulled his T-shirt over his head, and jumped into the shower. I caught a glimpse of his olive bum with its dusting of dark fuzzy hair before it disappeared behind frosted glass.

  Something twitched in my trousers.

  He left the shower, a towel wrapped round his waist. A little trail of dark hair, quite thick, ran between his nipples and thinned as it went down, down, inside the towel.

  The something twitched in my trousers again.

  “Towels in the bathroom. Jump in and meet me in my room.” He walked into the bedroom on the other side of the flat.

  I jumped in the shower, covering my whole body in shower gel, rubbing it into a good lather, then rinsing it off, my eyes closed, the image of his fuzzy bum in my head. I stepped out, wrapped myself in a white fluffy towel, and dried myself in the bathroom.

  “In here,” he shouted from the bedroom.

  I followed the noise. It led me to him lying on his side, completely naked on his bed. The treasure trail continued south to a thick dark bush around his groin. His cock and balls emerged from amongst the hair. Hanging either side, he’d not manscaped his balls; they were nicely covered in dark fuzz. He patted the bed in front of himself.

  I lay on the bed with my head next to his, expecting a bit of kissing and chatting, but he immediately shuffled around so we were top to tail. I opened my mouth to ask a question, and he immediately latched onto me, sucking and licking. I remembered lying on my bed like this with Sky, aching to see more under his man skirt, but felt Mario latched onto me, and I jumped back to the here and now.

  So, no conversation, then?

  Because I didn’t want to lie there like a stunned mullet, and knowing I wasn’t going to get any conversation out of him now—his mouth was full—I got stuck in among the dark hairs and his musky smell. And it was good. It was fun. I enjoyed myself.

  We stayed like that for a bit. I wondered if I had something out of the freezer for dinner that night. Did I need to pick up a suit from the dry cleaner’s for work tomorrow? Had I sent that report to my boss?

  Then he stopped what he was doing to me, so I stopped what I was doing. “You fuck me now,” he said, reaching into the bedside cabinet for the accoutrements.

  It wasn’t a question—it was an order. This was what was happening now. He handed me a condom, sorted himself out with the lube, and knelt on the bed, watching himself in a mirror on the far wall. He moved around on the bed so he was sideways against the mirror: his head at one end and his bottom at the other.

  I knelt behind him, and after a bit of condom action and some slipping and sliding, I was in. I was fucking him. He kept looking at us in the mirror, watching me as I slid in and out. He started saying all sorts of porny things people say in those films. It felt like I was being filmed—a bit fake. I looked around the room for a camera mounted on the wall. Nothing.

  After a while, of thrusting away, composing my shopping list in my head, I sped up a bit and it was over for me.

  He shouted, “You fuck me harder,” as I separated from him, before lying on his back in front of the mirror and finishing himself off.

  We lay there on the bed, not touching, not speaking, the smell of sweat and come mixing in the air to form a salty odour.

  He walked to the bathroom and got into the shower, reappearing shortly afterwards in a clean towel. “You want to fuck again?” he asked, as romantically as a washing machine salesman would show me the latest model.

  I shook my head. “I’ll get washed, and I’ve got to see someone about… something.” I climbed off the bed, cupping myself in my hands. For some reason I didn’t want him to see me completely naked again. I couldn’t explain why, it just didn’t feel right.

  When I had washed all traces of him off my body, I dressed, checked my pockets for wallet, keys and phone, and stood by the door.

  André-Mario-Luigi was on his laptop in the corner of the bedroom, scrolling through screen after screen of men’s thumbnail images.

  “Bye, then,” I offered, half-heartedly.

  “Bye,” he replied, not turning away from the screen.

  I closed the door behind me.

  I walked along the busy pavement of the Holloway Road, comforted that my flat was only a short walk away. I called Amy, as I knew she’d want an update later and I wanted to get home and be alone, silent. I made use of the street noise and rang her.

  She squealed a bit down the phone. “How was it? Can you still walk?”

  “It was fine.”

  “Fine doesn’t sound great. Fine’s not amazing. It’s not earth-shattering, is it?”

  “It was fine,” I repeated.

  “Gonna see him again?” she asked. “Help you wash away all that stuff with the mystery man who disappeared—what was he called again? Si, Fly?”

  “Sky. Doubt it.”

  “Oh, shame.”

  I walked along the street, surrounded by noise, and let the silence between Amy and me hang there.

  “So, I looked into sciencejobs dot-co dot-uk, and turns out there’s a few agencies that specialise in that sort of recruitment. Turns out my degree, and where I did it, makes me pretty attractive for loads of positions.”

  “Right, sounds good. What’s the catch?”

  “Lots of those jobs are in science parks, way out of London. Cambridge, Oxford, and up north too. And I don’t want to leave London. I don’t want to leave you.”

  “Cambridge is quite a New Age, hippy place too. There’s more to it than the uni and science, so I’ve heard.”

  “But it would mean, you know, living in Cambridge. It’d be like going back home and staying there. The whole point of going to uni in London was that I wouldn’t have to go back home again.”

  “If you want a job there, you might have to think about it, or commute to Cambridge from London. It’s all possible. You just need to open yourself up to the possibilities. Besides, you’ve not even got an interview yet. You’ve not even done an application, and you’re putting all these barriers in front of yourself.”

  “I know. I just can’t stop thinking about Mum, back home in Barry, with her dreamcatchers and patchouli oil and wish glass, wishing herself a better life while Dad sits on the sofa, refusing to look for work since the mine closed. I just couldn’t go back there. I’d end up looking after them both, I just know it.”

  “When did the mine close?”

  “Nineteen seventy-nine.”

  “Has he worked since then?”

  “So I’m not moving to Cambridge,” she replied, signalling this topic of conversation was over. “What you doing for the rest of your Sunday?”

  “Make something to eat, iron some shirts for work, watch an old film.” Try to forget what I’ve just done. Try to forget Sky, as he was a figment of my imagination all along.

  “I’m going to make a start on some applications. Wish me luck. I’ve got Enya on all-songs shuffle and a pot of herbal tea, so I really do mean business.”

  “Good luck.” I put the phone down.

  Once home, I found my pint glass of white feathers, and took each feather out, in turn, and stroked it. I lay them flat on the kitchen table, arranged in a circle, with the quills at the centre, spiralling out like a wheel, then put my hands on them and said (to the air in front of my face) “Sky, where are you? I need to speak to you.” I closed my eyes, squeezing them shut.

  As I opened them, Sky stood in the middle of the kitchen, all white man skirt, big white feathery wings, and perfect, sculpted hairless chest of him.

  I blinked, and he didn’t disappear.

  He spoke quietly, crouching down a bit, “I’m not meant to come when you call me. It’s not allowed, but I thought I’d nip back for a quick chat. What can I help you with?” He folded his
arms serenely across his chest and closed his eyes.

  “Why am I shagging everything that moves? Why am I doing this, when I don’t really enjoy it and afterwards I feel like a used tissue or an empty airhead slag? When what I really want is to be with you?”

  “You know that’s not possible.” He held his hand out in front of him.

  I reached for it, and as expected, grabbed thin air. “I miss you all the time. All the time I’m thinking about seeing you again. Even when I’m with other people, I’m thinking about you.”

  “I think there’s a compliment in there somewhere.” Sky smiled.

  “There is. There really is.”

  “Then you know why you’re shagging everything that moves, don’t you?”

  “But it doesn’t help.” I pleaded to Sky as he disappeared in a puff of green smoke in front of my eyes.

  Bugger it. What am I meant to do with that? I stroked the wheel of feathers and called Sky’s name for a while, but nothing doing.

  I put a film on that I knew backwards and started to iron my shirts for the coming week. As Bedknobs and Broomsticks accompanied my ironing, it suddenly occurred to me that maybe the Latin Miss Price chanted could bring Sky back. I’d done some research—Wikipedia, obviously—on the different sorts of angels, and there were an awful lot of Latin names. Maybe that would be the link he needed to come back to me?

  During my ironing, I wrote down some choice Latin from the film for later use.

  I walked through the kitchen. The feathers weren’t on the table any longer: they’d scattered all over the floor. This is the sign; this is Sky trying to get in touch with me. I know it. I knelt and picked up the feathers, counting them back into the pint glass. Seven. The same number as before. So he’d not sent me another one as a message.

  Shit, what if the way they were on the floor was the message? I should have taken a photo. But I hadn’t. Could I remember how they had lain?

  I took them out of the glass and rearranged them on the floor. They kept moving.

  “What are you telling me?” I asked the air. “What message do you have for me?”