by Liam Livings
That’s it. I’ve done it. I’m gone. This is Heaven… or somewhere. I still wasn’t quite sure I believed in Heaven, with the angels playing harps on the nearest cloud and all that jazz. So this wasn’t Earth, this was some other place. I’d made it. An orange light seeped through my eyelids. The hue of Heaven, definitely.
I opened my eyes fully and saw a silver sign just above my head, surrounded by blackness. I’m here; I’m at the Pearly Gates of Heaven. They’re going to talk about whether I deserve to get in or not because I did this. I already had my response prepared. I’d thought about it long and hard before doing this.
I squinted to read the silver sign on the black gate. “Volvo.”
Hang on a minute, what’s that doing on the gates of Heaven? I looked around the silver sign, and the black gate was the radiator grille of a large articulated truck that had stopped less than a foot from me on the outside lane of the A40. With its hazard warning lights blinking orange light at me. Hue of Heaven, my arse!
Fuck it.
I can’t even get this right. That’s how fucking useless I am. Un-fucking-believable.
I steadied myself against the front of the truck and collapsed onto the ground, as I sobbed.
Someone shook my shoulders and looked up. A woman with a perfect sixties brown bob and twinkly brown eyes stood in front of me, one hand on her hip and the other on my shoulder. “All right, love?” She didn’t wait for a reply. “Let’s get you somewhere in the dry, shall we?”
I shrugged. Where was she going to sit me now? Did she have a little shed on the back of her truck?
She took my dirty hand and led me up the steps of her truck cab on the driver’s side. I climbed the steps, and she shouted behind me, “Slide over, love. I’ll put the heating on. I’ve got a Yorkie, if you want, too.”
For some reason—and I have no idea why—the mention of the Yorkie from a complete stranger brought about an even louder bout of crying than before. I think it was something about the kindness of strangers being so surprising, and unnecessary. Especially when I compared it with the kindness I’d received from those I had described as my loved ones.
“’Ere, do you want the Yorkie or not, love?” came her voice, behind me.
I slid across the cab and waited for her to join me.
“Now, let’s see what I’ve got.” She reached into the glove compartment.
Who knew trucks had such big glove compartments? I could sleep in there.
She handed me half a Yorkie and started eating the other half. “You’ve got yourself in a bit of a pickle, haven’t you, my love?”
I stared out the windscreen and reflected on my complete and total failure to end things. I took a bite of the Yorkie and cried. Big, splashing tears rolled down my face. I scrunched my eyes up, and she patted my back.
“There, there. It can’t be that bad, can it? They’ll be here soon, so don’t worry. It’s a good job I wasn’t going too fast, eh? I saw you miles off and just stopped.” She patted my back and chewed her Yorkie. “What’s made you do a silly thing like that, eh?”
I chewed my Yorkie. Where to start? Can I start? Should I start? A part of me still half hoped I was dead and this woman was some weird kind of greeter outside the Pearly Gates.
“I’m Elizabeth, but everyone calls me Betty.” She put her hand out for me to shake.
I half-heartedly shook it. “Richard.”
“There, that wasn’t too difficult, was it, lovey?” She paused. “I know what you’re thinking: what’s she doing, driving a big truck. Bet you didn’t think women drove lorries, did you? Well, neither did I really, you see….”
She told me about how her dad used to be “on the rigs,” and that it was all she’d ever wanted to do. And how, when she was old enough, she came along with him on school holidays, to see how it worked. Her mum had wanted her to get married and get a job where she lived, but Betty loved being on the road so much, she just couldn’t have stayed at home. She told me about meeting her husband on the trucks a few years ago.
“I thought I was never going to meet someone. I just thought, It’ll be me and my old cats. But one day in the café where I always have my breakfast when I’m around the M25, in walks this bloke, and I knew I would marry him.”
She became quite defensive at that, saying how she didn’t believe in love at first sight, and she couldn’t tell you how she knew, but she was as sure as she’d ever been that that man would be her husband. “And we was married two months later.” She added, “I’ve got a Fruit and Nut, if you want?”
I started to cry, not about the Fruit and Nut, but about her story. How beautiful and perfect it had been—even the bit about the incontinent old cats she adopted, always choosing the one nobody wanted from the sanctuary and giving it a nice end to its life. And then she’d go back once that one “had passed” and pick up another. This woman’s kindness knew no bounds. That made me weep again.
I looked down, and my passenger door opened. A couple of people in green jumpsuits were talking to me. One of them asked my name. I heard Betty shout it over my head, then found myself slowly stepping down from the truck’s cab. One of the green-jumpsuit people wrapped me in a silver blanket and walked me to a big white car parked next to the Volvo lorry, where I was told to lie down. The blue lights faded, and I lay on my back on a trolley in the white car with one green-jumpsuit person next to me. I closed my eyes—and fell into the blackness.
Chapter 30
I woke in a bed. It was a hospital bed, because it had no duvet. Hospitals were, I’d reflected on my last stay, the only places in modern life that didn’t give you a duvet. Even hotels had got pretty modern, giving you one. But the only place where you were guaranteed a scratchy white sheet and a blue blanket that looked like it had been knitted by your granny, was hospital. So that’s how I knew it. I was definitely in hospital again.
I drifted in and out of sleep. People in white coats poked and prodded me. Other people in blue tunics put things in my ear and helped me to drink. Occasionally someone in green would put a tray of something to eat in front of me. Not the jumpsuited green people, no; these were normally women with green dresses and kind faces. One of them helped me eat one day. She sat in my visitor’s chair, spooning small mouthfuls of something into me as my hands lay limp at my sides.
Days and nights and weeks merged together, punctuated by hazy trips to the bathroom accompanied by a woman in green to shower, wash, dress me, and help me to the toilet when I remembered I needed it.
A few times I was asked by different men in ties and white coats what day, what year, and what month it was, and who was the Prime Minister at the moment. I was surprised by how hard I found it to answer them, and how, even the second or third time round, I still found it much more challenging than normal.
Then I saw a familiar face. Or I could have been dreaming, I couldn’t truly know, because I drifted in and out of sleep between people’s blurry outlines administering various things.
A skinny white man in skinny white jeans and a white vest stood by my bedside. “Oh, Richard, what am I meant to do with you?” He put one hand on his hip and waved the index finger of the other.
I rolled my head away from the side of the bed where he stood. He didn’t really expect a response to that, did he? I hadn’t said more than the odd word since I had finished Betty’s half a Fruit and Nut in her truck cab. There wasn’t anyone I wanted to talk to. There wasn’t any point really, because I wasn’t meant to be here at all, never mind talking to people.
Every time I thought about what I’d tried to do, I was met with two feelings slapping me in the face: disappointment that I hadn’t succeeded and embarrassment that I’d put all these people to such trouble looking after me, when really I wasn’t meant to be here.
The skinny man continued talking. “I’m so sorry. I know you’ve been trying to get in touch with Sky, but I explained, I’m looking after you now, so you won’t be able to see him, I’m afraid. I don’t make the rules, I just stick to th
em. I am very sorry.” He paused.
I rolled my head across the pillow to follow his voice.
Luke, I remembered that was his name, said, “Look, if you have a message for him, I can pass it on. I don’t think it says anything about that in the handbook. In fact, I’ve read it extensively, and it mentions nothing whatsoever about messages. So just tell me what you want to say, and I’ll pass it on.” He leant against my empty bedside locker.
“I want to be with him,” I said half into the pillow.
Luke wrote it in his leather-bound notebook. I was expecting a quill pen and so was a bit disappointed he used a normal biro instead. “Anything else, or just that?”
“My job. Can you do something about that, please?” I said, closing my eyes. If I was stuck here, the least he could do was make sure I didn’t lose my job. Again. That, at least was one thing I didn’t mind about my life.
After another few days of people in white coats, blue uniforms, and green dresses floating around me, the skinny-white-jeans guy returned. I caught a glimpse of him in the mirror on my bedside locker. He coughed, then said, “I’ve got a message from him. Do you want me to tell you?”
I shrugged. In some ways it felt worse than not hearing from him at all. It was like getting small crumbs of Sky, which always left me feeling unsatisfied.
Luke pulled the leather notebook from behind his large white feathery wings. He coughed, then began reading. “Sky said: I love you, and I always will. I am sorry I can’t see you any longer, but they are the rules. I didn’t have any choice. I wanted to feel your skin against mine, but it’s not to be.”
“Is that it? It just ends like that?”
Luke turned the page. “Yep, that’s it.” He wiped his forehead with his hand. “Anything to say back to him, or is that enough?”
Where to start? How to respond to that? “Just tell him I’m sorry it didn’t work. That I was looking forward to being with him, but it didn’t work out.”
“Hang on. My pen’s not working. Say it again, would you?”
I rolled my eyes and repeated myself. “Got it?”
Luke reread his writing, tutting throughout. “It’s complicated stuff, this, isn’t it? I’d better go, take it back to him. I’m sure he’ll want to say something in return as well.” He secreted the notebook behind his back, then walked towards the wall. “I’m not sure this was such a good idea, not such a good idea at all.”
He walked through the wall, and I was alone once again in my hospital room.
I slept fitfully and dreamed that Luke had returned, complaining at what he’d let himself in for. He stood in front of me, gnawing at his nails and perching on my bedside locker, shaking his leg as he crossed them. “I’m a bag of nerves,” he said. “You’re asking me this, he’s asking me that. I’m trying to write it all down in my little notebook, but I think some of it’s being missed. This isn’t my forte, you know. I’m not trained in shorthand. And as for all these emotions, these feelings… I just don’t know how you live with yourself, trying to get along with all of these swirling about your head all the time.”
So I asked him what he wanted to do. And Luke looked at his notebook for inspiration, then back to me, and shrugged.
“What do you suggest?” I asked. In my dream, I was sitting in bed with my eyes open. In my dream, I had a perfect complexion and no bags under my eyes. In my dream, no one asked me why I’d done what I had.
“I’ll sneak him in.” Luke winked.
And I woke, or he disappeared. I wasn’t quite sure because I was full of sedatives. I peered in the little hand mirror the nurses held up to me after they’d shaved me. My skin was white as porcelain. I felt exactly like porcelain, too, fragile and as if someone pushed me too hard, I would shatter into hundreds of sharp pieces. My face had no spots.
Maybe I hadn’t dreamed that message from Luke.
I stared at myself in the mirror, then noticed a shape behind me, in the reflection.
“Ssh.” Sky put his finger to his lips, then looked to one side as if he were being followed. He grew larger in the mirror as he walked towards it. My reflection was no longer there at all. Now the whole mirror was filled with Sky’s face. “Be quiet, or they really will think you’re round the bend. Luke suggested we cut out the middleman. He said all these emotions were doing him in. ‘It’s not what I signed up for when I came on the induction’ is what he told me. He’s sneaked me in, instead of him coming to see you. If we don’t make a big show, no one will notice. They’ll just think it’s your allocated guardian angel talking to you, no problem. Okay?”
I nodded.
“You do realise you were this close”—he put his thumb and forefinger an inch apart, right up close to the mirror—“to electroconvulsive therapy? Luke’s been working day and night to sort the rest for you. You kept mumbling about guardian angels and the two men in white clothes, and when you started going on about an Aussie temp called Kylie, that’s when they started proceedings to section you. So no more, okay? You can’t tell anyone, or they’ll wheel you off and fill you with electricity, and that’ll be it.”
“But you are there. I can see you. I’m talking to you. I spent the whole night up with you. I can’t have dreamed that, can I?”
“No. I’m not saying it’s not true. All I’m saying is that someone in your… situation doesn’t want to be shouting about guardian angels if they know what’s good for them. All right?”
I zipped my lips and stared at Sky’s face in the mirror. It was a bit too mesmerising, too mystifying for my own comfort. I swayed in the bed slightly. “What’s going on?”
“You’re up to your eyeballs in medication. But you’re not hallucinating or dreaming. I am here. So was Luke before, actually, but he slipped in just as you were falling asleep. It can be quite confusing, I know, but we thought it best to stop you calling out about him anymore.”
“I want to touch you. I want to kiss you. That’s why. When can we be together?”
“Don’t you think I’m frustrated too?” He leant forward in the mirror, nearer to me.
“Why, I’m the one stuck with Mr Useless?”
“I thought I was allocated to you. I thought that was it, I’d come back from my sabbatical—ironically it was about how to work with our human emotions and to avoid another mistake like I made before when I wasn’t paying attention. I was all set to come back and mind the arse off you. It was all going to be perfect—your relationship, work, friends, home, everything. Although there was a module about not making it seem too easy in case it becomes obvious. So I’d have still kept it subtle.”
“So what happened?”
“They said I’d compromised the angel-client relationship and I wasn’t allowed back. I thought I was sticking to the handbook, but turns out we way overstepped the mark that night together. Way overstepped.”
“So who have you been minding after the sabbatical?”
“No one. They kept me in the training college. I went to some classes, but I’d already done them before I came to look after you. So I complained. They said they’d give me some teaching to do, since I wasn’t just a normal student angel. But they didn’t. Nothing came of it, so I sort of mooched around the college all day, drifting in and out of lessons, hanging about in the staffroom or trying to make friends with the other students in the common room. The usual sort of things, I suppose.”
“If ‘usual’ can be used to describe a guardian angels’ college, I suppose so.”
“Come on, it can’t come as that much of a surprise. I told you I’d been on induction. Who did you think was teaching me? What do you think they do with us when we first are, before we’re let out to look after you lot? Didn’t you think it needed some sort of organisation? You thought it just happened, did you?”
“To be honest, I hadn’t thought about it much. Taking in what you told me was enough to think about. But now you’ve told me, I suppose it makes sense, in a strange weird, blowing-my-mind-up way.”
�
�What did you think you were doing on that road? Honestly, why did you think that would help anything?”
“You know exactly why.” I looked away from the mirror, out the window.
“I think I do, but I want to hear you say it, so I can understand your logic. ’Cause standing here, it makes no sense at all.”
I explained about the Bobby-and-Alex situation, how stupid I felt allowing that to happen, increment by increment. I went on to tell him about how I felt surplus to requirements in my own flat, my own relationship, my own life. “And on top of this, all I could think about was you and that perfect night we had together, and how I hadn’t got anywhere near to that with Bobby, not even at the beginning. There wasn’t anything to keep me here, so if I wasn’t here, I would be with you. Simple.”
“I thought you wanted to be with Bobby.”
“But if I had died, I would go to Heaven, or wherever it is you live, and we would be together. Wouldn’t I?”
“No. I’m not a dead person. I am an angel. I started as an angel, and I will always be an angel. It says so in the handbook. It’s very clear on that point. I checked.”
“Oh.”
“And to make matters worse, to further complicate things with ‘these damn emotions,’ as Luke described it, I have fallen in love with you. Completely, utterly, head over heels, crazy stupid, ‘can’t get you out of my head’ in love. And it’s very, very clear about that in the handbook. No relations or excessive contact between guardian angels and humans. What do you think of that?” Sky leant away from the mirror, disappearing deeper into it.
“Me too. Even though I know it’s completely insane and will probably lead me to a mental hospital—the man who’s in love with his guardian angel—yeah, right, I can tell you the meds they’d prescribe me then. Despite that, I haven’t been able to get you out of my head, not since we first met. Even when I was with Bobby or the others, you were still there in the back of my mind. I never really committed to anyone else, I think, because I was secretly hoping you would return and we’d be together.”