Gabriel's Angel

by Mark A Radcliffe

  ‘Looking for a bit more,’ she said with a smile.

  ‘Like the harder I try not to let you down, the more I do. I mean how much fun have I been to live with lately? I’m sorry.’

  ‘Yeah, but how do you feel, Gabe?’ Ellie laughed.

  ‘Not worthy.’ He laughed too.

  ‘Yeah well, that’s about right. How long are you going to be?’

  ‘I don’t know, I may be late; go to bed, I’ll try not to wake you.’

  ‘I’ll see how tired I am. See you later.’

  For Ellie, even though she loved him, the whole exchange had been automatic. She would not remember the words she had said an hour after he had gone, because she wasn’t really in the world at the moment, she was in herself, preparing herself. Doing housework of the womb with the music turned up really loud so she couldn’t notice the comings and goings of the rest of her life.

  On the Tube to Old Street he thought about himself, Gabe the Liar. He had always been big on the truth, especially with Ellie. But, he reasoned now—the way people do when it suits them—that perhaps the truth can be the lazy option. Just throw the truth at people and leave them to deal with it. Mainly because your conscience won’t let you keep it to yourself. Purging yourself of every minor activity in your life, without any thought for the impact your actions might have on those you love. He was right to lie. At the moment the only thing that mattered was Ellie’s well-being. It was all well and good her saying that they were in this together, and of course they were, but whatever happened to them was really happening to her. She needed—she deserved—protection from the nonsense of his stupid redundancy.

  I only give her problems, he thought, with the self-dramatisation of a man with too many emotions in him. Followed by: I know, I’ll send flowers!

  When he got off the Tube, he phoned a florist and ordered a bouquet of carnations, roses, and freesias to be delivered to Ellie first thing in the morning.

  ‘Any message, sir?’

  ‘I love you more than life itself,’ he said, before realising that he sounded worryingly like a James Blunt song. ‘No, no, no, sorry. Just say, “Sorry for being a twat.” ’

  ‘Twat?’ asked the woman, more used to Mr Blunt et al. ‘Is that with a big T?’

  ‘Yeah … no, no.’ Stop apologising, thought Gabriel, that’s so self-indulgent. ‘I know’ he said, without thinking, ‘Say, “You’re the sunrise.” ’

  ‘ “You’re a sunrise?” ’

  ‘No, no. “You’re THE sunrise.” She’ll get it.’

  ‘OK,’ said the flower lady, unconvinced. ‘It’s your message.’

  He met Dave outside Shoreditch Church, and they walked without speaking down toward Brick Lane, like two men marching to a place that was going to cut their bollocks off. When you get past Shoreditch Church, the place stops being a road to somewhere else and begins to be what it has always been: a grey, impoverished mess. A buffer zone to the City. Just past the church, behind a taxi rank, the streets open up into rows of purpose-built flats, mainly occupied by Asian families. It is quiet there; the most striking thing about it is the complete lack of green. No trees, no grass, just unwashed buildings and one or two mildly anxious brown faces. There are only a few cars, all parked. One with no wheels, another with a broken windscreen. No noise, no life. This is a place used to being a shortcut to somewhere else. When you get past there, the road opens up again: one or two pubs, too many minicab offices, a strip joint, and the smell of Indian food from Brick Lane.

  Still they didn’t speak, until finally they arrived outside a converted warehouse. Cheap location.

  ‘Here we are.’ Dave pressed the intercom buzzer, and a voice said hello.

  ‘Er, hello, Dave Gilbert and Gabriel Bell?’

  Gabriel could have sworn he heard a smirk from the third floor, but the intercom was off. The door buzzed open. They walked up the stairs slowly, in part because Big Dave didn’t really do stairs, but mostly because it felt as though they were about thirteen and going to see the headmaster for smoking behind the bike sheds.

  On the third floor, they were told to sit and wait. Gabriel and Dave sat on a soft imitation-leather sofa in a corridor that passed for reception and watched a hard-faced secretary ignore them while she stared at a computer screen. After a few minutes, the smug bastard in charge popped his head round a door further down the corridor and shouted. ‘Alright, come here; I haven’t got long.’

  Dave and Gabriel shuffled in. Smug Bastard shut the door behind them.

  ‘Out of work?’

  They both nodded.

  ‘Didn’t see it coming, eh?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Doesn’t that worry you?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Doesn’t it worry you that you didn’t see that what you were doing wasn’t any good?’

  ‘Depends on what you mean by good,’ said Dave.

  ‘Yeah right, thanks professor. I am familiar with your writing. It’s dull, but then maybe your editor told you to try to bore the bollocks off the reader. If you work here, you write to style, and you respect your audience, too many so-called journalists these days patronise their audience, preachy fuckers. That’s why so many are out of work.’

  Gabriel bit his lip so hard it almost bled. Smug Bastard looked at him.

  ‘You think you can produce the kind of stuff we produce? If you think you are too good to give people what they want, you’re both tossers.’

  ‘What makes you think we can’t write to style?’ said Dave, diplomatically.

  ‘Well, we’ll see. Remember our readers don’t want both sides of the story, they just want gossip they can borrow in the pub, and some tits to think about while they do their job. Transfer spec and links to the girls. You do not write more than 300 words on anything, and you never write about your own club.’

  He looked at Gabriel.

  ‘You. Who do you support?’

  ‘Chelsea.’

  ‘Tosser.’

  ‘Fuck off.’

  ‘Ha ha.’

  To Dave: ‘What about you?’

  ‘Arsenal.’

  ‘Fucking hate Arsenal.’

  ‘Who do you support?’ said Dave.

  ‘Spurs.’

  ‘Don’t like football then.’

  ‘Careful fat boy, no union here.’

  Which was probably thrown in just in case they thought it was going to be OK.

  ‘All right, hundred a day; start at 8:30. There will be some shifts, but we’ll see how you go for a couple of weeks. See you tomorrow. Oh, and by the way, I won’t necessarily want you both after I’ve seen what you can do.’

  And with that he turned away.

  Outside, Dave lit a cigarette and said. ‘Well, that went better than I thought.’

  ‘Let’s get this straight: are we competing with each other for work?’

  ‘Kind of looks a bit like that, or maybe we are competing with whoever he already has.’

  ‘Feels bad, mate,’ said Gabriel. ‘I mean it was your idea. I can’t, you know, be fighting with you over work, feels wrong.’

  ‘I know, mate,’ said Big Dave, exhaling a plume of smoke upward. ‘But it’s not like either of us has got much choice, is it? I mean gallantry and all that is a good thing, but fuck, you can no more afford not to show up for this than I can.’

  They walked in silence toward Brick Lane, Dave puffing on his Marlboro, Gabriel wondering about what was likely to pay the most: freelance sportswriter for porno website, or paper boy?

  ‘It’s like Spartacus,’ said Dave.

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Kirk Douglas and Tony Curtis fighting it out at the end, you know, the loser gets stabbed by their mate, the winner gets crucified.’

  ‘I’m Spartacus.’

  ‘No, I’m Spartacus.’

  ‘No, I’m Spartacus …’

  They wandered toward Brick Lane for some bagels. ‘I reckon Ellie might like a cream-cheese-and-salmon bagel. May soften the
blow.’

  ‘I thought you weren’t going to tell her.’

  ‘I wasn’t, but I have to. I mean for a week at least I’ve got some money coming in and this is as close to bringing home a solution as I’m likely to get. Anyway, lying to her makes me feel ill.’

  ‘It will be more than a week. Most of those bozos are shite. If that smug bastard rated them, he wouldn’t be hiring us would he?’

  ‘Let’s hope not.’

  ‘See ya tomorrow, mate.’

  Gabriel sighed. ‘Guess so.’ He headed back toward the Tube station. He felt OK. There was a part of him that knew he shouldn’t, that he was going to work for an immoral lard-arse, writing crap for morons, and that wasn’t exactly what he’d hoped for when he first went into journalism. But he had left the house with a problem, and was going home with a solution. That was as good as it got. That and the bagels, and a doughnut, and maybe when he got to the Tube he might splash out on a couple of cans of Lilt. It had, he reflected, been a funny old day.

  Meanwhile, a blue rented Nissan had driven through Stoke Newington, Dalston, and into Shoreditch, each traffic light more annoyingly red than the last. Its driver, a pretty, if tired, art teacher who had travelled down from Norwich, was dying for a wee and listening to the one CD of Belle and sodding Sebastian for the third time. She wasn’t exactly certain she could turn left straight after Shoreditch Church. But she did it anyway. The road was empty so she didn’t slow down, she turned left and right quickly at the end. She was just beginning to realise that she didn’t really know where she was when her phone went off again, she looked at her bag, and took a left into a quiet half-lit street at the same time as she saw a cat in the road and swerved. She saw a tall bloke too, ambling along the pavement, with a paper bag in his hand.

  And then she was on the pavement too. He must have heard her, because he began to turn round. She tried to swerve but the man was too close and it was all happening too fast, and so she drove straight up Gabriel Bell’s arse. Obviously, not actually into it. No car, no matter what the posters tell you, is that compact. But it was his arse she hit first, throwing him a good ten feet into the air. He had no chance and, as it turned out, neither did she.

  She swung the car back on to the road and seemed to accelerate—hardly having the time to realise that under the circumstances this was an error—toward a block of flats on the other side of the road. The car didn’t make it to the wall; instead it wrapped itself around one of those old fashioned lampposts that don’t really bend no matter how hard you hit them. And she hit the lamppost hard. Not so hard that the airbags wouldn’t have made a very significant difference to her chances of survival, had they been working, but they weren’t. Dumb fucking luck, as the Americans say. If you believe in that sort of thing.

  It was like a war scene, albeit a small one. People came from their homes to look. At first they didn’t get too close. They didn’t trust strangers, even unconscious ones. One man went over to the car and reached in to turn the engine off. Someone else put a blanket over Gabriel. Mostly they watched and waited for the ambulance.

  There was a knock on the door of the strange room. Gabriel jumped up and opened it. What he saw was a tall, very thin man in his mid-to-late fifties wearing a flowing white cassock.

  ‘Hippies, I knew it,’ he mumbled.

  The tall man smiled a welcoming smile: head tilted slightly to the side, warm, bright-eyed, he seemed careful not to show any teeth. Gabriel bit his bottom lip and stared at the stranger who held his smile. ‘Hello,’ Gabriel said. ‘Where am I?’

  The man pressed his hands together and said, ‘My name is Christopher. If you would be so kind as to follow me, my colleague and I will explain what is happening to you.’

  ‘I had an accident.’

  ‘Yes, yes you did.’

  ‘But I’m not injured.’

  ‘It depends what you mean by “you.” ’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘The you that is here is not injured. Your essence, your spirit, your consciousness, your … .’

  ‘What about the other me? The one that got hit by the car?’

  ‘The physical you. Yes, that you is rather badly injured. That you, I’m afraid, is lying in a hospital bed with all kinds of wires coming out of it. That you is, to use your words, pretty fucked up.’

  Gabriel stared at the man, who was still smiling. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I told you. My name is Christopher. I’m here to help you. I am, well … I suppose you might call me an angel.’

  ‘I don’t think I would …’

  ‘I know this is difficult. If you just follow me, things will become clearer.’

  ‘Am I dead?’

  ‘No. I don’t believe they use up hospital beds on dead people. But you’re certainly not well. If you just follow me perhaps we can help you with that.’

  Christopher turned slowly and smiled again, waiting for him to follow. As Gabriel stepped out into the passageway, he said, ‘Is this a dream?’

  ‘No,’ Christopher said instantly.

  ‘If it was, you wouldn’t tell me.’

  ‘Bang your head against the wall.’

  ‘I already have.’

  ‘I know.’

  They walked down the white arching corridor, and Gabriel looked out of the windows. He could see that they were on the ground floor of a semi-circular two-storey building. Outside was parkland. No other buildings; no other people. The light was the light of early autumn, the sky was 4 p.m. blue, the land was flattish and, despite the lack of rain, the grass was green. Gabriel could see past the building he was in down to a calm grey lake. Beside the lake stood a thin line of trees; there was little breeze, enough sometimes to make the leaves sound alive. It looked like a plush campus, an empty common, a flat corner of the Sussex Downs. It looked like England in September without the rain or the promise of autumn.

  ‘Did the accident really happen?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Christopher, without turning round.

  ‘How did I get here?’

  Christopher ignored the question but said, ‘I saw the accident; you weren’t the only one hurt. You’re going to meet the other casualty now. This is where we will be working.’

  They stopped. Christopher opened a door and stood aside so Gabriel could enter the room. Inside were six chairs in a circle; three of them were already occupied. A chubby, vaguely orange man stood up as they entered. He introduced himself as Clemitius. He said: ‘I used to be one of God’s messengers but I got promoted. Now I’m a psychotherapist,’ and he smiled a similar smile to Christopher’s. Except that he showed his teeth, which were yellow and looked a little too big for his mouth.

  Sitting on either side of Clemitius were two women who looked as confused as Gabriel felt. They didn’t say anything. One of them was called Julie. The other was called Yvonne.

  ‘Have a seat,’ Clemitius said. ‘We’re just waiting for one more.’

  2

  Kevin Spine had never been a popular man. It wasn’t just what he did for a living—he killed people for money—after all, not that many people actually knew that about him. Nor was it the way he looked: a small, lithe man of 57, he had powdery greyish skin with a thickly lined face, and he dressed a little bit like an undertaker, but without the big hat.

  It had more to do with him being completely devoid of social skills. He wasn’t rude, because that would imply some kind of insight and accompanying set of choices. He simply had absolutely no idea how to function around other people. He got nervous around strangers and that made him sweat, which made him self-conscious, and when he was self-conscious he said the first thing that came into his head.

  He couldn’t go into his local shop any more, following an incident where he found himself stuck at the counter while the plumpish girl on the till had to do a price check. He looked at her. She looked at him. He looked out the window. She looked at him. He began to sweat. She looked at him.

  ‘Hot in here.’

  She sa
id nothing.

  ‘Phew, very hot, I’m beginning to sweat,’ he said, fanning himself theatrically. The girl stared. ‘I’m sure you’d know about sweating,’ he said.

  This garnered a response, even if it was mainly blushing,

  Kevin, immediately worried that he might have said something vaguely suggestive, tried to repair matters. ‘I mean, you’re a big girl, aren’t you? Not tall; I mean big. Not that that’s a bad thing, some men like that. Not me of course.’ He sweated more but couldn’t shut up. ‘And not that you eat to please men, that is, assuming you’re big because you eat and not because you have a gland problem or something.’

  ‘Mr Nish!’ the girl shouted. ‘Mr Nish! We’ve got a nutter at Checkout Four.’

  The only time Kevin relaxed in the presence of others was when he was killing them. Perhaps that is what drew him to the work. Or maybe it was because he was quite good at it. He spent nearly all of his time alone. It may be that if he had taken the time to get to know a few people, he might have found something to like just enough not to kill so many of the species. But he didn’t have friends; what family he had, he hadn’t seen for more than a day or two a year for twenty years, and whilst he had toyed with the idea of joining the chess club that met in the local library every Wednesday—he had a sense of chess as being a noble pastime for the modern warrior he sometimes imagined himself to be—he had finally decided against it because he worried that being with people might weaken him. And anyway, he was rubbish at chess.

  So instead he killed people for money. Indeed, at the beginning of his career, he killed people for not very much money at all, reasoning quite sensibly that if you are to make a go of the contract-killer business you need a reputation as being reliable, elusive and effective. If he had to kill one or two people on the cheap to get a reputation, then so be it.

  It ended up being three: a cheating husband, a business partner who was allegedly skimming money from a used-car dealership in Warwickshire, and a bloke who sold drugs to teenagers and made the mistake of selling some dodgy cocaine to the daughter of a retired gangster. Retired gangsters can be very touchy about ‘a little rat’s prick taking liberties.’ Kevin slit the throat of said drug dealer and hung him from a tree in a quiet country road between Hatfield and Potters Bar. Far more flamboyant than he liked, but business was business. He did it for £1,000. Now he wouldn’t get out of bed for less than £25,000.