Gabriel's Angel

by Mark A Radcliffe

  What went through his mind as he hit the water? Was it, ‘Shit, I can’t swim?’ Was it, ‘I need to grab the jetty before I sink too deep?’

  No, it was—quite unwisely under the circumstances—‘I mustn’t let go of the space where my ball used to be, in case the water is dirty and I get an infection.’

  3

  Anthony Foster was lying naked on a roof terrace in the small Spanish city of Almunecar with his equally naked girlfriend, practising—or at least pretending to practise—his Spanish.

  Tash was lying on her stomach. Her long, tanned body and perfectly shaped bottom weren’t helping Anthony’s translation attempts. ‘Estan listos para pedir?’

  ‘Oh I know that: pedir is to ask for … “Are you ready to order?” ’ He reached out and stroked the top of her thigh. ‘Can I just say, “Si, I am more than ready.” ’

  Tash smiled. ‘Yes you can say it, but only in Español, por favor. Try this: ‘Tienen una reservacion?’

  Anthony rolled off his towel and onto Tash. ‘I need a reservation now?’

  ‘We won’t learn this language by osmosis, you know.’

  He kissed her on the end of the nose. The phone rang. ‘How do you do that?’ He smiled, kissed her again and moved to roll off her.

  She smiled, lowered her hand to his cock, and said: ‘Estoy ocupada.’ Anthony winced slightly but got up anyway, saying in a really poor Schwarzenegger voice, ‘I’ll be back.’

  Something made Tash turn toward the open door that led into the flat. She saw Anthony slowly buckle downward, holding the phone to his ear. It was as if the bottom of his spine were melting as he folded onto the arm of the sofa and paled. The soft, tanned skin of his face shrank in the light. His thick hair, the hair of a young man, seemed to grow wiry and draw back from his face. She watched as the life left him and he became old. So old he could barely hold the phone. And then as whatever he was being told took hold, he became young again, childlike, crying without breathing, trying to speak, trying to shout, but nothing coming out. Like a little boy whose puppy had been run over. Like a child lost and alone in the woods. Like a young man being told that his mother had been murdered.

  4

  Kevin Spine stood beside the double bed. He stared at the wood-framed ‘Van Gogh self-portrait’ print above the bed and fingered the crisp, pale-blue duvet. He sighed, straightened his back, and looked into the full-length mirror on the wardrobe door. He was wearing the same black suit and white shirt that he had been wearing when he virtually castrated himself on the banks of the Thames. Still, he was dry and bloodstain free, and given the circumstances, remarkably pain free as well.

  He was in what appeared to be a motel, with en-suite bathroom, a small television, and a saucer full of mints. He picked up the remote control and turned the TV on: it was showing an episode of ‘Porridge’. He flicked through the channels: ‘Friends,’ ‘The Young Ones,’ ‘Brideshead Revisited,’ another episode of ‘Porridge,’ and finally ‘The Tweenies.’ There was no text button, no news, nothing to tell him the date.

  He pulled back the patterned green curtain and looked outside. Wherever he was, it wasn’t London. He was on the second floor of what appeared to be a white-walled, curving two-storey building that stretched for maybe 150 metres and formed a large, incomplete circle. Opposite his window, a path led down to a lake surrounded by trees. The sky was remarkably clear, the grass exceptionally green, and for a moment he thought he was dreaming. He began to wonder, among other things, who had brought him here and why. And where was ‘here’ and ‘why doesn’t my groin ache?’ He glanced down at the bedside table and saw a small card with his name on it. He picked it up and turned it over. It read: ‘This is a safe place.’

  He walked to the door. Locked. How long had he been here? He looked at himself in the mirror; he was clean-shaven but that didn’t necessarily mean anything. It was obvious that whoever had brought him here must have patched him up and dried his clothes. They might also have shaved him. If he was kept clean-shaven there would be no way of knowing how long he had been unconscious. That might be a way of disorienting a prisoner, he thought.

  However, nobody ever heard of anyone trimming someone else’s nose hair, and Kevin knew his own nose hair. He stood in front of the mirror, pushed his nose upwards, and stared into his nostrils. There were no untoward or overgrown nose hairs. There was, however, a card tucked behind the top of the mirror. He took it out.

  ‘Don’t do that; it’s not nice.’

  Kevin was not a man given to rumination; he believed himself to be a man of action, and he had the video collection to prove it. If he found himself at any time in his life requiring contact with the world, he watched a video. Something with Jean Claude Van Damme or Chuck Norris tended to do it for him. Single-minded men of few words and fewer thoughts. Lone men; armed men. Violent, inarticulate men. But given that there were no videos currently available to him, he was forced to ask himself what the bejesus was going on. He sat on the bed and saw another card on the pillow.

  It said: ‘Someone will be along shortly to help you understand. Try to relax, and know this: you are closer to God than you ever imagined you could be. Take comfort from that.’

  ‘Comfort my arse,’ he muttered and went into the bathroom. He pulled down his trousers and pants to examine his genitalia. Not only was it all there, it was all in the right place. There were no dressings or scars. Kevin began to get nervous. More nervous than any man discovering he still had genitals should. Had he been dreaming? Was he dreaming now? He stopped staring at his willy and glanced up at the basin. On its corner was another card. He hopped over and picked it up:

  ‘You have some odd habits. Someone will be along shortly and everything will become clear. Now leave yourself alone, for goodness sake.’

  There was a knock at the door. Kevin answered quickly. He even smiled and said, ‘I’ve been expecting you.’

  The man standing there looked like a kindly uncle. The kind of man who had worked in an office for thirty years and smiled at his own confusion as the mores, language, and habits of those around him caught up with him and passed him by. Had he been a man in an office, he would have been in charge of the tea-and-biscuit fund. He would be polite and dependable, recognised by those around him mostly for his height, or rather his usefulness in getting things from on top of other things. Not for his gentle decency, nor his innate tolerance, nor his capacity to take small pleasure in the small pleasures of others. He would have been the tall man who smelled just a tiny bit of lavender.

  ‘Please, follow me,’ Christopher said softly. ‘You must be feeling a little confused. We’re here to help you with that.’

  ‘Why do you think I’m confused?’ asked Kevin as they walked along the corridor.

  ‘Because most people are when they come here. One moment you are going about your everyday business—in your case killing someone and castrating yourself as you fall into the Thames. The next minute you are here, seemingly healthy.’

  ‘You shouldn’t underestimate everyone,’ said Kevin.

  Christopher stopped and looked at him. ‘Do you know where you are?’

  Kevin looked out of the window. ‘I might. I’m not telling you.’

  ‘I don’t think you do know, Kevin, actually.’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘You don’t.’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘So tell me then.’ Christopher could feel his serenity slipping.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Because you don’t know.’

  ‘I do know. This is not unlike something I saw on the New Avengers once.’

  And Christopher—an angel who, had he been a man, would not have argued with other men—thought to himself, You’re an angel. And a therapist. You have lived through the ages and watched with a bemused detachment as people have run and jumped and warred and fallen. You are old, uninvolved. Unflappable.

  And then: This man killed people for money and we’re not actually in the therapy room yet. Someti
mes he knew that all the insight in the world didn’t make a blind bit of difference.

  ‘Right,’ Christopher said to Kevin. ‘So you know that you are dead and that this is a therapeutic community just beneath heaven where you will undergo group counselling with other dead or near-dead people in order to establish where you will spend eternity. You know that, do you? You worked that out by your close examination of your genitalia and nose hair, by watching a bit of ‘Rising Damp’ and from eating the complimentary mints, did you? Did you?’

  Kevin stared at him. His hand slipped down toward his groin. The tall thin man in front of him was shaking.

  ‘Dead?’

  ‘Yes!’ Christopher softened a little. ‘I’m afraid so, but all is not lost. Please follow me.’

  ‘I’m dead … and there is a God?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Fuck!’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But I’m not in hell?’ Kevin thought he was going to be sick. He thought, This must be a dream. He pinched his thigh as hard as he could. It really hurt.

  Christopher didn’t reply; he just turned and walked toward the therapy room. Naturally, Kevin followed.

  ‘You know what I do … what I did for a living?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And …?’

  Christopher stopped and inevitably Kevin stopped with him. They were standing in what amounted to a curved corridor. Outside the sun was shining; Kevin thought he could hear birdsong. The grass was very green, the trees very straight, and the walls of the corridor were spotless and white. And so was the floor. Christopher watched Kevin as he looked down. He thought, You have never seen such a spotless white floor in your life, Kevin.

  ‘Look, those old commandments, the ‘Thou shalt not kills’ and ‘Thou shalt not covets’—all that—they weren’t doing the trick. God is interested in the inner you, your salvation in spite of what you do or did. God believes in resolving difficulties rather than punishing evil these days.’

  Angels, by tradition, watch and sometimes guard. They have been known to deliver messages and to fight the soldiers of darkness when necessary, but theirs has, for all the excitement, been a fundamentally simple existence, their being characterised by a clarity around Good and Bad that other people can only dream about.

  It was that sense of deep-felt confusion among people that played on the mind of God. And so he sent the ever-faithful Peter to set up a project that reflected the complexities of modern times. Pre-death therapy. A project that didn’t judge but rather enquired as to what brings a person to wherever they are and offers them a chance, albeit a very slim chance, to do something about it. To make themselves better. Most importantly, and this is perhaps to what Peter clung, it was an endeavour that sought to heal.

  Many of the angels who were called upon to make this experiment work had their doubts. They had worked for God for a very long time. They may have muttered things like, ‘If it ain’t broke …’ But Peter said that as people evolved, so should heaven. He might not have believed it, but he said it nonetheless, and that is what counts. He added that the choices people make are less clear morally than they once were, that while the commandments remain ‘a useful if not fully comprehensive guide,’ they don’t always legislate for the many confusing influences people encounter.

  God is gentle and God is good, Peter said. He’s not going to get all Old Testament on the world just because it creates false gods and calls them celebrities or sometimes, quite bizarrely, role models. Peter said that his was not an angry God, nor a moping one. His was an inventive God, a responsive God—a God capable of trying things that might surprise even his most devout followers.

  Peter interviewed all the angels, and those selected received training. Many received therapy of their own, up to three times a week in some cases.

  Christopher found it very hard to know what to talk about. He thought of the process as a job interview. It didn’t matter that he didn’t particularly want the job. It only mattered that he did his best. So he was pleased when Peter told him he was ‘a grounded and well-focussed angel, one who would benefit this enterprise,’ although he wasn’t terribly sure it was a compliment.

  He was less moved when he was told that he retained an ‘admirable moral clarity’. He was an angel. That was surely like saying he had wings.

  Christopher opened the door to the therapy room and Kevin, who was now quite pale, stepped inside. There he saw four people, including Yvonne Foster who stared at him in horror.

  ‘What the …?’ Slowly Yvonne stood up.

  Kevin looked at her and his normally grey skin turned almost translucent. Colour didn’t so much fade from him as evacuate. The fingers on both hands started to twitch, but the rest of him froze. His stillness was drawn not from the school of cold-blooded killers of which he had always liked to consider himself a graduate, but rather the fact that his brain had pretty much closed down. He was staring at one of his victims. Yvonne was wearing the same blue business suit she had had on when Kevin had bludgeoned her to death. The same white silk blouse. Her hair was impeccable. Blonde with a tinge of white at the sides, short, perfectly set. If he had ever imagined a Judgment Day it would probably have looked like this. But he hadn’t. He had killed her. And she was staring at him. And standing up. And she looked really angry.

  He pinched himself but didn’t wake up. He raised his right fist and hit himself on the head hard. It really hurt.

  ‘That man attacked me! He … killed me?’ said Yvonne, half accusing and half asking.

  ‘Yes,’ said a short, stout man with a round, slightly orange face, and thin sandy hair. ‘So I understand.’

  Yvonne took a step forward.

  ‘Please sit down, Yvonne. I assure you, you are perfectly safe here.’

  ‘Yes, but he isn’t,’ she said.

  Clemitius raised his hand. However, he expected his actions to carry a weight his appearance couldn’t quite carry off. What authority he had came from his old eyes with the large bags under them, and of course the fact that he was an angel in a cassock, a robe that did for angels what uniforms do for everyone. ‘There can be no violence here,’ he said. ‘Violence is not tolerated, no matter what. It is forbidden. If you strike anyone here, you will be ritually removed. This will be a safe place. For everyone. Regardless of anything that went before. Do not doubt this rule.’

  He paused and looked around the room. Everyone was looking at him. He drank in the moment then added, with something approaching a smile: ‘Consider it God’s law.’

  Clemitius once said to Christopher, when they were first assigned to work together, that a therapeutic community is as close to heaven as a person can get without dying. As Christopher thought when he said it, that comment said more about him than it did about anything else. Christopher and Clemitius were a match made in heaven. Clemitius believed absolutely in what he had been charged to do; he relished the therapy he had been offered. It was probably the attention. He arrived early and devoured it. Waiting for a question, a reflection, an insight from the poor sap charged with his treatment, he talked and talked about whatever came into his head. When he wasn’t being treated he read; he read everything he could about therapy. And he became a believer. Devout. He had been an angel for thousands of years. Nobody had ever asked him very much about himself before.

  Christopher, on the other hand, had found it a bit embarrassing. Clemitius said Christopher was a born host. He said it with disdain, but Christopher took it as a compliment.

  After Clemitius had handed down God’s law, the group sat in silence for a few moments. Christopher was going to speak, to comfort. It was what he thought a host should do. He was going to say something about how surprised they must feel to be here, or perhaps even how sorry he was to see them all here, when he was pretty certain they would rather be somewhere else but—and it may have been that he could sense Christopher’s need to offer something like comfort—Clemitius spoke first.

  ‘Well, I’d like to welcome
all of you here to what must seem a very confusing place. I’m sure that you would like to know exactly where you are and what you are doing here, and we will try to help you with that now. All of you are, technically speaking, either dead—sorry for your loss—or nearly dead, in which case we wish you a full recovery or an end to your pain, whatever seems most appropriate. You, Gabriel and Julie, your bodies are in a hospital in Central London, coincidentally quite close to each other I understand?’

  He looked at Christopher, who nodded and said, ‘Almost as close as you are to each other here.’

  ‘Quite,’ said Clemitius. ‘Kevin, your body was discovered on the embankment by a woman out jogging early this morning.’

  ‘I’m quite embarrassed to hear that,’ stammered Kevin.

  ‘Yes,’ said Clemitius. ‘Well, anyway, the important thing is you are all here. Yvonne, as you probably know, you were murdered earlier today by Kevin. Brutal and shocking as that undoubtedly was, you are here now and I hope that somehow you can find it within yourself to work with us toward a good place.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Yvonne said. ‘And where, exactly, is “here”?’

  ‘This is the place where you find out where you are going to spend eternity.’

  ‘So there is a hell?’ said Kevin.

  ‘ Yes,’ said Clemitius.

  ‘Shit,’ said Kevin quietly.