A Madness of Angels

moved, very little of that blood could have been hers. She knelt by me and ran the torchlight in a businesslike manner over the length of me. Clearly I didn’t make a good impression. Professional fingers felt around the back of my head and turned my face this way and that, digging into me in search of injuries with a strength almost as bad as the injuries themselves, whatever they were.

“What happened to you?” she asked.

I coughed dust in answer.

“Head hurt?”

I nodded.

“How many fingers am I holding up?”

“Three.”

“Know what day it is?”

I thought about it. “No,” I said, surprised to find it was the case. “Not really.”

“Can you walk?”

“Perhaps.”

“Any demonic magic you’ve got useful right now?”

I laughed through the dryness of my throat, and regretted it as the movement of my lungs sent pain racing all the way to my elbows. “Nothing,” I whispered. “Nothing.”

She hesitated, her face draining of all feeling, becoming suddenly cold. She looked suddenly stiff by my side, eyes fixed on mine, mouth hard. Fear wriggled into my belly and started doing the cancan all across my stomach wall. She didn’t move, didn’t speak.

I croaked, “You still…” The words became tangled behind my trembling tongue. “You still – need me.”

No answer; her hands didn’t move, her face didn’t change.

“Not yet,” I whispered. “Please. Not yet.”

Her eyes darkened, then a half-smile flitted across her face. “Maybe not,” she answered. “A conversation for another time.”

I grabbed her wrist as she started to stand, and to my surprise, she didn’t try to pull free. “What about… everything else? What about the Whites?”

“Lee is dead, isn’t he?” she said, sounding surprised. “Half his goons just died with paper in their mouths – isn’t that a sign? What does anything else matter?”

“It matters to me,” I rasped.

There was a look in her eyes, taken aback; but the mask was so finely drawn and so expert, it was down in a second over whatever she felt. She said, “Come on. Let’s get you out of here,” and put an arm under my shoulder and, a bit at a time, and with surprising gentleness, helped me to my feet.

Part 3: The Madness of Angels

In which things must end.

Hospitals. Life suspended. Not our favourite place.

Oda told no one where we went, and I did not, in honesty, even know that the place existed – a private ward somewhere south of the river, where the nurses were all old, loud, and, by implication, far too experienced to tolerate any sort of strop or independent thinking from their patients. They fed us boiled vegetables and slices of overcooked meat, until Oda, to my surprise, brought us ice cream, which we ate by the tub.

The attending doctor, a small, infinitely cheerful woman who introduced herself with “Hi, I’m Dr Seah – hey, who beat you up? Jesus,” and who wore a long stethoscope that went almost down to her waist, informed me that I had a nasty cut to the back of my head but no need for stitches, several cracked ribs that necessitated my staying still while the world moved around me, a twisted ankle and various lacerations, burns and bruises, some on the inside, that only time and a good diet could heal. We were furious at the vulnerability of our own body, but we scattered wards as best we could around the bed, threatening to walk out, healed or otherwise unless they were left untouched by the cleaners, and, despite ourself, we obeyed the doctor’s orders, and stayed in bed. From our room we could see the sun rise, and watch the shadows bend to long, luminous angles as it set in the west, and the regular cycle of days and nights had never seemed more reassuring than it did then. Of Hunger, we saw and felt nothing. Perhaps we had frightened him more than we thought; we didn’t know and didn’t want to.

The only person I saw in that time confined was Oda. She would arrive every day at 11 a.m. precisely with a new pile of books and some new secret food smuggled in past the wary eye of the nurse and the cheerfully unfussed eye of the doctor (“You know, I figure… fuck it!”), and sit by my bed saying not a word unless I spoke first, until exactly 6.30 p.m., at which point she’d stand up and say, “There’s a guard downstairs who’ll watch you,” and pull on her coat.

“Shouldn’t it be ‘look after me’?”

“What?”

“Shouldn’t the guard be looking after me, rather than just watching me? Watching makes it sound like I’m a prisoner, instead of the valiant injured.”

“In that case, he’ll do both,” she said, and without further comment, swept out of the room, leaving me alone with the radio headphones and the latest three-for-two book offers from the bookshop down by the riverside market.

Days passed and they were, I realised, little better than the passing of days when I had been underground. Down in the Exchange, though time had been a sunless, timeless series of patiently ticking events, at least underground the non-today and non-tomorrow had kept me occupied. In the hospital, the day was well enough defined by the rising and setting of the sun outside my window, but there were no events to make yesterday any different from today, or tomorrow any better than the day after.

To keep ourself busy we read books, tuning down our worries and fears into the strange, artificial reaction of feelings in the face of ink and paper, until we forgot that we were doing anything so mechanical as reading; the things we saw simply were, rather than being a conglomeration of syllables. Thus, drifting through the best of the three-for-two offers, we managed for a while to forget the passing of time.

I don’t know what day it was when Oda came in, her bag of books slung under one arm and a paper bag of bread rolls and salami hidden in her jacket pocket, and I asked, “Who knows I’m here?”

“Me, Chaigneau, the men guarding you.”

“Just the Order? What about Vera?”

“What about her?”

“Shouldn’t she know?”

“The Whites are alive. Guy is dead. Half the people he employed have expired with bits of paper in their throats; everyone’s up in arms against what’s left of his men. They had to hire a lorry to get the bodies out to Essex for a burial.” She saw my face and her eyes narrowed. “You look like a wet tissue. Isn’t that what you wanted? Lee dead, his army broken?”

“A lorry of bodies?”

“Get used to the idea. Sacrifices have to be made. Besides, they were mostly the other side.”

“I didn’t mean for… I didn’t think that…”

“No, you didn’t think that, did you?” she said, slicing open a bread roll with a penknife and loading it with folded salami. “But it’s fine. You didn’t think about it and it happened and it’s a good thing it happened and frankly we should all be pleased that it did. So go on and pretend you’re guilty that people died if you must, but do it somewhere else, please? It was necessary.”

She handed me a roll with an imperious tilt of an eyebrow. I took it automatically and rubbed the thin white flour on its top between my fingers for a moment, then licked my fingers clean again before taking a careful bite. Oda watched all this and, for almost the first time since she’d sat vigil by my side, spoke without being spoken to.