A Madness of Angels

“What does he say?”

His tongue rippled across the thin blue edge of his lips, and he let out a sigh of contentment, shoulders relaxing to let more neon light spill through his clothes. “The monster is close, his feet on the tarmac and it sings to the time of his rhythm … he prays for life; so sorry, so sorry, he says, so sorry that it went like this, forgive me in the night, forgive me the past, forgive me time and forgive me… forgive me… oh, his fear is so bright! He fears the blue-eyes!”

“None of this is helping me,” I declared. “I’d be happier with points on a compass or GPS coordinates, please.”

“He fears you,” whispered the creature, curious as he studied me. “He fears the blue-eyes, and prays… so sorry… so sorry …”

“Where?!” I shouted.

“On the sea. He is at sea.”

“A boat?”

“Salt and endless dark falling, and the smell of petrol from the engine towers pumping out heat into the cold wind.”

“A ferry?”

“Would you like to hear his prayer, blue-eyes?”

“Why, what does he say?”

“He says… we be light, we be life, we be fire! We sing electric flame, we rumble underground wind, we dance heaven! Come be we and be free! Forgive me, forgive me, forgive me and have mercy in the night, make me a shadow on the wall but do not let him eat my heart, forgive me…”

“He prays to the blue electric angels?” we said, incredulous.

“And to me,” he murmured.

“And he’s on a boat?”

“Crossing the seas. Oh” – a look of sadness moved across the creature’s face – “but he’s not alone. How sad, how sad not to be alone on a night of such cold winds and hidden thoughts…”

“Who is with him?”

“It runs silently across the water’s edge…”

“Enough of this crap!” I raised the reflective edge of the plastic in warning. “Here’s me, sorcerer, pissed off and blue-eyed and not in the mood; so you tell me who is with him like you had a grasp of concise necessity; otherwise I’ll bind you to a bloody hall of bloody mirrors!”

“He doesn’t have a name that I can hear.”

“Give me your best shot at a description.”

The creature thought about it, tilting its head up towards the roof to find inspiration, while cracks of pinkish light crawled up round the edge of its neck, running through its skin. “The one who travels with him… he is hungry,” he said. “He is so very, very hungry.” A quizzical tone entered his voice. “He knows I’m here. He wonders why I watch, since he does not travel alone. He reaches out and says, what are you? Why have you come? He smiles. He says, I see blue fire in your strings, and stretches a wing and…”

“Leave!” I shouted.

“So hungry…”

“Leave right now! Piss off, be dismissed, get your arse banished out of here, get out!”

A tightening of shadows around the edge of the creature’s face? A sunken quality to the eyes, a twisting of the pinkish light around its limbs? I wasn’t about to take the risk. I picked up my stack of blank CDs, and threw them at the spirit. The orange-neon glow split and reflected off the spinning disks as they fell around it, and the lord of the lonely travellers screamed with the sound of a plane crashing from the sky, of brakes snapping on a speeding bike, of the emergency cord being pulled on the train. It raised its arms above its face while cracks of burning light spread through its skin and blazed the colour of sodium street lamps, so bright I couldn’t look, so loud the windows shook, and, its face a mask of surprise and light, it shattered into drifting pinkish shadows that skittered across the wall, oozed out under the door, and were gone.

I grabbed up my belongings, and left that hotel without looking back; and didn’t sleep until the comfort of daybreak.

In the afternoon I phoned Charlie. He said Sinclair was sleeping and wasn’t about to be woken. I said I thought Simmons had left the country and was on a ferry. He said he’d look into it. I didn’t mention the shadow. Nor did I mention the folded piece of yellow paper and the note For Matthew that I’d found at Simmons’s house. I didn’t see any need to let him know.

The yellow piece of paper advertised a play; and at this play, I assumed, would be Bakker. I took only one precaution before going: I went to Bond Street to find a jeweller.

His name was Mr Izor, he was American, but, he assured me, despite this he still had perfect taste. We wondered whether something as subjective as taste could be “perfect”, but decided not to ask further and let our eyes drift over the sparkling mass of diamonds, gold and silver watches, necklaces, rings, earrings and miscellaneous pins that were on display in a dozen cases around the plush, red-carpeted room. Even the door handles looked like they were gold, but Mr Izor assured us when he saw our stare, “Oh, Jesus, no; manager’s way too cheap.”

I told him what I wanted. He said, “OK, different, who’s the lucky girl? Or is it a lucky guy?”

I said, “I want it to sacrifice to the spirits of the wishing-water in the direst of emergencies; but should I ever meet the lucky girl or the lucky guy, I’ll be sure to come back to your shop for advice.”

“Don’t go with the diamonds; tasteless, totally common.”

“I’ll keep it in mind.”

“Guys like silver.”

“Thanks. What about my current needs?”

He found it for me, eventually. It was about the size of a two-pound coin and cost a figure that made me shudder. Sums that large, I decided, shouldn’t be paid using a credit card, let alone one that wasn’t real. For the first time since my resurrection, I felt a pang of guilt at my lifestyle, and the credit card/prostitute ad that I was using to steal the things I now loosely called my belongings. The attraction of a home to call my own was suddenly a hunger, like the need for fish and chips when hungry and having just smelt vinegar. It stuck in my mind and in my belly, a sense of emptiness.

I bought the thing anyway. We told ourself that our need out-weighed the damage, if any, to the jeweller’s business. We told ourself that all the way to the theatre.

The show was by Waterloo Bridge.

I bought a ticket for £10 from the returns queue and was assigned a seat in a box-like black theatre, two floors up beside a large red button with the alluring notice “THIS BUTTON DOES NOTHING” stuck up next to it, a label that troubled and confused us throughout almost the entire performance. I was wedged into a seat between a polite couple from Cambridge wearing a business suit and pearls respectively, and a pair of old ladies in huge padded jackets who didn’t once meet my eye and looked disapproving at every irreligious reference in the play, of which there were plenty. The play was full of torture and swearing and stories, in roughly even measures, creating a strange mixture as it floated from physical violence to battles of grammatical wit to renditions of things that should have been for children, if you took out some of the decapitation; so that by the interval we were thoroughly befuddled, and strangely entranced. We bought a chocolate ice cream then, despite the pain it caused me to pay so much for it, because it seemed to be the thing that was done, and because our stay in hospital had taught us that ice cream was a thing never to be refused, in any weather. Then we stood out on the balcony and watched the reflection of the tourist cruisers’ lights on the river, the buses on the bridge, the tracery of little blue lamps in the trees along the bank, and listened to the comments of other people with their ice creams on the terrace below.

“Well…”

“… yes…”