Archangel

'Get her,' Alan Millet said. He'd pissed about long enough with these idiots.

'Who the bloody hell do you think you are, bloody secret police. ..?'

'Get her.'

Millet's voice slashed the shriek of the young man's laughter.

'Please yourself, squire.'

The young man went to the bedroom door, closed. He knocked lightly and when it opened an inch he whispered into the crack. Millet couldn't hear what he said against the force of the record player. The dancers now swirled around him, ignoring him. He was isolated from these people, cocooned from them, kept apart by the wire of a camp across a continent, like a membrane. What did these shits know of a man in a strict regime Correctional Labour Colony.

What did any man know? What did Alan Millet know?

The door opened. She came out, her face expectant and puzzled and her fingers fiddling with the blouse buttons.

Millet was sweating in the damp closeness of his raincoat.

He thought he might be sick. An unstubbed cigarette burned smoke into his nose. She hadn't tucked her blouse into her jeans. She was barefoot. Her hair fell half across her face.

She saw Millet. She blinked at him, confused.

'What are you doing here?'

'I had to see you.'

'What about?'

The dancers veered between them. A man with a loose beard stood behind her in the doorway, trying to play protector, his hand resting confidently on her shoulder. He looked annoyed.

'About Michael Holly.'

'You bloody promised… you promised you'd never come again… it's my birthday, you know t h a t… you're barging in on my birthday… '

'I have to talk to you about Holly.'

The young man behind Millet said, 'You're out of turn, squire.'

No dancing now. The living room and the corridor to the bedroom door were a cockpit. Conflict, anger, rising across the space between Millet and Angela.

'Quit while you're in one piece,' the man behind her said.

She brushed away the hand on her shoulder, shrugged helplessly and pushed back her hair. She came to Millet and took his hand and led him through an aisle of hostility into the kitchen. She jerked with her thumb towards the door for those in there to leave. She kicked the door shut behind the last of them.

'You'd better take your coat off. Will you drink something?'

'I won't, thank you.'

She pulled out a kitchen chair, slid it towards Millet, and perched herself on a stool.

'What must you talk to me about?'

Better if he had never come. Better if he had turned away at the door. Better if he had not seen the small reddened swell at her neck.

'I came to talk about Holly.'

'I'm not involved with Michael Holly.'

'I came to tell you what was happening about Holly, what we hope will happen.' it's not my business what happens to Michael Holly.'

'I came to say that we hope we can free him, not immediately, not tomorrow… but we hope it will be soon.'

'You haven't been listening, Mr Millet. We were divorced. Our lives have separated.'

The tiredness billowed through Millet. He started to unbutton his raincoat.

'I just thought you'd want to know.'

'You came here just to tell me that?'

'For Christ's sake…' Millet's hand hit the table. The food bowls jarred, a glass wobbled above a narrow stem. 'I thought it might mean something. I thought… I'm sorry.'

He stood up and started for the door.

She waved him back to the fchair. The tears were bright on her cheeks.

'You couldn't understand, Mr Millet.'

'I thought you'd want to know.'

'I shall never see Holly again. I didn't want that. Holly said it. Holly said I would never see him again. Listen to me, Mr Millet. Don't interrupt…'

Her head was in her hands and she spoke through the fingers that spread across her face.

'I won't interrupt.' i went to the divorce hearing. 1 don't know why I went. I suppose a woman has a tidy mind and wants to see something through, see it settled and final. I was to have gone with a friend, but she cried off in the morning, rang me just before I was due to leave the flat. I went on my own. I'd never thought he'd be there, and if I'd considered for a moment that he would be there, then I'd never have gone myself. If you didn't realize, Mr Millet, it's a pretty stark occasion. The court was just about empty, and there were only the two of us in the public bit. Two of us, and we sat at opposite ends of a great long bench, and there was a mile of cold polished wood between us. It doesn't last long, it's an express job – that way it's cheap – and we never looked at each other all the time that the bloody lawyers droned away.

I didn't take in a word that was said. It was so stupid; I was at my own divorce hearing and all I wanted to do was to run the length of that bench and hold onto him, hold him and say that it was ridiculous, that it wasn't happening to us, and that we should go home. We never looked at each other, not once. I didn't look at him, I just loved him. I loved him, Mr Millet, loved him with a mile of polished bloody wood between us. At the end, he stood up and I stood up, and he went out fast and I went slowly. I walked out of the Court, and I was a free woman and I was blubbering like a baby. I don't know why, I don't usually do it, I went across the Strand and into the first pub I saw, and I went up to the bar and ordered a double something, and I found a seat and sat down. I sat down next to Holly. Shit… can you see that, Mr Millet? I sat down next to him. He was crying. I suppose that's why there was a seat beside him in the pub, I mean, nobody wants to sit next to a grown man who is crying. And we couldn't help each other. We just sat there, and sipped our drinks, and bloody cried. And it was too l a t e… too late for both of us. He went and bought me a pork pie, a horrible thing, all fatty, and he said that he had never cried in his life before, at least not since he was a small child. He held my hand and he told me that nobody would ever see him cry again. He said that if he ever saw me again, I would make him cry. All the time that he spoke he held my hand, he squeezed it so that it hurt first and then was white and numbed. Something in him died that day, Mr Millet. It wasn't all my fault, you know. He killed it himself, but something died. Perhaps it was the will to love that died.

Perhaps it was the dependence on another living and breathing soul that died. If he comes home or if he stays in the place where he is now, still that death will be final. I could never meet him again, I could never bear to see him cry again. It's taken me three years to try to lose the memory of Holly weeping. I'll never lose it, Mr Millet. Holly will never cry again, he'll never love again… Suddenly he stood up, and his beer wasn't finished and his pie wasn't eaten and he wiped his sleeve across his face as if nobody was looking and half the pub was, and he waved to me as if we'd only known each other for half an hour and he walked out through the door. So you see, Mr Millet, Holly is none of my business.

The man that I knew is dead, dead in his tears.'

Millet stood up. i hope I haven't spoiled your party.'

Chapter 19

'What was it worth?' Mikk Laas asked. it was worth nothing,' Holly said.

'Does freedom have a rare taste?'

'For me it had nothing.'