The Angel's Cut (23 page)

Cole said, ‘Oh God what are you?' and didn't wait for an answer. He was in tears, and trembling, but he was hard. ‘You can kill me,' he said. It was a promise. A dedication. He kept repeating it as his hands slid, their blades scraping Xas's only partly unfastened trousers down around his thighs. ‘You can kill me,' Cole sobbed as he pushed one hand under Xas's pelvis to raise it and part his legs.

Xas lay still. He didn't try to protect himself from any of the man's harmless offers of harm—or homage—he wasn't able to tell which it was. It didn't matter; harm or homage, he deserved both. He let it happen. He'd think about what it meant some other time. He took the touches, the force, the knowledge. He stayed pliant in the grip of the elbow locked against his throat, and under Cole's weight and the precipitate dry then slippery pushing that couldn't split his skin or tear his muscles. Xas listened to Cole's self-annihilating chant. He took what hurt but couldn't harm him. It was better than being dropped out of a plane into the sea. It was more personal. And afterward they weren't so far apart.

They lay still on the churned ground. Their bodies were clotted with damp bark. They had dug down in their
thrashing to where nets of white mould grew in the rotting needles. The forest was hushed. Then a gust of wind came and leaves rained down from a black oak up the slope. The leaves were dry, and solid enough to click as they hit the branches and boles of other trees. But theirs was a kind of weightless solidity, and the angel hearing the sound they made thought something—something about himself, akin to the thought he'd had all those years ago in the deathly seclusion of that house by the walls of Beaune, where he'd felt time stop. Then Cole kissed his shoulder, and the thought vanished. Cole's tongue was warm and his lips were cold. Cole's hands were abraded, red and raw. He slid one under Xas's head, his palm cupping the angel's cheek, and slipped the tip of his thumb into Xas's mouth.

It was twilight when they arrived back at the hotel. They climbed the steps to the terrace, going slowly, as if they were both injured. Cole trembled whenever he paused. Xas put an arm around the man to support him indoors. He waved away a concerned bellhop.

Cole straightened and looked about him. The bellhop saw his chance and pounced, passing Cole a note. Cole handed the folded paper to Xas.

The note was from Crow. ‘
I'm sorry, Con,' it read. ‘I had to
leave with Flora. My wife's illness requires my attention
.'

Cole found his voice. ‘I'll keep Mr Crow's room for my friend here,' he told the bellhop. He walked on and Xas followed. The parquet crackled and gave and kept on reacting to the pressure of their steps long after they had passed over
it. When they were in the dingy hallway outside Cole's door Xas could still hear the floor gossiping away to itself.

Cole couldn't fit his key into the lock. Xas pulled his hand away and took the key. He opened the door and pushed the man through it. Inside Cole turned and caught him. They closed the door with their clasping bodies and leaned on it together. Cole put his mouth against Xas's ear. ‘You won't die,' he whispered. ‘You won't get sick. And you won't ask for anything.'

Xas breathed deeply, took sustenance from Cole's smell. They pressed their gritty faces together. Despite all the heat of the last hour the angel felt he was being told a story, one that began with extravagant formality, as though spoken in the proper Parisian French Sobran's friend Aurora had used. ‘
This is how the day ran—
' she would say. Xas felt he had paused in the middle of doing something practical, like digging a ditch, and was leaning on a spade listening with quizzical attention to someone better than him tell a story as though building a memorial.

‘You won't die,' Cole said again. ‘You won't fall sick. There's nothing you need that I can give you.'

‘I
would
like to lie down,' Xas said. He pushed Cole to persuade him to move. The man moved, but didn't release him. They shuffled clumsily across the room, Cole holding Xas's collar bunched in his hands, his head lowered so that the flat of his forehead was against Xas's. The back of the angel's legs hit the edge of the bed and they fell together, rolled onto the coverlet, wound together. Cole held Xas tightly, exerting so much force that his limbs trembled. He
kept talking in bursts. ‘I remember you offered to tell me how you came to be at Mines Field that night,' he said. ‘It was one of those fairytale offers, a
test
, like the crone at the well, or the talking bird in the apple tree. You were telling me to listen, you were telling me that there was something I might need to know before I did to you what I wanted to do.'

Xas said, ‘Don't talk about tests.' What Cole was saying seemed to carry some kind of infection inside it. It made him feel the way he fancied an illness might. He had never imagined there were things
he
needed to know. What needs did he have? He'd only come back to Los Angeles to humour Flora. She'd been resourceful. She deserved to have her resourcefulness rewarded. What needs did he have? He used to carry a parachute only out of respect for his fellow wing-walkers. The only thing people could do to hurt him was die. Not that they did it to hurt him. In the hangar at Mines Field he'd said to Cole, ‘Shall I tell you how I came here?', meaning, ‘Shall I tell you how I have you at an advantage?'

Cole kissed Xas's neck. He was laughing, softly, mirthfully. ‘You won't die, but you are an animal. You enjoy being an animal, a gasping, shaking, writhing, slick, greedy little animal! Is it any wonder I thought you were filthy? You made me do things. Made me
want
to. You're
all wrong
. Your skin never shows anything. I bit you and hit you, but does it show?'

Cole's breath was hot on Xas's throat. His voice was hoarse. ‘It's as if a light is licking you clean all the time. What is that?' Cole froze, thinking, then raised his head and peered, his eyes mad. ‘
Who
is that?' He seemed inquisitive, rather than distressed. He dropped his head again and kissed
Xas's shoulder. ‘I can dirty you, and you won't ever spoil. You can be kept clean forever. Think about that. Think what it must mean to me, what value I'd put on it.'

Some of this was spoken into Xas's mouth. Cole pulled back once more to look into his eyes. ‘I'm looking forward to this,' Cole said, and his own eyes were wide, looking forward with happy ferocity, rather than fear. He set his mouth against the angel's again, his lips split and swollen by their violence, and caressed Xas's undamaged mouth with light, grazing kisses. He removed Xas's shirt, and stroked the angel's chest and shoulders, till his fingers once more wandered into the hairline of white down. ‘You had wings,' Cole said. ‘You were some kind of angel. But now you're a wreck. You're salvage. You don't belong to anybody.'

There was a window open, and one of the mountain flies had come in. The fly bumbled about vaguely and alighted on Xas's hand, immaterial, as though it were already its own dried corpse. Xas shook his hand, and then slipped it under Cole's shirt. The small of Cole's back was slippery with sweat. Xas said, ‘Maybe, like a wreck, whoever raises me will own me.'

‘It's very dark, but I can still see you,' Cole said, wondering.

And it was true, there was next to no light in the room, but the flesh Cole was stroking caught what there was and gleamed like the top side of a cloud under starlight.

‘You can be the light for me when I close my door on the light,' Cole said.

‘Yes,' said Xas. ‘I can be that. A light in your sovereign darkness.'

T
hree weeks went by before Xas walked back through Flora's front door. It was early Sunday evening, and Flora was washing her smalls at her bathroom basin while listening to the wireless, a broadcast from Radio City Music Hall in New York. Millie had taught Flora to appreciate the East to West time difference, and the fact that the Coloured musicians who only got to play late in New York, were broadcast at a perfect time for listeners on the West Coast. Flora was tapping her feet to a tune when she heard the latch rattle. She called out ‘Hello?' then dried her hands and put her head around the door.

Xas was standing in front of the radio, listening to the trumpet solo. He said, ‘That's Cootie Williams.'

‘I should have known it was you. You know, most people sing out when they arrive. They say, “Hello, it's me.”'

‘Hello,' said Xas, ‘it's me.' He peered at her, searchingly.

‘Your bag and parcel are in your room.'

‘I left them here before I went to the studio,' he said. ‘I still had my key.'

‘When you left you must have had only your key, and the clothes on your back.'

He went past her, into the bedroom at the back of the house. She switched off the radio and heard him unzip his bag. He reappeared with a suit on a hanger and went into the bathroom, saying, ‘This has been folded for weeks. Steam sometimes works.' The shower went on. He crossed the hall again and emerged with a brown paper parcel, which he put into her hands.

The parcel held a white silk shawl embroidered with red roses and tangles of green thorns. He said, ‘There was a Czech woman who lived off my courtyard in Berlin, and did fine embroidery.'

‘Thank you,' Flora said. She wrapped the shawl around her.

He reached out and freed her hair, spread it on her shoulders.

‘I'm thinking of cutting it,' she said. ‘I've resisted a bob for ages, but I'm so busy these days, and it's such a lot of trouble to take care of.'

‘I can perhaps make a difference to your busyness. Not that that's a plea for your hair.' He went back to the bathroom and shut off the shower.

She raised her voice to say, ‘So, you're going to start mending, cleaning, and cooking again?'

He re-emerged. ‘Do you mind?'

Flora was surprised to find herself feeling awkward, and a little repulsed, not by anger or dislike, but as if they were
magnets that had come into oppositional contact. ‘No,' she said, then, ‘How is Cole?'

Xas raised one eyebrow, and turned his head from her.

Flora felt dismissed. She drifted away into her kitchen and began making coffee. She called out to ask him if he wanted something to eat. There was a delay in his response, not absent-minded or impolite but, she felt, one that was supposed to allow for her to revise her invitation. Then, ‘No thank you,' he said.

He must know she'd guessed that Cole had tried to kill him. Cole must have given away at least that much. Was he waiting for her to say something?

She put the workings in her percolator, then changed her mind about coffee and left the element beneath the pot unlit. ‘I take it you saw
Helen Hope
?'

‘Yes. Thank you.'

‘For the deaf children?'

‘Yes. Thank you for remembering. For making the effort. For asking me to come back.'

‘You're welcome,' she said.

‘That Helen Hope was a little like you,' Xas said.

Flora came out of her kitchen and glared at him. ‘You're kidding! That do-gooder?'

‘Up till now all Crow's heroines have been fatalistic, exhausted and asexual. I was never sure if they were his ideal woman, or a portrait of someone he loved.'

‘They're like his wife. Or his idea of her.'

‘Helen was a little like you,' he said again.

‘So you keep saying.'

‘Though you've always been fatalistic, Flora, so that's no change.'

‘That's what I let everyone think,' she said, dry. ‘Actually I have a plan. Or I'm open to the possibility of one.'

They were standing a little apart, and there was anger in their interaction, Flora felt, though she knew she was very glad to see him.
She
wasn't angry; so maybe it was him. She asked, ‘Are you angry at me?'

‘What reason would I have?'

Flora flushed and looked away. She began to babble. ‘I've put you in the wrong room. It's always damp in there. You'd be better off in the other.'

‘Millie's,' he said.

‘Yes. I just put you back where you were before. I wasn't thinking.'

‘I'll move my bag,' he said. He stood and gazed at her for a long time, then went to the bedroom where he could be heard stuffing the clothes he'd taken out of his bag back into it. He crossed the hall to the room Millie had occupied for the months they had all lived together. Flora listened to the sound of drawers slide in and out and his too-soft footfalls moving back and forth across the room. He reappeared and asked her for a bar of soap to grease the sides of a stuck drawer.

When he came back after seeing to the drawer he settled on her window seat. He said, ‘You look uncomfortable.' He pushed up the sash, then lay down and folded his hands on his chest.

‘I'm fine,' Flora snapped. ‘You're being evasive. I asked you about Cole.'

‘Cole isn't representative, is he?'

This remark puzzled Flora. It wasn't at all what she'd expected. She said, ‘In what way?'

‘He's unrepresentative of
people
. When we first met he said to me, “I'm not
people
. Not
folk
”. But at the time I only thought he was boasting about his talent.'

‘Cole's odd, through and through,' said Flora.

‘His only interest in things is in how they concern
him
. Is a thing useful to him, or is it a threat.'

‘Uh-huh,' said Flora, and then got stuck herself. An application of dry soap would be no help to her.

Xas said, ‘We talked about the trouble we had. How he couldn't figure me out and started telling himself stories in which I was poisonous and a liability. We talked. My explanation—or my demonstration of it—cleared things up some. But he didn't ask me any questions. When we were back in town and on his home territory I thought he'd feel safer. I tried then to tell him a little about myself and he just sat in silence, smirking, as if what I was saying was an imposition, or painful in some way. As if he was being very forbearing and I was being gauche. So I shut up. Then, as soon as he was comfortable again he did what he always does, he started to talk about what he was up to. His plans.'

‘Which are?'

‘He owns all the farm land around the golf course next to Mines Field. The county wants his land to build a bigger airfield. He stands to make a lot of money. He wants to buy an airline. It's on his to-do list.'

‘Oh,' said Flora, who had thought Cole's plans might have been influenced by the momentous things Xas had told him. ‘That must have been discouraging for you,' she said.

‘It was horrible. It wasn't as if he disbelieved me. It was just that the me I was revealing to him—and offering him some custodianship of—was irrelevant to the point of non-existence.'

‘What was it you told him?' Flora asked.

Xas reached with his foot for the cord of the bamboo blind. He caught it between his toes and pulled it out so that the blind rattled down, releasing all the dust caught between its slats.

Flora went to him, tapped his legs to get him to make room, and settled, supported in the curve of his body. She said, ‘Are you ever going to tell me?' She picked up his hand.

‘Cole likes to have sex with me. So, I can make it up to him. I can make up in that way for what I am. For the impenetrable, stony, irrelevance of what I am.'

‘Look at me,' Flora said. He did. His expression was a little bleak, but mostly blank. She said, ‘You just told me that Cole wasn't representative. Maybe I am. You can tell
me
anything. I have faith in you. I know you're good.'

This last remark provoked a look of pain. It was faint and fleeting, but Flora saw it. Xas made a companionable, noncommittal noise, and his voice was even lovelier without words, and when his mouth was closed. Flora stroked his silky hair. ‘Sorry,' she said. ‘But you should trust me.'

Flora thought, ‘Is he sparing me?' And she thought, ‘Am I testing him?' Finally she thought, ‘Is this any way to behave?'