The Angel's Cut (14 page)

‘You can test me if you want to, Cole, but you'll have to trust me, and be patient about the results.'

‘I'll think about it. I'd better not make the ten thousand a whole sum or my manager will say, “This doesn't look like a total of several miscellaneous items.” So we'll say nine thousand and change.' He inclined toward Xas and rubbed his hands together. He took a careful look out into the garden to check that no one could see, then kissed Xas again—beginning the kiss proprietary but finishing with the pressure of true possession. He broke off and breathed at Xas, ‘You're
my
miscellaneous.'

O
n a dank, late January evening, Xas was on his way back to Flora's. It was after dark, and foggy when he got off the trolley at the stop along the Venice shore. He left the beach by an alley between a pool hall and a chop suey house, then passed the little lean-to where a man worked mending sewing machines, and another shack that had a butter churn standing by its door—no one ever seemed to be home there. He reached the start of the sandhills.

The track from the shore to Flora's back gate was fringed by orange poppies, their bells pinched closed in the damp air. In the dips by the path the tangles of bushes were reefs where fog clung like seaweed. When Xas passed a flat stretch of rushes and wet sod, he could hear a soft quacking conversation, but couldn't see the ducks. He found the stile that took him over a fence, where the track went along for a while beside a brackish waterway. Xas crossed the water balancing on a sewer pipe. The pipe's
rusting iron was wrapped in tarred cloth, and sticky beneath his boot soles.

On the other side the track continued along by a stand of low, matted live oak. When the trees came to an end, Xas was out in the open, surrounded by blind white mist, with no landmarks in view, only the track leading him on. Up and down it went, a course of cold sand. The fog had set its surface, but the sand was dry underneath and Xas's footprints showed behind him as white splashes on the dark grey path.

Xas didn't hear the archangel coming, for his wings were silent, mist lubricating each feather. The archangel dropped down out of the air as stealthy as an owl. He knocked Xas over and pinned him on the ground.

‘Ha!' he breathed, a satisfied predatory noise, then added, offhand, ‘I wasn't actually looking for you.'

‘Then perhaps you don't need to sit on me,' Xas said.

Lucifer extended one thin finger of a wing hand and scratched Xas's neck. Xas felt the archangel's nail tear his skin. He felt the bright, frightening pain of damage—something he'd not experienced for a very long time—not since he'd woken up in the Soldiers' Gallery of Château Vully to find his wings had been cut off.

Lucifer put his mouth by Xas's ear and said, ‘He feels that,' as solemnly, savagely happy as a tiger delaying his kill by making sport of his prey.

Xas wasn't sure whether Lucifer was talking to God about him, or to him about God.

When—some twenty-five hundred years before—God and Lucifer had signed him, and made their treaty, they had
agreed to split both the price and benefits of his freedom, which is to say that Lucifer got the benefits and God the price. ‘
Xas can go freely
,' the treaty said. ‘
Lucifer shall have his
pleasures and God his pains
.' Xas had very little idea why they chose to tie themselves to him in that way, though perhaps it was to keep each other honest, for, if Lucifer had the pleasures of his freedom then Lucifer wouldn't interfere with him, and if God shared his pains, then God would protect him. Xas had believed that was the idea—until the day he lost his wings. (The treaty had a third clause:
Only
when Xas is with Lucifer will Lucifer be with God
. But Xas didn't like to think about that.)

The archangel abruptly rolled over onto his back and lifted Xas above him, holding the angel by throat, wrists and ankles. As Lucifer went over, Xas heard his wings hiss and clatter, his plaits and pearls sliding from his neck and shoulders. He looked down at the terrible scars on Lucifer's chest, partly hidden by the gleaming ropes of his jewels and hair. Xas noticed that the archangel had a residue of salt in his ears, and salt on his bare arms. Xas knew, of course, that Lucifer had come from Hell to earth through the salt dome in Turkey, Hell's only gate. Then Xas was immersed in the cloud of the archangel's bodily perfume—a resinous scent of apple, ozone, and lightning—and he lost all the strength in his muscles. He found that he couldn't take his eyes off the glassy points of the archangel's canine teeth, just visible between his relaxed lips.

There is nothing more appalling and paralysing in nature than an archangel. Archangels have no natural enemies. Xas
knew that this archangel wasn't the most dangerous, wasn't the great champion of Heaven—but he was brilliant, and princely, and playful, and full of the malice of misery.

Lucifer looked at Xas with distaste. He said, ‘What
are
you wearing?' Then, ‘You smell,' then, ‘What do you smell of?' Thoughtful.

‘Cologne,' Xas said. He'd been with Cole, and hadn't washed. He smelled of Cole, of sweat, cologne, and the mousy smell of Cole's infection.

Lucifer said, ‘Listen,' then was quiet as though they were both supposed to be listening to God.

‘No,' Xas said, refusing again.

‘
No
,' Lucifer mimicked, and moved the angel back and forth above him as fathers fly their babies. Xas had always liked the look of that. He knew that parents only did it to make their babies laugh and—instinctively—to rock their infants' senses of space, motion and position into health and capability. But to him it had always looked as if those parents were saying to Heaven: ‘
I hold this happiness between
me and You
,' and, if they were, then that was instinct too, the instinct humans must have, despite all their ideas about a just and loving God, to preserve themselves from that God's unloving love of perfection, His exacting beneficence.

‘Why would I be looking for you,' Lucifer said, ‘when I have nothing to say to God?' He repeated, in exactly the same tone, ‘I have nothing to say to You,' this time addressing God. He pushed himself up off the ground using one set of wings. The sand billowed up around them. He landed on his feet and let go his multiple grip, keeping hold
of Xas with only the hand on one top wing. He stretched his wing high over his head so that Xas dangled by one ankle.

Xas's jacket flopped over his head, and Lucifer shook him till coins dropped out of his pockets.

Xas had had enough. He contracted his stomach muscles, bent his spine, whipped up and grabbed the hand clamped to his ankle. He closed his teeth on it. He bit down till he broke the downy skin, and the sinew in the archangel's hand creaked, and the archangel's blood spilled into his mouth. Xas sank his teeth into Lucifer—and learned something new.

Archangels may have no natural enemies but, it turned out, Lucifer had a remarkable array of defences. There was no reason—no divine design evident in the fact that Xas's spit on the permeable surfaces of human mucosa—men's mouths, women's mouths and vulvas—could make men stiff and responsive, and women wet and responsive. Why would God have made an angel like that? And why would God have made the blood of an archangel, who had no natural enemies, so toxic?

Xas's mouth began to burn, then his vision blurred and he became breathless. He opened his teeth and let go. The muscles of his jaw and neck stiffened, then locked in a spasm. Foam filled his mouth and nose and burst from them.

Lucifer dropped him.

Xas thrashed about on the ground. The half moons of his own eye sockets eclipsed his vision, then he saw red, and a roaring filled his head.

It was Millie who found him. She was coming home from the Villa Venice, making her way in the pre-dawn dark. She'd nearly reached Flora's back gate when a noise made her stop. She couldn't make any sense of the soft scuffles and thumps or the sound of breath bubbling through froth. Whatever it was that was making the strange noises lay in a hollow before the last rise in the track that branched off the main way and terminated at Flora's gate. The hollow was shadowy and, Millie later said, all she could make out was motion, a frenzied thrashing that seemed to form a knot of clearer air in the mist there. Whatever it was, Millie knew she'd have to go past it in order to get to the house.

She edged down the hill, shading her eyes from the streaks of light shining through the gaps between the plank palings of the fence. (Flora, knowing that both Millie and Xas came the back way, had left the light on in the kitchen.) A clot of kicked-up sand hit her leg and she broke into a run, jumped over the place and scrambled up the slope. At the fence she stopped and looked back. In the lines of light shining between the palings she saw that was it Xas. It was at that moment Millie heard the sound of one of her own records, Duke Ellington's ‘Black Beauty'. Flora was at home. Millie hauled open the gate and ran to the house.

Flora brought a blanket and they threw it over Xas and pinned his flailing limbs by lying on him. ‘No, let me do it,' said Millie, who was worried about Flora's scars.

‘I'm down here now. Did you know he had fits, Millie?'

Millie shook her head.

Flora, who was close to Xas's face, saw that the foam streaming from his nose and mouth was tinged pink—but a little less so than the smears on his hair or the puddle of foam around his head. She hoped that the blood was only from a bitten tongue, and that the bleeding was easing. The foam gave off a fiery resinous perfume. ‘Has he poisoned himself?' Flora said.

Millie looked about for a bottle or a pill box. ‘Maybe he's snake-bit,' she said.

‘I can't help you carry him,' said Flora. ‘Sorry.'

‘Once he's quieter we can roll him onto the blanket and drag him in,' said Millie.

‘Jesus—what is that?' said Flora. The resinous smell alone made her heart pound and her mouth fill with metallic saliva. It wasn't unpleasant, but somehow terribly alarming.

There were pauses now between Xas's spasms. Millie let go one of his hands to retrieve a dollar note that was sticking out from a flattened spray of lupin. ‘There's money all over the place,' she said.

Flora touched Xas's face, felt the wet foam, then snatched back her hand and wiped it on her shirt. Her fingers throbbed as though she had brushed against the ruffled stingers trailing below the sail of a Portuguese Man-of-War. She told herself that the sensation must be imaginary, but her fingers continued to smart.

Millie got off Xas and helped Flora up. ‘He's still breathing,' she said, and Flora supposed that her friend had been thinking the same thing she had, that Xas might
succumb completely to whatever this was. Millie continued, ‘My cousin was bitten by a rattler. But it wasn't like this.' She caught up the blanket and spread it beside Xas's trembling form. ‘Though I suppose this might be the beginning of the paralysis,' she said, uncertain.

‘We need a doctor. Let's get him to my car.' Flora gave Millie a shove. ‘You roll him onto the blanket. I'm sure I can help you drag him.'

Millie did as she was told, while Flora went on, speaking faster all the time. ‘He can't have meant to kill himself. He just got out another big stack of library books. And he just restocked my cupboards.'

Millie said, ‘Restocking your cupboards might be his way of taking care of you, seeing to you before going out into the wasteland to drink lye.'

‘This isn't lye.'

‘Poison. You know what I mean.' Millie added, ‘I knew a guy who drank lye. It burned his insides out.'

The women each took a corner of the blanket and pulled Xas's now inert body slowly up the slope to the gate, through it, across the lawn and into the light of the spider web encrusted lamp above Flora's back door. There Millie crouched and searched Xas's legs for a bite, for puncture marks in the fabric of his trousers.

‘He has a gash on his cheek,' Flora said, and then realised that she'd never seen a scratch on him, or a bruise, or any kind of blemish.

‘There is a mark on his ankle too,' Millie reported. ‘Like a rope burn, as if he's been tied.'

‘His wrists are all right,' Flora said. ‘There's no marks of any kind on them.'

‘So it's not bloody Cole,' Millie said.

Flora started to laugh. She laughed at Millie's vehemence, and because they both knew what she meant. And she laughed in a kind of wry distress because she understood that all this time she had been expecting to see signs on her friend's body of Conrad Cole's passionate ill-use.

Millie carefully turned Xas's head. She slipped her fingers into his mouth to check his tongue.

‘Careful.' Flora didn't know how to warn her friend about the foam.

Millie gingerly pushed two fingers and a thumb between Xas's teeth. His cheeks stretched as Millie's fingers probed his mouth. It seemed that Millie wasn't stung, as Flora had been, though she did say, ‘This frothy stuff tickles like sodium bicarb.'

Flora had a thought then that maybe Xas was faking. Perhaps he'd staged all this. Maybe this was all-of-a-piece with his odd habitual altruism, his strange stories, his manic busyness. With considerable difficulty, Flora got down on her knees. Millie put out a hand to help, then reminded, ‘We should get him to a doctor.'

Flora slapped Xas hard across one wet cheek. The moisture had an oily, acidic feel to it, but stung her palm no more now than the slap itself did. ‘Stop it,' Flora whispered, and slapped him again, backhand this time.

‘Okay. Enough,' Millie said. ‘You're reminding me of a teacher I had who was always slapping me when I couldn't stop coughing. He can't help it, you know.'

‘He's putting it on.' Flora was determined. She hit him again.

He moaned. It was an enormously satisfying sound and, hearing it, Flora felt masterful, faintly amorous and, for an instant, completely free of pain. It was as though by doing violence to him she was passing on her chronic pain, handing it up to some vast, engulfing, anodyne being. She had an image of herself as a child in church, sitting beside her grandmother, exempt from everything but keeping still, taking the collection plate from a person at the head of the pew and passing it on to Grandma without having to put anything in it herself. She started to cry. She sobbed, ‘Stop faking,' and punctuated it with another slap.