The Angel's Cut (6 page)

‘I've jumped too,' the man said. ‘A parachute gives you unimpeded views. But it's only a slow fall, not flight. To fly, to depend on the air without an engine, I got near to that only once. It was the very first time I went up, when I was only four. This was how it happened. My father and I were out driving when we saw some men down on one of the flat flood meadows by the river. They had a big man-kite up in the air. I hadn't yet seen an airplane—this was only a few years after Kitty Hawk. Daddy drove us down to have a look and the men asked if I wanted to sit on the kite. They winched it down. It came down rock steady. There was a strong, even wind blowing, with no gusts. I wanted to try going up, but didn't think Daddy would let me. But he did—though he made me promise it would never get back to Mama. The men lifted me up into the kite—there was a seat on it—and let out the line again. I guess I was only fifteen feet up at most, but there was nothing underneath me. A car with good suspension can bounce you about, but this was different. I was being buffeted and jostled very
softly
. It wasn't like rocking in turbulence in a plane. In a plane you feel you're the pivot. Either you, or the engine. And it wasn't like a balloon or a dirigible. I've never felt anything like that kite. And I remember looking down on Daddy and the other men, all grinning like crazy. And then I
saw our shadow—my shadow inside the kite's—and I remember thinking how funny. How funny that we weren't attached at the feet, me and my shadow. Then Daddy put his arms up for me and the men fetched me down again.' At the end of the story the man put up his arms, mimicking his father's suppressed anxiety at their separation. ‘Daddy was an old man then; he and I never had much fun together, but we had one or two secrets, about the things he let me do without our having to campaign at Mama. Mama was one of those women who know everything is dangerous.'

Things at night were no less visible than they were in the daylight to the angel, only coloured differently, a world of many shades of darkness from luminous to inky. The man's eyes, his thick eyelashes, his mouth, all were variations on darkness. Xas could see him clearly, but he still seemed obscure—obscure and unfathomable. Xas was closer to the man than he'd been to almost anyone in a long while; close enough to smell the ketones on his breath and know that he'd gone without food for too long. It wasn't a pleasant smell, but it was very human and, blowing in Xas's face, this scent, and faintly moist breath, seemed as powerful in their way as the ram air into which he used to lean when he was wing-walking.

The man added, ‘Mama was always a stickler for neatness. She would dress me, then ask me to check myself in the mirror, where I'd find myself looking the way she wanted me to look, not that I cared then—I was too young to care. But my reflection never impressed me as
me
. When I went up in the man-kite I recognised myself by my shadow.'

Xas inhaled sharply. He felt breathless. He said, in wonder, ‘Is that what
people
feel on first leaving the ground? They feel it too? A separation from their shadow?' This was a revelation.

‘I'm not
people
,' the man said. ‘Not
folk
. I have no idea what folk feel.' He had kept one arm up after miming his father's eagerness to hold him. He had hooked a finger into the cord of the lamp. Now he gave it a tug, and the light went on.

Xas and he looked at one another.

Xas felt his own face softening with concentration. Everything receded from him but the face before him, in which he read recognition, not of
himself
, but of the mutuality of what was happening.

Something was happening. The man looked wondering and resigned. Time slowed, then came to a stop. It stood still so that they could both look at it. They looked into each other's eyes and saw time. Or at least, Xas did. He saw time together, and time apart.

Then the man opened his mouth and pressed the tip of his tongue to the back of his top teeth and thrust his lower jaw out a little. It was the expression of someone who is conscious of some action he must perform with his mouth—but who can't decide what. He chose speech. ‘This airfield belongs to the county. So do the roads around it. But the surrounding farmland—much of that belongs to me now. I've been buying it up. I'm going to buy a small airline and fly it out of here.'

Xas laughed. ‘Why tell me that?'

‘You look important,' the man said. ‘There's something important about you.' He took a step closer.

Xas could feel breath stirring the hair at his hairline.

The man pulled a face, then plucked at the grubby collar of Xas's borrowed flying togs.

Xas realised that he felt encumbered, and wanted out of those togs, to be free of their thick legs and stuffed underarms. He felt like a pantomime bear.

The man laughed, in a poorly-tuned, unpractised way. ‘All right,' he said, ‘let's see what you have in there. Let's see who you are.' And he began to tackle the clasps of the togs.

Xas laughed too, surprised. Then they were both laughing and wrestling with the top layer of Xas's clothing, till the flight coveralls were off his arms and flapping around his waist. The man took Xas by his shoulders and appraised his leather jacket. Then he let go and unbuttoned the top of his own overalls. He was wearing a white dress shirt, without a tie. He tapped the shirt's starched front, then waved a hand at a black jacket that was hung to cover a telephone on the wall by the door. Xas recognised the thing as a phone because its receiver dangled out from the bottom of the jacket, trumpet down and off the hook. ‘I was supposed to be at a fancy send-off tonight. My own. I was going to Europe with Miss Kay North.' He named a famous actress, and Xas knew that the man was still trying to impress him. ‘We were to sail on the
Lake Werner
.'

‘You missed your boat,' Xas said.

‘I've been to Europe already.'

Xas wondered whether the famous actress had embarked alone, or would storm in any minute now to slap this man's face and throw a ring at him. Xas could see her doing that, having seen her do it in a movie.

‘Tell me why you're here again?' the man asked. ‘Now that we've finished horsing around.' He regarded Xas from under the fringes of his eyelashes.

‘I wasn't aware we had finished. And does it matter why I'm here?' Xas said. ‘Let's say we missed the same boat. We're
not in
the same boat.'

‘Are we in the water together then?' the man asked. Then he said, ‘We'd better hold tight.' He didn't say it in a bold or insinuating way—he simply said it. Then he put his arms around Xas. His face was young, excitable, domineering. ‘You like to play,' he said. ‘I can tell you like to play. You have a dangerous look. It would be better if you were famous. If you were famous you'd be careful to be careful. As it is I'm going to have to make you make promises.'

‘
Make
me make promises?' Xas was amused. He moved his arms up so that he was holding on too—feeling skin, warm under the linen dress shirt. ‘Shall I tell you again how I came to be here?'

‘I can wait.' The man moved his mouth very gradually toward Xas's. Their eyes locked till the man's gaze lost its focus and Xas was left staring into the mysterious animal darkness inside his pupils. The man put his lips against Xas's, just rested them there, motionless, his starved breath blowing into the angel's mouth. Then his lips moved. ‘But I
can't wait,' he said. The tip of his tongue touched Xas's and they were kissing.

Xas put everything into the kiss. He said
Yes
in his mind, in his native language—but not aloud, not to God. He had a memory then, of flying under thick cloud in the dark of the moon, deviating back and forth, winding to follow the smell of river water, a smell like a wavering green curtain thousands of feet up in the air. This remembered river smell charmed Xas to move away onto a course that wasn't his own. He was kissing, he'd let go of his bearings, bewitched by something both behind and before the kiss, the mouth that bit through the icy oxygen tube, and the story of a boy who first recognised himself from the air, in his discrete shadow. ‘I will follow this,' Xas thought, in rapture, ‘I will follow this.'

The moment that the stuff in the angel's saliva hit his nervous system the man gasped and his whole body hardened and his lips flooded with heat. There was no distance between them then, for all their differences.

The lamp was swinging, then the fuse in its bulb broke with a sharp musical noise, and the shade clattered. The ground was soft, and there were too many confounded clothes, big buttons and small, and a cummerbund with hooks and eyes hidden in its pleats.

Xas had forgotten what it was like to take hold of someone avid, himself avid. He trembled and felt clumsy. His spit worked its magic—‘
une puissante potion d'amour
'—as his one true love had said. But the angel had forgotten how careful and exact he had to be. He was fumbling, palsied
with pleasure and lack of practice, and by his fear of being too strong, till the man's human hand gathered him and held them together, and moved, and mingled their wetness. The man's other arm, braced against the floor, held his body above the angel's, so that there was enough space between their bodies for them to press their foreheads together and look down the length of themselves, at what their hands were doing, and at their skins, damp and lustrous in the blue pre-dawn light. ‘Not so fast,' the man breathed, though he was in charge, then, ‘Oh, you're so beautiful!' He kissed Xas and then stopped what he was doing and pulled the angel over so that Xas lay on top of him. Even in his eagerness he registered how easy it was to move Xas. People always noticed, whenever they by chance took his weight, that Xas weighed half what any human of an equivalent size did. ‘There's nothing to you,' the man panted. Then he tried to slip his arms into Xas's opened clothes, to put his arms around him and hold him close. Xas remembered his back, and took the hands and kissed them, tasting their sweet mixed chlorophylls—and machine oil. The oil made his throat catch. He swallowed several times and the man rested the heel of his hand against his throat. He said, softly, ‘You're not very substantial, but I think you must be—someone.'

Xas coughed. ‘Why have you stopped? Please,' he said. ‘Please.'

‘I hope I can trust you,' the man said, and caught Xas's hands and held them still.

Xas was astonished at this show of self-control. ‘I promise I won't—' he began, but broke off. ‘What do I promise?
What are you worried about? What should I do or not do? Should I promise not to embarrass you? To be discreet? To keep out of sight?' Then, wanting to pledge everything, he said simply: ‘I promise.'

‘You promise easily.' He stroked Xas's throat with his palm, then his cheek with his knuckles. He said, ‘I get the impression you could cause me trouble. I wasn't thinking of my public life. I always close the door on what I don't like—what I don't like at all, or don't like any more. But it's like you and I are in a room together already. One of my darkened rooms.'

Xas opened his mouth to answer this, but couldn't. He was moved beyond his intelligence. He felt something closing around him, something like the warmth of a room from which all light has been excluded. He left his mouth open to taste what the man had said. Then he kissed the man, and kissed him. Then, after a moment, he stopped and thought to ask the man
why
he hadn't sailed with the actress.

‘I did think I might want to marry her, so I had everything arranged. Then I thought I might
not
want to—I might prefer to work on breaking records. I decided that I'm not in a hurry with anything else.'

‘What else?' Xas stroked the lobe of the good ear.

But the man's gaze had moved to take in the body above him, and his face stopped looking clever and turned blank and greedy again. ‘Are you really like this?' he said, nonsensically.

‘What else?' Xas said again, hungry to learn who this person was.

The man made a noise of exasperated delight and seemed about to answer when Xas heard someone whistling. The whistling was a tuneful, carrying rendition of a popular song.

The man was watching his face. He lifted his own head to listen. He frowned in concentration. ‘Is someone coming?'

‘Yes. Whistling.'

The man scrambled up. Xas followed. They began fastening buttons. They were laughing, wasting time looking at each other instead of attending to what they were doing.

Xas saw the woman first, crossing the field, against a blue and mushroom pink sky—the sun wasn't up yet. She was wearing a fox stole and a cloche hat, which framed the long, pale oval of her face. Her dress was cut on the bias, a thin fabric that showed her hollow thighs and the round bosses of her hip bones as she walked. She was carrying a brown paper bag. She came into the hangar and stopped, raised an eyebrow at the two of them, and set the paper bag down on the trestle table.

‘It's only Flora,' the man said, breathless.

Flora had dressed and got out of the house when it was still dark. She had a danish and coffee at Albert's, while the baking shift made Cole's sandwiches with the day's first bread. The sun was just below the horizon when she crossed the bridge over the mire the county had made of Coral Canal. The oil rigs lining Trolley Way stood against the pre-dawn sky like black latticework.

At Mines Flora parked her car and went toward the hangar that housed Cole's experimental distance racer.
The morning was so still that the airfield felt like a soundstage. Flora pursed her lips and began to whistle, and her tune floated away from her and seemed to echo against the pale shell of the twilight.

When she came to the hangar door Flora saw that Cole had his back to her and was buttoning his shirt. His hair was tousled and he was laughing his disconcerting, shiftless giggle. When he laughed, Cole looked his age, which was twenty-five. He seemed big, gangling and coltish.