Illuminations, p.10
Illuminations, page 10
He was so earnestly contrite that Angie felt immediately reassured – embarrassed, even, by her sacrilegious fugue of a few moments earlier and the fact that she’d misread him so badly. She gave a relieved sigh and self-conscious giggle almost simultaneously, so that he’d see that she’d been frightened but was game enough to laugh it off. The tension broken, they continued back towards the house.
‘No, I won’t think that you’re a twat if you don’t think that I’m some bag of nerves who’s not up to the job. I was just shocked by what you said, by the idea of it, which I suppose means that it would make a good season-ender after all. You can’t help wondering what the character would do.’
Jez was already at the back door, going in. ‘What do you think she’d do?’
Angie considered. ‘Well, she wouldn’t do it, would she? Look, if it’s an early nineteenth-century horse pistol, it would more than likely blow up in her hand and take her eye out. Quite apart from that, I don’t see that she’s got a motive. I mean, “shoot him or he’ll end humanity”? And what would that accomplish? I was up at half past eight this morning, and humanity looked like it had already ended. Everybody’s gone, apart from me. Apart from her. So, no, she wouldn’t do it.’
Before following her client back into the stubbornly anachronistic kitchen, Angie risked a last squint at the sky. Although still awful, it was nowhere near as bad as she’d expected. The vast, pregnant woman that she’d found the most upsetting element of the scenario – titanic and yet frighteningly vulnerable – was now greatly reduced in size, having retreated to a safe remove, gradually dwindling into the noon-blue heights. The lunar sickle under her bare feet was now about the same size as an ordinary daytime moon. Did that mean that the woman with Joanna Southcott’s face was now in space, in orbit? Angie felt relieved on her behalf. She was well out of it.
The ghastly red thing, a clenched butcher’s fist of hate and malice, was still just as big as when she’d last looked, floating in approximately the same posture with its winged back mercifully turned towards her. The wings were now spread spectacularly, where before she’d barely registered them, scalloped kites with wet pink membrane stretched between umbrella ribs of bone. Beneath each lifted sail there hung a seething cloud, the black of a scabbed wound, both cumuli dissolving at their edges into sanguinary specks that rose to stain and stipple the azure. Her eyes adjusting to the distance, Angie at first took the slowly moving flecks for swarming insects, then perhaps some species of large bird; a flock of liquorice flamingos. After several seconds’ observation, though, there was no way around it: they were crimson angels, rising in whatever the collective noun for such a breed might be, a murmuration or a murder. An unkindness.
Now she had her eye in, it was evident that these ascending flakes of clotted blackness weren’t the only aerial phenomena abroad in the meridian skies. From higher up, from the vicinity of the withdrawing star-crowned woman, there descended a precipitation of white dots, a talcum dusting settling through the stratosphere towards the dark arterial spatter spraying up to meet it from below. She understood that this was the opposing team. Realising that she’d paused, the client took a few steps back to Angie’s side, peering up glumly at what she was peering at.
‘Yeah, this is the big fight scene coming up, with the red dragon’s angels and the angels of the Lord. It looks like a cup final, but it’s more like wrestling – the dragon is the heel, so he’ll be going down. It’s really just the contract’s small print, with a long list of penalty clauses and what have you, but it gets a bit Sam Peckinpah in places. To be honest, I think we’d be better off indoors until this lot are done with all the smiting. You can show me the upstairs.’
Throughout the brief excursion, the four six-winged beasts had kept to their positions at the compass points, mute and impassive, like adjudicators, or the corner posts of an ethereal boxing ring. Angie and Jez went back inside, and Jez locked the back door behind them.
‘Huh. I don’t know why I bothered doing that. Not when it’s like you said, and there’s nobody left except you. Force of habit, I suppose.’
They made their way back through the atavistic kitchen. In the hall the seconds were still falling like lead shot from the grandfather clock, and Angie asked the client if there was genuinely no one left on Earth but her. There at the bottom of the stairs, he stood and thought about it.
‘No. No, it’s just you. Everyone else is … well, you’ve heard about the Rapture? It’s a bit like that, except it isn’t just a thing for all the fans – the Christians – or for people who’ve not coveted their neighbour’s ass or anything like that. It’s everybody. Good, bad or indifferent, atheists and Mormons, Satanists and Buddhists, Moslems and Jehovah’s Witnesses, the lot. Actually, “Rapture” is an out-of-date expression. In today’s terms, think of it as “everybody’s information has been instantly uploaded to the cloud”. Except for yours, of course. The seraphim in legal said we had to retain one decent solicitor to represent the Panacea Charitable Trust, in order to keep all of this legitimate.’
The client began to mount the stairs and Angie followed him, considering what he had said. From what she’d gathered, there was still some ambiguity about her own position. With this mind-numbing transaction finally concluded, would her further services be necessary, or would she be ‘instantly uploaded to the cloud’, something which, frankly, didn’t sound ideal? She couldn’t think of any way to raise the issue when the answer might reduce her to a pleading wreck and spoil what had, until then, been a well-conducted lawyer/client interaction. Best, perhaps, to change the subject.
Halfway up the staircase was a small, north-facing window which, she realised as she passed it, looked down on to Castle Road. She couldn’t see the Astra from this angle, although over on the street’s far side she could make out the faded Brexit Party poster that she’d noticed earlier, still languishing behind its glass in the deserted terrace. A stray idea occurred to her.
‘I don’t suppose that you kept up with Brexit, or had any thoughts about it?’
He continued his ascension, which on this occasion went no further than the upstairs landing.
‘Well, in my experience, you give the ballot to a mob of populists and nine times out of ten the vote goes to Barabbas. Or the golden bull-calf. That was the will of the people, wasn’t it?’
Unable to think of a credible rebuttal, Angie joined him on the landing. Here they started with a cursory inspection of the bathroom, very tasteful in mint-green and ivory. The bath itself was one of those claw-footed items that she’d only previously seen in picture books or films, and which she’d always found vaguely unnerving – a Hieronymus Bosch life form to accompany the walking helmets and crawling hot-water bottles. There appeared to be no shower, and while she didn’t raise the issue, Angie wondered if, with just the tub, this would present the client with bathing difficulties. Having read some of the literature, she wasn’t sure if he could displace water in the normal way or if he’d have to lounge there on the steaming surface, high and dry.
She was sure that none of the fervent matrons of the Panacea Society had ever, in a century of ownership, once used that bath or flushed that sacred toilet.
They continued from the bathroom to the property’s rear bedroom, overlooking the back garden. No doubt reasoning that the returned messiah would be organising very little in the way of sleepovers, this had at some point been converted to a study. An Edwardian writing desk was set by the west window with its view of the museum in Newnham Road, while the remaining walls were decked in bookshelves, floor to ceiling. It was very cosy, although Angie didn’t know why an omniscient being would have need to study anything. Her client stood perusing his new library, his hands deep in his pockets as he read the embossed spines without discernible enthusiasm.
‘This is my suggested reading list, then? This is what they thought I’d enjoy flipping through on rainy afternoons? There’s nothing here but books about me and my dad, as if I’m Frank Sinatra Junior or somebody. I mean, who does that? Who wants to read all about their fucking awful upbringing, or how their dad was always going into one and smashing the place up? There’s no crime fiction, there’s no science fiction, nothing here by anyone who’s black or Asian. And for saying there were never more than one or two blokes in the Panacea Society, there’s nothing here by women. If you walked into a bookshop and this was their catalogue, you’d walk straight out again. I’ll probably get rid of them as a job lot and then have a flat-screen installed. That’s more me, if I’m truthful.’
Angie ran her hand across the writing table’s varnished wood, its glinting leather and the plump, soft paper of its blotter; reassured herself that this was still a solid world, for all that it kept bleeding into dream. From this reaffirmation of reality, she glanced up at the window and was nonplussed to discover that, in August, it was snowing. Fat white flakes fell lazily through blazing sunshine, although as she watched, her mind corrected this initial error of perception. Obviously, it wasn’t snowflakes. It was feathers, some of them on fire. Jez joined her by the antique bureau.
‘That’ll be the debris from the angel-holocaust that’s going on above us. You can see why I suggested that we come indoors before we got the Full English Gomorrah. It’s like this for the next hour or two now. Nothing I can do about it, I’m afraid.’
Outside the window in the distance, sizzling through the swansdown blizzard, there were intermittent shooting stars, blazing parabolas that plunged like crippled Spitfires on to Bedford. Angie speculated that these were slain angels, burning up as they passed through Earth’s atmosphere. They watched this phosphorous precipitation for a while, and then she and her client returned along the landing for a look at the front bedroom, where there was a bit more light.
‘Oh, this is nice.’
Angie agreed. It was nice. The wallpaper was blue coronets on misty pink, the brass bed buffed to gold beneath a counterpane of white chenille. On the rococo dressing table a glass jar of potpourri was resting on a doily, gently perfuming the air with lavender and rose. Thick claret curtains were held back by brocade ties to either side of the bay windows, and out through the pristine nets, charred plumage and meteoritic angel-corpses rained down on the neighbourhoods around Albany Road. The beast with a bull’s head still kept watch from the east, unflinching as a bored Buckingham Palace sentry, even when the flaming casualties appeared to fall directly on its immense bovine face.
It took her quite some time to register that the allotments on the road’s far side were nowhere near as meagre as they’d seemed when she arrived. This was perhaps because the proper verdant glory of the fenced enclosure had been unapparent from ground level and was only noticeable from above, but from above the modest acreage was a vision of fertility. How had she missed those half a dozen sturdy trees, or overlooked those scoliotic canes bowed by tomatoes big as stop lights?
Thinking to remark on this, she turned and found Jez watching her with an uncomfortable expression, brow and lipline writhing as though in the throes of some inner predicament. She asked him what was wrong, which only seemed to make whatever it was worse.
‘Look, I don’t want to … no. No, it’s a bad idea. Forget it.’
Unsure what it was she should forget, she pressed him further. He groaned and looked authentically miserable.
‘Angie, I know how this is going to sound. We’ve got a huge power gradient here and I’m not trying to abuse that, OK? You can tell me to get lost, you can say no, and nothing is conditional on that. It won’t change how much I respect you for the job you’ve done today. It won’t change our relationship. It’s just, you’re the first woman that I’ve had a decent conversation with in getting on two thousand years. I’m desperate for you not to think this is some Harvey Weinstein thing, but would you be offended if I asked about the possibility of having sex with you? It’s OK if you’re offended, that’s completely understandable. I’m sorry, this is unprofessional. I shouldn’t have said anything.’
She looked at him, and for the first time recognised in his tormented eyes a little of the man in all the paintings. He was a good-looking chap – not handsome like the men in her occasional sex fantasies, but streets ahead of all the specimens she’d slept with in real life. He was no Trevor, put it that way. As for going to bed with him, she couldn’t think of any reasons not to. He seemed likeable, and with her future still uncertain, this might be her last fling. Seriously, who was going to sniff at rolling in the hay with mankind’s saviour, even if he’d admittedly just disappeared mankind? Who would pretend they’d ever had a better offer? Now that she’d allowed herself to think about it in such terms, this was kind of a sexy situation, with the whole house, the whole planet, to themselves.
‘No, don’t apologise. I think I’d like that, what you said. And no, somehow I don’t feel pressured. Can we do some kissing and stuff first?’
Face flooded with relief and gratitude, he stepped towards her, wrapped his arms around her. He was warm and yielding, and his scent was like wood shavings and fresh laundry.
‘Of course we can. Kissing and sex and all of that, it’s literally the only good thing about being in a body made of flesh. The rest of it just hurts. Angie, you smell so good. This is amazing.’
Then her tongue was in his mouth, and their hands moved like those of virtuosos on the keyboard of the other’s spine. Kissing turned everyone into a teenager, and clearly neither Angie nor her client were an exception. They caressed and fondled, making noises of appreciation down their noses as they tenderly undressed each other, blind and voiceless, their lips suction-locked together and their eyes closed. Only when she was down to her bra, the blouse and jacket somewhere on the carpet with her kicked-off shoes, did Angie think of something and break off the increasingly heated contact.
‘Just a minute.’
Padding to the window, she unfastened the elaborate ties and pulled the wine-dark drapes together with a jingling swish of curtain rings. She knew that the bull-headed titan and his thousand-eyed wings weren’t deliberately staring at her tits, but it was creepy and off-putting all the same. Having the blinds drawn made her feel less like she was in some unusually ecclesiastical Confessions film. With this accomplished, Angie and her client carried on where they’d left off.
In minutes, both were naked and their osculation had grown frantic. She had nipples that were sucked to rubber thimbles and his hot erection in her palm. Those fingers on his right hand, usually depicted raised in benediction, were inside her, blessing juices into holy water. As their conjoined stumble led them inexorably towards the bed, like a conflicted pantomime horse, Angie realised that in the gloaming of the curtained bedchamber, his head was glowing faintly with its own diffuse and milky radiance. Nothing too bright or dazzling. You wouldn’t notice it in normal daylight.
It was pretty good, the sex. Excellent, even. He was thoughtful and attentive at all times, and when he asked if he could lick her out, his face was that of an incredulously happy puppy. Conscientious to a fault, he made sure she had one orgasm in the bank before he moved into an unsurprising missionary pose on top of her, careful to reassure her over any contraceptive worries.
‘It’s all right, you won’t get pregnant. Mum and Dad weren’t just from different species, they were from entirely separate ontologies, so technically I’m like a mule. I’m sterile. I can’t reproduce.’
They fucked enthusiastically while smouldering angel carcasses dropped screaming on to Bedford all around them. He delayed his climax until Angie’s second one so they could come together, something that she’d always counted as a minor miracle, and yet it left her feeling shallow for having expected something more; perhaps something transcendent, with a spiritual dimension. Or if not transcendent, at least dirtier. Speaking objectively, it was the best shag that she’d ever had, and if the special effects left her disappointed, then she knew the fault was very probably with her. Her and the numbing, spectacle-addicted culture that had sculpted her desires and needs. She was too modern.
Afterwards they lay together side by side and talked, their conversation punctuated by sounds of collision as fatalities from the war overhead impacted with the nearby avenues. He seemed to want to talk about his parents, and as Angie listened, she ran one magenta fingernail across his ribs, pausing to trace the contour of what she at first believed to be an appendectomy scar.
‘I wish that I could have done more for my mum, the stuff she’d been through. My conception was the last thing anyone would call immaculate. You’ll notice that the PR stories in the Bible don’t say anything about consent. And when they say she was a virgin, in that place and time that means she was about fourteen. I can’t even imagine what it must have been like, an all-powerful iterative equation, violently imprinting a genetic sequence on some helpless child who lacked the senses to perceive it properly. All the time I was growing up, she only mentioned it the once. From what I gathered, she experienced it as a sexual assault by an enormous eight-winged seagull. That detached look that she has in all the iconography is post-traumatic stress disorder. It destroyed her.’
He asked Angie if she minded that he vaped, and when she said she didn’t, he hopped briefly from beneath the covers to retrieve his e-fag from the crumpled jacket on the floor. She had to admit that his bum was lovely. Back in bed, he drew a lungful of fruit-flavoured fog before continuing.
‘Dad was a nightmare, basically, and worse when he’d been drinking. Yeah, I know, it wasn’t really drinking, that’s just what you’re hearing as a close equivalent to what I’m saying. What it was, was prayer. Prayer got him hammered. That’s not why he made humanity, but it was certainly an unexpected bonus. His behaviour got more and more erratic, and then finally he fell into a sort of feedback loop: people would pray, he’d get drunk and annihilate a town or two, which would make all of the survivors pray, and so on. He thought he was hiding it, but everybody knew. I mean, you take the Book of Job. It’s obvious that he’s completely rat-arsed, and that Satan talks him into beating someone up, as if he was some two-pint Tyson spoiling everybody’s Friday night. What could we do? It’s not like anyone was going to stage an intervention.’
