Illuminations, p.11
Illuminations, page 11
Angie ventured an amusing anecdote about her own dad, who had been a type compositor when that profession still existed, with a passion for real ale and sixties vinyl, but this thread of conversation didn’t seem to take off or go anywhere. They talked for a bit longer, until the downpour of angels outside sounded as if it was over, and then Jez asked Angie if she fancied any lunch.
They didn’t bother getting dressed. They left their clothing scattered on the bedroom floor, as though by some mute understanding that the age of people wearing things was over. The world and its dress code were no more. Downstairs, Angie sat comfortably naked in the dining room while Jez fussed in the kitchen, with her gaze continually drawn back to the dark lumber of Joanna Southcott’s box, squatting there on the sideboard like an unexploded New Testament time bomb. From the next room, Jez called through to ask her if she wanted wine with dinner, and if so, would Pinot Grigio be OK? He’d looked through all the cupboards without finding the wine glasses so this would, unfortunately, be served up in dainty little teacups. Angie said she didn’t mind.
The food turned out to be a beautifully prepared portion of sea bass each, with an accompaniment of still-warm artisan bread rolls. The fish was perfect, falling off the fork, and the fresh bread steamed when she cracked the crust. By this juncture of her unusually eventful day, Angie decided that she found the nudist dining weirder than the paranormal nature of her lunch companion. She supposed she was acclimatising. Sipping hesitantly from the child-sized chinaware, she was surprised by just how good the wine was, if a bit close to room temperature. Thinking about it, she was even more surprised that the abstemious Panacea Society had thought to put away a bottle or two for the home’s new owner to enjoy on his return. When she remarked at this to Jez, he stared at Angie blankly for a second, fork paused halfway to his mouth, then realised her misapprehension.
‘Oh, what, this? This isn’t from the Panacea Society. I got this from the tap. That’s why it’s not properly chilled. If I’d thought earlier, I could have filled a jug and stuck it in the fridge.’
She chewed this over with the sea bass – which, now that she thought about it, was just as unlikely an ingredient for the charitable trust to have provided as the wine. The business in the kitchen with Jez doing all the prep work had been theatre, she saw now; a performance for her benefit to make the meal seem less uncanny. She was fairly certain that if she went out into the kitchen, the gas oven would be stone cold. He’d just waved his hand or summoned angels, hadn’t he? Deceitful, although probably well meaning. It was good grub just the same, and very filling. Neither of them finished it.
When he had cleared the plates and cutlery away, they sat and treated themselves to a second doll’s-house cup of transubstantiated Pinot Grigio. Angie was uncomfortably aware that her job here at number eighteen was concluded, and that it would only be good manners to leave shortly and allow the client to get on with his day. It seemed like a good time to raise the matter of her prospects.
‘I suppose I should be getting off soon. Is it all right if I stay in Bedford, or should I prepare to be uploaded to the cloud?’
He looked hurt that she’d even had to ask.
‘The cloud? No. Not unless you want to be. I’m told it’s very nice, in a nirvana sort of way, with the white light and bliss and everything, but frankly, we’d expected you to stick around the town here. You’re the other party’s legal representative, and so the company’s obliged to take your satisfaction very seriously. Besides, how would it look if I let you show me the house, then went to bed with you, and then had you disintegrated? Also, from a practical perspective, all our legal people were appointed by my dad. There might well come a time when I need independent counsel. No, you stay wherever you feel comfortable. As far as I’m concerned, the whole of Bedford’s yours.’
Which seemed a generous gratuity. She thanked him and his company for their consideration, and the chat moved smoothly on to other matters, mostly season three of Killing Eve. They both agreed that Jodie Comer had been brilliant, although Jez maintained that he was personally getting a bit tired of made-up charismatic psychopaths. Eventually they lapsed into an easy silence and she noticed that he was once more scratching his palm distractedly. She figured it was time for her to go.
He walked her to the front door, where the hallway clock informed her that it was only a minute or two after half past one, as if minutes and hours were still a thing. She didn’t bother to collect her clothing from upstairs, even the jacket with her keys and mobile in its inside pocket. It wasn’t that sort of planet any more. Nude on the doorstep, they exchanged a fond kiss and both wished each other luck, before the client went back inside and Angie turned to find out what was left of Bedford, now that it was hers. The orange bricks of the front path were warm beneath her feet.
At the front gate she lingered to assess her options. While she’d thought originally to pick up her car from Castle Road around the corner and then drive back to her flat, that didn’t seem to be the way that things were going. Cars and homes, like mobile phones and clothing, had already begun to feel slightly retro; a bit last Saturday night, before the advent of a billion-year-long Sunday.
Angie stepped out on the sun-baked pavement of Albany Road and latched the gate behind her. There were dozens of singed feathers shifting in a listless breeze along the gutter, and what looked to be an outsized lump of coal that rested, smoking, in the middle of the street. Beyond that, on the far side of the road, the low fence that had previously bounded the allotments now enclosed a miniature deciduous forest, full of thirty-year-old trees that hadn’t been around at half past ten that morning. Most of them appeared to be in fruit, and choirs of birds perched on already overburdened boughs, relinquishing the wildflower tangle of the ground below to drifting bees and at least three species of butterfly. Outside the bolted gate of the transformed allotments stood a man with wings, who Angie estimated to be at least nine feet tall. His chest was puffed out and his hands were clasped behind his back. He had a number-one cut, white robes, and a sword with a blue-hot acetylene flame for a blade that somehow hung from his rope belt without setting the robes on fire. Security.
The beatific bouncer, turning his shaved head at intervals for deadpan glances up and down Albany Road, appeared to have no interest in the naturist solicitor. Taking this as an indication that she wasn’t the angelic bruiser’s primary prey, Angie stepped out on to the grey macadam and began to cross towards him. Pausing halfway, she identified the charred material at the road’s centre as a huge incinerated torso, one of the supernal combatants that hadn’t burned away completely in the atmosphere before it hit the streets of Bedford. There was nothing left save for a blackened ribcage with a yard-long sternum, a Gothic accordion, steaming and defeated. Wondering if the aerial slaughter was entirely over, she looked back at the house and the marvel-haunted skies above it.
The hallucinatory dogfight was concluded, with its casualties and contrails cleared away to ready the high cirrus stage for what appeared to be the headline act: it was equestrian after a fashion, featuring a skimpily clad bareback rider and her steed, although this crawled rather than cantered. Angie recognised the painfully slow mount as the red dragon that had been trolling the pregnant woman earlier, reduced here to a seven-headed beast of burden at the whim of its capricious mistress. Two or three of the vermillion creature’s near-motionless craniums were thrown back in resentful snarls, as it progressed across the firmament at a real-time clay animation pace. Sprawling along its back, insouciant as a Tory Leader of the House, what Angie understood to be a deified ancient Iraqi sex worker lifted her gem-encrusted grail in a sardonic toast to heaven.
Sumptuous body insufficiently concealed by gossamers of red and purple, only the colossal wanton’s painted eyes betrayed her age, which made the furthest nebulae seem barely adolescent. Her expression was that of a former Pinewood beauty, dragging the iconic costume out of mothballs yet again and wearily reprising a career-defining scene at her nineteenth comic convention. Little wonder she was knocking back the Saints’ Blood. Angie speculated as to the contractual language that the sacred harlot represented, and concluded that this must be something like a wax seal or a signature, down at the bottom of the document’s last page. Conceivably the beast-and-woman combo was a corporate logo, possibly a mascot, an over-elaborate MGM lion. With an unexpected pang of sympathy for both these veteran performers, Angie turned away and carried on across Albany Road.
On the far pavement, the impossibly tall sentry guarding the allotments’ west gate – a twelve-footer, she decided, seen from closer up – ruffled his feathers self-importantly at her approach. He looked her up and down disinterestedly, as though contenting himself that she had nowhere to conceal weaponry or vodka, and then gave her a perfunctory nod.
‘Yeah, you’re all right, love. Go on in.’
His voice was like a hurricane ten miles away. Until that moment, Angie hadn’t really planned on entering the paradisiacal allotments, but hadn’t specifically been planning not to. Now that the imposing doorman raised the prospect, she could see it had advantages: if she’d ruled out returning to her car or flat, then she was going to need some manner of accommodation, and here looked as promising as anywhere. Plus, the Light of the World was living just across the street, and it might be nice having somebody she knew around the neighbourhood, someone she might run into as he set out for his morning walk along the Great Ouse, or whatever his routine turned out to be. She entertained the fleeting thought that one night he might ask her over to watch season four of Killing Eve, before remembering that there wasn’t going to be one. Oh, well. Angie thanked the angel and then, sliding back the bolt that was the low gate’s only fastening, she stepped into the jungle.
Like a Tardis or an acrimonious divorce, it seemed much bigger from inside than out, and it smelled lovely; a bouillon of everything. Closing the gate and setting out through lush grass for the nearest shady arbour, she took stock of her divine surroundings with their frankly unbelievable biodiversity. Parrots splashed Rousseau colours on the woodland’s canopy while tangerine-furred foxes rustled through the orchids carpeting its floor. Moving with a magnificent deliberation through a distant stand of elms, she thought she saw a tiger, and against the suede mahogany of Angie’s forearm trickled a sole ladybird, bright as a shaving cut. Coiling around a branch above her was something she took for an exotic vine that had a curious metallic sheen, glinting and coppery. All of it tingled.
Angie barely noticed she’d acquired a retinue of iridescent turquoise dragonflies that hovered in formation at her brow, a shimmering seven-pointed diadem. Strolling unhurriedly between the fruiting trees, she used her tongue to dislodge a recalcitrant fibre of sea bass from her front teeth, noting as she did so the persistent tang of her recent fish dinner flavouring her mouth. It was a pity that her client hadn’t thought to offer her dessert, some sweet indulgence that would cleanse her palate and allow her to more thoroughly appreciate the tastes and perfumes of her Castle Road arcadia.
The final woman, then, there in the garden, faintly peckish.
COLD READING
In the old black and white plate, the shadow on the left of the ghost’s face uncurled its legs to scuttle for the margin and the cluttered desk beyond. I shrank back in my seat and no word of a lie, I genuinely felt it. It was over in a second when I realised it was just a garden spider come indoors out of the cold, what had been camouflaged against the dark bits of the photo, but I really felt that sort of tingle up the spine that all my clients go on about, so I know what they’re saying. I can empathise with them. It’s not all acting.
Actually, to be perfectly honest, I think nine times out of ten, it’s that gives us what I suppose you’d call a supernatural feeling: something turning out to not be what you thought it was. I can remember I was only six or seven when I saw my first and only ghost. I was with Mum and Dad in the lounge of a seaside pub at night, standing there glued to the glass doors and gawping out into the dark, not thinking of anything in particular. Just then I saw this man walking across the car park of the pub away from me. He wasn’t any colour. He was all washed out and grey, and then I realised there were parts of him that I could see through. I could see the scrubby strips of grass, the bollards, and the drooping lengths of chain that closed the car park in through the black folds and shadows of his jacket. I thought, ‘It’s a ghost! I’m really seeing one!’ And then – and this was the most frightening bit – it turned its head and looked straight at me. It had got two blurry faces, one of them just slightly offset from the other, and it smiled in at me through the glass from out there in the night, and then it spoke my name. It’s like, I saw its lips move, but I heard its voice as if it was right next to me, rather than outside in the car park. It said, ‘Ricky? Would you like a Fanta?’
Obviously, it was my dad, standing behind me in the lounge with his reflection superimposed on the dark outside. The business with two faces turned out to be caused by double glazing, but just for a second there, you know? I’d thought it was a ghost and that it proved all of the stories that I’d heard from other kids at school. I think it made me cry, and when I explained why – about the ghost and everything – Dad told me off and said I was like an old woman, getting taken in by all that superstitious rubbish. Always very level-headed was my father, and I probably take after him in that respect, although I never really liked him much. I was much closer to my mum, but then that’s very often how it is with boys, especially an only child. When Dad passed on, I suppose Mum was my first audience, as well as being my most willing and my most appreciative. She thought the world of me, my mum. She gave a little gasp and filled up when I did his voice and said, ‘I always loved you, Irene.’
Knowing Dad, it was a safe bet that he’d never told her that in life, and when I saw the comfort that I’d brought that woman, my own mum, that’s when I knew I had a gift. That’s when I knew what Ricky Sullivan had been put on this Earth for. Oh, there’ll always be the unbelievers and debunkers in the papers, on the telly or what have you, and it does, it makes me angry when they say people like me are cold, unfeeling, just taking advantage and all that. I’m sorry, but if they could see the happiness in people’s faces, if they really thought about the service me and others like me are providing, giving people strength to get on with their lives when they’ve just lost a loved one, well, they couldn’t say the things they say. I’m sorry, they just couldn’t. I don’t have to justify myself.
I mean, do I believe all of the things that I tell people? In my heart, I can’t say that I do. But then, what about priests? You can’t tell me that all of them believe every last word of what they preach, but do they get called ‘ghouls in cardigans’ or ‘Vincent Price, but camp’? No. No, they don’t. That’s because people recognise all of the reassurance and the comfort that religion brings to people, and it doesn’t really matter if it’s true or not. Or doctors, it’s like doctors when they say that a placebo – that’s like, what, a sugar pill? – that a placebo can work wonders without any side effects, but that they can’t prescribe them ’cause of all the medical red tape and ethics, health and safety, all that business. That’s me. I’m a spiritual sugar pill, but I do people good. I’m sorry, but I touch their lives.
And yes, I suppose you could say that I’ve done very well out of it, got the mortgage on this house paid off last year, but that’s not what I do it for. It’s not the money. How can I explain? It’s more the gratitude, the look on some poor widow’s face and knowing that you’ve helped them. That, to me, what can I say? That look’s worth more than gold. That’s my reward, right there.
Although this place is very nice, it must be said, with the old-fashioned furniture and all the books, the angel figurines along the mantelpiece, all that. It’s mostly for the clients’ benefit, same as the New Age music I’ve got on. It reassures them, makes them feel as if they’re in safe hands. No, no, it’s very comfortable. It’s very cosy, especially now that the clocks have gone back and we’ve got these cold nights. If I peer out of the window at the park across the road, it looks like one of them old-fashioned fogs tonight, where you can hardly even see the trees. It just makes me feel all the warmer, with the central heating turned up, standing here in this new cardigan that one of my old ladies knitted for me. Said I hadn’t charged enough for all the happiness I’d brought her, bless her, and she knew that I liked cardigans. A lovely lady. No, when I was little, what I liked best were the rainy, windy nights when I could lay tucked up in bed and think about all of the people out there in the cold, so that I could feel even snugger by comparison. I’m lucky in that that’s what my whole life’s like these days, very snug. Snug by comparison, you might say. Ah. There goes the phone. The landline, not my mobile, although even I have trouble telling them apart because the ringtone’s very similar.
‘Hello, there. You’ve reached Ricky Sullivan – the angel’s answering service. This is Ricky speaking. So, how can I help you?’
‘Um, hello. My name’s Dave, David Berridge. Look, I’ve … well, I’ve lost somebody, y’know, recently, and I was just … I don’t know. To be honest, I’ve been in two minds about if I should ring you up or not. I’ve never really been much of a one for all this, no offence, and I don’t even know if they’d approve, the person that I’ve lost …’
Just judging from the accent, he’s a local man, probably lower middle class and in his, what, his forties? Early fifties? He sounds lost, as if his life’s just fell to bits and nothing makes sense to him any more. He’s calling out for help, and I’ve already heard enough to know that as clients go, this one is classic Ricky Sullivan. You can tell quite a lot about a person just from speaking to them on the phone. I’m writing down his full name on my jotter even as I’m talking to him.
