Gabriel's Angel Read online

  Adam was pretty convinced that the one true God was actually a triumvirate. Less Cliff Richard and more the Bee Gees. The holy trinity was the biggest clue to this long-hidden truth he claimed, but most importantly, according to Adam, modern life demanded three gods. They may have only needed the one god 2,000 years ago, back when things were simple, people travelled by camel, and entertainment was the occasional stoning and the odd miracle. Life was more complicated now; there were so many distractions, so many things to think about, so many things to worship. In the same way that modern shaving required two blades, it also needed the attention of three gods, to ensure we remain balanced.

  How can the one true God suddenly have become three? Evolution. We have evolved, said Mr Aldanack, grown taller, stronger, more sophisticated. Are we so vain as to imagine that God doesn’t evolve, too?

  But credit where it’s due, Adam talked and poured wine at the same time, and the more James listened, the more Adam appeared to assume he was interested. In fact, by the time James was tucking into homemade apple and blueberry pie with ice cream, it was almost as if Adam were trying to persuade James to play a benefit for the church.

  ‘But I don’t quite understand,’ said James. ‘It doesn’t sound like your church needs the money.’

  ‘Quite,’ said Alice. ‘And it’s not like Dog in a Tuba will contribute to the profile of the church in anyway. I mean they were a piddly little band.’

  ‘It’s true,’ said Matthew. ‘We were.’

  James coughed. ‘Not piddly. Unfulfilled maybe, too edgy to be mainstream popular perhaps but not piddly, Matt. Never piddly.’

  ‘Well let’s not worry about that,’ said Adam. ‘Let’s just see what it’s like to promote a gig or two in our backyard, shall we?’

  Alice and Matthew shrugged.

  ‘I, er, think we might need to rehearse first,’ James said.

  ‘Never used to bother you, James,’ said Alice.

  ‘Where?’ said Matthew.

  ‘My place,’ said James without thinking. ‘I’ve got a converted barn, it’ll be good. Next weekend?’

  ‘What about your friend in hospital?’ asked Alice.

  ‘And Michael?’ said Matthew.

  ‘It would do him good,’ said James. ‘Take his mind off of things. We’d be doing him a favour I think.’

  Alice and Matthew were silent, but Adam, who was, as far as James could see, a godsend, clapped his hands together loudly and said, ‘That’s settled then. Can I come? I would love to see your farm, and see you all playing together again. We could all drive up together. Alice? Matthew? What do you say?’

  ‘OK,’ said Matthew, ‘be nice to see the others, and I’ve got a couple of songs.’

  Why is it that everyone writes bloody songs these days? thought James. ‘Don’t worry about that too much,’ he said. Alice looked at him, and James added, ‘Although it would be great to hear them.’

  ‘Don’t forget to talk to Michael,’ said Alice.

  And even James realised she wasn’t flirting. She just hated him.

  31

  Izzy had her faults, goodness knows she knew she did, but they did not include letting her best friend down in her hour of need. She left Sam in the short-term car park and told him that she would be as quick as she could. Sam, being Sam, asked if she had any idea how long it would take, and Izzy had snapped, ‘I think you’d be a better judge of that than me.’

  She made her way nervously up to the third floor, and smiled in an over-compensating kind of way at just about everyone she passed. Get a grip, she thought. People will think you’re insane.

  When she got to Gabriel’s ward she nodded at the only nurse visible, who was talking on the phone, and pointed to Gabriel’s’ room mouthing ‘I’m just going to visit Gabe,’ just on the off chance the nurse had imagined she was popping in to give him an unprescribed hand job. Izzy was surprised to find the room empty, with just Gabriel in it. She realised that it was not simply the first time she had been alone with him since the accident, but probably the first time for about five years. Except for that time in Stoke Newington, although they weren’t actually with each other then, just in the same place as each other without Ellie or Sam.

  Izzy had been out with a couple of friends, they’d been to a film and for a pizza, and now were drinking wine in a Spanish bar, laughing at each other trying to salsa. Izzy remembered it well; she was pregnant, although she didn’t know it. If she had known, she wouldn’t have drunk as much as she did. She did have some kind of sense of something being different, a sense she liked to think had made her feel differently and thus act differently. The more they drank, the more courage they found to dance, and the more they danced—loudly, flamboyantly, and with the kind of joy that disguises a lack of poise—the more they attracted attention.

  Izzy still remembered the hand landing on the small of her back. Strong, large enough to make her feel as though her waist were tiny. At first she tensed but the drink had relaxed her and so she smiled, she let herself lean back; the owner of the hand took her hand and spun her round. She couldn’t remember if he was good-looking, but she could remember that he was tall and dark and Spanish, and dancing with her. Her friends clapped and laughed, which felt like it meant it was OK, and so she danced.

  And the music didn’t stop, her friends had found dancing partners, and it felt … well it felt like one of those films, where the plain girl takes centre stage and shows the world that she is beautiful and dazzling, and can dance. In truth Izzy wasn’t really dancing, she was jiggling about while her partner spun her round. He moved like water, and she went where he prompted. And the thing about dancing is that physical barriers get breached: it didn’t seem remotely inappropriate that sometimes his hand would hold her buttocks, or that when he pulled her toward him and held her there for a moment—in perfect time of course—she could feel his cock against her stomach. That was how they danced in Spain. She only became conscious of any kind of barrier being breached when he looked her in the eye and ran his fingers down her breast. Twice. But it was OK, she looked at her friends and they were still laughing with their partners, and she looked at the dancing man and he looked, well, he looked like he was dancing. He wasn’t leering, he wasn’t slobbering, and so she smiled and sweated and closed her eyes as he flung her around, drew her close and grabbed her arse quite tightly.

  And when she opened her eyes she saw Gabriel. Standing at the bar smiling, drinking out of a bottle and talking to someone. Her first thought, her very first thought, was that she hoped he was talking to a woman. He wasn’t, he was talking to a fat bloke, and when Izzy caught his eye he raised his bottle and smiled even more.

  What kind of smile was it? Was it a ‘hello, fancy seeing you’ smile? Was it hell. It was a ‘what a crap dancer you are’ smile, or an ‘Aye aye, you’ve pulled’ smile. She remembered trying to ignore him, she remembered thinking ‘I can dance if I want,’ but with his eyes in the room, she began to realise she couldn’t. She tried but she felt wooden, slow; the hands that had seemed so fluid a few moments earlier suddenly felt hard and intrusive. She stopped dancing. Men like Gabriel, men who looked like he did and walked like he did and expected attention the way he did, stopped women like Izzy from dancing.

  They never spoke about it. Izzy didn’t know to this day if he had mentioned it to Ellie. She was going to ask her but she never did. As time went on it became too hard. That was the last time they had been in the same room as each other, without either Sam or Ellie being there. Until now.

  ‘OK, let’s get on with it, but before we do, I should tell you that this is nothing personal. I don’t want to rub your willy; I don’t even want to touch your willy, and I certainly don’t want this to count when either one of us are totting up how many people we have had sex with.’

  She pulled back the sheets and, on seeing the end of the catheter that should have been inside Gabriel, muttered, ‘How the bloody hell did that get out? Christ, it’s been years since I’ve put one
of these in. Still, first things first.’ And she picked up Gabriel’s penis, as if it were a small fish on a hook that might not be quite dead, and started to rub.

  It took longer than she expected for him to get an erection, but once he had she seemed to get into her stride. In fact it did feel very functional and impersonal, except for when she looked at his face, or found herself thinking of how annoying she had found him when they were all out together. Unfortunately, the longer she massaged his penis the more she found herself thinking of her thirtieth birthday party. How he’d got off with Ellie, and how her birthday—HER birthday, nobody else’s birthday—was recalled quite simply as the evening that East London’s version of George Clooney and Julia Roberts got it together. The more she thought about it, the more annoyed she got, and the harder she rubbed. She realised this, fortunately, before she drew blood, and stopped.

  This is silly, I need a distraction, she thought. For no reason, no reason whatsoever, she decided that she needed to sing. So she closed her eyes to the past and the penis in front of her, started to masturbate him again while humming, for no logical reason whatsoever, ‘The Long and Winding Road.’ And it worked, the humming distracted her, and so she got louder. But there is only so long any adult can hum without singing and so she began to sing. Which of course is when the consultant and attendant ward round came in, just as she got to that bit that goes ‘Don’t leave me standing here … .’

  32

  The group sat in silence. Christopher had entered the room feeling anxious, but seeing Clemitius sitting there looking solemn and pompous had turned that feeling into irritation. Who wouldn’t want to leave a room with him sitting in it? In fact, if he could have thought of an excuse, he would have turned around and left again, but he couldn’t, so he sat down. And didn’t look at Clemitius. He just joined in the silence and became more aware of the discomfort of the others.

  ‘I’m wondering how everyone feels after yesterday’s little … event?’ said Clemitius. He didn’t sound like a therapist. He sounded like a disgruntled teacher whose class had not come to school. Gabriel started to speak, but Clemitius held up his hand. It was shaking. ‘Let me finish, please. I don’t mean how do those of you feel who have been looking at your loved ones—I think to some extent you passed on your option to comment first when you left the group. My main concern right now is for those who stayed. I’m wondering how those of us … left behind feel.’

  Nobody said anything. Gabriel sighed and looked out of the window. Julie felt embarrassed but she wasn’t sure why. Yvonne meanwhile screwed up her brow, pantomiming surprise. She looked at Clemitius, who avoided her gaze, and she wondered, was this man trying to tell her off?

  ‘I have to say, I personally feel … well, a little angry,’ Clemitius continued. ‘I feel something has been breached, and I feel that there is some healing to do here today.’

  ‘I think you have to realise,’ Yvonne said calmly, slipping into the demeanour that had taken control of hundreds of meetings with thousands of men she had little respect for, ‘that we have been through a lot, and different people respond to difficult things in different ways.’

  ‘Indeed,’ Clemitius said. ‘Kevin, you have been through difficult things as well, but you don’t leave in the middle of the group, do you?’

  ‘I wouldn’t dream of it,’ responded Kevin. He sat upright in his chair as he spoke. He looked neater, more ironed than when he had arrived.

  ‘No, well, you wouldn’t,’ said Yvonne. ‘You have such high standards of behaviour, don’t you?’ But she spoke evenly, with less contempt. She looked at Gabriel and Julie. Gabriel half smiled at her and she thought about her son. She thought what it would have been like to have seen him, to see him one more time, and that that possibility was somehow being challenged now. But it wasn’t just self-interest that filled her. She thought about what she had seen, its messy humanity, and of Gabriel curling in his chair. And she decided that Clemitius was wrong. About everything.

  ‘My main concern is about boundaries,’ said Clemitius. ‘I am worried about how safe it feels to be here now. For a group to work, everyone in it must know the space is safe, that they will not be abandoned, that they can reveal part of themselves without having that part mistreated. What is to stop another breach? And how easy does that make it for us to share our deepest feelings? You must all be feeling many things, including, I imagine, uncertainty and anger, anger with Christopher perhaps, for initiating such a rupture in what we are trying to create.’

  Nobody said anything. Gabriel sighed again. He shuffled in his seat, not with embarrassment but with irritation. He opened his mouth to say ‘Look,’ but before any sound came out Clemitius said, ‘How about you, Kevin?’

  Kevin thought for a second. ‘Yes, I am angry,’ he offered.

  ‘Do you know what it is about what has happened that makes you feel angry?’

  ‘I think it’s the fact that he is always so sarcastic, do you know what I mean?’ Kevin nodded at Gabriel.

  ‘Yes yes yes,’ said Clemitius, a little too enthusiastically. ‘I do know.’ Christopher winced slightly but stayed quiet. He wasn’t thinking about what Clemitius was saying. Instead he was full of what Peter might be saying if he were here.

  ‘Well so what? That hardly ranks alongside murder, does it? Does it?’ asked Yvonne.

  ‘I think you need to try to let go of the murder thing,’ said Kevin. And Clemitius nodded sagely.

  ‘Do you? Do you really?’ Yvonne turned to Clemitius. ‘For goodness’s sake, you should be ashamed of yourself—a man of God? You are so lost in the trees there isn’t a hope in hell of you seeing any wood, is there?’ she spat. ‘Do you know what I’m interested in? My son being all right, nothing else. They are the same; they care about what and who they have lost. I’m not interested in working through my difficulties. It’s too bloody late for one thing.’

  ‘Not necessarily.’

  ‘No, it’s never too late,’ said Kevin.

  And Gabriel looked at him with new contempt. ‘Oh for Christ’s sake.’

  ‘Oh but it is, Kevin, isn’t it? It’s too bloody late for the people you killed!’ said Yvonne.

  ‘Unless they are all sitting in some interminable group somewhere,’ chipped in Gabriel.

  ‘No no, they are all quite dead,’ said Clemitius, with surprising emphasis on the word dead.

  ‘Well it’s too late for them, isn’t it, like it’s too late for me,’ said Yvonne. ‘I’m tired of all this.’

  ‘Well of course you are, therapy is hard work and it’s not actually too late for you. Heaven awaits,’ Clemitius beamed.

  Kevin looked pleased with this. Yvonne looked annoyed.

  ‘Well you see, that’s just wrong,’ Yvonne said.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘That’s wrong – that young man wanted to see his wife, he clearly loves her very much and he wanted to see her, even to try to help her, and Julie, I think she felt truly awful that he was here because of the accident and I think that seeing her friends trying to help must have helped her? Those are good feelings to have, love, guilt …’

  ‘Oh,’ laughed Clemitius. ‘Guilt is a good feeling to have, is it?’

  ‘It did help,’ said Julie. ‘It helped more than this does. Seeing what we do, who we love, what space we leave behind … of course that helps …’

  ‘Yes,’ snapped Yvonne. ‘Yes I think it is a good feeling. Maybe not always, but if say, you’ve killed someone, I think the very least you can do is feel a bit guilty.’ She looked at Kevin.

  ‘I really feel you need to get past Kevin’s previous deeds,’ said Clemitius. ‘You are not here to judge any more than I am.’

  ‘Indeed,’ said Christopher quietly. ‘But you don’t get past something without talking about it, I suppose?’ Clemitius looked at Christopher and shook his head.

  ‘Oh really, thou shalt not judge, eh?’ shouted Yvonne. ‘I hate that. Doing wrong is still wrong: he killed people, he took money
to kill me, he did it for a living, why doesn’t that get judged while “not fulfilling one’s potential” does, whatever the hell that means?’

  ‘I wonder why you remain so fixated on what other people have or haven’t done, Yvonne. Don’t you feel it’s important that we get past the things people do and see who they are?’ Clemitius spoke with a fixed grin that made him look almost maniacal. His large lips filled his face, which reddened in surprise at the show of pleasure it was so unfamiliar with.

  ‘Yes, exactly,’ said Kevin. ‘I don’t feel that what a man does with his life necessarily reflects who he is,’ which was something he heard in a film once and had been waiting to say for about three years.

  ‘Well I do,’ said Yvonne. ‘I think what we do is exactly who we are, and I think everything else is rubbish. Believe me, I tried to pretend otherwise for a long time, but it’s just pretend. Your life is the sum of its parts, that’s all. What you intend or how you explain it or what excuses you have, they’re all nonsense.’

  ‘Oh Yvonne, if only it were that simple,’ said Clemitius pityingly.

  ‘And don’t patronise me, you silly little man,’ she snapped. ‘You may be some kind of angel thingy, but to me you’re a foolish self-indulgent prick with a small-man complex.’ And with that she got up and left, slamming the door behind her.

  There was silence for a moment before, inevitably, Kevin spoke: ‘She seems upset. Maybe it’s her time of the month, if you can get that when you’re dead.’ He reddened. ‘Can you?’ he asked, looking at Julie.

  ‘It does appear to be the case,’ said Clemitius rather grandly, looking at Christopher, ‘that you have set something of a precedent for leaving the group. I wonder if it might be time to start locking the door?’

  33

  Ellie came round from what Dr Samani had called her ‘little harvest festival’ to find the good doctor sitting beside her bed smiling. ‘Eight!’ he said. ‘Eight eggs.’