ANGELA (2 page)

It was a Saturday and Angela took the train to the place where I would take her as a child. It was just a grassy embankment overlooking a football pitch where a team with no name would play games that didn’t matter on Saturday afternoons. I’d take her there with sandwiches and she would sit away from me and eat them so gingerly, always watching me. Always watching. It was as though she knew I would leave her. It was my way of saying sorry, you see? Sorry for the things I hadn’t done yet. Sorry for the things I had.

It wasn’t enough.

On the train my grown up Angela listened to a woman speak about the death of her infant grandson in that bleak way that only women of a certain age and from a certain part of Liverpool can. Her words were quiet and slid out of her like wet slate under the grey sky.

The train pulled into the flickering station and she stepped off it into disinfectant, diesel and tobacco smoke. The walk from the station to the grassy knoll took twenty minutes between semis and garages and when she got to the pitch the grey rain began and she ate three jam sandwiches in the same spot she had all those years ago, with her anorak pulled up over her head. No one played football. No one passed her by, and ninety minutes later she retreated down the same path, and boarded the return train.

From the window of the train from Liverpool to Preston she saw a body in the shrubs at the side of the track. Grey skin. Blue jeans. Face down. She mentioned it to no one and now somehow, in death, he was hers.

Janet is leaving.

Twenty-three years after walking through those doors for the first time, she’s leaving.

Angela had been there on her first day. She’d shown her the fire exits. She’d even shown her to the office on the day of her interview, but now it was over like it had never begun. With a condemned solemnity Janet cleared her desk into a cardboard box she’d brought from home and once she’d emptied her last drawer there would be only a broken seat and brown finger stains on a beige keyboard to prove she’d ever been there at all. Angela thought of Janet often. She was a kind but quiet woman who had learned to keep herself to herself. In her younger days she had been attractive, in her own way, and Angela had always had the impression that she was the kind of woman who would have liked to have children but wasn’t able. She had a propensity toward heavy knits and denim skirts, which didn’t work together at all, but the combination had become unmistakably hers over the years, and when Angela learned she was leaving she walked over to her desk and asked where she got them from, the jeans and the wool.

“I’ve had them years Angela”, she said, her voice quiet, dry and trembling like she held a moth in her throat. She had got them from a shop in Leeds many years ago. It was where she was from, where her parents still lived. She gave her the address and when Angela took the train there the following Saturday there they were, still hanging on the racks, like pieces of Janet. She bought two beige jumpers and a long denim skirt. At home she placed one jumper and the skirt in a cardboard box marked “JANET 2014” on her bedroom floor, and wrapped the second jumper in metallic red paper and a bow. And now this was it, Janet was leaving, and tonight there would be a meal to see her off. Another loss. Another ghost in the office. Another box in Angela’s bedroom.

“Are you coming tonight Angela?” Veronica said over the box files.

“Yes, yes, I’m coming. What are you wearing?”

“Black”

“So will I. I’ll wear black. And what time?”

“Um, say a quarter to eight”

“Ok, see you there”

“Yes, see you there”

She is home. It is 7:15pm. The birds have been fed and she shovels the days crust from the plastic floor in the second bedroom and starts to get ready for the meal. She picks out the black dresses from a slanted wardrobe and throws them on the bed before her, where they lay there like sad, empty people. She critiques them all. Too wide. Too short. Too old. She picks one, the wide one, and drags it over herself. She lets it cover her face for a while and looks through the fabric and sequins at the room beyond. The boxes stacked around the bed shimmer through the fabric and glitter like a haphazard city. She thinks of Janet dying. Surely she would now? The cancer had come back twice already. She couldn’t have long. Was she scared? Was she filled with regret? Or was she free, finally? Would she just fly away between crystal towers on brilliant white wings?

Angela pulls on the dress and a pair of purple heels and the combination makes her look like a frog on stilts wearing a bag. She looks over at the boxes, now just boxes again, and feels the old ache return. She climbs up on a little plastic stool, taking a box marked “FIONA, 1987” from the stack. She lifts the hair net from the top of the bundle of clothes and holds it to her face. It still smells of her.

She arrives at the restaurant at 7:40pm and hears their laughter before she sees their faces. They are stood at the bar, all of them, twenty five of the people she works with, their drinks two-thirds empty, their cheeks too flush to have just arrived. They see her over the room and Veronica does her regal little wave, beckoning Angela to her side. She makes her way over, through their shoulders and backs to Veronica's side, the place where she is most comfortable.

“Veronica, I thought you said quarter to eight?”

“Do you want a drink Angela?”

“Yes, I’ll have a Bacardi and Coke please Veronica.”

“Diet?”

“Yes, Diet Coke, thank you”

The room crackles and hums as workplace dynamics reorganise themselves through alcohol and repression into something vaguely dangerous. She sips sweet black tar through a pale pink straw and watches. Their laughter makes their eyes wide and their lips curl back. Angela sees white teeth and white eyes, fingers pointing here, there, everywhere. Jewels of sweat form beneath the sequins in the folds of her back and she feels them coalesce and run in rivers down her canyons, tickling and shaming her till they soak into her tights. The smell of her own fear rises up, bitter and shameful, kissing her face as a sign shines in red above a fake door and tells her that it is not an exit.

“I need to visit the ladies, Veronica”

“Excuse me, can I get past. I said excuse me, please I just need to….”

In the toilet cubicle she hitches up her dress around her neck and dabs herself off as best she can with what tissue is left on the roll. It is too hot in here. She hates the heat. She hates it. The music from the bar rises and falls through the opening door as girls come and go, touching up and talking and peeing. Young high voices, full of malice and life.

“What is that hair about!??

Laughter.

“1988 called. It wants its dress back”

More laughter.

That could be about anybody. It could be about anybody.

Dried off and rearranged she’s back in the bar which is almost empty now apart from those couples out on a Wednesday night for whatever reason. A girl with kind eyes says, “Are you with the party?” from behind the bar, and she says yes and wants to cry. “They’re through there”, the girl says and points round the corner to the dining area at the back of the building. Angela notes her name badge. Maria.

Ah yes, she can hear them again. Their voices come to her around the angle.

Move it! I don’t want her!

Do you want her Sheila? Aaahahahahahaha!

Veronica you have her.

No, I have her all bloody day! Jeremy?

Fuck off!

Hahahahhaaaaa Ahhh, Jeremy…

NO WAY.

Ok fine, put it here next to me, I’ll have her, AGAIN! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA…….. .

It takes effort for her to turn that dark corner, out of the relative peace of the bar area, with the quiet couples and down turned eyes and into the unbridled electric maelstrom that boils just out of sight. She considers just going home, but makes herself stay. Yes, it hurts here, but it would hurt at home too, and at least here the voices she hears aren’t pre-recorded, or in her head.

She turns the corner and pretends to be looking in her bag as they pretend not to see her and tumble on with their rabble and rouse.

“Janet”, she says. “Janet, I was in Leeds last week and got you this. I know you’ve got one but…”

“Oh, thank you Angela. You didn’t need to do that but thank you.”

“Not sure it’ll be your size. Probably too small for you because you’re quite swollen up these days aren’t you?”

The room goes quiet, betraying the fact that they are paying her no attention.

“You’re here with me Angela,” says Veronica, saving the moment, and pointing down at a piece of folded card with her name written on it.

It is stained with wine.

I was twenty-three.

I was working on the docks when He came to me. I had been given the job by a friend of my mothers who had pitied me enough to take me in after she died. She had found me destitute on the cobbles behind my mother’s terraced house and lifted me up from my morosity with a kind
condescension
. To me she was a shimmer of ecclesiastic light, cutting through the shadows with delicate authority. I had never seen anything like her, and I never would again. She died that night, in a sleep I helped her find.

I had never been a strong man, I had never built or brawled, but I had my voice, and it was all mine. Too lilting for a man of substance perhaps, but I was no man of substance. I would sing my aching song and the birds would come from all around and sit on the windowsill and whistle along, my balsa wood bones reverberating with the pleasure I brought myself. Mother would say I had the voice of an angel, and then cry herself to sleep stroking my jet-black hair, her sharp nails tracing the scars on my scalp.

You’re weak, she said as she drifted away. Weak like your father.

And she was right.

It was the fifties and the newspapers sold me dappled monochrome images of palm trees and distant beaches and I felt the cold north repel me. My dream had been to get to a beach in Spain before I lost the use of my legs, before I went the same way as my mother. Hereditary, they had said, and I knew it to be true. As I sat in the waiting area at her first appointment I could already feel the ends of my fingers and toes dipping into the same static sea that eventually washed her away. I had to do something with the life I had left, before I was just a broken twig of a man, bent up and salivating.

So I took the job down by the black estuary. I worked hard and late with all the strength I had. I just needed to earn enough to take the ferry out into those wild curling waters, away from that isle of men like me, across the channel, to where I could use what remained of the power beneath the tremor in my legs and the breath that shook in my lungs. I would busk and hitch until I saw those blue waves break on that yellow shore, and then maybe I would too. That was my only goal. To see the blue sea and let it take me. My reason to run. My reason to live a little longer.

I had never wanted a daughter, nor a son, and I had certainly never before wanted to watch my own child grow in the stomach of her wretched mother, caged and screaming, but then one night, despite all that, there He was.

I felt Him before I saw Him, a stab in the chest.

Outside.

Go outside.

Go into the rain.

The black sea curled and slapped the dock walls. I looked between the sheds for the man in my mind, and He was stood there, where I feared He’d be, shocking my marrow, blacker than the night but darker than that even. He wore a coat of feathers; black feathers that seemed to reflect and remove the light all at once. And behind the feathers, the face. That face that burned me, burned my eyes and my soul and scorched the earth. He beckoned me over with an arthritic claw that clicked as it curled and I stood in His presence for the first time, but I knew then that He had been in these shadows all along. Ever since I was a little boy. He had seen me through my bedroom walls with those eyes, both red and black at the same time. Please know that I wanted Him out of me, every part of me wanted that, but the knowledge that He was a part of my life, indistinguishable from my blood and shit, for now and for always, saturated me. I was, no, I had always been His.

“Yes Father?” I said, through the night that separated us and through the rain that streaked my face.

He answered me in images. They flashed behind my eyes like epilepsy, taking my sight.

The street.

The girl.

The deed.

The cage.

The knife.

The flames.

That night I dreamed but didn’t sleep. I saw Him before my brain, behind my eyes. A suit of feathers. A hole in His face, and that tongue. No man should ever have to see that tongue; even inside of a dream no man should see that. It is enough to separate you from your sanity.

And it did, in the end, it did.