‘What is it you want? To confess?’ Xas asked. ‘Or to exonerate God?’
‘I’d do that?’ Lucifer took a few steps toward him, came close enough for Xas to be able to distinguish the noises the water made dripping from his wings and the sprinklers. ‘Why won’t you answer God,’ Lucifer said, puzzled, ‘when He’s speaking to you?’
‘God can’t make me hear Him.’
Lucifer looked intensely interested. ‘How long has that been going on?’
‘None of your business,’ Xas said.
A man had appeared at the edge of the green. A greenkeeper possibly, come to shut off the sprinklers. The man was watching them—seeing a six-winged angel in conversation with a smaller human figure. The man was peering about him, perhaps looking for the camera crew. His as yet unrewarded search was probably the only thing keeping him conscious and mobile and able to finish what he’d come out to do. He stooped to a tap and wound it, shutting off the water.
The turf ticked, and silence seem to drift down over Xas in a series of diaphanous layers, each more muffling than the last.
Lucifer turned to regard the man, who was fortunately far enough away not to suffer the blow of the archangel’s attention. He said, musing, ‘Why is it that just having something to do makes them so brave?’ He seemed not to expect an answer—even from God—for he simply went on, ‘Can you really not hear Him?’
‘I really can’t.’
Lucifer’s lips parted again, and this time Xas could read the look. Lucifer looked impressed, and avid. He came closer.
Xas took several steps back.
The archangel came to a stop, but said, ‘I was holding you before. If I intended to hurt you I would have already.’
‘You cut off my wings!’ Xas roared. The world turned a soft shade of red. He jumped at Lucifer, intending to tear at that body with his fingers and feet—and his teeth, even knowing what would happen. He’d do it. He’d bathe in his brother’s toxic blood.
But Lucifer took a step back and Xas’s fingertips brushed squeaking down a stretch of slippery feathers. Xas sprawled on the turf. For a second Lucifer’s bare feet were before his face, just out of his reach, then Xas saw the toes splay, and press hard into the grass, raising mud. All six of Lucifer’s wings swept down, so that Xas lay for a second inside a dark tent of feathered muscle. Then there was a loud crack and sheets of water leapt off the ground to follow the retreating momentous gravity of the archangel’s body as he tore himself off the earth.
The water dropped back down and lay quiet as water should. Xas rolled onto his back to watch the archangel vanish into the darkness. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the greenkeeper keel over in a faint. The sound of the archangel’s wing beats receded, grew faint, faded away. Xas lay for a few minutes on the sodden ground. Then he got up, retrieved his jacket, and set out walking away from the hills, toward the sea.
For Flora getting out of bed was a process. First she’d throw off her covers, using only her arms, and keeping her back firmly against the mattress. She’d roll to the edge of the bed and drop her feet onto the floor. Then she’d straighten her arms to move her torso off the bed. Each morning she would accomplish this series of manoeuvres with as little movement in her hips as possible. And still her scars pulled.
That morning, after a fog had rolled over the house and a chill set in, Flora made her usual efforts to get out of bed. She put on her robe and slippers and scuffed her way to the kitchen to make tea and toast.
Once she’d settled at the table with her toast and a wedge of fresh, sweating butter on her plate, O’Brien jumped up beside her and sat at her elbow as she ate, his eyes turned modestly aside—as falsely nonchalant as begging cats are. He couldn’t be hungry, for there was still some ground beef in his plate. Xas must have come in near enough to O’Brien’s breakfast time for the cat to be able to convince him that his need was genuine.
Flora finished chewing and paused to listen to the house. The bed Xas was now using—Millie’s—was in better shape than the other, but still creaked whenever he moved. Not that he often moved. Flora suspected that when he got into bed, for the few hours he’d spend there, he’d lie awake and motionless, often reading.
Flora listened, and heard nothing. She called, ‘Xas?’
The bed creaked. A moment later he came into the kitchen, barefoot, but fully clothed. His leather jacket was dark and damp, his shirt clinging to his chest and stomach.
Flora stared at him. O’Brien seized his moment, and the remnant of her butter, and carried it off under the table.
Xas was dishevelled, and his face seemed different, unguarded. It was his mouth. Flora had always thought his mouth was his most alien and unused feature—though he talked and laughed, and though, Flora knew, Cole had uses for those smooth, rosy lips.
Xas regarded her for a moment, then removed his jacket and dropped it on the floor. He drew out a chair and straddled it, his back to her. Then he pulled his shirt off over his head. The revealed feathers hissed, crackled, then settled. They were soft, sleek, and of supernatural whiteness. They coated his muscles, and lay close to his skin, only grew unevenly in the channels of scars—each shaped like the letter ‘J’, one a mirror of the other.
Flora touched his back. The feathers were warm and animal. ‘They’re beautiful,’ she said.
‘This isn’t a whole body,’ he said.
‘I do understand that.’ She took hold of his shoulder and tried to turn him.
He obligingly got up and sat down again the right way around. She was sorry to lose sight of the feathers, but at least could study the alteration in his face.
The change was sorrow, and surrender too. Somehow, he was putting himself in her hands—which was what, she realised, she wanted him to do. She said, ‘If I don’t seem surprised, this is the reason. A man came to claim your pearls. One Henri de Valday, from Château Vully, in France. He told the jeweller and me a story about his family’s great wine. He said that, in the barrels in which the wine begins its life, there were angel wings, one wing in each barrel. His grandfather claimed to have seen them. In Henri de Valday’s story about how the wings came to be in the barrels there was a winemaker with your name—Jodeau—the name on your pilot’s licence, the name you gave the Madill Brothers.’
Xas kept his eyes cast down. Flora longed for him to look up at her. She touched his cheek. ‘What kind of angel were you?’
‘I’m still an angel.’
‘But before this.’ Her hands described a feathery flourish in the emptiness over his shoulders.
‘I don’t know how to answer that. I can’t think where to start. I don’t want to leave things out. With my lover, Sobran, I kept leaving things out. For decades I left out the salient fact that I came from Hell, not Heaven.’
Flora was silent a moment, managing that first shock: ‘Hell, not Heaven.’ Then she mustered her courage and said, ‘Start anywhere. I’m an editor, I can cut it together. Start in Hell, if you like.’
So, without pausing even to acknowledge her next poorly suppressed gasp of astonishment, Xas told her his story, beginning with the start of the calendar, the place where history commenced again in positive numbers.
‘Just after the Crucifixion Christ came to preach to the souls in Hell—as the doctrine says. We fallen angels hung about to listen and I noticed that He looked like me. He had vestigial signs of injuries, some wear on His youth, and a chipped front tooth, but He looked like me.
‘I thought about that for a long while before daring to ask God about it. And, while I was thinking, I began to make my garden.
‘You see—I had a garden in Hell. I’m sure it’s there still, in its mountain valley, under glass whitened within by condensation. In my garden I grew trees and flowering vines, shrubs and ferns, and everything was softly dark in the unsteady light that shone through the dome, of fire reflected on the summits of the surrounding mountains, and the wavering greens and purples of the aurora infernus.
‘I bel
ieve my garden’s still there because I found a water pipe leading into the salt dome—the salt dome in Turkey that is the gate to Hell. I think Lucifer built the pipe, and probably a distillery too. He always was something of an engineer. Of course he waited until I was gone before he took over my garden. He hadn’t shown any interest in it before. And he’d had two thousand years in which to show an interest.
‘Shortly after Christ had preached in Hell, Lucifer came to see me. I was in the garden’s unfinished dome, up to my ankles in a slush of scoria, lichen and water, trying to make soil. Lucifer asked me what I was doing, I told him, and he flew off again. I’m certain now that he’d come to kill me. Because he’d worked out that I was a copy of Christ, and that that had to mean more than what my lover Sobran said he thought it might mean when I told him about it. Sobran thought that maybe God had a template for treaties. That if Christ was a kind of treaty between God and humankind, and I was one between God and Lucifer, then maybe that was why I looked like Christ.
‘I am a treaty between them—the Adversary, and the One who can’t be opposed. The treaty consists of three clauses. One: Xas can go freely. Two: Lucifer will share his pleasures and God his pains. And Three: Only when Xas is with Lucifer will Lucifer be with God. You see, God is everywhere but in Hell. Hell is hellish because there’s nowhere comfortable to sit down, and because of the heartbreaking bleak vacancy of no God. Damned souls and fallen angels feel it all the time—God’s absence. But if a fallen angel flies out of Hell—after burrowing through the salt—they are then with God, as everyone on earth is with God all the time, whether or not they know it. But Lucifer is never with God. He carries God’s absence around with him wherever he goes. Except when I’m with him.’
Flora was following this, despite the shock after shock of it. She said, ‘So you’re not just any old angel?’
‘You asked me what kind of angel I was. I’m the kind who is a treaty between God and Lucifer. And I’m a copy of Christ—though that’s probably only symbolic, as Sobran thought.’
‘Symbolic my eye,’ thought Flora. She felt she was looking at the numbers on the reel of a film she had to cut. She asked, ‘But weren’t you a treaty before Christ?’ She wanted to add, ‘These shots are in the wrong order.’
‘Yes. I asked God about that. I may have come first, but Christ is the original. God exists outside time so can make an angelic copy of a divine human before the birth of that human. God said to me that He made a copy of His Son because He wanted to see what His Son would do if He didn’t do His duty.’
‘God’s experiment can’t have pleased Him then, since you’re a fallen angel.’
‘I’m not really,’ Xas said. ‘I wasn’t cast out of Heaven. I only followed Lucifer to Hell. I was interested in what he’d been saying. He didn’t get to finish, so I followed him to hear the rest. I chose interest over happiness. But I was free to go back. Then, as soon as I tried, as soon as I was out of Hell and on earth and on my way to Heaven, they caught me and made a treaty out of me. They signed me—God and Lucifer. First I was a copy, a test. Then I was a treaty, or something like a telephone, or two-way radio.’
‘Wait,’ said Flora, holding up her hands. She was still trying to put the story in order, and had run up against something unexpected. ‘Did you just say that the war in Heaven was only hundreds of years before Christ?’
‘Yes,’ said Xas. He looked impatient. ‘The churches have got it wrong. They talk about the truth of the Bible but keep reading it more like a myth than a history. In the churches’ readings there has to be an agent of good and an agent of evil. But the malak, the clever messenger angel in the Old Testament, the one who tests people—like Job—that’s Lucifer, working for God.’
Flora, hearing this, had several thoughts. A first and a second and so on, each thought revealing itself to her as a succession of shining faces, like the girls of a chorus line peeling off girl by girl, to finally reveal the star. First she thought, at last feeling it as true, that, yes, Xas was an angel. He didn’t have wings, but the shape of his life was angelic, epochal.
Her next thought was a memory. She recalled the moment just before she’d met him. She was crossing Mines Field, carrying Cole’s bow tie and a bag of turkey sandwiches. She was whistling a tune and listening for her whistle to echo, as if the twilight was a soundstage. That moment had been one of a certain kind in Flora’s life. Flora—the film editor, who sometimes, when she was alone, thought she could sense an alteration, as if in time itself, something like the soft click of a splice passing through the gate of her editing machine.
She could feel that now, and she was positive that what she was feeling, and had felt at other times throughout her life, was God, God’s personal attention turned to her, Flora McLeod. Because if God lived outside time, then when, as a girl, Flora had sat in church beside her grandmother—passing on the collection plate because she hadn’t a purse of her own—God was there. God, Who had all the footage. God, matching shots for meaning as well as logic. He was there in the church, He was there on Mines Field, and He was here now in her kitchen.
Flora considered this thought, then asked Xas, carefully, tentatively, why he’d come back.
‘I came back because you asked me to. Because, like Sobran, and unlike God or Lucifer or Conrad Cole, you make me feel I have the power to please you. I came back despite having met Lucifer on your paper road. Despite having become available to him and not wanting to. And despite Cole’s attempt to kill me.’ He added, emphatic, ‘Being invulnerable doesn’t make much difference to the horror of having someone try to kill you. It’s the hatred that’s horrible. Or it’s the desire—the desire with emptiness as its object, yourself harmed, then emptiness where you were. Cole wanted the world without me in it. That hurt me.’
Xas was breathing hard.
Flora tried to make her stiff, incompetent body get into a position where she could embrace him. She couldn’t, and let out a sob of pain and frustration. Xas jumped up and took her in his arms. Her satin robe was the only thing between his skin and hers, and his more-than-human warmth was pouring into her.
He was shaking. ‘People die,’ he said. ‘I’ve been afraid of that since I first cared for one. But he showed me his power, and that was even worse. He made part of me disappear. He made me afraid of dying.’
Flora had a suspicion that Xas’s ‘he’ was Lucifer, not Cole. She was too afraid to ask him what he meant—what exactly Lucifer had done to him. God in her kitchen was one thing; Lucifer, as she imagined him then—out in the fog, wings mantled, standing on the cold clotted sand of the track by her back gate—that was more than she was ready for.
She held Xas and whispered ‘Sweetheart’ and ‘Darling’. She said, ‘Hush now,’ and, ‘It’s all right’, and he buried his face in her unwashed hair and took deep, gulping breaths of her probably none-too-clean human smell, as if he were smothering and she was oxygen.
Later, when the light was fading, Flora and Xas were lying on the sofa. O’Brien had settled on their legs, where, even if he slept, he’d get immediate notice of any promising movement from either of them. Flora was hungry, but she was also very comfortable. It was rare for her to be so comfortable. Xas had a superlative, gentle dexterity. Holding her, he was as pliant, and yielding, and strong, as water.
Flora had been talking to Xas about what was important to her. She’d finally told him about the fire—what she could remember—the heat against her ankle and the first streaks of flame she had looked down at past her own raised arm, and then, suddenly, the flames enfolding her upper body and head like the petals of a carnivorous flower; all that, and then how she’d run and the fire had streamed back from her face and arms and chest so that she hadn’t inhaled it; that, and how the people had scattered before her, except for Cole, who had stood in her path like a matador, his cape a curtain he’d torn down; all that, and the long terrible weeks in the hospital. She told it all in a rush. And as she did she began to feel that the story of the fire,
the story that was the centre of her life and made her Flora, even more than her work, wasn’t the centre any more, that maybe the centre of her life was this, herself lying in a dusky room in the arms of an angel. She felt that she and Xas had, in effect, been saying to one another: ‘This is the use the world has made of me so far. What do you think it means? And what am I to do now?’
Flora told Xas about the fire, and John Weber, and what Cole had done to John. She said, ‘Con killed John out of indignation. He got indignant on my behalf and had to do something about it. He hates to feel helpless.’
‘Yes,’ said Xas. Then, ‘Are you going to show me your scars?’
‘Not right now. I’m too comfortable to move.’ She gave a sigh of happiness, then slipped her fingers under the cushion of the window seat and felt for the paper she’d stowed there. As she did she had a moment of feeling mythological, as if she was Psyche, lamp in hand, creeping toward the couch where Eros lies sleeping. ‘Someone came asking after you. He wrote me notes. This was the last of them.’
Xas took the paper and read, then dropped his head back against the window frame. He closed his eyes and said softly, ‘I knew I was a copy but I hadn’t really considered what that meant.’
‘What?’
‘It means I’m not like—’ he hesitated, then began again. ‘Perhaps it doesn’t so much matter who I’m like, as who I’m not like.’
‘Your brothers?’ said Flora.
Xas nodded faintly, but kept his eyes closed.
Flora thought of snuffed candles—fire starved of air. He was dampening himself down, more angry than sorry, and trying to hide it from her. ‘The note says God made angels, but didn’t make people.’
‘That’s Lucifer’s heresy—that God didn’t make the world, only found it. And that when He made angels it was an attempt to discover how people worked by copying them.’