Speaking With the Angel

  I stretch with her, still inside her. It’s quiet.

  We lie in each other’s arms and then she says, ‘We’ve lost our virginities.’

  I say, ‘I thought you hated me,’ and she says, ‘I do.’

  I flick her on the arm and she punches my leg.

  And we lie a bit more, doing nothing, contemplating things again.

  Then I start going a bit soft so I say, ‘Shall I take it out now?’

  She says, ‘OK.’ So I do, quite slowly. We both gasp a little. We really do.

  I sneak a quick glance at it and there’s some blood. Which is OK I think.

  She says, ‘You’ve been in the wars.’

  She’s actually talking to my nob like it’s some other person in the room.

  She’s holding it very gently, she says, ‘You’ve been in the trenches.’ (We did ‘First World War’ this term).

  I say, ‘Are you OK, with the blood?’

  And she says, ‘I’m dandy,’ which I just love.

  Then she lights a cigarette and says, ‘My first post-coital fag.’ ‘Coital’s fucking isn’t it?’

  And she says, ‘One hundred per cent.’

  After a while we get up. We lie on the bed kissing and stroking each other, listening to her favourite records, discussing the lyrics, talking about school.

  She walks me home through the still summer air. I say I won’t be able to sleep and she says, ‘Wank about me.’ I say I will but in fact I won’t because I ache like mad down there.

  We sit on the kerb near my flat.

  My mother comes out on the balcony, it’s getting dark.

  She shouts down that she’s been worried sick about where I was.

  I say I’m sorry and that I’ve been with Georgia and this is Georgia.

  My mother knows all about Georgia and she smiles.

  She says, ‘You must come to tea soon, Georgia.’

  We kiss good-bye.

  I say, ‘I love your hair, I love your dress, I love your shoes,

  I love your laces, I love your body.’ She says, ‘Don’t be poxy.’

  I go up in the pissy lift feeling like I could eat the world.

  I go on to the balcony to watch Georgia walking away but she’s still standing in the street, smoking.

  She looks up at me and says, ‘We forgot to listen to the B side.’

  I say. ‘Tomorrow?’ and she says, ‘Tomorrow.’ And then she walks away.

  The Department

  COLIN FIRTH

  Through a creepy forest she ran, young Emma in her white nightie; flapping and phantasmic in the gloom of an enchanted night-storm. For it was prophesied that the only way to lift the spell was for her to find the Night Garden and take the ring from the hand of the evil Lucien Lothair who ruled all Sardorf with an iron fist and a nasty climate. In order to do this she had to run through this forest, where darkness had stolen all colour – sucked it like a vampire does.

  Something was chasing her. How could she know if she was running towards even greater danger? She couldn’t, basically, so she just had to get on with it and run anyway and hope she was running in the right direction. On she strove, scraping her extremities on stumps of mighty oak and frowning yew – whereupon she came upon an ivied wall … wildly she fought for passage – and lo! By luck or grace, she fell upon a door which gave on to …

  The Night Garden:

  All moonlit and full of eerie beauty and tranquillity. Here the wind fell silent – and her pursuer seemed not to be around any more. The garden seemed to belong to a great house or castle, now mainly forgotten. All around were crumbling walls and sundials, old statues, rose trees, terrible gargoyles and stone animals. What she didn’t see were little real live devilish faces poking from behind rocks. Then suddenly, standing right in front of her, there was a group of weird children. They were staring at her. One of them said, ‘Who are you?’ And then, before anyone could answer, this big loud honking voice from somewhere else, suddenly shouted ‘Henry!!!’ which is my name …

  And then there wasn’t any garden or children, just me sitting next to my grandma’s bed, probably late for school, smelling haddock – wishing Grandma’s stories didn’t have to be always interrupted. You see how annoying it is? It’s more than annoying, it’s irksome. In fact, it was twenty to nine and I was about five minutes away from quite a big detention if I didn’t go damn sharpish. I still wanted Grandma to go on, but that’s always when she gets strict and says, ‘No more talking, the session is closed.’

  Whenever I’m listening to a story I always turn her bedside clock away so I don’t see the time. She says I’m not allowed to, because I have to respect punctuality – but I always manage it. Clocks are definitely on the TTPUYL list. Things That Pants Up Your Life. Grown-ups think they are fantastic – they love minutes and they add them up like they’re made of pound coins or something. Our teacher Shitty McVittie (I didn’t make up the shitty part, that’s what everyone calls him) … if you’re, like, a minute late then it’s like you’ve stolen a minute off him and so he’ll steal an hour off you – after school. Even Grandma says ‘chop chop’ all the time, in spite of being magic. It’s strange, because the place where clocks most can’t get you is in her stories. Even after she’s told one it’s like you go into a kind of slo-mo for ages.

  So when I came out of Grandma’s room I already knew I’d be thinking about the rest of the story until five o’clock, and I’d probably get in trouble for daydreaming. You always come out with a load of new words and things you can carry in your head until next time – and school would be much worse without these things in your head … my head.

  It can still make you go a bit mental to be torn viciously from a mysterious midnight garden to your mum shouting ’cause you didn’t eat your haddock. So your life is made of half-finished stories and games that never actually get added up into a whole thing – unless it’s your homework or your broccoli, then you can finish it all, however long it takes.

  There’s a name for all this: most people call it real life, but actually it’s called the Department of Nothing. It’s not just one department, but loads of mini departments. The broccoli and haddock and meat with vomity white bits get made in the Kitchen of Nothing. School is the Paper Department, where they have this special doom-paper so that anything you write on it is doomed. Then there’s the Waiting Room of Nothing where you get told Not now, I’m busy, or You’re not old enough yet and all that, and this is also where all detentions come from. And then the Department Vacuum Cleaner comes and sucks up all the second halves of stories and games, so you can never find them again. Grown-ups think they are the controllers, but they’re not really, because it’s the Clock Department who have all the actual power; marching grown-ups about like sergeant majors to one two, one two. Absolutely everyone lives there – unless they get to go to Grandma’s room, which is the only way out of the Department – except nobody knows that, even though it’s blatant. The trick is holding on to the magic to get you through the Department of Nothing. The luckiest thing is that stories come right at the beginning of the day.

  Stories are my best thing in my life. OK so … it goes, best things: Grandma’s stories, Grandma, Tintin books, the crossword in The Chronicle, gobstoppers, weekends and holidays. And days when Mr McVittie’s away. But the main best thing is usually Grandma.

  Grandma doesn’t live in the world any more, because she has to live in her room. She can’t do the stairs and her health isn’t brilliant. She wishes she could get out, and I wish that too, but her room and the stories are better than any of the places she wants to get out to, and that’s where I visit, all the time, even though she’s strict and checks if I’ve washed my hands, and you have to ask her if you can sit down. Going to Grandma’s room is like going to thousands of incredible different places. And sometimes when she’s doing a story, I look at her hands, which I know are really old and kind of baggy but they make me think of places too. They’ve got paths that lead where you don’t know,
like a map of mountains and rivers of countries you wish you could get to.

  And when her teeth are out and in the glass they smile at you so weirdly that sometimes you think they are going to burst out laughing about something they know and you don’t.

  It’s not like with the woods at the bottom of our garden, ’cause when you go in them you think it’s like this totally wicked place to explore and you can’t see further because the bamboo is so thick, but then you always really quickly get to the fence of Mrs Lowescroft’s garden, or if you go the other way, you get the fence to Crossways Road, so the whole exploration turns into a total bin. But when you go to Grandma’s room, it’s like exploring with no fence at the end. Except for when Mum calls you. She makes her room seem bigger than the world outside, which she wants to escape into, and I think it’s sad that there’s something back to front about it all. I want to escape to her room, and she wants to escape into the Department of Nothing.

  Grandma tries to persuade Mum to let her go out – to church or something. That’s what she talks about wanting to do, and she talks about it a lot. Mum always says she’ll talk to Doctor Morgan and she’ll see. Grandma said she felt like Rapunzel, but who everyone’s forgotten about. She said, ‘My prince would get a bit of a nasty shock if he climbed the walls and saw me now, wouldn’t he? He shouldn’t have been so blessed long about it.’ She always says these kind of things in a cheerful voice, but she only does her cheerful voice when she’s not really cheerful. It’s a Mary Poppins putting-a-brave-face-on sort of thing. When she’s happy she always goes all strict and pretends not to be cheerful.

  She’s quite a back-to-front lady really.

  Max – my older brother, who’s not on my list of best things – says it’s completely pants to go visiting your Grandma all the time instead of having proper friends. He calls me the Prince of Pants and the only reason he hasn’t told everyone at school is because he’s too embarrassed for everyone to know that his brother’s a bell-end. Well, he’s fourteen and I found a picture of All Saints inside his Southampton fanzine, and he’s got a mail order catalogue under his bed for girls’ underwear, and he’s only just stopped playing with Pokémon cards and you can’t get much pantser than that, and weirdest of all, I found two Barbie dolls in with his Action Men and I think he might be doing pervy things to them.

  He says stories are for poofs, but he’s the one going on all the time about the evil shed. I’ve always been scared of the evil shed even if I don’t know whether to believe him about it. The evil shed is the shed in our garden which no one uses, and Max says that at night the old bags of cement which are in there, turn into bollock-eating midgets. They are exactly the right height to eat your bollocks and there’s no escape. The boy who used to live in our house before us, Christopher Creswell, was sitting down on the floor of the shed once, when a midget came up through a rotten floorboard and ate his entire bollocks, his nob and part of his bum, and now he has to wear special trousers. So that’s why I don’t go down there. It’s probably not true but I don’t want to chance it and neither does Max – which is funny for someone who thinks stories are for poofs.

  But Max isn’t even close to the top of the list of things that pants up your life. He isn’t even on it really. I don’t care actually; he doesn’t spoil things. TTPUYL have to be much worse than just irksome. The evil shed would be, but it’s probably not true and anyway I can avoid it. TTPUYL have to be hard to avoid. Like clocks. Timetables. Shitty McVittie detention. Sarcasm. This is what Shitty McVittie uses and it makes me wish the cane was legal – ’cause I’d much rather have the cane. Well, not really.

  Then there’s Uncle Toby. I don’t even know if he’s evil but he gives me the creeps, even though he used to be a vicar or dean or something, but that just makes him creepier. I think he stopped being a vicar when he got into trouble for walking down Mitford Road with his penis out. But I’m not sure about that; it might just be a rumour. He’s my dad’s brother, which means he’s my grandma’s son, and she doesn’t like him either but she won’t ever say why … so maybe it’s because of his penis … I don’t know. She’s just always telling me to watch for him.

  And then scariest of all, even though I’ve never met him, is O’Hare – of Brothers O’Hare. He’s the undertaker and it’s not just ’cause he’s the undertaker, I mean, I’m not so pathetic as to say oh ooey! The undertaker! It’s ’cause he’s actually just scary and the undertaking parlour is scary as well. There used to be four Brothers O’Hare, but one’s gone away, another one’s simple, and one’s dead except people say he’s still there, as a ghostly partner. The back window of the parlour backs on to the railway line. Max says that old Mr O’Hare was found hanging in that window. It’s called the Darkling Window of Death. If you go down the High Street, you have to pass in front of O’Hare’s, and often you see O’Hare watching you through net curtains, thinking of you in his clutches. I saw him driving the Daimler with the box in the back containing Old Mr Hesperson, and you could see he was thinking, ‘That’s another one for my evil collection.’ He first came here to Walden Bridge in 1989, which is the year I was born, and I’ve always wished he hadn’t, because it’s as if he came here specially to wait for me. It’s probably nonsense, like the shed, but nonsense is a lot scarier than sense.

  When I got downstairs, Mum was doing where’s my glasses, which is where you feel guilty for standing still while Mum runs through different rooms banging drawers and things, with her glasses on her head going ‘Where’s my glasses?’ and she’s annoyed ’cause you’re not as worked up as she is. She told me to get a move on ’cause I was late for school, and then wouldn’t let me go because she had to tell me that she had to go to the Underwoods tonight, and Dad had his movement ’cause it was Thursday.

  Dad hates it when she calls it a movement. He says it’s a society, not a movement. But it’s always hard for my dad to argue very well because he’s so boring. It comes from not expressing himself as a child. He even used to be a morris dancer but he’s stopped that now, because a counsellor told him to have more self-respect. He lives mostly in the toilet when he’s not at work. Since he joined the movement, my mum loses her temper and her glasses more than she used to. The movement go in the woods and do wolf business. It sounds slightly like the Cubs, except someone told me it’s all naked – which I’m not sure it can be because they do it even in February. Mr Bowyer from the Abbey National goes, and so does Wing Commander Devonish. I know they play drums and Mum says they sniff each other’s bottoms. That’s what I heard her saying when they were arguing. She said Dad hadn’t kissed her in five years and yet he’s sniffed the area branch manager’s bottom, and he sniffs it every Thursday at seven o’clock, after the news. No one’s supposed to mention it. When it was beginning about six months ago I answered the phone and someone said ‘Can I speak to Romulus, son of Grey Dawn?’ and I told them they had the wrong number. When I told Dad, he got angry and told me to ruddy well tell him next time, and I said how was I to know? which is answering back but Dad didn’t send me to my room because he can’t be bothered, usually.

  Mum was still doing where’s my glasses when Dad came down all ready for work. He didn’t want to stop and talk – just like I didn’t, so he said one of his quotes to get through the room and past everyone, like he who riseth late must trot all day, whatever that means. As he was going out the door, my mum tried to stop him to talk about the Underwoods and he did a fantastically huge bottom-cough, and my mum went postal. My dad said he was only expelling negative Chi. Chi is another thing he’s started going on about since the movement. I don’t know quite what it means, but it seems definitely to be negative.

  I did get detention. When I got there McVittie had started a biology lesson and he asked me if I wanted to take the class because I obviously knew so much about the subject and stuff. The thing is, at that exact same moment I was quite sure I saw a Devil Creature from Grandma’s story sitting at my desk. I know you probably don’t believe me, but the
re would be no point in my lying, seeing as I’m taking so much trouble to tell you all this anyway. He was only there for a second and then he was gone and McVittie was saying, ‘Look at me when I’m talking to you’, and then he said, ‘Don’t look at me like that.’

  He has a plastic skeleton called Frank, who he always asks what the punishments should be. He goes ‘Let’s ask Frank, shall we?’ and then puts his ear to Frank’s mouth. He says that Frank used to be a prurient and beastly schoolboy who was always late and got endless detentions and thus became a skeleton. Frank told him I had to stay for an hour after school. McVittie made me copy a chapter about femurs and humeruses, while he said things like ‘Does anything pass through that head of yours, eh? Does anything actually interest you?’ And I said things like ‘Don’t know, sir.’ I thought about telling him that I still had to buy Grandma The Chronicle on the way home, and if I was late there might not be any left, and she was an old lady and she didn’t have much to look forward to apart from The Chronicle. But how can you, when you’re in the Department of Nothing, and McVittie’s the Head of Department?

  I got the paper, but I had to run like bugger. I went up the drainpipe into Grandma’s window. She hates me coming in that way, because it scares her, so I got quite a long and very boring telling off for it, and also for sitting down without asking, and for being late, and I told her why, so she bollocked me for that as well, and besides my hands were a state … You just have to wait for it to be over, and then you can start the crossword. This was a whole ten minutes, and then I realized I had dropped the paper coming up the drainpipe, so I got bollocked quickly for that.

  ‘Who are you, O weird children?’ said our intrepid heroine. Their answers were always mysterious. One little girl held in her arms a Devil Creature who was grinning at Emma. ‘Who looks after you?’

  ‘Blind Jack.’

  ‘Who’s Jack?’ said Emma, by way of enquiry. But instead of answering, one of the children took her hand and said, ‘Come.’