ANGELA Read Free Page A

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.
     

NO ANGEL
     
    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