The Blue Angel [Chapter 1 - draft]
Door’s stiff. Frozen? I haven’t been out the back for over a week. It’s been too wet. Soaking. Chucking it down constantly. I’ve barely been out of the house. Sent the others out for shopping. I’ve kept the central heating on and hidden myself away. Only thing to do. But I want to check on the garden. See what damage has been done. All that planting and transplanting and the tender loving care we gave it at the end of the summer. I want to see if the weather has ruined it all. Today there’s no rain. Too cold to rain. The sky is full and grey, however. The colour of tupperware. Someone’s put a tupperware lid over the town. Our garden is tiny, walled in by bushes and red bricked walls. You can’t even see into next door’s either side or over the back. We have a secret garden. In the few sunny days we’ve managed to have here, I sat in a deck chair and read, bang in the middle of the lawn. I sat for hours while Compassion set about making us a path from fragments of flagstone she found in the shrubbery. She can be a good little worker when she wants. She dug out a curving shape for the path and dug it quite deep. Filled it with the rubble and dust from chipped plaster that we had bags and bags of after we did the downstairs walls, and then the put the paving stones on top. Scooped the earth in and hey presto we had a path. She made it a curve so as not to disturb me from my reading, in my chair, in the middle of the garden. So it’s in a kind of S shape or, as Fitz has pointed out, a reversed question mark. Actually, it’s more than cold today. It’s absolutely freezing. The grass is silvered and I can’t smell the honeysuckle at all. That’s when I crouch to examine the herb garden, expecting the worst. The rosemary is dead, I can see that at a glance. Black in my hands, the needles like blades. And - worst of all - the bush that we moved to a place where it would be in shelter, treating it so carefully, so solicitously, even Fitz pitching in to help - the Wildthyme has been split right down the middle. Its branches are snapped. In two halves, both lolled flat on the ground. Quite dead. I straighten up and sniff the air and realise that it’s going to snow. This idea makes me shiver and that, I suppose, is because I’ve been dreaming about snow rather a lot lately. It’s figured everywhere; every scene I can recall having dreamed just recently. As if the seasons change sooner in my nightmares. There is a bang then as the window two storeys above my head is flung open. I look round to see Fitz glaring down, his palms on the wet sill. He isn’t even dressed yet. In the t shirt he slept in, his hair tangled up, unwashed, a furious look on his face. Three days’ worth of stubble. * It was all some time ago. Now the worst had passed and this was his quiet time. He hadn’t had a funny spell in ages. He was still learning to be calm, however, and not let his mind tick over too quickly. His Doctor had warned him about the dangers of that. His private Doctor to whom he paid out vast sums of money. That Doctor worked from a Georgian townhouse by the North Park, across town. -One Doctor to another, eh? -Indeed. I hadn’t thought of that. -Well, some times we all have to see a specialist. And with a flourish, his Doctor wrote him out an indecipherable prescription, at which he stared, all the way down the street, back into the centre of the town. He didn’t know what he was taking, but the Doctor seemed to think these funny green pills were just the ticket. -I should be more curious. Don’t you think, Fitz? -Oh, probably. -I used to be more curious, didn’t I? -You used to be insatiably curious. -Hm. I thought so. He could still remember the things he said then, at the time he was having his funny spells. The things he went around saying in the thick of it all. But he couldn’t remember where he had been, what he had done, exactly who he had said these things to. Still the words came back to him, thick and fast, his irrepressible words of warning. His gift of the gab, his sixth sense, his gift for being seventh son of a seventh son. He had the knowledge and wanted to pass it on. His words had the ineluctable force of truth and he had to let them out. But people never listen. They told him these words were lies, just his lies, and none of them convinced anyone. That had made him more anxious than anything. Anxious was exactly what he wasn’t these days. He had learned to calm down. -Is the garden wrecked, Doctor? -My herb garden’s looking a little shabby. -It’s nearly winter. The whole lot would die then anyway. -No, no, no, Fitz. It would be all right. I’d see to it. -But it’s too late now. -The thyme is split completely asunder. -What? -The wild thyme. Dead. Lolling on the grass. -It’s too cold to hang about here all day. I’m going back to my book. He remembered telling everyone - who? - about the men who were made out of glass. Whose hearts were scarlet and could be seen, pulsing, alive, through the sheeny see-through skin, muscle, sinew of their chests. These hearts, it could be plainly seen, had faces of their own; malign and watchful faces. These men of glass sat in golden chairs which ran on wheels and shot bolts of fire at those who stood in their way. The Doctor was convinced - swore blind to anyone who would listen - that they were coming here. Heading to this world out of revenge. They were coming after specifically him. It is winter now and this is my new house. In the mornings the windows are mapped in careful lines of frost. I suppose you could say I laze about. I like to cook. I spend a lot of time in the kitchen. My watchword is optimism. We’ve painted the kitchen bright orange, and all the crockery and utensils are cornflower blue. I had crates and crates of kitchen things, far more than I’d ever need. I can’t remember actually buying any of them. These blue things were bought in Italy, in Florence, and I don’t remember when I was there. A side effect of the green pills, I imagine. One of many. Those pills also turn my pee purple. Very strange. I cook and I put on the same CD again and again, shuffling and repeating. It’s the incidental music from all the Bette Davis movies between l938 and l953. I like a little drama. I live optimistically with my lodgers, Fitz and Compassion. I call them my companions. That’s what they’re like. Compassion isn’t very well. Se’s been having funny spells too, just lately. Fitz is languid, somewhat sarcastic. Sometimes he looks at me quizzically, as if there’s something he wants to ask me. We have a floor of this new house each. I don’t mind sharing. The attic is full of my boxes. I can’t be bothered unpacking all that stuff yet. Maybe I’ll do it on Christmas morning, and pretend someone has sent me presents. Fitz has been up there, poking around amongst all my books. He’s a great reader, it turns out. Lately he’s been pouring over an ancient leatherbound volume he found in a trunk in the attic. A warped and frangible text that he says is called the Aja’ib. He spends all day reading that. I think ... I think it was my grandfather who brought that book back from the East. I’m sure that it was. My mother passed onto me all my grandfather’s things. When Fitz has finished with the book I’ll take a look at it and find out. At least the dreams that the Doctor was having were under control. That was the main thing. His private Doctor in the Georgian house by the North Park told him not to worry. Ever. There was nothing at all to be anxious about. Indeed, sometimes his Doctor would phone him in the middle of the night - just when the dreams were becoming perplexing - and murmur a few words of consolation. The Doctor thought that was very good value indeed. He felt he was being monitored all around the clock. That his welfare was being seen to. He has a healthy imagination; that’s what the Doctor tells himself. But one that needs controlling and tempering. That’s all it is. -And you don’t want any more episodes, do you? -Oh, no! No more episodes for me! Funny thing is, his private Doctor even infiltrates the dreams that he does still have and gives him words of advice there, too. Is nothing sacred? His private Doctor is an avuncular presense. A deeply lined face and a shock of silvery hair. He wears frilly shirts and bow ties to work, his opera cloak flung onto the consultation couch. A touch of the old Empire about him. We’ll crack this little problem, Doctor. Nothing to it. Have more pills. He speaks winningly and sometimes he hypnotises his patient, spinning a kind of golden pendant in his face. He sings a sort of nursery rhyme; half familiar, terribly exotic. The Doctor believes he is getting his money’s worth. He hasn’t had an episode in ages. These men of glass lived in a city called Valcea which, the Doctor would insist, he had visited. An impossible city of glass, set up at an incredible height. He had gone there and visited the Glass Men and learned how brutal and sadistic they were. Their city had black and white parquet floors, which the Glass Men’s golden chairs couldn’t leave at all, because they seemed to run off something akin to static electricity. Something like that but, at any rate, this circumscription meant that the world - the real world - was safe from their incursions. The Glass Men were too precious to endanger themselves by leaving Valcea. Yet, having foiled their plans that first time - their plans to destroy the Ghillighast, the race with whom they shared their world - the Doctor returned home and soon he learned that the Valcean Glass Men were working on schemes to make themselves more powerfully mobile, so they could transport their avarice elsewhere. They had discovered the means to motivate themselves, and could detach their glass city from their world and set it free, to float like an ice berg leaving a mother berg in the frozen north. The city of Valcea was free to swim across vast expanses of murky space, to come to earth after the Doctor, to come to this world. And he knew they were coming after him. At the height of his queer, excitable spell, the Doctor had taken to alerting everyone - friends, relations, the authorities, people on the street - that the Glass Men were coming, and it was all his fault. He had led them to this world. Curses on his travels and his endless curiosity! Anyday now. That is what he suspected. But the pills his private Doctor gave him calmed him down, calmed him down, calmed him down.
