Andrew Taylor - Fallen Angel

It seemed to Eddie that almost all his life he had been condemned to third place. Look at his parents, for example. They might not have liked each other, but their needs interlocked and they excluded Eddie. Even when his father allowed Eddie to join in the photographs, Stanley’s interest was always focused on the little girl, and the little girl always paid more attention to Stanley than to Eddie; they treated him as part of the furniture, no more important than the smelly old armchair.

When Stanley died, the pattern continued. His mother hadn’t wasted much time before deciding to find a lodger. But why? There had been enough money for them to continue living at Rosington Road by themselves. They could have managed on Thelma’s widow’s pension from the Paladin, her state pension, and what Eddie received from the DSS. They would have had to live frugally, but it would have been perfectly possible with just the two of them. But no. His mother had wanted someone else, not him. She found Angel and there was the irony: because Angel preferred Eddie, at least for a time.

Only Alison and Angel had ever taken him seriously. But Alison had gone away and now Angel no longer needed him because she had Lucy instead. But what made Lucy so special?

Eddie’s eyes widened. The milk was swelling. Its surface was pocked and pimpled like a lunar landscape. A white balloon pushed itself over the rim of the saucepan. The boiling milk spat and bubbled. He lunged at the handle of the saucepan and a smell of burning filled the air.

I blame you.

Mummy, Mum, Ma, Mother, Thelma. Eddie could not remember calling his mother by name, not to her face.

Angel had taken charge when Thelma died. Eddie had to admit that she had worked miracles. When he finally managed to drag himself downstairs on the morning of his mother’s death, he had sat down at the kitchen table, in the heart of Thelma’s domain, and laid his head on his arms. Still in the grip of an immense hangover, he hadn’t wanted to think because thinking hurt too much.

He had heard Angel coming downstairs and into the room; he had smelled her perfume and heard water gushing from the tap.

‘Eddie. Sit up, please.’

Wearily he obeyed.

She placed a glass of water in front of him. ‘Lots of fluids.’ She handed him a sachet of Alka-Seltzers which she had already opened to save him the trouble. ‘Don’t worry if you’re sick. It usually helps to vomit.’

He dropped the tablets one by one into the water and watched the bubbles rising. ‘What happened to her?’

‘I suspect it was a heart attack. Just as she expected.’

‘What?’

‘You knew she had a heart condition, didn’t you?’

A new pain penetrated Eddie’s headache. ‘She never told me.’

‘Probably she didn’t want to worry you. Either that or she thought you’d guessed.’

‘But how could I?’ Eddie wailed.

‘Why do you think she gave up smoking? Doctor’s orders, of course. And those tablets she took, not to mention her spray … Didn’t you ever notice how breathless she got?’

‘But she’s been like that for years. Not so bad, perhaps, but –’

‘And the colour she went sometimes? As soon as I saw that I knew there was a heart problem. Now drink up.’

He drank the mixture. At one point he thought he might have to make a run for the sink, but the moment passed.

‘It’s a pity she didn’t change her diet and take more exercise,’ Angel went on. ‘But there. You can’t teach an old dog new tricks, can you?’

‘I wish – I wish I’d known.’

‘Why? What could you have done? Given her a new set of coronary arteries?’

He tried to rid his mind of the figure on the bed in the front room upstairs. Never large, Thelma had shrunk still further in death. He glanced at Angel, who was making coffee. She was quite at home here, he thought, as if this were her own kitchen.

‘What happened last night?’

She turned, spoon in hand. ‘You don’t remember? I’m not surprised. The wine had quite an effect on you, didn’t it? I didn’t realize you had such a weak head.’

He remembered the basement restaurant in Soho. Snatches of their conversation came back to him. The silk tie, blue with green stripes. Himself vomiting over the shiny bonnet of a parked car. Orange candle flames dancing in Angel’s pupils. The three white tablets in the palm of her hand.

‘Did you see my mother last night?’

‘No.’

‘So what happened when we got back?’

‘Nothing. I imagine she must have been asleep. I took you upstairs and gave you some aspirin. You went out like a light. So I covered you up and went to bed myself.’

‘You’re sure?’

Angel stared at him. ‘I’m not in the habit of lying, Eddie.’

He dropped his eyes. ‘Sorry.’

‘All right. I understand. It’s never easy when a parent dies. One doesn’t act rationally.’

She paused to pour water into a coffee pot which Eddie had never seen before. He sniffed. Real coffee, which meant that it was Angel’s. His mother had liked only instant coffee.

A moment later, Angel said in a slow, deliberate voice: ‘We had a pleasant meal out last night. Your mother was asleep when we got home. We went to bed. When I got up this morning I was surprised that your mother wasn’t up before me. So I tapped on her door to see if she was all right. There was no answer so I went in. And there she was, poor soul. I made sure she was dead. Then I woke you and phoned the doctor.’

Eddie rubbed his beard, which felt matted. ‘When did it happen?’

‘Who knows? She might have been dead when we got home. She was certainly very cold this morning.’

‘You don’t think …?’

‘What?’

‘That what happened yesterday might have had something to do with it?’

‘Don’t be silly, Eddie.’ Angel rested her hands on the table and stared down at him, her face calm and beautiful. ‘Put that right out of your mind.’

‘If I’d stayed with her, talked with her –’

‘It wouldn’t have done any good. Probably she would have made herself even more upset.’

‘But –’

‘Her death could have happened at any time. And don’t forget, it’s psychologically typical for survivors to blame themselves for the death of a loved one.’

‘Shouldn’t we mention it to the doctor? The fact she was … upset, I mean.’

‘Why should we? What on earth would be the point? It’s a complete irrelevance.’ Angel turned away to pour the coffee. ‘In fact, it’s probably better not to mention it. It would just confuse the issue.’

The dreams came later, after Thelma’s funeral, and continued until the following summer. (Oddly enough, Eddie had the last one just before the episode with Chantal.) They bore a family resemblance to one another: different versions of different parts of the same story.

In the simplest form, Thelma was lying in the single bed, her small body almost invisible under the eiderdown and the blankets. Eddie was a disembodied presence near the ceiling just inside the doorway. He could not see his mother’s face. The skull was heavy and the two pillows were soft and accommodating. The ends of the pillows rose like thick white horns on either side of the invisible face.

Sometimes it was dark, sometimes misty; sometimes Eddie had forgotten his glasses. Was another pillow taken from Stanley’s bed and clamped on top of the others? Then what? The body twitching almost imperceptibly, hampered by the weight of the bedclothes and by its own weakness?

More questions followed, because the whole point of this series of dreams was that nothing could ever be known for certain. What chance would Thelma have had against the suffocating weight pressing down on her? Had she cried out? Almost certainly the words would have been smothered by the pillow. And if any sound seeped into the silent bedroom, who was there to hear it? Who, except Eddie?