Angel

by Arty

Chapter 2

1995

"Excuse me young man."

I turned to look at the speaker. I heard giggles and from the corner of my eye, I saw Angela and some of her friends staring and pointing at me. The sun was shining outside, making the shop seem darker than normal. I wondered what fate had in store for me now. I groaned inwardly at the unintentional pun. The security guard motioned me to one side.

"What's the problem?" I spoke warily, aware that, even at this early stage, people were looking at us. The 'little angel' and her friends seemed to find my predicament extraordinarily diverting. The guard ignored my question.

"Have you paid for everything in your bag today?" The guard spoke with heavy irony, he must have seen something; or thought he'd seen something I amended to myself. Outside the girls were becoming more animated. I started to get a bad feeling about this. I realised that the guard had stopped and was waiting for my answer. I replayed the conversation in my head up to this point.

"I think so, that is, yes." I had a thought. "Unless someone has slipped something in my bag without me noticing."

The guard looked disappointed. Then I realised that I'd said one of the 'magic phrases' that I'd learnt from some of my wilder acquaintances. I struggled to remember other things that were important to say or do when you've been caught shoplifting. Since it wasn't an activity that I had a lot of interest in I hadn't taken much notice. I started to regret my inattention. I was led to a door with the legend 'Private' on it. I remembered something else from what my 'friends' had said. I stopped walking towards the door.

"Excuse me, you didn't answer my question." The guard looked disgruntled. "What's the problem?" I re-iterated.

"I have reason to believe that you haven't paid for all the items in your bag."

There, he'd said it.

"I want to see the Manager."

"That's where I'm taking you."

"No, I want to see the Manager out here."

"Stop messing about and get in there."

"I don't have to do that. Get the manager please."

"I told you, that's were I'm taking you!" The guard was beginning to lose his temper, and I was becoming uncertain. It was too late now though. Angry as he was, I trusted him less than I did at the start of all this, if that were possible. Could you have negative trust, I wondered?

"I don't want to and you can't make me. Besides, my mother told me never to go off with strangers." I sounded like a petulant little boy. The guard, predictably, was less than pleased.

"Why you little…" The guard raised his hand to me and then he realised where we were and lowered his arm. We had started to gather a small crowd. Eventually he spoke into his radio. "The kid wants the manager out here. There're too many people for that. The longer we mess about the bigger the crowd." The radio crackled unintelligibly. He turned to me. "The manager'll be here in a minute," he tailed off talking to himself, but I still heard him say, "for all the good it will do you."

About a minute or so later a man in his thirties, wearing an ill-fitting suit, came out from the door marked 'Private'. He looked impatient and walked quickly and purposefully towards us. His expression was set in a frown; he stopped in front of me and spoke in a hectoring tone that was calculated to browbeat me into submission. "All right you, let's have a look in your bag." I pulled the bag out of reach. No way was I letting him look in there, my acquaintances were adamant on that point.

"Are you a policeman?"

"What's that got to do with anything?" The man looked nonplussed.

"Are you a policeman?"

"No of course not! Give me that bag!" He made a grab for the bag, but I was too quick for him again. Desperation leant my reflexes the extra edge that I needed to keep the bag out of his grasp. Someone in the still-gathering crowd giggled. The manager, who hadn't started out in the best of moods, got crosser still. Surprisingly, the angrier he got, the easier it became for me to act coolly.

"You haven't got a right to search me unless you're a policeman. Want me to tell the police that you searched me, in front of all of these witnesses?"

The manager looked around at the crowd that had grown appreciably larger since voices had been raised. My heart was thumping and I was sweating buckets. I just hoped that I could bluster it out.

"Aren't you gonna call the cops mister?" A voice from the crowd jeered at him.

Just as the unknown voice spoke, the crowd parted and a policeman and a policewoman walked towards me. I sighed in relief; perhaps I could get out of this unscathed after all. The manager looked at me strangely, shoplifters aren't supposed to welcome the presence of the police, he started to look less sure of himself.

"All right, what seems to be the problem?" The policeman spoke to me in fatherly sort of way while his partner, a woman, shooed the assembled shoppers on their way. I decided to get my version of events on record first.

"This man," I pointed at the guard. "Stopped me before I could leave the store and tried to get me to follow him through that door." I pointed at the door, in front of which, we were standing. "I didn't like the idea of being in 'private' with him, so I stopped here and made him call the manager." I left out the threatening behaviour, though I stared at the guard to make sure that he understood this might only be a temporary state of affairs. "When this bloke came," I pointed at the manager this time, "he tried to search me and I was refusing to let him and then you came." I wound down, suddenly I felt very tired.

The Manager and the policeman turned to stare at the guard, who shifted uncomfortably at this scrutiny. The policeman spoke first, "Is this true? Did you speak to him and stop him from leaving the shop?"

"Yeah. But he was gonna leave, why else would he walk to the door? Why should I have to chase him all the way down the High Street?"

"Because, you lazy moron, if he hasn't left the shop, he hasn't stolen anything yet!" The manager almost shouted at the man. He turned away in disgust and opened the door jerking his head at the hapless guard who shambled, reluctantly, ahead of him through the doorway.

"Are we to understand that you don't wish to press this matter any further, sir?" The fatherly policeman was polite to the point of rudeness. The manager scowled at the policeman and stalked after his subordinate, ignoring the question. The door cut off the sound of him screaming imprecations at the guard, as it closed. I turned to move away and, suddenly, the world seemed to turn grey and colourless.

"Are you all right son?"

I shook my head and sat heavily on the floor. "Feel faint." I stuck my head between my legs and waited while the shop and all its fittings seemed to swirl about me. I started to feel very sick.

"Mark!" The sound of Susan's voice cut through the rushing sound that was almost all I could hear and the next thing I new I was being held by a pair of comforting arms. My faintness receded. No way was I going to lose consciousness and miss the chance of feeling her hugging me!

"It's all right officer, he lives next door to me. I'll see that he gets home all right." I said nothing and relaxed in the circle of her embrace. Sometimes these situations did have their compensations after all.

"You do that miss, he's had a very lucky escape." The policeman spoke with heavy irony, "If that guard hadn't been so impatient, we'd be knee deep in social workers around about now." And with a fatherly pat on my shoulder the two of them sauntered out of the shop.

I looked in my bag. I still had no idea of what the little horrors had put in there. Lingerie. No wonder they looked so thrilled with themselves, imagining my embarrassment when this lot came to view. I pulled it from my bag and threw it vaguely in the direction of a clothes stand. Someone would pick it up eventually and I couldn't bring myself to care all that much one way or another anyway.

"When I see them I'll…"

"Say nothing. What's the point? You might want to talk to your friends in their hearing, about how some kids who played this sort of trick on someone and they all got caught as they were seen on CCTV and the police just assumed they were all one gang."

Susan laughed at that. "They'll be shitting bricks by the time I've finished with them." She turned to me, "How did you know all that stuff?" She waved vaguely at the door marked 'Private'.

"It was just something I remembered hearing. Come on let's get out of here."

As we walked out of the shop Susan laughed, "You saved her again you know."

"What are you talking about?"

"The little angel could have had a police record if you'd simply rolled over. I bet they were on CCTV like you said."

I shrugged; I didn't feel like I'd saved anybody. I just felt tired. Susan turned to me and spoke again. "I don't care what you say, I'm putting it in my journal."

"What journal?"

"The one that I'm keeping, I want to be a reporter one day, so I'm practising. I write a journal every day. Then I read it a year later, I reckon if I can make a boring day sound interesting a year later then I must be doing something right. And today is definitely not boring."

"Oh." I felt too tired for witty repartee. She pushed open the swing door in preference to the revolving one and I breathed a sigh of relief. The gaggle of girls broke up as we approached them. I said nothing and Angela stared at me as we passed. At least, I reflected, if this was one of 'those times', Angela wasn't crying.

The blackness had returned once more.

Was it my imagination or was it not quite so stygian?

I reflected on the scene I'd just been part of. Susan and Angela were common factors. If it was VR, it was the most detailed VR I'd ever heard of, and how the hell did they manage to capture people's thoughts? I veered away from the dawning realisation that this was no VR scenario, but now the thought was planted it was impossible not to keep returning to it. Was I dead? I didn't feel dead. That seemed hilarious, what was death supposed to feel like? I struggled to remember anything, but all I had apart from the odd fact was the last two scenes. For some reason the details of the scenes seemed etched on my consciousness. But then when I concentrated on them they flowed away.

Even so, I persevered, and found that I could eventually bring everything to mind. My name was Mark and I knew two girls: Susan and Angela. For some reason that I couldn't fathom, Angela's mother hated me. I thought of Angela, I remembered the way that the sunlight had caught her hair and made it glow. She was a nice kid, on the whole, apart from a tendency to cry at awkward times. If it weren't for her mother, I'd have been happy to live next door to her.

I let myself drift and for a second I thought I could hear a voice. A girl's voice. I turned towards the sound and it stopped. And then I was turning and weaving to put me in position to dive into the next bubble…

1996

I watched in horror as Angela grabbed the half-full bottle of brandy that they had filched from her mother and drank it down.

I'd been hidden in the trees where I had been standing for an hour or more waiting for the time when they would feel sick or something and I could grab the bottle away before the could do any real damage to themselves. I'd watched as the three girls took swigs in turn from the bottle. It had been obvious to me though, that the other two weren't half as drunk as they made out. I remembered something I'd read about drunkenness - it has said that drunken behaviour was a learned behaviour and then it had gone one to detail a tribe of South American Indians that got progressively quieter the more drunk they got, because that's the way everyone else behaved when they were drunk.

"I dare you!"

"Yeah, go on, finish it off. I bet you can't."

"Angie baby, can't take her drink!"

"Can too!"

"So finish it off!"

The raucous shouts interrupted my reverie and I stood paralysed with indecision as she gulped down most of the rest of the bottle. She'd lost a lot of coordination and streams of brandy ran from the corners of her mouth, but she managed to swallow most of it. I'd hoped to wait until they'd become careless, but half a bottle of brandy in one go was dangerous; she could die of alcohol poisoning. As I stepped into the clearing the other girls shrieked in drunken terror and ran away. Angela swayed drunkenly and dropped the bottle.

"Go 'way. Spoilsport!"

Shit what should I do? I grabbed the bottle from her nerveless fingers and threw it into the trees. What next? Medical help of course, but did I have time to wait for an ambulance? I couldn't leave her alone while I found a 'phone, so I'd have to take her with me and God knows how long it would take me with her in this state. Could she afford the time? Hang on, if I could make her sick, then perhaps she would get away with just a hangover? It was worth a try, as she could easily die if that amount of alcohol got into her system, on top of what they had been drinking in the last hour. I dithered for a bit longer then I bent her forward and stuck my longest finger down her throat.

"Wha' ya' doin? Urrrrrrgggghhhh"

Her querulous questioning was cut short as she spewed up the last hour's worth of drink plus what was left of her last meal. True to form, I was covered in the stuff and she was spotless. I laughed mirthlessly, one way or another I always got screwed by events. Oh well if this was the worst that happened to me this time, I'd count myself lucky.

"What the hell is going on here?" I think my heart must've stopped. For a second I thought it was Angela's mother brought here by the terrified stories of her friends, but then I sighed in relief as I realised that it was Susan.

"Bloody hell, Susie, you scared me half to death!"

"Maybe you deserve it. What are you doing to the poor girl?" Unlike the rest of the estate, Susan didn't automatically assume that I was always in the wrong, but that didn't mean she was a pushover either. She'd always been clear-eyed about the fact that I could do bad things occasionally. I thanked God or Fate or whoever that had sent her to me and explained the situation as concisely as I could.

"She drank half a bottle of brandy in one go. I had to make her sick, before the stuff could get into her system. I think she needs to go to hospital though, could you call an ambulance while I take her home."

"How come you're here?"

"I saw the three of them sneaking the bottle from Angie's house. I know what I was like at her age. But Brandy's much more dangerous than Sherry, so I decided to follow them and see if I could stop them from getting into too much trouble." I shrugged my shoulders helplessly, "Perhaps I should've told someone, but I didn't think she'd end up drinking most of the bottle by herself! Will you go and call the ambulance, while I get her out of here?"

Susan nodded in agreement and ran down the path to find a telephone. By now Angela had started to register how ill she was feeling and, as usual, she started to cry. At least her mother wasn't here to abuse me about it. I wondered how long that state of affairs would last. This thought spurred me into action.

"Come on, Angela, let's get you home." We wove unsteadily through the trees until we reached the field that backed on to our houses. I looked out across the fields and was relieved to see that there appeared to be no one about. Perhaps I'd be lucky this time and I wouldn't get blamed for this…

"Take your hands off my daughter! You little tearaway!" Angela was dragged from my grasp and herded off to her house by some other adult. This left me to the tender mercies of Angela's mother. I felt myself being pushed forward and I stumbled and fell. I resigned myself to whatever was to come next.

"God you're stinking drunk and covered in spew! You're disgusting!" By this time a small crowd of jeering teenagers had gathered eager to see me get my 'comeuppance'. Events had got away from me again and I waited for the maelstrom to stop. Just at this point the paramedics rolled up. Just in time as things appeared to be getting ugly.

"Someone call an ambulance for a young girl? Had a bit too much to drink."

I could see Susan running to catch up. She was wasting her time.

"There's only this young tearaway. He doesn't need an ambulance though just a damn good hiding!" The crowd grumbled its agreement. I hoped the presence of the two outsiders would keep them in check.

The paramedic ignored the tirade and spoke to me gently, coaxingly. "Come on son, let's get you back to the ambulance and checked over." I'll give him credit; the only sign he made of my vomit-ridden state was a slight wrinkling of his nose. I nodded dully and followed him, anxious to get away from the crowd. Susan caught up to us.

"What happened?" She was breathless from the running and her chest heaved making her breasts move in interesting ways. I marvelled at the fact that I took the time to notice this. I risked a sideways glance and saw that the 'medics were just as enthralled. Perhaps it was a man-thing. Still I could see she was expecting some sort of explanation. I dragged my eyes from her breasts and answered her.

"The little angel did it again. Her mother dragged her away before I could say anything and then I nearly got torn apart by the angry mob. These two," I indicated the two paramedics, "Turned up just in the nick of time and saved me from God knows what." I turned to speak to the two men. "Thanks for saving me from them. I'd shake your hand, but I doubt that you'd appreciate it just at the moment." Susan giggled at this. The paramedics looked at me strangely. This was not the conversation of a drunken yob. Oh well, I couldn't blame them for their perception; I wasn't exactly looking my best.

"You don't sound very drunk." You could hear the uncertainty in his voice. His partner looked interested, this was a change from the usual Friday night drunkenness. Susan leapt to my defence, anxious now to correct any wrong impressions. A mother hen defending her chicks could not have been fiercer.

"He's not. The vomit is from the girl I rang the ambulance for. Mark made her sick." She glared at the paramedics, daring them to denigrate my actions or me. It made me feel good knowing that there was someone on my side for once. I wondered what would happen when, inevitably, she left for University.

"She'd drunk half a bottle of brandy in one go, I didn't know what else to do." I decided that I should elaborate on Susan's bald statement of the facts. Besides, I still wasn't sure that I had done the right thing. "Did I do the right thing? Was there anything else I should have done?"

The two 'medics exchange glances. "It was better than nothing son, in the circumstances." Said the serious one.

The other one chimed in. "Next time, though, stand behind them before you stick your finger down their throat!" The two of them chuckled quietly as they remembered other times. It was gallows humour I supposed, normal in the circumstances, a defence mechanism that allowed them to do their jobs and sleep at nights.

"Will she be all right?" I wasn't going through all of this and then have her die in spite of me. I had to be sure. I waited for the answer.

"Probably. Tell us where she lives and we'll make sure she's all right before we leave." Before they turned to leave us alone, the first paramedic spoke. "You did okay lad, you might well have saved her life."

I shrugged. It was becoming a habit. We gave them the Angela's address, pointing out her house and describing what it looked like from the front. They left assuring us that they would make sure that Angela was all right. I wished them luck; Cerberus had nothing on Angela's mother. When they'd gone, Susan held her nose and spoke, "Thad was number seben"

I laughed, "Can I borrow your garden hose? I can't go home smelling like this." By now Angela's mother would have poisoned the water with my mother. I'd be lucky not to receive a visit from the police. I sighed.

"Come on you 'hero', you. Let's get you washed off before you have to face the music."

As I popped through the bubble on the other side I was able, once more, to think for myself. Some things were clearer, I knew for certain that I was re-experiencing episodes from when I was younger. I revelled in the knowledge. This was a relief, but being a passenger as my younger-self experienced things was no fun. In all the stories that I'd read about this sort of thing, the experience was mitigated by the ability to make a difference. I remembered something that had caught my attention. As I'd entered the clearing, Angela had seemed to be limned in a faint glow, like a picture I'd seen once that purported to be a photograph of someone's aura.

I didn't think my younger self had noticed it, but the advantage of being a passenger was that you got to notice stuff that the driver couldn't. I wondered if what I was experiencing was normal, I mean did everyone who died get to do what I was doing? I mean, I'd heard of a person's life passing before their eyes, but I'd always imagined a sort of cinematic quality, possibly with comfy seats and surround sound. This was more Slaughterhouse 5 than anything I remembered reading about near death experiences. I pondered this, perhaps everyone experienced the same events, but the memory was filtered by the mind attempting to fit something strange into a familiar mould. What did that say about me, I wondered, that Slaughterhouse 5 was more familiar than a cinema?

At least, everyone was consistent about the bright light. I would know what to do when the bright light appeared. I realised, with something approaching surprise, that I'd pretty much come to terms with the idea that I was dead, or dying. I wondered what the afterlife was like. I was still unsure as to the purpose of this revisiting, but anything was better than this unstinting blackness. Of course if I was going to relive my life, why couldn't I relive the fun bits? My first kiss; the first time I made out with a girl; my first time - you know what I mean. I was stumped I couldn't remember any of those things. Was I still a virgin? I didn't feel like I was, even though I couldn't remember specifics the velvety feel of…

Shit! Here I was in purgatory, or wherever it was, and I was having wet dreams! If I was dead and this was judgement day, perhaps I shouldn't be trying to remember my erotic exploits. The remembered sensations of my penis surrounded by a hot, wet mouth came unbidden to me. Oh well, if we weren't meant to have sex why did God make it feel so good? I'm sure She had better things to worry about. And another thing why was God always a man? God was definitely a woman - I mean women get much the better deal as far as orgasms go. And no man would have designed a penis, that embarrassing barometer of man's sexual feelings.

I paused in my diatribe. Diatribe, an odd word for it - didn't 'di' mean two? Since I seemed to be the only one around here, perhaps it was a 'monotribe'? For some reason the trip to the next bubble had seemed to be taking longer, but now the blackness in front of me was being replaced by the flickering opalescence of the next bubble in the chain. I accelerated towards it…

-Continued-

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