Muddle and Win (11 page)

He never carped, he never questioned, he never came back to complain about how difficult it was. That was why his bosses liked him. They just pointed him and he went. And then there would be no more problem. The only thing with Windleberry was that you had to remember to shout ‘stop’.

All the heavenly hosts turned out for him on the day
he
went to be guardian to Sally Jones. They lined the crystal corridors and they thronged the battlements. He stalked past them with his jaw jutting, his fingers curled around the grip of his sax case and his heels going
clip-clip-clip
on the paving that was made of the rose of dawn. He looked neither right nor left. He said no goodbyes.

Behind him trailed the briefing choir, singing his instructions in dutiful plainsong:

They accompanied him to the very top of a high watchtower. And there, true to their word, they vanished into little puffs of purple smoke.

Agent Windleberry paused on the brink. All along
the
battlements, the eyes of the Host were on him. Below his feet was the great gulf: the darkness, the nebulae, the stars, the Earth. He looked down upon it, at the tiny, tiny gem of the world.

No angel could be unmoved by that sight. So forlorn. So deadly, like a beautiful, poisoned flower.

Because it
was
deadly. The only way an angel could get there was to fall. Falling is easy. An angel that falls can fall a very long way. It’s the Not Falling Any Further that’s hard. It was said that Pandemonium itself was founded by a group of angels that, so to speak, had simply got off at the wrong floor.

But that was a long time ago.

Windleberry saw the sunlight playing across half the Earth. He saw the border of night and day, a ring of twilight forever moving, forever in the same place. He saw the galaxy of human souls shining in the darkness of their lives.

He put one foot out over the void.

And he fell.

CERTAIN VERY-WELL-TRAINED SOLDIERS
on Earth, when they have to land secretly in enemy territory, do what they call a ‘HALO’ jump. That’s ‘HALO’ as in High Altitude Low Opening. You jump out of a plane that’s flying very high up, where it can’t be shot down. You then fall and fall and fall and fall, and at the very last moment, when you are least likely to be spotted or picked up on someone’s radar, you open your parachute. And you land safely.

That’s the idea.

Angels, when they are landing in dangerous territory, do what they call the ‘NO HALO’ jump. That is, before you jump you switch your halo off.

It also helps if you are not accompanied by bright
lights
, the appearance of new stars, tongues of fire or claps of thunder. All these things tend to give your position away.

Windleberry, of course, executed his jump perfectly. He always did. And he made his landing not on the top of Sally’s head but somewhere else. He had some reconnaissance to do.

The mind he came to was not like Sally’s mind. The corridors were narrow. They were also ill-lit, because the person they belonged to was on the edge of sleep. In this mind, if you didn’t have a very clear idea of where you were going, you ended up in the same place three times out of five. There was one huge room near the bottom where most of the ideas were kept. They wandered about in the half-darkness, getting in each other’s way and occasionally eating one another. Around it, other rooms were arranged in no kind of order, stacking up on top of each other like badly built apartment blocks.

Windleberry trudged up endless flights of stairs. The stairs looked as if they saw more use from a skateboard than a pair of shoes. In the gloom, little things scuttled and squeaked around his feet. Somewhere a voice shrieked ‘
Sally
!’ in rage tinged with tears.

In a dark passage high up in the mind, he found the door he was looking for. It had a sign on it. The sign read:

He knocked. There was a sudden movement inside.

‘Who’s there?’ called a voice.

‘Agent Windleberry,’ he said. And then – since he realized, with some broad-mindedness, that Ismael had been out here for some years and might not even know the name ‘Windleberry’ or associate it with the long string of glories and achievements that were sung in the corridors above the clouds – he added, ‘I’m assigned to Sally.’

More sounds followed, as if things were quickly being swept off a desk or table.

‘Come in,’ said the voice.

Windleberry entered. It was a small, gloomy office, lit by a single anglepoise lamp that was perched on one of a number of piles of paperwork that half covered the desk in the middle of the room. The walls were lined with cabinets, shelves and one large cupboard. There were two empty chairs on the door side of the desk. A strange smell hung in the air. On the far side of the desk sat the guardian angel.

Well, yes, it
was
an angel – just. It looked like an angel that had been dragged through sixteen thorn hedges backwards and dropped a couple of times off a high cliff. It looked as if it had at some point been on the wrong end of a barrage of tar bombs, and had never quite got the stains out. It wore the regulation dark glasses, tuxedo and bow tie, but the tie was undone and the tuxedo wasn’t so much rumpled as in deep trauma.

‘Well, goodness me,’ said the angel through gritted teeth. ‘What a surprise.’

Windleberry sniffed the air. Strange  . . .

‘To what do I owe the pleasure?’ said the angel.

‘Top Priority,’ said Windleberry. ‘Sally’s been infiltrated.’

‘Shame,’ said Ismael, tipping back his chair.

‘Intelligence suggests that it was witnessing
continuous
non-compliant behaviour from Billie that made Sally vulnerable.’

‘Intelligence is welcome to come down and see if they can do better with Billie than I can.’

‘It’s no laughing matter,’ said Windleberry. ‘Sally is key.’

‘Why?’

Behind his translucent ebony Ray-Bans, Windleberry frowned.
Why
wasn’t a question that got asked a lot above the clouds. One of the reasons it didn’t get asked much was that the answers were never very satisfactory. They tended to involve long lectures about stretching measuring lines across the Earth and entering the storehouses of the snow, and other things which, to any thinking observer, were rather beside the point.

‘Because she’s good,’ he ventured.

‘Why?’

‘Because she is. Or would be, if she wasn’t being interfered with.’

‘
She’s
being interfered with? I guess you’ve not read any of my reports. No surprise. I don’t expect anyone up there actually reads what I—’

‘Yes, I have.’

Windleberry had prepared for his mission with
his
usual diligence. He had read the reports on Sally, on Billie, on Sally’s mum, on Greg and on Sally’s dad. He had read the reports on Charlie B, on Ameena, on Janey, on Cassie, on David, on Chris and on all the other students in Sally’s class. He had read the reports on their teachers. He had read
Paradise Lost
. He had read the reports on Mr Granger and Mrs Kemp and the driver of the number 86 bus. He had filed a complaint that there was no report on Shades the cat, which had got him some funny looks up in the Records Department.

But yes, he had read the reports on Billie. There was quite a file on Billie.

‘Billie’s a good kid,’ said Ismael fiercely. ‘That’s what you guys don’t get. You say, “Why can’t she be like Sally?” She can’t be like Sally
because
of Sally. Sally’s always there, always better than her at everything. Better marked. Better liked. Just better. All the time. How do you
think
she’s going to take that?’

‘There’s no excusing—’

‘No? OK. So Sally gets to be better at everything. But why is it
Sally
who gets to have 20:20 vision, and Billie who has to wear glasses? Why is it that
Sally
can eat what she likes and Billie comes out in spots? That’s just not fair!’

‘It doesn’t have to be fair. You know that.’

‘Yay,
verily
! So I tell Billie it’s better she comes second to Sally in everything and all she has to do is not mind about it. How far’s that going to get me? You know what? When I saw Sally throw that fit of hers this evening, and all that posse she had looking after her flapped off to have their wrists slapped, you know what I did? I
cheered
. I absolutely
rocked
it in here. Just for a moment I wasn’t playing uphill. No hard feelings, Winifred, but my bedtime prayer tonight is that you won’t get too far too quickly.’

‘You misunderstand the mission,’ said Windleberry coldly. ‘It is not a choice between one and the other. There can be no compromise. No meeting place—’

He broke off. He sniffed the air again. ‘You
smoke
?’

‘Officially, it’s frankincense,’ said Ismael, tipping his chair. ‘
Un
officially, I smoke, swig, snort and chew anything I can get my hands on just to keep my nerves steady and my eyes on what she’s doing. Don’t give me a lecture, freshie. Wait till you’ve been down here a while and we’ll see how you do. Right now you stink of soap, yay verily.’

Windleberry leaned across the desk. ‘Maybe you’re right,’ he breathed. ‘Maybe they don’t read your
reports
upstairs. But they read mine. I’ll be filing one about this meeting, as it happens. What would it
not
be good for me to write?’

Ismael untipped his chair. He too leaned forward. ‘Ugly talk, Winifred.’

‘It’s “Windleberry”. But you don’t need to remember that. Because it won’t be me you’ll be answering to if you don’t bring Billie round. You know that posse of Sally’s that flapped off? They didn’t just get their wrists slapped. They were sent up to be  . . . Forgiven.’

There was a short, thick silence. Angels are perfect in every way. So the very worst thing you can do to one is to find something to forgive it for.

‘Sure,’ said Ismael at last. ‘I’ll work on Billie.’

‘Better get started, then,’ said Windleberry coldly.

‘Billie will get home,’ said Ismael. ‘But not for your sake, Wimple.
Or
Sally’s. She’ll get there because in the end she’ll want to.’

‘You need to be right about that.’

‘It’s no business of yours if I am or I’m not. And I kinda hope you’re about to get out of here. You’re making my feng shui come out in spots.’

Windleberry looked at Ismael. His mouth was a short straight line.

Ismael looked back. So was his.

Windleberry put a hand to his Ray-Bans of translucent ebony.

There’s a reason why angels wear dark glasses most of the time. It is because of the light in their eyes, which is the pure fire of Heaven. For an angel to touch his glasses is like a gunslinger stroking the butt of his Colt .45 in a crowded saloon.

Ismael put his hand to his glasses too. As if to say – yeah, he could probably manage a couple of sparks himself.

Windleberry straightened. He strode majestically from the room. His measured steps went
clop, clop, clop
, fading down the passages of Billie’s mind. Ismael stayed motionless, watching the door.

After a moment the cupboard coughed. A small gout of yellow smoke exuded from the keyhole. A voice said, ‘Izzie gone?’

‘Yeah. You can come out now.’

The cupboard door opened. Out sidled Scattletail, shiftily, like a word dropping from his own mouth. The smell of smoke was suddenly stronger, and it had a sulphurous flavour.

‘Thought he’d sniffed you out there,’ said Ismael.

There were more thumps from the cupboard. Out came the inner self of Billie. She was wearing
her
pyjamas, which these days were more brown than pink and too small for her. She was not, of course, where she should have been at this time, which was in bed.