The Angel Wakes

That was it. He didn’t elaborate or try to convince me, he just gazed at my wide eyes with his isn’t it obvious? expression. I was astounded because, even at the age of nine, I had begun to suspect my own limitations. Despite my interest in aviation, it had seemed perfectly natural for me to dismiss any notion of flying planes in favour of the next best thing. No big deal, just the way it was. I was a realistic kid, not yet consciously aware of the working-class coil but a victim of it all the same.

His simple contention made me doubt my own failings, it conveyed his belief in me and prompted me to ask myself, why not? That particular question stayed with me for many years and many times I tried to find an answer until finally yielding to my own ambition. Thanks to him I am now a content man.

My other strongest memory about that day is the manner in which we left the family gathering (really descending this time.) My Mother’s attendance had been under protest for some reason lost on me but she was quite happy to let her expression convey irritation to her in-laws. We were just about through the ceremony of family familiarity, my Mother’s temper holding up against her chagrin but weakening with every strained smile or catty remark. It was like the Poseidon Adventure and my Father and I could almost hear the groans and creaks of her composure, capsized in this sea of over-talkative relations.

But we were almost free, the afternoon was drawing to a close and it looked like we would escape with our harmony intact when I, armed with my new found confidence, had to go and blow it.

Ever since he lost it, I’d been fascinated by my Uncle Ron’s leg. Well, not so much his leg, but its replacement, the crutches that he kept upright at his side like two mystical staffs of kinetic magic. They weren’t the old fashioned, wooden type that you had to jam under your armpits, these were the modern kind that you held with your hands and had the grey plastic bits that fitted around your forearms, chrome and plastic triumphs of modern design.

James Bond crutches. If I’d been missing a leg, they were the type of crutches I would have wanted.

I never really understood why Uncle Ron’s leg had been removed. I thought amputation was only ever caused by explosions or tropical diseases or even snakebites but Ron’s had been lost to bad circulation. I didn’t know what that meant but, soon after it happened, my mother told me through the cloud from her Embassy-Number-One-Extra-Mild-King-Size, that it was caused by smoking.

I decided that I would like to try out the crutches, just to see how well they worked. As I’ve said, I was a realistic kid so when I slid my hands through the guides to grip the grey plastic handles and was ready to take my first step, I was unable to resist the compulsion to hide one foot behind my leg in true Long John Silver fashion.

My simulated rehabilitation was abruptly halted in the middle of the living room by my Grandfather’s fierce protestations to which my foot reacted by dropping to the floor as if it had been cut off. It stamped on the cat which screeched and tried to attack my Grandmother’s wig as the closest animal-like thing to the ground. I startled and stepped back, tripping over Uncle Ron’s real leg protruding from the couch. As I fell backwards, the crutches splayed upwards, one knocking the cat and the wig from my Grandmother’s head and the other shattering the glass lampshade hanging from the ceiling.

“You stupid little bastard!” shouted my Grandfather through a whisky rage as I detached the crutches, stood and guiltily handed the wig back to my Grandmother.

His pointed finger held me frozen and punctured my Mother’s wafer thin resolve to remain calm. She sprang from the vinyl settee and declared that, that was it! We were going. All around me, people stopped picking glass from their hair as the room erupted into apology and argument. My Grandfather argued with my Grandmother, my father argued with my grandfather, my Grandmother argued with my Mother and my Mother argued with everybody. Nobody spoke to her son like that; he was only having a wee go on the crutches! She was not to be dissuaded by the less partisan of the clan with even my Uncle Murray unable to joke her back onto the glass-strewn couch and she led her bewildered son and embarrassed husband out of the now silent room on a wave of satisfied rage.

As we left, I heard my Uncle Murray say, “I’m glad Ron’s not blind.” That was him all over.

We stood as silently in the sinking lift that day as we do now, watching my uncle’s coffin drop snugly into his grave. The crutches incident bore intra-family conflict that lasted until the whole episode was brought into painful context years later, when I and the rest of the family discovered Uncle Murray’s fate.

I was about to go for my leadership test, the weakest part of my route to the cockpit and I’d decided to seek encouragement from my mentor. I stood in the kitchen watching Uncle Murray chop and stir and grate.

“Ready for the test?” he asked as he put a carrot under the knife.

“Would you follow me?” I responded flatly.

“The thing I hate about this recipe,” he said tangentially, “is having to chop these carrots so small.” He was busy rolling the blade over the orange flesh, subdividing, it seemed to me, almost to infinity.

“Why don’t you use the grater?” I squinted.

“YES!” He straightened from the chopping board and turned to face me. “I would follow you. Across the Sahara on a chocolate camel!”

“Thanks. I think.”

“The thing that makes a leader,” he waved the knife at me to make his point. “is common sense and the bravery to use it. That’s all you need.”

“Thanks!” I said again, really meaning it this time. I began to actually look forward to the test.
Uncle Murray had stopped waving the knife but kept it pointing at me. He suddenly seemed pensive.

“You okay?” I asked.

“I wasn’t sure whether to tell you this. Not with the test coming up but I think I’m going to, all the same. It might help you get things in perspective.”

“Oh yes?” My tone was conspiratorial. “Something exciting, is it?”

Uncle Murray chuckled.

“Exciting? Probably the most exciting thing that’s ever happened to me.”

“Go on then.”

For the first time in my life, I saw trepidation on my uncle’s face. He took a deep breath.

“I’ve got cancer of the colon and I’m going to die.”

He grinned by way of a punctuation. I froze. Inside my head, my mind was screaming, mayday! MAYDAY!

“We’re all going to die, of course. What I meant was, I’m going to die sooner rather than later.”

He was talking too much.

“How soon?” I asked. He reacted as if I’d asked how much to change the clutch, drawing in breath with a hiss.

“Difficult to say. Months at least, probably longer.”

“And it’s definitely terminal?”

“As cancer,” he joked. “Sorry.”

“I don’t know what to say.”

“Don’t say anything. Just think about what I’ve said and then focus on that test.”

My eyes conveyed the newly perceived insignificance of the test against his illness but he was ready for me.

“Life is short and you have to cram in as much as you can. I told you about this now in the hope that you’ll use it. Life can’t just stop because one of us dies. Contextualise, boy!”

“I don’t know if I can do it now.”

He lowered the knife and his voice.

“You’ll do it,” he told me. “As sure as we all live and die.”

And I did. I went to Innsworth and led my team across the simulated hazards with a confidence born of my uncle’s predicament. A triumph for common sense and cancer.
As it turned out, Uncle Murray’s death was long, long and painful. Towards the end, I managed to get some compassionate leave and spent hours at his bedside, nipping in to give his immediate family a break and guiltily regretting their return.

He had become skeletal and while he lay motionless, I would convey my training experiences to him, the thrill of flight, the challenge of aviation theory, the constriction of military life and every so often he would ask about something specific in a distant, falling-asleep voice.

It wasn’t enough, though. Everything I had achieved, I owed to this man and all I could do was make professional small talk and even that eventually ran out. Sitting with someone in extreme pain does tend to kill conversation. He had given me so much and I wanted to reciprocate now. I loved him and I wanted to turn that love into something that would help him through his pain. I considered just telling him that I loved him but I couldn’t find the right words or the right time.

That’s why I confided in him. I thought the story of my celestial emissary would give him hope for whatever was to come and besides, it kept me talking.

I hate long silences.

I was maybe six or seven, my illness oozing from me in prurient tickles of sweat that glued my body to the bedclothes. Delirium had turned to sleep into and out of which I was drifting while, in the living room, something big was happening. My brief but numerous moments of consciousness would afford me muffled snatches of the argument raging between my Mother and Father. This in itself wasn’t particularly unusual, my parents were good at arguing, real marital reivers.

My uncle managed to ease a smile onto his thin face when I used that term. He loved the Borders.

The verbal battles always upset me but this one was causing some serious anguish which could have been attributed to my weakness from the fever but for the fact that I had detected another voice seeping through the woodchipped plasterboard. That of my Grandmother.

This was bad.

Grandmothers only attended fights for one of two reasons; to mediate a resolution or to rescue whichever of the protagonists she called her own from a doomed marriage. This was my greatest fear, the ‘D’ word,...... Drambuie. My Mother kept a bottle in the wall unit for ‘special occasions’ and my Dad had once joked that they’d open it when they got divorced, then. Except I hadn’t seen the joke.

I kept my eyes closed and my white charcoal body motionless while I listened to the bass tones of hatred pound the other side of the wall but my matchstick limbs twitched when I heard the unexpected creak of a floorboard beside my bed.

It was a footstep no more than a couple of feet away. Someone was in my room.

Uncle Murray’s eyes had been rolling in his dark sockets, floating in a pool of pure pain during my recollections but now they stopped as if some imaginary insect of death that had transfixed him had come to rest on the end of my nose. He peered at me but I was too caught up in the telling to allow him any sniff of interjection.

My visitor moved around my bed, from left to right and still I listened, although not now to the furore but to the soft pacing. I could feel a presence like the warmth of the sun and I knew that he was gazing down at me. Slowly my muscles relaxed and my angst subsided. The anger in the next room faded and I found myself scared of only one thing.

Opening my eyes.

I wanted to look, wanted so badly to know who could have expressed kindness so silently but something stopped me, a dread or an inverse compulsion. I listened and listened but could not look. If I saw my angel, perhaps he would abandon me. I was in no doubt that the visitor pacing my blue carpet was here to calm me, to reassure me that everything would be all right and that the most fantastic sensation of hope and love that his presence conveyed could only be something pure given by someone perfect.

I faked sleep, breathing deeply but quietly enough to continue my surveillance until finally sleep needed no faking. When I awoke I was alone. I found my parents in the living room also alone and quiet now. They did eventually open the Drambuie but never did divorce (my uncle of course knew this already) and my angel never revisited, probably because I never needed him again but I never forgot.

I looked down at my uncle’s desperate eyes and smiled as kindly as I was able. My story was complete and given as a spiritual gift to help him through what was to come. That’s when he came out with a statement that, once again, changed my life.

He said, “That was me in your room, son.”

Well, I just stared at him and he smiled back at me through tearful eyes. I felt humbled and stupid, it all seemed so obvious now. Of course it had been him or if it hadn’t been him it would’ve been some other relation or friend, someone who had accompanied my Grandmother that day and then escaped from the conflict into the peace of my bedroom.

How could I have been so idiotic to think I’d been visited by an angel? Jesus Christ!

I touched his cool hand.

“I’ve gone through my whole life thinking I had an Angel!”

“Sorry,” he wheezed.

I shook my head and smiled.

“I’m glad it was you.”

“Good credentials for my trip upstairs, eh?” It was the longest sentence I’d heard him say.

I squeezed his hand.
 

“I’ll miss you,” he said.

I reciprocated silently, then we sat in silence until my gentle removal.

That was the last I ever saw of my uncle and when I left him he was still smiling. He died two days later, in a haze of morphine with his wife and daughter by his bedside.
He’s gone now but I can’t help thinking that maybe my initial impression of his visit wasn’t so far from the truth. Again, I look around at all the people here, all the people who loved this man and I think, yeah, I wasn’t stupid at all. I got it right from the start.

We’re retiring now to leave the gravediggers to their work. Down to the wake while I think of my angel. He’s dead now but maybe I’ll see him again. I look up at the sky and smile.

The wind gusts and, did I hear something? I turn my head towards the whisper and then doubt my hearing. Sounded like someone saying, ‘You die, you fly’. That’s him all over.

Down we go to the tea and sandwiches, the toasts and the tales.

Down to my angel’s wake.

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