The Angel's Reply
The Angel’s Reply
1
Her face was no longer familiar. Instead, it merely had a familiar quality – that of precipitating memory. A simple see-saw action, Pavlovian: an object observed, smelt, heard, followed by a moment from the past relived. Proustian, as the lazy adjective has it. In which case, Julia was my madeleine, not encountered in a Parisian teashop, but on national television. There she was one night, a contestant on The Business, aged thirty-five, still with her bustling, manipulative head-girl energy; still possessed of that wide forehead and those mischievous hazel eyes, that miniature smile whose dimples so used to accelerate my sixteen-year-old heart. But somehow unrecognisable. She looked divine, in the Renaissance sense – like one of Michelangelo’s savagely overgrown, androgynous putti that crowd the cornices of the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Not wholly human.
Julia was my first love. It happened in the autumn of 1984.
I was living at my father’s house, a cramped Edwardian semi in a Hertfordshire smalltown with a long, L-shaped garden that seemed to disappear into total darkness as the misty nights closed in. I wasn’t supposed to be there – the situation at my mother’s having become intolerable for everyone – and this sense of the illicit informed everything that came later. Julia Beauregard was the daughter of my father’s neighbour, though I didn’t know that then. I was only vaguely aware of her as a gregarious, tomboy schoolgirl who fell giggling from shop doorways with a gaggle of her friends. Blues, they were called (among other things), the girls of St Aloysius School, due to their all-navy uniform. I would be getting a dose of them soon. Bizarrely, Jools (the name by which everyone knew her) would be my drug-dealer before my girlfriend, though we were never really officially together in the eyes of the world. I sometimes wonder whether anyone ever knew about us, in that leaf-blown autumn sanctum. We were far out from standard adolescent interaction, accepted ritual. We became, briefly, a society of two.
The Business, as most people know, is a tawdry TV talent contest that pits wannabe executives and ‘creatives’ against each other in a pitiless match that always ends in the expulsion and humiliation of one of the hopefuls at the end of every episode. The host, a once-successful businessman turned TV personality – crinkly wide-boy Tony Sackman – is known universally as The Closer. On the evening I encountered Julia again after so many years, Sackman was deliberating over her performance in a conference suite full of sheeny-suited, youthful go-getters. ‘Mmmm,’ he rumbled in his basso profundo. ‘Mmmm . . . So you expect me to take you on after failing at every task, even simple ones like stocktaking and auditing?’ Julia’s symmetrical face blinked back at him – and me – all familiar impudent charm. ‘I don’t deal in stock, Sir Anthony (for Sackman, despite starting as an East End barrowboy, was a knight of the realm) . . . I deal in people.’ And here Jools smirked for emphasis, raising her dimples. ‘What’s the difference?’ countered the billygoatish entrepreneur, throwing, as he liked to do, the ingénue a curve wider than the Eastern Seaboard. At this, Julia flushed, and seemed quickly out of her depth – a look I remember from when her mother grounded her after she stole three bottles of whiskey from Tescos, a night which ended in a police cell. Also from another night, one even more dimly hidden in the abyss of the past. ‘People, Sir Anthony, people are more . . .’ But it was game-over. ‘All right, you’re fired!’ growled Sackman, before utilising his immortal catchphrase. ‘Who’s next?’ And the camera lurched over to find Julia’s smugly attendant companions, thus sparing her further ignominy.
Had she been about to say, ‘People are more important?’ Goodness me! That was certainly not how I remembered her attitude, or worldview, back in those distant teenage days. It took an embarrassingly long time for me to find out that people, for Jools, were to be used, exploited; a necessary means. Julia, in the obligatory wasteland that was my sixteenth year, was an education in cynical self-interest. In how to crush a heart like a flower in the palm of your hand and smile as you did so. But there had evidently been some harmonious, philanthropic revisionism on her part, as her current website attested. I remember Julia from the days when people survived without their own dot.com address or social media timelines, and I located her easily, after a cursory Google search. She was smirking on her Home Page (rather sexily I had to admit), in a silk scarf thrown over an off-the-shoulder number, surrounded by a torrent of motivational-speaking guff that advertised the business she ran with her husband. There was even a link to her ‘Biography So Far’, which I perused while trying not to flinch at the rollcall of MBAs and diplomas – and this from a girl who left school with a single O’ Level, after her expulsion for dropping acid on Founders’ Day. More piercing to the soul was a picture of Jools on a bicycle with her two children – a sunny park somewhere, with a pelagic horizon of shimmering green behind; one smiling infant on the pushbike’s carry-seat, the other strung in a papoose over her chest. Maternal bliss. Domestic serenity. Who’d have thought she had it in her? Her husband, a prominent German businessman, was named but not shown. The principle interests of Julia Beauregard-Schloss were listed as ‘snorkelling, hiking, and family-fun days out’. I couldn’t bear to look at it for long. And trust Jools to marry a German.
Things were different, of course, in that Orwellian year.
If the past is another country, it can be easily visited via the glimpse of a face from the time, a scintilla of forgotten perfume. Julia’s face on the unreal TV screen was my passport to towns and terrains and peoples forgotten for well over a quarter of a century. As an art historian, though not a very prominent one, I am always looking for an image that encapsulates an epoch. For me, Julia’s unforgettable – and, it has to be said, beautiful – face supplied that for me. Unfortunate in love (no family by my late thirties), and not much luckier in my career (I get by, just), I find an elucidation of the past even more critical now. Where did it all go wrong for me? Was Jools to blame? Or was it my fault all along? Were fixed stars governing my fate, regardless of a seemingly free will? After seeing Julia Beauregard’s face by accident one evening on national television, I simply had to find out. Your first love, they say, never really dies, it just travels deep underground; an eternal spring; its intensity tamed, but still active. Still alive and kicking you.
2
It was September, and I had just turned sixteen the month before. Pinkening apples hung from low trees, and the air held that incisive crispness of a new season. The arrangement of living at my father’s place hadn’t come without battles – he worked in the North all week, and drove home on a Friday night with all the windows open to prevent him from falling asleep at the wheel. Separated from my mother, pushing fifty, he was about to turn bitter as the apples he cut down with a curved saw, perched on a ladder in the front driveway, every Saturday morning. He suspected I wanted the house as a base to entertain my new sixth-form friends (known collectively as The Drugheads), and fought hard to deter me from moving in. He wasn’t far wrong, though in my own hilariously intense way, I was after Franciscan isolation. I longed to have the evenings after school alone to paint, to write verses on the perennial subject of why I didn’t have a girlfriend, to jerk off. I had decided I was celibate, though in reality I was just failing to get any action. The real reason why I had to be there was my stepfather – a man who had just bought my mother a clock which chimed like Big Ben at midnight. If only this were his most heinous crime. Stig was Norwegian, and possessed of a strong violent streak – a Neanderthal-anger that made him lash out at my mother or me when the mood took him. Such an incident had occurred in the summer, over the pettiest dispute, and I vowed never to be on the receiving end of his fist again. He wanted me gone so he could convert my room into a guest bedroom. This was effected with surprising rapidity. On returning to my mum’s bungalow to collect clean pants, I discovered the walls I had once papered with pop stars and, later, Renaissance prints, Duluxed an antiseptic white, my futon replaced by a bed that looked as if it belonged in a hotel. Why, I thought, when they never had any guests to stay? The swinish Stig had got his way: he had my mother all to himself. And I had my father’s empty, gloomy two-up two-down from Monday to Friday.
My first night almost made me change my mind immediately. I had a sudden vision of my future: of coming home after work (or in my case, school), preparing a tragic supper of cold meats, bread roll and stubby cerveza, then trudging off to watch pointless television all night. Just as my father had when divorce stranded him on the shore of his late forties, like a melancholy fish. It was only when The Drugheads piled back the following lunchtime did I see how my time could be more usefully spent. Smoking ganja, spinning vinyl and talking endlessly while we bunked an afternoon of tectonic plates in Double Geography – that was the real reason I was there. A lightbulb of possibility flickered on, one that wouldn’t be extinguished until the icy winds of January blew in; those dissipated, desperate days of Julia’s torture that I can hardly bear to recall now.
But all that was to come. The freshly arrived autumn bristled with a bright promise. The Heads were a triumvirate of the coolest sixth-formers in the school. All were in the year above me. Jaz was the first to make himself known, collaring me at a party in the summer, his Sly Stone afro ablaze in a halo of light. ‘Let’s sack these dickheads and go for a couple of spliffs . . .’ How had he known I was already an incipient dope smoker? It was the eighties, after all. The world had moved on to harder substances, politically too. I didn’t resemble Jaz or his tribe – he was tall, vertiginously cool in his army coat; his face distinguished with exotic pock-marks, slightly Syrian or Egyptian: an obvious ‘Head. His leather satchel that night held the best selection of vinyl I had ever encountered. Not the latest records, I should add. A television version of the meeting would have soundtracked the mid-80s scene with The Smiths (and it’s true, we were all Still Ill, all Hand in Glove, with gladioli in our back-pockets), but we were the first post-modern generation who could listen to music of the recent past with equanimity and a straight face. Hence Jaz’s stash of Joni Mitchell, Janis Joplin, Heart, Murray Head, and, astonishingly, an album by smoky chanteuse Elkie Brooks. The defiant iconoclasm of such choices summed up the times. These voices, for me, I’m afraid, were 1984.
For some reason, Jaz wanted to be my friend (maybe it was my decidedly uncool obsession with Renaissance art – something I had to keep hidden from more conventional friends). The other Drugheads I met later. Psycho Stevie – a genius of acerbic observation and a man never without an eighth of resin in his long coat. Finally, Mill, a boy from one of the outlying villages. Mill had an elegant, aristocratic air: he was officer-class, but with an addictively cynical, worldly sense of humour. He was the only one of us with a car, and I never did find out why he was called Mill – it was neither his christian name nor his surname. Or maybe I did, and have since forgotten. Time swallows so much. We were young then, blazing to go, to experience; to make an impression on the world. The four of us became inseparable friends overnight.
I should add that we didn’t just spend our time lying around stoned, listening to Lou Reed’s Transformer. All of us had burning ambitions to be artists of some kind: poets, painters, rock ‘n’ roll musicians. There was a strong work ethic present – often a toking session would be curtailed by one of us having to hurry home to finish a short story, or a canvas, or practise the saxophone. The first evening I properly encountered Julia was the result of such an imperative. Jaz had brought a strange female friend with him after school in order to ‘Smoke those roaches from yesterday’. Was it an excuse to introduce us? Had word gone around that my father’s place was now an open house for all kind of drinking, drugging and debauchery? Unlikely. It was, as with so much else that shapes a life, an accident. I remember the evening so vividly, it feels as if it happened last week. It was a Friday, and the smell of early bonfires permeated from outside. I was anxious about my father’s weary return. Crows were populating the long L-shaped garden, and I was stood at an easel in the middle of the living room, trying to paint them, when the doorbell rang. I hurried to let in Jaz and his unexpected female companion.
It was only after the first spliff that I recognised her as one of the St Aloysius girls who I would see fooling around on the way to school. Suddenly Jaz looked at me with his serious game-face.
‘Gotta split.’
‘Why, man?’ I asked, nervous he would leave me alone with a real live breathing girl. Hilariously, we still used the argot of the 60s. ‘We’ve only just started.’
‘I’ve got to work on this sestina . . . about the miners’ strike.’ He smiled apologetically at Julia. ‘Sorry, sweetheart.’
I looked at Julia to see if she wanted to leave also. She didn’t appear to be in a hurry. She was sitting with one leg crossed mannishly over the other, her right ankle resting on her left knee. Without her blue uniform she seemed older by a couple of years. She had been talking to Jaz almost non-stop since she arrived; her roundish face making comical expressions, her glossy bob swinging every time her head shook. Her manner was actressy, scurrilous, brash. One of the boys. Yet I felt immediately comfortable in her company. She was slightly plump in her dye-spattered jeans and rollneck. Her hips were wide and covered intentionally by her pullover; she wasn’t one of those teenage girls who constrain your breathing with their loveliness. However, there was something about her. Something unbearably magnetic. It was her face which held me transfixed. Maybe it was the dope, but my eyes couldn’t cease devouring her pretty lashes and dark, arched brows; her tiny symmetrical mouth with its dimples – curved half-moon creases which appeared like the smile on Botticelli’s Abundance, or Autumn at the merest hint of irony.
‘That’s all right, Jaz,’ Julia implored. ‘Abandon me with a strange boy.’
‘He’s strange, but he ain’t no boy,’ said Jaz, thrillingly. ‘I think you’ll find he’s more mature than those posh berks.’
Jaz had a way of making a compliment sound casual but final, and I was grateful for his imperial seal on my character. The Posh Berks were a crowd of middle-class stoners who lived in the centre of town, in whose house, I discovered, Jools went at lunchtime to gamble. This seemed terribly grown-up and dangerous at the time, Julia being sweet sixteen like me. But I could see it didn’t impress my worldly friend. Jaz was never afraid to let people know which side of the social division he stood. The place he was hurrying back to in order to complete his sestina was his dad’s tiny, freezing council flat on the Ferryway Estate.
‘That’s a lot to live up to, Jaz.’
He smiled his charismatic, bazaar-hustler smile at me; pockmarks stretching across his cheeks.
‘You’ll manage it. Ciao, you groovers.’
And so he left us alone, the front door thunking shut behind him.
Julia shifted her leg from the platform of her knee and cleared her throat theatrically, to acknowledge the awkwardness of the situation. I liked her already. I was already a little in love, as one can so easily be at sixteen.
‘Well . . .’ she began. ‘It’s a nice little set-up you have here.’
‘Not that nice. My dad’s back tonight.’
A pause followed, which was drained of silence by the cawing rooks out back; though filled with the strange sensuality of the bonfire smell, which seeped in stoically, anciently – an old country odour, probably the oldest known to man. There was something balanced and correct about the two us being there alone on that glowing evening – as if, to use the commonplace, we had known each other all our lives. Some kind of falling-into-place was going on, a Platonic recognition; an Aristophanean meeting of lost halves. Growing up without sisters, girls had always terrified me, yet here was one smiling in my direction, all to myself – the female animal with all its undefended, unintentional force of attractiveness. The thrill of our polarity was almost a dangerous quality in the air, as pungent as the woodsmoke in our nostrils.
‘Hey, talking of fathers,’ Jools nodded towards the ripe salmon of the sky outside, ‘that’s probably my dad burning his leaves.’
Startled at the mention of her father’s proximity (I didn’t touch her, your honour!), I asked her what she could possibly mean.
‘Didn’t you know? My garden backs onto yours,’ she grinned, her dimples somehow correlating with her intelligence; her astute mockery of everything, a trait she would later infect me with.
‘I had no idea . . . So, what, you live on our road?’
‘Noo,’ she intoned, as if admonishing a half-witted child. ‘We’re on the main road. We only connect with the bit at the bottom, the fence by the apple trees.’
‘The L-shaped bit?’
‘Yeah. The bit you can’t see from here.’
She referred to a part of the garden I had only visited once, my father having moved a mere twelve months ago. From the living room, it looked as if it wasn’t there at all, though if you travelled its full thirty feet and turned hard right at a shrouding evergreen, as I had done in the summer, wasps and pollen blowing about me, a further stretch of land planted with equidistant crab-apple trees would be revealed. At the end of this stood a non-descript mesh fence, with the only thing visible beyond it being someone’s kitchen garden and an imposing brown-lacquered shed. The fence was traversable, and the house it belonged to out of sight, but the immaculate upkeep of the creosoted shed deterred me from investigating any further. This, it turned out, was the property of Angus Beauregard, Julia’s father, a monosyllabic banker, whose garden ran so far back from the main road it intersected with ours.
‘Does he know you’re here?’
‘No,’ Jools shrugged. ‘Why should he?’
‘I dunno. I mean, you seem to get a lot of freedom.’
‘Not as much as you!’ she smiled, though the accusation was playful, covetous.
‘Yeah, I suppose so. But my parents have split up.’
‘I wish mine would.’
‘Not good, eh?’
‘I try to spend as much time as possible away from home. My mum’s a cow.’
‘Not literally, of course . . .’
We both paused, looked at each other, then burst into fits of dangerously hysterical laughter. Great unstoppable gales of it. The habit marijuana has of conjuring up an exact, comical visual image in two minds simultaneously had floored us. For us both, the sight of Julia’s mother bending to chew the cud and swat flies with her tail was as unswervable as it was operatically hilarious. Whole minutes seemed to pass as we tried helplessly to control ourselves. Someone outside the window would have thought us insane. Eventually, seemingly on safer ground, Julia’s face a purple pumpkin, mine trembling with tears still streaming from the corners of my eyes, we managed to reclaim the power of speech.
Chokingly, I asked. ‘What’s her name, then?’
Julia took a deep breath to stop herself going again, then answered: ‘Joy . . . But she’s not very happy.’
And we were off once more, into those detailed paroxysms of mirth so tedious to the sober observer. But there was no observer, as the light thinned over my father’s meagre furniture; the open fireplace; the never-used dining table; the ratted sofa where we both sat, poised inwardly; the scuffed upright piano; the antiquated record player that span his stuffy Brahms and Chopin at the weekends. We were gloriously alone. His house was right on the edge of town – a small market town that clung to the edge of London’s commuter belt – and this intensified the feeling of isolation. You were somehow closer to nature there. You really felt the weather – gathering storms, racking East winds; sunsets like kaleidoscopic pools in the Western sky. Julia’s house was on the main road that led, once the lip of its gradient had been gained, straight into the blackened countryside. A liminal place, where the transgressive could be explored.
Suddenly, there was a clunk from the front driveway.
I looked over Julia’s head and out the window. ‘Oh, no. He’s back!’
How fast we moved then still astonishes me. In a frenzy, Julia was on her feet, clearing the roach-filled ashtrays from the floor, hiding torn Rizla packets, as I attempted, uselessly, to open every door and window to clear the incriminating smoke from the fugged air. As in a predictable French farce, I hurried her upstairs to my bedroom and instructed her to hide in the wardrobe. Then I went down unsteadily to greet my father.
‘Didn’t expect me back, obviously,’ he cut in sarcastically before I had chance to explain. He was placing his overcoat and scarf over the banister, as was his habit.
‘I was just doing a bit of painting,’ I stammered. ‘Then going up to do a Geography essay.’
‘Bit late to be doing a Geography essay . . .’ His face was lined and weary, haggard in the half-light. He seemed hunched, preoccupied.
I thought my eyes must be very red; the air around me that of the crack-house or opium den – I was trembling with full ganja-paranoia. Did he know? Had he clocked I was smoking drugs? That I had company? What was the old bugger driving at? In retrospect, of course, he must have seen everything, and was exercising the famous tolerance of the parent we only recognise when we become parents ourselves.
The light had dimmed to nothing in the hallway, shadowing our faces to the extent it felt we were conversing in a coal-mine. I made my excuses and raced upstairs, then gingerly knocked three times on my wardrobe door, heart racing at the impossible situation. An electro-cardiogram would have shown it to be off the scale.
‘Julia . . . Julia!’
Suddenly her face appeared, puckish, amused, as if she had just sat through an after-dinner speech by a master raconteur. I sometimes wonder whether that smile marked the exact moment I fell in love.
‘Well, that was fun!’
‘Jesus . . . Get it together!’ I hissed. ‘If he finds I’ve been smoking gear, I’ll be back at my mum’s in a flash.’
‘What’s wrong with that?’
‘Stig.’
‘Eh?’ and her dark, terpsichorean eyes shone in the dim bedroom. Powerful forces of attraction were at work between us, intensified by the forbidden space we were standing in. After years of failure, I had finally managed to get a girl into the virgin territory of my room without even trying.
‘I’ll explain later. But first I have to get you out of here. If he finds I’ve got girls around he’ll change the locks!’
‘Too late,’ Julia grinned, her voice a whisper.
‘Why?’ I demanded, lowering my voice to a whisper also.
‘My bike’s outside . . . And it’s a girl’s bike.’
I must have groaned or smacked my palm theatrically to my forehead. In my mind it was all over: the only thing hitting my forehead now would be the back of Stig’s hairy-knuckled hand.
‘There’s only one solution, then –‘And I grabbed Julia’s arm, hoisting her into her coat which I had presciently rescued from the banister where my father’s now hung. Then I led her to the door. ‘We’ll have to do an Escape from Colditz.’
Down the stairs we went, four feet brazenly clumping, while I was sure he was in the kitchen, cutting coins of salami onto a plate next to a newly opened beer. A stuporous fumble for my own coat at the bottom, and we were out, the front door closing behind us. If we hadn’t been so stoned, I’m sure our flight through enemy lines wouldn’t have been so smooth.
‘We made it!’
‘Yeah, but I’ll have to face the music later . . .’
Julia whipped the padlock from her bike, and we rolled off down the hill into town. Above was an ultramarine sky; mauvish, like Cranach’s Adam and Eve, with a rising gibbous moon. The earthy smell of the bonfires was still all-pervasive in the crisply delineated night. It was magical. A bond had formed between us over the last hour, not only through the shared hysteria, but by the adversity we had just faced and overcome.
This is an extract from chapters 1 & 2 of an unpublished novella c Jude Cook 2024