Chasing Angels

by Meg Henderson

  She didn’t know if she had any real justification for being disappointed in her cousin, but she was. Jessie had laughed at him, at his conjuring tricks and his fortune-telling, and she wondered if her aunt had simply known him better and so had fewer illusions from the start. But Kathy had always adored Harry. If she ever had to re-visit Glasgow – touch wood – she expected to find him happy, healthy and wealthy. It wasn’t just his looks, though being so film-star gorgeous certainly helped pad out those illusions, it was everything about him. His good nature, his intelligence, his ability to understand all her confused thoughts throughout her life; there had never been a single thing she’d needed to explain to him, he had understood instinctively. To Harry she had entrusted her dreams of one day being a writer, when she had read a book she liked she had given it to him, bestowed it upon him as a golden gift, and Harry had taken it each time with his generous smile, silently sensitive to the precious treasure he had been given. He knew of her visits to art exhibitions, deep, dark secrets she never told anyone, and when she had discussed the peculiarities of their shared family, he smiled with easy understanding. Throughout her childhood Harry had been the keeper not only of her secrets, but more than that, of her soul. But when she had been forced back to Glasgow by the news of the onset of Con’s illness five years before, it was Harry who had contacted her, he had brought this duty to her and laid it upon her. Her own fault, of course, for giving him her address, but still, it rankled that Harry of all people should assume she should know, that she wanted to know. And so she had come back. Why? There was no clear answer to that no matter how many times she had asked herself the question, but she knew that she had always been aware of family ties, even those she would’ve been happy not to have. She supposed her mother had instilled that into her, and then her own natural instinct to always complete the circle, to always end things properly, had compounded Lily’s morality. She had done her best to keep in touch with Aggie after Lily’s death because her mother would’ve wanted her to do so, and probably Con fell into that category too, especially since her brother, Peter, the adored absent son, had never again made contact. Her attendance, she supposed, fell into the duty category, not to Aggie or Con themselves, but to Lily. She did it because Lily would’ve been disappointed in her if she hadn’t; she was fulfilling Lily’s duty for her. And it was during that first phase of Con’s illness that she met her cousin again after fifteen years. She had been so shocked by the meeting that she had to dig deep to rationalize it. Fifteen years was a long time, she told herself, people change, she had changed. What had she expected? The same fresh-faced boy, his early promise now blossomed into a mature, happy and successful man? Well, yes, that was exactly what she had expected, and no matter how hard she tried to convince herself that she had been expecting too much, the disillusion had found its way into cracks and crevices she didn’t know existed in her vision of Harry, and had set there like concrete. Maybe somewhere she had always had her suspicions, but if she had, she had kept them locked away in her own private filing system. What was it Jessie had said of her son? ‘Less there than meets the eye.’ That was it.

  The first time she saw him was at her father’s bedside in the Royal Infirmary, just after the nerves in his spinal column had frozen for good. Con was lying on the fresh, crisp bed linen, so delighted with the attention he was receiving that you’d have thought someone had told him he would live for ever, and he barely acknowledged the arrival of the daughter he hadn’t seen or heard of in all those years. It was as if, for both of them, they had seen each other hours ago, and neither had been anxious for the time to have passed quickly. ‘Why the hell am Ah here?’ she asked herself. If she had ever needed proof of the complete absence of affection between her father and herself, it was contained in that passing glance; she only hoped that wherever Lily was, she knew how much she was in her daughter’s debt. But there again, Lily had been looking after someone for her all this time too. The man standing at the bed with his back to her looked familiar, but the impression was so not Harry that she decided not to recognise him. Then he turned round to face her and she felt a prop giving way somewhere in her life. He wore a white, shiny suit with a royal blue shirt open to mid-chest level, and dangling there – dear God, it couldn’t be! – was a long gold chain with some sort of medal attached, the size of an old half-crown. She tore her gaze away and looked down to the floor. She had hoped this would stop her from giggling out loud, until she saw his bare feet inside a pair of Indian thong sandals. It must be a way-out doctor, she decided desperately, the medical profession had replaced the traditional white coat with a white suit, and perhaps they were more open these days to alternative outlooks, even to the mysticism of the East. Please, let it be that! Then she looked up at the face beneath the long, shaggy, dark blond hair and all was lost; it was indeed Harry. But still, she reminded herself, swift, superficial judgements were wrong; think of Angus, and how she could’ve dismissed him as an oddball just because of how he chose to look. But this was Harry, not a stranger she might pass in the street, they had known each other all their lives. If this was the same Harry he should be wearing an understated, handmade suit, with a silk shirt and a discreetly expensive Hermes tie. His carefully coiffed locks should complement the tan he had picked up on a secluded beach somewhere exotic, and he should be carrying a neatly folded cashmere coat, with Gucci shoes on his feet. Instead he looked like the result of some hideous genetic accident. It was as if Mr Whippy the ice cream man, Jesus Christ and Medallion Man had for some reason been in a laboratory while experiments in fragmentation were being conducted. Only things had gone wrong, there had been an explosion and they had all ended up with bits of each other. ‘They should sue,’ she thought grimly. But it was Harry. It was Harry.

  After exchanging a few words with Con, whose attentions were anyway directed towards performing his suffering, humble martyr routine to a new audience, she and Harry had gone to the Women’s Voluntary Service cafeteria on the ground floor of the hospital. She would’ve preferred to go elsewhere, but the thought of walking down Castle Street, of actually being seen with this apparition, was too much. Most people in hospitals, she reasoned, had other things on their minds, so they probably wouldn’t notice the odd duo in their midst. Or so she thought. As they sat stirring their coffees she was aware of glances in their direction, and then reverential approaches from what she supposed were normal people with mental problems. They clasped Harry’s hand and stared into his eyes, ecstatic smiles suffusing their faces, and on each he bestowed his benign attention and murmured a few words before they backed away, tears in their eyes. Kathy had no idea what to make of this, but her cousin, seeing the look on her face, quietly explained all. He was now a well-known, not to say renowned fortune teller, and he was no longer Harry Nicholson, he wasn’t even Harry Harris, he was simply Hari; such was his importance and fame within Glasgow that he needed nothing more to identify him. His appointment book, which he called ‘my client audience list’, was booked up a year in advance at any given time, and he had been forced to invent a means of not being contacted by phone. He had a series of codes that had to be changed frequently as the wily Glaswegians, hellbent on receiving his forecasts, or perhaps desperate for a card trick, cracked each one. At the moment, if she wanted to speak to him, or his mother, Jessie, he informed her earnestly, she should let the phone ring three times, hang up, redial and let it ring twice, hang up again, and on the third attempt, let it ring four times, and on the fourth ring either he or his mother would know it was safe to answer. She watched in amazement as he took a notebook and pen from his pocket and wrote the sequence down before slipping it across the table to her, making her promise – ‘On what?’ she thought, suppressing a mad giggle. ‘Ma faither’s life?’ – never to let anyone see it, no matter how much they might plead with her. She took the piece of paper and put it in her coat pocket, scrunching it into a ball as she did so; she thought she could assure Harry that she would neither divulge it, sell i
t, or use it, for that matter. The citizens of Glasgow, he explained, held him in such high esteem that he could barely venture outside his, or, rather, his mother’s door, without being recognised and a few reassuring words requested by those who crossed his path. Harry had become Glasgow’s very own guru, sought out by the famous, by footballers even, and for many Glaswegians few came more famous than that. She had felt slightly light-headed; never before had she regarded Glaswegians as being particularly stupid or gullible, but sitting before her, wearing thong sandals on bare feet in the middle of a chilly autumn and sipping coffee that was too hot, too weak and needed more milk, was the living proof that they must be. If she hadn’t seen the way total strangers were still approaching him, she would’ve assumed by his conversation and appearance that he had gone gaga, but she could see the truth with her own eyes: they did worship her oddball cousin. Had this happened, she wondered, after she had gone? The citizens of Glasgow couldn’t have been like that while she lived there, she would’ve noticed, surely? Had some alien species landed and brainwashed them all? Was it like the sci-fi film she remembered from when she was a child, The Bodysnatchers? Had pods containing embryo Doppelgänger Glaswegians been deposited in the backcourts of tenements, waiting for the tenants to fall asleep before being taken over by the physically identical creatures growing inside the pods? She laughed quietly to herself at the thought, then laughed again because it seemed more likely than Harry the Fortune Teller. He showed her the medallion around his neck, given to him by a grateful client, and when he insisted that she look closer, she saw that it had been specially designed for him. It was like a large coin surrounded with a frill of gold filigree, with Harry’s profile pressed in to the centre. Harry the Queen, she smiled, then wondered if he was, in more ways than one. He was beaming with happiness. Warming to his theme he described the centre of his operations, a tiny single-end in Maryhill where he granted audiences to his clients; he thought it was important, apparently, to stay close to their roots. ‘Aye,’ she thought, ‘an’ their money tae, Harry!’ The single-end was decked out in dark green chintz and the very best second-hand Victoriana, he had an absolute rule that everything had to be at least second-hand, had to have had a ‘past life’. He could, he said very calmly and seriously, spot a reproduction piece by the aura it gave off, and he allowed nothing in the single-end to ever be cleaned, the spiders’ webs and the dust were crucial to the aura. Spiders were his ‘thing’, he explained, they had mystical significance, he even had one on his business cards. He produced a card for her inspection and, sure enough, there it was, the single word ‘Hari’ with a tiny spider dangling by a thread from the first letter. Kathy tried to concentrate on a blank section of the card, because had she looked up and met her earnest cousin’s gaze she knew she would giggle till she collapsed in a heap on the floor. In the middle of the one room in Maryhill, he continued, was a table, an old one, naturally, to avoid causing hell to the all-important aura, and on it was a crystal ball. Looking at him she wondered if he’d seen his psychiatrist lately, and if she could get to the door and take off before he caught her. And around the room were various other items that also held mystical significances. There was, for instance, a piece of stone sacred to Highlanders and, he said, teuchters keen to curse enemies arrived in a steady stream at his door to hold the stone and send its destructive vibes on their way. Kathy nodded seriously; no doubt Harry had discovered the ‘sacred stone’ in some backcourt, backcourts being particularly abundant in similar ‘sacred stones’.

  ‘I foretold your father’s illness,’ he intoned.

  ‘So did Ah, Harry,’ she laughed. Now she was back in Glasgow she found that the harsh accent she had thought lost for ever had re-established itself without a pause, and the thought depressed her almost as much as being there. ‘Let’s face it,’ she said to the guru, ‘the drink was aye bound tae get him in the end. No’ think so?’

  A slightly irritated but tolerant smile played across his lips, but he said nothing.

  ‘Can Ah ask ye somethin’, son?’ she asked.

  Harry nodded.

  ‘Are yer feet no’ freezin’ cold in they sandals? Would ye no’ be better tae just wear them in the summer, like?’

  Harry smiled sadly. She didn’t understand, he said, his aura kept him warm at all times, he didn’t feel things in the same way as other people.

  For some reason an old song popped in to Kathy’s mind. ‘I’ve got my aura to keep me warm.’ She almost laughed out loud, then she looked at him again and felt like crying.

  ‘When did this happen tae ye?’ she asked, her voice full of concern, despair and sympathy, that obviously passed over his head.

  He took a deep breath and launched in to what she realised was his standard reply to an oft-asked question, if not the one Kathy had asked. ‘I always knew I had the power,’ he said, and she knew he could hear the words echoing mysteriously in his mind as he spoke, ‘but I had to keep it in check. I had much to learn, I had my art to perfect before I gave it to my people.’

  ‘Away for God’s sake!’ she said kindly, as if talking to a misguided but basically pleasant child. ‘Harry, son, this is me! Kathy, remember? We’ve known each other since we were weans.’

  The guru gazed at her sadly; he had been denied once.

  ‘Harry, Ah don’t mind ye foolin’ a’ these folk, except it tends tae be the poorer wans that are easiest fooled, an’ they don’t have money tae gie tae guys wi’ crystal balls!’ She laughed at her own double entendre. ‘Everybody hastae earn a livin’, that’s fine, Ah can see that. But Harry, son, you don’t really believe a’ this, dae ye?’

  Harry looked even sadder; denied twice. Then suddenly he screwed up his eyes and squinted at her so intensely that she had a hard time not giggling hysterically. He grasped her wrists in his hands, closed his eyes, breathed so deeply and evenly that he was in serious danger of hyperventilating. Kathy looked up, and all around them were anxious faces, witnesses to an impromptu guru session. ‘I see,’ Harry intoned, his voice dropping a couple of octaves, ‘your future. I see you in a foreign land—’

  Kathy yanked her wrists out of his grasp and got up to leave. ‘Away tae hell, Harry, son! This is me, no’ wanna the punters!’ she said. ‘You’re the wan in the foreign land, it’s called Nutterville!’

  Thrice denied. He sighed; it happened to the best of gurus.

  That had been their first meeting in fifteen years and, thereafter, throughout the progression of Con’s illness, Kathy had contrived to keep Harry at arm’s length. She had thought about it often during her blessed returns to Glenfinnan between crises. There had been no special link between them; it had all been an illusion. Harry was one of those people who are all things to all men, and women too, presumably. What she had thought of as deep and meaningful had in fact been a vacuum, everything, even the dearest dreams she had entrusted to him, went in one ear and out the other. She suspected that everyone he had ever met had thought they had a special relationship with him too, because Harry listened uncritically while smiling that lovely smile. He probably couldn’t remember anything she had ever said to him, anything anyone else had ever said to him either for that matter, there was nothing inside that lovely head and never had been. But she had loved him as a child, as she had loved Jamie Crawford, and at least Harry had done her no harm. Well, no conscious harm anyway; it was hardly his fault that she had invested more in her vision of him than actually existed. How could Harry be blamed if people built castles in the air, just because that was all his mind consisted of? So on subsequent visits to Con she had avoided her cousin in order not to hurt the feelings of the Harry she had once thought he was, in case that shining creature should be in there somewhere, locked behind the banal gaze of the guru. Still, you couldn’t help laughing when you thought about it. Harry Nicholson, true son of Eddie Harris the gangster, a soothsayer in sandals!

  And now, a few years later, here they all were, the ungrieving daughter, Harry, the fortune-telling cousin, Je
ssie, his ex-whore mother with the germ fixation, sitting in their places in St Alphonsus’s, with Con in his box at the front and Rentacrowd a few pews back, ready, willing and anxious to do their stuff but tolerant, if only just, of the family’s right to be at the front. Kathy looked at Con’s coffin; the twenty-four hour candles were still burning and, more to the point, they were still there, as Frank McCabe had promised. ‘The auld bastard must be deid right enough, then,’ she smiled to herself. She turned her gaze on Frank McCabe himself, all togged up in his business vestments, though still with the habitual slipper boots on his feet. The little priest had been worried that few people would turn up to see Con away, hence the booking of Rentacrowd, but many old-timers from the Barras had filed in behind what was left of the family. Some were missing, of course, Maggie, the Chief, the older Pearsons. She swallowed hard; the last thing she wanted to do was to start bubbling, that might well be mistaken for tears for Con. Hysterical laughter, dancing down the aisle with those castanets burning holes in her hands, all of that would be acceptable, she mused, but tears were definitely out. Frank McCabe started the mass. She had already decided that she would not be bobbing up and down as required, she would remain seated at all times. She was not of this faith, therefore, she reasoned, it would be patronizing to ape its rituals, which anyway had changed out of all recognition since the last time she’d been at a mass. And apart from that, she knew Frank McCabe would be watching her and her refusal to conform would drive him mad. It was all in English now too. Hadn’t it still been in Latin in 1973 when Old Aggie had been seen away? She couldn’t remember, but her mind had been full of other thoughts at that time, there had been no room for registering the language of the rituals. There was a shuffling noise behind her and a hand touched her shoulder. She looked round but didn’t immediately recognise the man and woman standing there, so she smiled non-committally and faced the front once more. Then it hit her. Jamie Crawford! She felt the hairs on her neck stand up – another cliche that was true – and kept looking to the front rather than turning round again. What was she supposed to say anyway? What exactly was the etiquette for greeting your former lover, the father of the unfinished child you had secretly buried early one Sunday morning a lifetime ago? The woman must be – what was her name again? Angela; that was it. And how was she supposed to make conversation with her? Oh, you had the live baby, did you? How nice! Mine was dead. I just put her in a red satin box with hearts on it and stuck her in a muddy hole beside my mother.