by Tim Lebbon
“Two days.” He thought of where he had been and the things that had taken him there. As in all particularly vivid dreams, he retained some of the more unusual sensory data from the experience—he could smell the old back alley, the piss and the refuse… he could hear the woman hitting the street, feel the jump in his chest as he realized what had happened. He could taste the strange fear he had experienced every second of that waking dream, even though Amaranth had professed benevolence.
A nightmare, surely? A sleeping, verge-of-death nightmare.
“Where’s Jamie?”
Alison started crying again because they were talking about their son, their son who still had his father after all. “He’s at home with Mum, waiting for you. Mum’s told him you fell out of the sky but were caught by angels. Bless him, he—”
“What does she mean by that?” Adam whispered. His throat was burning and he craved a drink. He felt as if someone were slowly strangling him. Angels, demons, who can tell?
Alison shrugged. “Well, you know Mum, she’s just telling Jamie stories. Trying to imbue him with her religion without us noticing.”
“But she actually said angels?”
His wife frowned and shrugged and nodded at the same time. This was obviously not how she had expected him to react after surviving a crash into the sea in a passenger jet. “Why, hon? You really see some?”
What would you think if I said yes, he thought.
Alison brought him some ice water. Then she kissed him.
Three days later they let him go home.
In the time he had been in hospital, several major newspapers and magazines had contacted Alison and offered her five-figure payments for Adam’s exclusive story. He was a star, a survivor among so much death, a miracle man who had lived through a thirty-nine thousand feet plunge into the North Atlantic and come out of it with hardly a scratch. Hardly. The three parallel lines on his cheek had scarred. You were lucky, the doctors had said. Very lucky.
Lucky to be scarred for life? Adam had almost asked, but thankfully he had refrained. At least he hadn’t died.
On his first full day back at home the telephone rang twice before breakfast. Alison answered and calmly but firmly told whomever was on the other end to go away and spend his time more productively. On the third ring she turned the telephone off altogether.
“If anyone wants us badly enough, they can come to see us. And if it’s family, they have my mobile number.”
“Maybe I should do it,” Adam said, sipping from a cup of tea. Jamie was playing at his feet, building complex Lego constructions and then gleefully smashing them down again. A child’s appetite for creation and destruction never ceased to amaze Adam. His son had refused to move from his feet since they had risen from bed, even when tempted to the breakfast table with the promise of a yogurt. He loved that. He loved that his wife wanted to hold him all the time; he loved that Jamie wanted to be close in his personal space. Even though his son barely looked up at him—he was busy with blocks and cars and imaginary lands—Adam felt himself at the center of Jamie’s attention.
“You sure you want to do that?” Alison asked. She sat down and leaned against him, snuggling her head onto his shoulder. He felt her breath on his neck as she spoke. “I mean, they’re after sensation, you know. They’re after miracle escapes and white lights at the end of tunnels. They don’t want to hear… well, what happened to you. The plane fell. You passed out. You woke up in the fishing boat.”
Adam shrugged. “Well, I could tell them… I could tell them more.”
“What more is there?”
He did not elaborate. How could he? I dreamed of angels. I dreamed of demons scratching my face when I did not believe in them, of a place where good luck and bad luck were distilled into very refined, pure qualities. I dreamed that I gave a pledge.
“You need time at home. Here with us. Time to get over it.”
“To be honest, honey, I don’t feel too bad about it all.” And that was shockingly true. He was the sole survivor of a disaster that had killed over three hundred people, but all the guilt and anger and frustration he thought he should feel was thankfully absent. Perhaps in time… but he thought not. After all, he was one of the lucky ones. “Besides,” he said quietly, “think of the money. Think what we could do with twenty grand.”
Alison did not respond.
He could hear her thinking about it all.
They sat that way for half an hour, relishing the contact and loving every sound or motion Jamie made. He joined them on the settee several times, hugging them and pointing at Adam’s ears and eyes, as if he knew what secrets lay within. Then he was back on the floor, back in make believe. They both loved him dearly and he loved them too, and what more could a family ask? Really, Adam thought, what more?
There was more. The ability to pay the mortgage each month without worrying about going overdrawn. The occasional holiday, here and there. Adam’s job as a publishing representative paid reasonably well, and he did get to travel, but Alison’s previous marriage had damaged her financially, and they were both still paying for her mistakes. Money was not God, but there really was so much more they could ask for.
After lunch, Adam took a look at the numbers and names Alison had been noting down over the past week. He chose a newspaper that he judged to be more serious than most, selling merely glorified news, not outright lies. He rang them, told them who he was, and arranged for a reporter to visit the house.
That afternoon they decided to visit the park. It was only a short stroll from their home, so they held Jamie’s hands and let him walk. The stroller was easier, but Adam liked his son walking alongside him, glancing up every now and then to make sure his father was still there. Their neighbors said a friendly hello and greeted Adam with honest joy. Other people they did not know smiled and stared with frank fascination. On that first trip out, Adam truly came to realize just how much he had been the subject of news over the past week. The last time these people had seen him he had been on a television screen, a pixellated victim of a distant disaster, bloodied face stark against the white hospital pillows. Now that he was flesh and blood once more, they did not quite know how to react.
Just before reaching the park, an old stone bridge crossed a stream. Adam loved to sit on the parapet and listen to the water gurgling underneath. Sometimes Alison and Jamie would go on to the park and leave Adam to catch up, but not today. Today Alison refused to leave his side, and she held their son in her arms as they both sat on the cold stone.
“We’ll get moss on our arses,” she said, glancing over her shoulder.
“I’ll lick it off when Jamie’s in bed.”
“You! Saucy sod.”
“You don’t know what surviving a fatal air crash does for one’s libido,” Adam said, and he realized it was true. He could feel the heat of Alison’s arm through his shirt sleeve, feel her hip nudging against his. He felt himself growing hard, so he turned away and looked at the opposite parapet. There was a date block set in there, testifying that the bridge had been built over a hundred years ago. He tried to imagine the men who had built it, what they had talked about as they were pointing between the stones, whether they considered who would cross the bridge in the future. Probably not. Most people rarely thought that far ahead.
Something glittered in the compressed leaves at the base of the wall. He frowned, squinted, and leaned forward for a closer look. Something metallic, perhaps, but glass as well. He crossed the quiet road and bent down to see what it was.
“Adam? What have you found, honey?”
Adam could only shake his head.
“Honey, we should go. Young rascal’s getting restless. He needs his slide and swing fix.”
“I’ll be damned,” Adam gasped.
“What is it?”
He took the watch back to Alison, gently wiping dirt from its face and picking shredded leaves from the expanding metal strap. He showed it to her and watched her face.
“Does i
t work?”
He looked, tapped it against his palm, looked again. The second hand wavered and then began to move, ticking on from whatever old time it had been stuck in. Strangely, the time was now exactly right.
“Looks quite nice,” she said, cringing as Jamie twisted in her arms.
“Nice? It’s priceless. It’s Dad’s. You remember Dad’s old watch, the one he left me, the one we lost in the move?”
Alison nodded and stared at him strangely. “We moved here six years ago.”
Adam nodded, too excited to talk.
It told the right time!
“Six years, Adam. It’s not your dad’s watch, just one that looks a bit—”
“Look.” He flipped the strap inside out and showed his wife the back of the watch casing. For Dear Jack, love from June, it said. Jack, his father. June, his mother.
“Holy shit.”
“Shit, shit, shit,” Jamie gurgled, and they looked at each other and laughed because their swearing son took their attention for a moment, stole it away from this near-impossibility.
They walked in silence, Adam studiously cleaning dirt from the watch, checking its face for cracks, winding it, running his fingers over the faded inscription.
At the entrance to the park Alison let Jamie run to the playground and took the timepiece from Adam. “What a stroke of luck,” she said. “Oh, you’ve put it right.”
Adam did not say anything. He accepted the watch back and slipped it into his pocket. Maybe this was something that would make a nice end to his interview with the newspaper, but straight away he knew he would never tell them.
With Jamie frolicking on the climbing frame and Alison hugging him, Adam silently began to get his story straight.
Nobody is news forever, even to the ones they love. Stories die down, a newer tragedy or celebrity gossip takes first place, family problems beg attention. It’s something to do with time, and how it heals and destroys simultaneously. And luck, perhaps. It has a lot to do with luck.
Three weeks after leaving the hospital, Adam’s name disappeared from the papers and television news, and he was glad. Those three weeks had exhausted him, not only because he was still aching and sore and emotionally unhinged by the accident—although he did not feel quite as bad as everyone seemed to think he should—but because of the constant, unstinting attention. He had sat through that painful first interview, the paper had run it, he and Alison had been paid. Days later a magazine called and requested one interview per month for the next six months. The airline wrote to ask him to become involved with the accident investigation, and to perhaps be a patron of the charity hastily being set up to help the victims’ families. A local church requested that he make a speech at its next service, discussing how God has been involved in his survival and what it felt like to be cradled in the Lord’s hand, while all those around him were filtering through His divine fingers. The suggestion was that Adam was pure and good, and those who had died were tainted in some way. The request disgusted him. He told them so. When they persisted he told them to fuck off, and he did not hear from them again.
His reaction was a little extreme, he knew. But perhaps it was because he did not know exactly what had saved him.
He turned down every offer. He had been paid twenty thousand pounds by the newspaper, and nobody else was offering anywhere near as much. Besides, he no longer wanted to be a sideshow freak: Meet the miracle survivor!
The telephone rang several times each night—family, friends, well-wishers, people he had not spoken to for so long that he could not truly even call them friends anymore—and eventually he stopped answering. Alison became his buffer, and he gave her carte blanche to vet the calls however she considered appropriate.
This was how he came to speak to Philip Howards.
Jamie was in bed. Adam had his feet up on the settee, a beer in his hand and a book propped face-down on his lap. He was staring at the ceiling through almost-closed eyes, remembering the crash, his thoughts dipping in and out of dream as he catnapped. On the waking side, there was water and the nudge of dead bodies; when he just edged over into sleep, transparent shapes flitted behind his eyes and showed him miracles. Sometimes the two images mixed and merged. He had been drinking too much that evening.
Alison went straight to the telephone when it rang, sighing, and Adam opened one eye fully to follow her across the room. They had been having a lot of sex since he came home from the hospital.
“Hello?” she answered, and then she simply stood there for a full minute, listening.
Adam closed his eyes again and thought of the money. Twenty thousand. And the airline would certainly pay some amount in compensation as well, something to make them appear benevolent in the public eye. He could take a couple of years off work. Finish paying the mortgage. Start on those paintings he had wanted to do for so long.
He opened his eyes again and appraised his artist’s fingers where they were curved around the bottle. He was stronger there, more creative. He felt more of an emotional input to what he was doing. The painting he had started two weeks ago was the best he had ever done.
All in all, facing death in the eye had done wonders for his life.
“Honey, there’s a guy on the phone. He says he really has to talk to you.”
“Who is it?” The thought of having to stand, to walk, to actually talk to someone almost drove him back to sleep.
“Philip Howards.”
Adam shrugged. He didn’t know him.
“He says it’s urgent. Says it’s about the angels.” Alison’s voice was neutral, but its timbre told Adam that she was both intrigued and angry. She did not like things she could not understand. And she hated secrets.
The angels! Adam’s near-death hallucination flooded back to him. He reached up to touch the scars on his cheek and Alison saw him do it. He stood quickly to prevent her asking him about it, covering up the movement with motion.
She looked at him strangely as he took the receiver from her. He knew that expression: We’ll talk about it later. He also knew that she would not forget.
“Can I help you?”
There was nothing to begin with, only a gentle static and the sound of breathing down the line.
“Hello?”
“You’re one of the lucky ones,” the voice said. “I can tell. I can hear it in your voice. The unlucky ones—poor souls, poor bastards—whatever they’re saying, they always sound like they’re begging for death. Sometimes they do. One of them asked me to kill her once, but I couldn’t do it. Life’s too precious for me, you see.”
Adam reeled. He recalled his dream again, the island of unlucky souls surrounded by the stinking moat. He even sniffed at the receiver to see whether this caller’s voice stank of death.
“Has something happened?” the man continued. “Since you came back, has something happened that you can’t explain? Something wonderful?”
“No,” Adam spoke at last, but then he thought: the watch, I found Dad’s watch!
“I’m not here to cause trouble, really. It’s just that when this happens to others, I always like to watch. Always like to get in touch, ask about the angels, talk about them. It’s my way of making sure I’m not mad.”
The conversation dried for a moment, and Adam stood there breathing into the mouthpiece, not knowing what to say, hearing Philip Howards doing the same. They were like two duelling lovers who had lost the words to fight, but who were unwilling to relinquish the argument.
“What do you know about them?” Adam said at last. Alison sat up straight in her chair and stared at him. He averted his eyes. He could not talk to this man and face her accusing gaze, not at the same time. What haven’t you told me, her stare said.
The man held his breath. Then, very quietly: “I was right.”
“What do you know?”
“Can we meet? Somewhere close to where you live, soon?”
Adam turned to Alison and smiled, trying to reassure her that everything was all right. �
�Tomorrow,” he said.
Howards agreed, they arranged where and when, and the strangest phone call of Adam’s life ended.
“What was that?” Alison asked.
He did not know what to say. What could he say? Could he honestly try to explain? Tell Alison that her mother had been right in what she’d told Jamie, that angels really had caught and saved him?
Angels, demons, fairies… gods.
“Someone who wants to talk to me,” he said.
“About angels?”
Adam nodded.
Alison stared at him. He could see that she was brimming with questions, but her lips pressed together and she narrowed her eyes. She was desperately trying not to ask any more, because she could tell Adam had nothing to say. He loved her for that. He felt a lump in his throat as he stooped down, put his arms around her shoulders and nuzzled her neck.
“It’s all right,” he said. Whether she agreed or not, she loved him enough to stay silent. “And besides,” he continued, “you and Jamie are coming too.”
He never could keep a secret from Alison.
Later that night, after they had made love and his wife drifted into a comfortable slumber with her head resting on his shoulder, Adam had the sudden urge to paint. This had happened to him before but many years ago, an undeniable compulsion to get up in the middle of the night and apply brush to canvas. Then, it had resulted in his best work. Now, it just felt right. He eased his arm out from beneath Alison, dressed quickly and quietly and left the room. On the way along the landing he looked in on Jamie for inspiration, and then he carried on downstairs and set up his equipment. They had a small house—certainly no room for a dedicated studio, even if he was as serious about his art now as he had been years ago—so the dining room doubled as his work room when the urge took him.
He began to paint without even knowing what he was going to do.
By morning, he knew that they had lost their dining room for a long, long time.
