Muddle and Win

by John Dickinson

  ‘You like each other really, don’t you?’ whispered Muddlespot.

  Muddlespot danced a little jig on the rubble that had once been the statue of Calm.

  IT’S FAIR TO say that reactions in the Jones household varied.

  To Mum, run ragged between managing an office during the day and trying to herd her family through the evenings, Sally’s outburst was a shock. It was worse because she knew Sally had a point. Billie did drag her heels over her homework, and even when she didn’t or said she hadn’t got any, there was usually some reason why it just wouldn’t be worth the effort of asking her to help wash up. (Most likely because Billie was already in a massive sulk, and standing over her and trying to make her clean each dish properly would just lead to something getting broken, as Sally had said.) So it was just easier to ask Sally. And everything would be done in ten minutes.

  Except that now they wouldn’t be. Now suddenly, just when she had thought that everything was already as difficult as she could possibly manage, it had got more difficult still. So her reaction to Sally’s revolt was one of dismay.

  Her dismay would increase when she discovered that Sally had chucked the photograph of herself and Billie into the bin. But she hadn’t found out about that yet.

  Greg, Mum’s partner of four years’ standing, had spent the whole of supper eating in silence. He always did. He had lasted this long with Mum by taking up the least possible space, both in the house and in conversation. He liked being part of the family and had been pleased to find that he was more or less accepted into it. His desk at work was well decked with family photographs, and his drawers were stuffed with little gifts the girls had given him at odd times. He knew that Billie and Sally were entering their teens and that this was going to mean changes, but he also sensed that to try laying down house rules himself would be like dropping wildcats into a sack and then tying the sack over his head. He preferred to rely, lovingly and trustingly, on Mum to get them all through it. And also to have his dinner on the table for six o’clock, which would be five minutes after he got in through the door.

  His attitude to Sally’s performance, when he realized that it had happened, was therefore one of delegated dismay, and it didn’t stop him reading the sports pages.

  Billie, who was a lot closer to everything that was going on than Greg, was at first as shocked as Mum. She was so surprised that by the time she had caught her breath to have a lovely and totally justified yell back at Sally, Sally had slammed the door and was halfway up the stairs. So her next feeling was frustration, followed almost immediately by a feeling of wonderful and secret delight that she would have found very hard to explain, but that lasted all evening and resulted in the best English essay she produced all term.

  Shades registered no reaction at all. Except that it was time somebody filled his cat dish.

  ‘I can’t cope!’ said poor Mum.

  ‘Maybe you should have a word with her,’ said Greg, who was so deep into the football transfer market that it took him a little while to think about what his mouth had said automatically. ‘When she’s calmed down,’ he added.

  Mum put her head in her hands.

  ‘Should the oven be on?’ said Greg helpfully.

  ‘No,’ said Mum. ‘Sally should have switched it off after she took the cake out.’

  Greg tilted his chair back so he could reach the dial without getting up. ‘She has. But it’s still on. Dodgy connection maybe. There, that’s got it.’

  ‘That’s dangerous,’ said Mum. ‘I don’t want to wake up and find the house full of smoke.’

  Greg stood on his chair to prod the smoke alarm. Nothing happened. ‘Battery’s gone.’

  ‘Everything’s falling to bits,’ groaned Mum.

  ‘I’ll get it fixed,’ said Greg.

  (What this meant was that Greg had now said he would get it fixed, and would carry on saying he would get it fixed until Mum either bullied him into it or lost patience and called the electrician herself. And then she would have to miss a morning’s work waiting in for the electrician, who would promise to come some time between eight and twelve and would, in fact, arrive at about a quarter to one.)

  Mum put her head on the table. ‘I want a new job.’

  ‘Mine’s taken,’ said Greg.

  *

  There was dismay, too, in the palaces above the clouds. Voices were raised. Discussions were heated. Fingers jabbed at charts on which lines dipped alarmingly. Angels hurried down corridors clutching sheaves of papers. Juniors followed seniors into meetings, wriggling their brows at bystanders in that way that says, ‘Don’t ask. It’s terribly important, but just don’t ask!’ And of course that meant the bystanders did ask. And the answer would be an urgent shake of the head and the words, mouthed through the crack of a closing door, ‘Sally Jones’.

  ‘It’s a disaster!’ exclaimed a Seraph, sitting halfway down a table of polished rainwater.

  ‘We’ve been caught with our cassocks down,’ said another. ‘We must rectify the situation immediately!’

  ‘I have an attack choir standing by, Archagent.’

  On his throne of rose petals the Archagent brooded. His wings were a hundred fathoms in length and rippled with the light of rainbows. They wavered gently, reaching to the distant walls and up into the great dome above him. His eyebrows were small thunderclouds. He had ten thousand of them. When he frowned it was really quite impressive.

  He was frowning now.

  ‘The LDC still registers zero, Archagent,’ said the last speaker. ‘There’s time. If we move quickly—’

  ‘Infiltration has occurred,’ said the Archagent.

  All down the long table, rows of faces watched him. He could look each one of them in the eye. Many times over. And he had also been around for a few thousand years more than any of them. He understood some things they didn’t. ‘It is a situation of Potential.’

  Of course the golden trumpets could blow. The Divine Wind could breathe upon the invader. The ranks of angels could descend with fire upon the mind of Sally Jones, and very quickly there would not be much of this particular infiltrator left.

  But once the mind had opened to the ideas of the Enemy, the Enemy could keep coming back. There would be another infiltration, and another, and another. And sometimes it happened that the Enemy chose to meet force with force. Legions of demons and cacodemons might come surging up to meet the powers of Heaven head-on. With consequences that could be very undesirable for the subject.

  ‘Ground once lost to the Enemy can never be wholly regained,’ he said.

  There was a dispirited rustle of feathers down the long table.

  ‘We should cut our losses,’ said a young angel. ‘Go to Early Martyrdom.’

  Another rustle greeted his words. They were thinking about it. If there was a knife fight at school (unheard of at Darlington High, but not impossible). If Sally tried to intervene. If it happened tomorrow, while the LDC still read zero . . .

  ‘Drastic, Simael,’ said the Archagent, mentally recording the young angel as someone who, given a red button, would find a reason to press it no matter what. ‘Drastic – if direct.’

  ‘Shall I arrange it, sire?’

  ‘No.’ He rose from the throne of petals. He was taller than a cathedral spire and as gentle as a cloud in the soft south wind. He looked out of the window of opal down at the little world below. ‘This is the Long War,’ he said. ‘There is disappointment, but no defeat. There is valour, but no victory.’

  His thousands of years of struggle had taught him many things. One of them was that however high you got, no one ever told you what was really going on.

  Another was that, no matter what the LDCs said at any particular moment, the worst heart on Earth was never very far from Glory, and the purest was never far from Disaster. A soul that had been clean, clean, clean all along was in some ways more vulnerable than one chequered with successes and failures. The Enemy was cunning. He knew how to use self-hatred. He knew how to use s
hame. For Sally, the smallest failure now could be terrible. It had happened many times before.

  ‘We are not bidden to despair,’ he said.

  Though indeed, he did feel very close to despair.

  ‘What can we do?’ they said to him.

  He faced them.

  ‘We shall play the game as it must be played. One to one . . .’

  They sighed, reverently.

  ‘ . . . And we shall send our best. Send . . .’

  He paused. He counted one, two . . .

  ‘ . . . Agent Windleberry!’

  Once more the feathers rustled all down the table. Windleberry, the whisper seemed to say. Our best. Agent Windleberry.

  It is also possible that they said Windleberry? Oh, the boss’s bright-eyed boy! Why’s it always Windleberry? Don’t know what he sees in him.

  Windleberry? Again! Makes you sick, doesn’t it?

  Maybe he’ll come a cropper this time . . .

  That’d be good . . .

  If bosses everywhere are the same, then so too are the poor bossed.

  One person did share the Archagent’s opinion of Windleberry. That was Windleberry himself.

  Windleberry was not smug or self-satisfied or conceited. He was just the best. He knew it.

  No one carried angelic perfection to the same lengths that he did. No one watched more sleeplessly, praised more mightily or fought the good fight more fiercely. His jaw was long and lean and square. His forehead was high and square. Under his crisp white shirt his pectorals were massive – and square. His wings were made of bright white light (and they were square too). His flaming eyes were shaded behind Ray-Bans of translucent ebony. His bow tie was vermillion and his tuxedo was a daring cream. His long, square fingers flew lightly over the keys of his tenor sax, and the notes he played made angels weep – for the right reasons.

  He had served in every heavenly department and was thorough in everything he did. Other angels marked the sparrow’s fall, but Windleberry gave it marks out of ten and made it fall again if it scored less than three. Other angels counted the hairs on a human’s head, but Windleberry clipped a tiny numbered label to each one and offered them around for sponsorship. He had spent a century on the watchtowers. He had given artists and poets such visions of inspiration that most of them had been locked up before their work could be completed. He had reduced the composer Handel to tears over writing the Hallelujah chorus. He had slain dragons, carried stars and sung so loudly in the countertenor line that the angelic choirmasters had despaired of ever getting the balance right.

  He had served with the cupids. Cupids have a culture all of their own. It comes from doing what they do stark naked and showing their bums all the time. You go with the cupids with a name like ‘Windleberry’ – you have to be tough.

  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:

  ‘O-o-oh A-Agent Windleb’ry, champion of li-ight,

  Yo-oung Sa-ally Jo-ones is lost to the ni-ight.

  Our bri-ightest ho-ope in Darlington Row

  Has be-en infiltra-ated by-y the Foe.

  Your mi-ission, if to accept it you cho-ose:

  Apply to the butt of the fiend some well-planted sho-oes.

  Oh spe-ed you no-ow for glo-ory beckons,

  This choir will self destru-uct in fi-i-ive seconds.

  A-a-a-men.’

  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, y
es, 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.