Attack of the Cupids (8 page)

‘Sally . . .'
said Mum. But it was too late.

‘You
always
think I'm wrong! You're
always
being snide and mean! And you're
always
talking me down at school . . .'

‘Why should I? You do it every time you open your mouth.'

‘Sally!' said
Mum.

‘Sally!' said Windleberry.

‘What's going on?' said Muddlespot.

He was peeping round the archway into the chamber where the two of them stood. He had wisely swapped his red pillbox hat for a workman's helmet, in case the roof fell or something came flying in through one of the windows. A mind in the middle of a family row is a hard hat area.

‘Just another day in the Jones house,' said the Inner Sally bitterly. ‘Where've you been? I've really needed you.'

‘No, you really haven't,' said Windleberry.

‘Tidying up, I think,' said Muddlespot innocently. ‘Did anybody drop this?'

Windleberry looked at it.

It was a small, folded piece of card. Inside the fold, crudely-drawn and coloured, was the shape of a pink heart.

Something inside Windleberry went very quiet and cold.

‘That?' he said carefully. ‘No, I didn't drop that.'

‘What is it, then?'

Angels are not allowed to lie.

‘It is a heart, crudely drawn and coloured in pink,' Windleberry said.

The voices of the row outside seemed suddenly far away. The taste of old, bad memories flooded into his mouth. He turned away and drew something from the breast pocket of his dinner jacket.

‘. . . I'm calling Viola
now
. And after that I'm calling Cassie!'

‘Kamikaze,' sighed the Inner Sally.

‘And you
can't stop me!
'

‘And what's that?' said Muddlespot.

‘This? – Oh . . .' said Windleberry, putting it back again. ‘Something I happened to have with me. Standard issue.'

It had been a small but powerful hand torch. And for a second, as the twins stood face-to-face in the kitchen, something had flickered in Sally's eye. It had been a signal – for anyone who knew how to read it.

‘Really?' said Muddlespot, interested.

‘Have you got her number?'
said Billie.

Tight-lipped, Sally gave her the number.

‘That
looked
like a signal,' said Muddlespot.

‘Did it?' said Windleberry. He shut his mouth firmly.

But when he checked his hands, they were shaking.

The Jones household at night. The girls are in bed. So is Mum, who has taken herself off early with a headache. The only ones awake are Greg, down in the living room watching the football, and Shades the cat, crouched on the landing and sifting the darkness with his yellow eyes.

The house is a vast, shadowed wilderness, tumbled with belongings. Menace is everywhere. It crouches behind the water glass. It waits beyond the pot of skin cream on the bedside table. It watches from between the sheets of homework, piled untidily beside the door.

On Earth, an angel is an idea. Ideas have to fit inside people's heads. So angels have to be very small, and when they step out of the head that houses them they find the world is very large indeed.

There's no truce out here. Inside the mind there may be rules about what happens when you meet with The Enemy. Outside, there are no limits. Eyes may be gouged, heads split, backs stabbed and tongues torn out by the roots. Out here, you must watch every shadow. And when The Enemy appears, you'd better pray you've got him outnumbered.

On a high, flat hilltop (in fact a pile of books), Windleberry waited. He looked out across the sea of chaos that was Billie's room. Billie did not do tidy. Billie had never done tidy. Parents of career teenagers, who thought that nothing could surprise them any more, peeped in on Billie's room from time to time and were impressed. There were clothes, clothes and more clothes upon the floor (every third item was an odd sock). There were books, papers, sweet wrappers, cassettes, CDs, pencils, pens, sharpeners and – oh, more books, some make-up things that possibly she'd forgotten about and (what was this?) an audiotape, her recorder that she didn't play any more, some pictures that at one time she had been going to put into her album but had in fact been left to crumple under the weight of a pile of shoes that were now too small for her. Every flat surface was crowded, and where things didn't get moved around very often the
dust would have come up to Windleberry's knees. The house mites ploughed through it like small komodo dragons.

In the darkness, the shelves and the top of the chest of drawers were mountains crowned with forests. The floor was a mass of waves and shapes and canyons, a volcanic surface where huge lakes of molten lava have flowed and cooled and cracked into piles of tortured rock.

‘Guard us,' Windleberry murmured, ‘from all perils and dangers of this night . . .'

He turned his head slowly, staring into the darkness. He could see little more than outlines. This was partly because he was wearing sunglasses. But he did not take them off. Angels on Earth never do.

‘From all evil and mischief. From the crafts and assaults . . .'

Under her blankets, like a mountainside trembling, Billie shifted and sighed in her sleep.

‘From lightning and tempest; from battle and murder . . .'

A shape dropped lightly out of the air and landed on two feet on the far side of the book. It strode towards him, darkness moving in darkness. Windleberry straightened.

‘From all sedition . . .?' he said.

‘Aw, heck!' came a voice. ‘Who're ya kiddin'? No one does that stuff any more.'

‘From all sedition,' said Windleberry more firmly.

‘Conspiracy, rebellion, from all false doctrine, heresy and schism, from hardness of heart et cetera. That do?'

‘Close enough,' said Windleberry coldly. ‘Pass, friend . . .'

‘Hey, that's nice of you.'

‘. . . Though I think you'll find it's
privy
conspiracy.'

‘Privy conspiracy? Is it now? Guess that must be the kinda conspiracy that gets worked up in the johns. How ya doin', Wimple?'

It was an angel. Of a sort. It had the square head, the square shoulders, the dinner jacket, the bow tie and the sunglasses. It had the wings. But it also limped a little as it walked. Its mouth twitched and one hand trembled slightly. Its blank, steady gaze was just a shade less steady than it should have been, as if behind the shelter of its sunglasses its eyes were revolving slowly in opposite directions. As if, sometime in the last half hour or so, it had been picked up by the ankles and used to stun a mammoth.

Ismael was Billie's guardian angel. It was one tough assignment.

‘I've had a busy day,' said Windleberry coolly. ‘What with that scene Billie threw this evening. I guess you were taking time out?'

Ismael pursed his lips. ‘I guess so,' he said. ‘After she pushed me through a wall a coupla times, yeah, I think I lay down for a bit. And when she had me in the arm lock – you could say I took time out. I'm kinda attached to my arms. I want to stay that way.'

‘Pushed you through a wall?'

‘I tell ya, Winkie. What she let out this evening was
nothing
. There was plenty more where that came from. Plenty. She's a good kid. But yeah, she's got issues. Is that why you flashed me the light? You want to tell me to make her better? Easy for you to talk . . .'

‘Will she behave at the party?'

‘Behave? Depends what you mean. But Billie – she kinda swings. She's had her shout so maybe she'll be sweet for a while. She'll be sweet just because she knows everyone's expecting her to shout again. That's how she is.'

‘I see.'

‘You think you can do better? Try coming over
sometime. I'll sew up my sides so I don't split ‘em watching you.'

‘Maybe I will. But that's not why I called you out. It's this.' Windleberry handed him the small, folded piece of card.

Ismael opened it. ‘Sheesh!' he said in a low voice.

‘Have you had one?'

‘Nope,' said Ismael, slowly shaking his head. ‘Not that I've seen.'

‘Sometimes they hide it. So they can say it's been delivered. But the Guardian doesn't find it. And then the first he knows is . . .'

‘Sheesh!'

‘I'll put in an objection on Sally's behalf,' said Windleberry. ‘Wrong time, exams, commitments and so on. But it'll make no difference.'

‘Nope. I guess it won't.'

‘Keep your eyes open. They're coming.'

‘You're sure?'

‘Trust me,' said Windleberry. ‘I know them.'

Not far away on the same bedside table, two other figures crouched in a cave. The cave was formed by a money pot, some cardboard packaging from a new school shirt, a broken alarm clock and a roulette set
that was missing half its counters and hadn't been played in months. Nevertheless it was a cave. Angels may hang out on high hilltops, but to another sort of person, a cave is a reassuring place. It reminds them of home.

Opposite Muddlespot sat the smallest, shabbiest, evillest-looking creature ever to creep down Darlington Row. His eyes were little horizontal slits, somehow bright and black at the same time. His nose was twice the length of his head, curving and pointed like the beak of a wading bird. He wore a battered broad-brimmed hat the same brown colour as his skin and a shapeless, rumpled coat that covered him from his lips all the way down to his toes. His mouth was tiny and sloped a little to one side. When he spoke all his words seemed to drop out of that downward pointing corner, as if they had trickled down his tongue in blobs of yellow spit and then dribbled out under the force of gravity. He looked like the sort of nightmare that a cockroach might get after pigging on bad cheese.

His name was Scattletail. Like Muddlespot he was an agent from Down Below, from the City of Pandemonium. He was the mouthpiece of Low Command in the mind of Billie Jones.

‘What it means, kid,' he said to Muddlespot, ‘is he's been tipped the Pink Heart.'

‘But what does
that
mean?' asked Muddlespot.

Scattletail spat. ‘It means cupids.'

‘Uh?'

‘Cupids. They're another lot of Fluffies.'

(‘Fluffies' = angels. As in: ‘Death to the Fluffies' and other battle cries of the Low Brigade.)

‘. . . What they do is get the humans to fall in love with each other. The pink heart is like their calling card. “We will be working in your neighbourhood” kind of thing. They're s'posed to give the other Fluffies notice that they're coming. Guardians don't like it if their humans go falling in love without warning. They don't like it even when they
do
get warning. It's their job to keep humans on the straight an' narrow. But straight an' narrow don't get much of a look-in when a human falls in love. All sorts of funny things start happening. Black becomes white, right becomes wrong.
An'
they start singing.' He shuddered. ‘That's usually the worst part.'

‘So this is just between the Fluffies? Nothing to do with us?'

‘Ye-es. An' no. It depends. Me ‘n Ismael – we have this deal. ‘Stead of fighting or arguing, we play at cards.
He wins, he gets to say something to Billie. I win, I do. Keeps it civil. We know where we are. ‘S far as either of us know where we are with Billie. But,' – he spat again. Out in the darkness, something sizzled – ‘I reckon neither of us'd take it kindly if the cards started flying around or the table started walking or the chairs started chucking themselves. That's what it's like when you get hit. Nothing's where you think it is any more.'

‘Hit? Like with a hammer?'

‘I've known it. Cupids – they use arrows mostly. But hammers – yep, I've known it. Also harpoons. Knew someone who got done with a wrecking ball once. Anything'll work, as long as it's gold.'

‘So – what should I do?'

‘Depends. You winning in there?'

Scattletail was a sideways kind of person. He looked sideways, spoke sideways, walked sideways, and he could spit to any angle from about 45° to 120°. He was looking sideways now, with his great nose curving off into the night like a toucan's bill. And his dark little eyes were very, very direct.

Muddlespot shifted a little. ‘Of course,' he said.

‘Hm?'

‘Underneath it all,' Muddlespot insisted. ‘In a subtle way.'

‘Hm.'

‘Oh, I know how it
looks
,' said Muddlespot. ‘But that's all part of my plan.'

Muddlespot knew he couldn't keep the true state of affairs quiet for ever. Sooner or later Low Command was going to have to notice what was going on with Sally, and then he'd be replaced and hauled off for that career interview and everything that came with it. His best chance of survival was to get himself transferred to another human first. The recognized way of achieving this was to sneak up on a colleague, disembowel and dismember him in a suitably collegiate fashion and then to take his place. Low Command didn't usually mind if you did that. Most of them had done it themselves at some time or other.