always thought if there was someone I could have talked to, someone who’d really listen… Not the doctor, who was always in a hurry to get me out of the surgery because I smelt of booze and worse; not the people at the day centre who heard stories like this all the time, every day. Besides, there are a lot worse tales to tell than mine.
There was nobody like that, of course. And if there had been, if some random person had come up to me in the street and said ‘How are you?’ and meant it, what would I even have said to them? Where would I have begun?
Sometimes I used to play a little game when I was outside, just to see if I could catch someone’s eye, to see if I could get them to look at me, even just for a minute. And you know what? Nobody looks you in the eye. And I realised, it had been years and years since anyone made eye contact with me, and the last person was probably Bev. So what did that mean? What does it even mean? If people stop looking at you, do you cease to exist? Does it mean you’re not a person any more? Does it mean you’re already dead?
Annabel
I knew it was unusual to believe in angels.
I didn’t talk about it at work because of course it would become some huge office joke. My colleagues dealt with horrific crime every day of the week, and the only way they coped was to have a laugh wherever and whenever they possibly could. They laughed about each other and they all took it, quite happily. Often they took the piss out of us, the analysts. Kate didn’t mind it at all, of course, but then she had so much confidence in her own skin that you could tell her she was a butt-ugly nobody and she’d give you a grin and a wink and reply with something like, ‘Sure thing, gorgeous.’
I knew I was too sensitive. I tried not to be. I tried to put on this brave, jolly face and deflect the worst of the jokes about my weight, or my lack of a social life, by getting in there first. I think they sensed that there was a line there that couldn’t be crossed.
That was why I didn’t tell them about the angels. How they were real, holy, beautiful and around us all the time. I would feel them when I was sad – a rainbow, a feather, a breath of a breeze against my skin. I talked to them and listened out for whatever they might say to me. I tried to act in a way that made them happy.
But at the moment I wasn’t happy. I thought constantly about Shelley Burton and all the other ones, those people, those poor people, alone in their houses at the moment of death, waiting to be welcomed home by the angels and yet on earth, knowing that they would lie there and rot, unloved, untended, unrespected. The thought of it made me feel ill and ashamed. I wondered if they had really known what they were doing, or if life had treated them so badly that the need to die had become a greater force than the horrible prospect of what might happen to them afterwards.
Today three members of the Tac Team were in for a meeting with Intel, and they were all having a good old laugh about my sudden fascination with rotting corpses. Oh, ha ha, very funny, Annabel the fat old frump has a fetish for foetid meat, who’d have thought it… Kate was joining in and having a laugh. Well, to be fair, even I was laughing, but what else could I do – burst into tears? They didn’t really mean it disrespectfully, even though any outsider would have been horrified at some of the things they were saying. It was just their way of coping with the things they had to see and deal with. Meanwhile I had my hand in my pocket, my fingers feeling the solid shape of the crystal angel I carried all the time, trusting, hoping for some peace from it all. Hoping that I could do my job properly and persuade someone to look into it, this alarming pattern of unloved and unwanted people.
Hoping that I could make it stop.
But they didn’t seem interested. I replied to Frosty’s email in the end, and copied in