Felix is still sitting, shivering, on the balcony when Michael finds him. It seems only seconds since they spoke on the phone. They go inside together, and he changes into a dry set of clothes while Michael makes them both a drink. He isn’t sure whether drinking is a good idea or not, but he takes the glass anyway. Michael is only trying to help.
He knows he is warm again, and dry, because the glass feels cold in his hand. It is black with cola, and smells of rum. The first sip makes him wince. So does the second. By the third sip, he is not thinking about the taste, or anything at all except the night Harriet drowned. He takes a seat beside Michael on the sofa.
“Come on, then,” says Michael, lifting his glass to his lips, “what’s brought this on?”
“I went to church.”
Michael splutters into his drink. “Well, that would do it.”
“I thought it might help.”
“I’m not sure it’s working.”
He tells Michael about Crows Hill, and how his memories of the town have been coming back to him. He tells him about all the moments that are surfacing in his head and floating there, like the bubbles in their drinks. He tells him about the pain inside, and how he thought he had escaped it when he escaped Crows Hill, but that it is still there, and has been all along, growing inside him.
“I’m seeing things,” he says, as they are finishing their drinks. His tongue feels thick, mouth sticky with a coating of cola. “The angel, from the memorial at East Park. And Harriet. Her face.”
“Seeing things?”
“Dreaming, I suppose. But I’m awake.”
For a long moment, Michael is silent. Gull song fills the void; long, lilting sounds from outside the balcony. Felix watches his friend, who is studying the shining black surface of his drink, and wonders what his eyes see there, bobbing in the blackness.
“What was she like?”
“She was brave. Wild. Careless, in that way some children are.”
“No, what was she like?”
“I think she was lonely.”
Putting his drink to one side by his feet, Michael swoops forward. He grasps Felix by the thigh. His fingers are firm where they latch onto him. His breath is sugary and cold.
“Eight years and counting. A lot of this is new to me, but I know you. I know you enjoy the job about as much as I do. I know five years is too long to be sitting at a desk. You expected more from life. I know because I expected more too. And we’ll find it. We will. In the meantime, we need to keep going. That’s all anyone can do. Yes?”
“Yes.”
“Remember what you said before, about the bar? You said ‘This is why people come here, time and time again. Not just for the drinks but for the sea and the night sky.’”
“‘For the breath of the ocean on their faces.’ You remembered.”
“Of course I remembered. Hold on to that, Felix. If it’s the only way to keep your head above the water, hold on to it. I know I will.”
“How’s Helen?” he says absent-mindedly. Staring at his hands, he senses Michael smiling.
“She’s good,” he replies. “Angela’s good too.”
Releasing his grip, Michael leans back into the sofa. They both take a mouthful of their drinks. The wind breathes heavily against the glass balcony doors.
“How long has it been?” says Michael suddenly.
Felix doesn’t need to ask to know what he is talking about. “Two years,” he admits.
“Two years! No wonder you’re feeling pent up. Don’t you miss it?”
“Are we really going to have this conversation now?”
Michael shrugs. “Now’s as good a time as any.”
He thinks about what he is missing, about the stream of women Michael professes to sleep with; a production line of faceless bodies, shining with sweat, grasping for attention, affection, connection in a world that requires it but provides none. He thinks about the phone calls, the arguments, the birthdays and forgotten anniversaries that seem to constitute Michael’s non-working life; his colleague, Lothario, living the dream-life in Southampton city centre.
“No,” he says. “Yes and no. It’s complicated.”
“It’s not really, though, is it?”
Shaking his head, he watches the last of Michael’s drink as it vanishes down his throat and wonders whether Helen really knows what Michael is like. He wonders if Michael himself knows, and if Helen would care. Mostly he wonders how Michael lives with himself day after day, and it is then that he realises why man surrounds himself with angels. It is not because the angel reminds him of Heaven or death but because she is a woman.
An angel is a messenger of God, but a woman is His child and so much more; a mother, a daughter, a sister, an instinctively maternal being. And as much as man needs reminders of Heaven and death, he also needs woman, whichever role she might play, to keep him safe, to keep him sane, to keep him singing in the night, until his song is spent.
It is almost dusk when Felix and Michael find themselves in East Park. The idea was Michael’s, inspired sometime around the last half-inch of the rum. The city is shrouded with dusk. Still, its sounds wash over them; the roar of traffic, the rattle of construction, voices as people flock past them through the park on their way back to wherever they call home.
When they reach the memorial, Michael and he perch on the low wall. Huddled into his hoody, hands firmly stuffed into his pockets, Felix turns on his seat and peers up at the statue. She stares stonily overhead.
“We’ve stopped by here before, you know.” As he speaks, Michael produces a pack of cigarettes from his pocket. He proceeds to light up. “The night Rachel left me. We must have lapped East Park a dozen times. It looks different in the dark. I’ve never really noticed.”
“Noticed what?”
“The memorial. The little details. I suppose I’ve never really looked.”
They sit staring at the statue, surrounded by the city-roar of traffic, the hiss of braking buses, white-noise chatter of voices, so many voices; a chorus of human sound. A woman walks past them, two screaming children in tow. Her face is red, her eyes thin, hands white where they clutch the handle of a buggy. Opposite them a slender man in a suit stops to tie his shoelace. Felix feels every ache, every strain on the stranger’s face as he stoops slowly to the ground. Sensing he is watched, perhaps, the man looks up, and Felix turns quickly away.
“I stopped by after work one evening,” he says, only half-conscious of the words coming from his mouth. “I think it was a Friday. I was tired.”
“Sounds like a Friday to me.” Michael’s eyes seem to smile in the fading light. “Association.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that when we see angels, we think of Heaven and death. I bet there were lots of statues at Harriet’s funeral.”
“Yes,” he says, remembering old, stony faces, smiling at him from the alcoves. “It was a church.”
“Exactly. The church, the graveyard and the fact that this angel is a memorial shows you’re associating these things with each other. She’s reminding you of what happened, and how it affected you. It’s normal to feel like this, Felix. Especially if you haven’t dealt with what happened.”
Across the street, at the bus stop, a small boy in football kit plays knee-ups with an empty beer can. He watches the boy, who seems smitten with the can, as though nothing in the world matters as much as keeping it from the ground. For one fleeting moment he admires the boy, who is so focused on such a small thing. Then he pities him, for the same reason. He pities them all; every man, every woman, every boy who could be contented with something as insignificant as an empty beer can; all of them lost in this city by the sea.