Bill and the UFO22

The midday sun made the green khaki canvas dry up like an empty fag packet. Rab, Phil and Bill were stripped down to their Ys. Todger sat with his tongue dripping, as if it had been rolled up and shook out like pink salmon dipped in brine.

Summy popped his head into the tent and did a double take on Bill and Todger. ‘What they daeing here?’

Only Wendy seemed unaffected. The button on her blouse remained tight to her bottle white neck. ‘The angels gave him a day off.’

Summy stepped hen-toed into the weaving sea of clammy legs and pushed and pulled, like an oarsman at the Oxford boat race, to find a space to sit. ‘What’s she talkin’ about?’

Rab sighed, barely lifting his sunburned neck to look at Summy. ‘Don’t know. She’s been like that all morning.’

Wendy fiddled with the zip on her sleeping bag, running it up and down the metallic tract, before saying anything. ‘It’s no’ my fault if numpty-head has been talkin’ rubbish all morning.’

‘How what’s he been sayin’? Summy sounded upbeat and genuinely interested.

Rab groaned and shook his head.

Phil smiled nervously and looked away.

Wendy snorted. The inside zip was jammed, on what seemed a bit of nothing material. She coaxed it, with tight-mouthed curses, over the snag in the metallic tracts.

‘I was just telling them about the UFO I saw.’ Bill pushed off his elbows and sat upright.

‘Jesus.’ Wendy rolled her eyes.

‘No Jesus wasn’t there, but Lazarus was, just to show that being dead wasn’t all bad. But all he did was moan about the spaceship. Said it wasn’t a good place to crash. That it was freezing and pretty spazzy. He was ashamed to be seen in it.’ Bill scratched at his neck, following a sweat droplet with his index finger as it ran down his scrawny bare chest.

Rab pulled himself upright. ‘I cannae take any more of this. I’m goin’ outside for a fag.’

‘If your goin’ out. So am I.’ Wendy dropped the unzipped end of her sleeping bag.

Phil was half sleeping. ‘Me as well.’

Wendy looked at him. ‘You don’t smoke.’

‘Am goin’ to start.’ Phil didn’t wait for any further invitation, just crawled straight out of the tent and sat outside, with his mouth open, looking up at the Buddleia bumblebee bush in the next garden, as if he’d been tent lagged and its oxygenated greenery had given him mouth-to-mouth.

Summy was left with Bill and Todger in the sauna like gloom of the tent. ‘Everybody’s looking for you.’ Summy’s legs made a sucker like sound, when he moved them from the groundsheet and went to sit on Wendy’s sleeping bag. He made a face. ‘It’s a bit…’

‘A know,’ Bill tapped his lower teeth as if trying to decide the right tone of musical note. ‘Smelly?’

‘Aye.’ Summy held the sleeping bag up to his nose and a knowing look played his face, ‘but not in that kind of way.’

Bill didn’t catch it. He was thinking about something else. ‘Angels don’t have a smell, but they do have a presence. Sometimes they borrow smells and leave them lingering. And sometimes the younger angels tend to overdo it.’

Todger twitched in his sleep, his short doggy legs running long dog miles.

Summy gave Bill a searching look. ‘Why do you keep goin’ on about angels. You were always a bit weird, but in a good way. Have you turned totally daft?’

Bill patted his own shoulder in consolation; his eyebrows shooting up and down in mock indignation and a smile breaking onto his face. ‘You though I was weird?’ He looked at Summy and laughed in recognition. ‘I thought you were weirder.’

Summy’’s shoulders rocked back and forth as he tried to hold in a laugh. ‘So what happened? You’re a bit old for invisible friends, but...you sayin’ you’ve seen some kind of angel.’

‘I suppose they are invisible friends, but they just stay a bit longer.’ Bill rubbed Todger’s belly. ‘The ones I saw were younger angels. They’ve got a greater radiance, tend to be more innocent and have soft feet. They like to keep them that way. They don’t want them turning into feet of clay, for obvious reasons?’

Phil wasn’t up to date on his Angelology and this showed in his face. ‘What reasons?’

Bills lips pursed. ‘I don’t know. Obvious reasons for an angel… Maybe when they’re older they need to stand like a statue a lot, to get painted by somebody like that Michelangelo.’

‘How do you know all this crap?’

‘That’s easy,’ Bill was waiting to pounce. ‘They hypnotised me so that I’d forget to remember to forget, but because all of mankind are fallen angels I forgot to remember.’

‘Right.’ Phil was disorientated. A wasp buzzed outside, its winged shadow made it seem the size of a spiked fist. He stared at a dust mote trying to work out the rhythm of forgetting and remembering.

Bill took this trance as some kind of affirmation. ‘Angels said they were pig sick of waiting for people to die before they could chat to them. So they came here early to promote a fairer system for people in the wrong religion and poor people that can’t afford to be dead. They draw the line at agnostics, of course. They’d like to spit on them, but since they don’t eat anything, even McDonald's, they don’t have saliva.’

Summy sighed. ‘You any fags?’

‘Nah.’ Bill grinned. ‘You?’

‘Nah, I’ve got nothing. Summy crawled across to the tent entrance. ‘Why would angels come to Scotland?’

Bill grabbed at his arm. ‘They come to Scotland because young angels get sunburned and there’s, usually, no chance of that happening here.’

Summy opened the tent flaps and waved them back and forth, like the pages in a fat Harold Robben's book, to fan in some air. ‘You know something?’ He looked at the dog. ‘You’re dafter than Todger.’

‘Thanks,’ said Bill. ‘The angels said that he was the smartest dog they’d ever talked to. And they were going back a bit to the beginning of time. The only thing they could feed him on was Manna, which is pretty tasteless, but Todger showed animal cunning and grew another belly and was pregnant with the amount he ate.’

‘Not another Virgin birth.’ Summy was sitting half in and half out of the tent.

‘You don’t say that around angels. It would piss them off big time. The younger angels are just looking for a bit of work, before the Second Coming, but God only knows when that is. All the old guard, like Gabriel and Michael, get to appear with the Virgin Mary when she goes on tour. They get The Nativity, The Assumption and Lourdes. The younger ones only get bit parts in people’s dreams.’

‘What’s that one that was in the news? Magic something?’ Summy sounded excited, even though he knew it was a lot of kack.

‘Madjugorje?’ Bill nodded as if he knew what he was talking about. ‘Nah, that was just a peasant woman with two torches. Nobody wanted to admit that the Madjugorje Virgin Mary…that each milieu chooses its own…that there was a Communist cover up, because she had a moustache. It all got a bit silly.’

Summy thought about it for a second, before answering. ‘The whole things stupid.’ He was trying to backtrack, but he couldn’t help smiling. It was like a 200000 piece Jigsaw puzzle, where some of the corners had been filled in. ‘What’s an angel really like then?’

Bill placed his black coat down as a pillow and lay back looking at the ceiling of the tent.’ Well, Ralph, my Guardian angel, told me that our emotions make children of us all. If innocence can be rudely corrupted at any time, like a swimmer coming up for air, then perfection takes a longer time to achieve, and angels are perfect creatures. They’re pretty rational about it and have a checklist for angelic tendencies.’

Bill was talking funny, but Summy felt in a fugue enough state to let him continue, ‘What kinds of things are on the checklist?’

‘Stupid, little things, like do you help your granny across the road syndrome? My Guardian angel told me he’d like to tell me more about it, but it takes a tenth of eternity to run through and even he’s not completed it yet. Eternity is the walled playground where the big boy’s play. Sometimes he can hear them, but never properly sees them.

Todger whined because Bill sounded sad; the kind of emotional incontinence that his owner had been warned about.

‘I’ll need to take him out for the toilet, but will need a disguise. What do you think I should wear?’ Bill looked at Summy for inspiration, because with all his angelic rantings he’d run out.