COLM
It was a little past nine, and Colm was half-dozing in the chair before the fire with Pádraic, his feet kicked up on the stool. They’d had a huge breakfast, and Pádraic had piled as many rashers in front of him as he’d thought Colm could eat without actually dropping dead, which was a fucking lot.
Pádraic was leaning back in his big wing-backed armchair, the one that Colm knew Asmodeus had had made for him about fifty years back, so it was wide enough to accommodate his huge shoulders. Colm knew that he took care of it, because he could see the patches where the fabric had been worn and replaced. Pádraic was knitting, his lips thinned and his brow furrowed in concentration as he worked, counting loops and hitches and whatever else.
Colm didn’t know much about knitting – Jean-Pierre could crochet a little, but he didn’t knit, mostly just did his sewing. Despite Pádraic’s huge fingers, he did very delicate work, knitting the loops of wool very tight and close together, never seeming to miss a stitch, and he didn’t work from any kind of pattern or code, even though it looked like the jumper had a complicated design on the front.
In a square wicker basket, four feet by two, that rested beside his chair, many similar jumpers were already made and put together. Pádraic always knitted things for the children in his classes coming up to Christmas, and he donated a lot of woollen things to the churches too – he did hats and gloves and things for babies and children.
George already, Colm had noticed, had a nice heavy cardigan made of soft, dark green wool that he was wearing everywhere as of recent, and mittens and a hat to match. When Colm had mentioned this, Pádraic had grunted noncommittally and started frying more eggs.
Outside, Bedelia and George were laughing together, and the sound filtered in through the open window: Bedelia still had her trampoline up at the bottom of the garden, in amongst the incredibly overgrown flowers and berry bushes, and she and George were playing on it together. Every now and then, George’s laughter abruptly stopped: he did this when she kissed him.
“Did you always want children?” he asked Pádraic.
Pádraic glanced up from his knitting, considering the question for a moment, and then shook his head. Placing his jumper on his knees, where it looked very tiny, he clasped his big hands together for a moment, and then signed, “Liked children. Didn’t want them.”
“You worked in the NICU ward when you were a nurse, right? De said you did.”
“Sometimes. I wasn’t a…” He signed something Colm didn’t understand until he spelled it with his fingers: “Paediatric nurse. Why the question?”
Colm shrugged.
“How old is your daughter now?”
Colm inhaled slowly, looking to the quiet crackle of the fire beside them, smelling the earthy scent of the turf on the air. “Eighty-three,” Colm murmured. “Her birthday was in January – I went over before we moved from Texas.”
Pádraic was watching him, his lips curved in a grim smile, quietly understanding, knowing, and Colm reached into his coat pocket, hanging as it was on the side of his chair, and pulled out his wallet. Pádraic had his hand out before Colm had even opened it, and Colm slid out the two photos nestled into little window, handing them over.
“Ah,” Pádraic said quietly, smiling as he took them, and Colm watched the way he studied them, carefully, keenly. The first one was old and very battered, Colm knew, when Heidemarie was only six and growing too old to be bounced on Colm’s knee, the two of them smiling for the camera, but the other was taken in the sixties, when she was a young woman, and she was grinning as they stood together, holding her dog at the time, a horrible little schnauzer that had been far too big to really be carried, against her chest and leaning her head on Colm’s shoulder. Pádraic handed them back, and Colm slipped them into his wallet.
“No pictures of her in your house,” Pádraic signed. Not judgily – he didn’t mean it like that.
“In my room,” Colm said.
“Not the same.”
“Heidemarie’s a point of contention in our house,” Colm said darkly, and Pádraic frowned at him, his great head tilting slightly to the side.
“Why?” The singular word was spoken gravely, darkly, and Colm sighed, tugging the kettle off the fire and pouring more tea.
“Jean,” Colm said. “Why else?”
Pádraic folded his hands over his belly, leaning back in his chair and for a moment basking in the warm heat of the fire, his head tilted toward the flicker and heat of the warmth that radiated from the hearth. His expression was quietly thoughtful, and he felt pensive, too – Pádraic, as mute as he was, kept his emotions close to his chest, even from people like Colm, so that you had to really concentrate to skim what he was feeling off the top. He had to wonder if George would have become quite so good at it so quickly were it not for knowing Pádraic.
“I like Jean-Pierre,” he finally signed, the movement of his hands slow and measured, with long pauses between phrases. “But he is… controlling.” He thought for a second longer, and then spelled with his fingers, “Mercurial. Aimé seems like a decent sort, for being rich, but Jean-Pierre seems like he needs to be tempered.”
“He wasn’t always like this,” Colm said quietly. “He didn’t used to be this bad – he was always shitty with his boyfriends, I didn’t meet the first one, but he was always, you know, the way that he is with them. But he never used to be so catty with me, and his temper never used to be this bad, and he never used to freak out so bad, being on his own. Sometimes I feel like he hates me.”
“He doesn’t,” Pádraic signed. “You know that. It’s your fault, letting him be so jealous of Heidemarie.”
“My fault?” Colm repeated, copying the sign, too, surprised by how irritated it made him.
Pádraic shrugged his great, heaving shoulders. “If the shoe fits. You hide pictures of her in your room, you never mention her, never bring her up – have you mentioned her to George? To Aimé? To any of your new friends in the city?”
Colm clenched his fists on the armchair.
“You let Jean control things,” Pádraic said simply. “It doesn’t come from nowhere.”
“Dún do chlab mór,” Colm snapped.
Pádraic made a locking motion over his closed lips, and Colm scowled, crossing his arms tightly over his chest and leaning back in his chair, listening to it creak underneath him.
“Going to visit her for Christmas?” Pádraic asked.
“Yeah,” Colm murmured. “I never see her for Christmas itself – she had three sons and a daughter, and two of the sons who were magical, they both died, but Gunther and Angela, they’re married to mundies, and the grandchildren are mundies, so I’m hard to explain. I’ll go at the beginning of December, stay a few days, before I come home. Benedictine is coming for Christmas – she met Bedelia?”
Pádraic’s expression dropped into a further scowl, and he looked out of the sliding doors to the garden, to Bedelia and George, who were sitting on the edge of the trampoline. George had his hands out, palms up, his eyes closed, and as Bedelia talked, tickling his palms, George was laughing and squirming in his seat.
“She’s making him name the bones she’s touching,” Colm said quietly. “She’s been teaching him the bones of the hands.”
“Boy faints for blood,” muttered Pádraic in his quiet thunder.
“I think he’s okay if it’s on the inside.”
Pádraic smiled in a tiny way, resting his chin on his knuckles for a moment, and then he signed, “I never wanted her to marry an angel.”
“They’re not married yet.”
Pádraic released a low, wordless grumble of disapproval, and Colm laughed, sipping at his tea.
“At least it’ll mean she’s safe from your Benedictine.”
“Mine?” Colm repeated, and laughed. “Uh uh, you don’t get to put her on me anymore than you can Jean.”
“And Aimé?”
Colm inhaled slowly. He knew that Pádraic was changing the subject to avoid talking more about Bedelia – he was protective of her, as any father was protective of his daughter, as was only natural, and Colm knew it had far less to do with any desire to keep Bedelia from dating at all (although he knew that was part of it), and more to do with the way so many angels reacted to people like her. Colm, in his position, probably wouldn’t want to talk about it either.
“What about Aimé?” Colm asked.
Pádraic shrugged again. “You said,” he started, thinking for a moment, and then moved his hands very deliberately: “you were worried about him. That he should leave.”
“He should,” Colm said. “You’ve never seen Jean with his boyfriends – he takes them apart and builds them back brick by brick, so that all they know is him. Fucks with their heads. They worship him, by the end of it – he loves them, of course he does, but… I like this one.”
Pádraic didn’t sign anything in response to this – he only arched one bushy eyebrow, and Colm clucked his tongue, breaking eye contact.
“Well, most of them… Manolis knew exactly what he was fucking in for. They threatened each other constantly with knives, slapped each other around, said the worst fucking things they could think of. And Bui wasn’t physical about it, but he was just as bad as Jean was for words: he could be really cold, could cut Jean to pieces with the right few words and leave him sobbing. Benoit was a sweetheart, but he was a masochist, and he said so – he knew from the beginning that Jean-Pierre would hurt him, would fuck him right up, and he invited it. Verbally, he did. Said it was like holding a beautiful knife by the blade.”
Farhad hadn’t known, of course – but as far as Colm had seen, Farhad was the closest to a normal relationship he’d ever seen Jean-Pierre in, and that was only because he came with an attached expiration date.
“He should leave,” he said again.
“Maybe. And when he does?”
Colm’s phone started to vibrate on the system, and Pádraic, as superstitious as anything, crossed himself, and then rose from his seat, holding his hands palms up in the air as he stood and walked away, clapping at the door for Bedelia and George to come inside.
Colm was initially relieved when he saw that the call was coming from their neighbours across the road, but he still pulled himself to his feet as he answered.
“Hi, Mrs O’Malley, how’re you doing?”
“Oh, I’m well, Colm, I’m well now, but it’s only…” The old lady’s voice faltered a bit, creasing in the middle like crinkling paper, and Colm’s hand hovered over the collar of his coat. “Well, Peadar went off on his wanderings, and he’s just come in screaming his wee head off, dragging at me, you know. Tom’s just been across the road to check and we saw your car wasn’t home, but Peadar is really itching to get in. I’m just worried something’s wrong – he’s never acted like this, you know, and he’s bit Tom’s arm when he tried to pull him away—”
“I’ll be right there,” Colm said quickly, and he shoved his phone into his pocket, dragging his coat.
“Need help?” Pádraic asked.
“I’ll let you know,” Colm muttered, jogging out to the car. As he slid into the seat, dragging his seatbelt on, he dialled Jean-Pierre, but there was no answer – he’d tried to call four times before he got home, and even tried to call Aimé before remembering he’d get no answer, that he didn’t have a new phone yet.
Tom O’Malley was standing awkwardly on the doorstep when Colm got home, and even from the pavement, he could feel the desperate, complete fury, the agony, the grief, radiating from inside the house, and he swallowed, steeling himself.
“Colm,” said Mr O’Malley. “Deirdre said she called you—”
“I’m sure it’s nothing, Mr O’Malley,” Colm said. “Tell her thanks for calling – Jean’s been fostering this queen in heat, I expect Peadar’s just up for the ride, so.”
All the tension went out of the old man in one, and he looked at Colm, relieved. Laughing, he clapped Colm on the shoulder, and looked to Peadar, who was still clawing at their front door in distress.
“Is that all?” he asked, and chuckled. “Well, that’s alright – our big old tom has some balls on him yet, so he does.”
“Sorry again to worry ye both,” Colm said, grinning himself, and he picked Peadar gently up, soaking the anxiety out of him and leaving him a little dopey – it’d only last for five minutes, but it would be long enough for the old man to walk him back across the street and lock him in. “Have a good day there.”
“And yourself, and yourself,” Mr O’Malley said, still laughing to himself as he scooped Peadar’s now purring ginger body against his chest and walked back across the road.
Colm could not see any sign of Aimé’s bicycle, and nor could he feel the familiar shape of Aimé in the house – what he could feel was Jean-Pierre, a hot burning flame, and he took a second to ground himself on the doorstep before he opened the door and stepped inside.
The hall was a mess, as he had expected. The hall table had been thrown against one wall, and the bowl that normally held wallets and keys had its contents thrown on the ground, with Asmodeus’ carefully filed pile of alphabetised takeaway menus in similar disarray.
A look into the living room showed that it was in a similar state: while Jean-Pierre hadn’t, as he had in tantrums passed, smashed any of their dinnerware, one of the armchairs was overturned, and several of the small tables had been similarly overturned.
Some of the sofas had had their stuffing torn out, the fabric burst and ripped, and Colm could see blood on one of them where Jean-Pierre had obviously caught his arm on a spring, but he doubted it had taken long to heal, because there wasn’t blood stained anywhere else.
Colm walked up the stairs, and, projecting the most calm he could, opened Jean-Pierre’s bedroom door.
Jean-Pierre must have run out of steam before he’d come back into his bedroom, because this was surprisingly neat, and Colm knew that in one of his rages he didn’t distinguish between his own possessions and common ones, but most of his books were still on their shelves, but for a few that had been thrown about, and Jean-Pierre had torn apart a few of his own blankets, but hadn’t done anything more dramatic than that. He certainly felt angrier than he ever had before, but perhaps he was so angry he was paralysed quicker, and lacked the energy to rage for as long as usual.
Jean-Pierre – unsurprisingly – was not in his own bedroom.
Colm wondered if it should have offended him, upset him, that Jean should choose to hide himself away in Asmodeus’ bed instead of Colm’s own, but any sense of vague jealousy faded when he looked through the ajar door and saw Jean-Pierre fitfully asleep in a nest built of a mix of Asmodeus’ clothes and blankets, and Colm’s own.
Asmodeus’ drawers and wardrobes had been messily hauled open so that Jean could drag out whatever smelt most like him, but he probably wouldn’t have done that in Colm’s room – Colm guessed from the pile he could see that he’d mostly dragged up the clothes from Colm’s floor and the uppermost layer of his laundry hamper, although he did note that Jean-Pierre was buried under Colm’s duvet instead of Asmodeus’. He hated De’s silk sheets.
“Hey, Jean,” Colm said gently as he came in, and when Jean didn’t move, he picked up the bottle of pills on the side of the bed, shaking the bottle, but Jean-Pierre had only taken one. He usually medicated himself when he realised he was in too much of a rage to get himself out of it, and this sedative was one he’d been using since the early eighties, a sedative that was hard on the brain and light on the organs, with a name Colm couldn’t pronounce.
Putting the bottle aside, Colm gently peeled the duvet back off of Jean, who, buried in a cocoon of his own wings, was trembling lightly.
Colm pulled him up by the hair, reaching underneath him to support his chest, and then he lifted the other angel up, dropping him heavily into his lap. Jean-Pierre’s eyes were staring forward, but when Colm snapped his fingers in front of them, he didn’t react, so Colm reached up and gently dragged them closed, and they stayed like that.
Colm knew, from unfortunate experience, that a Jean-Pierre sedated would soon be a Jean-Pierre whose sedatives had worn off and was full of rage to be directed at the nearest potential target, but he couldn’t bear to leave his brother when he was like this. He was weak that way.
He turned them around in the makeshift nest of stolen clothes and layered blankets, resting his head on De’s pillow and rapping the duvet around them both. When he soaked up some of Jean-Pierre’s feeling, the immensity of it, the intensity, actually made him feel sick for a second, but it passed after a moment or two. After dropping a quick text to Pádraic to let him know he was okay, and ask him to tell George not to pop around for a few days, he wrapped his arms tightly around his brother and held him close.
“Good for him,” he murmured to the emptiness of the room, and felt the weight of Jean-Pierre on his chest.
