Angel Covered in Moss

My head felt like it was trundling on a conveyor belt as soon as my phone buzzed me awake, and my lungs felt stuffed with cotton balls. Fumes were floating through the floorboards. I think I was getting an accidental high from a leak in the chemist below my apartment. But even more important than me coughing last night’s dinner back up was the high midday sun glowing through the smoke in my apartment. I had woken later than I should have. I’m as useless as a dead junkie, man.

 

I was supposed to take Cara to Las Vegas to visit her ill grandmother at nine a.m. The fumes must have kept me comatose. When I picked up my buzzing phone, the voice in the receiver sounded distant, like the voice in a dream that talked to you from beyond the clouds. It said a black convertible, that had been stolen two hours ago by Cara, had toppled over on Highway sixty-two. The faraway voice continued, saying passers-by had noticed a fragile bourbon haired lady stumble out of the fumes and walk like a broken doll back towards the city. My woozy brain projected the picture of a line of blood streaked far into the horizon. Cara walking along some distant desert road, her brain leaking onto the sand like a petrol can. If only I could light a match on the trail of blood and the fire could take me straight to her.

My mouth was too heavy to manufacture words, plus I wasn’t sure if the voice was real, so I didn’t reply to it. I hung up, and then strived to get up.

 

I eased myself to my feet and grabbed the sweater that had received a hundred mouse bites and my jeans with black paint. Not my paint, someone else’s. I stole them from some back-alley bin. I found my keys straight away which were lying on the floor in my sparse arrangement of an apartment, save for a wooden stool and a mattress resembling stamped bread. Luckily, I could see my front door through the white fog because I left it ajar last night. I liked to leave it half open, hoping some interesting fella will one day have a proposition for me. I guess my laziness saved me from chocking to death.

 

I checked my phone in the elevator now I felt a little more able brained and steady from no fumes and saw I did in fact receive a call about ten minutes ago. I wasn’t tripping. Cara really had been in a crash.

 

Car crash, divine intervention, I don’t know what it was. You can’t walk out of a fifty-mile-an-hour head on collision with a dump truck and not have God shuffle the deck to give you the best hand. Cara didn’t wear a cross round her neck. She wasn’t one of those types to tell you she goes to church on Sundays when you ask what she’s doing on a Saturday. The only habit that verged on religious was the necking of a new pill she stole from a chemist using a litter picker. She was nicknamed ‘the claw’ like the claw crane you use to pluck prizes out of a big glass box at an arcade. With no money to pay for them she stole prescription meds out of self-preservation: to make speaking to new people less intimidating and more like an hallucination to a God, or in her words, ‘If I feel like I’m talking to a ghost, they can’t judge me. They’re dead.’

 

I always told her not worry about looking for work if it ‘causes you to be in this much mental trouble talking to people’. I could smell the sick in the toilet, I could see the medication leaflets piling up on my kitchen top. I even told her my life mantra: ‘You gotta’ sit in one place because eventually you’ll be in the way of something big. You don’t have to talk to any regular Harry then.’

 

However, unlike me, she wanted to work her way up from nothing, earn the respect and admiration from people. She was homeless for five years and as a cleaner, she worked longer shifts than a fisherman. But the reward wasn’t even enough to buy wad of cod. I said to her ‘Don’t work, just wait. Be like the shopping bag blowing in the wind that gets snagged on something big.’

 

Outside in the lobby of my apartment, all my neighbours had left their homes and were waiting on the sidewalk, their breath puffing out, huddled in their dressing gowns waiting for the fire engines to arrive. Malek from next door was dressed in a suit. A rare sight. Maybe he finally got a job.

He said he’d knocked twice for me, he said he knew my problems of disappearing into my mind. However, my door was half open, so it was a straight lie, but I ignored it. I told him Cara had been in an accident. I needed to find her. Malek smiled with those huge cheeks of his and said, “She used to tell me that too, Drystan. I assume her friend called you, telling you how she’d be in a crash, etc?”

 

“She loves me, Malek.”

 

Malek’s smile turned from genuine to strained. She only spent three weeks with him and always told me he was asking too much from her, to buy him a better apartment, to get the groceries. “Glad you finally got a job.” He nodded. I could see his cheeks blush. “Check the bar downtown,

Drystan. Look straight to the bar, I’m sure she will be lent into the eyes of a mysterious stranger.”

 

I don’t know why I felt compelled to believe him, I wanted to go and run straight to the nearest accident and emergency, but what if Malek was telling the truth? Maybe Cara just made it up to me and got her friend to call, then went and began an affair with a stranger in the bar. I headed east towards downtown.

 

The bar was where we first met with its neon sign above a low curved doorway. It still looked like a mouse’s door in the skirting compared to the large glass buildings above. The rodents inside drank cheap drinks and music allowed them to dream of a life they wish they lead. To my surprise, Cara was stood by the bars water fountain like a broken doll, the dim blue light turned her into a moving mannequin in a closed shop window. She filled the glass she stole from a free table next to her from the water fountain that’s trickle could not be heard over the thumping electro beat of The Chemical Brothers.

 

She leant into the private space of a well-dressed woman in a dress that glistened like a disco ball who looked as though she had been placed into a Gucci cot straight from the womb. Not often you get rich folk bottom dwelling in here. I was getting worried Malek’s words were living up to reality, that she had just forgotten about me and was moving on, but no. Not quite. I noticed Cara had crusty red lines inked across her forehead. In a psychedelic setting it looked like a fashion statement. Mrs. Gucci nodded to Cara’s forehead and Gucci girl said something to her friends that made them all laugh at Cara. Cara looked dazed and her eyes were glazed. Usually, she would blush from being ridiculed. Even in a dazed and confused state she’s in her default mode is for her to try and make people like her. I decided to wait until she left the bar to grab her and take her home. I couldn’t do it in here. These Gucci women looked like the types to shout ‘rape’ if I grabbed Cara by the arm in here. I took a seat on an empty table near the front door and waited.

 

I tried to keep my eyes on her, but I got distracted a waiter hovered into my periphery. I had no money to order, but by the time I’d finished turning away the waitress, Cara and the women were gone, The Chemical Brothers blasted into a beat drop and the women were gone like a car screeching off from a parking lot. I didn’t see them leave.

 

With no sign either way of Cara and the women on the sidewalk outside the bar I went back to my apartment, and like any good wannabe detective I should go out into the night, check all the local bars and clubs. Be a wannabe Travis Bickle. But I preferred to daydream the scenario, at least I could have an ending that suits me. When you are soaking up rent bills, and eating the mice’s cheese, you only have the energy to daydream. Hoping she’s going to turn up, unbloodied, just happy to be back with me.

 

Between the periods of daydreaming in my apartment I wondered the streets, hoping I’d just bump into her. I saw Malek a few times over the months. He walked out every morning at eight thirty with a well-dressed woman. She also wore a suit. So, when I saw him back when the chemist was on fire, I assumed he had a job, but she was the one who cashed the cheques. He just dressed up to copy her.

 

Everyone is on a train in life, you just chose which station to settle on. I guess Malek settled on a station platform where his partner could throw him pieces of bread like a pigeon. I’m still waiting for someone to help me onto the right platform.

One solemn day of walking the streets, halfway through my circuit of what I liked to call ‘chancing’, I walked along some side street alley hoping to catch a drug deal going down, hoping it goes wrong when I’m there so I could steal the cash. But I was suddenly rooted to the spot. The face of Cara, charred and bloody hung on a large poster on the alley wall. There was a number at the bottom I could call. Maybe there is a police search for her. I looked at the poster with more care and saw Cara was the face of an album cover that had been nominated for several Emmy’s. It had her on the front cover of the album with a train behind her. It must have been that same night I saw her in the bar because the blood was still wet on her face, glistening like a diamond under the train lights above. And the Gucci women she spoke to must have been this band.

 

But luckily, I knew that place in the album cover, it was the place we’d go and sit some nights. We’d be there starring up through the light in the train tracks, sharing the same thoughts of how our lives. How her father didn’t approve of her not going to college due to her crippling anxiety issues, so he threw her out and she lived from cheap hostels to the streets. I told her how my mother got me a job working on a farm four years ago. Mom told me it would help us both financially as she couldn’t work due to her crutches from her ‘car accident’ I never witnessed. She used to ring me when I had just sat down on my bed in the tool shed (I had to sleep in there as the head farmer had no room in his home), my legs heavy and my head throbbing from tiredness. We’d both talk about how we felt stuck, she assured me that the money I’d earned will help us both buy a place together, ‘you just got to stick at it, Drystan.’ I saw her in Time magazine a month later with her rich entrepreneur boyfriend she never told me about. Her number only goes to answer phone now. I had been working while she was behind me, tying bricks to my feet.

 

The blood on Cara’s face, according to the internet was the most searched thing on Google. It looked like crystal rock on her face. Like any diamond you look in to and you can see how vast and valuable it is. And people, fans of the album, critics, even some scientists wanted to investigate this red abyss on Sarah’s face. But the question posed on social media and articles was: who is this woman? To everyone else she’s just a fox drifting the streets at night, no home, no identity.

 

The clacking of the train’s overhead drilled my brain as I approached the station platform from the album cover. It was full of men and women carrying heavy briefcases – I imagined containing blueprints for the next rocket ship going to Mars, or cream that cures hair loss. The train track covered me in shadow. In fact, it covered most of the road’s underneath in shadow, snaking through the city. The fragile figures wrapped in sleeping bags holding out their empty tins waiting for the gemstones that leak through the sieve above. The flashes from the train carriage shot through the wooden beams above like God was taking snaps of this desperate place.

 

I reached the section me and Cara used to sit and talk. We would sit on the piles of cushions, the seats from train carriages no longer needed. Cara’s body was motionless on a rotten couch, bloodied and covered in dirt and soot. She looks like an angel covered in moss.

 

I took off my jacket and flung it over her. You’ve been left here used like a tube. The women/band members I saw in the bar must have watched her die and then taken pictures and then used it for their album cover. I wanted to lash out at something round me, but everything round me was already beaten and desperate.

 

The only way she could open-up to the world was for it to open her up. I sat by her body like one of the shadowy figures in a hundred-year-old oil painting. Just doing what I did best. Waiting. I could call the cops. But something more interesting always happens when you sit and do nothing. After an unidentifiable amount of time, like when you’re not sure if you have been asleep or awake, a silhouetted figure grew taller in the spotlight. Its husky voice said, “She used to message me from under this bridge.”

 

I turned round half expecting someone around my age, mid-thirties, some forgotten boyfriend, but the figure was brittle, shoulders like a coat hanger in a jacket. A face like braille. His wispy grey hair blew from the train that just took off. I said,

​

"She could easily have been helped you know.”

 

“If you’re one of her layabouts, or one of her, lovers. I suggest you leave.”

 

“Then what, you burn her body. Get her off your conscience. Tossing her away like a shopping bag.”

 

Her father shook his head and said people would pay good money for her story: to show the world the tragedy of youth,

“She ran away from home. . . Young man, she didn’t want to do anything but hang around the gutter.”

 

“If that’s what you believe. . .”

 

Her father chewed the bottom of his lip, looking me up and down, scanning me to see if I looked like someone his daughter might associate with. Perhaps he didn’t want to gamble on me being a nobody, that I did in fact know quite a bit about here. Maybe more than he did. He said, “Wait here. Give me thirty minutes and I’ll be back with a bag of cash. It will be an amount you wouldn’t have seen before, so remember that when you are walking away from here.”

 

I left it a beat before replying, my life mantra finally about to pay off. I’ve finally waited long enough in one place to be in the way of something big. But thinking about me waking up late, me not paying attention in the bar downtown, me not looking for her. Maybe waiting for good things to happen to me means I ignore the person who needs help, just like my mom did.

 

Pretending I was considering the fathers offer, I said, “Sure. I’ll be right here.” Her father scuttled off, hands in his pockets, head down, heading to the nearest pay machine.

 

While he was gone, I dragged Cara into a back alley that’s smell hit the roof of my mouth. The stench of rotten bananas and sewage. I hid her under the boxes that lay between two bins. I know it’s come too late, Cara. I should have done more sooner for us instead of being happy doing nothing. But I’ll work as hard as I can now. I’ll make sure the world knows you’re not a dead junkie on the front of an album cover.