Iambs With Whisky
“Oi! Pub humans!”
Crowley tapped the bar smartly with two fingers, and peered accusingly into the darkness. He was, in fact, rather surprised that it was quite so dark, considering that The Dirty Donkey was right on the corner of Whickber Street, a well-lit Soho thoroughfare, one of those thoroughfares that was always somehow alive and vibrant at every hour of the clock. Neon slashes, sodium smears and the stabbing sweep of headlights made up the typical palette through the rather smeared windows of the pub. He was not wearing his glasses, which were sitting in a small shining puddle of melted ice-water on the otherwise highly polished surface of the bar. Nonetheless, there was still a palpable gloom.
Propping himself up rather precariously on one elbow, Crowley glared even harder into the shadowy corners of the large room, projecting as much bitter intensity as he could muster through what was a fairly impressive alcoholic fugue. He was completely rat-arsed.
Ah, there they were. They were swimming into focus, but very slowly. Wobbly seated shapes emitting a now audible low hum of conversation, punctured by laughter and the occasional loud exclamation. He could just make out a group of young girls and a man in a grey suit sitting in a dim corner on his left, some couples scattered here and there, and a rowdier group of men on his right, ties askew and smart shirts rolled up to their elbows, lining the window nearest the doorway. There was a lone middle-aged female sitting quietly just to his left, the humorous eyes in her large plain face watching him patiently, if expectantly.
This time he cracked the base of his glass loudly against the bar, causing the amber liquid within to slosh precariously up the sloping sides. The whisky would not have dared allow itself to spill, however.
“Right, everybody, shut it!”
The low hum dissipated and an air of anticipation replaced it.
That was more like it, thought Crowley. He twisted awkwardly to look over his right shoulder at the tall, thin barman who was standing behind him, arms folded, and looking staggeringly bored.
“More Talisker, umm…what’s your name again?”
“Tony.” The barman bit out the answer with extreme prejudice.
Crowley’s head bobbled in mild surprise. “S’weird. That’s my name.”
The barman swung a bottle down onto the bar at the demon’s elbow. “Yeah, it’s a small f*ckin’ world, mate. Could you get on with it, please?”
“Sure. Course.” Crowley swivelled less than elegantly round on his creaking stool to face his now quiescent audience. He shifted uncomfortably, his long legs refusing to behave with any decorum on a stool which only had foot spars at precisely the places his feet didn’t want to be. Tongue between his teeth, he pushed out one black-clad leg and hooked his foot around the stool next to him and dragged it noisily towards him. Draping one leg over it, and leaving the other to dangle loosely, he looked profoundly uncomfortable, but told himself that he had won an important battle in the fight for physical self-expression over sh*tty furniture. He nodded.
“Yeah. OK. Well, it’s been a great evening so far. I’m sure I speak for every person here when I say how much we all appreciated that timeless harmonica rendition of -” He waved his glass cluelessly.
“Candle in the Wind,” shouted a shadowy someone, helpfully.
“Exactly so. An inspiring effort from – “ Again, his glass wobbled pleadingly.
“Bob!”
“Yeah, Bob.”
“It was Bob!”
“It was me,” said Bob, a grey-haired man, who peered nervously and smiled at Crowley from somewhere in the dingy centre of the room.
“Right. Bob.” The demon grimaced in response. “Wonderful.”
He gulped the glinting golden remnants in his glass, his head tilted back dramatically, and slammed the glass back on the bar with a theatrical, throaty gasp.
“Fill me up again, Tony. And keep on doing that, as I’m going to be busy.”
He could sense rather than see the exasperated eye-roll, but the clink of glass on glass reassured him that his beverage needs were being fulfilled, if somewhat huffily.
Then the dim blear of the pub landscape rolled giddily, like a muddy wave, and Crowley leaned right, very nearly following its churning heave with one of his own. He swept long fingers through his hair, swallowed, and made a rudimentary effort to straighten up. It made little difference to the angular slouch but, at last, his preparations were complete.
“I…am going to recite a poem,” he announced solemnly.
He sighed.
“It is a poem about loss. Loss.” His head was slightly bent and his gaze was unfocussed, soft, far away.
“This poet understood loss. We spoke about it – long time ago. He wasn’t in London often, but I had to speak to him about this poem. Well, this one part of that larger…thing. It was so right, so apt and I had to talk to him about it. He was Poet Laureate by then, and he felt so responsible for…you know, being the voice of queen and country, but you see, he was a mystic really. A musician of language. I mean, I didn’t get a lot of it but, when you read it, the emotion and the darkness and the pain were there in every syllable. Every cadence so exquisite.
Dark, dark eyes. Sad voice. Weirdly, not good at reciting his own poetry. Oh, and a great beard. Really epic.”
Crowley nodded judiciously to himself. “I mean, I’ve had some beards in my time, but this was dedication.”
His eyes darted over each blurred, uncomprehending face.
“He could actually orchestrate his grief, in the most detailed and profound and beautiful way. ’Mazing, really.”
Crowley took a deep breath and let it out slowly, tremulously.
“This is ridiculous. But I came here to do this stupid, self-indulgent thing and I’m bloody well going to see it through. Couldn’t do it in the bookshop. Needed…something else.”
He fumbled behind him, brought out the glass of whisky and downed it all. He wiped his mouth.
“Okay, then. This is canto 129 of In Memoriam. Not the best known, and maybe not the best. But, for me, for us, it’s…Right. f*ck. Canto 129.”
A pause.
“Dear friend, far off, my lost desire,
So far, so near in woe and weal;
O loved the most, when most I feel
There is a lower and a higher,”
He had always stuttered over “friend”, Aziraphale had. He’d pause, afflicted almost by the enormity of the word, as if even the whisper of it would unleash a celestial fury or an infernal firestorm. He too had been guilty of flinching, not so much from fear of the official consequences but from that very stutter, hearing that hesitation. “Unspoken” was their daily, yearly, millennial round. Not stated. Implied through code and gesture. Nodded. Gazed. They played accepted roles and Crowley gladly performed, preferring the reflected glory of Aziraphale’s orbit, rather than sully his angel with darkness and desire. For two so together, so binary, revolving endlessly in twinned pulsing rotations, still they were adjacent, gapped through unease and no small amount of red terror. Terror of each other. For each other.
Aziraphale had left him now. He was, quite literally, on a higher plain. Crowley now revolved on his own axis, solitary, a wandering astral body, sheared from its satellite moorings, adrift in empty space. He ached with the loss of his tether. He mourned and raged and cursed.
He still loved, though. He could not be free of it.
Would not.
“Known and unknown; human, divine;
Sweet human hand and lips and eye;
Dear heavenly friend that canst not die,
Mine, mine, for ever, ever mine;”
The angel was so obviously angelic, a beaming radiation of love and light, the pinnacle of all that Crowley knew that goodness and righteousness could be. The demon bowed his head before this idolatrous vision, and smirked. Pert, voracious, secretive, flirtatious Aziraphalean entanglements were the delicious plague of his existence, a fine-drawn agony of laughter and delirium. How did humans do it, with their breath-like existence? He had known the angel for many millennia, knew his habits and interests, observed his quirks and peccadilloes. Knew him. Yet, he was constantly surprised. Often confused. Never quite sure.
A-zir-a-phale. Aziraphale. Four syllables of fricative softness. Fricative? Oh, for f*ck’s sake! He only knew the bloody word because of A-zir-a-phale. Still, the fricative softness. That was something to get your forked tongue around. Open-mouthed expulsion of the first vowel, the sighing satisfied declaration from the back of the throat, followed by the vibrating tongue on the roof of his mouth, widening his lips all the while, then the thrilling purr of the ‘r’ sliding into another pleasing gasp. Finally, his teeth could stroke his long lower lip on that delightful ‘f’, and his tongue would land lightly behind his upper front teeth to finish. Yep. Those musical syllables gave one a complete oral workout.
The name, very naturally, reflected it’s owner; mellifluous, sweet, indulgent. Also, it had to be admitted, a little sassy, with schoolmarmish overtones. The angel was always so damned tangible, wiggling his sublime corporation about, waving those fine, strong hands and pouting irresistibly. Resistance, of course, was what Crowley was all about. He resisted for all he was worth. He rarely touched and never presumed. Absorbing instead every glorious glance from storm-blue eyes, every casual brush of the hand on shoulder or back or chest, absorbed and remembered and cherished until, invariably drunk and burning in a hell of his own making, he would stagger to his bed, then twist and thrust as he bit Aziraphale’s name into his own wrist. Mine.
He swallowed.
The pub was still here.
“Umm…eh. ‘Strange friend…’” he paused. Rather shakily he reached back, aimed for the whisky and missed by a fingertip. He frowned in concentration and tried again. This time he had it, the cool of the glass letting him know how overheated he was. He swallowed a large mouthful, concentrating on the sharpness, the depth of the peaty tang.
He turned back, muttering. “Sorry ‘bout that.”
The eyes of the kindly woman in front of him caught his and she smiled at him. It was a tight, compressed little smile, accompanied by a rallying nod.
He raised the glass to her with a courtly, graceful salute.
“Right. Aahh…
Sssstrange friend, past, present, and to be;
Loved deeplier, darklier understood;
Behold, I dream a dream of good,
And mingle all the world with thee.”1
The last syllables were uttered quietly, almost reverently. “Thee” was a mere whisper. Head bowed and curtained by coppery strands, he muttered into his chest,
“Thank you. You can all go now.”
An upward snap of fingers and, when he slowly lifted his head, the humans were all gone. The tables were empty, the chairs tight to their circumference as far as their rounded arms would allow. The one light behind the drinks cabinet behind the bar threw a sickly shallow taint that died almost as soon as it slicked over the brass fixings. The silence was profound. It pressed on him until the sound of his own breathing began to disturb him, and he felt what seemed to be the start of panic building in his chest, a coiled and whimpering thing.
Time to move.
He slid off the stool, his legs unwilling to work too hard to keep him upright, so he grabbed at the cool paw of ornamental brass lion, snaking his wrist around it until he had snarled some discipline into his knees.
“Come on! I’m not sobering up, so you’ll just have to bloody work.”
With a hip-led locomotion that was more fluid than solid, Crowley, while plucking the bottle of whisky from the bar, hoisted himself to vertical and then weaved over to the dark corner at the back of the room, near the door. Arms loose at this sides, head thrown back, baring his throat like a sacrificial kid, he stormed and smoked towards the ceiling, which was resolutely just a ceiling and nothing else.
“Aziraphale! All the world! D’you hear me? All the world! Every rotten, golden, glorious shining morsel of it.”
He clinked the bottle against his teeth and drank clumsily.
He waved the bottle mournfully, and his voice broke.
“You said ‘Trust me.’”
He looked up again.
“I’m still here. Still waiting.”
His shoulders sagged. His head bowed. The silence pinned itself around him, thick with nothing.
“Dear friend.” The utterance matched the double-thud of his heart.
Drawing in an immense sigh from the very tips of his snakeskin boots, he blew it out slowly, loudly and loosely through exaggeratedly pursed lips, and then exclaimed, with a wave of the bottle,
“Right. Bollocks to this!”
He whirled to his left, stiff-armed the pub door and barrelled out into the night, his shoulders managing to collide with both the opposite door and the jamb. The long low squeal of the door swinging back a bit, then back again, then properly back, seesawed in increasingly small slices into the silence, and then stilled.
Crowley’s shadow stalked past the windows with a loping slant and finally slid off the glass into nothing.
~*~*~*~*~*~
Letting the emptiness of the room reassure him for a moment or two, Aziraphale eventually allowed his shoulder blades to unstick themselves from the velour back of the bench where he had been pressing them furiously for the last ten minutes. He sagged forward, the hated grey silk of his suit jacket hissing with the friction. His palms lay flat on his thighs, rubbing slowly forwards and back as he fought to calm the jangling chords in his chest, to placate the squirreling scrabble in his brain.
Obviously, it was stupid to have come.
What, exactly, had he expected to achieve?
Well, a jangly chest and a squirrelly brain, certainly.
He got up and walked stiffly to the bar, his muscles stabbing at him. He caught sight of his reflection in the small strips of mirror behind the shelves of bottles at the back. He was pale and pinched-looking, he knew. It was true that the suit drained the very life from his complexion and gave his blond curls a chilly platinum sheen, but it was not just the heavenly attire that ailed him. He smiled at his serious visage, a grim, wan affair.
He reached out and carefully picked up the black sunglasses from their shallow lake, gently flicking them and scattering droplets ever farther afield. A spotless, ice-white handkerchief was pulled from his pocket, and the angel began to clean the sunglasses slowly and methodically. He breathed and polished, blew and burnished, his touch as delicate as if he was holding the drooping bell-head of the most tender white snowdrop. Eventually, when the task had lost all meaning, he wrapped the handkerchief closely around the sunglasses and slipped them into his pocket.
It was time to leave. He had been away too long already.
He picked up Crowley’s glass and surveyed the inch of topaz spirit.
“My dear boy. I, too, dream a dream of good, and mingle all the world with thee.”
His voice was thick in his tight, aching throat.
“It won’t be long now. Hold on, Crowley. I – “
He paused, swallowing the words, strangling them.
He twirled the glass in agitation, the weight of the fluid moving round faster and faster. The rhythm and motion calmed him somewhat, and his sombre eye found delight in the amber brown glow of the racing whisky.
A foolish, angel-soft notion struck him and the smile that now floated across his lips was cloud-light. Turning the glass around, he found on the crystal sill the whisper of a print from Crowley’s lips. To this he pressed his own, sweetly and devoutly. Then he threw the whisky back, and gasped a little at the blaze going down.
“Tennyson, eh? Well, then,” Aziraphale’s eyes glittered, ‘The old order changeth, yielding place to new,/ And God fulfils Himself in many ways,/ Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.’”2
Aziraphale looked around him for the last time and the granite edge of his angelic voice cut through the gloom.
“I will make them yield! By God, Crowley, I will make them yield.”
There was a deep, terrible whirl of wings. A rush of brilliant pearlescent illumination flashed, then faded. Dust particles swirled and tumbled for a time.
Finally free of the presence of angels and demons the deserted air of the pub settled once more into a stolid, inky reality. The brass lions sat open-mouthed and unseeing. The empty glass was just an empty glass.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~
