Attack of the Cupids Read online

  Holly was still crouching in the centre, clutching her shin. The play swept past her.

  Whack! And here it came again, cruel, lethal, the little white ball spinning across the grass towards Sally with all the inevitability of death. Tara was chasing it like a hound. Desperately Sally tried to control it, scrabbling after it as it bounced away from her stick. Tara was beside her, poking for it. And up the field there was Ameena, exactly as before, running, pointing exactly as before . . .

  Whack! went Sally’s stick, and as it did so she tensed for the impact that would send her spinning into redness.

  It didn’t come. Tara sped away from her shouting, ‘Mark Ameena! Stop her!’ Up the field Ameena gathered the ball. She had no support. Four green bibs were bearing down on her. On the far touchline Billie was shouting, ‘Over here, Ameena! Over here!’ She was in completely the wrong place.

  Ameena wove. Click-clack went her stick and she was through them! The goal was ahead of her. So was Imogen.

  ‘Go, Ameena, go!’ yelled the reds.

  ‘Stop her!’ cried the greens.

  ‘GET UP THERE, REDS! GIVE HER SOME SUPPORT! WHERE ARE YOU?!?’

  Ameena seemed to hang in her stride. The defenders she had beaten were on her shoulder. Imogen was backing before her. She leaned one way, she went the other. She was away from them! She was through on goal!

  ‘Stop her!’ screamed Cassie.

  ‘Stop her!’ yelled Tara.

  And Imogen, who was the only one who could do anything, did the only thing she could. Her stick sliced low through the air.

  ‘Aarghh!’ Ameena barked in pain and fell.

  ‘Foul!’ groaned the reds.

  Pheeeeeeep-pheeep! ‘PENALTY HIT!’ roared Miss Tackle. She dashed to the scene of the crime. Billie was ahead of her. Screaming ‘Yaaaarrh!’ (or something like it) she pushed Imogen full in the chest and knocked her over. Angry cries broke from the greens. Tara caught Billie by the hair and yanked her head back.

  ‘STOP!’ bellowed Miss Tackle.

  They stopped. There was an awful silence.

  ‘Get off,’ Miss Tackle said softly. ‘The three of you. Wait for me on the touchline.’

  Another time maybe they would have protested. (‘But Miss Tackle! It wasn’t my fault! She started it.’ etc.) This time, no one did. They all knew it had gone too far. And when Miss Tackle spoke like that you did not argue. Billie strode to the touchline like a small ball of sparks. Tara and Imogen followed, coldly keeping their distance from her. No one said anything.

  ‘Ameena?’ said Miss Tackle.

  Ameena did not get up. Her eyes were shut, her lips were drawn so the teeth showed. Shocked, the other girls gathered around her.

  She’s really hurt, thought Sally. Badly. And this wasn’t anything to do with her. She wasn’t taking sides. She was just playing for us because we asked her to.

  Carefully, Miss Tackle began to unlace Ameena’s boot.

  ‘Holly’s hurt too, Miss Tackle,’ said someone.

  Miss Tackle frowned at Holly, who had limped over to join them. ‘Why aren’t you wearing shin pads?’ she said crossly.

  ‘Someone took them, Miss Tackle,’ said Holly.

  Miss Tackle was still frowning. At a time like this, losing your kit was definitely your own fault.

  ‘Can you walk?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Go to the office and get it looked at.’ She went back to unrolling Ameena’s sock.

  Ameena had been wearing shin pads, but it hadn’t helped her. The edge of Imogen’s stick had come slicing in just over the top of her boot and caught her full on the ankle. There was a vicious red mark there. It was already swelling. Miss Tackle tested it gently with her finger. Ameena sobbed.

  ‘We need the stretcher,’ said Miss Tackle.

  The bell had gone for last period but Charlie B was still standing by the lockers illegally loading himself up from a packet of crisps.

  Charlie was one of those boys who would one day discover weight training and turn himself into something surprisingly solid. But for the time being the gym was a bit distant, rather too much effort and a lot too expensive, and he got his exercise mostly by eating things he shouldn’t. His big brother worked in a local takeaway, so some truly unbelievable stuff showed up in Charlie’s packed lunches and none of it was ever less than a day old. Like most other Year Seven-to-Nine boys he lived in an entirely separate world, one ruled by anarchy and fantasy violence; but Sally had shown him how to multiply fractions last term and there remained between them some tenuous interplanetary contact.

  ‘Here’re your shin pads,’ said Sally, handing them to him. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Oh, right,’ he said. ‘Hope they helped.’

  ‘I’m OK,’ said Sally. ‘But Ameena and Holly are both in the Accident Book, and Ameena’s going to the hospital. Imogen and Tara and Billie are in front of the Deputy Head now.’

  ‘That’s tough. Did you know they’ve discovered an asteroid that might collide with the Earth in a few months? They’ve called it Zebukun.’

  This was the sort of news that Charlie genuinely thought could cheer people up.

  ‘. . . I reckon if it hits in our hemisphere we’re bound to see something. That’d be so cool!’

  ‘If you say so. By the way . . .’

  ‘Umm?’

  ‘Where did Billie get that mouse?’

  ‘Why ask me?’ said Charlie, showing no surprise.

  ‘I just thought – if I had to find a dead mouse in school, whose pockets would I search first?’

  ‘You can search ‘em now,’ said Charlie innocently.

  ‘What would I find if I did?’

  Charlie smiled a tight little smile.

  ‘Stay out of it, Charlie. It only makes things worse.’

  ‘You know what I’m going to be when I grow up? I’m going to be a gun-runner. Rich’ll be pushing smack but I’ll be running guns, dodging patrols, breaking blockades, all that. Guns are cool.’

  ‘You,’ said Sally, ‘are going to be a chemist. Rich will be an engineer. And you’ll each have a wife and two kids and you’ll be very proud . . .’

  ‘Don’t say that!’

  ‘But if you see Tony Hicks?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘You could drop a toad down his trousers for me . . .’

  WINDLEBERRY: Sally!

  ‘. . . Preferably one of the poisonous type.’

  It took a moment for her words to filter across whatever light-years divided Charlie’s personal universe from reality. Then, slowly, a kind of light began to grow in his eyes. Deep within his brain thoughts fired and ideas came wheeling into focus. Mental capacities that were kept firmly shut down for 90% of the school day soared to full power. A smile spread over his lips, as if he were an artist who had glimpsed in some clouded sunset a gleam of the walls of Heaven.

  ‘Could get him to swallow a frog. How about it?’

  WINDLEBERRY: Sally!

  ‘Forget it,’ sighed Sally. ‘I was only joking. Thanks for the shin pads, anyway. You really saved my life.’

  ‘Y’r welcome.’

  It is time to consider the sex of an angel.

  Angels have no sex. They don’t need one. An angel is an ‘it’ rather than a ‘he’ or a ‘she’. This is true even if – like the cupids – their physical appearance very strongly suggests something else.

  Angels can appear as anything. It could be a shaft of light or a wonderful smell, or a voice speaking from the air. Traditionally, however, they appear as a person. And again traditionally, that person is almost always male.

  Why?

  Probably it’s because when angels appear it’s to hand out orders, and Tradition has always found it easier to take orders from men. It’s something to do with the deeper voice, the bushier eyebrows and the hint that you’ll get beaten up if you don’t do as you’re told. There’s no point getting upset about this. That’s the way Tradition is. Or was.

  So angels mostly appear as ‘
he’ and are mostly referred to as ‘he’.

  There is one angel, however, who has very good reasons for appearing as ‘she’ at least half the time, and has spent her career operating almost exclusively as ‘she’ under names such as Venus, Aphrodite, Aidin, Branwen, Chalchiuhtlicue, Erzulie, Hathor and so on. It is she who lights the divine passion in the heart of human souls. It is she who commands the cupids. She is the Angel of Love and her seat is in a chamber in one of the highest towers of Heaven.

  Now, suppose that it were possible to enter that chamber (without melting). Suppose that your eyes were to adjust to the glare and the glory, that you looked around. What would you see?

  All right, the Mirrors of Burning Glances, the Arch of Pure Joy, yes, yes. But what else? You know you can get clues about a person if you’re in a room they use a lot. What else would you see?

  Would you, possibly, see that the Chamber of Glory was . . .

  . . . maybe . . .

  . . . just a little untidy?

  Like, these piles of letters and reports and things everywhere?

  Love is patient. Love is kind. She does not envy, she does not boast, she is not proud. She is not rude, she is not self-seeking, she is not easily angered, she keeps no record of wrongs. In fact, she prefers to keep no records of any kind at all. Love is just ♥♥♥♥ when it comes to paperwork.

  The paper streams in through the door, with lots of things written on it that people think Love ought to see or know or do something about. And then it gets added to the piles. Which pile? Take your pick – it doesn’t matter. Usually her secretary adds it to whichever one is lowest and least likely to collapse under its own weight. So they rise and rise – amazing, teetering constructions, until they appear more like a model of some great city on a hill than the workload of an important angel assembled on an important angel’s desk.

  Oh, yes. About that desk . . .

  There had been a woman who had begged that her heart should live on after her death, so that she might love her lover from beyond the grave.

  ‘Sure,’ the angel had said. She liked this sort of thing.

  ‘There you go,’ she had said, a moment later. ‘Now, er, what shall I do with it?’

  So she was using it as her desk.

  This wasn’t as good an idea as it seemed at the time. A living heart has no flat surfaces, is a bit sticky and tends to move up and down rather a lot. The moving up and down isn’t immediately obvious when it’s hidden under the forest of marking, reports, files, letters, memos, test papers and coursework, the indefinite storage of which is what this angel thinks a desk is for. But it’s there beneath it all, valiantly labouring on, loving its lost lover. Occasionally the weight of bureaucracy is just too much and it has a seizure, whereupon the angel has to resuscitate it by thumping it as hard as she can with her fist. But she’s the sort of angel who thumps her desk from time to time anyway so there’s usually no problem about this.

  On it beats, on and on, although the woman and her lover both passed the gates of Death long ago. And the towers of paper shake and shift gently with each pulse, and every now and then another pile of marking sidles to the point where the not-very-flat surface becomes a not-very-straight side, and there it gives one last teeter, a slight wail, and tumbles and spills all across the Tiles of Willing Sacrifice until it comes to rest at last against the Wall of Desire, or against the foot of a full-length Mirror of Burning Glances (whereupon it starts to smoulder). That might have bothered another angel, but not this one.

  It’s not that she doesn’t focus on things. She just focuses differently. She has an instant, total kind of focus where suddenly the only thing in the world or the universe that matters at all is whether someone called Jules will look round and see someone called Sarah watching from the crowd. Zoom, and she’s there! The eyes lock, the pulses bounce, the rest of the room goes blurry and it’s job done. Love can do this a million times in an hour, although generally she doesn’t work at that rate because it takes a few seconds for the heart to cook properly and she thinks it’s better not to rush it.

  She once shocked the entire Celestial Staff Room by suggesting that every angel in Heaven should have their own computer. This was not because she wanted to catch up on her paperwork. It was because she had heard about online dating and reckoned that if the rest of her market was going digital then so should she. Heaven, she told her colleagues, should move with the times.

  (The Staff rather struggled with the concept of ‘times’. The Choirmasters asked if she meant 3/4 time, 4/4 time, 5/8 time or something sort of jazzy. The Appeals Board never even got as far as ‘times’ because they were still struggling with the word ‘move’. This is pretty much what happens every time she comes up with an idea. Deep down, Love is one really frustrated little archangel.)

  More facts about Love:

  1) She likes being a woman;

  2) She likes giving orders;

  3) She doesn’t like Tradition. Tradition goes around in whalebone corsets and an ankle-length dress, insisting that everything be arranged through the parents, preferably with a bride-price and while the couple are still too young to think of thinking for themselves.

  In a place like Heaven, it’s always going to be an uphill battle for her. Even her own cupids prefer to think of ‘her’ as a ‘he’. Somehow they just felt that life as a cupid is tough enough what with being short, fat, naked et cetera, without having to take orders from a girl as well. They like to see her in one of her male forms, such as Eros, the winged archer, the God of Passion. As Eros, she is as close as she ever comes to being a cupid herself. That is, she is about the same weight and only several times the height.

  Not that they call her ‘Eros’. No way. They are cupids. They call her ‘boss’. Or sometimes ‘Dirty Erry’.

  As in . . .

  ‘Yer’ve visitors, Erry,’ said her secretary.

  ‘Visitors?’ says the angel, in tones of honeyed surprise. ‘Am I expecting anyone?’

  She is not expecting anyone. And since it is her secretary’s job to be expecting anyone or anything that she isn’t expecting so that he can tell her in time for her to expect it, and he hadn’t, everything is his fault. This comes as no surprise to the cupid, who learned on his first day that ‘Everything is your fault’ is his job description in four words.

  ‘They’re ‘ere anyways, Erry.’

  ‘Then you must show them in, my darling, mustn’t you?’

  She knew who it was. She felt his approach before he entered, like the pull of gravity from a huge dark star. She felt the billions of years, the slowness, the patience, the coldness of death, the inevitability of ending. She felt him coming closer. She rose to her feet.

  Love met Doom in the chambers of Heaven.

  They were two ancient creatures. She was warmth and a great light, he emptiness and everlasting cold. Both were massive in their knowledge and power and understanding. There were few secrets of Creation that one or other of them did not know. In a moment of depth and silence, they bowed.

  The moment was interrupted by Mishamh, who stepped between them with his feathers all fluffed like a robin about to fight. ‘We have come,’ he announced, ‘to warn you that we are raising a complaint with the Governors about the Department of Love.’

  Love blinked at him. ‘You’re so sweet,’ she said.

  Complaining to the Governors was the Heavenly equivalent of sending in the tanks. ‘You’re so sweet,’ was not the answer Mishamh had expected.

  ‘The Department of Love is obstructing the work of the Appeals Board!’ he said sternly.

  ‘Aw, shucks!’ said Love.

  ‘The Department of Love,’ declared Mishamh, ‘has for thirty centuries frustrated every date and deadline for the End of the World that has ever been decreed!’

  said Love.

  ‘As detailed in our list of charges.’ The young angel held out a scroll written in letters of meteorite trail upon the stuff of adamant, which is what the Physics staff ten
d to use when they are upset.

  ‘We assume you will provide us with a copy of your response,’ said Mishamh haughtily.

  Love smiled. A scroll of moonlight appeared in her long fingers, inscribed with the notes of a nightingale’s song. She blew it as if it were a kiss towards the dark figure of Doomsday. He read it. His mouth twitched, a little.

  Mishamh looked to his master.

  ‘She requests that you be transferred to her department,’ he said. ‘As soon as your duties allow.’

  ‘What?!?’

  ‘He’s just so handsome when he’s angry,’ said the Angel of Love.

  ‘But . . . our Complaint . . .’ stammered Mishamh.

  Before his eyes the Angel of Love tossed the charge sheet of adamant carelessly into the air. At once it became a cloud of sparkling dust, from which troops of little cupids seemed to fly with mocking, silvery laughter to circle around his head. Every one of those little naked creatures was himself.

  The room seemed to be spinning. The desk at which the angel stood was definitely going up and down, which didn’t help matters at all.

  He heard Doomsday say, ‘I fear my subordinate is engaged on a project of considerable importance.’

  ‘Which will soon be considerably unimportant, I believe,’ said Love. ‘At least for the next two thousand six hundred years. You could apply for him to be transferred back once your asteroid was on its way in again, couldn’t you?’

  ‘I could . . .’

  ‘But . . . the Great Curriculum!’ cried Mishamh. ‘We’re making a mockery of everything it says! We have to destroy the world!’

  ‘What, all of it?’ said the Angel of Love.

  ‘All of it,’ said Mishamh, rallying as best he could. ‘Every last living thing. The earth they stand on. The air they breathe . . .’

  ‘The children? The little furry animals?’

  ‘Yes, all.’

  ‘Isn’t that rather – sad?’

  ‘Sad?’

  ‘I think it’s sad.’

  ‘It is indeed sad,’ said Doomsday. ‘And it is Right. Sorrow is a part of the Curriculum. For a time.’

  ‘The Governors want it to happen!’ said Mishamh.