Angel 83 (lock up)

‘Well, let’s get him fed.’ Angel squeezed Adam so tight her son cried, but then he laughed as if it was a game. She shook her head, ‘Sorry Tony, you cannae feed him peggie-eggies, he’s too wee. You need to buy formula milk,  feed him a bottle and wean him onto solids, slowly, blended stuff.’

Bruno mocked him. ‘How could you think our son was old enough to be eating eggs.’ He said it again. ‘Our son—I quite like the sound of that. I’m going to buy a pipe and blazer and have his picture embroidered on the pocket and have photographs made up so I can hand them out to total strangers.’

‘Shut up!’ Angel laughed. ‘Here’s your son, you better get used to him then.’ She dumped Adam on him, leaving him with Bruno even when he started greeting.

She stood up and eyed Tony, ‘I’ll go and see if there’s anything in the kitchen he can eat. Have you got any milk and bread?’

‘Aye,’ I think so,’ said Tony. ‘I’ll check.’

‘Some of the girls in The Unit, when they were waiting on their money fed there wains bread wae some boiled milk and they added sugar.’ She shook her head, ‘But I’d never dae that –adding sugar, yuck’.

Tony went into the kitchen ahead of her, but she hung back at the table and picked up a bit of paper and sat down and wrote a note. She wasn’t sure of the legal terminology, but she worded it quite simply and said Bruno was the father of Adam and dated it with her tears  

Adam screamed and Bruno couldn’t pacify him. She couldn’t bear to be without him  a moment longer and got up from her chair and hurried across to take her son from him.

Tony appeared from the kitchen holding a bowl and a couple of Pan loaf slices of white bread. ‘I just cooked the milk in a pan,’ he said, apologetically.

Angel held Adam who stopped crying in stages. ‘Get me some wipes,’ she said to Bruno, ‘from the bag and I’ll clean his nose and mouth…You’ll get his nappies in there too, to change him, later’

She was still teary, realising for her there would be no later. ‘I’ve left the note on the table.’

She found it difficult to say any more, patted the seat beside her for Tony to sit down and took the wipe from Bruno and wiped away snot and spittle. He struggled to get away from her and his face was clean and pink. His smile broadened to a half moon. She kissed his nose, his forehead, his cheeks and chin and his mouth. ‘I’ll love you ‘til the day I die,’ she cried.

She took a bit of bread from Tony and dipped it in the milk and held it to his mouth. Adam guzzled it greedily. She fed him a little more and shifted his weight and lifted him over to Tony’s lap. ‘You feed him,’ she told him.

Adam’s head jerked forward, all eyes on Tony and the next bit of broken bread placed into his mouth. That was the way she wanted to remember him.

She hurried to get her coat and get away before she changed her mind. ‘I’ll hand myself into the nearest police station,’ she waved her hand to indicate she couldn’t speak, say any more.

‘Angel!’ Bruno called her name.

She was already in the hall, at the front door, pulling it shut, outside in the street, seeing nothing, blinded by her tears, broken. She walked up onto the main road and kept going, shuffling by shops with brightly lit windows and houses and pubs. People at bus stops looked through her as is she was a ghost and the wind and rain didn’t touch her, young boys hanging about didn’t see her, on and on she went. Thoughts of Lisa’s birth and then her death welled up in her and with every step she relived it. Then Adam was there, skin-to-skin and she wailed into the empty night clutching her arms around herself to hold him. She looked behind her and thought she’d go back the way she came and hold him one last time.

She sat down on a wall, a rhododendron bush to her side overgrown grass and a public path behind her. A Yorkshire terrier came sniffing at her back and a well-to-do voice rang out, ‘Snowy, come back here at once’.

The dog nudging into her side and arm to be petted, licking at her hands, she chose to ignore. The dog’s owner was more persistent.   

 ‘Oh, my goodness,’ the elderly mannish woman’s face floated up in front of Angel’s. ‘Are you alright?’ she asked.

Snowy circled and the elderly woman kept yakking and yakking and asking questions and tried to take Angel’s arm.

Angel stood up and pushed her away. She kept walking along more dimly lit paths, bigger houses and better tended gardens. The police car crept up behind her and parked in front of her. She kept walking, but the policeman was out of his car and stood on the kerb in front of her. The policeman in the passenger side circled around the back of the car and dragged his feet slowly cutting in behind her.

‘Are you from around here?’ the policeman that was driving the car asked, pleasantly, blocking her way.

Angel shook her head.

‘It’s just that we’ve had a report that there was a young girl in distress, fitting your description, would that be you?’

She tried to side step him, but he put an arm out. The other officer stood beside him, almost the same height, but broader, she recognised the type as gym bunny.

‘Can you tell us your name?’ the gym bunny was more business like. ‘And where you’re going to and where you’ve came from?’

Bone weary, Angel looked him in the eye, ‘I came from Corton Vale prison and I guess I’m goin’ back to Corton Vale prison.’

The policeman exchanged glances and smirked. The gym bunny stepped aside to call it on his walkie-talkie.  

‘And how exactly did you escape?’ the police driver asked. He held open the back door of the police car as if inviting her to a chauffeur-driven event. But held his hand flat on top of her wet hair as she ducked down so she wouldn’t bang it on the door.