X1.
Steps red-velvet off an X5: the moon in her bag, Gaiman and Moore in her bag, Ophelia drowning in her bag, steps into a crowd heaving through Christ's Pieces, first day in the city, follows the sink-hole through the crap grey arcade, curious amongst the crowd.
They caught an angel on Union Lane. Injured, he was, dazed and confused. Crying, he was, funny in the head. Screaming at blackbirds, he was, a danger to traffic. A cage was built with scraps from Mackays. A cage they put him in, wheeled over the common. His wings, they beat the cage-bars which rang out like a choir: sheet aluminium from the cutting room floor, singing like the choirs of heaven, hollering, it was, all over the common. Took him to Petty Cury, they did, where Snowy Farr once pitched.
She followed the crowd to where his cage stood, where they prodded him and probed him. He had a limp blue bag held to his chest, and was screaming loud: an angel funny in the head. The bag was the prize of their hunt. They opened the cage door, and the angel tried to escape, but they kicked him in the chest, kicked him in the bollocks, kicked him in the eye, grabbed his bag and slammed the door.
Out the bag: equipment. Wires, notebooks, Enochian microfilm one-time-pads, alien holy indistinct machinery, short wave radio tuned to number station, bits of stuff which made no sense, real stuff with no name nor description.
Velvet girl looks at the angel, apart, stage left. The others fight over bag spill, dead centre. Her alone, thinking: what washes flows powers this city?
X2.
"I raise my glass to punting" the angel says, "my champagne dangles on a string, tealights in moonlight: a moon most expertly packed in your bag, by the way, folded into quarters and wrapped round with string. I raise my glass in vague remembrance of Brideshead", he says, "and to the glorious Jeremy Irons. I raise my glass to the honour and glory of your chosen profession, to balls, and porters and to stream regurgitating incontinent consciousness forty-year-hence Desert Island Discs."
His wing cage rang like a choir colliding with a sanding machine. "This is swarf to you, now, white-noise fetish kitsch, to you, now. I deal in hope: yours amongst others, by the fraction of an ounce. And I have none left, I am cleaned-out, dry. Raided by Scotland Yard, precursors impounded flagged deprecated eliminated from products by 2009 by act of Parliament queen and state. A drugless dealer; a street corner bum. Allegory and metaphor, excrement of study-note despair. I low like the cattle standing heavy on a common".
The mob turn towards the angel, now: shout "spy". Bare his nameless things before his eyes and demand their names. She steps back, now, as the crowd inch forward, glances aside now as their faces meet.
"You want to meet a boy? A girl perhaps? A boy.", Angel off to the side, to new-to-the-city girl.
"YOU ARE HERE, in a room in a college", he says. There is a boy here, and it is his room. You are there now: she is there now. High-ceiling candle-in-bottle red-velvet dress gas-fireplace picture-rail gloss edge of bed, sitting, hands in lap, listening. The angel, and the mob, distant transparent dessicated like flowers, the two of them sitting in awe. He is talking, the boy, and she listens, now, knows his name now, what they did last week, now, where they went and who they met last term, now, the moon unpacked and long discarded on the floor, though a moment before they had never met, and the moon was secured with string.
X3.
He killed a dragon today, though three more were added to his list. Glass cabinet green baize quaint-locked serif-type timetables nailed onto classical columns. There is so much to be killed.
The dragon, he hanged from a lamppost, as a warning to others. Dictator-wide streets and Soviet blocks, a dragon hanging from a lamp standard in the central reservation, neck distending by the weight of its own guts, and the elasticity of their putrefaction.
The barricades moved 300 yards forward, today, sheet-metal scrap barbed-wire concrete martyr-shield lock-in tunnelled complexes of mechanico-ethical machinery; and the river is ours to Jesus lock.
Grantchester Meadows was defoliated today, brown and sour. Their crime, not ours. A headphoned and sunglassed soldier leans from a helicopter and drops confetti shreds over the common, watches it drift in the breeze; radios angles of attack. Still, before dawn. Three sweeps of polychlorinated broom and it is gone. The meadows were ours, but strategically nothing: he shouts, cries, hollow-laughs gives life to the space of his tall, visited room.
One of the oxen was weak today. "A friend of mine from college", he says. He will writhe in anxiety into small hours, for the sake of his ox. "Do not think you are worth anything, without an ox". (She prays that hers is well).
The newspaper said that they are closing in on traitors who are laming our campaign. They have files, a whole library of files, to be sorted translated and analysed. No room for the books, so they sit in the rain. We dare not burn them, so they pulp in the rain, riches of cities now a cheap sentimental pile.
He has some music to play her: a yawing cassette of seventies folk-rock: a band she does not know. The girl and the boy they crouch and listen, in wonder of each others listening. I saw an angel today, she said, in a cage by Lion Yard.
Today we played football, he said, with boys from the college, against a unit from Waterbeach, of irregular fusiliers. A fusilier, they say, can kill five a day: muted, grey, brown, and black ones, but five dragons all the same. And anyway, the iridescence fades as the porphyrins crack, so, after an hour, they all look the same.
Unsteady folk wanders. Time for sleep, Abilene!
One to bed, the other the floor.
"I'd fuck her if she wasn't a boy."
X4.
Within an inch of an aborting storm, the president lands in Sverdlovsk. A motorcade takes him expressly to the lab, where in an hour he will turn on the machine.
Even in Cambridge, you still can see, from place to place, small and bounded fires, surrounded by yellow-jacketed attendants, their idle tenders flashing primary colours into the evaporating mist.
Both he and she decontaminate land. He, and a gang, shift barrels onto a low-loading truck; she picks particles from a field, into containers.
Evening, and the others sit in the front room, watching the president's progress on TV, while the two of them, exhausted from work, perch awkwardly on the patio threshold; pass a joint to-and-fro; and watch the sun set uncertainly.
She tells him that she hopes that the machine will fail; that they go on living this life, this life which destroys them both; hopes that they become contaminated with the decades of dirty work; and that they both slowly, anonymously die.
He tells her that she is a fool, that life must go on, that Rose has had kids, and the work is for the children, and their children, too. She says, with a sigh, that for her abdication does not substitute for success, that induction fails without a base case, and that after a work day, when she stands and looks behind her, at twenty or thirty square metres of land ready for the plough, she is content if not happy.
He asks her if she really did see an angel on Petty Cury: a pause, an absent nod. She says that she didn't think he had heard her, when she told him amidst his stories of war.
The two of them watch hollyhocks rock in the wind amongst long grass, and hear occasional peaks and cries of debate emerge from the crowd deep within. They sit silently, think over the decade which they have past in the company of each other, and stare into the last light of the day.
Newsweek, once, had him on the cover: at work, shirtless with labour, muscles taut, pulsing, a picture of a war-crime in beautiful progress, cover of a special edition; his image flashed around the world.
Hero and villain have been determined by document, by data, by flags on file, by divisions inevident to the eye. Divisions conceived after the fighting has ended. Like tornadoes, they would attack, unaware of designations; as amoral as a storm.
From time-to-time, people who pass him, as he works in the street, will recognise his face from the photograph. They catch sight of him as he pushes barrels up a plank, onto the back of the truck. They will stand stare with equally warrantless admiration or hatred.
In those early days, he asks, if you had cracked us open like eggs, would you have found inside us that seed, dust, germ, of blossom and of decay? We are not cracked like eggs, she says, but stained glass: permuted red here, blue there, assembled into form, each from each other with the passage of time.
If you had the choice, he declares, between living like this, and living as once you were, where you saw an angel in a cage on the corner of the street, you would jump at the chance to return.
With a choice, she said, it would be neither that world nor this, a paradoxical place where angels rather danced on the heads of pins.
You're avoiding the question he says.
She smiles.
X5.
At 08:37:30, in Courier font, the voltage dropped on bus-bar 5. In the electrical switchroom, breakers tripped in unprecedented unison. Those which remained closed were then manually thrown and locked out, pending incident reports. By now it was now 08:38.
How rare it is, to see, recorded, the slow-motion dignity of working life, except as a prelude to some terrible mistake. How beautiful it would be to see a single moment recorded, in the life of a railway, or in the operation of the Sverdlovsk machine, completely without incident, in the detail only afforded to inquests and commissions.
She found her once-favourite dress, the other day, beneath a pile of parcel-twine: the dress which she had once arrived in town in, and the twine she had once wrapped the moon in.
She wonders where he is, now, what he is doing at this moment: what all of them are doing at this undistinguished moment, early on a Wednesday evening in spring. If there were an accident, an explosion, a calamity, she would know: it would be recorded by a Lord sitting in committee in parliament, then pieced together, and published in a report.
But without the benefits of such expert narration, what can her memories mean to her?
Days go by, deeper into the century.