Angels Don't Have Wings

In the bible, angels don’t have wings. In fact, the moral imperative is that we should never know they are amongst us. The presence of wings would change behaviour, much like a grovelling employee before a CEO, or a plain girl who seeks the protection and the validation of the beautiful. 

An angel is in all things anonymous, and you will be judged in accordance with their opinion of you, and never the other way round. 

Of course, I am being allegorical, but isn’t that just what life is?

*****

Let me tell you about my mother-in-law, my wife’s mother. Her name is Stella. She is seventy and still very beautiful, with thick, perfectly coiffed hair, ice-blue eyes and cheekbones that could cleanly cut damp paper. She is thin, elegant and entirely pampered and indulged. My wife’s father is called Johnny, but you won’t hear much about him in this account. He is one of those men who escapes an unhappy marriage by being successful in his work, so they are wealthy, and Stella has never had to break a fingernail on the daily grind. When he’s with his wife, he is completely pussy-whipped. When he is gone, I can never recall the sound of his voice, so rarely do we hear it. 

Careful of her figure, she just had the one child, my wife Emma. And Emma is also in thrall to her mother. Stella believes herself to be a superior being, vengeful and unassailable. She has never known dissent, never felt the flush of a quarrel, because what Stella says goes, and that’s just the way it’s always been. I dislike her intensely. 

They come to us several times a year, always at Christmas and Easter, and occasionally for weddings, or just for a change of scene. We live in a big house with three teenagers, so space isn’t the issue, but the money is. Stella requires constant entertainment, and this always involves having a drink in her hand. Although they give us some house-keeping money when they stay, it doesn’t cover the amount of alcohol we have to buy.

When they leave, I am obliged to drop bottles in various road and park-side bins so the neighbours won’t comment on the sheer volumes on recycling days. I feel grubby and ashamed by it all. 

My wife and I get along very well in all things except when it comes to her mother. Emma refuses to accept that Stella is an alcoholic and gives me the cold-shoulder for weeks after I mention it. In this regard, and only in this, I remind myself of the toothless Johnny, holding it all in for a quiet life. 

On Christmas Day, I noticed that she was on her third bottle of Prosecco, in addition to the gins and the whisky snifters and the port during dinner. She always begins well, with a tinkling laugh and a rakish grin, her cold nature thawing into something more affectionate the more she consumes. But inevitably there is a tipping point, when her eyes harden and her red-stained lips contort, and when this point is reached, no-one escapes her bile. My wife is fat, my children are too short, or too lazy, or too stupid, and Johnny is a dull fucker. Only I ever escape this, not being her blood. 

When everyone else was clearing the plates, she took herself to a chair and that was when I noticed the signs, so I quickly took her by the elbows and led her to the downstairs bathroom where she threw up copiously. After that, I guided her upstairs where she collapsed on the bed and began snoring before I’d even closed the door on her. 

My kids, who used to think Granny was just a bit naughty and quite a lot of fun, have for some time seen her for what she is, but they couldn’t get through to Emma either. ‘She’s just having a good time,’ was all she said. It’s all she ever says. 

*****

So now it’s Easter. We’re not a religious family but we like the traditions, so we cook the lamb and the new potatoes and open the chocolate eggs just like we’ve always done. Stella and Johnny are down for the week, and she shows no signs of quitting her habit. This is not a woman who would give up anything for Lent. So they turn up, Johnny looking older and Stella looking as glamorous as ever, and I briefly consider whether her internal organs resemble the portrait of Dorian Gray. 

This is a couple of days before Easter Sunday, and I have a new guest to announce, who will arrive on the feast day for dinner and then go on to a hotel by the sea. Stella is not amused. She has never met my guest, but she knows about her, because my children are very fond of her.

*****

Let me tell you about my Aunt Beryl. My parents are both dead, and Beryl is my father’s sister, a woman in her early-seventies from up north, with the flat northern vowels and the no-nonsense approach to life the stereotype demands of it. Like Stella, you don’t mess with Beryl. Unlike Stella, you don’t long to. Her common-sense is so thoroughly brutal it is enough to silence the lambs. She rarely drinks, not from any particular aspect of virtue but because more than one glass of wine makes her a little queasy. None of my father’s side are big drinkers. They just get on with things and let the world behave how it wants until the world behaves badly within their own orbit. Then you’d better watch out. 

On Easter Sunday, Beryl drove one hundred and fifty miles to our house for lunch, and would then leave to drive a further seventy five to her hotel on the coast. So she wasn’t intending to linger. I had told her about Stella, of course. Over the years, I’ve told Beryl about Stella countless times, but the two had never met. I was dreading the encounter, but that was the feeble part of my nature. The bolder side imagined the inevitable frisson clearly, and was drawn to it like a rubbernecker. Stella has never had competition in our house, and I felt quite keenly that if she could only see herself reflected in my aunt’s dead-eyed stare, it might clip her wings. There was no way in hell that Beryl would put up with a drop of her crap. 

So in she comes, a little plumper and stiffer around the hips, but still in remarkable shape. Her skin was flawless, her eyes bluer than Stella’s because they were not pinked by the booze, and her hair still more black than grey. I’ve seen family photos of Beryl when she was a young woman and she was gorgeous. My kids love her. To them she is a paragon of calm and measured bloody-mindedness, a person who cuts through all the teenage angst and just tells them to stop being so daft. She is not overtly affectionate with them, but she listens to them and tells them they’re morons, and they respect that. She doesn’t know my wife very well, but she’s cordial with her greeting, and appreciative of the hospitality. 

One thing Beryl’s always worn ever since I’ve know her are those batwing glasses that were popular in the sixties. She varies the style all the time, she must have hundreds of pairs, and they all seem to suit her. When we sat down, she put the glasses on the table facing towards Stella. I should have know then, really. One of my cousins is a real whizz in IT and gadgets, and in our last conversation the night before last, when I was complaining about Stella and her habits, Beryl just said calmly, ‘Oh, we’ll stop that nonsense.’ And I noticed that before we sat down to lunch, Beryl was in the garden head to head with the kids, like a pow-wow. Something was brewing. 

I think it’s fair to say that Stella took an immediate dislike to my aunt. Stella, who’d never learned to drive and never went anywhere without Johnny in tow to carry the bags, must have felt immediately threatened by this more competent female. And as the drinks kept slipping down, she began to mock Beryl’s accent and talked crassly of flat caps and whippets. She ate none of the food my wife had prepared, and didn’t thank her between courses. She just prattled on in her slurred affected middle-class accent, telling Beryl how she longed to be a widow, like her, and how free she would be, and all of this with her husband sitting to her left and staring fixedly at a point about the cheese plant. 

It was all horrible, but Beryl was inscrutable. ‘My, my,’ and ‘Is that so?’ was all she really said. And the less Beryl said, the more Stella filled the void with her waspish, inane commentary. At one point, Beryl looked straight at me and said, ‘Well, you weren’t exaggerating, were you!’ 

‘What does that mean?’ said Stella, and I’m starting to see the usual signs, the pallor that precedes the flow of saliva and the inevitable sickness that would follow. But Stella wasn’t quite ready for the toilet pan yet, and staggered from the table in order to put on a playlist of seventies soundtracks on Alexa, which she demanded to be played at full volume. She’s whirling around to Donna Summer whilst my aunt just watched, fiddling occasionally with her glasses on the table until Emma stood up abruptly and turned the music off. For the first time ever, she took her own mother to the bathroom and then up to bed. 

When she came back down, she was visibly shaken. It was one thing to keep it within the family, but now a member of my family had seen it too, and that brought her up sharp. 

‘I’m so sorry,’ she said.

‘You should all be sorry,’ said Beryl. ‘Every one of you has played a part in all of this, letting her get away with it, letting her behave how she likes. She believes she’s something she’s not ….’

‘She used to tell me she was an angel, when I was little,’ said Emma. ‘She said I was lucky to have her for a mother.’ 

‘Well I told my kids I was the devil himself and they’d soon found out if they crossed me,’ said Beryl. And then she looked at Johnny. ‘You,’ she said, ‘ought to be very ashamed of yourself. Perhaps when the kids next come to visit me, in the grim-up-north, you can come too, and help me walk the whippets. The archangel Stella can stay at home and fend for herself.’ 

He said nothing, but then, Johnny never did. Big as my rambling old house was, we could all hear Stella snoring from upstairs. 

‘My, my,’ she said again, as she got in her car to leave. As she was just about to pull out of the drive, my youngest knocked on the driver’s window. ‘Your glasses,’ he said, smiling. ‘Can’t believe I forgot those,’ said Beryl, winking, before slinging them in the glove compartment. She’s never really needed them. Just a fashion statement. 

*****

Our houseguests stayed a couple more days after that. Stella was pretty quiet for the rest of that day, but the following morning she came down like nothing at all had happened and poured whisky in her coffee. ‘You have to stop this,’ said Emma. ‘You made a fool of yourself.’

‘Nonsense!’ said Stella. ‘Beryl’s just a boring old frump. I can’t help my spirit. It can’t be confined in the normal way.’

‘Yes, it must be hard to be earthbound,’ I said, watching her hands tremble as they held the mug. 

‘You’ve no idea,’ she said, without a care in the world. 

‘You’re never going to stop,’ said Emma, as though it had never occurred to her before.

‘Stop what, dear?’ her mother asked. 

*****

The day before they were due to leave, my middle son pulled me into the garden. ‘Seen this?’ he asked, and he showed me a video that had been put on TikTok and was currently going viral. ‘Drunk Granny,’ was the caption. I’ve got to say, my initial reaction was to laugh. In fact, all my further reactions were the same. 

‘Inspired,’ I said. ‘Let me guess. I speak to Beryl, Beryl spoke to my cousin Peter, he procures a pair of spy glasses - or maybe already had them - and Beryl comes down and films it all when they were plonked on the table. She told you in the garden, didn’t she!’

‘Yep.’ 

Stella leaned out of the patio doors, mug in hand. You could smell the spirits from where we sat. ‘What are you boys laughing at?’ she said, all arch and coy, innocence itself.

‘Nothing,’ we said in unison. 

‘But who’s going to see it?’ I asked. ‘I mean, really see it beyond teenagers and twenty-somethings …’ 

‘I’m showing you, aren’t I?’ he said. ‘And all those so-called ‘friends’ of hers, down the club, down the gym, the spa, the local restaurants, well they’ve all got teenagers and twenty-somethings in their family too. Trust me Dad, this might not be your scrolling choice, but I’ll give it until the minute they get home before her phone starts ringing, if not before.’

‘But we could take it down,’ I said.

‘Dad, any one of us could have done this over the years. It’s not hard, but we need to have plausible deniability. It’s not been posted from any of our devices.’

‘But it’s posted in our house!’ I argued. 

‘Yes, but we can’t take it down. Only Beryl can do that. And Beryl doesn’t give a shit!’ he said, proudly. ‘Why would she care if she gets the blame?’

‘Inspired,’ I said again. 

‘Well, she’s ruined every Christmas and every Easter I can remember,’ said my kid, and I guess it was true of my other ones too. ‘She thinks she’s something really special, but she’s just an old drunk who blocks up the toilet and keeps us awake all night with her snoring. She treats everyone like shit. Every time they’re here we’re all tense, and when they go, you and mum fight for a week afterwards. The only person who’s going to cure that woman is her own bad-arse self.’

‘Beryl’s an angel,’ I conceded.

‘Yes,’ said my boy. ‘An angel with wings on her glasses.’ 

*****

Stella denies to her friends that she’s the woman on the video, but of course she would. Her face, her voice, her behaviour are all as unique as her DNA. She no longer speaks to us. The calls started coming in on her phone an hour after the conversation with my son, but she wouldn’t look at the evidence. She’s changed her number now. It’s just Emma who’s got the new one, and Emma tells me she hasn’t changed. She won’t ever change, but that doesn’t mean we can’t. We don’t invite them anymore, not that she’d come any way, and I’ve got to say that Christmas this year will be a joyous occasion without her. Joyous and cheaper. 

When I gave Beryl the update, and the number of likes on the video she refuses to take down, she stayed pretty quiet about it. She was never one for interrupting, but at the natural conclusion of my spiel she simply said, ‘My, my.’