The sandwich would hardly have been hallucinogenic. Made by Jimmy's fair hands the night before and before we'd started to argue, it was tuna and tomato, on granary, no mayonnaise, no butter. Jimmy always said that vine tomatoes set off the flavour of the fish, which he grilled with a little fresh ginger, allowed to cool and then sliced.
It was more than a good sandwich, it was an exercise in the art of food. But, as I told Jimmy, he had his work/life balance all wrong if all he could think about was making lunch for the next day, and investing so much time and energy into it. "Dave," he said to me, "It's all about caring, and maybe that's something you wouldn't understand."
Well, that was the start of some pretty hot words and by the time we'd finished, you'd have thought the universe was falling in. All from that one remark. We slept in separate rooms that night.
It was pleasant there under the trees. The clouds were high and white and the sky was a deep, deep blue. Fathomless.
So, I wasn't paying much attention when someone sat down at the other end of the bench. He wasn't intruding and I wasn't twitchy about it.
You had to be just a bit aware of what was going on around there sometimes. I'd had a little trouble with the odd predatory male there in the past. I must have been thinking something like that at the time because my mind just spun away, thinking over all that time (I mean, the four years that Jimmy and I had lived together) and whether he had been unfaithful at all. And then thinking whether that was important and why, and what if he did fancy Max, who was a lot younger than me and successful in his government job and who liked to remind me that he would take Jimmy on, anytime.
I was thinking all that and going back over it, so I didn't at first realise that the man at the other end of the bench was speaking, and well, what he said didn't make it sound like he was actually speaking to me, more like addressing the whole world.
What he said was, "They live in the clouds."
As I say, I thought he was talking to someone else, or maybe just thinking aloud. Sometimes, I couldn't be sure whether what I was thinking was just in my head, or whether I was saying it out loud as well. But then I looked round to see if he was actually talking to me, and whether I should be worried or not.
He was just sitting there, smiling gently, a grey-haired man in his shirtsleeves, a bit shabby but not a tramp or anything, his arms folded over his chest, his legs straight out and crossed at the ankles. He looked as though he'd seen the world. He looked - how can I put it? - as though he understood a few things. He didn't look like a threat anyway.
"They live," he said again, "in the clouds".
I said, "Were you speaking to me?" but there was no one else for fifty yards.
He did have the most sparkly blue eyes. I wondered if he wore lenses.
"Yes," he said. "I was. I thought you might be interested. You were looking up there so intently. I thought you were wondering where they came from. I've been studying them too, for a long time now, and it's my view that they live in the clouds. I've seen them sometimes, scooting back there like thrushes to the nest. More furtive though."
I didn't know what he was going on about.
"Of course, I suppose you could say, as my daughter does, that I am simply an old man with more time on my hands than is good for me. You could also say, as my neighbour Manny says, whenever I tell him that I have seen them again, that I should just get on and acknowledge my spirituality. Give it an outlet. Don't bottle it up. Accept that there is something out there."
He paused.
"Go to church is what he says, or if I don't like to, to go to the synagogue with him. Though I'm not Jewish, he says he can show me around, explain what's going on. Maybe I will one day. I'm still of the view they're real."
He turned and looked at me as I took a small bite of the sandwich. "Manny says that his God can't be far from mine, and anyway, what does it matter which one you're praying to? I wonder if it does. I wonder if praying to one damages another. Do you think it might?"
At the first mention of God, I thought that maybe Care in the Community was at the back of it all. He hasn't spoken to anyone for days, I thought, and now he's going to latch onto me. I looked at my watch. In fifteen minutes, I'd have to be back to the travel agents where I worked. Selling another exotic destination, the time of their lives, to some couple who wanted two weeks in heaven. I could go back now, pop in at the bookshop on the way, see if the Kafka had come in.
"Of course," the man continued, "I sometimes think that they could be things I've created in my mind. I could just be losing my marbles."
I couldn't leave it there somehow.
"Do you see them?" the old man said, "Or do you just sense their presence?"
"What are we talking about here, exactly?" I asked him, adjusting my tie. It's a nervous thing.
"The spirits, the seraphim, whatever you call them. They sing to me sometimes, you know. They sing about the love of heaven which is dying. It's us making it die. They sing about that. It's the damnedest thing. I can't sleep for it buzzing in my head."
Now, I've never had any use for religion at all. An appeal to vanity, to everything that is basest within us, that's what I told Jimmy when he was saying we should get in touch with our spiritual dimension. He said he thought, in the midst of our row, that what we needed was some kind of foundation of trust, and that the only kind of trust worth having was that based on love.
I said that whatever happened, I wasn't going to go back on principles. I couldn't stand religion, even if some of it was quite appealing in an emotional kind of way. "I could make you fishers of men." I loved that.
But even if we did accept it, what religion would have a couple of gays who didn't actually think being gay was a sin, thanks very much? So much for the Jehovah's Witnesses who called round. "I'll pray for you," they said as they left, without so much as a copy of the War Cry left behind. If they are going to be the ones in heaven, I will cheerfully accept the other place.
Just then, the sun emerged briefly from behind the edge of a cloud, and then once more was obscured, almost as quickly as it had appeared. In that moment, when the lacy edge of the vapour was brightest, you could just have imagined that an angel, a gleaming diaphanous angel, was really up there, flickering to and fro. I put my hand over my eyes.
The old man said triumphantly, "There! You must have seen that!"
I said, "I saw the sun and a cloud. That's all. That's all there is up there."
He looked at me, with one grey eyebrow cocked at an odd angle, and then at my unfinished lunch. He asked if I could spare the remains of the sandwich. I handed him the half I hadn't eaten, couldn't face, and stood up to go back to work where I would be excused from thinking any more. About Jimmy. About anything.
"This is good," he said, taking a bite. "Someone believes in you."
They Live in the Clouds was read by Alex Willmott at the Liars' League Dreams & Visions event on Tuesday, November 13, 2007.
Michael Spring writes occasional fiction under his own name and on sport as Jeff Blakeney. He loves horse racing, books and his family, but perhaps not in that order. Brittle Star, Fieldstone Review, Volume and Radio Ulster are among those who have published and broadcast him. He lives in London.
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