Outside the room where Father Bryce meets his first extraterrestrial are twenty marines with face-masks and oily new guns. Politely, neither Father Bryce nor the space alien mentions this.

They’ve been talking about nothing for an hour when the alien finally gets through the ice. “So. The general said—”

“Yeah,” says Father Bryce. “I’m supposed to ask you a few questions.” His hand’s out in a may-I-please way.

“Sure, sure,” says the alien.

“Religion.”

“Yes.”

“We— Do you… have religion?”

“God.”

Father Bryce is still. “Yes.”

“Sure, we know God.”

“Really?”

The alien looks uncomfortable. “Yeah.”

“Great! So, how… do we make sense of the issue of… being made, you know,” Father Bryce sees the alien is smiling now, nodding encouragingly, “in His image.”

“I,” says the alien, smiling, “was going to ask you the same thing.”

“Really?” asks Father Bryce. He wants to laugh.

“Yeah!” They laugh. “I didn’t how to bring it up,” says the alien. They laugh.

Drying an eye, the alien says, “Oh, that’s funny.”

I never thought too hard about that. The guardian angels, I mean. Does everyone have them? Are they all so efficient? Do they all do their job adequately?

My own angel’s name is Daniel. He lost his faith some time ago. Maybe he wanted to do more than he could and fell short of his goals. Maybe he felt that circumstances thwarted his attempts to prosper and protect me. Maybe he was just lazy, but couldn’t see that, blaming everything but his own inaction. Did he do enough? I don’t know.

I imagine him as being like me, trying, but not trying too hard, bewailing the lack of breaks he got, the lack of opportunities which he really has no right to expect. Like me.

Whatever. Daniel began to doubt his place. He doubted whether God had given him the power to achieve anything. He achieved nothing. He began to wonder if he was just unlucky, surely a hard thing for an angel born into the sure knowledge of the providence of God to come to believe. But he did. He began to think that no justice could exist. He began to think that God either couldn’t do anything or didn’t care and wouldn’t.

I don’t know if Daniel is right. But right doesn’t have much to do with these things. Daniel lost his faith in himself, and then he lost his faith in God. Oh no, you’re thinking, oh no, an angel can’t lose his faith in God, because where would that leave us? And if you’re more theologically inclined, you’re thinking, how can this happen? An angel has no free will. If an angel loses his faith, who can be responsible for that but God?

Don’t ask me. It wasn’t long ago that it was all sure and sorted in my head. Now I don’t know. But I know that Daniel made his own decision. No one compelled him. His failure to achieve was his own doing. His doubts were his own and his loss of faith his own loss.

Daniel didn’t notice when he fell. He doesn’t know when it happened, just that one day he realised that God began to give him no time, no help, no notice, and that his praises to the Almighty began to be rote, and parroted, and empty.

He fell. But he was still my angel, and he is my angel still, even now. He just carried on doing his job. He takes no joy in the work, but there is nothing else for him to do.

He’s still in denial, really. He can’t bring himself to look in the mirror most mornings. He can’t bring himself to take note of the way that the feathers on both pairs of wings have become charred and greasy like a well-used grill pan, and he won’t acknowledge that the teeth in the mouth of his calf’s head have become sharp and yellow.

Daniel still writes to his colleagues. He never saw them much to begin with, and they communicated a lot through letters. He writes to them now of his fears and the doubts which consume him. They don’t write back anymore. But he keeps on writing.

(“Dear Uriel,
I sometimes wonder why so much of what happens to the people we’re supposed to guard is so bad. Why are we so ineffectual?”)

he saw one of his colleagues a few weeks ago, in the distance, all light and halo and shining wings, looking down benevolently on his sleeping charge. Daniel looked down and fingered one of his feathers, and he felt it come away in his hand, and he looked at it, all black and filthy. He held it in a bony black-nailed hand that he couldn’t recognise as his own. So he hid. He ran away before the angel could see him.

Daniel is finding other people to blame. He iswondering if this was my fault. He has begun to wonder if I’m not a hopeless case. I think that he is gradually beginning to hate me. If I won’t be helped, then why not just make me go down the path that I was always destined to do? So now he nudges my elbow. He tells me things to make me doubt myself and make me doubt my own faith.

And he kept me self-obsessed, so that I could not see what was wrong, and what she was going to do, and I wasn’t ready, and I wasn’t able to stop her, and now I am here at a funeral.

He thinks it’s all my fault, you see. But it isn’t.

I think that maybe we deserve each other.

© HD Ingham 2009

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