Tuesday noon, a bakery in Soho
There is a popular joke that in Heaven, the police are British, the cooks are French, the mechanics German, the lovers Italian, and everything is organised by the Swiss. In Hell, according to the same joke, the chefs are British, the mechanics French, the lovers Swiss, the police German, and everything is organised by the Italians. None of this is true, except maybe for the part about British chefs.
Ask a Londoner where to go for a nice selection of cuisine and they will point you to Soho. It's common knowledge that this is the part of town where you can taste the four corners of the world, often along the same street, and go to four different bakeries for dessert after. Now, the truly interesting aspect of such common knowledge is this: everyone knows there's lots of restaurants in Soho, but few stop to reflect on why Soho has such an abundance of them.
It could be due to the many French, Greek, and Italian immigrants that settled there in the 1800's. It could also be due to British cuisine not meeting the standards of the sophisticated celestial palate.
"Mis-ter Fell!" The waitress sounds out each syllable like a scandalised old matron who just caught him trailing mud on her kitchen floor. It's quite the achievement for someone barely past twenty. "Where have you been? Do you know what day it is? Do you know how many unsold chocolate croissants I've had to eat? How many Daily Telegraph crosswords I've had to solve all by myself?"
The act falls apart when Allie starts chuckling at her own drama. A lovely girl. Mischief in pints but not a mean streak to her.
"Good to see you back, sir. Were starting to worry we might have to shut down business, what without our most regular customer." She heads towards the table and snatches up his usual newspaper from the racks as she goes. "How've you been, Mr Fell?"
You can't avoid becoming a regular when you live in the same place for 200 years: the trick is to circulate between establishments at an interval of 30 years or so. Most cafés and restaurants see a change of personnel in 30 years. It's still not foolproof, however. Aziraphale has thought about raising the bar to 50 after one unpleasant experience over at Wardour Street, where he scared an elderly gentleman almost into cardiac arrest. The bakery had served the most exquisite éclairs in the 60's, and he'd come there every Friday to have one. The old man in question had been a high school student making extra money as a waiter in the 60's; in the 2010's, he had been sat down in a chair by worried personnel who didn't understand why he was stammering that the bakery was haunted.
"Just peachy, dear. Bit stressful at work there for a spell, but it's all settling back into its usual rhythm. Ah, thank you." The Daily Telegraph. It has a way of being surprisingly on the money when it comes to horoscopes, and although Aziraphale technically doesn't have a sign he reads them every time. Especially the ones involving stars Crowley helped build. "How is Snowball? Not limping still, I hope?"
"Oh no, sir. Vigilantly keeping the flat free of socks and other dangerous vermin," she grins fondly. "Now, what can I get you today?"
"Well," he says, excitement sparkling in his eyes and trickling into a happy wiggle by the time it reaches his shoulders. "I have been dying to try that saffron crème brûlée you added to the menu a couple of weeks ago."
"You've got a good eye, you've got." Allie wags a finger to underscore her point. "And your usual tea with that. Anything for your husband? Or he isn't coming?"
"Afraid not, dear. Anthony had to stay behind at work today."
"Something to take home for later, then? Bit of angel food cake? Croissant?"
Allie has the kind of mind that made phone books superfluous even before the advent of the smartphone, and could have proceeded down the list of items Crowley has usually ordered for the past month. Could have recited the recipes for each item, too – the allergics and vegans love her for that.
Aziraphale declines with a gracious thank you and a maybe next time. When he opens up the Telegraph it's not to read horoscopes but to hide the smile that blossoms on his face. Husband.
Practice makes perfect, they say. If you have eternity to practice, you get very good at your chosen craft. The only talent Aziraphale has cultivated that long is lying, but it still proves the point. One can plot a timeline of his development as a liar by reviewing the assumptions humans tend to make about him and Crowley. It starts with his earliest frightful denials that they even know each other – a novice lie, pitifully obvious. The deceit becomes passable when he's bold enough to call them business acquaintances, but still wouldn't hold up for scrutiny very long. He reaches his peak here, at this café table, on a level of sophistication where the lie speaks itself without him saying anything at all.
If he's being honest – and honesty is harder to learn than lying – he ceased correcting their assumptions because he wanted to hear what he couldn't bring himself to say.
There is another timeline parallel with his, and that is the lies Heaven spun to clip his wings.
It starts with an "us" and "them", where one side is made of love and the other is incapable of such a feeling. It haunts him through 6,000 years of scrambling to be rewarded that love, the only love that matters, and never being considered worthy. It ended when he plunged himself to Earth, knowing there was more love in one demon than in the entirety of Heaven.
It's been three days since their world began, and Aziraphale is looking for something that will tell Crowley what he can't say in words.
He had explained crème brûlée to Crowley, once, with some misplaced hope that knowing the craftsmanship behind it might sway the demon to appreciate the dish and not just devour it, as he was wont to do with anything that could be swallowed in one bite. Most things, it turned out, could be swallowed in one bite, if you had the same blasphemous disregard for joints as you had for food. 'Snake thing,' he'd say with gleeful innocence, every time Aziraphale shot him a disapproving look. Food was the chemical equivalent of music, compositions of flavour and texture that created trilling little arias and rich, deep harmonies that put goosebumps on your skin. You couldn't just unhinge your jaw and swallow like it was some deceased rodent.
Crème brûlée takes care and attention to make: the right temperature, the right time, one pass through water and one through fire. The slow, painstaking work of making it perfect, just so. And finally, once the spoon snaps the crust, the sweet reward for one's efforts.
When the dessert arrives, Aziraphale devotes himself to it like a vicar to his prayer. There's the curling sweetness of the caramelized crust, yes, and the creamy body of saffron embraced in the raunchy crunch of gingerbread crumbs and oh , the feathery touch of vanilla underneath. Down to the very last beatific spoonful, Aziraphale is, in all the ways that matter, in Heaven. And he can hear Crowley's remark – 'who are you to speak of blasphemy?' All grins and cheek. Good Lord.
He smiles, dabs his mouth with the serviette, and reaches for the Telegraph. The Celestial Observer had cancelled his subscription. While not surprising, it felt like a rather petty thing to do – they hadn't even sent a notification letter about it. But no matter, the Telegraph has the best crosswords.
Aziraphale doesn't get to the crosswords. There's an advertisement about new exhibitions opening at the British Museum, and while Religious Icons and Imagery would have made his heart leap any other day, what catches his eye is the photos from Jewellery of the Ancient Middle East.
Angels and demons are more like sentient energies than beings of physical matter. It is fairly easy to grasp how this makes things like size, shape, and composition a matter of personal taste, but to understand what happens when an angel is excited, it would do well to rehearse some basic physics.
Excitement is the rapid heartbeat, sweating, and inhibition of higher brain functions that comes from the nervous system telling the body to gear up for action. It's a lot like Morse signalling, in the sense that it involves a series of electrical energy pulses, but also very unlike Morse in that Morse is not very exciting at all.
Now consider the atom. It's like a tiny solar system, where the planets are electrons in orbit around a core based on their respective energy levels. Electrons are normally content with this arrangement, but if they get excited they will leave their orbit, do a little flamenco in intermolecular space, and settle back in when they have let off the energy surplus. This phenomenon is called excitation, because mixing the two up would be very unfortunate for body and atom alike.
As a being of sentient energy, Aziraphale experiences both excitation and excitement. Nobody has briefed his nervous system about this, so when his immediate impulse is to gavotte through time-space straight into the bookshop, his human body tries its best to comply.
There is a motion like rising, but not up from the table as much as into the table. A chair is involved somehow, though it isn't quite sure about the details. The cutlery and china did not consent to this, whatever this is, and careen across the table with an infernal clatter and also infernally hot tea. Then there's the newspaper, which is both in Aziraphale's hands and in everything – chair, teacup, cutlery – he's trying to catch.
This is one of the rare occasions when Aziraphale is not particular about keeping numbers, and the tip he leaves on the table is enough that they'll remember him after 50 years and more.
"Mr Fell!" Allie comes hurrying across the room, paper box in hand. "On the house! For Anthony." She loops the string around his wrist.
"Oh. Congratulations. Absolutely." At least he thinks that's what he says. His thoughts are no more in his body than his electrons and there's a slight risk he might be speaking Akkadian. He has one foot out the door before he turns back around, just to be sure: "Thank you!"
Whether the bookshop has kept the E.L. James volumes or not, Aziraphale doesn't notice. He drops the paper box on the desk and rips into the phone book, the page he marked for Tadfield, running a trembling finger down to the number he needs.
Each signal is an eternity before someone finally picks up.
"Hello…?" A female voice answers, in the tone of a person in those films where there are strange noises in the attic and somebody goes up alone with a torch to investigate.
"Hello! Oh wonderful, I was just about to– Ah, this is Miss Device, yes?"
"This is Miss Device's landline, which was cancelled weeks ago. Who are you and how are you calling me?"
Aziraphale's phone book was printed 15 years ago and really can't be held accountable for not knowing that Jasmine Cottage no longer has a landline. Likewise, Aziraphale can't be held accountable for successfully calling a non-existent number. He's just excited.
"Oh. My apologies. Wouldn't have called if I'd known there wasn't a landline. But, now that you've picked up– Oh, right, we were never introduced. My name is Aziraphale – we met at Tadfield airbase when the, uh–"
"You fixed my bike!" Her voice brightens with recognition, before dropping right back down: "And stole my book."
"Accidentally acquired it. Listen, Miss Device–"
"It was burnt like a forgotten piece of toast. That book–"
"Also an accident. Miss, please, I'm calling you regarding a very important matter. I..."
Past the initial shock wave of excitation, electrons return to their normal state. Aziraphale's higher brain functions are blinking back online, and when they realise what is about to come out of his mouth they pull the brakes like a demon blindsided by a velocipede.
"Yes?" Anathema's voice crackles with static and annoyance.
"I… could use a bit of help," he says with some effort.
Because one can't very well call a stranger on a dead phone line and say 'I'm really in the mood for committing crime, fancy a burglary sometime this afternoon?'