Sometimes I go out for bike rides with an angel.

I do mean a real ‘angel’. Not someone who is just ‘angelic’, but a genuine angel. No I didn’t believe it either but he is now my regular ride partner and he is….no really he is, an angel.

I write ‘he’ but in truth I am not sure what gender ‘he’ is and I never get a satisfactory reply when I ask ‘him’. We met by accident when I was admiring his bike which was leaning against a bench. It was a late winter afternoon in Truro, in the  square outside the cathedral, shaded by the failing light. I remember it was cold and it would rain before long. He seemed surprised that I spoke to him and it was unusual for me too; I have no habit of speaking to strangers. I am a watcher. 

With the weak winter light shining on his face maybe he had some kind of aura. But I think I am imagining that. Perhaps in my memory I want him to have an aura, perhaps even a halo. 

When I got to know him better he told me that people don’t see him. You would swear that no one was there. But there he is with a very nice titanium bike.

His face is hard to describe, soft and formless, your glance slides off it and you cannot describe what it looked like.

So if I tell you I cycle with an angel you going to find that hard to believe. I would too if it wasn’t actually happening. We have been friends for a while now, cycling friends, the kind you have where you meet up and talk all day about everything and nothing and then go home separately. The type where you don’t do dinners, or visit each other’s houses or go on holiday together or exchange birthday gifts. Just meet up for rides and talk about stuff. Lives kept separate and yet close through the shared intimacies and admissions of the ride. The rolling confessional booth of the road. 

That kind of cycling friend.

You will have your own. Mine just happens to be an angel.

What do angels look like? This may disappoint but he has no wings. He gets around on his bike or uses public transport. I have no idea how he pays for things. The only time I saw him get on a bus, he just drifted past the driver as if the driver could not see him. When I asked him once about those pictures in churches of  angels blowing trumpets and performing miracles, he just laughed. 

‘I am more of a social worker really’ he said. 

He has no shimmering clothes. No halo. He looks…well ordinary I suppose. Hard to describe. A face that is formless, that shifts in the light. Sometimes there are planes, lines, a shape to the mouth but when he turns, then they change to something else. Only his eyes remain constant. A steady gaze, they hold me when I look at him, which isn’t often because we only ever meet to go for bike rides and we are both facing forwards. When I glance across I sometimes get a glimpse of his eyes. I still can’t tell you what colour they are but they have a depth. I have read that you can see someone’s soul through their eyes but I have never been able to do that. Do angels even have souls? I must ask him.

He looks like a slightly overweight middle aged man to me. He says he looks like what I want to see, in which case I wonder why he looks like a harassed social worker. Or an English teacher. What that says about me? 

Apparently people don’t see angels because we don’t believe they exist. We cannot see that which we do not believe in so we ignore what we see. He is unseeable. Except I can see him and always have been able to and I have no explanation for that.

Babies see him. They stare intently at him. Dogs notice him too. He came to my house once and the cat woke up and stared too. You may have seen this happen? The baby staring intently at a corner of a room? The cat sitting still, watching an empty space? Probably an angel.

Or maybe a mouse? Cats are not reliable angel spotters.

He says it is a form of implausibility invisibility which is necessary in allowing him to do angel stuff. He doesn’t know why I can see him, but has assured me that I contain no ‘holiness’ and there is no future plan for me as a prophet or preacher and I am nothing special. Quite ordinary in fact. He says it is quite relaxing for him just to have a friend. 

I am not a believer in angels. I do not subscribe to organised religion – or disorganised religion for that matter. I am as spiritual as the next man, which means I like a sunset and sometimes gaze at the stars and shiver with the meaningless of our lives against that vast space…..and then get on with life as before. So averagely spiritual, no more.

But my cycle buddy is an angel. I know it without knowing how I know and anyway he tells me it is true and it is hard to disbelieve an angel. They are unable to lie apparently.

He doesn’t know how old he is, being an angel. He knows he has always been an angel and as far as he knows, will always be one. His memories exist in a moving three year window. Beyond three years ago, he can’t recall what he was doing. He is always telling me to live in the moment and that time is an illusion anyway. I guess one day he will forget me too and the rides we do together.

Quite often we just ride together in silence. Apart from me puffing, blowing and moaning. He is …comforting to be around. I did ask him if he was my guardian angel and he laughed and said:

‘Do you think you need one?’. 

He said he just liked cycling and I was available most of the time because since I retired……well he is right and I am available most of the time. 

He communicates with me on Facebook Messenger. 

‘Do you fancy a ride tomorrow? Meet you at the top of Moresk Road?’ 

It just pops up on my phone. I can even show you the messages if you are finding this hard to believe. 

How do angels do that….use Messenger? He must have a Facebook account. But he has no money, no home that I know of, no phone even. I asked him where he lived and he told me that my question made no sense.

‘Do you ask where the wind lives?’. He had stopped cycling for a moment to turn and look at me. I responded that his question made no sense.

‘Exactly’ he said

We carried on along a dark valley floor, scattered primroses and vinca suggesting spring was close. Brambles beginning to stir, twisting through the gorse and ferns. Somewhere hidden in the tangled undergrowth, I could hear a small stream.

I do want to know more about him but he has a way of looking at you that makes you stop asking questions.  Or I find myself suddenly distracted by something and forget my question or the lack of answer.

So every week or so we meet up and bump fists and talk about where we will go today. We never have a plan. We choose a place to ride to and once we get there we decide where we want to go next. We never stop for coffee. I don’t mind because I like to just ride. 

In fact he doesn’t eat or drink at all. Or need to stop for a roadside pee. Or get out of breath on steep hills. He always rides alongside me.  I never get dropped by him. 

We ride around Cornwall following the deep-set lanes wherever they lead, generally back to where we were before or we lose ourselves on some new roads until we get to a place we recognise. 

The lanes drop down into shaded oak woods; in winter they are puddled, gritty, deep in fallen leaves and in summer shaded, cool and flashed with new life.

Some days I talk a lot and he listens to me. My words tumble out.  I have no idea what I say. I just talk about what I can see and hear and what I have read and what I am thinking about and I ask him questions. 

Wouldn’t you ask questions if you had an angel for a friend?

I expect you think I am just imagining him. I also sometimes wonder if I am just imagining him too. There are the messages on my phone of course.

It would also take a lot to imagine or delude yourself that you are with someone else when you go out for hours on long rides, in the rain and cold.  I am not sure I could maintain self deception that well when I am cold and tired and my legs hurt and I want to be nearer home than we are.

I mean it feels to me as if I have been out for a day with someone real. Not an imaginary friend. I can feel him when we bump against each other. I can feel the slipstream from his bike. He speaks to me about things I didn’t know before. 

I like being out with him. I like the places we go. The long ridge lines of the high moorland roads where I can see from coast to coast, from one side of Cornwall to the other. The swooping descents on quiet lanes into hidden valleys, past old farmhouses and barns, tumbled roof lines and old machinery. We go for some pretty long rides. It is an endorphin rush when they go well and something close to purgatory when your knees hurt, your breath is acid in your throat, your heart threatens to break your ribs.

‘So what about purgatory? Is it a real thing?’ I asked him once.

 It was the top of a long hill and so it had led my mind to that question. And I wanted to stop for a minute.

He gave me one of his long looks, eyes huge in a face that blurred the more I gazed at it. I always look away. It is too uncomfortable looking at him for long, like gazing down the long drop off a cliff and feeling compelled to throw yourself over. I have to look away.

‘Purgatory’ he said ‘…..I think you create your own purgatory without any help from me.’  

He has been only a little more forthcoming about other aspects of being an angel. You know all those questions you had as a kid wondering why we had to go to church on a Sunday and would praying ever help. So I ask him. I don’t ever feel I get anywhere.

Is there a God? “Depends what you mean by God”.

Who or what created the world?  “It was along time ago”.

How old are you? “Time is an illusion. There is no before or after or beginning or end. I have no way to measure age”.

Don’t you have work to do? Saving souls? Looking out for people? Relieving suffering. Fighting evil. Promoting a godly life? “Umm yes…always lots to do. There are too few of us and so many of you. I need some downtime though”. 

Do you watch over me at night? When I am having a bad time? When I was in hospital a few years ago and wasn’t sure I would survive? 

He smiled ‘Why…. did you want me to be there? You seem to have managed alright. I can’t be everywhere.’ 

So we ride on and I talk about the age of the hedgerows and medieval field patterns and the origin of place names and he listens. Which is nice and makes me feel worthwhile and interesting and maybe that is his intention. 

One day in late February as we were finishing a ride that had taken us to the beach at Perranporth, wind lashed sand drifting like smoke and a distant roar from the surf, he told me he had his appraisal next week.

I didn’t know angels had appraisals but apparently they do. The angel world has a bureaucracy. There are targets. Souls saved. Accident averted. Wars avoided or ended. That kind of stuff.

‘I don’t want to blow my own trumpet’ he said ‘ but I have been pretty good at angel-ing this year’. 

He waited.

‘Trumpet’. He looked at me as if I knew what he meant. Was waiting for a laugh.

I didn’t get it.

‘Like Gabriel’ he said and rode ahead for a bit until I got it.

I had never heard him make a joke before. It was disconcerting. I asked him what would happen at his appraisal.

‘Stopping suffering is a key performance target for us’. He looked at me gravely.. “Have you ever tried to stop suffering? I already know the answer to that question so don’t bother answering”.

He winked. “Mind reader aren’t I’. 

He explained that trying to stop suffering is like trying to stop weeds. If you focus on just one small area, you can get rid of all the weeds but everywhere else they are multiplying. You go somewhere else and the place you just left starts to get weeds again. There is no solution, just hard work knowing that you will never win. Whack a mole for all eternity.

‘Partly it’s down to resources. There is generally more than one famine at any time, plus a war or two plus all the other misery and suffering. There are just not enough of us. But it’s also about how we work and about us not having superpowers of any description. It would be easy to solve things with a bit of superpower. Well we don’t have any. And so we can’t solve stuff easily. It’s all about persuasion’ . 

 He smiled at me again. ‘I don’t even have a harp’. 

‘So we do our best. Trying to keep the weeds down. Trying to make the world better.’

I didn’t see him again for a few weeks after that. I started to worry. There was a real sense of loss. I hadn’t realised how much I enjoyed our rides together.

Then a message appeared. ‘Want to meet up for a ride tomorrow?’

He seemed the same. Just as hard to know. I asked him how the appraisal went. 

‘Difficult’  he sighed.

‘The thing is my manager  knows what I  am going to say before I say it which is ….well frankly, it’s  very annoying. You question the purpose of the meeting. My boss is, of course, omniscient. He knows the answers before I give them. It all seems so pointless’. I told him we all knew that feeling.

We had paused for a moment at the top of a hill. The day was clear and sharp, the air fresh and everything we could see was hard edged and clearly defined. Colours popped. 

‘He told me that I need to prioritise and strategise, develop a more efficient system of resource allocation. My productivity needs to rise. He has given me some productivity tools but I don’t  know how to use them. I don’t want to know’

He turned towards me, his eyes big and luminous. I could see my reflection in them, sitting on the cross bar of my bike, staring at him.

‘The worse part is when he says “I know exactly how you feel about this” and he actually does. He even knows what I am going to say next.’

‘The thing is’ he says ‘ I prefer riding my bike to being an angel’. 

We carry on for some more miles. I mull over his predicament. 

We reach the end of the ride, where I usually turn for home and he usually just vanishes into the distance. Literally. 

‘Don’t worry’ he says. We shake hands. ‘Great ride…..see you next week’.

But no one else will see him next week. No one will even believe my tale. I guess thats how angels get away with being all around us, doing their stuff and why we never notice them. You can’t see what you don’t believe in after all. .

And no one is ever going to believe that I go for rides with a slightly depressed angel.