“A job.”

“You want a job?”

“Yes. Of course.”

“What kind of job?”

“Anything. Working in a shop, maybe. Anything to get me out of the house.”

I used to work, before Matty was born. I had a job in an office stationer’s in Tufnell Park. I liked it; I liked all the different pens, and sizes of paper and envelopes. I liked my boss. I haven’t worked since.

“OK. Come on, come on.”

“Maybe a bit of a social life. The church has quizzes sometimes. Like pub quizzes, but not in the pub. I’d like to have a go at one of those.”

“Yep, we can allow you a quiz.”

I tried to smile, because I knew JJ was joking a bit, but I was finding the conversation hard. I couldn’t really think of anything very much, and that annoyed me. And it made me feel afraid, in a strange sort of a way. It was like finding a door that you’d never seen before in your own house. Would you want to know what was behind it? Some people would, I’m sure, but I wouldn’t. I didn’t want to carry on talking about me.

“What about you?” I said to JJ. “What would you say to Cosmic Tony?”

“Ha. I’m not sure, man.” He calls everyone “man”, even if you’re not a man. You get used to it. “Maybe, I don’t know. Live the last fifteen years all over again or something. Finish high school. Forget about music. Become the kind of person who’s happy to settle for what he is, rather than what he wants to be, you know?”

“But Cosmic Tony can’t arrange that.”

“No. Exactly.”

“So you’re worse off than me, really. Cosmic Tony can do things for me, but not for you.”

“No, no, shit, I’m sorry, Maureen. I didn’t mean to imply that. You have a… You have a really hard life, and none of it’s your fault, and everything that’s happened to me is just “cos of my own stupidity, and… There’s no comparison. Really. I’m sorry I ever mentioned it.”

But I wasn’t sorry. I liked thinking about Cosmic Tony much more than I liked thinking about God.

The headline in Linda’s paper—page one, accompanied by the picture of me flat on my face outside a nightclub—read “FOR HARPS—SEE SHARP”. The story did not, as Linda had promised it would, emphasize the beauty and mystery of our experience on the roof; rather, it chose to concentrate on another angle, namely, the sudden, gratifying and amusing lunacy of a former television personality. The journalist in me suspects that she got the story about right.

“What does that mean?” Jess asked me on the phone that morning.

“It’s an old lager ad,” I said. “ «HARP—STAYS SHARP».”

“What has lager got to do with anything?”

“Nothing. But the name of the lager was Harp. And my name’s Sharp, you see.”

“OK. Then what have harps got to do with anything?”

“Angels are supposed to play them.”

“Are they? Should we have said he was playing a harp? To make it more convincing?”

I told her that, in my opinion, the addition of a harp to the portrait of the Angel Matt Damon that we had painted was unlikely to have helped convince people of its authenticity.

“And anyway, how come it’s all about you? We hardly get a fucking mention.”

I had many other phone calls that morning—from Theo, who said that there’s been a lot of interest in the story, and who thought I’d finally given him something he could work with, as long as I was comfortable talking to the public about what was obviously a private spiritual moment; from Penny, who wanted us to meet and talk; and from my daughters.

I hadn’t been allowed to speak to them for weeks, but Cindy’s maternal instinct had obviously told her that the day Daddy was in the papers talking about seeing messengers from God was a good day to reinstate contact.

“Did you see an angel, Daddy?”

“No.”

“Mummy said you did.”

“Well, I didn’t.”

“Why did Mummy say you did?”

“You’d better ask her.”

“Mummy, why did you say Daddy saw an angel?”

I waited patiently while a brief conversation took place away from the receiver.

“She says she didn’t say it. She says the newspaper says it.”

“I told a fib, sweetie. To make some money.”

“Oh.”

“So I can buy you a nice birthday present.”

“Oh. Why do you get money for saying you saw an angel?”

“I’ll tell you another time.”

“Oh.”

And then Cindy and I spoke, but not for very long. During our brief conversation I managed to refer to two different types of domesticated female animals.

I also received a phone call from my boss at FeetUp. He was calling to tell me that I was fired. “You’re joking.”

“I wish I was, Sharpy. But you’ve left me with no alternative.”

“By doing what, exactly?”

“Have you seen the paper this morning?”

“That’s a problem for you?”

“You come across as a bit of a nutter, to be honest,”

“What about the publicity for the channel?”

“All negative, in my book.”

“You think there’s such a thing as negative publicity for FeetUp?”

“How do you mean?”

“What with no one ever having heard of us. You.” There was a long, long silence, during which you could hear the rusting cogs of poor Declan’s mind turning over.

“Ah. I see. Very cunning. That hadn’t occurred to me.”

“I’m not going to beg, Dec. But it would seem a little perverse to me. You hire me when no one else in the world would give me the time of day. And then you fire me when I’m hot. How many of your presenters are all over the papers today?”

“No, no, fair point, fair point. I can see where you’re coming from. What you’re saying, if I read you correctly, is that there’s no such thing as bad publicity for a… a fledgling cable channel.”

“Obviously I couldn’t have put it as elegantly as that. But yes, that’s the long and the short of it.”

“OK. You’ve turned me round, Sharpy. Who’ve we got on this afternoon?”

“This afternoon?”

“Yeah. It’s Thursday.”

“Ah.”

“Had you forgotten?”

“I sort of had, really, yeah.”

“So we’ve got no one?”

“I reckon I could get JJ, Maureen and Jess to come on.”

“Who are they?”

“The other three.”

“The other three who?”

“Have you read the story?”

“I only read the one about you seeing the angel.”

“They were up there with me.”

“Up where?”

“The whole angel thing, Declan, came about because I was going to kill myself. And then I bumped into three other people on the top of a tower-block who were thinking of doing the same thing. And then… Well, to cut a long story short, the angel told us to come down again.”

“Fuck me.”

“Exactly.”

“And you reckon you can get the other three?”

“Almost sure of it.”

“Jesus Christ. How much will they cost, d’you reckon?”

“Three hundred quid for the three of them, maybe? Plus expenses. One of them’s a… Well, she’s a single parent, and her kid will need looking after.”

“Go on, then. Fuck it. Fuck the expense.”

“Top man, Dec”

“I think it’s a good idea. I’m pleased with that. Old Declan’s still got it, eh?”

“Too right. You’re a newshound. You’re the Newshound of the Baskervilles.”

“What you’ve got to tell yourself,” I told them, “is that no one will be watching.”

“That’s one of your old pro tricks, right?” said JJ knowingly.

“No,” I said. “Believe me. Literally no one will be watching. I have never met anyone who has ever seen my show.”

The world headquarters of FeetUpTV!—known, inevitably, to its staff as TitsUpTV!—is in a sort of shed in Hoxton. The shed contains a small reception area, two dressing rooms and a studio, where all four of our homegrown programmes are made. Every morning, a woman called Candy-Ann sells cosmetics; I split Thursday afternoon with a man called D J Goodnews, who speaks to the dead, usually on behalf of the receptionist, the window cleaner, the minicab driver booked to take him home, or anyone else who happens to be passing through: “Does the letter A mean anything to you, Asif ?” and so on. The other afternoons are taken up by tapes of old dog races from the US—once upon a time the intention was to offer viewers the chance to bet, but nothing ever came of it, and in my opinion, if you can’t bet, then dog racing, especially old dog racing, loses some of its appeal. During the evening, two women sit talking to each other, in and usually about their underwear, while viewers text them lewd messages, which they ignore. And that’s more or less it. Declan runs the station on behalf of a mysterious Asian businessman, and those of us who work for FeetUpTV! can only presume that somehow, in ways too obtuse and sophisticated for us to decipher, we are involved in the trafficking of class A drugs and child pornography. One theory is that the dogs in the races are sending out encoded messages to the traffickers: if, say, the dog in the outside lane wins, then that is a message to the Thai contact that he should send a couple of kilos of heroin and four thirteen-year-olds first thing in the morning. Something like that, anyway.