Angel

By Michael Pockley

What if
you had achieved
everything you ever
wanted to achieve

except love?

If Lily’s date goes well,
she will jump from Magdalen Bridge.

And if it doesn’t...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Beaten Track Publishing
• Release date: Jul 6, 2020
• ISBN: 9781786454300

Book preview

Angel

Angel

Michael Pockley

Beaten Track Logo

Beaten Track

www.beatentrackpublishing.com

Angel

SMASHWORDS EDITION

First published 2020 by Beaten Track Publishing

Copyright © 2020 Michael Pockley at Smashwords

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent publisher.

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

ISBN: 978 1 78645 430 0

Artwork:

Cover: Angel by Michael Pockley

Interior: Magdalen Bridge by Jack Pockley

Beaten Track Publishing,

Burscough, Lancashire.

www.beatentrackpublishing.com

What if

you had achieved

everything you ever

wanted to achieve

except love?

If Lily’s date goes well,

she will jump from Magdalen Bridge.

And if it doesn’t…

With thanks to Natasza Smielowska

for proofreading the Polish

Contents

4 p.m.

5 p.m.

5:30 p.m.

6:30 p.m.

7:15 p.m.

8:15 p.m.

8:30 p.m.

8:45 p.m.

9 p.m.

9:30 p.m.

9:35 p.m.

9:45 p.m.

10 p.m.

10:15 p.m.

10:30 p.m.

2 a.m.

About the Author

By the Author

Beaten Track Publishing

Magdalen Bridge

4 p.m.

Lily was well into her thirties yet her swaying stiletto stroll across Magdalen Bridge sucked the city dry. To the tourists, Oxford briefly became but a backdrop to a fine-boned, expensively bobbed blonde in a pink mini-suit tailored tight to a tiny waist.

Her nose was held aloft: it looked like scorn, yet to her, it was a shield.

As she bent at a bin, cars fell silent; birds paused in the sky. Apparently depositing litter, Lily surreptitiously slipped one final stone upon her own private pile.

Straightening, she gazed at the Isis meandering through the meadow past cattle contentedly chewing cud, their breath steaming in the clean, spring air. Lily stepped nearer the parapet, looking straight through the water to where Virginia Woolf would be waiting at the bottom, arms open, her calm, pale face trailing the duckweed which swayed in the stream.

Tonight, Lily would wear her winter coat. Its capacious pockets were just right to hold her heavy stones. Tonight, if her date went well, her bucket list would be empty. It would be time to end the sound and fury.

She would wait for a lull in the passers-by. She would take a final, self-consciously poetic peek at the moon behind Magdalen Tower, and then at the moon and Magdalen reflected in still waters, and then, with