Dave had big broad shoulders, and thick thighs, and a touch of a potbelly under a fine red woollen sweater. Just as an aside, Michael quite fancied him.

'Well. Charlie and Dizzy came up with this new style called be-bop. And then there was this guy Miles, who was in on the birth of the cool, which takes us very speedily to the 1950s.'

'1950s. Shoot. Jazz in the fifties.' Billie made it sound like the next century.

The band came on. Jack the bass player thunked away happily. The singer was a well-known Ella mimic, who clearly enunciated her way through a set of very standard tunes to approving, undisturbed applause.

Billie groaned. 'Doesn't anybody in this town swing?'

'We do,' volunteered another one of the guys, in huge unflattering thick-rimmed spectacles, and only then remembered to check with the others with a sideways glance.

Dave took over again. 'We're going someplace later, if you'd like to come along.'

They ended up in a drinking club downstairs in Goodge Street. Billie did no entrance routine there. She folded up the stole like it was a sweater and crammed it behind the seat and asked, 'You fellas want a drink?' Michael paid.

The guy with the spectacles turned out to be called Alphonse too. So Michael and Alphonse exchanged sympathies for the name. 'Bill, John, Richard, anything. I said, Mum, why Alphonse? She said it was because it was her cousin's name.' Alphonse had a cold. He sniffed and pushed his spectacles further up his nose. He looked at Billie at the bar and leaned forward to Michael and asked, 'How for real is she?'

Michael said, 'Get her to sing, and you'll be surprised how real.'

Alphonse said to Billie, 'He says I've got to hear you sing.'

'Does he now?'

'Well, I think we all do,' said Dave, smiling. Wickedly, they suggested 'Lady Sings the Blues'.

'What's that, I don't sing the blues. No, I want to have some good times.'

'Well, you tell us what songs you know, and I'll see if we can play them.'

They settled on 'Miss Brown to You'.

Alphonse played piano and the piano was vacant. It was vacant mainly because there really wasn't room to sit behind it. So Alphonse played standing up, wedged against the slightly peeling red paint.

Billie started to sing in a thin rough voice with a timbre like a trumpet. Their faces fell, and kept on settling. Billie snapped her fingers, she swayed in place, she nodded appreciatively when Alphonse took over, and said 'Yes, yes, YES,' while he played. Billie did everything that was naff and old-fashioned but it was somehow indisputably the real thing.

Dave and a Brazilian called Jorge looked at each other and shook their heads, startled, amused and slightly beside themselves.

The band from Ronnie Scott's came in, to much shaking of hands. Dave swivelled all his attention on to them. There was laughing about the night's set, scornful dismissal of a colleague who hadn't shown up, a reference to Dave's domestic situation… everything that could help make Michael feel spare.

Billie sizzled back to the table, ready to snap up more people. Alphonse sat next to Jack the bass player and started to sparkle, his eyes and glasses gleaming.

It was past Michael's bedtime. He was in a dive with Billie Holiday, and he kept nodding off. He saw the rest of the evening in a series of fast cuts. He glimpsed Billie back at the table, wreathed in smoke, barking with laughter. He saw Billie with eyes shut, swaying as Al and Dave played together. Billie and Dave danced. Dave, looking fat and awkward, tried to keep up with a woman who could genuinely do the Lindy Hop.

Michael looked up at Alphonse and said in a voice that sounded like dirty tapeheads, 'I'm not really up to having a good time.'

Alphonse laughed, and unsteadily gripped Michael's knee. 'You look shattered, mate.'

'Work in the morning,' Michael remembered. His watch said 2.00 am. He stood up and murmured excuses.

Billie jumped up and smooched him on the cheek. He gave her the keys and explained how they worked and made sure she had the address. 'You take care now,' she said and sounded like she meant it. Michael stumbled out into the balmy night air and somehow staggered safely across Tottenham Court Road to the flat.

Very suddenly he was alone in his own bed, and wide awake. He thought of a potbelly under a red jumper. He was very sure that the skin on the stomach would be smooth and warm and the flesh loose and gentle to the touch.

Experimentally, he called up Dave.

Michael asked him, 'I don't suppose you would ever normally consider sleeping with me?'

Dave looked surprised and responded, 'Not to be rude, but normally no. I've got a wife. And a girlfriend. My time is taken.' The Angel began to look about the flat and wonder how he got there. Suddenly his hand went to the bridge of his nose. Knowledge had come to him. 'I'm…' he stopped.

The Angel sensed what he was, and therefore, what Billie was. 'That means that she… she really is…'

Michael nodded yes.

Dave bowed slightly to the miracle. Suddenly he chuckled, as if surprised by something. Smiling, he sat down next to Michael and reached up and pulled off the sweater. The real miracle was not that the Angels had physical presence. The real miracle was that no matter who they were, they wanted Michael.

Michael looked at the swollen belly covered in tight curls and remembered the clunking way Dave danced. It sometimes happens that when you see the body, desire burns away like a fog.

Michael remembered who he had spent the evening actually talking to. He remembered glasses and the coincidence of nicknames, and a hand on his knee. He called up Alphonse. Alphonse smiled sweetly and evidently did not need a miracle to make him say yes. There was no potbelly under his jumper. Michael did have a good time after all, within his limits.

Billie trawled her way back at breakfast time. Michael was downing repeated cups of coffee in an effort to jolt himself awake. Billie was listless, dragging her stole across the carpet. Michael told her, 'Go sit in the sitting room, it's more comfortable. You want a cup of coffee?' Tame, somehow, she turned and went into the front room with its sofas and bay window, and she slumped, staring.

'Worse for wear, huh?' he said, trying to keep his own pecker up.

She shook her head. 'It's not that,' she said, and accepted the coffee. 'We all went back to Dave's place and they played me this stuff.'

She shook her head again, and sipped the coffee. 'Man I heard metronomes with more swing than that stuff. What did they call it?'

'Hip hop? Drum'n'bass?'

'Drum'n'bass. Man. I mean we had technology. We got mikes. We used it to make music more human. The mike meant you didn't have to shout at a song and deafen it. You could seduce it, make it relax and start talking to you. I mean that stuff don't even have songs. It just goes tick tick tick as fast as it can. There ain't any time even for a tock.'

She rubbed her eyes.

'In the future,' Billie Holiday said, 'there will be no such thing as swing.'

Michael heard sadness in her voice, and sat next to her.

Her eyes didn't blink. 'It's all gone. My whole world. My music. There are no little clubs like I remember. The life isn't there, even the black folks've got their mortgage in the morning. They all think I'm just play-acting for a while. They don't know I'm stuck in it, up to my knees.'

Billie looked up at Michael. 'Guess what I'm saying is easy. They're all dead: Prez, Bean, Fletcher. We're just stuff in the history books that a few professors play.'

Michael put an arm around her. 'Everybody plays you, Billie. Anyone who likes music at all plays you.'

'Big deal. I'm talking about how a whole world can die.' She sighed and patted his leg. 'I get fragile sometimes. I get fragile and I slump back. Or I get high. You got anything other than hootch?'