The Grassling

by Elizabeth-jane Burnett

  As it stretches, it considers itself from above; what might this slow, still life in the ground mean to a buzzard, or passing drone? What if a scientist took its picture now, and uploaded it. Could they use an algorithm to analyse it, to see how it is changing to meet its environment, or how to maximize its growth? It thinks of older methods of land management, how they were gentler and more tied to natural processes. John’s father, farming near Dartmoor, ploughing with horses. Mulch in place of pesticides. Fields left to rest while the soil replenishes itself. But these have increasingly been replaced by the methodology of mining, even as this has become more aggressive, with powerful new technologies. And part of it wants to send this field study of a planted woman, resting in the earth, to an agricultural technology corporation to see what they would make of it. But the bigger part of it flinches at this surveillance, curls tighter, stays hidden.

  Now, the only sound through the rain is the lambs: a chorus of woollen bleating. Greenfinches dart above from branch to high branch before skipping off into air. Like mobile patches of grass, they gleam and spark. Wet light finds its way to the daffodils, shining them into the foreground. Their bent heads, glistened by rain, hang limp like muted trumpets. It is staggering how completely we forget the rain when the sun comes. Whilst in it, it is impossible to comprehend anything else. Then, greenfinches gabble in the apple tree as the Grassling basks in bright daffodils bells. It plucks some for its father, realizing a year has passed since its last gift of yellows.

  At the still hour of the stilling day, air freshens, sounds settle. Sky starts to blush; bleats blot the air. It uncurls and begins its evening inventory, checking all along the border. Badger, mushroom, stream, flower. Particular trees. The leaning tree, the knot of willow and birch, the fir trees. The fallen tree. It needs to check it’s all still there, like phoning home. Even in the wood, little pockets of trees form, huddle together, preferring each other’s company. Few stand completely alone. As the sky starts to slit with light, cuts of lemon in the lilac, the tree’s leaves darken and whole trees seem to slip into darkness, to be absorbed, or to absorb it.

  The trees at this hour seem to come into themselves, or out, out of their barks. To be speaking. As the birds end their sound, the trees take over, speaking through moving; extending their leaves, swaying, resting, rustling. And, with a last shuffle of lilac and leaf, it is dark. It returns to the inner circle and the trees seem to close in. Do they huddle, really – cuddle? It feels like they would accept it here. Given long enough, wrap willow around it, plait each other’s hair. It does not want to return to the domestic. It wants to stay and stay and savour each last thing. ‘Stay,’ they seem to say. ‘Stretch,’ they seem to say. ‘Shhhh sloe shhhh slow sOAK shhhh shhh will. ow. (stretch. sloe.) shhhhhhhhhhh.’ Throats soak in sap. And what conversations need to be had, except these? It won’t hear anything as fascinating as these trees.

  Something cuts through. A lick of flame as a fox pads across. Stops and sniffs. Does it smell the Grassling? It admires the regal point of its nose as it takes the air. Lifts its own nose to wind as the fox does. Wonders how its own body smells, swarming with sap and soil. Red ears prick against a backdrop of dark hills. Head pivots: left, right; missing the Grassling, before a full head-turn brings them face to face. They look into each other for five, ten, twenty seconds before the fox darts, disappearing into land’s edge. What passed between them? It thinks, a kind of softness.

  Then how does one pick oneself back up, out of the earth? Return to the inside of buildings, having been inside the soil? To people who do not pass on nutrients, but bloat and hoard and fence. It is harder to do these things out in the open. Out without fences. Out without borders. It is harder to hoard, lying flat and stretched on blossoming earth. But there are still neighbours and places not to cross. There are still natives and lives that are nothing like yours. There is still the awareness that your stretching may be crushing those living invisibly under you. And as the ducks fly over, always the last to call it a day, it wonders when the night residents will come. It wishes it could stay to find out. It wishes it could stay. Root. Take it all in over centuries.

  It stays. Flutters. A small scrunch. A mouse breath. Little beats of air. The briefest of contacts. It slips. As if into muslin: little pockets of air stitched tight; feeling itself splinter. There are breaks everywhere: tiny mouse-breaths, puncturing, rupturing. It feels strange to have a windpipe or lungs; such big bones, such large organs. Surely air comes in smaller than that. It becomes aware of its nostrils which seem about the right size. Perhaps it is a cluster of nostrils, flaring and shrinking; this seems more possible. Perhaps it is moss, and has no bones at all. This seems plausible. It waits for the mice to move over it. Little voles. Tiny paws. Hurried breathing. Mutters.

  Stars come. From everything very small, to everything enlarged. Now it is longer than bones, wider than lungs, linear. If it has arms, they are only for pointing; if it has joints, they are stars; if it has legs, they are for leaping onto the next and the next. What it was before this is so pitiable it can barely remember it. It doesn’t know how long it is a constellation or what brings it back. All it knows is returning, and walking once more along the grass, concerned once again with the moving over of ground.

  But though it moves, part of it remains. The animal that lay in the earth, a star at its heart, tissue between the arms of its star, is what it is now. Free to roam but tethered, long and lithe beneath the badgers. Interlocking with the trees, mycorrhizal. The wax and wane of friendship in the dark; the give and take of hidden hosts. Beating and shining through the field to where he lies, the root of itself pulls up, forever trying to reach him.

  32

  X Absent

  Swallows reel over, fizzing with early summer, as we wait. Summer is sooner each year, as seasons shuffle in the warming weather. When Nigel, the RSPB guide at West Town farm, arrives, the first birds he points out are house sparrows. He hears before he sees them. Looking up, we find a male singing from the eaves of a barn; higher still, out pops a female, without the black on the breast. There are about four couples in this area, he informs us, cocking his head in all four directions of sound. He talks about their habitat and eating preferences, breaking off now and then.

  ‘I keep losing its thread,’ he explains, ‘because I keep hearing things.’ As the walk progresses, this is what interests me most: how finely his hearing is attuned to the birds. ‘I hear a song thrush,’ he announces, though swallows and sparrows are the only birds in sight. ‘Too far,’ he mutters, before honing in instead on the collared doves that sit in the next field. ‘They like being around humans,’ he says, informing the group of their diet and how they like to eat the seeds off arable land.

  He takes out an audio device and starts playing the sound of swallow song. Immediately one swoops across from where it has been nesting, flying so low over us that we see its breast feathers gleam. I wonder about luring it in with the promise of a potential friend or lover when all we have to offer is bodiless digital sound, when it already has so many new stimuli to contend with. Rising temperatures have meant that birds have had to adjust, with a number of species migrating earlier and changing their breeding patterns. Yet, not every species responds in the same way. Birds waiting in Africa for the changes in day length that will trigger their migration may find themselves arriving too late to catch the species they rely on for food, who may have been warmed into action sooner in England. It is a bewildering time to be a bird.

  In the orchard we find a bright blue bird’s egg in the grass. Nigel asks us what bird has come from it. No one knows. He runs through the different sizes of eggs for different-sized birds, showing us what a pheasant’s egg looks like, a wood pigeon’s. This, it transpires, is a song thrush’s. ‘Can you hear it?’ he asks, but kindly, as if he knows it’s beyond our human-tuned ears. ‘It’s at the top of the hill.’ We pass through some scrubby woodland by the side of the old railway line, Nigel whispering ‘goldcrest’ to him
self. ‘I think it’s further off, in that conifer,’ he gestures to a tree, some distance away; it seems impossible that he could know what’s in it. We wait while he plays his audio, and a tiny speck of bird floats down to a nearby branch. All eyes follow, landing on its golden head. ‘It’s my favourite bird,’ a woman next to me breathes, pointing at a brooch on her lapel of a goldcrest. ‘They tend to like conifers,’ Nigel says, revealing how he had known where it would be.

  Out into the open fields, filled with tall grass, we see swifts high in the air. Nigel explains how they live almost entirely on the wing, eating and sleeping as they go. They come from the Congo, he says.

  ‘We’ve only recently learned new information about their route. We knew they came from the Congo, but now it seems they also go via Mozambique.’

  ‘Why not just stay there?’ Goldcrest woman asks.

  And my mind drifts across the continents to Swahili, one of the languages of my mother. In Swahili there is no letter X. The sounds that this letter makes are entirely absent from the language. I think of the vocal alignments that exist because of this absence, that wouldn’t be there with this other letter’s presence. Sometimes, to hear one thing we must block out another. I think of the yellow focus that had brought my father daffodils and the spectrum colours of all his flowers since.

  During the focus on birdsong, human sound diminishes, speech stalls. When conversation returns, it has moved on to consideration of how long birds live, with three or four years being the most common lifespan, if they make it past the perilous first year.

  ‘But swifts average a few years longer,’ Nigel says. We watch these long-living, sky-loving creatures float, just too far from us to be fully assimilated into knowing. Then, standing in the tall grass, Nigel pins his ears back. ‘House martins,’ he mutters, just as a group roams into view, circling over like little clouds. ‘I’m just hearing wrens here,’ he says, ears still pinned back, ‘and a chaffinch over there – hear that single note? And, quite far off, a blackbird.’ He moves through the grass, barely audible, ‘I would have expected to hear skylarks.’ A moment later he whispers, ‘Hearing is the start of seeing.’

  He tells us how Devon fields are good for attracting a variety of birds because they are often small, with mixed-enterprise usage.

  ‘See that winter wheat,’ he points up the hill, to the next farm. ‘In areas like East Anglia you get field after field of that. Good for some species, but not others.’ As we gaze over to the rippling green, his ears go back again. ‘I’m hearing a distant skylark.’ We wait. ‘It will have nested over in that wheat,’ he says. ‘They nest in the tractor tracks but what’s so threatening to them now is the timing of the agricultural processes. They need a solid two weeks for the eggs to be in the nest and a solid two weeks for the young to be in the nest. But if the tractors come back before that time, well then …’ We all process the significance of tractor wheels over skylark nests. ‘Being in the tracks like that, they’re also prey to badgers, hedgehogs, foxes; anything that moves along the lines.’

  A buzzard hovers into view.

  ‘Would a buzzard eat a skylark?’ someone asks.

  ‘No, it would be too slow to catch it.’ Relief is palpable through the group.

  Back home, my legs and ankles throb. I think of the long grass we’d walked through and wonder if I’ve been bitten. My legs start to feel hollow, of unequal length. I feel them close over at the knees, at the pelvis; sense my joints more keenly, the body branching out in directions over which I have no control. I have felt what it is for stems to grow, low along and underground. But now they lift as they build, forcing the torso upwards. Parts of me spread wide: limbs scurrying under grass; others narrow: the straightening spine. Light moves up and down the luminous shift of the body.

  As I enter my father’s room, the light continues. There is far more than one small window can channel. It seems as though there were nothing but light, with little obstacles here and there, tiny objects. And in the light, sound carries like twigs of driftwood, bobbing up and down before lining up into speech.

  ‘How was West Town?’ he asks.

  ‘OK.’ When I had told him earlier where I was going, he’d said, ‘What, to see a few sparrows?’ which, of course, had been the first birds Nigel had shown us.

  ‘I think it’s a waste of time, this writing, isn’t it?’ he continues, getting right to the source of things as usual. I explain that it’s not just History (which seems to be his main objection – ‘History’s dead!’ he’s assured me several times) but also Creative Writing: nature writing. I say that this has become a popular genre and he seems easier. We return to talk of birds: the magpie that nests in the chimney; the blackbird that flew straight into his room.

  ‘It sings just here, below the window,’ he says. ‘There are so many of them.’

  ‘It’s a lovely sound,’ I say. And, as if on cue, its distant ripple lilts through the room. I wonder how far off it is, and guess the hedge below. I long for ears as well tuned as Nigel’s, that could probably stretch to the blackbirds that live out towards the copse, and wonder what it must be to live so fully in sound like that, so clearly hearing the notes that to others stay hidden.

  ‘I suppose you get to know all the birds around here,’ I say.

  ‘Yes. Blackbirds are best, I think.’

  ‘I agree.’ We listen for a few more moments to the turn and tumble of its trills and I wonder whether Nigel can ever turn it off, this hidden language, or if the thread that he keeps losing ever snaps.

  33

  Xylophone

  The first sounds are false starts. It strains its chords as no note comes. It is not used to this part of its mouth. It cocks its head. Though it is practised in listening, sound-making is a newer art. It tries again. Using the full arc of its mouth, its lips pull further apart than they have ever been. Its cheeks fill and fall, fill and fall, as the air pushes up from its throat. It is the very front of the mouth where sound gets syrupy. It has to forget what it has learned about using the stomach, the diaphragm, the full blast of the lungs. This sound comes from under the lips, from pinching the nose. It helps to smile.

  Air hits the back of its teeth, its tongue becomes a hammer, its teeth a xylophone. Its cheeks inflate, hoarding sound like a squirrel. Tongue against teeth triggers a vibration. In xylophones, the shorter the bar that is struck, the higher the pitch. For a while it is a blackbird. Trill-la-la-lickwrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrTrill-lilla liiiiirrwrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrwurrwurrtrickalickalickweowchipchipTrala-lilla. Then it pulls in its torso, thinning the sound, and is a robin. It pictures all its notes pinched in the middle. But it is the wren that seems most like itself. One trill into another at a speed too fast for the equipment in its mouth. But it tries: trptrptrptrptrptrpprrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrprrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrtsweetsweeesweesweesweesweeeeeecrrrrrrrrrrrtsweetsweeesweesweecrrrrrrrrrrrrr up and down in pitch as though hanging from a swing. This is the kind of sound that is somewhere inside it. That shuttles up and down its vein. It recognizes the pulse and tremor of it. It knows it has it in it.

  And it has felt it before, this speeding sound. Back in the winter, when its blades had beaten like wings and its arms became strings as it had practised falling. It had heard it then, rising from the ground in solicitude: shouldwecatchitshouldweholdit. The wind had filled its bones, moving up and down the spaces of the body, pooling at the joints, sounding at the nodes. And the sound had filled with fir and moss, eucalyptus and snowdrop; pushed up from, and along into, grass. When the grass had spoken, it had felt the words land inside itself; sound-maker and receiver wondering what to make of each other.

  Even before that, it had felt sound like this, lifting up from the soil. Curious, inquisitive, trying to work it out: isithollowisitrungisitgrassorwomanisitoneofussprungfromusorwhoisitwhatisit. Though this was less like the touch of the air, over string or blade or bar, and more the taste of it changing, like the flavoure
d flurry of a chemical reaction. Here the earth had laid open, and as the grass had spoken it had lifted up a soil singing with worms. Carrying their signals with it, the grass’s tinkling sound had drifted over. It, too, was a familiar sound.

  But to be sure of its own sound, it tries on some other voices. The pigeon is too airy; it feels ridiculous as it huffs and puffs the sound through. While the pigeon inflates its chest, the Grassling uses the back of its neck, the whole channel of its culm; air gushing and wafting through the hole. What is it trying to say? There’s no depth to it. The deep lowing of the cow from the next field is more substantial. This comes from the stomach and the bubble of the mouth, air taking up the whole head, which is frowning and limp. Sound pulls up from the pit, lolling around the head before tolling. Then it is a tractor. There is something soothing in the low sustained note, something freeing in the volume. But it can’t quite get the tinny artificiality, the pang of notes hitting metal.

  Then there is a fight in the hedge, it is all at the front of the mouth: peeppippypeeppippypippippip peeppippypeeppippypippippipppp. Sparrows defending each branch. Here, the hammer on the bar is fast, the tongue on the back of the teeth unleashed with the furious swing of a gnat’s wing. There does not seem enough time to match sound with touch and the voice inside it starts to rock with the thrill of it, recognizes the raucous spill of it. It wonders about the gnats, endlessly circling. It strains to hear and must get near. With its ear against them they bustle towards it, so their sound is ticklish, quick and lilting. Tseetsisstsisstsisstsisstsisstsiss tseetsisstsisstsisstsisstsisstsiss tseeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee. The voice inside it is a little like this.

  Then a gruff ruhhfff of a bark draws attention. It does not want to use a voice that way – roughly, pulling coarse against the chest like a knife up to the throat. Or too crudely. ARRGRRRRR ARRR ARRR ARRRR. The crow doesn’t care who hears it. The fuss it makes. Leaning in with all its body, ruffling the whole length of it to make its point which puffs and paws the air it caws. The voice inside it is not like that. There are things to be said, but the whole field doesn’t have to hear them. Or perhaps the whole field does hear them. And it feels, then, overwhelmingly, that that is exactly what a field is: millions of throats like this, millions of passages; channelling air and water and movement and things constantly touching and coming apart; it is all this, every blade of it.