Slow Birds: And Other Stories

by Ian Watson

  ‘All those who are here,’ Teresa Monsarrat echoed bitterly. ‘But your parents are never at our wedding now. They were at our very first wedding, when we were alive.’

  ‘We’ve gone over that. I’ve told you: either they belong elsewhere because they’re older … or just possibly I, uh, underestimated their feelings about mixed marriages.’

  ‘Which makes this your mother and father’s Hateful Day. So they’re in a different slice of time, a better one for them … What sort of afterlife is this, that separates kin?’

  ‘Maybe this is the only possible way to organize a Hereafter: slice by slice. You can’t crowd all the generations of Humanity who ever lived into the same region. It would be, well, over-populated. That’s what Carla – ’

  ‘Carla! Always Carla! The great TV pundit of other people’s books! Hasn’t it occurred to you, Dennis, that all these other people,’ and she waved from the car window in a queenly manner, ‘may simply be extras – and only we two are real? Maybe this is our own personal Heaven, which you’ll soon turn into Hell.’

  ‘Carla says – ’

  Teresa moaned.

  ‘Carla insists that she’s real, and all the others are real. They’re all subject to the same compulsion as we are to re-enact this one day, in full awareness. With a kind of intellectual free will, if you like. Although by now it’s become a very special day for them, it wasn’t when they were alive. It was just a day like any other. So she concludes that each time-slice has to be built around one person – or a few – for whom the day was extraordinary. These souls are a sort of seed crystal – a focus for the day.’

  Yet already the conifer-guarded drive of the Monkton House Hotel was upon them …

  ‘That’s us: partly because of what Kwame later became, but mainly because of the strength of our love, Tess. I’d never have made High Commissioner without you. I’d never have stuck it.’

  Relentlessly the chauffeur turned in through the gateway.

  Compulsion, thought Dennis, fingering the red rose in his buttonhole, Teresa by his side before the still uncut tiers of wedding cake.

  Or a blessing for evermore?

  Rising, he rested his hand upon Teresa’s hand as she stood to cut the cake; and the waitress bore it away to dismember it. Champagne popped off and fizzed into glasses.

  The wedding guests, as ever, were Jenny and Laurie and Kay, Colin and Barbara Seaford, Zsuzsanna Gilby who spelled her name pretentiously with a ‘z’, Melanie Alden with her Max, and Daniel Adebonojo, who possessed the only other black countenance. A small party, smaller than at the original wedding during their lifetimes, but these were the contemporary guests.

  And day by identical day these same familiar faces came first to St Anselm’s for the service, then to the reception – which was sometimes rowdy, sometimes almost silent.

  For necessity existed: the gentle urge to carry out the selfsame actions, by and large, ad infinitum. Gentle, unless resisted. And there was freedom, too: the licence to think and feel and speak one’s mind. Rather as actors in the thousandth performance of a play might think about other things, acting out a sub-drama of their own, and even – such being the nature of this drama – ad-libbing, improvising, and commenting on it, toward the same general outcome.

  The outcome, for Dennis and Teresa, being half a night of passion … until they woke up apart elsewhere in town, unmarried, back at the beginning of yet another rerun of their great day.

  But also here today, looking strained and tense – fighting to be here, rather than where her own inner imperative preferred her to be – sat Carla Rushworth, accepting a glass from the waiter and promptly draining it without waiting for Colin Seaford to propose the health of bride and groom.

  Duly Colin popped up to recite his piece.

  And Dennis rose to reply.

  ‘I …’ He swallowed; it was an effort not to comply. Teresa’s a long way from home,’ he managed to say. ‘It hurts a bit, being exiled for ever … I’m afraid it’ll hurt even more today. Because today is different.’ He tried to ignore the expression on Teresa’s face, as she guessed the drift of his little speech. Laurie and Kay, at least, were nodding encouragement.

  ‘As you see, Carla’s here. I’ve spoken to her several times before the service, I … we … she was in love with me once.’

  ‘Please!’ protested Zsuzsanna. ‘Have some pity! Try to think of Tess.’

  ‘I do. That’s the trouble: thinking. We have to think harder, about what we’re doing every day.’

  ‘But we all do, Dennis. Surely I’m not the only one. Every little action is becoming perfect, sacred. So is each blade of grass, and sip of champagne, and crumb of cake. It’s all as bright as an acid trip by now. Etched, luminous, radiant.’

  ‘Ah, but où sont les neiges d’antan?’ quoted Kay, in a brittle tone. ‘We see daffodils, but never snow. Nor chrysanthemums and autumn leaves. Nor rainbows and summer showers. Isn’t that all a little sad? And isn’t it sad never to see a lover again? Why can’t I be there by the sea with Alan, clambering over boulders, with the salt spray in our hair?’

  ‘I can remember perfectly well what a disaster that relationship was,’ said Zsuzsanna. ‘It simply didn’t work out for you two.’

  ‘But why can’t I have a day during the first year, when it was wonderful?’

  ‘Because, deep down, it was false – unlike Tess’s and Dennis’s marriage. How can you live a lie, for eternity?’

  All this while, the waiter and waitress had been refilling glasses discreetly and circulating with little plates of wedding cake; this done, they toasted each other and started to flirt, as though Dennis’s disruption of the proceedings had let them off the leash of their duties.

  Dennis glanced at his watch. Thirty minutes till Teresa must retire upstairs to change into her casual clothes; less than an hour till they would drive away together, to Harmouth by the sea, to spend their eternal first night in the Marine Parade Hotel. Until they fell asleep.

  ‘I want you all to listen to Carla,’ he said. ‘You too, Tess.’ Pityingly he touched her shoulder: white lace upon black skin. She shrugged his touch away.

  Carla looked sick. Not from champagne or cake – which she hadn’t touched – or from the Chicken Kiev preceding, which she had only nibbled at. She was sick with determination.

  ‘We’re all prisoners,’ she said, as firmly as she could. ‘Prisoners of a Bloomsday Situation. Let me tell you what that is …’

  Dennis’s head buzzed as he forced himself to listen clearly. By now the waiter and waitress were kissing and touching each other as if no one else were present to observe them. It seemed quite indecent to Dennis.

  ‘We’re all dead,’ he heard Carla say. ‘And don’t we remember it! Dennis and Teresa, heroic victims of that squalid little coup. Me, dead of a mere overdose. And every day we repeat the same slice of time – even though there must be thousands of other such slices, all separated out. One with Marco Polo in it, and another with Napoleon, and others with the dead from Ancient Rome and Egypt and human prehistory. Think of all the richness we’re robbed of! Think of all the days we’ll never know!’

  ‘And the horrors, too!’ broke in Zsuzsanna. ‘Do you really wish to be everywhere and everywhen? Would you really want to relive the whole of your own life? Suppose you’d been tortured, would you want that over again? Or been in a car crash or a war – or dying slowly of cancer? I should know. I spent two years doing that, and I didn’t take the easy way out, either. Not that there was anything wrong with you, Carla, but jaded boredom. I don’t, incidentally, remember the moment of my death. I was too drained and drugged, hardly a person any longer. As far as I’m concerned, this is an innocuous day. And maybe that’s why things are as they are. Maybe this is the greater compassion.’

  ‘No! All time should be ours. Surely that’s what eternity is. Not this … this endless celebration of one little day.’

  Teresa looked up sharply. ‘Oh, of course you wouldn’t wish to celeb
rate today!’

  Colin Seaford stuck his hand up. ‘You’d imagine it would get to be an awful bore, over and over again. But really, as Zsuzsanna says, it isn’t. There’s such a, well, sense of security; and of striving, yes, striving for a fine perfection.’ He coughed apologetically. ‘All this fuss you’re making, Miss Rushworth: it’s spoiling things. If this is eternity, I’m content. Eh, Barbara?’ However, his wife, fiddling with her glass, looked less sure. ‘We ought to get on with things. It’s … nasty, not getting on with things.’

  ‘I’m in exile, too,’ Daniel Adebonojo declared. ‘I’m homesick every day. You’re nice people, but you aren’t my people. Where are they all? There’s only Miss Openibo; and every day she’s taken away from me by Mr Monsarrat. If you see what I mean.’

  ‘“If this is eternity”?’ Carla echoed Colin Seaford’s words contemptuously. ‘But it isn’t. Eternity means the infinite. Yet everything about this afterlife of ours is so utterly finite. That’s why I say that this is a Bloomsday Situation. Joyce’s Ulysses is crammed with finite lists of every damn thing that existed on that single day. It’s full of loops of events: closed paths leading back to their own beginnings. It’s a time-prison. And I’m sure that Joyce is stuck in the original of his Bloomsday right now, because he conceived it so strongly and obsessively! Just as we’re stuck here.’

  Laurie laughed. ‘So God, or whatever, read Ulysses and said to Himself, “Wow, there’s my afterlife”?’

  ‘No, no … it’s such a strain fighting this damn compulsion. I don’t mean the fictional Bloomsday. I mean the real one, the original. Joyce is almost sure to be the seed crystal for 1904 because of all the psychic energy he poured into that concept, of a slice of frozen living time. Dennis and Teresa may very well be the seed crystals of our own particular Bloomsday. Or, at least, two of the crystals. We all know how important Kwame Openibo will be.’

  True,’ said Daniel. ‘So what are you proposing?’

  Teresa shifted nervously. ‘I have to get changed. Soon! I must. Or we’ll be late setting out. We mustn’t be late.’

  ‘I’ll tell you what I’m proposing: none other than the Bloomsday Revolution.’

  A strangled ‘What?’ from Zsuzsanna.

  ‘If this is the afterlife, I want a richer, bigger one. I want something evolving and changing and growing. We have to break out somehow. We have to cut our way through. And I’ll bet you that James Aloysius Joyce is saying the same thing right now, after his thousandth or millionth Bloomsday.’

  But at that moment Teresa rose and fled.

  ‘We’d better talk about this tomorrow,’ Dennis said. ‘We really do have to get on the move. Will you come to the reception again, Carla?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ she promised fiercely. ‘I’ll come.’

  So Dennis relaxed and let himself simply be a bridegroom once again. As though at a signal, the waiter and waitress disengaged from each other and began to collect the empty glasses.

  Thus once more Dennis and Teresa were wedded at St Anselm’s and chauffeured to their reception – following upon another first night of hymeneal rites in Harmouth where, to the lick and suck of waves on the sands, they had made desperate love to heal the breach of faith troubling her.

  At the reception Carla spoke up. From the corner of his eye Dennis noticed waiter and waitress begin, discreetly at first, to misbehave …

  And Zsuzsanna challenged Carla. ‘It’s all very well to want something bigger, and evolving. But what if all the evolving gets done while you’re alive? What if that’s the lot? Finis, finito!’

  ‘Maybe,’ suggested Laurie, ‘God, or whatever it is, records everything you are and stores it in Himself? Yes: on lots of floppy discs in His mind. And there’s only so much storage space on each disc – even though the storeroom extends forever. There are only so many pages in each book, though the library itself is infinite. Who’s to say that we’re able to break fresh ground, once we’re dead?

  ‘Though on the other hand,’ he went on, ‘if that’s so, then we couldn’t very well be holding this discussion, could we? We wouldn’t be aware of anything unusual. We’d just be repeating everything, word – and action-perfect.’

  ‘Ah, but people possess free will,’ Jenny pointed out. ‘If we lost that, we wouldn’t be the same people we were when we were alive.’

  ‘Do you call this freedom?’ Carla asked her bitterly. ‘Our acts are programmed.’

  ‘Now wait,’ said Colin Seaford, ‘That’s true most of the time during life, isn’t it? A lot of the time we aren’t actually really conscious. We’re just acting automatically, routinely. So we can’t be exercising all that much freedom. It seems to me that right now we’re being thrust towards a kind of perfect consciousness of every single second of one day. Eventually we’ll be truly aware, as we never were before. We’ll notice everything. Maybe, once we’ve mastered one day, another day will become available; then another.’

  ‘I notice that bird.’ Daniel Adebonojo gestured out of the French windows, to where a solitary, very early swallow swerved and banked above the lawns. Sadly he regarded it, as it jinked in figure-eight flight, for its eyes had recently beheld Nigeria; or so it seemed to Daniel. ‘I don’t suppose it minds doing the same thing over and over, day by day. That must be pure bliss for a bird. Oh to be a swallow! It’s birds’ Heaven. Angelic’

  Yet they were distracted from the vista outside by the conduct of waiter and waitress: the man unbuttoned the young woman’s blouse and fondled her breasts.

  ‘Is that what you mean by revolution?’ Colin Seaford demanded of Carla. ‘Disorderly conduct? Impishness?’

  ‘Maybe we ought to ask them!’ Carla strode from the table and confronted the pair. ‘Just what are you two playing at?’

  The waitress flushed. ‘I … you see, Miss, it’s the only time we have to ourselves. All the work we have to do, then we have to go our own ways: it isn’t right. We aren’t being wicked, Tony and me. It’s just the bloody frustration of it all! Oh yes, it’s nice doing all the right things at the right time, neatly. But only to snatch one kiss in the kitchen, when Tony and me had ever such a good time once … I’ve forgiven him for running off and leaving me with the kid.’

  Carla swung round. ‘This needn’t be how it is. It needn’t be!’

  And Teresa rose.

  ‘Wait,’ said Dennis. ‘How can we do anything, Carla? What can we do?’

  ‘I have to go,’ said his wife. The urge, the urge is in me.’

  ‘Just as a swallow has to migrate? And nest? And mate?’ Perhaps Carla did not intend to reduce Teresa’s status to that of a bird. Or perhaps she did.

  ‘We’ll talk about it tomorrow. Will you come to the reception again, Carla?’ Dennis hoped to ease his wife’s departure from the room, but his words had the opposite effect upon her, and she consequently left in tears.

  ‘We could try to stay awake all night long,’ proposed Daniel, soon after the obligatory champagne toast the next day. ‘That way we might break through into the next slice.’

  ‘And maybe,’ Colin said, ‘the next slice isn’t tomorrow at all, but a year away. Maybe the afterlife is only a sampling taken every now and then: a set of cross sections. Maybe tomorrow’s just an empty fog, and yesterday too; and it’s that emptiness that seals us off from other slices. A cordon sanitaire.’

  ‘If we’re going to escape the pattern,’ said Carla, ‘I suggest that Dennis and Teresa break the mould of their own actions.’

  ‘I knew it!’ Teresa slammed her hand down upon her plate and then stared numbly at the broken china.

  ‘For all our sakes,’ begged Carla.

  ‘Yes, but how?’ asked Dennis. His tone was cold; yet this coldness was perhaps only a mask for a restless excitement: a cramping suffocating excitement. Heart-attack territory, almost. Carla Rushworth was wild and beautiful today; and suffering anguish, besides.

  ‘Why is it your Bloomsday? Because you and Teresa got married. So next time – ’

 
; ‘No!’ With a wounded cry, Teresa launched herself from her seat; but Dennis held her – and the lace sleeve of her bridal gown tore.

  ‘ – do something else.’

  Struggling free of her husband, Teresa ripped the whole sleeve away, then balled it up and threw it at Carla. She wrenched the bodice of the gown, exposing her shoulders and the cleft of her breasts.

  ‘Here, take my wedding dress! Never fear: it’ll all be back in one piece by tomorrow. Since I have to get changed anyway, why not here? Why don’t I perform a striptease to complete my humiliation?’ She tore the fabric open to her waist. There’s just one thing, Miss Carla Rushworth: you’ll need to collect tomorrow’s dress from my flat. It won’t appear by any miracle in your wardrobe.’

  ‘Oh God,’ cried Dennis. He gripped Teresa’s wrists to stop her going any further. ‘Carla didn’t say that she and I should – ’

  ‘But she meant it, you fool! Don’t you understand anything? I have to get changed. Let me go!’

  ‘You’ve married him hundreds of times already, love,’ called the waitress. ‘Can’t the other woman have a go? You could take it turn by turn. It might make it more fun for the rest of us.’

  Zsuzsanna Gilby held her own head as though it ached. ‘The beauty’s gone away; it’s all being torn to shreds. I can’t stand it.’

  ‘Well, something’s got to give,’ declared Carla. ‘Eh, Dennis?’

  He stared helplessly about, still clutching his shuddering half-stripped wife.

  ‘Do it,’ urged Daniel suddenly.

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Barbara Seaford, to the consternation of Colin.

  ‘Do what? Marry Carla instead?’

  ‘Think of it as an experiment in freedom, man,’ said Daniel, encouragingly. ‘A blow, to bring the walls down.’ He smiled protectively at the betrayed bride.