Slow Birds: And Other Stories

by Ian Watson

  ‘What a fine experiment it’ll be, indeed!’ shouted Teresa. ‘Why should they even bother driving to Harmouth? Don’t they have bedrooms in this hotel? We could all troop upstairs and watch. Just in case something interesting happens.’

  ‘If you desperately don’t want it to happen,’ said Barbara, ‘maybe that will be a fierce enough wedge? Passion, jealousy: what powerhouses those are. Can’t you be brave, Tess? Dennis isn’t really betraying you. It’s for all of us: for all your friends.’

  ‘It’s monstrous,’ said her husband. ‘Though on the other hand … Are you sure, Babs?’

  His wife nodded. ‘Tomorrow Carla will stand in for Teresa. They can swap their clothes in one of the cars, before the service.’

  ‘But won’t our dear vicar wonder how the bride has happened to change the colour of her skin?’

  ‘Not if no one else complains. Him? He’ll think he has bats in his belfry. Or maybe he’ll believe it’s a miracle.’

  ‘I wasn’t exactly – ‘ began Carla tentatively.

  ‘Come on, love,’ Barbara egged her on, ‘you’ve made your bed now, and you’re bloody well going to lie in it. Tomorrow’s your Bloomsday. So let’s see you do any better!’

  As the peal of bells faded behind the Rolls Royce on another azure, cloud-puff, daffodil day, Carla Monsarrat (née Rushworth) laughed with joy.

  ‘We did it. What an awful strain it was at first: didn’t you think so, Dennis dear? But what a weight lifted as soon as that old dodderer said the magic words. “Whom God hath joined,” eh? Irrevocable!’

  Dennis acknowledged that he had felt the same; though amidst such a welter of other emotions as well – which would have been even more tumultuous had Teresa been sitting in the tiny congregation. But Jenny had stayed outside with her; and had so well soothed her by the time the newlyweds emerged into sunlight that she had even thrown, lamely, some confetti.

  ‘So we’ve crossed our Rubicon.’ He breathed deeply. ‘Or is it the River Liffey?’ (Now they were passing the Alexandra Hospital, where shamelessly as usual the daffodil beds bloomed …)

  Carla patted his hand. ‘Husband mine,’ she murmured. ‘Sufficient unto the day?’ Mockingly, it seemed, she patted the lace lap of her pristine wedding gown. The reception today was a muted affair, with Zsuzsanna and Jenny comforting Teresa in a suffocating way.

  And in their bedroom, later:

  ‘Should we, Carla?’

  ‘We’re married, aren’t we? Oh, my bashful bridegroom, didn’t you yearn to, achingly, about two years ago?’

  ‘Ah, two years …’

  ‘And many marriages ago. We must act married, Dennis dear, you know. We have to heap that one last straw upon the camel’s back. Do you need me to seduce you, so that you can feel absolved of guilt?’ And Carla began to undress.

  ‘At least,’ he joked feebly, as he watched her, ‘I suppose I won’t have to deflower you.’

  She flushed. ‘That’s quite uncalled for. And you know it. Still, if you’d prefer a little preliminary quarrel, for us to make up, to add some spice and pepper and sincerity? Is that how you use sex: to make amends? Amends to Teresa, for instance, because she’s black … Do you really need a sanctimonious excuse for passion?’ Carla, tossing her curly auburn hair, crooked her finger. ‘Come here, Dennis. Be mine.’

  He obeyed.

  A herring gull screaming against the window woke them raucously to morning light, in a bedroom spartan and antique.

  An aspidistra commanded jadedly the windowsill: a pot of weed in an aquarium tank. For washing the sleep from one’s eyes there was a china ewer and bowl upon a chest of drawers. From beneath the bed peeped a chamber pot. A print hung over the bed: an engraved crucifixion, nails and thorns and kneeling Mary. Ora Pro Nobis. Above a small firegrate, crucible of chilly ashes, the mantel shelf bore by way of ornament a heavy green glass paperweight or door stop – crocus blossoms of blown air within, amidst tiny stray bubbles – and also a china windmill egg-timer; in the test tube of the lower sail the sands of time were slumped to everlasting six o’clock.

  However, Dennis’s digital watch, lying on top of his casually piled clothes, recorded 0750. Stumbling out of bed and clutching a shirt to his nakedness, he hurried to the window and saw, first of all, the sea. With, half to one mile away, the crooked arm of a pier from bandstand to distant lighthouse sheltering a steamer, smoke pluming softly upward, slipping slowly forward.

  But no such harbour, in spite of its name, existed at Harmouth. Nor had they gone to bed in such a room as this, beneath the image of the virgin Mary, mocking her passion by consummating theirs.

  A moment more, and he glanced around the fronds of aspidistra. A few hundred yards away, past a detached dwelling house or so, a hump of bare cliffy land abutted on a slack green ocean: thalassic canvas painted darker by stray cloud shadows.

  ‘Tess, come and see!’

  ‘Do try to remember who I am.’ Gathering up her skirt, Carla slipped tan-bodied, white-breasted, to his side.

  They dressed quickly and crept quietly downstairs, avoiding a brush with the mistress of the house or any of her tribe, pausing only briefly by a calendar hanging in the hallway: some tea merchant’s gift, the sheets torn off up to September, 1904.

  Minutes later, they were both hurrying down the stony pathway towards the point with its stout granite Martello Tower. Upon the parapet a shaving bowl glinted, and a hand mirror semaphored the morning sunshine, from the hand of a fellow who was bantering with another young man – tall, attired in cloth cap, stiff white collar and waistcoat – who was squinting morosely out over the bay as the mailboat cleared the piers.

  ‘You said June 16th,’ panted Dennis. ‘But that calendar – ’

  ‘He wasn’t really here in June. He was here later on in the year, for just a few days.’

  ‘It is him, isn’t it?’

  ‘By the looks of it.’

  ‘Remember how the Count of Monte Cristo burrowed through the walls of his prison, only to break through into another cell? Is that all we’ve done?’

  ‘At least it’s a first step! A change of scene.’

  ‘But how do I get back to my wife?’

  ‘I’m your wife, Dennis darling. We got married yesterday. Till death …’

  ‘But death can’t part us.’

  ‘Not when we’re beastly dead already.’

  They halted under the walls of the tower. Carla called up, ‘Joyce! James Joyce! Is that you?’

  And a face peered over, to inspect them casually. ‘What do you want, then?’

  ‘We’re exiles,’ shouted Carla. ‘Dead exiles, in eternity. Like you.’

  ‘Oh, I’m not exiled, evermore.’ Joyce grimaced. ‘Damn it!’ And he gripped the jagged solidity of the masonry.

  ‘Could we discuss something, Mr Joyce?’

  ‘And what would that be?’

  Carla patted her skirt, which fell barely to her knees. ‘From the cut of our clothes, I think you can guess.’

  ‘Why don’t you come up? Eggs are frying. We can always crack another couple. There’s a loaf and honey. Though the milkwoman’s late. As always. And as always she arrives in time, with her Sandycove milk to save us. For ever and ever.’

  He vanished from the parapet; soon a key scraped in the iron door below. This opened heavily, releasing a haze of coalsmoke and fried grease fumes. At the head of the ladder, legs apart, trousers baggy, stood Joyce; frowning, he beckoned them up.

  ‘So: you’re welcome to the omphalos, the navel of dead time.’

  ‘Oh, there are other navels besides this one,’ Carla assured him, mounting the rungs.

  Joyce nodded, handing her up. ‘As I see. One other, anyhow. It’s something to know I’m not alone here, in some unbelievable condescending hell.’

  ‘I’m sure there are thousands of other such days. Single-day slices. Dennis, show Mr Joyce your watch.’

  ‘My watch? Why? Oh, yes …’ Gaining the top, Dennis displayed his microchip timepiece to
Joyce, who peered at it intently, with the scrutiny of a lapidary, and touched the tiny control buttons.

  ‘It appears,’ Joyce said wryly, ‘to be time for breakfast.’ And led them inside into a large domed gloomy room, where one young man in a tennis shirt loitered elegantly, while the one who had been shaving wrestled with fry in a pan, and glowered at the newcomers.

  ‘O jay, what’s this?’ he protested. ‘Am I running a restaurant?’ He transferred his attention to admiring Carla’s bare shanks.

  ‘Don’t mind Gogarty,’ said Joyce. ‘He never quite forgave me – ’

  ‘For being Buck Mulligan in Ulysses!’ exclaimed Carla in delight, advancing.

  Gogarty restored his scrutiny to the pan. ‘I’ll want a few pints in me, before we can go into all that. Immortality’s one thing – but this gets a bit steep. Eating the same bloody egg every morning: it’s worse than Communion. Or the Miracle of the Loaves. Oh, cyclical theory of mystery! And speaking of loaves,’ he addressed the man in the tennis shirt, ‘hack us a few more slices, will you, Trench?’

  Breakfast was soon devoured – with the milkwoman arriving at their iron door with ewer and measure, and words of praise to the glory of God and for the goodness flowing from the udders, in the very nick to rescue them from the rigours of Gogarty’s wine-dark tea; after which Gogarty and the English Erinophile, Trench, departed with towels for the bathing place down at the cliff base – Joyce, with inner struggle, steeling himself not to quit the tower in their company, a refusal in which he was ably assisted by Gogarty pausing on the threshold to deliver an impromptu wicked limerick:

  ‘There was a dead writer called Joyce

  Of all time and space he made choice;

  A Martello Tower

  Became his true bower,

  So with his own petard was hoist.’

  ‘Even so,’ said Joyce, after the two men had gone on their way, ‘I shall have to be setting out soon.’

  ‘On your Odyssey, yes. But with us,’ said Carla.

  ‘If you like to. And I don’t suppose you have any pounds, shillings and pence of this particular realm with you, do you now?’ In his great loose trouser Joyce jingled change.

  ‘You can break this pattern, you know. We did.’ Carla had already explained how, over egg, bread and tea. ‘You can slip through into another slice of time.’

  ‘And leave my Nora here all alone, while I run off with another man and woman?’

  ‘It’s for the sake of the Bloomsday Revolution,’ said Carla hotly, ‘as named in your honour.’

  ‘An infamous honour, maybe, just like the fame of the Wandering Jew? I don’t mean Bloom, but Ahasuerus …’ Having pulled his chained watch from its fob, Joyce consulted it. ‘It seems to me that the pair of you only arrived here, rather than anywhere else, because you yourselves chose such a name.’

  ‘That’s true!’ exclaimed Dennis. ‘Carla, you chose the name because you were brooding on Joyce. So here we came. But what if you’d called this the Madeleine Revolution instead? Wouldn’t we then both be calling on Marcel Proust and reliving one day of the recherche du temps perdu – back in that slice of his youth to which the taste of Madeleine cake had led him? Because Proust’s probably another “crystallizer” of a different slice of time: some time in the 1880s or so.’

  ‘And maybe Gogarty wasn’t so far out with his little jingle, after all …’ Restlessly, Joyce paced.

  Noting this sign of imminent departure – to be about his daily business – Carla pressed Joyce. ‘What would be on your mind, then? Who would be?’

  ‘Why, Nora. And Italy.’

  ‘Do you remember how you wrote, in The Dead, “They escaped from their lives and duties, escaped from homes and friends, and ran away with wild and radiant hearts to a new adventure”? That was surely written about yourself and Nora Barnacle – who stuck to you like a limpet … But equally: what other people, in other times, are on your mind?’

  Brooding, Joyce paused. ‘Oh, Vico. Giordano Bruno …’

  ‘Hang on a bit,’ said Dennis. ‘Wasn’t Giordano Bruno burnt at the stake by the Inquisition?’

  ‘By the scrupulous Holy Office, yes. In 1600, a fine round number.’ And Joyce recited:

  ‘Chi le catene ruppe e quelle porte,

  onde rari son sciolti ed escon fore?

  Who’ll burst those gates and break the chains?

  For rare’s the man, who freedom gains.’

  ‘Yes, but we don’t speak Italian,’ Dennis said.

  ‘I do.’ Carla held thumb and index finger a little apart. ‘Così. Poco?

  ‘But think of the Inquisition! Just imagine a slice of time with inquisitors rampant, still burning out heresy. That’s a dangerous place to think of.’

  ‘Dennis dear, these slices are perfect days, not nasty ones. Or at least they’re innocuous. As Zsuzsanna said, maybe there’s a compasison in all this.’

  ‘So today is perfect, is that what it is?’ Biliously Joyce eyed the door left ajar by departing, limerick-dispensing Gogarty. With its massive iron key protruding, it now more resembled a dungeon door in some devout Dominican’s stronghold. He shrugged. ‘Well, if I can’t go to Pola, then maybe Nola?’

  ‘Eh?’ said Dennis.

  ‘He was going,’ Carla explained, ‘to teach in the Berlitz School in Pola on the Adriatic. And Nola is where Giambattista Vico, his favourite philosopher, hailed from.’

  ‘But how do I go there? By abandoning Nora? Or by running to a priest to kneel and profess faith, at last, and confess my sins? That, I fear, would take all day …

  ‘Still,’ and he brightened, ‘we do have all day to find out, don’t we? All day again and again. All moanday, tearsday, wailsday in one. A paring from the fingernail of time. And isn’t history the nightmare from which we’re all dying to awake? Though to what else? So yes I say, yes I will. Yes.’

  And out of the domed stronghold, pushing the door, he stepped into the brightness of the sun.

  They all descended the ladder. Diminished, a seal’s head already was bobbing sleekly in green water: Gogarty’s, to which Joyce raised a hand in farewell, unseen.

  Soon Carla and Dennis Monsarrat and James Joyce were walking swiftly up the path on the first course of that day’s ever returning Odyssey, to cover the half mile to Sandycove Station; thus into Dublin itself, to search out some portal of discovery: upon places beyond and times before. Or at the very least to find a pint of porter in a pub.

  If you've enjoyed this book and would like to read more great SF, you'll find literally thousands of classic Science Fiction & Fantasy titles through the SF Gateway.

  For the new home of Science Fiction & Fantasy …

  For the most comprehensive collection of classic SF on the internet …

  Visit the SF Gateway.

  www.sfgateway.com

  Also by Ian Watson

  Novels

  Under Heaven's Bridge (1981) (with Michael Bishop)

  Black Current

  1. The Book of the River (1984)

  2. The Book of the Stars (1984)

  3. The Book of Being (1985)

  Mana

  1. Lucky's Harvest (1993)

  2. The Fallen Moon (1994)

  Other Novels

  The Embedding (1973)

  The Jonah Kit (1975)

  Orgasmachine (2010)

  The Martian Inca (1977)

  Alien Embassy (1977, 2006)

  Miracle Visitors (1978)

  God's World (1979)

  The Gardens of Delight (1980, 2007)

  Deathhunter (1981)

  Chekhov's Journey (1983)

  Converts (1984)

  Queenmagic, Kingmagic (1986, 2009)

  The Power (1987)

  The Fire Worm (1988)

  Whores of Babylon (1988, 2004)

  Meat (1988)

  The Flies of Memory (1990)

  Hard Questions (1996)

  Oracle (1997)

  Mockymen (2000, 2004)

  Collections<
br />
  The Very Slow Time Machine (1979)

  Sunstroke: And Other Stories (1982)

  Slow Birds: And Other Stories (1985)

  Evil Water: And Other Stories (1987)

  Salvage Rites: And Other Stories (1989)

  Stalin's Teardrops: And Other Stories (1991)

  The Coming of Vertumnus: And Other Stories (1994)

  The Great Escape (2002)

  The Butterflies of Memory (2005)

  The Beloved of My Beloved (2009) (and Roberto Quaglia)

  The Book of Ian Watson (1985)

  Ian Watson (1943 – )

  Ian Watson was born in England in 1943 and graduated from Balliol College, Oxford, with a first class Honours degree in English Literature. He lectured in English in Tanzania (1965-1967) and Tokyo (1967-1970) before beginning to publish SF with "Roof Garden Under Saturn" for the influential New Worlds magazine in 1969. He became a full-time writer in 1976, following the success of his debut novel The Embedding. His work has been frequently shortlisted for the Hugo and Nebula Awards and he has won the BSFA Award twice. From 1990 to 1991 he worked full-time with Stanley Kubrick on story development for the movie A.I. Artificial Intelligence, directed after Kubrick's death by Steven Spielberg; for which he is acknowledged in the credits for Screen Story. Ian Watson lives in Northamptonshire, England.

  Copyright

  A Gollancz eBook

  Copyright © Ian Watson 1985

  All rights reserved.

  The right of Ian Watson to be identified as the author

  of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the

  Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  This eBook first published in Great Britain in 2011 by

  Gollancz

  The Orion Publishing Group Ltd

  Orion House

  5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane

  London, WC2H 9EA

  An Hachette UK Company

  A CIP catalogue record for this book

  is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 978 0 575 11477 7