Bird Inside

by Wendy Perriam

  He had asked her where she lived, in fact, and she’d had to lie, think quickly, had blurted out the name of a small village several miles away.

  ‘That’s not far from my studio. I can drop you at your door, but we’d better stop and check my roof first. There’s a rather dodgy patch right bang in the middle, which might well have sprung a leak.’

  She skewed round to the window, as if to turn her back on him, at least symbolically. This was the second stranger she had met in just one night, landed in a car with. Could she trust him any more than that oily chuckling foreigner who’d tried to lure her up the steps of his hotel? At least it was now daylight and they had no language barrier, and anyway she longed to see his studio, felt important and excited to be conversing with an artist, one who sounded famous, who had even written books, given public lectures, made a gigantic modern window for a new church in Los Angeles when he was only in his twenties. She needn’t stay for long, just a lightning tour of everything, then scat. He’d be bored with her, in any case, if she tried to hang around, must be used to cultured people who could talk his language, ask the right deep questions.

  He had turned off the main road, along a narrow winding track, so thick with leaves and branches the car crunched and crackled over them, complaining sometimes, shuddering, throwing up cascades of mud from treacherous hidden puddles. She felt worried for the car, now smirched with mud and grime, but extremely tidy inside; the shelf beneath the glove-compartment neatly stacked with map-books, the back shelf clear and clean, a car-rug folded four-square on the leather seat behind her. It could have been her father’s fussy Ford, except the make was very different; one she didn’t recognise, with a long body, lowish snout, and walnut panelling inside, instead of fake-grained plastic. She’d have thought a stained-glass artist would have driven something workmanlike – an estate car or a van, and that she’d have been sitting in a cluttered mess, with tools and things around her.

  ‘No wonder Saint Christopher was demoted,’ his namesake muttered grimly as they passed a Ford Fiesta crippled in the ditch, one door hanging open, a child’s blue-patterned sweater trailing in the mud. ‘He’s meant to be the patron saint of travellers. Or perhaps he was just overstretched last night.’

  Jane shut her eyes, so she needn’t see the sweater, or that pathetic piece of knitting still anchored to its needles, but flung into the ditch. ‘Why was he demoted?’

  The artist shrugged. ‘A mistake, in my opinion. We lost Saint George as well. Just the Church trying to be rational, whereas the whole point of religion is its appeal to the irrational. In medieval times, Messrs Christopher and George were both in the Top Twenty, both included in the list of ‘Holy Helpers’, who were rather like our wonder-drugs – a group of fourteen saints famous for their potency in serious diseases, and probably far less dangerous than modern chemicals.’ He rummaged for a cigarette, lit it from a lighter concealed in the front panel. ‘I wouldn’t mind betting that people owe a damn sight more to Christopher than they do to penicillin. He’s reputed to have cured everything from snake bite to the plague. Most medieval churches had a picture of him right opposite the door, so that everyone who entered would be protected from fire, water, tempest, plague and sudden death. Perhaps I ought to have him in my studio, instead of calling in a builder for the roof. Hey, you’d better keep your fingers crossed. We’re here.’

  She crossed them superstitiously, looked out at what appeared to be a large deserted barn, divorced from other buildings or a farmhouse; its strong walls stoutly boarded, its old roof furred with moss. The narrow tree-lined road had opened out to a vista of bare fields, combed in neat brown furrows, the pale sky vast beyond them, its curdled clouds glinting where the sun was breaking through. The dawn light had been grudging up till now. Both trees and town had hemmed her in, the car itself had blinkered and restricted her. She struggled with the door, couldn’t find the handle, wound the window down instead, gulped lungfuls of sheer space, breathed in light and air, inhaled the cold November smell of raw morning and ripe leaves. The artist slammed his own door, didn’t help her out, started exclaiming at the tide of debris blown in by the storm, which fringed the barn like some untidy garden planted randomly with empty cans and boxes, dirty tattered papers, plastic bottles, a mauled and bloody bird. ‘Okay?’ he called, not looking back, but picking his slow way between the litter.

  She nodded, clambered out at last, wincing at the shock of cold which stabbed right through her clothes, contrasted with the stale fug of the car. She turned up her coat collar, ran to catch him up, stumbling on a plank of wood spiked with rusty nails.

  ‘Careful, or you’ll break your neck. Hell! It’ll take me half a day to clear this shambles. The roof looks fine from here, but God knows what it’s like inside. Come in.’

  She couldn’t see at all at first. He was standing in the way. Then he moved, dived sidewards, and the huge dramatic window which filled one end of the barn suddenly jolted into view, colours shouting at her – blazing scarlet, smouldering purple, fierce electric blue, yellow like a dandelion, so sharp it set her teeth on edge. She moved a few steps nearer, still reeling from its impact, realised she was looking at three panels of stained glass – tall explosive panels which magnetised the room, drew the eye towards them, almost bludgeoned it with colour. The reds were dominant, rowdy restless reds in what she’d thought were abstract shapes, until they suddenly transmuted into birds – birds flying at her, spiralling, swooping, plunging down. She had never seen such creatures, some ferocious bloody species with jagged wings, cruel talons; other smaller tawny birds flapping up beneath them from a tangled overgrowth. The panel on the right was not yet quite complete, and the trees outside were showing through the gaps, their bronzed and yellowed foliage jumbling all the images, adding still more rich confusion.

  She kept staring, mesmerised. One bird’s elongated head thrust right across the panel, like a spear or a javelin, flung into mid-air. Another’s neck was bent back on itself, in such a tortured posture she almost felt its pain. The sky was represented by scraps and shards of blue; not a tranquil summer sky, but a threatening one, crisscrossed with black lines. Her eyes were hurting from the clash of violent purples, the grind of red on blue. She turned away, saw more birds: drawings, paintings, sketches, tacked all round the walls. Some she recognised – eagles, falcons, herons, doves – others were fantastic, birds from myth or nightmare; many daubed with colour, a few just whirling lines.

  She longed to make some comment, find words intense and keen enough for the boldness of the glass, but the only ones which came to her seemed timid and subdued. ‘It’s … it’s huge,’ she mumbled lamely, as she gazed up at the roof-beams, aware that she was copping out by shifting her attention to the lofty room itself. When he had talked about his studio, she’d imagined somewhere poky, an attic or a garret, not this hangar of a building, whose steep-pitched gabled roof made it look another church.

  ‘It needs to be when you’re working on this scale.’ Christopher was prowling round the room, looking out for breakages or leaks, though she couldn’t see a trace of any damage. ‘The larger the better, so you can get as much glass as possible up against the light. My first studio was tiddly – well, just a room at home, in fact. I found it so frustrating. It was rather like working in a coal cellar. You could only see a fraction of the window at any one time.’

  She had assumed he made the windows in the church itself, felt a total ignoramus, longed to ask a tidal wave of questions, but was scared they’d sound so basic he would dismiss her as a fool. She moved into a swatch of sun, the dull blue of her winter coat immediately lightening into summer. Even so, she felt lumpen in comparison with the blaze and slam of colour which had drawn her back again. She stood closer to the window now, crouching down, then peering up, to try to scan it all; aware of greater detail in the panels – some sections streaked and variegated with amazing marbled mottlings like wine-stains, sunbursts, tortoiseshell, or the rainbow bloom on pigeons’ breasts or
puddles. She pulled her coat off, threw it on a chair, felt hot from flaming scarlets, drunk on claret reds. How could glass be so transformed from the boring stuff of window-panes or milk bottles?

  There was more glass in the wooden racks which ran down one long wall, and were divided into sections, each labelled with its colour and graded into sizes – sheets and stacks and slabs of glass, but which all looked dour and dead. Could it be the same glass as that glowing in his panels? How had he transformed it, made it come alive? The labels on the racks didn’t seem to match their contents – the glass-sheets dull and dusty, sometimes broken pieces, or just motley strips and scraps; the names themselves poetic: streaky gold pink, seedy ruby, flashed amber, reamy white. She touched a sheet of pink, shuddering at the sharpness of its edges, one corner snicked and jagged. The studio seemed dangerous altogether – sharp-toothed saws hanging naked on the walls, savage-looking unsheathed knives laid out on a table, a murky jar of acid labelled ‘POISONOUS’, a large box crammed with glass fragments, each a small discarded knife itself. Yet it was also very orderly – all the brushes marshalled into sizes, and standing to attention in a battalion of old coffee tins; jars of paint lined up in tidy rows; tools and rulers, screws and nails, in separate drawers and boxes; the high walls newly whitewashed, the wooden floor well scrubbed.

  She turned back to look for Christopher, found he’d disappeared, then heard a rush of water from a cistern just outside. She, too, needed the bathroom, desperately, in fact. She darted out to find it, pushed the door in front of her, glimpsed a cooker, not a toilet. She backed away, collided with the artist who was just entering the kitchen, still wearing his thick camel coat, as if he couldn’t spare the time to take it off.

  ‘I’m … looking for the loo,’ she said, cursed herself for blushing. She had turned into an awkward adolescent who couldn’t mention simple natural functions without squirming, going red.

  ‘Just there.’

  She was glad to lock the door, let her flush subside, only hoped he couldn’t hear as she emptied her full bladder; had a strange uneasy feeling he was standing right outside. She washed her face and hands, peered into the mirror, surprised to find she looked nothing like she’d feared – not the dishevelled grubby wreck she had kept seeing in her mind. Her cheeks were very pink still, which made her eyes look brighter, and though her hair was tousled, it wasn’t unattractive, seemed thicker tangled up like that, as if some arty hairdresser had spent several skilful hours on it to produce the natural look. She opened the bathroom cabinet which hung above the basin, feeling like a spy as she found indigestion mixture, senna tablets, cough linctus, shampoo for sensitive hair. She also found a toothbrush, gave her teeth a brief but guilty scrub; knew it was a crime to use someone else’s toothbrush, or go through strangers’ cupboards. She pushed her jersey up, tried to spray her underarms with Deodorant For Men. The smell was powerful, an uncompromising reek of spice and musk. Now he’d know she’d stolen it, know that she’d been snooping. She grabbed the disinfectant bottle from its niche behind the toilet, dabbed a little on her skin, prayed the two strong odours would counteract each other. She lingered for a moment more, to calm herself, let the smells disperse; admired the unusual toilet seat, carved from dark unpolished wood, with knots in it and markings.

  She emerged, at last, still nervous, but relieved to see he was not outside the door. She found him in the kitchen, mopping up water from the fridge – a narrow compact kitchen, tightly snugly organised like the galley on a schooner; more birds tacked all round the walls, violent ones again.

  ‘Are the birds for your church window?’ she asked, pausing in the doorway.

  ‘Christ, no! Anthony wouldn’t give them house-room.’

  ‘Who’s Anthony?’

  ‘The vicar. Though he thinks he’s God, actually, or perhaps God’s elder brother. I’m starving, Rose. Are you? We can’t have proper breakfast. I never normally eat it here, so I haven’t got eggs or even cornflakes. And the power’s still off, so I can’t make toast. How about smoked salmon? There’s a packet in the freezer here which has started to defrost. We’d better eat it up. I can thaw it on the oil-heater.’

  She loathed smoked salmon, had only had it once, almost retched on its slimy texture, its salty raw-fish taste. ‘I’m not hungry,’ she remarked, as her stomach gave a loud protesting rumble.

  ‘It sounds as if you’re ravenous.’

  She was. She hadn’t eaten anything since tea the day before, and that had been just soup again, a brand called Poacher’s Broth with speckly bits and pieces floating on the top – scraps of fur, of feather? She longed to tear into a whole large loaf of bread, something plain and filling, which she could cram into her mouth, not wait for sluggish oil-stoves, or toy with fancy fish. He was, in fact, getting out some bread now, but thin-sliced in a wrapper, not the farmhouse loaf she’d pictured, with its crisp and floury crust. He spread two flimsy slices with some low-fat butter substitute, portioned them one each. She glanced at his flat stomach, had presumed he was the thin type – naturally, as she was – but perhaps he had to struggle with his weight. The fridge looked sadly bare. She glimpsed a ‘Gourmet Meal-for-One’, with a picture on the packet of a salmon steak in an unlikely shade of pink, nestling on a bed of snow-white rice. Eagles on his kitchen walls, salmon in the fridge. He was fiddling with the other salmon, spearing out the still half-frozen slices, pausing for a moment to push back his heavy coat sleeves.

  ‘We could always have some figs with it,’ he murmured.

  ‘Figs?’ She associated figs with constipation – liquid in a bottle – recalled the senna tablets in the bathroom. Perhaps his bowels were dozy, or plain stubborn.

  ‘Why not? Apple sauce with pork, gooseberries with mackerel … I’ve got an ancient fig tree in the garden. It’s the first time in a dozen years the fruit has ever ripened. All other years, they’ve just stayed small and hard. But we had such an incredible summer – nineteen thousand hours of sunshine, here on the South Coast. That’s the official figure, Rose, from January to now, which means it’s the sunniest year on record.’

  She climbed up on a stool, still eating breakfast in her head, grilled bacon with the loaf now, two fried and buttery eggs. ‘We seem to be breaking all the records. The coldest January, I think they said, followed by the hottest spring and summer, then the worst storm just last night, and …’

  ‘That reminds me – perhaps I haven’t got a fig tree. I was so relieved about the roof, I never thought to check.’ He was already through the door, striding down a passage to an exit at the back. She followed, screwing up her eyes against the sun, which was setting fire to russet leaves, kindling late chrysanthemums. He had made a patch of garden just behind the barn, with a rustic bench, a table, a square of pavement edged with plants and shrubs, and one twisted and distorted tree supported by the wall.

  ‘Good God! Yesterday that tree had all its leaves, and was loaded down with figs. Yet this is meant to be a sheltered spot, protected from the wind.’

  The branches were now bare, save for two last bravely clinging figs, and a single leaf fluttering near the trunk. Its other leaves and fruit were smashed beneath it, or scattered round the garden, some figs split right open, revealing fleshy pink insides. He began to gather up the whole ones, stuffing his coat-pockets until he was bulging either side. ‘It’s funny, really. Things always seem most fruitful just before they’re kiboshed. I’ve noticed it before. I had this exotic flowering bush which went down in the last storm, and its flowers had never been more lush that year, some the size of tea-plates.’

  Jane said nothing. Nature seemed so cruel, not just decimating bushes, but fattening them up first, then gloating at the loss.

  ‘We could have breakfast out here,’ Christopher suggested, retrieving one last fig. ‘It’s so bright it’s unbelievable. Or would you be too cold?’

  ‘No,’ she said, shivering. ‘I’ll go and fetch my coat.’

  ‘I’ll get it. I’ve got to light the oil-stov
e. At least we’d avoid the stink of paraffin outside. I loathe the smell, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said with feeling, wondering if her cottage was just a pile of boards now, her precious oil-lamp engulfed beneath the rubble. Thank God she’d brought her duffel-bag, which at least meant she had a ten-pound note and her most vital bits and pieces.

  ‘I won’t be long. You sunbathe. Hey, talking of records, where d’you think is the sunniest place on earth?’

  ‘Timbuktu.’ She picked a name at random, like a rabbit from a hat.

  ‘Clever girl! You’re just a bit far west. The Eastern Sahara gets an average of four thousand three hundred hours of sun a year.’

  She tried to picture the Sahara – sand and sand and sand – swaying phantom date-palms, long-lashed humpy camels. She sat down on the bench, which felt damp and splintery, gazed out at the horizon, the Sahara’s dusty yellow moistening into the brown of patchwork fields; misty blue beyond them, which could be haze, or sea. The clouds were wispy, furrowed, so dazzling where the sun broke through, she had to look away. She closed her eyes, felt the sun scarlet on her lids, as fierce as the geraniums bleeding in their shattered pots beneath the table legs. She ought to leave, and couldn’t; felt hypnotised by colour, the colour in this garden, the colour in the studio. Yet despite the sun, her hands were stiff with cold. Her coat had not materialised. Perhaps he’d forgotten all about it, got distracted in the kitchen, or was trying to boil a kettle on the oil-stove. Tea would be quite wonderful – a pint of something sweet and hot, to warm her from inside.

  Still he didn’t come. She paced around the garden, to stir her circulation, calm her fretful mind. He was probably bored with her already, had started work, dismissed her, thought better of his offer of smoked salmon in the sun. She jumped a flowerbed, dived back through the door. She’d tell him she was late for something, had to leave immediately. She wrinkled up her nose at the stench of paraffin, seemed to taste it in her mouth as she walked towards the studio, stopped outside the door. She could hear him on the phone, his voice quite different from the controlled and faintly ironic one he’d used to her so far. It sounded almost shrill now, querulous, vindictive.