A Box of Birds

by Charles Fernyhough

  It’s not James who’s got the Lycee into this mess, I want to tell her.

  ‘Gillian?’

  She gets up, stretching her body wearily. ‘Yes?’

  ‘If you had the right electrodes, and the right mapping data, you’d effectively have a way of manipulating a person’s memory?’

  She nods. ‘That’s what the Lorenzo Circuit’s there for. It’s the material basis of memory and consciousness. The matrix of who we are.’

  And if you could only find a way of speaking their language, the birds will come when you call.

  ‘So there are obvious therapeutic benefits. For Alzheimer’s.’

  ‘Absolutely. Think about what we’re dealing with here. These are people who have lost their most basic sense of identity, every flicker of memory that made them what they were. Their Lorenzo Circuits are a mess of tau and amyloid. Put a nice safe electrode in, stimulate a bit of temporal cortex and—who knows? Maybe Grandma will remember something.’

  I say nothing. For the first time since he walked into my lab, I think I’m beginning to understand what Gareth is trying to do.

  PART TWO

  ◉

  The City

  CHAPTER NINE

  All Stories Are True

  ◉

  Effi says I can stay with her in Pelton for a few days while I try to find James. I don’t want to hang around in the forest any longer than I have to. The daily reminders of the security breach are bad enough; the thought that my own carelessness has caused a Process Nine to happen is stopping me from sleeping. Gareth had the technical ability to hack the Lorenzo Circuit data, but I gave him the opportunity. I left him alone in my office with a live connection, which was all the opening he needed to get on to the network and lay the sniffer. Reconstructing the map from the backed-up fragments will take time. I couldn’t have caused more trouble if I’d been spying for Sansom myself.

  At least I understand now what Gareth meant about lying low for a while. If he’s got hold of the mapping data, then Sansom are going to be interested. From what he told me on the phone, I know that someone from the biotech has already approached him. The police are looking for a Lycee student, someone with the access and the know-how. If Gareth can keep himself out of danger, I might be able to find him before this goes any further. If not, then I’ll have more trouble to feel responsible for.

  That’s why I need James. He knows Gareth; he knows why his friend went off the rails last time. And he knows how Sansom operates; he’s there every week, demonstrating against their research. He might know something about the mines, and he might have some idea why Gareth is so interested in what Sansom are doing down there. He’s not been straight with me about packing in his studies, but for all I know his vanishing from college was just some misguided effort to protect me. He knew it would be a problem for me, having an animal rights campaigner in my tutor group. It all fits with the idea that, when he kissed me on the footbridge that night, he was kissing me goodbye.

  I pack for Florida and move my bags to Effi’s. I listen to The Travels of David Overstrand again, hearing the story of the woman roaming the city, joining up the landmarks of Pelton as though they might reveal some carefully obscured message. The Stadium of Northern Electricity. The twenty-four-hour markets of Star City. From Effi’s flat in Millennium Heights, these are visible landmarks. Gareth has already mentioned David Overstrand’s name to me. They live together in a squat, he told me, James and his activist friends. I printed out the address from Academic Records. The street name looks harmlessly suburban, and yet there’s something going on there, enough to make James lie to me and throw away the prize of a Lycee degree. He wants me to go there, that’s obvious. The mysterious recording, this self-conscious effort to intrigue me: it’s James down to the ground. But, then again, it isn’t James on the recording. Whatever game he’s playing there, he isn’t playing it alone.

  I try to explain to Daren, Effi’s nurse, that I can’t help him out today.

  ‘But I need you, Yvonne. These days, bathing your mum is a two-man job.’

  ‘My mum?’

  Effi left India for England sixty years ago. This morning we did what we always do in the hour or so before Daren shows up: we got out the old Bombay street map and looked at it together, tracing routes through the post-war city along streets that still had their imperial names. I always want to hurry to the beaches. I want to imagine her in an impossible bikini, busty and lithe, the talk of the subcontinent. Now, at eighty-five, her skin has the powdery wrinklings of a nutmeg. Daren’s is a different kind of blackness, glossy and sullen. If he’s making any joke about Effi being my mother, he isn’t showing it. A mosaic of sweat gleams out from under his stubble. There’s a transparency around his eyes, a frailness there.

  ‘Yeah. She’s no skinny disco dancer.’

  I hear her coughing in the living room across the landing. The TV drones. She hears the man on the mid-morning cookery show, can’t tell if he’s black or white. It doesn’t matter any more.

  ‘Is she all right? Apart from the dementia?’

  ‘I don’t know. She’s losing weight. They’re running some tests. When you’ve been around as long as she has...’

  I watch him washing cups at the sink. The kitchen window is open, and I can see the twisted floodlights of the football ground, the parks and galleries of the new docks, then the dismal sprawl of Northside. The city lays itself out for me like the forest used to, eight storeys of distance and solitude. All of yesterday I was poring over a battered A–Z of Pelton, trying to work out which of the grey blocks that mark St. Lawrence Road is James’ house. The church is visible from here, a sad relic of old England above the slate tiles of the refurbished terraces. Maybe, if I knew where to look, I would even see the squat that James calls home.

  ‘Come on,’ Daren says. ‘Let’s do those obs. Blood pressure, blood sugar, all the rest of it. You get to her age, you need a daily MOT.’

  I follow him through into the living room. The dual carriageway reaches us with a steady ripping sound. Daren dumps his medical bag onto the table and checks his blue plastic smock for breakfast stains. Effi thumbs off the TV and looks up at her young saviour. He’s been coming here for months now, smelling of sports fragrance and the optimism of youth, and he’s already one of the certainties she clings to, proof that, amid the unravelling of every thread of selfhood, there’s a human link back to health and happiness. He rewinds the clock for her, undoes the ravages of time. She sees through him into a past no one else can see, smarting with wedding-night nerves, the jangle of wirelesses.

  ‘Sing to me,’ she says.

  Daren shoots a look at me and puffs out a sigh. What was a joke when he first started coming here has become a comforting routine. He picks up a hairbrush from the side and twirls it in his hand. He goes over to the old one-piece stereo, exclaims silently in mock surprise and lifts the arm onto the vinyl. Cliff Richard croons into the room. The ancient amplifier is turned up full against the traffic, and the edges tear. The nurse grips the hairbrush like a microphone and sways from one foot to the other, mouthing the words silently, rock-and-softly-rolling then giving it a bit of pelvis when the drums come in. Effi smiles and drifts away. She’s twenty-four again. England is new. The Shadows cruise down the dual carriageway under our window, quiffs a-tremble, Strats zinging in the breeze. And on the back seat of their convertible Rolls, a young immigrant bride cannot think about dying, can’t see into that distance, cannot even frame the thought.

  I wait for him to rock past me, then catch his eye.

  ‘Daren, I’ve got to go somewhere.’

  ‘Florida,’ he says. ‘Have a nice time.’

  ‘No. Before that. I’ve got to go out for a while. There’s someone I have to see.’

  Effi is asleep. He tosses the hairbrush onto the sofa and grins at me.

  ‘Take your time. I’ve got my mates from the five-a-side coming round. We’re going to have a party, aren’t we, Mum?’

 
Outside I find a grey spring afternoon, bleak with sea fret. The flagship redevelopments around the waterfronts are half erased by low cloud. I feel like some off-duty public-school sixth-former among the beautiful young things who are throbbing out of Bankstown metro. This place has become fashionable since I first came here as a student, visiting Effi as part of our community action scheme. There are trendy coffee dives where there used to be charity shops. The bingo halls are full of body-pierced couples making ironic statements. Even the graffiti on the boarded-up church halls is now done with aching poise, suggesting night-time streets thronging with art students. AGATHA, IF YOU DON’T BRING MY SOUNDPOD BACK YOU’RE GOING TO GET YOUR FACE SPLIT OPEN. I don’t mind graffiti, as long as it’s spelt correctly.

  They’re selling God outside St. Lawrence’s. A Chinese migrant is pulling pamphlets from a Morrisons bag and slotting them into invisible hands. Out of pity I take a few. Further down, St. Lawrence Road is getting a makeover. The first stretch of houses seem to have their contents in their front gardens: mattresses, washing machines, ripped-out kitchen units piled to the height of a man. Through dusty windows you can see the gleam of undercoated doors closed on emptiness. These are the lucky ones, the ones that are attracting investment. Others are simply giving in to decay, opening rotting doors to walk-in claims of ownership by whoever takes a fancy to their derelict charms. Old Union Jacks hang, curtain-wise, over glass taped up from the inside. Halfway down it all changes: the townhouses get their top coats of blue or purple paint and rise to untouchable heights on flights of grey granite steps. Affluence is creeping down the street, a house at a time. Whoever lives in the ruins of Victoriana, they won’t be here for long.

  Number 76 is one of the squats. A banner in the downstairs window says YOU’LL MISS US WHEN WE’RE GONE. As I wait to cross the road I can see a man eating chips in a car outside the house, his driver’s door open and one foot rooted to the kerb. His car is even older than mine. He’s kept the engine running, possibly for heat, possibly just for the rare olfactory pleasure of petrol fumes. It’s the smell of my childhood, a Victorian townhouse in Bristol, traffic jams on summer days. The chips guy has a Greek policeman’s moustache, a blue tracksuit, white socks and loafers. He watches me go up the steps to the house, and then throws his chips into a skip and comes up after me, making screwing movements with a little key.

  ‘They’re wasted,’ he says. ‘They won’t hear you.’

  His accent is estuary. He opens the door and stands there beside me, waiting. A thick sift of dinosaur metal is filtering down through the floorboards.

  ‘I was looking for James,’ I say.

  ‘JAMES!’ he yells up the stairs.

  There’s a thud, like something falling, and I hear a woman’s laughter.

  ‘Go on up,’ the man says.

  The staircase has other ideas. Some half-hearted renovator has ripped out all the carpets, leaving broken gripper bars like arrays of shark-teeth. Several of the steps have come loose and the rest are spongy with woodworm. There are no banisters. Maybe James’ animal rights friends get around by levitation. I can sense the moustache guy watching me as I pick my way up, thinking weightless thoughts. The music is coming from behind the second door on the landing. BEWARE THE HARSH REALITY is scratched into the maroon paintwork. I knock twice, trying to cut across the machine-gunning bass drum. I think how easy it would be to give up on this, take Gillian’s advice about the danger of getting mixed up with these people, turn on my heels and walk away. But Gillian doesn’t know the half of it. Gareth is out there, lost in some neon-crazed downtown, and Sansom will be trying to find him. I can’t let that happen. I have to get to him first, and for that I need James. He knows what happened the last time his friend lost control. I might need that information.

  I realise that I’m taking his bait, though. He left the soundpod for me for a reason. Perhaps he thinks David Overstrand can work the same magic on me as he did on him. In which case, there’s more to this than the story of the woman in the recording. There’s the story of me, the real Yvonne Churcher, the true self under all those layers of illusion and habit and biology. Who knows: maybe it’s a love story. And this is where it starts: with a lonely woman in drab mufti, heart in her mouth, knocking patiently on a door.

  ‘Go on in,’ comes the moustache voice from downstairs.

  Maybe James calls out the moment he sees me, and maybe what he says is my name. Maybe he’s never stopped saying it since we parted on the footbridge, our lips still zinging with each other. Whatever he says, I don’t hear it. I’m too cut up by the sight of him, standing in the corner of the room in black jeans and a paisley shirt, striding across a double bed to get to the sound system, turning the music down. There’s a girl on the bed, younger than me, who tries to bite his leg as he climbs over her. She has blonde hair tied up, a face stretched between cheekbones and nose-bridge, a thin mouth that looks as though it’s tasting tin. She’s wearing combat trousers and a faded tee-shirt saying 2010 ADULT MOVIE OSCARS: BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS. Her fingers are busy with a magazine. I can smell dope, toast, old dust-engrained floorboards, chocolate and possibly sex. A guy in a suit is scanning some photos onto a hard disc at a desk under the window. There are body parts and hairy bits, gleams of animal flesh under studio lights. A colour printer is churning out glossy repetitions of his work. In the time it takes the spill of blue scanner-light to work its way up the page, the suit guy is folding up the printouts and stuffing them into envelopes, and then writing addresses on that I can’t see.

  ‘Yvonne,’ James says, stepping down off the bed.

  ‘James,’ I feel myself saying, ‘I know you think it’s funny to keep turning up to my tutorials when you’re not even a student any more, and then getting me drunk and coming on to me in the middle of the footbridge when my boss was quite possibly walking past,’ I’m saying the words, can’t stop them, this embarrassing leakage, this flow of thought made flesh, ‘but now Gareth has got the mapping data and Sansom are already on his back, and you send me this recording like it’s some big mystery, like this is all an experiment to see if I’ll fall for your story, like...’

  ‘Yvonne,’ he says. But really I haven’t said a word.

  ‘Wait...’

  ‘Where are we starting?’

  ‘Listen.’

  We’re in the living room downstairs, looking out over the wasteland of No.76’s garden. The guy in the suit tongs another lump of coal onto the fire, and then begins.

  ‘A young woman is roaming the city in the heat of summer. She has blonde hair held up with a tortoiseshell slide, and pale, reclusive skin. She is dressed lightly in a sundress with big yellow flowers, but she walks as though she were being dragged down by tremendous weights. She makes her way through the shopping district as far as the river, where she stops. She looks westwards along the embankment, searching for a crossing, and then turns to the east. A river is the only true absence in a city. You can’t build on it, fill it with rubbish, park your car there. You need that connection with nothingness in the midst of all the chaos. So observed David Overstrand.’

  ‘Nice,’ James says, jotting something down in an exercise book.

  ‘Soon enough, by straight routes and crooked ones, the young woman comes to the Half-Span Bridge.’ It’s the blonde girl, picking up on the suit guy’s opening. ‘There’s a walkway where pedestrians can cross, with cars rushing by on one side. On the other side is a steep drop into the river. For a while the woman stands there on the walkway, leaning on the parapet, looking down through the girders at the water. The traffic goes by behind her, but nobody takes any notice.’

  The guy with the moustache makes to protest, but he is silenced by the suit.

  ‘It’s OK. That’s pukkah.’

  The girl — Bridge?— sits back, satisfied, in her corner of the sofa.

  ‘Second verse, same as the first.’

  ‘What are the young woman’s precise coordinates at this point?’

  The guy in
the suit starts sketching something on a piece of paper.

  ‘Start at the Persian buffet on Spring Gardens.’

  The group nods in agreement.

  ‘Chuck a lefty down Westwood Road and proceed towards the city centre through Bankstown Underpass.’

  ‘Not at night...’

  ‘David Overstrand only saves the souls of the damned by daylight.’

  ‘It is daylight. Shopping time in the cool west end of the city. You have to fight your way through the crowds at Bankstown Market. Then you branch northwards off Westwood Road and cut along Summerhill until you reach the Royal Infirmary...’

  ‘You can’t do that,’ Bridge says, shaking her head.

  ‘That’s a Leipzig Transgression,’ James says.

  He glances across, sending me a grin I don’t need. A motorbike goes by on the street outside. It’s all right, I want to tell him; I know what this is. It’s the story of the young woman roaming the city in a mysterious state of distress, wandering the streets on a summer’s afternoon against the backdrop of Pelton landmarks. I could be back in James’ corridor, listening to the recording on his soundpod. I’m none the wiser, though, about why they have invited me here. If I twist around in my seat I can see through a knocked-through wall into the next room. It looks like a studio of some kind: there’s a photocopier, video equipment and several TVs.

  ‘Come on, Yvonne,’ says the suit guy, whom they’re calling Level Ten. ‘We want to hear from you.’

  ‘Is that a structural wall?’ I say, still staring at the hole.

  ‘We don’t know. Grandstand decided he wanted open-plan living so he took a sledgehammer to it. Just start where you like.’

  ‘But no one’s explained the rules.’

  ‘Don’t worry about the rules,’ Bridge says kindly. ‘Just be yourself.’

  She stretches out on the sofa like a kid in sand. She’s beautiful, in a fierce sort of way, but she seems bunged up, cut off from the world. It takes her a second or two to respond, as though the words were coming to her through water. Perhaps she’s a mermaid, who’s lost the shell-encrusted mirror that will get her home. Grandstand, the moustache guy, is filthy with her. But she only has eyes for James.