A Box of Birds

by Charles Fernyhough

  ‘I’m somebody who’s looking for the truth about himself. Things have happened to make me the way I am. That’s what I’ve got to try to understand.’

  ‘That’s Freudian mumbo-jumbo, James. You can’t reduce me to what happened to me as a child. You can’t rewind a tape and show me where each little bit of my character was formed. I’m so much more than that, and I’m so much less than that.’

  ‘I’m not trying to reduce you to anything. I’m trying to show you the truth about yourself.’

  ‘So you know the truth about me, do you?’

  ‘I know you’re hiding behind a whole lot of masks. I know you’re trying to find the answer in science, because of things that have happened to you.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘You became a scientist because your dad gave up on science. He was a vet first, wasn’t he? When he became a vicar you felt betrayed. He wasn’t talking to the animals any more, so you thought you should.’

  ‘That’s such crap, James. You don’t know the first thing about me.’

  ‘Sometimes we’re blind to our own stories. We don’t even know that we’re telling them. Listen, your science is telling you the same thing. That network in the brain that you’re obsessed about? The Lorenzo Circuit. You told us it’s constantly spinning new stories out of the bits of information it’s got stored away. I sat there in your office and I wrote that down. Our brains are at it all the time, making order out of chaos, stitching together patterns of meaning. All those different bits of the brain working in synchrony, knitting it all together. I don’t know, maybe that’s what Gaz has got obsessed about as well. Maybe that’s why he thinks you’re the only person who can help him.’

  Suddenly I’m back in the lab, with Gareth’s cortex projected onto the twilight in front of me. Again, this queasy sense that I’m recalling things I haven’t yet lived through, that I am no longer the facts I thought I remembered. The Lorenzo Circuit spins its web.

  ‘Anyway, that’s what David was trying to show us. We’re blind to our own stories. We need someone else to help us to see them. That’s what we never finished. He had to leave us, just as I was starting to get there.’

  ‘And your story is Bankstown Underpass? Something happened there that changed the way you are, for ever?’

  He stops, hugging himself inside his fleece.

  ‘I nearly died there. In a way, I did die.’

  ‘You look pretty alive to me.’

  He sighs a deep breath onto the breeze. A mile to the north, two huge Chinook helicopters swing low over the valley, heavy gods on the move.

  ‘David used to say to me, Bankstown Underpass, you can’t get bigger than this. You can’t get bigger than your own story.’

  ‘Bankstown Underpass? Is that what he called you?’

  He narrows his eyes, as though the thought were causing him pain. ‘We all had names. It was part of the way we tried to make ourselves real to each other. Except David. He was always just himself.’

  We sit down on a rock to spare our knees. Our rucksacks stand back to back on the hillside, reluctant duellers. I hold my head in my hands and feel this weight I’m carrying, the heft of myself.

  ‘But why all parts of the city? Bankstown Underpass, Grandstand...’

  ‘Because they’re the places where David found us.’

  ‘I don’t get it.’

  He starts picking at a clump of heather, stripping the brown flower-buds with his fingers.

  ‘You remember the woman on the Half-Span Bridge? So thin that she could have dropped through the railings like a set of car keys...?’ Now I see it, in all its obvious colour.

  ‘Bridge isn’t short for Bridget, is it? It’s short for Half-Span Bridge.’

  He looks disappointed that it’s taken me so long to make the connection. ‘Her real name’s Stephanie. Needless to say, she hates her real name.’

  ‘And when David found her...she was really about to throw herself off?’

  He shrugs. ‘That makes it sound pretty dramatic. But that’s Bridge. She’s a drama queen. David talked her out of it. He worked out what was happening for her, and he made her see it.’

  ‘And the others?’

  ‘They all needed him. He found them when they were at their weakest, and he didn’t let them down. Level Ten was at the top of the Byggate multi-storey. Grandstand was at the stadium.’

  I think of the faces I know from the squat. If what James is saying is true, they came close to not being there at all.

  ‘So that’s what your storytelling game is all about? Celebrating the fact that you’d been saved?’

  ‘We never wanted to forget what David had given us. We’d been blessed. Skipped the fake brain doctors and their happiness drugs. We’d had a lucky escape.’

  ‘Isn’t it a bit creepy that you rejoice in it like that? All the myth-making, the storytelling: isn’t it a bit weird?’

  ‘It’s our truth, Yvonne. David saved us by showing us our own stories. That’s why I sent you the soundpod. Because I wanted David to save you too.’

  I remember the child’s trike in the back yard.

  ‘What was he like? There aren’t any pictures of him at the squat.’

  ‘David didn’t believe in cameras. He didn’t want us living our lives through a viewfinder. He wanted to show us the world as it really is. Anyway, we remember him in our stories. He had such an amazing presence. He had this aura; you always knew when he was in a room. Trying to take a photograph of him would have been like pointing a camera at the sun.’

  ‘You’re talking about him as though he’s dead. He is coming back, isn’t he?’

  The view blurs up with mist. I don’t know if we’ve climbed up into the cloud or if the cloud, tired of flight, has sunk down onto us. We sat down here in bright sunshine, but now the air is vaporous and grey. You remember how the land can catch you out, send your thoughts twittering off in one direction and then say: look, fool, the truth is over here. How it can even get you doubting your own memory of the sunshine, of ever having believed that there was a star out there.

  ‘I don’t know. We hear rumours, stories of sightings, but no one really knows. He was trying to stop a dam being built in India. He’d got into Tibet and was trying to blow the fascists apart. He moves among the people who believe in him. No one else can see him. There’s not one thing you can say about him that won’t be contradicted by someone else. He’s become his own shadow, and that makes him hard to find. We just have to stay here, and keep believing. Wherever David is, he’s a long way away.’

  Then the sky suddenly opens and you’re higher than you ever thought possible, and the land ahead of you becomes the land below you, shining with the green-hued opulence of sunlight on rain. The river, the furrow it ploughs through the hillside, the tiny ruin of the drover’s hut detailed in broken lumps of sandstone, like an abandoned game of mah-jong. And a sob in your throat that this beauty could have crept up on you like this, that you watched for it at every possible entrance and yet never saw it coming, it’s had you, you’ve been caught out again.

  It’s pushing night by the time we reach the hut. All that’s left of the sunset is a lemony afterglow, a layer of clear spirit under the night. The earth has shape again, contours you can get your bearings by, black solidity. Behind us, the fellside we’ve climbed down is roofed by girders of cloud. Under our torchlight the hut is psychoactively vivid. Going in there is a battle of curiosity and disgust, as compelling as a roadkill. Actually, it feels quite homely. The roof has been shucked off in slabs of broken pantile, but the half that remains is shelter enough. Whoever was here last has even left a pile of firewood, which James quickly gets going. I watch him crouch by the newborn flame, feeding it scraps: prehistoric man at his life-or-death task. I want to ask more about David, but this secret of his is so big, such a huge dead-weight of fact, that manoeuvring it into an attackable position is more than I have strength for. When I go outside for more firewood I see lights on t
he other side of the valley, several miles away, maybe lampers looking for rabbits. They’re a long way out to be lamping. I wait for the gunshots but there’s only the spook-show of owl-talk, the cluck of burn-water on rocks. I watch the flickering lights for a while, eventually judging that they’re moving away from us, with the jerky pace of human walking. We got this far without seeing a soul. It never occurred to me that we might not be alone up here.

  When I go back inside the fire is blazing. James is still crouching, his arms outstretched for balance, the hood of his fleece pulled up around his face. He stares into the flame with a kind of flustered intent, as though he’d only built this thing to hypnotise himself, and the magic wasn’t working. Or maybe it’s just another way of shutting me out, another party I’m not invited to.

  ‘What happened at Bankstown Underpass?’

  ‘I walked out into the traffic. I was seventeen years old. David was there, watching. It’s like he knew it was going to happen. He healed me. He made me understand why I’d done it. Why I had tried to do it, and also why I had failed.’

  He’s laid our sleeping bags out under the bit of roof. I go over to mine and sit down.

  ‘And now you feel like you owe him everything?’

  ‘Of course I do. But I can’t repay that debt. Other people keep getting in the way.’

  ‘What others?’

  Then I realise. He’s still thinking about his friends. Bridge, Grandstand, Level Ten. They’re the only others that matter.

  ‘I’ve been watching them, Yvonne. I’ve seen what motivates them. I’ve seen why they’re doing this, and it’s not for the reasons it was supposed to be. This was meant to be about me and David. It wasn’t meant to be about them.’

  ‘I don’t get it. This afternoon you told me that you were all in this together. Bonded by what David meant to you.’

  He shakes his head, mourning a reality in which that might have been true.

  ‘I told you part of it. The whole thing is more complicated.’

  ‘Try me.’

  He scrapes at the dirt floor with a piece of bark, and then flicks it into the fire.

  ‘David gave us tasks. Things we had to try and achieve while he was away. The Atrocity Exhibition. The campaign against Sansom. That’s what we were supposed to be focusing on. But we’ve been getting distracted. Level Ten has been trying to sell a book made out of our games. Bridge has been talking to TV people, for God’s sake. They’re making a lot of noise, but it’s the wrong kind of noise. When David gets back ... I don’t want to think about that.’

  ‘Have you told them this?’

  ‘While you were in Florida. We had a ... situation. A frank exchange of views. I didn’t like what I heard, and I told them so. It’s over. I’m not going back there. I’m finished with them.’

  I stare at his hunched-up form, trying to judge this new information. I remember the phone call I overheard in the bathroom the other night. It didn’t sound like an argument, but it could have been the aftermath of one. Sometimes, when I see him together with them, he has the appeasing smile of an unwilling participant, caught up in something out of habit or a greater dedication. Now I can see the extent of what he has been trying to hide. I can’t say that it disappoints me. I’ve always hated the thought of the hold they have over him. While someone else has got him, he can’t be completely mine.

  ‘What about your tasks? The things that matter to you?’

  ‘I can’t make them happen without David. I realise that now. I haven’t got the fire in me that he had. There are moments when I look around and I doubt everything.’

  ‘Everything? Including me?’

  He puffs out contempt. ‘What are you? Just another story I tell myself.’

  ‘So what can you rely on, then? Bankstown Underpass? Isn’t that just another story?’

  ‘It’s the truth that makes the stories true.’

  I’m irritated now. ‘You know, I think there’s a truth that makes the stories true. The difference is that I go out and try and prove it.’

  ‘Yvonne.’ He’s quieter now, as though my anger were the excuse he needed to cool his own. ‘You doubt your own existence. The continuity of your own self. You’ve read some stuff about diffuse neuronal systems and now you don’t even think there’s a person called Yvonne Churcher.’

  ‘But I don’t doubt her nervous system. I don’t doubt that she’s made of chemicals and blood vessels and a heart and some fucking painful burns...’

  He swings around on his heels. His two-day-old stubble glints silverishly in the firelight.

  ‘Is that it? Is that what your faith amounts to?’

  ‘It’s not faith, James. I don’t need a faith. I look for evidence. Then I believe.’

  ‘Sure,’ he says. ‘The evidence of a few tortured monkeys. I’ll stick with the mumbo-jumbo.’

  The gash on my scalp is stinging. I put my hands up and clasp my neck from behind, pulling my elbows forward till they touch, blocking out the fire, James, everything. My own private gesture of doubt.

  When I look up again, James is crying.

  I touch his cheek in the firelight and he flinches, caught out by his own irritability. What a soft-triggered gadget is a man. Always wired for action, reacting to an imagined threat, even if it’s just the comforting hand of a girl. I pull him into me, feel his head surge up against my ribcage, signalling an intent, if only to show that we’re equals in this. We kiss. He tastes of tears and cigarettes. I break off and start unbuttoning his shirt, aware that I’m being rough with him, dimly convinced that I can manhandle him out of his grief. I yank at his jeans and his full cock twitches up into view. I trace its taut underseam with a finger, a line of frail abalone. Now listen. In the silence of the hut you can actually hear it pulsing, retwitching up into hardness with an infinitesimal kissing sound. I open my mouth and swallow it whole. It tastes like a lost part of you, something you thought you could never live without, as salty and tragic as a missing tooth.

  We go up and we go down. We scale a peak and find it’s only a sub-peak, the start of something bigger. There’s a straight path to the sky, and then the horizon turns into another embedded hillside, the pattern within the pattern. The air is clear, the sky rigged with fake azure, and the feeling is one of total abandonment, of being lost on top of the world. The Saxons’ map seems more and more irrelevant. By noon on the second day we’ve reached Mickelhope Ridge. The forest they told us about is supposed to be visible from here. But all we can see is moorland, abandoned stonework, an occasional white farmhouse hinting at human occupancy, like a star you know to be a sun, but whose glow never reaches you, never quite confirms your faith in its warmth.

  ‘There’s a road,’ I say, eyes watery with wind. ‘It must be five miles away.’

  He checks the map again. They’ve scratched it with a goose quill on a sheet of rolled-up cartridge paper, and he’s fed up with having to furl and unfurl it all the time.

  ‘They haven’t marked any roads. Not even the one we drove down.’

  I look over his shoulder at the map. The Kingdom of Esha stands in splendid isolation. There’s no access road, nothing to drive along in any direction. A showy medieval banner in the top right-hand corner states Here Be Dragons.

  ‘You know what this is,’ he says, wiping a hand impatiently over his hair. ‘It’s a Saxon map. It’s how this place looked in the eighth century.’

  The forest, the one we should have come across by now, has been etched on in a wide cloud formation, detailed with neatly individuated trees. We’ve tried the GPS on his ancient phone, but the tiny screen shows nothing but fields of brown heather. And I left my own phone behind in Florida.

  ‘But then again, unless we find the forest we won’t find this stupid Broken Twins thing. Which means Sansom get to Gaz before we do.’

  He crumples the map and tosses it westwards, or possibly southwards, into the heather. A curlew whirrs up without a cry.

  ‘They were right about the hut,’
I say.

  ‘We found a hut. Surely not the only drover’s hut on Mickelhope Moor.’

  He stands there, tasting something he’s not sure about. Maybe it’s the total emptiness of this horizon.

  ‘You don’t think we should go back? I could go online. Try to get back into the car park. See if he’s still there.’

  ‘Yvonne, Gaz has gone missing in the real world. You don’t think he’s actually going to be sitting in some computer game version of the Sansom car park, waiting for you?’

  ‘It was different. I got through onto a totally new level. I could move. I could see him.’

  ‘You dreamed that stuff, Yvonne. You fell asleep on the sofa. The whole point of Des*re is that it’s reality-based. You’re hooked into a network of fixed webcams. You’ve got people sending you bits of their lives: home movies, messages, scenes they want you to see. That’s fun, because real people can appear in the game and truth blurs into fiction and all the rest of it. And it’s self-regulating, so you don’t need game-masters or a wizardry. But it can only go so far.’

  He reaches for me, putting his arms round me from behind. He’s gentle, knowing where my wounds are. I feel him reaching for the amulet and fingering it uncertainly, twiddling the knob at its ear, winding it up and then letting the spring uncoil between his fingers, as though he were trying to work out some detail of its mechanism. I lean back into him, wanting him but wishing I didn’t, wishing this could be simpler.

  ‘You weren’t there. You didn’t see it.’

  ‘Your dreams are your own business, babe. He sent you some really good graphics. You saw a bird with amazing feathers. He did it all on the computer. He’s playing with you. He’s fucking with your mind.’

  ‘He was talking to me. If I could just keep him talking, he might tell us where he is.’

  ‘He’s not going to tell you where he is.’ He drops the amulet and pulls away. ‘Don’t you understand? He’s a hacker. He’s going to be paranoid about any internet connection. As far as he’s concerned, he’s already told you everything he’s going to tell you. It’s up to you now to put it all together.’