A Box of Birds

by Charles Fernyhough

  ‘So why can’t he just give me a clue? Whatever it is I’m supposed to be remembering, it’s not happening.’

  ‘He is giving you a clue. He’s just doing it as quietly as he can.’

  It’s one thing getting lost in the fog. But getting lost on a clear blue day, when you can see for twenty miles and still have no idea where you’re going — that’s a whole different kind of lostness.

  Every copse might be the start of it. A stand of firs in a half-occluded dip gets our hearts racing. But then we’re high enough to see how the blank grass on one side joins up with the blank grass on the other, and this is just an island when we’re looking for a continent, and there’s nothing above waist-height between here and the next bit of sky.

  Some time in the afternoon we hear gunshots. It’s too early for grouse-shooting. It might be the lampers I saw last night. But lampers don’t hunt by daylight. The rabbits see them coming. The quarry gets wise.

  Even lost, I never feel completely alone.

  I wish we hadn’t thrown the map away. A half-right map is better than no map at all. Or does the bit that’s right make you more likely to trust the bit that’s wrong? The road has vanished, anyway.

  The sun goes down on our left. We eat the last of the pig roast on a wooded bank above a stream, and stumble into the forest at nightfall.

  Mateus used to try to explain to me what was frightening about a forest at night.

  ‘It’s not what’s there,’ he said, playing up the hot intelligence a bit. ‘It’s what isn’t there. Every terrifying thing you can possibly imagine can take shape in that darkness. The brain works overtime, making its hypotheses, and they’re never proved wrong. And forests are noisy places. Your brain is tacking every kind of scary meaning onto each sound and sending it out into your body as a full-scale alarm. No rest from it, because nothing to disprove the fear.’

  So the forest is the terror that can’t be consoled. It’s the absence that can morph into the thing you fear most. James’ darkness, he wants to tell me, is Bankstown Underpass. His darkness is locked away in memory. In which case, I’m following his deepest terror into an even greater darkness. And someone is following me.

  The moon stalks us through the trees.

  ‘James?’

  He can’t hear me. I turn back and look at the lights on the hillside, the same lights I saw last night, except this time coming this way.

  We come to a burn running through a clearing in the trees. The water is fast and shallow, easily fordable. There’s a strip of sandy earth where we can light a fire, a hollow under a stand of beeches for shelter. The wood is dry and lights quickly. I lay the sleeping bags out and tend to the fire, getting up a blaze with dry beech leaves, hearing pine cones crack and sizzle. James rummages in his rucksack and pulls out two mining helmets.

  ‘You stay here,’ he says, putting one on and handing me the other. ‘I’ll have a look around.’

  ‘You’re not going to see anything now.’

  He twists a knob on his forehead and a brilliant beam jerks like a good joke across the beech trunks.

  ‘The map said there was a burn. We cross the burn and follow it out the other side of the forest. Then we’ll see this Broken Twins thing.’

  ‘How long are you going to be?’

  I’m whispering. Why?

  ‘Not long. We stick to the edge of the forest. Give me half an hour.’

  He hands me his phone. There’s no signal: we’re too far out. The clock on the display says 20:09.

  ‘Then what?’

  He grins. ‘Start without me.’

  I watch him ford the burn, doing ballet moves with his arms as he fights for balance on slippery river stones. He rests on something steadier and watches the beam of his lamp pierce the water, lighting possible paths through the swirl. A last leap gets him to the other bank, and I think he glances back, to see if I’m following him. Then he’s just a cone of yellow light, the height and pace of a man, barcoding across the trunks of black trees.

  By 20:14 he’s afterglow, the scatterings of an unseen sun, only visible in what reflects him.

  I look back the way we came. To start with I’m blind, retinas still bleached by the firelight. Gradually there are trees, bronzed and dancing closer in, and then dimly silvered by moonlight.

  The lights that were following us have gone out, for now.

  An owl shrieks. I hear something rustling just beyond the firelight. The brain makes its hypotheses. I’m frazzled, asphyxiated by fear.

  ‘James?’

  There’s no answer. Then cognition: harsh rationality.

  We’re after Gareth. Sansom are after Gareth. Along the way, they might just come across me and James.

  Which is why I’m filling our water bottles at the stream, trying to douse the fire.

  At 21:48 he’s still not here. The dead fire hoists smokescreens in the moonlight. A few embers still glow among the wet ashes. The signal meter on his phone now shows one bar. I could phone for help, maybe. Hunger slowly takes me apart, unscrews each limb and empties it, leaving a dull nausea. I still believe he’s coming back, but how will he find me? The smoke scrolls palely to the sky.

  A branch cracks in the blackness. My hand goes to the other helmet. There’s a shadow where there wasn’t a shadow. Someone is standing in the space between two trees.

  The phone shimmers into life. It takes me a moment to realise that it’s ringing. The caller’s number is recognised, and the display flashes up the ID.

  DAVID.

  ‘Don’t answer it,’ James says.

  I answer it. I can hear the hubbub of a bar, but no one answers my hello. There’s an impatient sigh, and the line clicks into silence.

  ‘Who was it?’ he says.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say, killing it with my thumb. ‘He didn’t feel like leaving a message.’

  ‘He never does.’

  ‘Do you reckon he could get to a phone?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘David. Wherever it is that he’s vanished to.’

  He says nothing. I can’t see him yet, but I think he’s in a worse state than I am. Every breath seems to hurt him. He puts a hand against a tree and leans there in obvious pain.

  ‘I doubt it.’

  ‘Oh. Must have been another David.’

  He calls out, a hurt shout of denial. I clench my fists, ready to fight him, absurdly ready to finish this somehow.

  ‘No.’ He’s quieter now. ‘It would have been him.’

  ‘So why didn’t he want to talk to me?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I can’t see you,’ I say. ‘Can you put your lamp on?’

  ‘It’s broken.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I dropped it.’

  ‘You dropped your helmet? Was your head in it at the time?’

  He limps over to where I’m sitting. I reach for the other helmet, switch the lamp on and hold it so it picks him out. His face is dark with dirt or bruises or both. There’s a bad cut under one eye.

  ‘What happened to the fire?’

  ‘I put it out. I thought we were being followed.’

  I see him staring at my chest, at the amulet that hangs in the space between my breasts. It seems to be bothering him.

  ‘No one’s following us. I saw some kids with torches. Lampers. That’s all.’

  ‘Did the kids beat you up?’

  ‘No one beat me up. I fell down a fucking ravine.’

  ‘The shaft? The entrance to the mines?’

  He doesn’t answer. I watch him stretch out awkwardly on my sleeping bag. His body shudders violently and then is still. The thought flits across my mind that he might be dying. But I’m sure the dying don’t snore.

  I’m attuned to the forest. I answer its alarms. At five the blackbirds start twittering, and then a woodpigeon bows a bass note and wakes up the mistle thrushes. By the time the ring ouzels get going, at six by James’ phone, the trees already have a spectral blue sheen.
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  I get up and splash my face in the stream. I haven’t fallen asleep so much as climbed up onto it, meticulously, after hours of muscle-pulling effort. The air up there was suffocatingly thin. Hunger had already dismembered me, laid my bones out to be picked clean. I dreamed I was awake and trying to dream. Then pain woke me, a sudden all-over pain that told of falling from a great height, in my back, my neck, my ribcage. I couldn’t sleep through that. So I got up and thought about food. We should have been in the mines yesterday afternoon. We finished off the pig roast last night, and I poured the last of our drinking water onto the fire. If we don’t find something soon, we’re going to die up here. Just seeing the problem clearly: it’s a comfort, somehow.

  James, too, looks like he’s fallen down a mountain. His cheeks are black. His upper lip is swollen.

  ‘We’ve got to find your mineshaft,’ I say. When he wakes, he can only open one eye.

  We’re supposed to have pinpoint memory for pain. When you shock a rat in a T-maze, it remembers where it got hurt. But after an hour and a half James still can’t find the hole he fell down.

  ‘I came out of the forest. I followed the burn, just like the Saxons said. The forest is narrow. I was out in the open in no time.’

  ‘We’ve done that. Both sides of the burn. Are you sure it was near the forest?’

  In the sunshine I’m even weaker. Lush grass climbs to the sky. There are sheep now, watching us, strutting off hippily and then turning back to be curious again. One seems stuck in a collapse of barbed wire.

  ‘It was dark,’ James says, striding off towards the caught sheep.

  ‘It was moonlight.’ I sit down.

  He reaches the sheep and starts unpicking it from the wire.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘I don’t know about you, Yvonne, but I can’t walk past an animal in trouble.’

  ‘This is not about Gareth any more,’ I yell after him. ‘This is about me getting home. You can come or you can stay here.’

  I lie back on the grass and close my eyes. Getting tough has exhausted me. The heat of the sun scans my image onto the grass. It’s over. I’m a trick of the light, lost in the brightness of day.

  Gareth is trying to explain something to me.

  ‘You can’t implant a memory, Miss. You can only enhance what’s already there.’

  ‘Are you trying to tell me that I already know where you are?’

  ‘That’s right. All the information is in there. The birds are packed in and they are impatient. You’ve just got to make them come to you.’

  ‘But I don’t remember. I don’t understand all these clues you’ve been giving me.’

  ‘Your memories are not you. They’re electrical activity in a physical system. You just have to take control of the system.’

  ‘How do I do that?’

  The brilliant bird-eye gleams.

  ‘You know that feeling you’ve been having? Where you sense these fizzing connections running right through your body and you feel like you’re about to remember everything? That’s what I mean.’

  ‘Gareth, stop fucking with my mind.’

  ‘You don’t have a mind, Miss. You have a network of bioelectrical systems which has somehow managed to convince itself that it is conscious. You’ve been careless of late. You’re beginning to believe in the illusion.’

  I can see his real face now. His ears stick out more than ever. He seems to be all rubber. His eyes make their own glow.

  ‘Am I dying?’ I say.

  ‘No. You’re about a hundred yards from safety.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I say, sinking into sleep.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The Broken Twin

  ◉

  They’re walking, dressed for any weather, an energetic stride-past of Gore-Tex and conspicuous synthetics: lost-in-fog red, hypothermia blue. They march down the hillside, making dainty runs down steep banks of scree, braking with their telescopic graphite walking sticks, an adult education class on the move. The bearded one in front has a waterproof map-wallet hung like a sales tag around his neck. He fords the burn on heavy tiptoes, offering a helping hand to women. The wind preserves them in a jelly of silence. They carry all they need in emergency-colour daysacks they never open. They run on fine weather and oxygen. Their faces look hale and hearty, and a little hot.

  I lie where I woke up, tipped out on my side with my ear pressed into a folded jumper. A reef of heather flinches at my every breath. I feel psychotic with untimetabled sleep. James is on his feet, facing the way of the walkers but having second thoughts about calling out. Instead his eyes are staring northwards, to the cheerful cabin the walkers have just emerged from. It must be the loneliest tea-shop in England, with only a dirt track to feed it: miles from anywhere, in the middle of the moor.

  The sign says BROKEN TWIN TEA ROOM. The missing S is betrayed by the stubs of snapped fixings. Inside is a mid-afternoon gloom, through which I can make out trestle tables overlaid with blue-and-white chequered cloths. Home-made cakes glisten under glass. Whatever the walkers had, it has vanished. Newspaper cuttings and wall-mounted black-and-white photographs give the place an atmosphere of quiet commemoration. It’s as dark as a museum, and as empty.

  ‘Where are the Broken Twins?’

  I can’t see who James is talking to at first.

  ‘Twin,’ comes a voice from behind the counter. ‘Only one left now.’

  ‘What happened to the other one?’

  ‘Dust,’ says the voice. ‘Silicosis. Twenty-three year.’

  I can see him now, perched on a wooden stool behind the counter. A weather-beaten old man, licking at a rollie. The sight of the cakes compels me. But there’s a warm feeling too, at the thought that they’re all this old guy’s work.

  ‘From the mines?’ James is asking.

  ‘Aye. Cut his lungs to pieces.’

  ‘So the Broken Twins aren’t some kind of rock formation?’

  ‘Near enough.’ The old man nods slowly. ‘Amount of that muck we inhaled.’

  I catch him staring at the grubby dressing on my arm. He has a way of being utterly, unbreathingly still. His crow’s feet are so deep they look like gills. For a moment I wonder if that’s how he breathes.

  We order all-day breakfasts. The proprietor gets to work with painful slowness. The first whiff of frying almost finishes me. He comes in with long oval plates on which slabs of bacon are skating about in a yellow grease. I consume it like a shredder. When it’s gone, I feel even fainter than before.

  ‘So there were mines around here?’ James asks, getting started on the toast and jam.

  The old man points to the floor.

  ‘Underneath here? Can you go down?’

  ‘Keep walking,’ the man says. ‘You’ll fall down one soon enough.’

  ‘Is the main shaft nearby?’

  ‘There’s a shaft,’ he says. ‘The cage still works.’

  ‘Can you get us down there?’

  The old man nods. ‘Take you down meself, if it weren’t for this knee.’

  He finishes clearing our table, and then pulls a chair over and sits down, breathing hard.

  ‘So tell me who’s asking.’

  James frowns briefly, dramatically. ‘The grandson of a very brave man.’

  I stare at his bruised, animated face, dismayed by a premonition of the bullshit that’s to come. But if it helped us to find Gareth, I’d believe it was Christmas Day.

  We’re looking at a map of the Mickelhope mines. It’s a roll of ancient architect’s paper, which the old man has pinned to the table with four sugar-sprinklers. At first it looks like a basic Ordnance Survey, stretching from Fulling all the way up to the head of the Churl. Then you notice that the entire area is criss-crossed by the pencilled ghosts of mine-workings.

  ‘Echofield,’ James says, pointing to a network of lines away to the right. He traces a main drive along the length of the paper, underneath where Wenderley Forest would be, to an area that has been ringed i
n red pencil.

  ‘That’s us,’ the old man says. ‘That’s where your grandad would have worked.’

  ‘It all connects. It’s a continuous network of tunnels from here to right back down the dale.’

  ‘Aye. Bit of a walk, like. Echofield must be fifteen mile.’

  ‘So you could go down here and come out underneath ... ’ He pauses, deciding against something. ‘Underneath what used to be Echofield.’

  ‘You could walk it, aye. Your grandad probably did, a few times.’

  ‘They don’t walk it, though, do they? They’ve got roads down there. They get around in Land Cruisers.’

  The old man shrugs. ‘So I’ve heard. They say a company has got it. You hear a rumble or two from down there.’

  ‘Are the actual workings still safe?’

  ‘They cut them buggers from granite. The supports are three-hundred-year old oak. They haven’t shifted since your grandad were working down there.’

  With each mention of James’ imaginary grandad, I squirm a little less.

  ‘The company is called Sansom,’ James explains. ‘They’re a biotech. What used to be Echofield is now their European headquarters. They’ve taken over the old mines and set up a research station down there. They’re doing experiments they don’t want anyone to know about, playing around with the brain function of chimpanzees. We think they’re using some kind of neural implants to control their nervous systems by computer. They’re using a light railway to get the chimps into the mines and right on up the dale. Up here, in other words. That rumbling sound is probably the trains.’

  The old man closes his eyes, as though on a headache. He seems to know what we’re asking.

  ‘It’s a squeeze, like.’ He looks up at the map again, sketching out an area with his finger. ‘Your Sansom lot have got all this. They think that’s as far as the workings go. They should have done their homework, talked to some of the people as knew. Them buggers were chasing the seam through nothing. You were down there on your side, swinging an eight-pound hammer on a tap you couldn’t even see. Didn’t waste time digging it out to make it comfortable. Just wanted to get the lead out. They were ferrets. The gaps they crawled through. You wouldn’t find them if you weren’t looking.’