A Box of Birds

by Charles Fernyhough

  He seems caught out. I can see him forcing himself to enjoy something which, in the end, leaves a bitter taste.

  ‘Gareth wanted me to find out something about you. Is this it?’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘You’re David Overstrand?’

  He laughs. It’s funny how I never had an image of what the mythical terrorist looked like. It’s because he wasn’t a person at all.

  ‘We all are. It’s a code word. Our name for each other.’

  ‘You took his name? That kid who was killed by the plane?’

  ‘He was a friend of mine, Yvonne. I was there when he was killed. I saw him carted off in an ambulance. It was the first action I’d ever been on. I was fifteen.’

  ‘That’s why there were no photos of him...’

  I feel the blast again, burning my face, filling my cortex with light. The silent outrage of the unborn.

  ‘You put that thing into me...’

  ‘No. I told you, I didn’t know about the bomb. I didn’t know about the implant. That was all Sansom. I wasn’t involved.’

  A pale face above me in the hallway. Bridge’s pinched sincerity, shimmering through my pain. We seemed to be fighting underwater, trying to turn each other in a direction we didn’t want to go. We need to know, Yvonne. We’ve got to find the people who did this to you. She was there. She was David Overstrand, the terrorist. They all were.

  ‘What did you know about, then? The other animal rights attacks? All those lab workers who got tortured? Or was Conscience just another way of forgetting how empty you were?’

  ‘They’re my friends, Yvonne. They saved my life. They stuck with me through everything. Until this happened, they’d never let me down.’

  ‘So when were you planning to tell me? After I’d agreed to join you?’

  He goes over to the fallen cage and unpicks the wire latch. Inside there is a frightened brown bird. It has something on its leg, a tiny grey tag like an electronic monitoring device. The bird stays hunched in its corner, not as convinced by the promise of freedom as we are.

  ‘It didn’t have to go as far as it did. If you’d only trusted your feelings. Done some thinking with your heart for once.’

  ‘You wanted me to find myself? You wanted to make up a story for me too?’

  He unpins another cage and watches the bird lift off into a gap between the rafters. Look after the birds, the wise men tell us. For James, that always meant letting them go.

  ‘You could have joined us. They wouldn’t have hurt someone who was helping them. You could have been part of it. But you chose reason. You chose to be right, all the fucking time.’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with being right.’

  ‘But you weren’t right. You took it to pieces to find out how it worked. Then you didn’t know what to do with the pieces. They didn’t fit back together. You’d lost the very thing that made them what they were.’

  ‘No, James. There’s nothing else. The pieces are all there is.’

  Ghosts look strange in the flesh. Familiar. But then they were alive once. In your arms. Inside you.

  ‘You’re empty, aren’t you, James? There’s nothing inside. Not even Bankstown Underpass. Not even a story.’

  A hassled frown dents the space between his eyes. This is not how he wanted this to go. He stands there, patiently curving his hand over one side of his hair.

  ‘I’m yours, Yvonne. I’m your puzzle.’

  ‘And I was always one to fall for a challenge, wasn’t I?’

  His eyes react, as though something brilliant had just started up behind me.

  ‘Come with me. We can get through this.’

  ‘No, James. It’s too late.’

  The sound of a motor makes him turn. I look up to see a jet of light shoot out over our heads into the boarded-up gloom at the end of the nave. The whirr of a data projector. There’s a spell of darkness, and then Gareth’s face looms up against the ruined wall, a pulsing hologram, bright as a dream in the ruins. His eyes are closed. I wonder if he could have fallen asleep so quickly. I watch, not breathing, as the projector adjusts its rotation slightly and then magnifies it so that the image of Gareth fills the space between the two central columns. His eyes behind their closed lids seem more sunken than ever. His face has the angular severity of an old man’s.

  ‘Where is he? How’s he doing this?’

  ‘He’s connected. He’s rigged himself up to this entire aviary. He’s feeling it, breathing it. It’s become his consciousness.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I don’t know. He believed it was possible. And maybe that’s made it come true.’ Gareth stirs, his restlessness blurring the hologram. His eyes are moving under their lids.

  ‘He’s dreaming,’ James says.

  ‘No. The birds are dreaming. There are only birds.’

  The beam catches on the side of James’ face, lighting him up like we were lit up for each other, long ago, when I was his cinema.

  ‘You’d better go.’

  ‘No hurry. They don’t know about this place. They’ll have seen the cam, but they can’t know it’s in Verona. Gaz did a good job of hiding that.’

  ‘They? You mean Sansom?’

  ‘The people who work for them. The Chinese gangs who arrange the stowaways. They’ve left me alone so far because they wanted me to find the data for them. Shame they can’t be here to see it.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  He unclips another cage and gently removes its occupant. He holds the bird towards me, lifting the grey tag in his fingers.

  ‘It’s here. Look. Every bird has got one. It has to be the mapping data. Gaz would never have trusted it to a computer. He’s put it into thousands of these little data chips, and he’s attached each one to a bird. They’re yours. If you can catch them.’

  I look at the other cages. Each bird has a similar grey tag. Those that have been freed are also carrying tiny data chips. The data are all around you, Gareth told me. James is opening more cages and shooing their inhabitants out into the air. The data scatter noisily around us, colonizing different corners of the church.

  ‘So this is how he disguises them from Sansom?’

  ‘You said the data were in pieces. Each bit was on a different account on Ermintrude. They weren’t going to put them together until all the pieces were ready.’

  More startled birds flutter up from his hands.

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘I don’t know. Report back to Sansom. Tell them they’re not getting their precious mapping data.’

  ‘And what about your friends?’

  ‘I walk out of here. I make myself disappear.’

  He tightens his cheeks, creaselessly betraying his youth.

  ‘Are you scared?’

  ‘Not for me. Like you say, I’m empty. What’s an empty box going to feel?’

  I shiver, feeling everything. ‘What about me?’

  ‘It’s not your problem, Yvonne. Sansom know who double-crossed them. They know who didn’t deliver on the deal. Go ahead and live your life. Go to Effi. She needs you. She’s not part of this.’

  He seems to be waiting. Tears blur the lights of the cages, brilliantly swollen. I’m frightened and cold.

  ‘Do one good thing,’ I say. ‘Pretend you got what you came here for. Make out that Gareth told you where the data were. Lead them off on a really long wild goose chase. Keep them away from this place.’

  He grins. ‘Since when have I ever done anything for anyone?’

  ‘Maybe no one’s ever really needed you before.’

  The idea flows into him silently. He goes to pick up his bag, and then stands there before me, sunglasses hooked onto his shirt pocket, the white threads of his headphones tangled around his jacket buttons.

  ‘What will they do to you?’

  ‘Nothing. The gangs have their methods for settling things. They’ll wait until I have a son. That’s the Chinese way. The son pays.’

&
nbsp; ‘He already has.’

  ‘What?’

  I feel the blast again, the quiet voice in the hallway. I can’t tell him. It was a feeling. It wasn’t truth.

  ‘James...’

  He’s on me now. Something’s wrong. I tense, ready to fight him. Our sudden movements startle the birds, and they flap up towards the light, deflected by the netting above the aviary. James’ arms close across my back and I feel the strength he pins into me, a grip that is too strong for love. He rocks with strange upheavals, feelings you could never name. There’s a white stain on the shoulder of his jacket. His voice is thick in my ear.

  ‘They can’t hurt me, Yvonne. They can tear me to pieces, but they can’t do what you’re doing...’

  He’s sobbing. I let him hold me until it stops.

  ‘You nearly died once, James. Do what David was supposed to have done for you. Take the chance you wouldn’t otherwise have had.’

  He stands back, unsteady on his feet. I feel a pinch of pity, watching him. What’s left of a man, after you take away his stories?

  ‘All right. I’ll do it. Sansom aren’t going to get the data.’

  He looks at me for the last time. His eye contact is uncertain, as though he’d not quite decided that, after all this, I was the person he really wanted to be talking to. The hurt of a moment ago has flowed right through him. He’s a boy again, with the world at his feet, a whole lifetime in brilliant view. He looks as fresh as the day he first walked into my lab, bristling for a fight. He got his fight. He got his story. I watch him swing his bag up onto his shoulder, his fist gripping the strap up by the neck of his polo shirt. He starts down the aisle, and I think he’s going to head out through the same door I came through. But then he stops and turns towards the scaffolding that holds the netting in place. There are some feed bins there.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘There’s another way out of this. For both of us.’

  He upends a feed bin and climbs up onto it. From there he can grip the edge of the scaffolding and clamber up. The poles are wet, and he’s wiping bird-slime from his fingers. He holds one shit-streaked hand out for me.

  ‘Come with me. There’s a door leading onto a balcony. Rooftops. Ways out of here.’

  ‘No, James. You’re on your own.’

  He retracts his hand and stays there on his hunkers, watching me. After a moment he stands up and starts pulling himself up onto the scaffolding platform that runs around the upper part of the church. I see him bathed in light from above, unbending from a crouch and scrolling through a menu on his phone. Then, finding no one he can think of calling, he puts the phone away and continues climbing, grabbing handfuls of netting and pulling himself up towards the stone ledge that marks the upper limit of the aviary. I realise now that it conceals a door. Gareth’s face hangs below him, brilliant in its sleeping stillness. The projector whirrs. When I look back James is gone, like the memory of the thing that woke you, vanished before you can work out what it was.

  PART SIX

  ◉

  Millennium Heights

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  A Box Of Birds

  ◉

  The nurse comes in the mornings. He makes himself breakfast, spends an hour playing backgammon on the computer, and then remembers that he’s supposed to help me wash Effi. I hear him thumping around in the kitchen, then mumbling my name around my bedroom door, wondering whether I’m decent. I come out in my dressing gown and follow him into the living room, where we’ve set up Effi’s bed. I can sense the heat in his dark skin, the nervousness behind his big brown irises. Effi greets him with a fart and bathes in his shadow as he leans over the bed to strap the pressure gauge to her arm. She loves that silhouette of him against the daylight, the tang of his breath as he separates a finger or finds a vein.

  ‘My dishy nurse,’ she whispers, scanning his face then trying to refocus on the TV in the corner. ‘Thank God for you.’

  He switches on the blood-sugar meter and waves it playfully under her nose. He finds a fat brown finger and she says ‘Ouch’ though he hasn’t done anything yet, and he says ‘Now for the icepick in the forehead’ and she says ‘Will you be so clumsy when I finally expire?’ He punches the needle into the flesh and peers down at the readout, and we stand there, the unlikely family, waiting for the numbers to settle.

  ‘And I reckon your mum could lay off them jelly babies,’ he says, showing me her latest blood-sugar outrage.

  His colour fascinates me. I want to examine him close up, work out exactly how that face is put together. I imagine his lips on my shoulder, the scrape of his stubble on my bare skin. I wait for another track to start up in his earphones before mouthing a sexual invitation whose exoticism surprises even me; he finally clicks off his soundpod and stares.

  ‘Well, Yvonne? Are you going to help me bath this fat pig or not?’

  The traffic roars through the half-drawn curtains. I go into the kitchen, which still reeks of the full English breakfast he’s just cooked himself, and flick the kettle on for tea. Daren stands at the end of the bed and lifts his arms like a Scooby Doo monster. Effi doesn’t move. He finds a big toe under the sheet and gives it a squeeze. The sensory jolt sends a flood of power rising through her brainstem, sifting her dreams like stones on a beach. She hears the bark of a chai-wallah on a rocking jetty. The slap of ocean against the pier. She feels a hand squeezing her, pushing the sari between her legs, the first man that ever touched her, faceless and lost in the pre-dawn crowds. The stain of Bombay washed out by a curve of sea. Then her cortex crackles back to life and she stares out dully at her two torturers, the blue rubber lifting-straps, the soap and flannels and towels.

  ‘Christ,’ she says. ‘Am I dirty again already?’

  ‘You stink,’ Daren says. ‘You are absolutely minging.’

  ‘That’s because it’s so bloody hot in here.’

  ‘It’s summertime. And the people what own this building haven’t worked out how to turn the heating off. Don’t worry. You’re paying for it.’

  ‘Can’t you open a window?’

  ‘The windows are open. Can’t you hear the motorway?’

  I’m off with the traffic, racing my own souped-up demons.

  ‘Come on, Yvonne. Let’s get this big fat minger sitting up against the pillow.’

  We drag one thick arm around each of our necks and get the straps under her. Then one two three and she’s upright on the pillows, panting from the heat and the insult of displacement. The nurse gets busy with the flannel. I like watching him work. He keeps pursing and softening his lips as the task gets tricky and then easy again, as crises of gravity and access arise and are deftly handled, threaded knots of concentration unravelling and pulling free. His arms are bare, and you can see the dry skin on his shoulders, the oil-black hair in his armpits. He tosses me the flannel to wash her down below, and then he squeezes some toothpaste onto her brush and tells her to open wide. She sits through it obediently, grinning like a lunatic while I hold up her lacey orange nightdress and dab her dry with the towel. He gets her to spit into a bowl then stands over her, brushing her silver-lined tresses and asking about her holidays, playing the hairdresser game, the not-dying game, until they’re both thick with smiles.

  ‘Swimming,’ she yawns. ‘I want to go swimming.’

  I put the tea down by her bed and perch on the edge. I pick up the old Bombay street map, unfold it along its familiar lines of softness, and start tracing a path between the beaches.

  ‘OK. You get off the train at Victoria Terminus.’

  It’s like a gift of oxygen. I hear her dry cough, then her sigh, her grateful release from this world.

  ‘You can see the top of the GPO like a great big onion. Dabawallahs are everywhere. You come down through the main concourse and you’re on to Bori Bunder. You go up Cruickshank Road towards Dhobi Talao. A little side-street gets you onto Queen’s Road. From here you can hear the sound of boats and seagulls and everything.’
<
br />   She listens, breathing heavily. There’s an abrasion in her lungs, a waking snore. A tentacle of neural activity reaches far across her cortex, links up with a flicker of sensory memory and claims it for her life story. All the while her cortex drifts into slow synchrony, out of the rolling foothills of the alpha wave and into the greater ruggedness of theta and delta. The smell of Crawford Market. The shouts of children on Chowpatty Beach. Sometimes her ancient eyelids flicker, jolting over some feature of Bombay’s topography, and I wonder how much is getting through. Daren insists that she can’t hear me, but that’s just medical bombast, the unwarranted certainty of nurses’ training. I’d rather believe that consciousness was a luxury Effi had learned to live without, that she’d moved on to a thriftier place where the body operates without knowing. Maybe it always did, and a graceful dying is just the proof of it. She’s going out as she came in, a bundle of automatic routines that can cope perfectly well without the buzz of being here.

  ‘Don’t stop,’ she murmurs, from somewhere on the edge of sleep.

  I keep reading, tracing the route from Opera House Junction, cutting careful shapes out of post-war Bombay. Her forehead is soft and elastic, like the skin on hot chocolate. There’s a pale blue cross from radiotherapy. Several more on her abdomen, if I were to lift the sheet and look. Cancer has joined her up, bowel to lungs to liver, made her whole. It’s the strokes, the sudden blood starvations, that we’re afraid of now. I fold the old map, taking care with its yellowing creases, and try to make out the sound of her breathing over the steady tear of the dual carriageway.

  ‘Ninety over sixty,’ Daren says. ‘Getting better all the time.’

  He coils up his blood-pressure meter and stows it in his bag. He surfaces with a tube of paper strips. He stabs a finger with a lance, dabs the paper in the blood and carries it over to the window. For a moment he conducts the roaring stillness with gentle hand-gestures, fixing her sweet blood in the overheated air.

  ‘All these cars,’ he says, holding the curtain aside with his other hand. ‘Where they all going? On such a hot September day.’