A Box of Birds

by Charles Fernyhough

  Bright sunlight blazes on the carpet where he’s standing. In the corner, the TV shows a bleached, dusty screen.

  ‘What’s this you’re watching?’ I ask.

  He lets the curtain drop to frame a strip of brightness. He grabs the remote and thumbs the volume higher. Dim sleeping figures are visible, the ghostly denizens of a twenty-four hour reality show.

  ‘This is brilliant. It’s called The Retreat, right? They’re on this healing retreat halfway up the highest mountain in New Zealand. They sit around all day shouting at each other and once a week someone gets voted off. The thing is, there’s a storm going on and they’re running out of supplies. The camp’s completely cut off. The rescue services can’t get to them because the weather’s so bad. They reckon they might die up there. It’s a real bummer because someone just got voted off. He can’t leave because of the weather.’

  I don’t know why I want to know more.

  ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘David. His name’s David.’

  I stare at the blackness. My heart knells strangely. It’s a feeling. It isn’t truth.

  ‘What really gets me,’ Daren is saying, ‘is that about a hundred million people are watching this, worldwide. Would you really want to be so famous that even your own death is on the telly?’

  I wonder if James would see the irony. He would find a way out of it, another mask of deceptions to hide behind. Unless, this time, reality has finally caught up with him. The stories bought him time, but in the end they simply stopped being true.

  ‘I don’t know. If you’ve got people coming after you, this might actually be the best place to hide away.’

  He thumbs it off. The screen returns to a purer sunlit blackness, mottled with fingermarks. He pulls the curtain wide and looks out.

  ‘It’s a beautiful day, Yvonne. Effi’s asleep. You’ve been cooped up in this place too long. What you need is a swing on the swings. What you need is a bit of sun on them lovely legs.’

  ‘I...’

  ‘Come on. Feel the fear and do it anyway.’

  He stands there, holding imaginary swing-chains, pushing himself back and forwards in the middle of Effi’s curtained sitting-room. Forward, back, forward, back. I can’t help laughing. He’s actually swinging, pushing, pulling, shuffling his feet on the carpet as he goes. I laugh until the incubated air makes me giddy; I laugh until I can almost hear the person I used to be. He’s swinging, on the swings, on the carpet, on the eighth floor. It’s easy, when you know how.

  We wait for a gap in the traffic and run across the road. I’m wearing a yellow sleeveless sundress cut above the knee. Daren has taken off his smock and is displaying a red basketball vest with a huge question-mark where the player’s number should be.

  ‘See?’ he says, opening the gate to the playground. ‘No ten-year-old drug-pushers with baseball bats. They’re all at school.’ There are two swings in the one frame. We sit down, dipping backwards side by side. The rubber is hot against my thighs. My skin fizzes with the unfamiliar prodigy of sunshine. Daren stretches his hands high up the chains and tries to pull himself up through brute strength.

  ‘So this memory place you’re taking me to. That’s where they’ve put all the data?’

  I cling on to the chain-linked steel. So many people in the world I could have confided in, and I go and spill my secrets to Effi’s nurse. But we’ve been spending a lot of time together, staying up late with Effi, hiding out like gangsters while the summer motors by without us. It’s time to face the world again. The launch of the Memory Centre was always going to be the most convincing statement of the Lycee’s success in mapping the Lorenzo Circuit. So Daren and I are calling in a night nurse for Effi, getting dressed up and going along to the grand opening. I haven’t seen Gillian since she arranged for my operation. She wore the transcendent tiredness of someone who had won a long victory. She was surrounded by her trophies: the treasured special issue of Nature, hot off the press, with its three back-to-back papers on the structure of the Lorenzo Circuit. Big fold-out colour plates showing the material basis of memory in three-dimensional glamour. Three meticulously detailed articles that would change the world, with Gillian’s name taking pride of place at the end of each long list of authors. The wonderful back-to-frontness of it all: the woman whose vision had made it possible tacked on at the end like an afterthought. She made the calls quietly, fingering the toned bicep of the arm that held the phone, warding off a few awkward questions with her stay-where-you-are smile. Later, when it was done, she left me alone with it, sensing my need to say goodbye. It was a tangle of platinum–iridium wires, insulated in polyurethane. The pulse generator was as discreet as a hearing aid. The thorn in my soul had been excised and rinsed clean. I thought of Mateus, whose research had made it possible. He still had his hooks in me. It had been part of me without my knowing, and then eventually with my consent. I tried to remember how it had felt, to have that secret buried in my cortex. But it hadn’t felt like anything. It was me, and it wasn’t me. That was exactly what Gareth had been trying to say.

  ‘So your people haven’t lost anything?’ Daren says.

  ‘Gareth didn’t actually steal the data. He copied it. We thought he was going to hand it over to Sansom. Or we thought that they would force him to. It was still there on Ermintrude, the Lycee’s server, but he’d encrypted it. He’d locked it away, surrounded it with weird firewalls, so that no one could get at it without his help. They were working on reconstructing the fragments from their back-ups, but it was taking too long. He talked to Gillian. As soon as he knew that I’d seen what he wanted me to see, he got in touch with her. She persuaded him that he’d made his point, and he agreed to cooperate. He reversed the mess he had made, they pulled the data off the servers, and they were ready to publish.’

  Brown eyes hang on my words.

  ‘And what happened to Sansom? Their experiment in the mines?’

  ‘Gillian needed no persuading to take on that particular cause. It’s proving to be a complex investigation. Sansom have the muscle to cover their traces. They’re claiming that the only people they ever had working up in the dale were some visiting scientists manning a research lab, under perfectly ordinary levels of industrial security. I still don’t know if I’m going to have to testify. They’ll have moved them out by now, anyway. In the meantime, they’ve got a renewed terrorism campaign to deal with. Aslan’s Law have taken a particular interest in their activities.’

  I think of the woman with the amulet, hurriedly released from underground into a new life as a hyper-promoted researcher. I’ve had my tangle of wires removed, but she’s stuck with hers. There’s no doubting the power of Sansom’s technology, even to reverse the damage that she has had done to her. Perhaps that gives her some hope, that she might find her past again, like she found the new life she thought she wanted. Whatever happens, Sansom will have to keep promoting her.

  ‘So what about your job?’ Daren says. ‘Are you going back there?’

  I look at the yellowing trees that screen off the park from the dual carriageway. Mid-September. Fulling will be full of betas in four wheel-drives, unloading duvets and home cinema systems for a new university year.

  ‘What, to cause more animals unnecessary suffering in the pursuit of some half-baked theory? I never wanted it, Daren. I had no more choice about it than the mice whose genes I tampered with. I thought I was experimenting on them. Actually, I think they were experimenting on me.’

  ‘You’ve grown a conscience.’ He sounds pleased to have made the connection. ‘Con-Science. That’s a good joke, isn’t it, Yvonne?’

  ‘They’re not against science. They’re against its dominance as a way of knowing. They think there are other ways of getting at the truth.’

  There’s music in that smile, music for driving to.

  ‘But you weren’t a bad person to be doing that research. That work does a lot of good. That drug we’re giving Effi, to help her breathing? She’s already had f
our months’ more life than she would have had otherwise. Think of all the fun we’ve had in four months.’

  ‘So are you saying that they ran their mazes for a reason? All those mice in all those experiments that never led anywhere?’

  ‘I’m saying Effi’s drugs were tested on animals. The people who test them do everything to make sure the animals don’t feel pain. I see the good this stuff does. I care for you, Yvonne. I’m not going to let you beat yourself up over this.’

  I manage a jaded smile.

  ‘Come on, Daren. You know what would have happened if Sansom had got the Lorenzo Circuit data. They would have patented them. No one would have been able to use that mapping information, to develop treatments or whatever, without paying a licence fee. We wanted it to stay in the public domain. That’s what Gareth risked his life for.’

  ‘He wasn’t doing it for the data, though, was he? He was doing it for you.’

  I shrug, acknowledging the baffling wisdom in his words. I feel the tug of another sleepless night, and let my arms drape forward around the chains.

  ‘The data on Ermintrude had only been encrypted. They hadn’t been destroyed. As long as he was prepared to help us out, we could unscramble everything. I went to see him in hospital. I had his phone, of course, so he knew how to contact me. Getting himself admitted was his idea. He said he had his own data to unscramble. I saw his face light up and I think I finally understood. He wanted me to come after him. It had to be me. He said I was the only one who appreciated what he’d been trying to say.’

  ‘Why birds, though? What’s that all about?’

  ‘The birds are your thoughts. Electrochemical processes you can have no knowledge of. You have to look after them. You have a duty of care towards them. Otherwise, what does it matter what you do? That’s all he was trying to tell us.’

  ‘Oh, yeah.’ He frowns, showing flex-points in his face that I never knew were there.

  ‘That’s why he stole the data. He didn’t want Sansom’s money. He wanted my attention. Never mind that he got everyone else’s attention too. This was all about me proving how much I cared for him. He made me remember. Me finding him, in his eyes, was a proof of how much he meant to me.’

  ‘The poor boy was in love with you!’

  ‘What does it say, Daren, that all these young men keep falling for me?’

  ‘It says, Yvonne, that you have an interesting personality. And you’re not wearing anything under that dress.’

  I hide my blushes in the sky. As I incline my face I feel hair sliding down my back, a wave of spangling softnesses. The sky is blue. The sunlight passes right through me.

  ‘That’s what I don’t understand,’ Daren is saying. ‘It was just you and James in that church. How did you stop Sansom getting their nasty hands on the data?’

  I close my eyes on the light. I push back with my feet and let go. The breeze on my skin, my whole body moving. At the centre of it all, this flicker of knowing.

  I’m here.

  The birds startle and clatter around us. They mob him, high on the scaffolding that lines the church, and he’s having to flap his hands to keep them away.

  ‘Yvonne. Come on. We can get through this.’

  ‘No, James.’

  His face is stretched by tiredness. That stubble looks rough. It’s his moment to stand straight and tell the world that he denies every shred of its reality, but he looks embarrassed, caught out in front of a crowd. I still don’t know who he is. Behind all the lies there must be something that doesn’t trip itself up, make a joke out of its own self-contradiction. Or did I fall in love with the contradictions, the supreme confidence that couldn’t look you in the eye, the militant truth-seeker who hid himself in stories? He wanted the sleepwalking masses to wake up, but all he had to give them was another fairy tale. Surely a man’s lies will always lead back somewhere, to the facts of his character that are biologically true: the thing itself, not the thing’s invention? If he could have been honest about that, we might have got on. But he couldn’t find it. He tried to make it up, and he fell apart. In the end, I was happy with the contradictions. I could have loved them, if he’d given us a chance.

  ‘There’s too many,’ he yells. ‘They’re crammed in too tight. We’ll have to let them go.’

  He starts pulling at the netting, ripping a long tear in the fabric.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Yvonne, I can’t walk past a caged animal. I couldn’t do it before and I can’t do it now.’

  I watch him climbing again, reaching for a girder that juts out from the stonework, from which he can reach the mesh above his head. He starts tearing at it with both hands until the whole of this side has come away. A few of Gareth’s birds flap flatly into freedom. But James wants them all set free, and he keeps tearing at the netting with all his weight until two edges of the rectangle have come down, freeing a sagging triangle of sky. He runs around the ledge at the top of the church, whooping out his satisfaction. Columns of light from the strengthening sun are melting the darkness of the nave. The birds startle at James’ noise and begin to rise in shoaly layers through the hole in the mesh, yellows and greens and browns, with dazzling wing-flashes and staring, sky-struck eyes. I can see the grey tags on their legs, each bearing a nugget of data. I stand on the midden floor of the aviary and watch the treasure of the Lorenzo Circuit take off through the gaps in the roof-tiles, rising past me in a flock of separate happenings, thoughts that cannot know themselves, the scattered wisdom of the morning.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

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  This book was made possible by the generosity of more than three hundred subscribers; I am very grateful to everyone who supported the project. Special thanks to John Mitchinson, Rachael Kerr, Cathy Hurren, Xander Cansell, Matt Railton, Dan Mogford, Justin Pollard, Jimmy Leach and everyone at Unbound; to Richard Bentall, Sarah Caro, Cristiana Cavina-Pratesi, David Chalmers, Andrew Crumey, Christine Dyer, John Findlay, Rhett Griffiths, Claudia Hammond, Simon James, Bella Lacey, Jonah Lehrer, Anthony McGregor, Sara Maitland, Gill Norman, Richard Osbourne, Edward Platt, Eleanor Rees, Nic Regan, Trevor Robbins, Jon Simons, Hugo Spiers, Angela Tagini, Pat Waugh, Valerie Webb, Susanne Weis and Angela Woods. As ever, I owe a huge debt of gratitude to my agent, David Grossman, and to Lizzie, Athena and Isaac for their patience and support. A version of the first chapter appeared in New Writing 14 (Granta/British Council). I received assistance at critical points from a Time to Write award from the Northern Writers’ Awards and an Arts Council of England Grant for the Arts. The quotations from Plato’s Theaetetus in Chapter 26 are from Benjamin Jowett’s nineteenth-century translation.

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