Bird

by Sophie Cunningham

  ‘Yes. They think that’s why you fell,’ Steve says. ‘The fever.’

  I finally focus on the fact that my leg is hanging suspended from a pulley. I am wearing one of those braces that pierces the skin and flesh to hold the bone in place. I stare at it with interest for a few minutes and try to work out what to say next. I look at Robert. He has tears running down his face.

  ‘How is Minx?’ I ask Steve. ‘Does she miss me?’

  ‘Of course she does. Her fur is all unkempt. She’s really let her grooming fall by the wayside.’

  Eleanor shoots him a look but it is too late. I begin to cry.

  ‘Oh, darling,’ Steve says to me. ‘I was joking. She’s fine.’

  ‘Do you let her sleep with you?’ I ask.

  Steve gives a melodramatic sigh. ‘I do. Despite the risk to my health. She wakes me at three with her licking and at six for food. She sleeps perched in the crook of my neck so I can’t move. She’s given me fleas.’

  I am about to say something but he holds up his hands. ‘Don’t say it. I know I can de-flea her. I did. Two weeks ago. It hasn’t worked. And she hates the stuff so much she races around the house like a demented speed queen, so I have to…’

  ‘May I please,’ Robert interrupts us, speaking formally, ‘have a moment with Ana-Sofia?’ Steve looks as if he’s going to refuse but Eleanor takes him by the arm and hustles him out.

  Robert reclaims my hand. ‘I am sorry,’ he said. ‘I was a shit. I was trying to play hard to get. You are impossible and it seemed hopeless and I had this strategy,’ he gulps air anxiously before going on. ‘But it was not a good strategy. I did not love her and we went out maybe twice once you left. That is all. Since then I have been waiting for you.’

  ‘Come here,’ I say, and let him kiss me gently on the mouth. He smiles at me tentatively.

  I want to tell him that such matters as our misunderstanding seem very small and far away, but I am overwhelmed with exhaustion. ‘We’re okay,’ is all I can manage.

  When I wake next Eleanor is with me and Steve and Robert have gone. Eleanor is in her early seventies now, but looks about twenty years younger. It isn’t just the effect of the colourful scarf she uses to tie her greying hair up, either. It is a physical lightness. A litheness. She still has the body of a dancer though it must be forty years since she’s performed.

  ‘I wish you told me you were going to India,’ she says. ‘There were things I could have given you. The first thing I would have given you is this.’ She hands me an old manila folder with a faded print of a once-gaudy-blue Yamantaka glued onto the front. He has the head of a bull but this Yamantaka beams, fangs and all: a cheesy G-rated god. Inside the folder are tattered pages covered in my mother’s messy looping handwriting.

  ‘It’s in English,’ I say.

  ‘Of course it is,’ Eleanor replies. ‘She wrote it for you. And when you were a girl I wrote you something to go with it. All my memories of your mother.’ She hands me a second folder, bound in red ribbon. I go to thank her but she waves her hand at me as if it is nothing. ‘Actually,’ she says, ‘at the time I did it as much for myself as for you. I also want to give you this.’ She hands me an old and battered music box. It is lined with purple satin and has a tiny ballerina inside that springs into life when I open it. ‘This belonged to your mother. She wanted you to have it.’

  ‘But why…’ I struggle for words. ‘Why did you wait so long to give me these?’

  Eleanor looks nervous but she meets my eye. ‘You never seemed to want to talk about her until now.’ And this is the moment, when Eleanor looks at me straight-faced and lies, that I realise she was frightened Anna would claim me again. I take her hand.

  ‘You know I love you like a mother, don’t you?’

  Eleanor nods.

  ‘In fact I can love you more easily. Better. Because you are not my mother.’

  Now we both laugh. God knows, my mother was not an easy person to love.

  I let go of her hand and pick up the music box. I stroke the ballerina with an index finger. ‘Do I look like Mom?’ I ask. I have asked Eleanor that many times over the years. ‘Was her hair really blonde, or was it brown, like mine?’

  ‘In India,’ Eleanor says, wiping tears away with the back of her hand, ‘her hair went brown, then grey. I don’t know if the blonde she had when she was younger was fake or not.’

  ‘Were her breasts as big as they look in photos or did she wear one of those Hughes bras?’

  Eleanor takes the chance to regain a few yards of moral high ground. ‘You don’t seriously expect me to discuss your mother’s breasts with you, do you?’

  I pick up one of the letters that lie in the box. It’s written in Russian and the handwriting is André’s. I remember that he continued to light the candles around Sofia’s image until he was well into his eighties, and that, in the end, was why we had to move him to a home. He kept setting fire to things. Postcards, newspapers, the remnants of the drapes he’d put up years ago. The blanket tacked across the window was singed all along the bottom where flames had licked it. Thank God it was woollen, and not flammable enough to go up. It was always a mystery to me how he hadn’t burned the house down.

  I lift the yellowed paper to my nose. I smell: gunpowder; ice.

  Another of the photos in the music box was taken on the set of Anastasia. It is a crew shot and Anna is next to a man who is looking at her with an expression I can only describe as devoted. Her eyes are cast downward. She smiles a soft and gentle smile.

  ‘Who is that?’ I ask, though I don’t doubt it is the man Gabriel told me about. The man my mother was in love with.

  ‘That is Nick,’ Eleanor says.

  I ask, because despite my wish to believe, nobody in their right mind would take Gabriel’s word, ‘Is he my father?’

  Eleanor shrugs. ‘I don’t know.’ All Anna’s friends shrug like that. It is one of the mannerisms everyone close to her seems to have: traces she bestowed on those she loved.

  ‘Why would she never say who he was?’

  ‘Your mother was always so indiscreet,’ Eleanor says, ‘about everything. I assumed this was one of the ways she kept him special. He was her one big secret. And she did once tell me that his wife was famous, and she would only go along with the maintenance payments if things were kept quiet. But your mother’s stories were like that. Everyone was famous. Things were always a big deal. Nothing could be just ordinary. So, who knows? But I met him once. He came to Ceylon with us.’

  ‘The holiday with the elephants?’ I say. ‘He was there?’

  ‘He only came for a few days. You don’t remember? He was very warm, very funny. He was a neighbour of Anna’s from Leningrad, when they were children. Then they had an affair in Paris.’

  ‘And the money?’ I ask.

  ‘It turned up in Anna’s bank account regularly after you were born. After Anna died it turned up in mine. Anna must have arranged that somehow.’

  ‘When did it stop coming?’

  ‘After you graduated. I have no idea how he knew that had happened.’

  ‘Did you try to contact him after Anna died? To see if he would take me…’ but before the words are out of my mouth I realise I’ve said the wrong thing. Tears have sprung into Eleanor’s eyes but there is anger in her face too.

  ‘I loved you, Az. I would never have given you up. Not unless he—whoever he was—had wanted to fight for you. Had loved you enough to fight for you.’

  Now it is my turn to flinch and my turn to get upset.

  ‘Honey,’ she comes closer to the bed and hugs me, ‘don’t.’

  That night I don’t take the sleeping pills offered. Instead I dredge through my childhood memories. I can remember elephants, green mangoes, frangipani flowers sprinkling down upon me like rain, and the prickly red balls Eleanor has since told me are rambutan, but I can’t actually remember meeting my father. But, as dawn nears, flashes come to me; a strong square hand in mine; bathing with elephants; a lullaby;
waking at sunrise and getting out of my crib—why was I in a cot? I was four by then.

  I finally fall asleep for a few hours and when I wake I ring Marilyn. ‘Do you remember,’ I ask, ‘the man that joined us when we were in Ceylon that time? My mother’s boyfriend?’

  ‘Sure,’ she says, ‘Nick. He only came for a week. He was a funny guy; but then your mom always had cute boyfriends.’

  ‘Did he come with us to the elephant orphanage that time?’

  There is silence over the phone but it is a loud silence, the sound of Marilyn thinking. ‘No,’ she says, finally. ‘I’d remember that. I think he was off with your mom somewhere.’

  So, the lately discovered memory of a sandy-haired man, his glasses covered in mud, rubbing an elephant behind the ear, what is that? Hope? And the thumb nail slicing into spiky red skins to pop out silken white flesh and put the fruit into my mouth, have I made that up as well? I remember nothing, I remember everything: a bed draped in a filmy veil of netting and the crashing of waves against rocks, lapping around my bed, the salt water splashing my toes; a song sung in the language of my mother’s land in the heat of a tropical night. And his hands. I remember his beautiful hands.

  ‘What are you reading?’ I ask Robert, because I haven’t got my glasses on and I can’t see the title from where I’m lying in bed. Robert looks at me because he knows me well enough by this stage to know that I can run with this particular line of attack for an hour or so. What are you reading that for? You don’t actually like that author, do you? On I will go. Some days I am rude to him and some days I ignore him.

  Anyway, when I ask Robert what book he is reading he looks at me and says, ‘Not telling.’ Then he puts down the book and says to me: ‘Darling, even if I die tomorrow, I will die loving you. If I die next week, or in a year, or in twenty, I will die loving you.’

  My voice is small and shaky when I ask, ‘What about her?’

  He comes and sits by the bed and looks me in the eye. ‘I’ve told you. There is no her.’

  ‘Why do you bother with me?’ I ask. ‘I don’t understand.

  ‘You smell right,’ Robert says.

  ‘Not in this place I don’t. I smell weird. Of chemicals.’

  ‘Well, perhaps it is because you are a bitch. My mother was a bitch and maybe, like you, I have a mother thing.’

  I throw a magazine at him.

  ‘It seems to me that you are better now,’ he says.

  ‘It does,’ I agree.

  I lift my sheets off the bar that holds them above my leg. The bits of metal that spiral into my flesh are disgusting to me, but Robert can look at them without flinching. ‘Do you mind,’ I ask, ‘untying this robe? I want to change into my normal clothes.’

  ‘Sure,’ Robert says. He undoes the tie and I hold my arms out so he can slip the robe off me. He helps me out of what I think of as my prison garb and looks at me thoughtfully, then he steps away from me to close the door. ‘You know, I do not think you should be getting out of hospital before you have taken full advantage of the facilities. The leg support. Things like that.’ I look at him to figure out if he’s joking but he looks intense, not amused. Intense in a way I recognise.

  I’m not sure that I’m ready for this and try and fend him off. ‘I didn’t know you had a fetish for medical equipment.’

  ‘What I have,’ he says, ‘is a fetish for you.’ He leans down and kisses my neck, before grazing his mouth across my skin and taking a nipple into his mouth. The feeling of his mouth on me courses up to my head and down to my toes. It’s as if an electrical surge has jolted me awake.

  ‘Someone might see,’ I say, slightly breathless, but actually it is unlikely that anyone will look in. The gentler rhythms of the night shift have begun. It is late and most of the patients are asleep.

  Robert moves his face down. He breathes on me until I start to moan and then, slowly, he presses his tongue against my flesh. When he comes back up and kisses me his face is slick.

  ‘I will be quick,’ he promises. ‘Despite the degree of difficulty.’

  ‘Okay,’ I whisper. My voice sounds hoarse to me. ‘Let’s give this a shot.’ I undo Robert’s jeans and see his erection. One of us groans, maybe me, maybe him. Actually, we are both groaning. After months of celibacy he seems huge to me and I am half-horny, half-afraid. ‘Do you really think you can fit that thing in? What are you going to do about the brace?’

  ‘I have been practising, imaginatively speaking, for some time now,’ he is pressing his face against my belly and kissing and biting me, but then he stops. ‘I’ll put your sling on, that will help.’ Now he’s up and about and putting my leg in its sling and winding it up so my foot is close to pointing at the ceiling. He slides a pillow under me with paramedical efficiency. ‘This is turning into a military operation,’ I say. ‘Let’s go.’

  He kneels on the bed before me. I clasp my healthy leg around his waist and then he’s in me and it feels good and I start to moan, so loudly he has to put a finger to my lips to shush me. But oh, I feel better than I have for a long, long time. The look of concentration on his face gives way to one of relief. I suppose mine does too, for what I feel is joy. I feel joyous.

  After hovering over me for a few minutes, and showering me with little kisses, Robert shifts so he is lying, precariously, on the edge of the bed. His hand rests low on my belly. We don’t speak; it seems we are in agreement that silence has more possibility than words.

  *

  With your Death full of flowers

  ‘It is possible,’ Ian said to me, not long before he died, ‘that your mother went mad at the end.’

  ‘When did you last see her?’

  ‘Steve and I walked up to her cave. I took her a chocolate cake for her 42nd birthday.’

  ‘You carried a cake all that way?’

  ‘I shouldn’t have bothered,’ Ian still looked hurt, all those years later. ‘She was furious.’

  ‘Why did you bother with her?’

  ‘Steve wanted to do the trek,’ he said. ‘You walk for days through forest of pine and silver firs. And the rhododendrons were in bloom. Have you ever seen them? Not like the neat shrubs in gardens, but fantastically gnarled trees, twisted by the wind, covered in the most beautiful flowers: white, pink, red, violet and yellow. The air is full of the fragrance.’ His lip trembled and his eyes filled with tears. His skin was translucent, tight against his angelic bones. Some days, just listening to Ian breathe could break my heart. He squeezed my hand. ‘Oh, I get emotional these days. Grief is so boring.’ He rested a moment before pulling some postcards and letters out from where he’d tucked them underneath his pillow, ‘I have kept all the postcards and letters Anna wrote me. They’re yours, of course, but they won’t answer any questions.’ I looked at the series of grainy pictures of snowcapped mountains. ‘Am tired,’ she’d written on one. ‘It’s beautiful,’ she’d written on another. ‘How is Ana-Sofia?’ was scrawled on a third.

  ‘I like to think the truth is that she found some hot sherpa boy to keep herself warm during a long, cold winter,’ Ian said. ‘I think she had herself a last fling.’ His imagination, unlike mine, never failed him. He took my hand. ‘I want you to tell me something. She was your mother. I want you to tell me what happened the last time you saw her.’

  And I smiled at him because this was a moment I didn’t have to embroider, or spin out of other people’s stories. My final memory of Anna is clear and strong and true.

  When Anna says goodbye to me she holds me very tenderly. Surely she is thinking that it is strange the way karma works. I am the age Anna was when her mother died. We share the karma of being mother and daughter, of course. Soon we will share the karma of being motherless girls.

  I don’t want to be there. I am eleven years old and beginning to understand what I have suffered at my mother’s hands. Anna’s vagueness, her casual cruelty, her self-absorption.

  Anna reaches out and pulls me onto her knee. She wants to sing to me, sing to me like s
he used to. She holds me in her arms and begins to be-bop in a low voice for moment or two—she needs to warm up, her voice is rusty—then begins: I can’t give you anything but love / Baby…I tolerate this for a few bars before I struggle out of my mother’s embrace. ‘I’m not a baby,’ I tell her. Then, perhaps because I want to be mean or perhaps because it is the first thing that comes into my head, I say, ‘You’re not pretty anymore.’

  ‘No, darling,’ Anna smiles. ‘No, I’m not.’

  I snuggle back onto Anna’s lap. ‘I don’t want to leave you, Mom. Can I stay?’

  Anna shakes her head.

  ‘Why can’t I stay with you?’

  ‘Darling, will you do something for me? Can we play our game?’

  I nod.

  ‘Okay,’ Anna says. ‘When Ana-Sofia was…’

  ‘A little girl…’

  ‘Her mother took her to Ceylon to meet the baby elephants. One fat little elephant put his trunk on the very top of her head. The elephant was blessing…’

  ‘…the little girl…’

  ‘…because she was going to have a long life. Because she was special. Her mother wanted the elephant to bless her so that…’ she pauses, waits.

  ‘…the little girl…’ I chime,

  ‘…would always know how much her mother loves her. Even if her mother was bad or naughty the truth is that she has so much love in her for her little girl that she cannot contain it. Her love is bigger than an elephant. Her love is bigger than a country.’ Anna stretches her arms as wide as she can. ‘Her love is this big.’

  ‘How big?’ I ask.

  Anna looks at me. ‘As big as the sky.’

  Epilogue

  sing my own death

  I walk away from starvation towards calm abiding.

  I walk beyond that to a place where there are only these things: clean crisp air, blue skies, rocks red as my robes and wildflowers on the path before me. I walk through apricot groves in the Zanskar Valley, then higher, where no fruit can grow. Though it is not the time of year for it, the temperature plunges and it begins to snow.

  I knock on the door of a small stone hut. It is a hut used by locals during the summer, when they graze their dzo at higher altitudes. An old shepherd, his name is Yangjore, lets me in and gives me some rich and salty butter tea. That evening we lie together, fully dressed beside the fire, and sleep. A yowling wakes me and I go outside to investigate.