A Thousand Paper Birds

by Tor Udall

  A week ago, she googled him, but all she could find was a dozen grainy photos shot from the audience. She also downloaded his album. After listening to it twice, she sat in the bath for an hour, the music still lapping against her. The next morning, his voice was still with her, a refrain haunting her on the tube, or while queuing for a sandwich. The Jonah she heard was different from the man she knows – so emotionally expressive, so tender.

  She’s not accustomed to sharing a bed without sex; it strangely unclothes her. But their casual liaison feels refreshingly mature. Jonah’s honesty about his unavailability takes off the pressure. There is, at last, no superficial infatuation, no constant texting, no juvenile fantasies about the future. But normally she is the one who is attentive, then doesn’t call for days. She tries to reconcile his extremes, but only sages can dance cheek to cheek with paradox; and Chloe knows she is no saint.

  This is the middle time. Chloe can see herself suspended between who she was before she met him and who she will become. She can’t wrap her mind around Jonah, however much she unfolds him. She likes his being surrounded with books, and that smell of school, cleaning fluid mixed with a hint of teenage BO. There’s something worthy in the way he stoops to meet her height, his piano-playing fingers and that awful brown suit that should have been burned years ago. But mostly it’s his pain she identifies with – the horror of being the survivor in a crumpled, thrown-away world.

  The man in her bed sits up and wipes his face.

  ‘Where’s your lav? I’m busting.’

  Chloe points to the door, and Christoff or Claude staggers across the room, his buttocks clenching.

  ‘I feel like death,’ he moans.

  Last weekend, Chloe had asked Jonah about Audrey’s funeral, but he’d only described the church in Cornwall. She had told him about visiting her granddad’s gravestone. Standing in her school uniform, she thought the inscription said ‘rip’.

  ‘To a child obsessed with origami, that word meant giving in.’

  Chloe could remember how cold she was in her knee-length socks, the sound of paper ripping.

  ‘Tearing it means you’ve stopped believing in the infinite possibilities of a square.’

  Friday night is the beginning of the May Day bank holiday weekend. Chloe wakes to find Jonah’s bed empty. Earlier they had decided to watch a DVD rather than participate in conversation. The credits led to sex, led to sleep, but now a piano plays, Vivaldi morphing into Bach’s Prelude in C.

  Chloe peers out of the blinds; it is still night, perhaps three or four in the morning. Stumbling over a pile of clothes, she pulls on one of Jonah’s shirts and stands at the doorway. Hunched over the piano in his boxer shorts, he is now playing Bowie’s ‘Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide’. His legs look cramped, but his fingers are articulate, arched above the keys. She walks across the room then sits down behind him, wrapping her legs around his torso. She presses her mouth against his ear.

  ‘I’d like to watch you play the cello naked.’

  ‘I don’t play the cello,’ he says.

  She wants to talk about the strings on his album. Instead she asks innocently, ‘Did you compose anything for Audrey?’

  ‘I was stupid enough to try for her funeral.’

  It wasn’t the answer she was expecting. Jonah turns around, but at the sight of her he hesitates, as if she’s too young, or inexperienced – as if he’s thinking, you wouldn’t understand, you’ve never been married.

  He swallows, says softly, ‘Not even Bach was good enough.’

  As she searches for a response, he turns back to the keys. Believing she could be any woman in this room, she holds him lightly, her body offering the shadow of a confessional.

  ‘There wasn’t a melody that matched her. I spent nights listening to different instruments . . .’

  ‘What about the piano?’

  ‘Not enough echo.’

  Chloe studies his profile as if he were an extinct species that she has stumbled upon in a museum. She hadn’t known it existed – this intimacy between two people; she’s never witnessed it.

  ‘It’s good that you keep talking about her.’

  Is it? For a moment, she is jealous.

  ‘It was like I needed a different key,’ Jonah continues. ‘Not major or minor. Not B flat.’ A wry smile. ‘A song in Q might have worked, I think.’

  Chloe gazes down at the worn pedals, the scratches on the wood – a piano that is well loved, well used. Then she curves into the cavity between Jonah’s shoulder blades and reaches out a blind arm to play a single note, then another, a black key. His voice vibrates against her chest, almost inside her, oscillating.

  ‘Mozart once said that the music is not in the notes, but the pauses in between.’ He stops her hand playing. ‘Like rhythm – it’s between the beats.’

  This is the lull between one note and the next. Jonah turns around on the stool and Chloe steps away. It is a movement and a rest.

  Suddenly she yearns for fresh skies, even the banality of Claude. But Jonah leans forward.

  ‘I took the cowardly way out in the end. I was so set on writing something perfect that I ended up with sweet FA. She got hymns, for Christ’s sake.’

  Chloe wonders if she should explain why she was by the lake on the night that they met.

  ‘I doubt I could have created anything either.’

  ‘I wish it was easier to visit her grave. We often talked about moving to that village – a life by the sea. I would have preferred Devon, but . . .’

  ‘I’ve only been to the sea once.’

  ‘Really?’

  She grins sheepishly.

  ‘Your first dark secret! You never say anything about yourself, your family . . .’

  ‘We only meet at Christmas. Some years I give that a miss. My stepfather’s useless.’

  ‘And your real dad?’

  ‘Lost to the cosmos.’

  She swirls her arms in the air, then doesn’t know what to do with them. She tugs on her earlobe.

  ‘Mum met him at a disco. She didn’t know where he worked, or lived.’

  She waits for the normal fussing, but Jonah remains on the stool, his eyes holding her steady. She widens her stance, juts her chin.

  ‘She kept saying it was the seventies – as if that excused her. She couldn’t remember if he was called John. James. I remember it distinctly. She was mashing potato.’ A bitter laugh. ‘She was adamant it was a mistake. “It or I?” I should have said.’

  Jonah checks she’s finished by tilting his head. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘It’s nothing. Really.’

  Jonah reaches for her hips. He pulls her towards him, his head close to her belly. Then he takes her tightly curled fist and brings her knuckles to his lips. Don’t do that. Don’t unravel me. Moments later, they are breathing the same breath, their mouths only millimetres away.

  As they lie down on the floor, it isn’t love, nor is it pretty. Her leg is bent under him, her heel on his chest, his heartbeat quickening under the ball of her foot. They both look for something to believe in, somewhere among the stains on the carpet.

  It is a night of holding, of gathering in. She discovers the roughness of him, from his trembling arms as he holds up his weight, to the cracked dryness of his heels. Here are his edges, his abrasive beard, the hang of his belly. They talk while making love and it sounds halfway between a psalm and a blue film. It is littered with insecurities, them getting to know each other’s demons and angels, but there is also the balm: the acceptance that everyone is screwed up on this strange little planet.

  Jonah sleeps. He is still inside her, her body cradling the softest part of him. Chloe blinks at the proximity of his face, then takes a mental snapshot, as if one day she will paint him. It will be a day’s work getting to know his body.

  She has not done this with the others. An edge of light escapes through the crack in the curtains and cuts across his skin. She can just see jigsaw pieces of his eyelids, his cheek. There is somet
hing erotic about looking at him without his knowledge.

  In the dim light of the lounge, she notices the white armchair sitting in the corner like a phantom. Somewhere in the dark, Audrey’s photos are looking down at them, a rumour of sex still lingering in Jonah’s unconscious muscles. Chloe commands herself to get up, get dressed, but her gaze is pulled back to his stubborn thighs, the hair below his belly button.

  She is taken by his stillness. What should she do with this man splayed beside her, this soul on loan to her for just an instant?

  Lying down, synchronising her breath with his, she realises it is possible to feel this. She finds faith in the soft place at the nape of his neck. She finds faith in the place in her heart where everything hurts, in the friction between the painful and the sublime. Then she finds a word she can’t speak. It is caught in her throat, unable to be lessened by the sound.

  A Dress Falls

  Putting a bench by the pagoda is Harry’s love letter. Sir William Chambers may have built the structure for Princess Augusta in the 1760s, but for Harry it represents everything he loved about Audrey. In the last five days, Jonah hasn’t come to the garden, so the theft remains unnoticed. Like a child nicking sweets, there’s a glee mingled with the nausea of scoffing the lot, the guilt queasy and ecstatic. Harry might look like any other gent, sitting on a bench, his face tilted towards the sunlight, but underneath is an illicit thrill, as if Audrey and he are stealing a moment.

  On this Bank Holiday Monday, his backdrop is a blazing blue sky and a towering folly, the most architecturally ambitious of Kew’s structures. Many said this pagoda wouldn’t stand up to the weather or the wars, but here it is, two hundred and forty-three years old. A Richmond bricklayer carried out the construction, and the ten storeys are a hundred and sixty-three feet high, tapering upwards, each floor diminishing in height and diameter. It is a masterpiece of chinoiserie, the spectacle of the Orient slap-bang in the middle of Surrey.

  The ten roofs are blue, but underneath each is a faded poppy red, the paint on the slats peeling. At the top is a gilded finial that looks like a spire. This spring the doors are open and visitors are climbing two hundred and fifty-three steps to worship the view. The pagoda has been given a fresh lick of paint, leaving white specks on the floorboards. But the tourists’ sun-lotioned sweat is eroding the reek of emulsion. They come out wobbly and elated, as Harry did that day when Audrey and he ran up the stairs, giggling like children. The interior, then, was a derelict shambles.

  Outside there are blue wooden benches set into the recesses of the pagoda, but today Harry is sitting further away so he can take in the scent of the Philadelphus ‘Enchantment’ – the fragrance of orange flowers and jasmine. He’d asked Audrey to plant them, and, after some hesitation, she got down on her knees, her white shirt becoming soiled. There were flecks of dirt in her hair, but as she dug deep into the flowerbed, she began laughing.

  The white petals have bloomed a month early. Harry fishes out his journal, but before writing about the flowers, he unfolds his bookmark. He smooths out the tired creases, the paper flimsy, then stares at the building standing on a corner of a street in Buffalo, New York. A neon sign reads ‘Genesee Hotel’.

  Harry knows every detail. There is a coffee shop on the ground floor with a large, curtain-draped window. Signs advertise milkshakes and ten-cent sandwiches, and a small billboard asks passers-by to ‘Give till it hurts Hitler’. On the left, a motorcycle officer is rushing into the hotel, but what draws Harry’s eye is in the middle of the frame. A woman is falling through the air, on her last journey from an eighth-storey window. The image is elegant and brutal. The girl is horizontal, her arms reaching out as if to embrace someone rather than the pavement she is about to crash into. Her dress is tossed up, showing her petticoat, her knickers, her lovely legs akimbo. Her dirty-blonde hair flails in the wind, but she has tidy black heels, shapely knees.

  Harry discovered that her name was Mary Miller. She walked into the women’s restroom, locked the door and crept out on to the ledge. What was she thinking as she plummeted, her face set in a smiling grimace, her chin raised to brace herself against the looming gutter? Perhaps she is still poised mid-fall, neither living nor dying, but imprisoned in the choice she made, at that one moment when she surrendered. Perhaps she is trapped inside a stammering disbelief, an eternal spasm. In the photo, time repeats like a stuck record, the scratch scratch of the same second. She has stayed pinned against the sky, her mouth open.

  On the ground floor, a well-groomed man is sitting at a table looking out of the coffee-shop window, oblivious to the fact that in the next second a woman’s body will tumble past his vision. Behind him there’s an innocuous, tasselled lampshade.

  Harry glances up from the photo. Milly is playing beside her favourite beech, the Nothofagus antarctica. The tree has grown sideways along the ground, making one particular branch her perfect dancing partner. Grasping it lightly, the child balances in a quirky arabesque, happily off-kilter. But her grin vanishes. Harry follows her gaze then freezes; Jonah is standing five yards away, staring at Milly. Harry desperately shifts himself to hide the bench’s inscription, but this is only the first of his worries; it would hurt Milly to know that Audrey was married. Trying not to draw attention to himself, Harry ransacks his mind for wisdom, but dread fills him from his boots up.

  ‘Move away,’ he hisses. ‘Quick.’

  Milly gawps at him, then runs off.

  Jonah has diverted from his usual route to the lake. Having forced himself to spend two sleepless nights away from Chloe, he is still thinking about her dancing in his T-shirt – he even sang, for Christ’s sake. Now he has arrived an hour early for their meeting, hoping a walk will clear his head. Those aren’t butterflies in his stomach, are they? Not exactly – it’s queasiness, he tells himself, from lack of sleep.

  His jowls feel thickly bilious, his legs both heavy and insubstantial. He tries to take in his surroundings – the pagoda, some benches, a little girl playing by a tree trunk. She seems familiar, dressed like a tomboy – must be no more than seven or eight. Jonah tries to remember where he has seen her beige cords, her stripy T-shirt, but in the recesses of his mind there’s only a voice begging: sleep.

  Like most children, she’s still joining up the dots – a picture not yet fully drawn in. There doesn’t seem to be anyone looking after her – there’s just a guy on a bench, holding a cutting from a magazine. So Jonah follows when the child runs off. Halfway down Cedar Vista she slows to a bow-legged stride, pausing every now and then to pick up fallen twigs and litter. The garden judders like a cine-film, focusing on grainy details, bleached-out colour.

  At the lake, there’s a nook in a particular tree where a small bottom can fit. The girl perches here, thought-fishing, her feet dangling over the edge. Jonah watches her blow the seeds off a dandelion clock, then polish a small pebble against her leg. He wonders if she will remember this when she is older: the intrigue of a burrowing worm, an iridescent feather, the appearance of a man, a stranger.

  Jonah recognises a desire for solitude when he sees it, but feels a teacherly duty, some quasi-Hippocratic oath. He walks towards her.

  ‘Are you OK?’

  As he looms over her, she covers her face.

  He squats down to make himself a similar height. ‘I’m Jonah. Are you all right? Where are your parents?’

  She scrutinises him through her fingers. ‘My dad’s a gardener. We live here.’

  ‘You mean onsite?’

  Her words are strangely defined, as if language is still new to her: something that requires proper attention from her lips and tongue. She takes her hands away and peers up at his shaggy hair as if about to make fun. Jonah’s thighs are beginning to ache. He tentatively rests his bottom on the grass and stretches out his legs.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Milly. But don’t worry – people have to pay to get in here, so it’s safe.’ She squints in the sunshine, her head cocked. ‘Do you live in a w
hale?’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Were you scared? How big was his belly?’

  ‘That’s another Jonah.’

  ‘I’m glad,’ she says simply.

  The light blisters the sky with beauty. When Milly jumps up, the sun crowns her head.

  ‘Do you want to see something special?’

  She reaches into her pocket and presents him with a wooden flower press. Her dirty fingers are studious. Carefully unscrewing the winged nuts, she shows him the blotting paper where some specimens are immaculately preserved, and others mangled. It smells of paper must: a dead tree holding dead petals.

  While Jonah admires a page of forget-me-nots, she scratches an insect bite on her shin then flops down on the grass, arching her back so she is looking at him the wrong way up. ‘Copy me.’

  Jonah looks behind him. ‘Where’s your dad?’

  ‘Working. He’s in the Palm House.’

  After running through the lists of dos and don’ts from his safeguarding course, Jonah decides to keep her company. Getting down on the ground is another matter. He cumbersomely lies down, flattening the lawn, until eventually he is looking at the world upside down.

  ‘The grass is giggling,’ she says. ‘Can you see?’

  Close up, the blades are quivering in the breeze. Jonah notices a ladybird, then the goose droppings on his elbow. Milly starts to sing, and it hits him: would his daughter have inherited Audrey’s gap-toothed grin?