A Thousand Paper Birds

by Tor Udall

  ‘I’m sure Audrey—’

  ‘Don’t say her name. You didn’t know her. Get out!’

  It looks like he’s about to hit her, but instead he pushes beyond her, slamming the door. She pulls on the rest of her clothes, as if this will stop her guts falling from her stomach; she leaves without saying a word.

  Harry sits by the lake, watching Chloe on the other side of the water. Perched on Audrey’s bench, she is clutching a yellow book that is horribly familiar. He aches to go over there and read it. It would be like hearing Audrey’s smoky voice again; but he has stolen enough.

  He thinks about the different versions of a story crashing into each other; the battle over who is right and who is wrong. Both sides portray themselves as victims; both accuse the other of perpetrating. The intrepid adventure becomes a tale of pity. The page in Harry’s notebook is smudged with rubbings out.

  We covet happy endings. So why do we end up the authors of our own failings?

  Harry’s hands are blotchy with cold. His eyes scratch with tears as he thinks of the many lives he has wrecked – not just Audrey’s, but Jonah’s, her parents’. He’s even hurt this young woman who is nervously glancing back towards the dogwood. She wipes her nose then hunches down deeper into her coat. Harry can no longer feel the pencil stub between his fingers.

  When did this tale, this little death, begin? When Audrey miscarried, or when she met me? But I am too biased to tell this story honestly. Forgive me.

  It is a bleak November day, the Gardens so empty of visitors that even the birds seem lonely. The water is on the verge of freezing and Chloe thinks back to a little girl’s boat on the lake, the paper sinking. Hands stuffed in her pockets, Chloe stares down at the eyelets on her hobnail boots. The wind is making her eyes water and she blinks, angry that Jonah suggested they meet here: a perverse joke.

  Across the lake, Chloe notices a trail of smoke. It’s a strange place for the gardeners to light a fire. It dissipates, then she sees it again, a couple of metres away – some kind of mist or fog. Jonah walks around the corner. He stands stock-still by the red osier dogwood.

  She speaks quickly before he can accuse her. ‘I’m sorry, Joe. I made a mistake.’

  He still doesn’t move. His chest is visibly rising and falling, as if he’s having to focus on pushing out the air. ‘You’ve been laughing at me.’

  ‘I haven’t.’

  ‘All this time you knew . . .’

  ‘I didn’t know what to do.’

  ‘Tell the truth.’

  They stare at each other like strangers, who thought from a distance they recognised each other, but now feel foolish.

  The conversation is like chewing gristle.

  ‘I wanted to protect you.’

  ‘How kind of you!’

  His sarcasm makes him step on to the deck, his large arms emphasising his point. As Chloe shrinks back, he forces himself to stop. He takes a breath, digs his hands in his pockets.

  ‘I trusted you.’

  ‘If you want me to feel shame, that’s simple.’

  She can wholeheartedly admit to what she has done, but can’t yet bring herself to agree to the consequences. She wants to ask, who hasn’t been broken? Who isn’t also beautiful? But Jonah holds the savageness of a man fighting for survival.

  ‘Who was it? A friend of ours? Who did she sleep with?’

  ‘I don’t know him. I’m not even sure they had sex.’

  Jonah reminds her of a wounded animal, moving around the deck, then he pulls up his trouser legs and sits down on the bench. But even with him beside her, she misses him. There is only the absence of comfort.

  They both gaze across the lake. A goose is waddling on to one of the islands, its honk reverberating around the empty garden. A heron is perched on a small rowing boat. Watching it, Jonah rubs his knuckles.

  ‘We knew each other so well. At least – I thought we did.’

  She wants to ask if he means her or Audrey, but anything she says will be a disappointment. I will disappoint you if I speak; I will disappoint myself.

  ‘I’m sure she loved you. Perhaps, after the miscarriage . . .’ She keeps talking, in the hope that she will find the right words, but none of them make the appropriate sound. Her voice feels fake, as it often does when she is honest. ‘Jonah, she loved you.’

  She hands him the artefact that is about to annihilate his past. He flicks through the pages, then stops, recoiling from Audrey’s handwriting, the familiar loops and dots.

  ‘It’s getting cold,’ says Chloe. ‘Why don’t we walk for a bit, to warm up?’

  As he stands, she glimpses the magnitude of his grief. He glares at the dogwood, the clouds, his shoes – anywhere but where she is.

  ‘You betrayed me. You both did.’

  Under a blistered sky, she tries to help Jonah breathe. She apologises again, tries to touch him, but his pride is deaf to it.

  ‘I should go.’

  Stay. Just a bit longer. We could circle the lake? Visit the pagoda? But wherever they go they won’t be able to walk away the damage.

  She places herself between Jonah and the path that leads to the exit.

  ‘Do you think there’s a chance we can work it out?’

  But the only ‘us’ is Jonah and Audrey. He even looks confused by her need to ask. It is a calm violence. This is just a love song of what could have been, and is not. He tucks the diary under his arm.

  ‘Goodbye, Chloe.’

  ‘Bye.’

  The sight of him walking away bruises her eyes. She turns and tosses a small pebble into the lake. As she watches the ripples she mourns the stillbirth of anything that craves to be born. It doesn’t have to be a child. It can be an artwork, an idea, or a miscarried love.

  Part V

  The Flower Press

  Just when we are safest, there’s a sunset touch,

  A fancy from a flower-bell, someone’s death,

  …

  The grand Perhaps!

  ‘Bishop Blougram’s Apology’, Robert Browning

  The Dreamcatcher

  The Gardens are quiet, the land asleep, as if dreaming of summer days when it throbbed with flora and tourists. A retired couple brace themselves against the weather. As they bend into the wind like twigs, it looks like the sky could snap them in an instant. A gardener is pushing an empty wheelchair along Syon Vista, as if a ghost is being given a guided tour. But the chair is only being returned to the entrance. Staff sit at Victoria Gate, idly chewing their nails.

  Around the lake, peacocks perch on benches to keep warm, replacing the visitors who usually sit here. The regal birds stare at the large, lone man hunched on the other side of the water. Wearing thick gloves, he struggles to turn the pages of a book. His eyes, hidden under a woollen hat, would make the peacocks wary.

  Jonah has become a witness to his life from a different perspective, his past rewritten by a different author. It makes him a stranger to himself, as if these last ten years have been a pantomime of gestures. All roads lead to Audrey. Jonah has visited many places in the diary: the Palm House, the Ruined Arch and Mademoiselle J’Attendrai’s bench by the pagoda. But he has never met the woman who walked through these pages. He recalls Audrey’s many trips to Kew, how her smile had felt like a secret. Jonah had been blind. He looks up at the charred, grey sky and thinks, you let go of my hand.

  A peacock shifts its weight while Jonah folds down a corner on one page, his fingers clumsy. The figure of Harry Barclay haunts him like an out-of-reach itch on his shoulder. Audrey’s description matches up with the stranger at the funeral: a misty figure. But whenever Jonah tries to picture what he encountered among the gravestones, all he sees are masks and shadows.

  He knows he should go home and mark that pile of essays. He has been turning up late to school, unwashed, and only yesterday he came close to slapping a child. It frightens him how easily he could have done it. He is no longer able to measure himself against others’ expectations; instead he is rememberi
ng that final morning, how Audrey put on a darker shade of lipstick than usual. She had rubbed her nose against his as a goodbye, not wanting to get the lipstick on his cheek – or that’s what he thought at the time.

  A shriek. Jonah turns around to see a splash, a struggling in the water. Two birds chase each other, their wings viciously flapping. The heron, poised on the bank, closes its eyelids. Jonah wants to throw gravel at its tatty plumage . . . to yell, ‘Did you see them together?’ Instead he makes a sound, somewhere between a scream and a shoo, but the heron doesn’t move. Its bruised wings stand out against the apple-green reeds, the smudged sky promising rain. The two birds plunge into the lake then surface, all feathers and beaks. When they dive down again, Jonah stands up, trying to spot them. He looks over the calm water then glances behind him.

  Her footprint on my heart and these gardens

  forever

  He urges himself to sit down again but it would be like embracing the woman who has cheated on him. It would make him a fool in front of Harry Barclay. Perhaps he should take an axe to the bench, burn it. But that would make his wife truly dead and he cannot bear that either. There is little he can endure, but this cold, this greyness. He beats his arms for warmth, his breath steaming in the air. As he follows the path around the lake, circling the bench, he realises that he is waiting for a man in an orange scarf to turn up and unwrap a Montecristo.

  Not yet. Be patient. In winter everything seems frigid but underneath the surface, creation is seeding. Under this frost, miracles are waiting for their precise moment to happen.

  Harry waits. Along the Holly Walk, the trees are one hundred and thirty-five years old, and among them is a sparrow of a woman in a tweed coat. She has just fondled a sprig of berries and turned to smile at him, her eyes hazy. It’s inevitable, this second where she knows, but, mistrusting herself, she turns back, berating her imagination. As she makes her way to the exit, Harry is unsure what to do. There’s a chance that this woman can show him how to help Milly. He follows her past the Temple of Bellona. As they leave the gates, Harry braces himself for the chaos of civilisation.

  Outside Kew Gardens station, mistletoe hangs wistfully, but the couple nearby don’t notice it. Harry waits as the old lady ventures into the bookshop. People queue outside the butcher’s, stamping against the chill of the pavement, while two children are snarled up in so many layers they can’t move their arms freely. They peer at a stall selling mince pies and homemade pickles. Items are crossed off lists, dogs are yanked away from hung, plucked fowl, and pigeons scour the paving stones for crumbs.

  When the tweed lady comes out of the bookshop, Harry extinguishes his cigar and follows her on to a train. She leads him through the maze of the Underground, and when they finally surface Harry is faced with Oxford Street, both its grime and magic.

  The road is jammed with buses and gaudy lights, festive rage and aggressive anticipation. The harassed, the overexcited and the overegged limp towards the finishing line of Christmas. The old lady enters a store and Harry flinches at the fluorescent strip lighting, the reek of plastic and money. As the woman joins the queue, she glances doubtfully at the CD she’s holding, then checks her list to see if it’s what her granddaughter wanted. As she feels her heart knock, once, then twice, she turns to look at Harry, her lips slightly parted. Her fall to the ground is strangely graceful. Harry feels helpless. He strokes her brow while someone calls for an ambulance.

  On Christmas Eve, Harry walks down Richmond’s busy, tinselly streets. He is desperate to understand how people leave. He purposefully shoves into the frantic crowd of shoppers, daring someone to make eye contact; but no one notices him. He stands forlornly outside WHSmith then takes the bus back to Kew. A man, struggling with several rolls of wrapping paper, sits down beside him. He jokes with Harry about leaving things until the last minute.

  On the big day Jonah drags himself to Surbiton for lunch with his dad: a quiet affair with two presents and a turkey crown eaten in front of the telly. Neither mentions the soggy sprouts or the inedible stuffing, and Jonah doesn’t speak about Audrey’s diary. Their dead wives are present, however, in the empty chairs. Especially when Jonah remembers Audrey giving his dad a kiss on the cheek. It always made the old man blush pinker than the strawberry wrapping in the Quality Street.

  Harry sits in an unfamiliar armchair in a house in East Sheen. The last-minute shopper is having yet another roast potato; his eldest child is asking for watered-down wine while the youngest’s wide eyes suggest she’s overdosed on chocolate. A little while later, the dad is reading out paper-thin jokes, his wife passes him a jug of cream, and Harry counts how many hours he has been waiting. He’s heard that Christmas Day is often busy for A&E: people hold on until the last moment to see the opening of presents, or that there are enough crackers under the stairs for the uninvited neighbours. Or they wait so they can please their wife one last time by swallowing that mouthful of her Christmas pudding. The penny gets stuck in the man’s gullet. As his eldest son slaps him on the back, he falls into Harry’s arms willingly as if the gardener is a long-lost lover, or salvation from the chore of eating the Boxing Day leftovers. But when he looks at his wife he grabs Harry’s elbow and says, ‘Not yet.’ But there’s nothing Harry can do about it.

  As he stares into the man’s eyes, he sees a kiss he has already witnessed. Last night the man and his wife had been hurriedly wrapping gifts. When they both reached for the Sellotape, his elbow crashed into her forehead. They shouted – then they kissed, a kiss full of love and mess and ‘Where did you put the scissors?’

  The paramedics arrive. They struggle to carry the stretcher past the table laden with half-eaten pudding, while a shocked, still-drunk wife tries to reassure her children. Harry sits on the bottom of the stairs, remembering the deaths he witnessed in the desert of El Alamein. He wishes he could go back and be with those soldiers in their last moments, or hold his mother’s hand as she lay under the rubble, her house bombed in the Blitz. Then he thinks about Audrey – how scared she must have been.

  He leaves the house quickly. As he pounds down the pavement, he needs to help someone, anyone, but the streets are empty. Everyone is still eating lunch, or sleeping it off, or watching telly. Then he has an idea. He takes a bus to Kingston Hospital and wanders the corridors until he finds a room that doesn’t have visitors. He enters, bobbing his head in greeting, then sits down and takes the gnarled hands of an old woman. She wears a paper hat, her cheeks strangely sunken because no one has remembered to put her teeth in. She seems glad to see him. But he can’t think of the right words to help, he can’t fix his face into a beatific glow; his expression is pockmarked with anxiety, he stinks of cigar smoke. He uselessly strokes her bony fingers, trying not to knock out the drip from the back of her hand. He doesn’t know whether to rage at God, or to rage at the lack of His existence. But before he can decide, the woman dies, leaving a sigh that lingers in the room long after her pulse has stopped beating.

  Christmas night is spent on the roads. As the drunken drivers swerve they see a man in a buttonless coat leaning against a parked car, or nonchalantly dodging traffic. Harry is on the streets again on Boxing Day morning, at the precise moment a six-year-old girl forgets to look both ways. How light she is in his arms, how noisy her mother’s screams. But she doesn’t stay.

  HB. 26.12.05. Potting Shed

  Sitting opposite her mum in the bath – a kiss on the lips, full of soapsuds.

  Her mum’s kiss again, her back crawling with chicken pox.

  Her mum soothing a scrape on her knee. The smell of BBQ and suntan lotion.

  Kissing the belly of her toy rabbit.

  On December the twenty-seventh Jonah goes to 1A Earl Road, obsessed with the mystery his wife was trying to solve. Having taken some pills, he’s had a full night’s sleep, but he’s still not sure if he’s resourced to do this. At least, now, he has someone to blame. His anger since Audrey’s death sharpens into focus, drilling down into this street, the hous
e with the navy door, the bell: Jonah rings it. A man of similar age greets him. A toddler is wrapped around his hips, the boy’s face smeared with chocolate.

  When Jonah asks about the previous owners he is told about the Banerjee family, but nothing else about the house’s history. When pushed, the man explains he has never heard of Audrey or a Harold or a Harry.

  ‘A woman with red hair didn’t come? A few years ago?’

  ‘What is this? Last month, I had some chick ask the same thing.’

  Jonah winces.

  ‘Is everything OK, honey?’ A voice from the kitchen.

  Harry peers past the front door and sees they’ve covered his wallpaper with ghastly peppermint paint. The old place still smells the same, though, of gravy, must and soil, and there’s a bit of his carpet cut out as the doormat. That makes him feel welcome.

  Wary of what Jonah might discover, Harry has followed him all morning.

  ‘My missus is calling.’

  ‘Yes. Of course.’ Jonah steps away. ‘Just one more thing. Harry Barclay. Do you know if he had a son or any other family?’

  The man is exasperated. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, mate.’

  He glances back towards his cocoon of turkey sandwiches and festive films, blind to the ease of his good fortune. Harry fights the urge to spook him; but Jonah takes the hint and walks away, calling out a lacklustre ‘Happy New Year’ as he reaches the pavement.

  A few days later, Jonah visits the Kew office, but receives even less information than Audrey. He then ventures to the National Archives, just a short walk from the Gardens. Trawling through press cuttings, he flicks past a story about a girl who was lost in Kew, but doesn’t recognise her pigtails. Then Jonah does something his wife didn’t think of: he walks to Victoria Gate and trawls the acres, looking for staff that might have known Barclay. Most of them are too young, but there is one, the Bird Keeper, who remembers.