by Sharon Irwin
Up Flew The Jackdaw
By
Sharon Irwin
Copyright 2014 Sharon Irwin
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When she was little, it was thought she had no Magic at all.
“Not so much as a Way,” her mother, Eggie, always announced before she was asked, “but we love her as much as if she had a Cure for cancer.”
Gem always wondered about that. Might her mother have managed to squeeze a little more love from somewhere if her very mundane daughter had suddenly manifested one of the eight major Cures, or one of the stronger Gifts? At the very least, she reasoned, her mother could certainly not have loved her any less for suddenly exhibiting a weak expression of one of the much more common Ways.
“Perhaps I have a Way with music,” she would suggest to her mother hopefully. “I pick up tunes on the piano really quickly,” or “maybe I have a Way with fire. See how quickly the coals lit for me.”
Her mother fielded many of those suggestions throughout Gem’s childhood. She would always answer in a similar fashion with something like, “No darling. That’s not a Way. I have a nose for Magic, trust me, and if you had any I would have sensed it. You are simply one of the every seven that is born without Magic and there is nothing we can do about it. Just be grateful that all we who do have Magic will share ours with you.”
But Gem was not grateful. Not at all.
She resented Magic for skipping over her and leaving her feeling like a beggar at a banquet, her hand outstretched for scraps from the Magic table, and so she closed her fist and accepted nothing from it. She picked out other children with no magic to be her closest friends, she would not let her father Find anything she had lost, and once when she was so sick with a flue she hadn’t managed to leave her bed for two weeks, she’d still found the strength to throw a box of hankies at her second cousin who had a much vaunted Cure for that ailment.
“You ungrateful little twit,” her cousin had snapped at her. “You can forget being Cured now. Here. You’ll need these. I hope you enjoy being sick for ages,” and she’d thrown the hankies back at her.
“Thank you very much for my own hankies! I’m sure I shall,” Gem had managed weakly from her sick bed and then strangely, she had enjoyed her flue from that point onwards, knowing she’d had the strength to tell Magic to get lost.
And then later, much, much, later, she’d met Bill, who could read the future from clues that were just raindrops and tattered cobwebs to everyone else. Bill’s Gift was strong, so although the gift of Foresight was not rare his readings were much in demand. Perhaps it was the way he’d also have a suggestion, a hopeful comment, a way of looking at the world and seeking the best in it that he somehow managed to pass on. So although she still felt furious at Magic for overlooking her, she decided the grown-up thing to do was to call a truce and accept Bill as a peace offering.
But she’d got it wrong and Magic wasn’t ready for peace.
She had scarcely married Bill and moved in with him when she noticed the birds.
Bill regarded her emerging Gift with wonder. “I don’t know how it’s hid all those years, but it’s a Gift of Foresight, just like mine,” Bill told her, but it was not just like his. His Gift allowed him to see both the good and the bad; hers in contrast was a lop-sided caricature. The feathered creatures only bothered her when they had a nasty tale to tell and were typically fiendishly obstinate about the delivery.
“It’s not what I’d all a Gift, Bill,” she insisted. “And even if it was, it involves birds. How downright mean and nasty is that?”
Ever since she could remember, birds inspired in her totally unreasonable feelings of dread. Bill blamed Eggie for passing on her morbid terror of all winged creatures.
“I’m not morbidly terrified, Bill. They just freak me out when they move. And I don’t want this so-called Gift anyway. They just want to tell me when bad things are going to happen. Like when your grandmother died, a starling flew down and pecked at my hair like he was trying to gather it for a nest. It wouldn’t stop and I was batting at it with my hands and my jacket, everything.”
“It really wanted you to know something important, Gem.” Bill could not be moved from advocating for the birds. “It probably wasn’t there to tell you Grandma was dead. Grandma was old. She was nearly a hundred. She had to die so why would a bird bother telling you that? I betcha it was the lost will it came about. I bet it was trying to tell you where it was. Pecking at your hair was just to get your attention. What did it do then? Fly to anyone’s picture? Did it hover around any specific spot?”
“I didn’t see any of that, but then maybe it happened when I wasn’t there. You know that Magic is weak in me. Like all you Magic people keep saying, you have to have enough Magic sense to be in the right place at the right time to catch things happening. Who’s to say that bird wasn’t hovering and flying all day and I was outside training the roses to climb up the pergola?”
“And then it got cross and pecked you!” Bill thought it was funny, but then he never understood how she could be scared of birds anyway.
Then there was the time a wren had tapped at the kitchen window and when she’d moved into the sitting room it had followed her, giving chase as she ran into the bathroom, fluttering and tapping, a blurred dark shape at the occluded glass, and finally onto the bedroom where it had continued to tap while she lay on the bed with the bed clothes held over her head.
Bill came home early that day. She heard his footsteps, unusually slow and heavy, walking down the hall towards her, all tangled up with the frenzied tapping at the glass. The bird stopped when Bill told her that her father was dead. She remembered listening for it in the silence afterwards, noting it was gone, wondering whether it was sitting in a tree somewhere pleased with itself, or was it just a bound servant of Magic, mindlessly compliant.
Either way, the birds did not tire of finding new ways to catch her attention. A robin had dropped a worm into her lap while she sat on the decking, one hand on the bump of her growing belly, admiring the way her roses had taken hold of the climbing frame. She watched in disbelief as the purple thing rolled in the folds of her dress for a second before she screamed and threw it off. The bird had sat on the back of a sun lounger close by, watching her, standing his ground as if to say, “Yes, I did that. I put the worm in your lap. It was me. Now something horrible is going to happen.”
She rang Bill, but he was already on the way home, sacked for not, “bowing and scraping.” That was how he put it.
They’d gone out to the forest that day so he could read cobwebs. They needed to have raindrops upon them or he couldn’t make it work. She’d been frantic, begging him to go back, to say he was sorry. She knew the size of the bills that were coming in, the things the baby would need, but he’d just pressed his lips together and shook his head.
“No way.” he said. “Just no way. Can’t go back. Something will turn up.”
They hardly had to step off the path before they found the first web waiting for them in the crook of a tree. It was like Eggie always said. Bill had enough Magic sense to go directly to a good one.
The web was large and perfect, each strand held perfectly tight under its own traction and the weight of the raindrops upon it. It was also at what Bill called, “a nice angle,” tilting slightly as if trying to shed its w
ater-load.
“See Gem, that one there.”
She’d leaned closer to see the sphere, a tremoring globe reflecting the green leaves it was surrounded by, noting how poised it was, how swollen, as if it might burst at any second and spill away to nothing.
“That means something’s about to happen. Changes.” His voice was excited. She realised he was actually enjoying being sacked. Being free was probably how he saw it. It made her cross.
“We know that. You’ve been sacked. That’s what’s changed.”
He was scornful.
“That’s there already, see.” He pointed to a tiny shrivelled drop that had barely the energy to drip off the edge of the web. “Done and gone. And here,” he had shown her, “see this drop that’s fallen through the web and is hanging on underneath. That means a complete reversal in fortune.”
And he’d been right too. A year later he realised he’d sold enough of the wooden furniture he’d always made as a hobby for it to serve as a living. Then he gave up looking for a job and wandered on down to his workshop every morning with a constant look of surprised delight.
She’d had Gavin by then and if the birds had anything bad to say about him she hadn’t noticed. They would have been dirty rotten liars anyway if they had anything bad to say about her perfect boy. Eggie was convinced he was Gifted.
“I just feel the Magic in him, Gem,” she told her, practically every time she came by, which seemed to be most days.
Gem could feel the Magic too, the way it rolled under the surface of Gavin’s skin, an energy like a building storm, as yet formless and unknowable, so it made her wonder if Gavin’s Magic had already decided on its manifestation, or if it was taking a moment to scout the boy out and decide what he was worthy of. It brought back bitter memories of her own Magicless childhood. Had Magic rolled under her skin and then got weary of her? Had it broken and then pieced itself back together into this horrible mockery of a Gift she was burdened with? Had it been there all along, but so weak that it took Bill to notice it in her?
Eggie speculated endlessly about what form Gavin’s Magic would take.
“I do hope he doesn’t talk to the dead,” her mother said. “That can be so draining, grieving relatives hounding you and all those court cases they have to attend. And the dead are so peculiar anyway.”
She took a bite of pie and looking at Gem for a long moment before adding. “But it is nice to be talented. I wouldn’t turn my nose up at any Gift.”
I would, thought Gem. I would tell these bad-news-birdies to get lost in a single heartbeat if I only knew how. She couldn’t see the point of telling her mother about her Gift. It was such a horrible one and Eggie could barely stand the mention of birds, never mind stories of them pulling at her hair and throwing worms in her lap.
Eggie could smell water from miles away, but being born in the era of piped water had dented her value to the community somewhat. Still she did enjoy the odd occasion when a farmer wanted to open a new well and she got the call. Then she would sigh and say at least she wasn’t like some of those Long-Speakers who went right out of demand when everyone got their own telephones.
“I think he has a Cure,” Gem offered.
Her mother’s eyes lit up.
“I doubt you’d be able to sense it, Gem, but I’m longing for it to be a Cure. My second cousin has the cure for the Flu. You remember her? She is so in demand. Such a conceited girl she grew up to be.”
Her mother’s voice sounded wistful, as she wouldn’t mind at all if Gavin caught some of that conceit.
“I’ve noticed,” Gem said, moving Gavin’s weight from leg to another, “that he seems to have an aversion to some people.”
Gavin fixed his attention on whichever one of the women was speaking, his eyes a light shade of amber searching each women’s face intently as she spoke.
“Like who? Shall we bring him into town and see who he takes a dislike to?”
“Well,” Gem started to speak, but Gavin turned around to stare at her, so she had to stretch past him and mouth the word, “Buddy,” at her mother while Gavin squirmed and whimpered at missing a part of the conversation.
Her mother’s eyebrows arched.
“Yes, I don’t wonder at that. He makes me shiver sometimes. Not you though, Gem, you don’t have the Magic we have. You wouldn’t feel him so bad,” her mother said, folding her arms on her lap and looking into the faraway distance as if pondering a great sadness.
If her mother had the Cure for the flue, she’d be unbearable. And Gem did feel Buddy, of course she did, perhaps she’d even have felt him without her small Magic, but it was mostly sorrow she felt for him.
Buddy should have died at eighteen, but his mother wouldn’t have it.
“Buddy has a great Magic.” she’d said. “The world can’t lose him,” but what she’d meant by that was that Buddy was all the world to her and she didn’t want to be in it if he wasn’t there too. The world would have carried on as it always does.
Buddy had a Way with the birds and the beasts; he practically talked to them, or at least he listened real well. Not long past his eighteenth birthday he’d taken a turn too fast in his first car, the one he’d been saving for all his life, and found the river waiting for him. It sucked him down and covered him up and Buddy lay there for a while, a few hours they speculated, before he was discovered. They’d hauled him out of the river, all beat and broken, cold and gone, no life left in him at all and the towns’ people got ready to say good bye while dogs howled and cattle rattled against their gates and birds gathered in every tree like dark silent clouds of despair.
But Buddy’s mother would not grieve. Not her. She took one look at his body, pressed her lips together tightly before saying “No,” just that one word and then she grabbed the keys of the car, and drove, drove, drove, miles, through the night, only stopping when she got there and sometime around dawn Buddy opened his eyes and sat up.
She came back the next day, grabbed Buddy tightly to her and meeting the accusing eyes of the neighbours still gathered, still solemn, as if the mourning had never been called off, whispered, “It’s worth it to me. I don’t care what it costs.”
In Gem’s lap Gavin grew heavy. He had grown tired of their conversation, of the way they kept anything important from him. His head settled onto her breast and he slept quickly and easily.
Her mother seized the opportunity to elaborate about Buddy.
“It’s like all the water in him has stopped moving. He doesn’t,” she paused as if searching for the exactly right word, and then finished with a flourish, “flow. I can see he’s there, but I can’t feel him. Not like this one. Overflowing he is.” She smiled indulgently at her grandson and then moved to pick him up. “I’ll put him down for his nap. I’ll be back soon.”
But she wouldn’t be. She’d stay there, smiling at him, and stroking his hair and day-dreaming plans about him manifesting some great Gift, if not the Cure for the flue than maybe something rare like an accurate sense of disaster. Those people got to go on TV, warn people out of airplanes, evacuate mines, maybe even avert an economic crisis. She could dream.
Gem moved out to the kitchen carrying the used cups with her. From the window over the sink she could see the main road that led to the house. Buddy was walking her way. She sighed. Just mentioning the boy seemed to be enough to bring him to the door, or maybe he was just here so damn much anyway, always looking for Bill to read him a cobweb.
Buddy saw her at the window and raised one arm timidly in greeting. She forced a weak smile on her face and waved with more feeling than she really felt.
“He’s a pity really,” Bill was fond of reminding her. “What harm is he doing?”
“He’s always here Bill, that’s what, and he creeps me out. I wonder will he bring us any of his bad luck.”
“That’s not bad luck Gem, and you know it. Don’t get superstitious. That’s the price they’re paying for bringing Buddy back.”
B
uddy slunk in the back door like he was ashamed of taking up space, of breathing in air.
“Good morning, Mrs Cooper.”
Buddy’s arms hung awkwardly at his side. He had no cap this morning that he could take off and twist around and around in endless circles of discomfort.
“Good morning Buddy.” She forced herself to be pleasant, to remember the boy he’d once been, his easy manner and cheerful greetings, his natural assumption that everybody was happy to see him. All gone now. Along with his Magic.
She handed him a glass of water. He took it gratefully with both hands and sat down, spinning it aimlessly on the table.
“I was just hoping...” he began.
“I know,” she finished, “that Bill will read a web for you. I’m sure he will when he comes home. He’s just run into town for a few things.”
“I saw his car missing; I wouldn’t have come in if you hadn’t...” Buddy stammered over his confession, that he wouldn’t have bothered her if she hadn’t seen him. That he’d have found somewhere to hide until Bill came home, that he knew she was uneasy around him, that he was uneasy around practically everybody
For the sake of the boy he’d been, that he still looked like despite the dullness in the eyes, she forced another smile and said, “Oh, Buddy you know you’re always welcome here. What a thing to say.”
He didn’t believe her. She knew that. She remembered a time before the accident when Buddy had a parrot that went wild at the sight of Gem, squawking and screeching at her. Buddy had calmed it down while Gem had sat frozen, terrified of its swishing wings and clawed feet and the message it wanted to tell her. And Buddy had guessed something of what she wasn’t admitting, but he’d held the bird and never told on her, and beyond one questioning look that had been old and wise, had never pressed her for an explanation. She held on to her memory of that. It helped her to deal with this lost, frightening creature.
“How’s your mum and dad, Buddy?” she asked.
Buddy hunched his shoulders even tighter. She wondered had anyone ever said it to him. That he was the cause of his mother losing her eye sight when the chip pan blew up in her face, that paying for his life was the reason his dad lost a leg in a freak chainsaw accident, that he was the reason his once bubbly sister now had frightened eyes, waiting for the tragedy that was to befall her paying for Buddy to come back. It wouldn’t be true even if those things had been said. His mother had brought it on them, promising whatever she had to someone who had the Gift of Reanimation, who’d been willing to corrupt it with spells learned out of books and bargains made with who knows what, and now here was Buddy barely alive when he should have been dead, and all because his mother wouldn’t accept her grieving.
“Mum, she misses the books since she lost her eyesight. You know how she loved to read Mrs Cooper. I read for her as much as I can but I don’t do the voices really well and she always has to stop me to ask who I’m reading.”
He smiled awkwardly. Buddy’s voice had changed to a low monotonous drone since he’d come back. She couldn’t imagine how awful it would be to hear him read a story. Outside, Bill’s car pulled into the driveway.
“Run out now Buddy and ask him to read you one before dinner. Tell him I’ll have it ready when he comes back.” She knew she should ask Buddy to stay and eat with them, but she just couldn’t.
“I will, Mrs Cooper,” he said, standing up so clumsily he knocked over the glass. He cringed at what he’d done and her stomach tightened
“Leave it, Buddy, I’ll get that,” she said, shoo shooing him from the kitchen with a wave of a dust cloth she was holding.
When he was gone she looked out the back door at the two men walking over the fields and remembered a young boy soothing a parrot and choosing to say nothing.
Gavin manifested his Gift that evening.
He stroked his grandma’s face when she’d been sitting over him, waiting for him to wake from sleeping and when she looked at herself in the mirror later, she saw the lines on her face had lightened.
She’d kept quiet about it for a while, but increased her visits so that between Buddy and her mother, Gem began to feel she was never alone in her own house. Her mother was reasonable. She did not force Gavin. She sat with him quietly, waiting for him to spontaneously reach towards her. Gavin was generous. He stroked the deep lines at the side of her eyes and mouth, smoothed her wrinkled cheeks, patted her hands where brown age spots were beginning to show, pulled gently at her greying hair.
Her mother said nothing until Gem remarked how great she looked one day and then it all exploded out of her in a rush. What Gavin had been doing. How he knew what he was doing for his granny who loved him so much.
Gavin did smile knowingly when asked. He placed a hand to Gem’s face, but took it off almost immediately.
“You see,” said her mother. “He knows, he knows you don’t need it. This is the most amazing Gift, I’ve ever heard of. I’ll be the talk of the town. I hardly know what to do. Keep him for myself, or boast about him to the world?”
Gem knew her mother was honestly completely torn by the dilemma.
“Well if you keep letting him do what he’s doing, you’ll soon have to start explaining yourself to people.”
“I’ll say I had plastic surgery,” her mother crowed, preening at herself in the mirror, “with a very expensive surgeon.”
So that was Gavin’s Gift. Of course her mother told. How could she not? Buddy seemed disappointed when they told him what Gavin’s Gift was, as if he’d hoped for something especially for himself, but then, didn’t everybody?
“Why do you read Buddy’s cobwebs so often for him?” Gem asked Bill once. Some people developed a terrible dependency on having their lives read for them and Bill didn’t encourage that, but he seemed to have endless amounts of patience with Buddy, reading them twice a day if Buddy wanted
Bill heaved a great sigh. “I think he’s looking for his death, Gem. Since his mother took it away, he’s been looking for it and I can’t help looking for it with him. If I knew a better way to help him, I would. You should see his webs. There’s nothing in them, no love, no friendships, no highs, no lows, nothing new, no changes. I know death is hard to accept, especially a child, but...”
The idea of losing Gavin flashed into her head for a second before she chased it firmly away and she knew by Bill’s face that his own words had put the same thought in his head. Still, his voice was sure when next he spoke. “This is not right, Gem. He shouldn’t be here, but he is and he’s suffering. It’s not right. All Reanimators should be-”
“Not all of them, Bill. It’s a strange Gift, but it helps to keep people from doing wrong, knowing a corpse can be Reanimated. And sometimes, that chance to say a proper goodbye is the right thing to do. Yes, this one did a bad thing, leaving the boy alive, but that was his mother’s doing too. That Reanimator corrupted the Gift. They had to have used Book-Magic and stuff I don’t even want to think about over there that night.”
“Book-Magic! That’s not Magic however you twist it. Spells and incantations. All rubbish. You have Magic or you don’t. And Reanimation shouldn’t happen. The dead don’t like it, even for a little while, and what’s been done to Buddy, I can barely stand it.”
She hadn’t known Bill had got so caught up in Buddy’s story. She wondered if she should talk to Buddy privately and ask him to stay away, but the she realised that would be to belittle her husband. He could take Buddy’s sorrow easier than he’d take her meddling.
Gavin was growing up at a rapid pace. He walked early and talked soon after, adding words to his vocabulary with impressive speed. Perhaps that was because he was a really good listener. One day when he asked her what libido was, she realised she’d have to keep a closer eye on the elderly women coming to ask him for healing. No matter how demure the client, she resolved not to give them as much as a second when she couldn’t both see and hear them with her son. They resented it, asking her would she have the gall to sit in o
n a doctor’s appointment.
“Yes, I would, if he was three years old and my son,” she told them, and an old lady or two found their libido problems were not going to be Gavin’s concern anymore.
Bill looked disgusted when she told him the story.
“I don’t know if we shouldn’t stop him,” he wondered. “I’ve never heard of this Gift of his before, perhaps we need to learn more about it before we let this continue.”
Eggie wouldn’t hear of it. She rose from the sofa flapping at him.
“That’s alright for you to say, Bill, but you haven’t woken in the morning and felt tiredness that you couldn’t sleep away. I just got used to it. I had to, I thought. Its old age, isn’t it, that’s what it’s like, and then one morning I felt a lump...”
“You have a lump?” Gem and Bill interrupted together. Gem jumped out of her seat with the shock of the news, but Eggie motioned her to sit down with a dismissive wave of her hand.
“No” said Eggie emphatically. “I don’t. That’s what I’m talking about. It’s gone. He took it away. And the tiredness, and the worry. You see, you two, you don’t see your own death looking back at you in the mirror. You think you know about death, Bill, but you don’t. You think just because you’re going to die one day, just like everyone else will that you can understand what I’m frightened of, but you can’t. You’re not old. It’s not close to you, but it’s close to me, Bill, or at least, it has been.”
She hugged herself and shivered like death had come and sat down beside her and dropped the temperature in the room. Bill hadn’t thought of it like that and Eggie saw him weakening, thinking of those who were old, who were sick, and she pressed her advantage.
“And it’s only us old people he helps, isn’t that right Gem? He wouldn’t help you.”
She had to admit that was true. She nodded quietly, not knowing how this battle of wills and wants was going to play out, not sure what outcome she wanted.
“And you, Bill, you were staring at webs as soon as you could hold your own head up, your own mother told me that. Would you deny the boy his Gift? You might stunt him and that would be a sin with a Gift like his. He might never recover it if you stop him now.”
Gem had never thought of that. Stopping a child’s Gift. It would be like stopping a plant from flowering, like telling the sky it couldn’t rain. Who would stop a child’s Gift?
But for all Eggie’s reasoning, Bill was just not sure.
“The Magic is there. It won’t go away, Eggie. And if ever you had a lump again, would you please tell us, but for now, we just need time to think this over,” Bill said.
Eggie looked panicked at the thought of Gavin’s Gift being denied her. She seemed to struggle with some decision she needed to make and then she blurted out.
“I don’t think you should do that Bill. I sometimes wonder if I stunted Gem in some way.”
Her words fell into a stunned quiet. Gem found herself trying to think too many thoughts at once and they all collided and collapsed as she could not decide which one to give her attention to. Bill’s face looked cross so she thought about that. It seemed much easier to figure out. Bill was cross because he’d always assumed that Gem’s Gift had been hiding or ridiculously slow-developing. Now Eggie was talking of having stunted it all along with something she’d done.
Eggie continued on, aware of what she had said, not sorry, but trying to take the rough edges of it.
“Even if I did Gem, you never had a Gift. I would have felt it in you. It was perhaps a tiny Way, but never a Gift. A Way’s not much use, Gem. Not the Way you had anyway.” Eggie snorted with derision at the very memory of it.
A Way might only be a gentle shadow of a Gift, but even knowing she had a Way would have soothed the black hole of rejection she used to feel as a child. Her mother knew she’d desperately wanted to have a Way. And it hadn’t even been a Way. It was a Gift all along.
Her mother was still talking and Gem forced herself to listen. Knowing Eggie she might never speak of this again. She would brush it back under the carpet and accuse anyone who tried to reopen the subject of obsessing, or dramatizing, or trying to stick the knife in her. Eggie had tried and tested ways of protecting herself. Gem knew them all.
“Birds were drawn to you when you were little. They used to fly in your bedroom window. Once you were born I was always finding birds in the house and you know how I’m terrified of them.”
Even talking about birds made her mother look unwell. She clutched the collar of her blouse and her skin had gone pale and blotchy.
“I would scream and chase them out and Anthony had to put screens up on every window and the chimneys, and now you’re just as terrified of birds as I am, aren’t you Gem? And they don’t come to you anymore,” Eggie finished with an upswing in her voice.
She thought of all the times her mother had told her she had no Magic, remembered how no matter how many times she’d heard her say it that it still landed like a hammer blow, how some part of her always cried out, furious and wretched, on hearing the lie which she’d been forced to accept as the truth.
And all she managed to say to her mother was, “Yes, I’m frightened of birds.” Her voice sounded like Buddy’s. She walked outside to the decking. Inside she could hear her mother laugh nervously. It didn’t take a Gift to sense the atmosphere had changed, that Eggie’s confession had rocked both Gem and Bill. Her mother had stunted her Magic on purpose for her own selfish reasons, her own stupid fears. And that was why she’d repeated the lie over and over, as it repeating it might make it true, as if no sacrifice had been demanded.
She heard Bill walking her mother to the door, his voice quiet, but firm and Eggie’s voice in response protesting, denying, and finally dismissive. That was how Eggie handled any situation that didn’t go her way. She knew by the silence after the door closed that Bill was standing there silently, his head maybe resting on the door frame. She didn’t want to be alone and she called to him, ‘Bill,’ and when he came she cried like a child at what had been done to her and they both knew any decision to stop Gavin could not be taken lightly.
“Let’s try and fix it,” said Bill a few days later, and as what had been done to her Gift was practically all they’d talked and thought about during that time, she knew that’s what he meant. In some ways he was never happier than when he had a problem to solve and a plan to put in place to resolve it.
He was enthusiastic. “Let’s go back to before it began. Let’s imagine you are a little girl. Wouldn’t you like a pretty painted bird house for your feathered friends to play in? And a bird bath. We can hang out fat balls for them.”
And he was away, sawing and hammering and sand papering and painting.
So she tried, at first because he was trying so hard, but soon because it was like straightening a twisted limb. She took to sitting outside the house, some food placed on the new bird table, watching while fear sat in her stomach like a knot and she wondered whether it was fear of what the birds might tell her, or the fear her mother had placed there. It didn’t matter in the end because the knot must have been loose all along, or she found the right thread to pull and one day when she felt for it, it just wasn’t there. She was able to sit quietly while they fluttered and fought and fed all around her and their language became clearer and clearer to her, like the face of a stranger approaching from a distance comes into focus to be revealed as a friend.
“Sit longer, Gem, and watch them and you’ll learn that language, just like a native,” Bill kept telling her, and she believed him because she knew she’d been living a lie all along and her Magic had never been tiny, just crippled.
So they didn’t stop Gavin even though he was changing. They both noticed it. His face glowed. His hands practically gave off sparks, his eyes shone in the dark. But just because they wouldn’t stop him didn’t mean Bill couldn’t worry about him and about as soon as he’d made every item of furniture a bird could ever need he did just that.
“I wish I knew more about his Gift. I’ve never seen anything like it before.”
“Check it out in your webs and I’ll ask the birds,” she told him and immediately he was happier. He hadn’t thought of that.
He came home later, puzzled but more settled.
“The spiders and the rain say yes,” he laughed. “There’s no sign of any harm out there in the woods. How about the birds?”
How could she describe it? She’d sat on the porch with a packet of grain in her lap ready to throw to bring them, but they’d shown up even before she sat down. She’d filled her mind with Gavin and the light that seemed to burn in him now and just willed them to show her an answer. Buddy had stumbled into the garden just as she’d begun and she’d beckoned him with one hand to come sit beside her. She didn’t want to talk, to cut through the feathered words with spoken ones and Buddy had seemed to understand. He’d taken up his seat quietly, his eyes filled with wonder, so as long as the birds danced around them he’d reminded her of old Buddy, the Buddy who’d died in the river a long time ago.
“Oh, Bill.” She started crying, just like she’d cried on the porch with Buddy, the soft beating of a thousand wings gently stroking their faces, the sheer joy of the tiny creatures, and Buddy, when it was finally over and the birds had clearly delivered their approval, he’d stammered out the words.
“Oh, Mrs Cooper, that’s the nearest I’ve come to a wild creature since...”
He didn’t finish his sentence. What was he going to say, since he was dragged back from death, since the night he died?
She’d reached forward impulsively and held his hand and then forced herself to hold onto it and not show her shock at how Buddy’s flesh was cold and lifeless and not at all holding the hand of another living being.
“The birds say it’s a good thing, Bill,” and when she said that what she remembered most was how she hadn’t let go of Buddy’s hand.
Her mother had stayed away for a few days following that awkward conversation, but she was soon back, steadfastly unrepentant, telling Gavin about stiffness in her knee and a tinge of yellow in her eyes she wanted whitened.
“It’s very aging to have that tinge of yellow in the whites, don’t you think, Gem? Can’t you make him see to it?”
For Gavin had taken against the old people. He squirmed and wriggled if he saw one approaching and he held onto Gem’s leg and screamed if she tried to leave him alone with her mother.
Gem had to admit she felt a measure of childish delight that Gavin wouldn’t Heal her mother anymore.
“He doesn’t want to do and we can’t make him.”
She wanted to get away from her mother so she brought Gavin out onto the decking where immediately she was joined by the resident robin and then a family of starlings and a fat chaffinch and two crows.
Gavin climbed into her lap, but he twisted and kicked and struggled as if with some imaginary opponent. When he’d elbowed her in the ribcage for the third time she told him to get down and sit on the steps.
“Bring him in, Gem. The birds are making him nervous,” her mother insisted through a tiny gap she held open in the doorway.
“Not,” shouted Gavin. “Not. Not. Not.”
“Gem, he’s in a state. Bring him in.” Her mother shut the door when the robin suddenly flew too close to her and took to banging on the kitchen window. Gavin stomped around the porch shouting, “not,” over and over until Gem had enough of them both.
“Gavin, you are going straight to bed and Mother, I don’t know what I should do with you...”
Gavin screamed, a single noted, high pitched sound, so frightening that Gem’s mother forgot her fears and had the back door open and the child in her arms before Gem could untangle herself from the blanket she’d thrown over her lap.
In Eggie’s arms Gavin arched backwards, one hand outstretched so at first it seemed accidental that his fingers made contact with the covering of climbing rose Gem had trained up and over the pergola. Later she wondered if that was what he wanted all along.
When his fingers made contact, a blast of destruction withered through every last leaf and petal of the plants. They fell from the timbers as bits of ash and charred stems and blackened flowers. They rained all over the porch, onto the chairs and into the mug of tea she’d brought out with her. They settled in her mother’s hair and in the collar of her blouse.
“Oh, Gem,” was all Eggie could say. “Oh, Gem, what is it?”
Gavin burrowed into her shoulder, crying so hard he started choking on his tears, his face reddened and furious.
Gem had no answer for her mother. She doubted Eggie expected one. She reached out for Gavin, but her mother turned swiftly away.
“We should put him to bed. I’ll bring him in.” Eggie carried Gavin into the house and Gem paused for a moment looking up at the blackened pergola and whispered, “Don’t be cross at him, Bill, don’t be scared of him,” and then she followed her mother in to the room where she laid Gavin on the bed, his eyes already closed.
“He’s fine, he’s just exhausted. Go clean up the porch, Gem. We don’t want anyone to see.”
Gem moved forward anyway and touched her son’s forehead. His skin felt soft and warm and his breathing was normal.
“Mum,” she started to speak, but Eggie cut her off.
“I don’t know, Gem. I don’t know, but if you don’t want others to start speculating for us, you’ll get out there and clean up the porch before Buddy or some other body comes by and won’t be able to keep their mouth shut. We can say I had an accident with some weed killer. Thought I was feeding them when instead I was killing them. These old eyes and this doddering mind could easily make a mistake like that.”
Her mother looked up at her sharply.
“Get out there and do what you need to do for Gavin. We decide what happens now. Nobody else.”
So the pergola was cleaned and empty by the time Bill came home. She saw him stop on the porch staring upward at the bare timbers, the empty pots where the roots had been.
“What happened to the roses?” he said as he came in the door.
She’d been trying to think of a way to tell him since it had happened. A few times she thought she had a good opening sentence she tried to remember, but it kept getting away from her, so now she turned to face him and had no idea how to begin. All she could think was that Bill hated any Gifts that had any sign of darkness in them, and this would seem dark to him. This would remind him of Buddy being Reanimated and his mother paying with her eyes and his father paying with his leg. For Bill, Magic was Magic, you had it or you didn’t. She knew he’d see the roses as the price that was paid for the old people being Healed, and Bill would hate that. This would seem like Book-Magic and spells although Gavin hadn’t done anything like that.
“Bill.” she said. “It was Gavin.”
She hadn’t meant to be so stark. Bill was quick in putting it altogether just as she’d known he would. She saw his face fall as he thought about all that Healing Gavin did for the old and now the roses had been shrivelled right out of the soil. He seemed to lose six inches off his shoulders and he stood there as if she’d delivered some impossible news and for some reason that enraged her and she shouted at him.
“He’s not dead Bill, he’s not like Buddy. We haven’t lost him. He’s here, asleep in his bed and he’s our boy and he’s here for us to rear and cherish and look after and how dare you look so defeated.”
He looked up, shocked at her sudden temper and she kept going.
“And I’ll tell you another thing Bill, you with your spiders and your rain, I was up there cleaning the pergola and you know what the birds said?”
She saw his interest quicken and that made her crosser
“Oh, you’ll listen to the birds. You want to know that they’ve got no problems with what happened today, but you can’t work out what you think yourself. Perhaps you’re like those people who pester you for readings, day after day after day, needing guarantee
s and reassurances just to get out of bed in the morning.”
And now she was sorry for him because she saw the pain she was causing him, but he was causing her pain too, standing there all broken-hearted like that.
“Bill, Gem. I couldn’t keep him in bed. He heard you.”
Her mother had appeared at the living room door, Gavin beside her, holding her hand.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “About the flowers. It was wrong.”
She turned to Bill and she willed him with everything she had not to let his son down
He bent on one knee and opened his arms to Gavin and said, “I’m just so happy you’re alright.”
“I am.” Gavin said. “But the flowers were wrong.”
She saw Bill lost for words, and another thing, that Gavin had lost that glow. His eyes were normal; the crazed energy that seemed ready to burst out of him had gone. She knew Bill saw it too.
He held Gavin and said nothing, both of them knowing he’d had to kill the flowers. He couldn’t have held onto that energy.
It was her mother who settled it, who decided for them while their minds were broken open.
“Look,” she said, and when they looked at her, she pointed at her eyes.
“They’re white. He’s Healing again.”
Later when Gavin had gone back to bed they talked it through.
“I’m not happy,” Bill said, although anyone looking at him could have seen that. “We should stop him. He’s too young to know what he’s doing.”
“Nonsense,” her mother had insisted. “It was a few roses, and we don’t stop him. We talk to him. We explain to him how he has to release the build-up and maybe not wait so long next time.”
“He’ll destroy the garden,” Bill muttered.
“I will bring him over a selection of potted plants and I will even buy him his own green house, and we will watch him. When it is time we will tell him to release the energy and we won’t let it build up so bad again.” Eggie spoke to Bill with a terrible calm precision that Gem recognised as her mother struggling to control her temper. She knew Eggie longed to just tell Bill how it was going to be and it annoyed her that she had to win him around.
“It’s wrong,” Bill insisted although there was doubt in his voice. How could Gavin be wrong, how could there be anything wrong about him?
“Look at me,” her mother insisted.
Bill did as he was asked.
“Look at my face. It’s not just wrinkle free. It’s glowing and I tell you what. I feel like I’m glowing inside. I have no pain. I got to the top of my stairs yesterday and I didn’t have to wait till I got my breath back. I went swimming, Bill. Do you hear me? I went back into the ocean for the first time in ten years because I felt able. How on earth could it be wrong?”
Later, when her mother was gone, he told Gem all the ways it could be wrong. That Buddy’s mother couldn’t be told it was wrong that her son was still with her, but Buddy sure knew it wasn’t alright.
That he’d seen a man with a kind of a Cure take a lump out of a guy’s stomach and place it in the body of a rabbit that fell over dead. It worked out alight for the man, but if you looked at it from the viewpoint of the rabbit, it didn’t seem so wonderful.
“And if Gavin had a lump in his stomach, and we could save him by placing that lump in a rabbit, would you do it?”
“Of course,” he answered. “I would do it before I gave myself a second to think, but afterwards, that’s when I’m frightened I’d go crazy, Gem. You’ve got to find your own way through things, not pass them on to other people. Or rabbits.”
“Like Gavin taking away people’s age and passing it into the plants. Or you Bill, when you bring people out into the meadow and you hunt for webs to take away their fears. Why shouldn’t they face their own fears, Bill, not get them soothed away by you?”
“That’s not the same thing, Gem. Who am I hurting, reading a few spider webs?”
“How do I know? Maybe there was this spider had a perfect web spun, and it was beautiful and you come by with some poor sad creature whose marriage is about to fall asunder and next thing you know, there’s a hole in that web and it’s dinner is falling through. How do you know that didn’t happen? Maybe you’ve driven those spiders to the point of madness, wandering through their meadows and causing their webs to act all crazy!”
Bill threw back his head and laughed.
“I never thought of that. Maybe our meadow is full of perplexed spiders. And that time the bird threw a worm in your lap, maybe its poor baby was waiting all hungry in the nest and got no supper that evening.”
She didn’t tell him that the birds had stopped drawing her attention so dramatically. That now they knew she noticed them, they were content, no, content wasn’t the word, they exulted in her attention. They preened for her and they played, arranging themselves in patterns that were like an alphabet she had finally learned to decipher
“It’s a complicated one, Gem,” Bill said, the solace he had gained from thinking of confused spiders draining away.
“Only because you’re a good person, Bill. It’s not complicated if you don’t care about being good and doing right by everyone and every single thing in the whole universe.”
Bill smiled, but she knew the look on the face. Whenever he talked about Buddy, his face wore the same expression of defeat and despair and frustration.
“That’s right, Gem, ‘cos I do care. I care about the likes of Buddy and what was done to him. I’ve started dreaming about him, Gem. If I ever did to Gavin what’s being done to Buddy, I couldn’t live with myself. I dream about Buddy most nights now, you know.”
She hadn’t. She shivered at the thought of dreaming about Buddy. It was hard enough the few times she encountered him during the day.
“Then maybe you should cut back on the time you spend with him. Give yourself a break from his torment.”
“No way, Gem. I couldn’t do that to Buddy. I couldn’t bear to see him hurt. Hurting Buddy would be like hurting myself. I’ll put up with the dreams. Buddy is putting up with a whole lot more.”
She realised then that the whole Buddy and Bill wandering in the woods, looking for webs, had grown to be something more than she understood. That out there, Bill had forged some kind of a bond with Buddy she hadn’t anticipated.
She looked away from Bill, down at the ground. It seemed like she was going to have to accept Buddy was going to continue to be a regular visitor. She suddenly felt a sort of panic thinking of the years ahead and Buddy constantly calling to the house, standing in the kitchen awkward and clumsy, or hiding out in the garden, trying not to overstay his welcome with her, and Bill constantly out in the woods looking for something for Buddy. A memory of Buddy before the accident jumped into her mind. It was frustrating. Old Buddy was a delight, but New Buddy certainly wasn’t.
“It’s complicated Bill,” she agreed with him. “It’s complicated and I’m not even trying to be good like you, so no wonder you’re all confused.”
