Starling Days

by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan

  He lugged their suitcases to the door of a brick building. The block of flats appeared to be only six storeys or so. He reached into his pocket for the unfamiliar keychain. His father had said to hold the black fob against the black box, screwed under the list of residents. Oscar did. A mechanism within clicked its assent and he pushed the door open with his shoulder. Mina trotted after him, tugging the smallest suitcase. She seemed happy.

  The entrance hall was small and clean. The floor was tiled. A lift flanked a spiral staircase. Oscar pressed the up button. The door whined as it opened. The lift was about the size of a telephone booth. There was no way he, Mina and their three suitcases would fit inside.

  “We’ll take turns. You first,” he said. He wheeled in two cases and Mina slipped in between them. “Dad told me the liveable one is on the fourth floor.” The doors closed over her face, and he felt a jab of worry. But what could happen to her on such a short journey?

  The lift returned empty. He loaded in the final case. The wheels of the suitcase caught on the peeling linoleum. Once on the fourth floor, he was disoriented. The landing was small and there was only one door. Mina, her back to him, had it open. Beyond his wife’s head was the sky.

  “I think the apartments are off this balcony thing,” she said. He followed her onto the exposed walkway. A pigeon squatted on the iron rail. It scuttled back a few steps, the scaly claws moving with surprising speed. He looked down. They were high enough for a fall to break a woman’s body. The four-storey drop ended in a courtyard. Industrial bins proffered up swollen black bags. But he didn’t trust them to cushion a landing. Oscar frowned. He forced his head to turn away from the drop. He didn’t want Mina getting ideas. The key wouldn’t turn in 4B’s lock. He jiggled it, pulled it out a fraction, gave it another twist. The door to the next flat opened. A white-haired head popped out.

  The old woman grinned at them. “Moving in?” Her accent was English, but hard to place. London metropolitan. A hint of something else? Northern?

  “For a few weeks,” he replied. There was no need to give extraneous information.

  “I’m Mina and this is my husband Oscar. It’s so nice to meet you.”

  The old woman took Mina’s hand in both of hers. It was a strange sight. Mina and the old woman had the same haircut with the same frizzy texture, one white, the other peroxide.

  “Have you lived here long?” Mina asked.

  “Forty years.”

  “That’s amazing,” Mina said.

  “Oh, I’ve seen some goings-on.” The old lady raised a sparse white eyebrow. “You’re from America?”

  Mina put her palms up in mock surrender. “What gave it away? Our terrible fashion sense?”

  “You should’ve seen how the kids around here dressed back in the eighties. Hair out to here.” She waved a hand over the top of her head as if she were signaling for help.

  Finally, the key gave way. He’d been turning it in the wrong direction.

  Mina said, “If you need anything, just let us know. We’re right here.”

  At least that hadn’t changed. If you were over seventy, Mina would listen to your longest stories, carry your bag, and tolerate your blinking hearing aid without a fuss. She got some sort of energy from it.

  4B was dark and the air tasted dusty. He slapped the wall for a switch. Click. But no light. The bulb must’ve died. He walked to where daylight edged the shutters and swung them open. The windows looked out on the looming concrete plinth of a Travelodge. The logo was emblazoned up the side in letters larger than a man’s body. Not an ideal view.

  The room was covered in a heavily patterned wallpaper. Here and there it was scratched or peeling off. A cheap-looking pine table and chairs dominated the middle of the room. A tangerine sofa leaned against the wall. A paper lantern covered the useless ceiling light. The jumbled style of the room was uncharacteristic of his father, but Oscar assumed the furniture had been left by renters. Student lets, his father had said.

  On his phone, Oscar made a quick list.

  Check supplies

  Buy light bulbs

  Dust

  Unpack

  *

  Mina stood before the supermarket’s food-to-go compartment. Her head was loopy from travel and the world had a pleasantly unreal aura. She skimmed past the labels for Coronation Chicken and tuna fish, looking for the vegetarian options. The packaging was delightfully foreign. She recognized the unpronounceably British brand names from the layovers they’d spent in London on the way to Oscar’s mother in Scotland.

  She reached into the cool cavity to grab a cheese sandwich and a bag of pre-chopped apples for the snack portion of the supermarket’s meal deal.

  Oscar had already gathered his food and was collecting cleaning fluids elsewhere. Her friends were jealous of Oscar’s cleanliness. Mina refrained from telling them that she suspected he’d started wishing he could rinse her brain with lemon-fresh detergent.

  She wasn’t surprised when, back at the apartment, he brought up Dr. Helene again.

  “She’s really okay with you quitting?” he asked.

  Since the wedding “attempt” had indicated her old medication wasn’t working, Mina had tried two different pills. The first had swelled her body, and her lips had peeled pale strips of skin. The second was almost as bad. For a few months, she’d puttered from class, to library, to tutees, to drinks with friends and back again. Her brain had felt heavier and heavier with each subway journey as if she might sink down beneath the rails. So, while Oscar prepared for London, Mina had asked Dr. Helene if they could try going medication-free. Mina quit everything. The mental-health meds, the vitamins and the birth control. Everything. They’d brought over boxes and boxes of the brand of condom Oscar liked.

  Oscar spread a spoonful of canned tuna across a rice cracker.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to eat something else?” she asked.

  He was munching what looked like cat food and she was the crazy one?

  “Tuna is very high in protein.”

  Her simple cheese sandwich was soft and tangy and surrendered easily to eating.

  “You didn’t answer the question,” Oscar said.

  “I told you, my treatment is under control. We’re having Skype meetings once a month and I’m keeping a mood log.” For each good day she made an uptick, ^, below the date on her calendar and for each day she felt bad she made a downtick, V. Too many Vs must be reported, at which point they would review the plan of care.

  Mina’s crazy was not the madness of delusion or hallucination. It was what the articles on the matter referred to as a mood disorder. She felt too much or too little and was sad when she should have been happy. Hence the mood diary: a way to order those disordered moods. Her first doctor had said simple depression. But after the wedding, Dr. Helene had mentioned the possibility of bipolarity. Impulsive decision-making was often a characteristic of mania. Dr. Helene hadn’t made up her mind. There wasn’t enough evidence to be sure. The medical terms made Mina feel like a bacterium—something to be studied and labeled. She preferred crazy. You weren’t supposed to use that word, but she liked the z, the way it slid across the mouth like a knife.

  “She’s not worried?” Oscar asked.

  “I mean, it’s not her first choice, but I promised I’d keep really good track of my moods and my sleeping. And I’ve been doing well with the monthly meetings.”

  After the wedding, they’d had to meet weekly. To be moved to monthly was like having your training wheels taken off, a mark of success. Mina had not mentioned the night on the bridge to Dr. Helene. If she had, Dr. Helene would never have allowed her to go medication-free.

  “You’re sure this is what you want to do? If you had the flu and cough syrup didn’t work, you’d take antibiotics. You wouldn’t just quit.” Oscar had had his hair cut just before they left the city. His ears stuck out, petite and vulnerable. Compared to the sharp jaw and aggressively earned biceps, those ears were strangely endearing.


  “You could try another medication. What if Columbus had given up after his first failed voyage?”

  It was a stupid comparison. Columbus just took it into his head to cross the ocean. Mina had needed her medication.

  A different pill might’ve worked. She might’ve coped with whatever weight gain, weight loss, hair gain or hair loss it caused. But she no longer had it in her to perform the sacrament of putting capsule on tongue. She’d lost faith.

  Mina forced herself to look at his ears as she spoke. If she looked at the ears, she had some hope of sounding calm. “If Christopher Columbus had given up, the native peoples of America would have had a few more peaceful years. What if we find a new pill, and there’s a flood or a storm and I get stuck without it? Or what if big pharma decides it’s unprofitable? What then?”

  Maybe in the hustle of invitations or budgeting the wedding, she’d forgotten a few doses. But brides weren’t supposed to need antidepressants. Maybe it was her fault. Maybe that was what had triggered it. Or maybe it wasn’t. Dr. Helene couldn’t say for certain. She could only offer Mina more pills with names that read like Latin put through a meat grinder. Mina crumpled the sandwich box and threw it into the trash.

  “Mina, what would you do without WiFi or hair dye or cheese sandwiches? You’d figure it out. But it doesn’t make sense not to use something just because one day it might disappear.”

  “This is different.”

  “Mina, it’s just helping your brain make the chemicals that other people’s brains make naturally.”

  “I just want to try to see if I can be happy for a bit. Without professional assistance,” she told him. “I mean it has to be worth trying, right? Otherwise, my whole life I’m going to be taking pills and wondering when they’re going to fail.”

  She wanted to learn the floor plan of this sadness. In their New York apartment, she could walk in the dark. Her body was attuned to the obstacles and automatically found the clear pathway. If she could get to know this sadness, she might be able to find her way through it.

  She could barely remember how she’d felt before being medicated. In the last year of Mina’s high school, her grandma died. The death was not just an excuse for missing class or flunking a final. She’d lost the woman who’d potty-trained her on a yellow plastic turtle. The woman who’d brushed her hair when she was sad. The person who’d hugged her goodnight almost as many nights as she’d been alive. For most of her childhood it had been just her and her grandmother. Her mother was long gone. Her father spent his days bookkeeping and his evenings at night school, training to become an accountant. By the time her grandma died, he’d got his accounting certificate. The school counselor called him to say Mina’s mourning period had become “inappropriate.” Little red cuts had danced up her arms. So she’d accepted the offered pills.

  Oscar sighed, swiped a flake of tuna from his chin and said, “I just want you to be safe.”

  “We’re only going to be in London for a few months. If I’m not feeling better in a few months, I’ll let Dr. Helene pop something down my throat. But let me get my head straight.” Maybe in a few months her throat would feel supple and she’d be ready to swallow capsule after capsule.

  “You promise?” he asked.

  “Cross my heart and hope to die,” she said. And made the gesture flicking a big X across her chest.

  “Mina!”

  “I’m joking, I’m joking. I promise.”

  *

  They unpacked their things. Oscar eased each of Mina’s jeans over hangers, smoothing down the narrow denim calves. Later they fucked and his hands ran down her sides and over the tops of her hips, and his fingers pressed down until pelvic bone pressed back.

  “Mine,” he said into her ear. “Mine.” In the moment, it felt true. The little naked body was his. The knees that turned slightly inward were his. The way her face twisted was his. Each shift and bend of his wife was his.

  “What are you?” he asked, knowing she would reply in a way she never would dressed and calm, her face smooth.

  “Yours,” Mina said.

  Her back arched and Oscar saw how it would have arched the same way in the cold black river, her lungs rising surfacewards as her limbs flopped towards the bottom. And then he pushed the thought away.

  “Mine,” he said.

  Afterwards he held her, the condom still clinging awkwardly to his dick, the contents ready to slosh out. But his arms strapped around her shoulders. His nose against her neck, he took in the warm, sweet, salty smell of his wife.

  Outside the florist, wooden crates were crowned with succulents and cacti. Back in New York, Mina had a cactus in a mug. It’d been her mug, when she and Oscar first moved in together. Then it had cracked and she hadn’t wanted to throw it away so she’d planted a green pincushion inside.

  She reached out to pet a succulent rosette. It had a slight fuzz, like the hair that grows on a girl’s back. This wasn’t what she’d come to buy. Perhaps the neighbor would like one. Mina decided she’d leave it on the doorstep with a note. She hadn’t seen the woman since they moved in the week before, but she wanted to be neighborly.

  Mina’s grandma had filled their apartment with ferns. So many ferns that they stained the light green. She’d said the plants cleaned the air. At the end, she’d been too weak to lift the red watering can. Mina had taken over. Each night before SAT prep, she prodded the spout between the leaves.

  Mina chose a pink-tipped succulent and carried it inside.

  As she opened the shop door, the brass bell clanked hello. Colors burned from plastic pots. The florist kneeled over a basket of calla lilies. She pushed the sleeve of her denim dress up her arm and plunged a hand into the bucket, rearranging the stems.

  “Hi,” Mina said.

  “Can I help? Are you looking for something in particular?” the florist asked. Her hair was pulled into a black bud at the top of her head.

  Are you looking for something in particular? was the sort of question Dr. Helene asked Mina. She never had a clear answer.

  “A dinner party,” Mina said. “I’m looking for flowers for a dinner party.” The guests were Oscar’s friends. They knew nothing of her breakdown and she wanted to greet them with flowers. For a few hours, she could be the wife Oscar deserved.

  “Any preferences? Color? Type?” the florist asked.

  Reflexively, Mina gripped her arms where the inked flowers climbed. It was odd how tattooed and naked skin felt exactly alike. The inked peonies were perennially opening, the buds always on the verge of blooming.

  “Peonies?” Mina peered through the greenery looking for those soft fists of pink and white.

  “Sadly, they’re out of season. We get some real beauties in the spring.” Gold-rimmed glasses hung from a chain at the florist’s neck. Light fell through the glass, scattering daisies of sunlight. One spun across Mina’s shirt and she stood very still, letting it rest there. The florist described the late-summer options. They decided on chrysanthemums.

  Arranged in three buckets, the chrysanthemums came in pink, yellow and chicken-heart red.

  “When does chrysanthemum season end?” Mina asked.

  “If you’re looking for locally grown, November,” the florist said.

  How good it would be to think of time in terms of the opening and closing of flowers—to wake up and think, Today is the day of the snowdrops.

  “I’ll take the red ones,” she said. The florist beribboned the flowers. The translucent plastic wrapping crinkled and the tissue shushed as Mina adjusted the bouquet under her arm and stepped out into the city.

  A girl walked past, a backpack turtling her slim shoulders, chattering happily up at her father. Her dress was blue gingham and swirled around her knees. A breeze tickled Mina’s neck. A week in, London still felt new.

  She’d wanted to leave New York, this body, this life. This dragging out of limbs. But maybe the answer was a change of place, a change of currency, a change of light. The sun, that summer tyrant, felt t
olerable here. In this sabbatical, Mina might find a way back into happiness.

  She’d begin with tonight’s dinner party. It was the first time they’d have guests since landing in England. Oscar’s oldest friend Theo. Theo she’d met before, a large English man with a face as bland as rice pudding whose only topic of conversation seemed to be their school days and the cricket score. But in Oscar’s childhood stories, Theo had always been the hero and Oscar the lieutenant. Perhaps he was one of those men who lost the zest of their boyhood.

  Theo was bringing his sister. About her, Mina knew nothing.

  Oscar lined up the knife with a tomato’s belly button. The knife was as sharp and fresh as the tomatoes themselves. The red skin slit easily. He tilted the chopping board and they skidded into the salad bowl. The mumble of voices wafted up from the street.

  It would be good to see Theo again. He always acted as if the order of the world was natural. Being with him, you briefly believed that everything was in its rightful place.

  For five years of boarding school, Theo and Oscar had shared everything. They’d been shoved together in science class. They’d lived on the same corridor. They’d lain on the school lawns eating slices of chocolate biscuit cake Theo’s mum had covered in tinfoil and sent in the post. Together they’d figured out how to bypass the school firewalls. Theo had guarded the IT-room door, ready to distract any incoming teacher, while Oscar watched some unclad blonde appear pixel by pixel through the stingy connection. He would copy and paste her into Microsoft Word, click Print, and flick the copy number to 2. The result: two black-and-white prints. Oh, the days of youth!

  Mina walked in clutching flowers. “Success,” she said. They were strange flowers, dark and heavy-headed, but no stranger than the mismatched plates they’d picked up from the Oxfam shop. Theo wouldn’t care about flowers.

  “Try one of these.” Oscar held up a quarter-tomato between thumb and forefinger. Mina bent her head, like a bird, to eat from his hand. Her mouth slid around his fingers and the red wedge.