Starling Days

by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan

  “There’s a flashlight on the hall bench,” his father said.

  “Oscar.” Ami stepped closer.

  “I have to go,” he said, “before the sugar metabolizes.” He waved a hand towards the crumbed table.

  On the road, his feet beat an even rhythm. But the beam of the torch swung erratically across the road and the grass. The light blinded him so he turned it off. There was enough moon to see by. Every now and then he switched the rubber-coated device from one hand to the other. Just one more pointless weight.

  Mina had texted, Happy Birthday. Just like the other acquaintances who saw fit to mark his ageing. Probably she was angry that he wasn’t celebrating it with her. But it was his birthday. On this day surely it was okay to want to relax?

  Mina looked at the calendar, and the way her upticks and downticks flitted through the month. Since Oscar had left she’d drawn a week of Vs.

  A big downtick for his birthday. She’d drawn him a card. She’d ordered a book of Japanese fairy tales. On the left pages there were Japanese words and on the right English. She’d thought he might use it to study for that language exam he was so stressed about. But he hadn’t been there to receive it.

  Right at the end, the uptick. The Women Who Survive had not progressed. But the knowledge of Phoebe’s coming was enough for Mina’s mood to rise, like a bird beating once more skywards.

  Phoebe arrived on time, Benson in tow, making good on her offer to spend her free afternoon pulling paper. She worked efficiently, her nose an inch from her spatula. She nuzzled the steel under the wallpaper’s seam. With a yank, she dragged off a great paper snake. Old glue stippled its back. Benson ran to where it fell, snuffling around the edges. Mina worried he’d bite it, but after a few growls, he lost interest.

  “You don’t have to do this,” Mina said.

  “It’s good to be out of my brother’s place.” Phoebe’s spatula dug under the next seam. “This takes me back to sixth form, making the sets for the school plays.”

  Small muscles rose and fell in Phoebe’s long arms. Each time she peeled away a strip she paused to look at her trophy. The work went faster with four hands. Phoebe’s phone twinkled pop songs. Paper flew to the bedsheet spread across the floor. The dog watched them. His head rested on his front paws in resigned confusion. Mina made tea. Phoebe took hers in a style she called builder’s, full of milk and sugar, and drank as she worked. By midday, the wall was stripped. The plaster’s complexion was pockmarked blue, white, grey and pink.

  Phoebe flopped onto the couch and kicked off her shoes.

  “Redecorating might be the new Soulcycle,” she said, and swung her feet up onto the padded arm, so that she took up the couch’s full length.

  “Soulcycle? Never tried it.” Mina dropped to the floor by the couch.

  “You just cycle in a gym with the lights off while they blast electro and someone shouts at you. It’s a thing.”

  Even before she’d left New York, Mina must’ve been falling away from her friends. No one had dragged her to this torture. She said, “So wallpaper removal is your official fitness style forecast?”

  “For it to be official,” Phoebe made air quotes around official, “I’d need a sponsorship deal, preferably one which meant I got buckets of cash rather than buckets of paint. But don’t your arms feel good?”

  Mina curled her biceps.

  “There you go.” Phoebe reached and squeezed Mina’s muscle.

  Mina clenched harder.

  “I have a favor to ask,” Phoebe said. “Could you watch Benson tonight?”

  “Does Theo have someone coming over again?”

  “Not exactly, but I have a thing.”

  “A thing? Yeah. I can watch Benson.” Mina wondered if a thing was a way of saying a date.

  Phoebe looked uncomfortable and pulled a tangerine cushion over her stomach, hugging it. “If I leave him at Theo’s he chews up the furniture. I mean, Benson’s a poppet but he gets lonely and bored.”

  At the sound of his name, Benson approached. He balanced his two brown front paws on the sofa, looking up at his mistress. Phoebe hefted him onto her lap, pulling him so close that the dog’s tufted ears framed her face. His huge body blocked his mistress’s almost completely. “Benson’s a shelter baby. The rescue center said his old owners were nice. They only left him because they were moving to Melbourne. But he gets edgy sometimes. I don’t think he’s sure I’m going to come back.” The dog’s eyes, ringed like knots of wood, goggled at his mistress. “Though I am, aren’t I, darling? Of course I am.”

  “Really, it’s not a problem at all. Will you be coming back to pick him up, or . . .?”

  “It might be easier if I came in the morning.”

  Would the night feel less empty with a dog? Mina forced her voice to sound funny and playful. “Oh, it’s that sort of a thing, is it?” She cocked an eyebrow.

  Phoebe covered her face with the cushion and issued a muffled groan. Theatrically, she flung her arms up into the air and the cushion fell to the floor. She said, “Okay, so here it is. I waitress. I mean, that’s not who I am. I’m not a waitress. I’m a blogger or a creative entrepreneur. But sometimes, well, Monday to Thursday, five thirty to eleven thirty, I waitress.”

  Mina blinked away confusion. “But there’s nothing wrong with waitressing. I worked at an ice-cream place all through college.”

  “Yeah, you used to work at an ice-cream shop. Note the past tense.”

  “Okay,” Mina said. “You’re a creative entrepreneur who waitresses. That’s pretty normal.”

  “It’s normal for twenty-one-year-olds fresh out of uni. Angst is cool when you’re twenty-one. I’m almost thirty. I have sore knees. You know, even the trophy wives the guys bring in are younger than I am.”

  “You’re beautiful and you’re much more interesting than anyone’s trophy wife.” Mina felt guilty for saying this. She was sure some of the trophy wives were perfectly interesting. She’d never had a conversation with one.

  After a lunch of boiled eggs and toast, they began in the bedroom. Mina hadn’t yet bought anything to protect the floor and the spare bedsheet was only large enough to cover a patch. They dragged it across the floor to each new worksite. Around four o’clock, the birds began to appear dejected and slightly lost. Perhaps it was a trick of the afternoon light. As they worked, Phoebe described the restaurant. It was a bistro specializing in food from Alsace, that strip of land between France and Germany contested in war after war. The menu was all schnitzel and sausages.

  “Is it stupid, do you think, that I reckoned something would come along? That I never found what you’d call a real job? I was hoping the blog would take off. And I thought there was no point in chasing some high-powered thing. We were trying for a baby.” Phoebe tilted her head.

  “I think it’s cool that you’re a waitress,” Mina said. “You make people happy. You bring them something they want.”

  Too soon Phoebe had to go. Again she changed in the bedroom, watched by the remaining flock. Mina was slightly disappointed when she returned in a white shirt and black skirt—no sign of a dirndl or Fräulein-esque puffed sleeves.

  Phoebe left, and Mina stared at the brown-eyed dog. It was better than being alone, she decided. Benson snuggled against her knee. She ran her fingers over his head.

  A notification popped up on her phone. It was the stalking app. Oscar’s battery is low. Tell him to charge his phone.

  She sat down on the floor and drew Benson close to her. The fur compacted under her arms and the dog’s body was surprisingly slim. What did he think when his owners vanished to Australia?

  She missed Oscar, and the way he’d start each day knowing what he wanted to accomplish. She missed the way he knew how to locate the knots in her back. She checked her phone. Nothing from Oscar. Not a word. Not an emoji. Nothing. She opened the app. The little photo of her husband hovered above the West Coast. It was the image from the Umeda Trading website. He looked professional and slightly distant. />
  Then there was Phoebe. Phoebe, for whom Mina had no words that made sense. Once she’d seen an owl on a camping trip. He’d lingered on his branch, golden-eyed and stripe-feathered. Mina had stared and stared until long after he flew off. That was how she felt about Phoebe.

  Mina supposed that before Freud, people repressed their emotions. But she’d lost count of the times one of her New York friends began a sentence, “So my therapist says . . .” Mapping your emotions was easy. It was cutting a new path that felt impossible.

  Benson’s doggy breath huffed into the apartment. She leveled her phone with his face. The tail tapped a marching beat. She sent a photo to Oscar. Silly. But was it so wrong to hope for something more than a perfunctory busy? She didn’t want to beg. She couldn’t demand, Come home. Because hadn’t she said she’d be fine? It wasn’t like she was about to die.

  Mina looked up Phoebe’s restaurant. It had varnished tables, parquet floors and gleaming lamps. A long, polished bar was studded with crystal tumblers. Right now customers would be ordering bratwurst and watching Phoebe take the order, her long hair pinned up to reveal the freckleless neck.

  “Shall we go on walkies?” she asked the dog.

  The sun was low. The shops had closed. Bars and restaurants had taken the stage. The dog strained at the leash, as his nose followed an invisible trail.

  Mina noticed the mother and son from some way down the street. The boy’s blue cap had caught her attention. A complicated monogram was stitched across the front. Lumpy knees stuck out from navy shorts. He looked like a boy from another era, about to be evacuated to the countryside or head off for high jinks. Had Oscar ever had a cap like that? Had his curls poked out from under the brim? The mother and boy came closer. It was late to be coming home from school, but perhaps he was in a club or a team. All at once, the boy was running, limbs flying akimbo. Mina’s breath caught, and she tried to step out of his way. But before the peak of his cap could connect to her stomach, he stopped. Right in front of Benson. He stuck an upturned palm towards the dog. Mina looked on, unsure. What had Phoebe said about Benson being edgy? What would she do if he bit the child? Shouldn’t the mother have stopped this?

  The mother stood to one side, her hands full of groceries. Leeks protruded from the plastic bags. “I’m sorry,” she said. “He’s in his dog phase.”

  The boy scratched Benson behind the ears. The dog flopped over and the boy petted the belly with almost scientific concentration.

  “He’s a champ,” he said, in a serious voice, as if it had taken him some minutes to come to this conclusion. His hand continued over Benson’s belly. Mina filled with pride. Ridiculous. Benson didn’t belong to her.

  The mother sighed, the grocery bags lodged in her elbow. “Come on, Jacob. We’ve got to be going.”

  Other dog owners nodded to Mina and she nodded back—a member of this club for tonight. She and the dog trooped past pubs, bookshops, tube stops. Flocks of eye-linered girls winged past. Then, for a few streets, no one. The dog’s legs lifted and dropped but his tail drooped. It must be heavy carrying that weight of fur.

  The road bent into a bridge. Mina looked over the side to see the ruffled back of a canal. Trees bowed over the water, leaves kissing it goodnight. One of the barges had Christmas lights strung around its rail. Mina thought she recognized the area from her previous visit to Phoebe’s part of town. Wasn’t the restaurant where Phoebe worked nearby? Mina wouldn’t go in. She just wanted to see where Phoebe worked.

  On a street of closed stores, a van was parked, the headlights on and the back doors open. Benson strained towards the vehicle. Mina pulled back on the lead, and the strap bit her palms.

  “No. Bad dog.”

  He let out a low, whistling whine.

  The driver’s seat was empty. A newspaper was folded on the dashboard, the block capitals of the headline mysterious in the low light. CLEAN ME was written in the grime on the truck’s side. Benson hurried on, hustling towards the back of the van.

  Another step and she saw inside. Mina’s shoulders leaped towards her ears. Inside the van bodies hung from hooks, limbs strapped together. Animals, she realized, headless and skinned. Cows? Deer? Sheep? She wasn’t sure. She had only the sense of limbs, and queasy white and red flesh.

  The shadows between the meat shifted. It was a man in a blue shirt, like a hospital orderly’s. He lifted a body off its hook. One hand took the feet, or were they hooves? The other grasped the corpse around its middle. There was a moment when he and the meat were dancing, before he dropped it to the van’s floor.

  Mina didn’t think she was better than meat-eaters. She was sure lives, both animal and human, were lost in the farming of cotton and the sewing of clothes and the collecting of the oil that the freighters used to carry even her simple socks across the ocean. She was sure that everything she did probably maimed some creature. It was just that when she tried to eat sinew, she felt a kicking in her stomach, as if the animal were trying to escape.

  The man’s eyes slid into hers. For a moment she felt that he’d like to eat her. She imagined that mouth, hot and saliva-sticky, clamping down on her arm. If they were pulled into that van, how long would it take Oscar to realize she was missing? She dragged Benson away.

  The restaurant and its generous blue awnings appeared around the corner. From the sidewalk, it was impossible to see Phoebe. The diners were bathed in twenty-four-carat light. On the other side of the street was a triangle of grass and benches. There were many buttons of green sewn into London and she hadn’t seen any of them patrolled. Mina eyed this grassy polygon. There was a paved path down the middle. Couples walked slowly, so close their coats brushed, while busy single people sliced past. She chose a bench with a clear view of the restaurant. Benson, calm after the long walk, settled at her feet. His haunch rested against her. Mina buried her cold hands in his fur.

  She just wanted to glimpse this waitress-Phoebe. But Phoebe must’ve been working far back in the restaurant because her slim profile never appeared in the windows. Mina’s body was sore from the day’s efforts. She did a few shoulder rolls that Oscar had taught her. She wondered if this was what stalkers felt like. But stalkers were not entrusted with the care of the stalkee’s dog. It didn’t seem so wrong to want to see a familiar face, if only for a second, if only from a distance.

  Mina skimmed her emails. Nothing from Oscar today. A wedding invitation from a girl she’d taken Introductory Latin with and who now worked for JPMorgan. An invitation to submit papers to a conference on Ovid. Suggested topics included:

  Amor: Force of destruction?

  Emotions in Ovid

  The dearth of same-sex relationships in Ovid

  Intertextuality in Ovid: What’s new?

  The Ovidian aesthetics

  Ovid’s literary persona(e)

  The psychology of exile in the Ovidian corpus

  Seduction in ancient literature: a comparative examination

  Tales of Transformation compared (within Metamorphoses, across genres, and/or across cultures)

  Visualizing Ovid

  Post-classical Ovid (reception and adaptation in all genres)

  Past-Mina would have thrown something together. She would have applied for travel grants. The conference was in Shanghai. Supposedly select contributions would be translated into Chinese. Present-day Mina turned off her phone and shoved it into her back pocket.

  Gradually, diners stopped arriving. Every time the door opened it was for another group of full-bellied clients leaving. Some hugged and kissed. Few looked over their shoulders.

  A woman in a white shirt and black skirt appeared in the doorway. Her face was turned away as she talked to someone inside. But the figure was all wrong to be Phoebe. Then a gaggle of others. Finally, Phoebe. Mina called out a greeting, but it was ignored. She shouted Phoebe’s name.

  Phoebe approached, confusion crinkling her face.

  Benson rushed towards his mistress, tongue waving. Mina, who’d had the leash loosely a
round her wrist, found herself dragged up and out of her seat. The yank was so hard her shoulder screamed in its socket.

  “Mina, hi, is everything okay? Is Benson okay?”

  “He’s fine. He’s here.” She must look like a crazy person. After the first attempt, a doctor with a checklist had quizzed her to prove she wasn’t a danger to herself or others. If she was a danger, she would’ve been assigned another ward, one she wouldn’t have been allowed to leave. The exhausting thing about being crazy was the constant need to convince people she wasn’t.

  “Benson and I just got here,” she said, eliding into that just the hours spent on the bench as the night got cooler. In the scheme of her life, she had just arrived in London. “I thought it might be fun to walk across the city. To get to know it better.”

  “Oh, cool.” Phoebe looked over her shoulder. It wasn’t quite a full turn, more of a twitch. “I told my friends we’d get drinks after my shift was up, so . . .”

  “Go, have fun. Benson and I’ll be fine.”

  Phoebe twitched her head again. “If you can’t take him, if there’s been a problem . . .”

  “There’s no problem. Have fun. It’s a beautiful night.” Her hip was half turned away. But something must’ve shown in Mina’s face, because Phoebe seemed to think she needed to offer Mina more. She said, “It’s a new moon, you know.”

  Mina asked, “A new moon is when you can’t see it, right?” There were no stars, only the faint light of the city reflecting off banks of cloud.

  “Yeah, I have an app that tracks the cycle. They say you’re supposed to feed the new moon your wishes. And then you reap them on the full moon. My astrologer friend told me, and I’ve been trying it. For the blog, you know?”

  Yet more apps. Mina wondered if the moon felt stalked. Another group emerged from the restaurant.

  “Anyway, I really have to go,” Phoebe said. “But we’ll hang out tomorrow, okay?” She squeezed Mina’s shoulder and Mina was left with the dog and the hungry moon.

  Mina and Benson watched Phoebe as she walked away. Benson pulled on the lead, but Mina held him. No, she thought, you’re stuck with me tonight. Phoebe’s was the efficient step of someone who knew where she was going. It was the sort of walk that would be easy to fall into line behind. Then abruptly, she stopped, as if halted by the riptide of Mina’s stare.