Featherbones Read online

  “You’re leaving?” someone says. The door slams shut behind him.

  Quiet settles over him, muting the music from the house. The difference is sobering, as though he has stepped willingly into an ice bath, or the arms of the sea. Cold stings his skin; refreshing, reviving, the most real thing he has experienced all night. Embracing the chill, he begins to walk.

  There is a house number, a street name, a city district on a sign beside an abandoned church. Cars line each side of the road, the vehicles perfectly parked. Street lamps illuminate the pavement every few metres or so. Otherwise it is empty; one street in a city made of many. Something that he learned to recognise long ago as loneliness clutches at him, and he looks back to the house, but already it seems dimmer, the music darker, the lights a distant murmur in the night.

  A taxi turns into the road, approaching from his left. Its wheels hiss through the gutter as it passes him. When the car draws level, he sees a face staring back from the passenger seat, pressed close to the window; drawn and angular in the dark. He thinks he recognises the face, although he cannot say from where or when. Then the shadows seem to rise up from the gutter and he is afforded one last look at the street, the rooftops, the destitute stars in the night sky, before blackness claims him.

  He slips from sleep into vague consciousness, roused by the birds outside the window. As his eyes adjust to the darkness, he recognises the sofa beneath his head, the flat-screen television in the corner, the shape of the sitting room, where he has lived now for a week, and it is a moment before he realises he is back at Michael’s house. Distorted by sleep, his surroundings seem strange to him. The man’s coat cuts a long silhouette where it hangs in the hallway, a deeper blackness inside the moonlit house.

  Rising, he staggers into the kitchen. The tap whines, sending shivers through the piping. He sips a glass of water, relishing the coldness as it slides down his throat. Around him, chrome cabinets shine in the darkness, reflecting even the smallest glimmers of light. Vague memories percolate his mind; a house party, the city submerged, Michael and a taxi. Standing at the sink, he takes another sip.

  Outside, the street is stagnant, Miserly Road trapped in the throes of night. And it is still night, he realises. It must be very early. Retreating from the kitchen, he finds his way back to the sofa, and with the smooth leather cushion against his face wonders when this nightmare will end.

  The evening comes back to him, then the church, the bar, his office and the long streets that link all these things; the city filled with dark shapes, flapping for flapping’s sake, screaming into the sky, desperate to move, to live, to make themselves heard, a blackness in the corners of his eyes and in his ears.

  Not for the first time, he wonders why his dreams have resurfaced now. Even Dr. Moore seemed only capable of repressing them. The dejected figure on the church floor fills his thoughts, and with it the vicar’s voice, distorted by the imagined heights of the service hall.

  “What do they want?”

  “To be loved. And to return that love in kind.”

  He thinks of lovebirds, and wonders why they are called such. Do they love? Are they more than birds because of it, or indifferent except in name? What of scared birds too, and dead birds, and whatdoesitallmeanbirds?

  The chirping that woke him grows louder, and it occurs to him that it is not coming from outside. There were no birds visible from the kitchen window, and none that could sing through double glazing. Despite himself, he begins shivering. Almost without realising, his eyes slide back to the indistinct coat, hanging in the hallway.

  Time seems to slow as its silhouette shifts. Two tattered arms unfurl from its chest, and it occurs to Felix that it is starving. He does not know for how long it has been standing in the hallway, or what it will take for it to leave.

  With its arms outstretched, it turns to face him from the doorway. Though he cannot properly make out its features, he is reminded of the statues from the church-yard, the night after the flood, their smiling faces black with soil and slime. It hovers uncertainly on the thresh-old of the sitting room, and he can’t be sure whether the clicking sound is coming from its throat or the joints in its arms. He imagines that it says a name. Then in one fluid motion it withdraws deeper into the house.

  He remains frozen, unable to breathe, as though an ocean of water is pressing down on him. It holds his lips together, threatening to rush into his lungs and drown him from the world once and for all. Silence settles back over the room.

  Then he gasps, drawing desperate breaths, struggling from the sofa as though capsized.

  “No,” he chokes. Like a man asleep, he stumbles through the house. “Not Michael.”

  His feet carry him to the hallway, then the stairs above. Steps creak beneath his weight, belying the real age of the house, and he is reminded of old flotsam, too long in the water, grown green and riddled with rot. Crossing the landing, he comes to a stop outside a door. The bird sounds are shrill now, almost reptilian in pitch, and he imagines hungry chicks, mouths wide, desperate to be filled. He pushes open the door.

  Darkness fills the bedroom, except for the light from the street lamp outside, which floods through the open window. His eyes rush madly around the room, as though seeing it for the first time, but it is the sight on the bed that makes him buckle and cry out, because mounted atop Michael, legs clasped around his hips, skin shining with sweat as it rides him into the mattress, is the figure from his dreams, except this time there is no beak, no marble eyes, no loose dewlaps; just his own face staring back at him, cheeping like a clutch of newborn chicks.

  Chapter Eighteen

  The sun has not yet risen when Felix slips away from Miserly Road. He quietly packs up what little he brought with him before wandering back into the city. When he reaches the Itchen Bridge, he walks to one side and stares out over the water. Against the vast sprawl of the city, the sea, even the bridge on which he stands, he feels tiny; that speck of silt from so long ago, swirling in the maelstrom. He notices ships in the distance, brooding behemoths barely visible as shadows in the mist. He notices other things, too, which he might have preferred not to see; small slits in the sky, some gliding smoothly, others bobbing as they grow larger, feathered wings beating furiously as they bear down on the bridge.

  His flat is as he left it one week ago. In the kitchen he finds a spoon, stained copper with old tea. An empty wine bottle sits on his balcony, filled with black dots; drunk flies and dead flies who did not know when to stop. His covers are still strewn across his bedroom floor from the morning that he left.

  Michael rings him several times throughout the day. After letting the first two calls ring off, he sends a reassuring text message. He is fine, after all. There is no need for Michael to worry.

  He spends a long time that weekend on the balcony. From where he stands he can see Queen’s Park and the docks, the Itchen Bridge, endless buildings rising uniform into the sky, and the sea. Familiar sounds fill his ears; bird cries, long, wilting sounds, and the beating of air beneath wings. Rain soaks him to his skin.

  The sea catches his gaze and holds it; a dazzling dance of silvers, greens, blacks, whites and blues. For the first time, he thinks, he does not see grey in the water. It is difficult to believe it is the same sea that swallowed the Titanic over a hundred years ago; the same sea that claimed so many lives that night, glittering now in the shadow of dusk. If it is a testament to man’s ingenuity that he can make such ships, that he can keep so much metal afloat, it is a testament to the water that it can take it back at will. The sea is everything in this modern world where people live entire lives as stony statues, never running, flying, loving or singing as they might.

  When night falls and he moves inside he can still hear the rain, pattering against his balcony doors. He watches the impact of the droplets as they fall against the glass, and through the curtain of water imagines other things, captured behind; beating wings, bare skin, his face broken apart by the rain –

  ***


  “So, you see, it’s your duty to uphold our good name, Felix, as I upheld it when I was a young boy.”

  Felix and his father were sitting in the Aviary after supper. Outside, evening sank over Crows Hill, bathing the town in shadow. The house had been in his father’s family for many generations. Once, a long time ago, it had housed the children who boarded at St. Barnaby’s. Felix’s father told him that his great, great grandfather had been housemaster in the boarding house’s final days. His father told him many things: about living up to expectations, about the history of the town and the importance of their family name.

  The cluttered heights of the room towered over him. Photographs lined the mantelpiece, depicting Felix’s parents when they were no older than he was now, but it was the birds that would always catch his eyes and hold them. Kestrels, kites, falcons and other kinds he could not begin to name stared glassy-eyed at him from their mounts atop bookcases and on deep shelves. He tried not to look.

  “Do you understand the importance? Of fitting in?”

  “Yes, I understand. I don’t want to be different.”

  From where he was sitting in his armchair, his father leaned slowly forward. His breath burned with the brandy he kept in a bottle on his desk. “Then don’t be. Listen to me, now, because this is important. As men, it’s our responsibility to be strong. My father was strong, and his father before him, and when you have a son one day, you’ll need to be strong for him, too. Yes?”

  Felix couldn’t remember having spoken so intimately with his father before. The man’s blue eyes burned into his, and in that moment it was impossible to believe he had ever been the young boy from the photographs, smooth-skinned and smiling for the camera. The birds continued to stare down through their hard, artificial eyes from the half-lit heights of their shelves, so much like Harriet’s eyes, as they had been afterwards when he found her floating in the churchyard; glazed and empty of whatever had made them bright before.

  “I can’t help it,” he said, more quietly now. “Please, I don’t want to be in here.”

  “Well you must. I don’t mean to be hard on you, Felix, but that’s the way it is. You’ll understand when you’re older.”

  ***

  In the darkness of his bedroom it is easy to imagine he is back in his father’s study. He can still hear the man’s voice in his head, smell the brandy on his breath, feel the waxy eyes of the stuffed birds staring down at him from all angles of the room.

  When his father went to bed, Felix would pore over the photographs of his parents, searching for something that he recognised. What were his mother and father like, when they were his age? Did they know who they were going to grow up into? His father said that school was Felix’s formative years; that it would “make him into the man he would become.”

  He remembers sitting with Mr. Stuart in an office no less dark or decaying than the rest of the school as he listened to a similar statement. Mr. Stuart said that better schools bred better men; that books birthed intelligence, equipping them with eloquence, with which to take on the adult world.

  Were these men better? Felix had wondered, studying his teacher's papery skin, his thin hair and the creases down the lengths of his beige trousers. Like his father, Mr. Stuart had grown up in Crows Hill. Felix had often remarked at the similarities between the two men. Many were the nights he had sat awake in his bedroom, listening to them downstairs talking politics and poetry and the finer details of Odysseus' travels in voices that seemed quite the same. He remembered his father’s old checked suits, his reading glasses, his hard eyes like the marbles used to give his stuffed birds sight. And he remembered the Aviary.

  It was a horrible name for a horrible room that could not have been further removed from a real bird house. Such places were noisy and bright and alive with the tireless movement of their light-footed occupants. His father’s study was a dead room filled with heat, alcohol fumes and fumes with more chemical bite. It was a tomb in which his father locked himself regularly, trodden by the sad ghosts of birds and, Felix had often wondered, perhaps another ghost; his mother, visible to his father in the birds’ stale eyes. Felix never knew the truth of this. He knew only that he loved Harriet, and had grown so much already for having done so.

  A presence at the foot of his bed draws him back to his room. In his half-asleep state, he imagines a silhouette, skeletal by the window, steeped in city light.

  “You’re not real.”

  The base of the bed sinks slightly as it climbs on all fours onto the covers. Hands press their way slowly up the length of the bed, then knees and feet as it moves closer, and with each indentation, each application of weight across his bed, he feels something inside of him, once strange but now almost familiar in the darkness; a heat behind his ribs, beside his stomach, stirring inside his flesh and bone –

  Feathered arms drag themselves closer; a swimmer clutching for dry land, or a newborn thing clawing for the first time from embryotic slime. Even when the figure’s hands close around Felix’s wrists, he does not open his eyes. Its fingers feel hot against his skin. He realises that he is also hot, and hard beneath the covers. A mixture of sweet, rank smells fill his nose, at once maritime and human: sweat and sea and sharp cologne.

  “Do you trust me, Felix?” it whispers in a voice that could be his. “Do you trust me?”

  Hearing himself in the darkness, he stirs. When it does not move from on top of him he struggles, half wrestling with the hands against his wrists. Then he buckles beneath the weight, throwing his body against it. His shouts fill the room as he writhes underneath it until he cannot shout anymore and sinks back into the covers. In this spent state his sleep-filled eyes open.

  He knows he is dreaming. He clings to the knowledge, because the alternative is too much to bear. Still, he shouts out at the sight of the face staring back at him; no weeping angel, no beak-mouthed monster, not even his own face, as he had expected, but another; its features sharp, thin eyes locked onto his own.

  What little light shines through his window illuminates the face in pools of shadow. Eye sockets seem to extend into the hollows of its skull. Cheeks shine, smooth and unblemished. Long lips stretch into the dark.

  “Michael,” he says, even though he knows it is not really him. “Michael. Michael.”

  Then in one fluid motion it leans forward into his face and presses its mouth against his. His body tenses, limbs rigid. When its lips begin to move he slowly softens, leaving only the hardness between his legs, the darkness of the bedroom and the wetness in the corners of his eyes.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Light floods through the pub windows, revealing rafters and old beams of wood. Dust floats like clouds of sediment on the air, reminding Felix of hulking wrecks, long lost to the bottom of the sea. He finds a table near the back of the room while Michael places an order at the bar. Most of the other Monday patrons are lunching outside, basking in the sun, and there are many tables to choose from.

  Michael is not long at the bar. When he returns, he is carrying two cups and saucers. He moves stiffly as he sits opposite Felix and slides one of the saucers towards him. His face is several shades paler than usual, his eyes bruised but bright. They study Felix across the table.

  “Coffee,” he says, indicating the cup.

  “Coffee?”

  “Like I used to make. Hopefully better.” Reaching out, Michael nudges the saucer closer. “There’s sugar. It’s hot.”

  Felix lifts the cup to his lips. As promised, the drink tastes sweet. It reminds him of another time, another life, when Michael made him coffees from the other side of the counter. He takes a second sip.

  “Why are we drinking coffee?”

  “You look like you could use one. I’ve ordered food, too.”

  “You’re not exactly the picture of health yourself.”

  “A sure sign that two men have made the most of their weekend, if you ask me.” Michael’s smile ghosts across his face. “I found you wandering the street
s on Friday night. Care to elaborate?”

  “I can’t remember.”

  They sit in silence for several minutes. Felix watches the old man behind the counter as he wipes the sides down. He moves automatically, cleaning the same spot over and over, driving the dishcloth into the wood with what looks like all the force in his knotted arms until Felix suspects he might go through the counter if he carries on.

  “You’re very quiet,” says Michael.

  “I’m enjoying my coffee. Thank you.”

  “Tell me what to do.”

  “For what?”

  “To help.”

  Looking up, he finds Michael watching him. Even tired, the man appears alert, as though at any moment he might spring from his seat, wings unfurled, and descend on Felix with cutting cheeks, sharp lips and outstretched claws –

  “I’m fine, really. I’m still tired from Friday.”

  “You’re a terrible liar. Don’t you trust me?”

  “Of course.”

  “So trust me. Talk to me.”

  Conversation comes unwillingly at first. It is one thing to reflect privately on his past and the events that have helped to shape him. For as long as he has felt separate from everyone else he has been doing just this. But to take these reflections and give them his voice, to make spoken sentences of his memories, seems the most daunting thing. He has never been outspoken. It is much easier to be honest in the dark, where no one will laugh at him, or ignore him, or judge him in any way. Nobody knows him like the dark, or growing dusk, or the shadows inside which he sits, watching and listening but never taking part or being noticed while the rest of the world passes him by.

  “This is difficult for me.”

  “Yes.”

  “When we say something out loud, that makes it real.”

  “I think so, yes.” Michael’s voice slides comfortingly into his ears. “As real as anything.”

  ***

  Silence filled the dining-room. Outside, evening sank over Crows Hill, bathing the house in cool shadow. The sun hovered at the top of the hill before vanishing behind the treeline. Felix thought he felt it as its light passed the window.