Featherbones Page 13

  He spends a long time in the shower, studying himself in the mirror above the wash basin. Although there is no outward sign of change he feels different. The same slender arms move up and down as they scrub his body. The flannel finds its familiar way through the hollows of his ribs, the arc of his collarbone and the dark pits beneath his arms. Mostly he studies his face, drawn back time and again to his severe eyes. He wonders when they became so serious, so similar to how he remembers his father’s eyes looking. He rubs them until the skin around is red and raw.

  In his wardrobe he finds a checked shirt, smooth and slightly cold against his skin, and a clean pair of jeans. Before leaving his flat he rummages for the landline. The dusty handset emerges from beneath a pile of magazines. The phone call does not take long.

  “I won’t be in tomorrow. No, I won’t be in Thursday either, or Friday. No. Yes, that’s right. Nothing to do with Michael. Why? I’ve had enough. I know. This is my notice. This. Has anyone ever told you you’re a bastard?”

  He finds himself on a station platform, stepping onto a carriage. It does not take long for him to be free of the platform, and in a matter of minutes he is staring through dirt-smeared windows as the city from which he has barely moved for eight years passes him by; blocks of flats and parking lots replaced by old brick tunnels and grassy embankments, rising alongside his window as though swallowing the train into their folds.

  It is easy to sit here while the rest of the world melts away. Trees stretch into fields, which seem stitched together when viewed from the inside of his carriage; a patchwork of greens and browns and crisp golden yellows tacked beneath blue shining skies. The carriage rocks beneath him, lulling him slowly in his seat, while far above cerulean clouds blossom with wind and rain. He only has eyes for their phosphorescence, their purple twilight tinge, and in the time it takes him to reach the next station he is lost in their depths, rolling with them through the sky; a fish caught in their awesome ocean pull.

  The train makes several stops. Each time is the same; the slowing of the carriage while, outside, grey grows in his vision; tall tower blocks, industrial parks that do not deserve to be called parks, cars boxed together behind wire fences, and commotion as passengers surge to their feet with their luggage. Around him the train empties then grows full again, quiet then loud, still then alive with flailing arms and dour faces as everyone staggers for the carriage doors. Through all of this he remains sitting at the back and does not move. Instead he dares to wonder what he is doing here, so far away from the sea, from the city that has become his home.

  He knows then he is not running away. He cannot escape himself any more than he can escape the thing perching in the empty aisle seat; his last companion in this mad struggle called life. For thirteen years the bird figure has lived on in the depths of his subconscious; the dream-sea that is torrents of nightmares, unspoken desires and human wishes, slowly transforming into the reeking horror that he recognises now. Without turning from the window he reaches across and takes a misshapen hand in his own. He does not let go again until they arrive at their destination.

  The train slows, shudders, pulling into the station at Oxford. Figures file awkwardly down the centre aisle as fresh passengers search for seats. He tags along after those departing.

  The street outside the station is clogged with cars, cyclists and sets of lights that do not seem to want to change from red. Like Southampton, this city was found-ed on water. The name inspires images of black-gowned professors and mortar-board hats; creatures of Mr. Stuart’s ilk, and his father’s. They call it the City of Drea-ming Spires. He remembers parks – real parks, with old trees and trimmed lawns – from when he used to visit the city with his father, and punts, floating like swans on the Cherwell, the Bridge of Sighs and All Souls College guarded by curlicue gates and gargoyles, water tumbling from stone mouths locked into snarls. He crosses the road and keeps walking until he finds a bus stop.

  It is raining by the time the bus arrives. Clouds weigh heavily over the city. The double-decker draws to a stop alongside the shelter, doors hissing as they draw apart to let him in. As he steps on board a wave of sickness rides him at the thought of where he is heading. He feels as though a cocktail of emotion is curdling inside him; lumps of white upset floating on a thin skin of anger and sharp acid pain. He wonders if he has made the right decision in returning after all these years; if he made a decision at all or whether his feet have guided him here of their own accord. Then he is buying a ticket, finding a seat, and it is too late for doubt and second thoughts.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Silence settled over Crows Hill Church, broken only by the sounds of small birds twitching in the trees and the muffled crunch of twigs beneath Felix and Harriet’s school shoes. The air was cold, the soil springy with water and slime. Ancient gravestones guided them through the grounds where it was almost possible to hear the church, ringing with early hymns, to taste the rigours of religion on their tongues; the hallowed heart of Crows Hill, guarded by grey angels and their cherubim children.

  “It’s so peaceful here,” said Harriet, ducking under branches and dragging her hands across the gravestones. “And private. When I come here I feel like I’m the only person in the whole world.”

  “Now there’s two of us,” said Felix, following behind her.

  She turned as she ducked beneath a low branch, and smiled.

  They foraged further through the undergrowth, as though looking for something, though Felix had no idea what that might have been. Sometimes Harriet would stop to study a headstone, running her fingers along the weathered inscriptions. Other times it was the statues that held her attention. Felix followed her lead.

  “They love the rain, you know,” she said, stopping by one of the statues near the back wall of the church. An old, angelic face stared back at her, its smile lopsided where its features had begun to wear away.

  “How can you tell?” said Felix, coming to stand beside her.

  “You can see it, in their faces. I think I would love the rain, if I was made of stone. I love the rain anyway.” She scooped up a handful of slippery soil. “It’s so refreshing.”

  “I was born in rain,” said Felix, almost fumbling over his words in his hurry to speak them. “In that flood, the big one that everyone talks about. The roads were all blocked, so my mother couldn’t reach the hospital. She died giving birth to me in her bed, with the rain against the windows. There hasn’t been a flood that bad since.”

  “That’s special, you know.” Using the base of the angel for support, Harriet sank cross-legged to the ground. “It doesn’t sound it, but it is. No one else in the whole town can say that.”

  “I don’t think they’d want to.”

  “Sometimes I don’t think I’m from this town at all.” Harriet’s fingers sank into the grassy mud and stayed there. “Sometimes when I watch the others at break-time, running and shouting together, I feel like I don’t fit in. Then I come here and I feel better. And the statues always play with me in the rain.”

  Once she had finished talking, Harriet sprang to her feet and danced. She moved dreamily; school dress fluttering, her shoes stepping lightly on the grass, seeming detached from the world as she swayed and span to some secret, silent waltz. The statues stood around her, their sad, smiling faces fixed onto the girl, but Felix had only eyes for Harriet as she celebrated the soil and the sky and the statues around them.

  She continued to dance until she lost her balance and tumbled into Felix. They laughed as they both fell over. He knew the wetness of mud against his arms, the damp that soaked into his school clothes from the grass, the silvery sound that was Harriet’s happiness, and in that moment the world could have ended for all he cared.

  ***

  He might be in a dream again, standing by the side of the road where he would wait on Saturday mornings while his father queued in line for the post office. It is hard to believe that he is here. He once swore to himself that he would never come back an
d yet it feels like he might not have left at all; as though all the years in between his leaving and returning have meant nothing, undone in hours. Breathless he begins to walk.

  The high street seems shorter, narrower than he remembers. He recognises the butcher’s, and the fabric shop, and the old post office that belonged to Mrs. Grantham. A sheet of plywood blocks the door, black with damp. The window above is a dark, empty space.

  He is drawn past a supermarket and a new cinema complex. At the end of the street is the town square, where they would hold the market on Wednesdays. There is a coffee shop now and, on one corner of the square, a bar or nightclub, stirring with activity in the fading light. Most of the shops are closed, and few people cross his path. A young boy kicks an empty can across the square, soundless as they stop start down the street. Across the road Felix spies a woman, face deadpan as she clutches a buggy, and moments later a man, grey suit clinging to grey skin, inside which he seems to wriggle, as though sloughing business attire and the false flesh beneath it.

  St. Barnaby’s is not far; ten more minutes through the town. The school, at least, has not changed. The school gates are rough against his hands, and cold when he presses his face against the old iron bars. With his vision blinkered he could be staring straight into the past; a part of Crows Hill trapped in time behind the old school walls. In the distance, across the playing fields, he can just make out the grounds. Strips of grass have been mowed short, made suitable for the cricket season, dotted with clusters of crows. He remembers floods of footsteps, shouts as boys flocked through the corridors and the shrieks of girls as they flapped noisily after one another on the playing fields. When he steps back from the gates, rust has coloured his palms an orange-red.

  A strange relief sinks over him. The feeling is unexpected but welcome. He realises it is not the town itself that comforts him – there is no love lost there – but the sight of some place familiar. In Southampton, people have forgotten, as people are prone to do, the history that has helped define them. He thinks of Old Town, crumbling away out of sight and mind, and the pocket watch in the museum, as broken and beautiful as the city itself. He wonders how much of the city he has really seen, how much of the world he sees and how much slips past him, unnoticed by most, except perhaps those who look, who have nothing else to distract them. He was no different, until the evening at East Park when he stopped and for five minutes listened to the city, reminding him of a face, a girl, a time when he ran in the rain, and slipped in the mud, and laughed until his eyes were as wet as his clothes.

  Turning from the school gates, he takes a small footpath and finds himself outside the house that once doubled as Dr. Moore’s clinic.

  The same Victorian standards that seem to have held the town in their unerring grasp reflect back at him from the front of the building. Detached from the rest of the street, it stands apart. Tall windows stare blindly outwards, the glass opaque with dust, behind which floral-pattern curtains cascade like rotting mulch. The porch is still there, the balconies, the black slate roof that characterises most of the town’s properties, but all of it is worn, as though it has not been tended to for many years now. Wood that was white is yellowed and flecked with wear. A small garden thrives with neglect beneath the porch, bushes scratching unchecked against the old wooden posts.

  The house is obviously unoccupied, but that does not deter him from lifting the latch on the front gate. Nettles brush his jeans as he walks into the shadow of the house, and he finds himself wondering if it is really neglect that has transformed the building, or whether such rot was inevitable, in this place where dreams lapped like surf so closely to reality and on more than one occasion may have leaked through; Dr. Moore’s sea, seeping into the woodwork, licking the paint from the walls, turning the curtains into slick, tumbling weeds.

  The front door looms before him. He might reach out, turn the handle, force the sodden wood with his shoulders and find himself in the hallway where he had once stood with his father when he met Dr. Moore for the first time. It would not be difficult. A muffled silence settles over him. He grasps the iron door knocker, once too high for him to reach, and finds it in the shape of a slender octopus.

  He wonders if Dr. Moore was ever a psychiatrist or if he only purported to be such, and was in fact something else. His esoteric counselling was most unconventional. Psychiatry should involve medicine; he knows this now. And yet there were never any medicines he can remember taking; no pills, no tablets, nothing except Dr. Moore’s teachings, which did not seem strange at the time but appear infinitely so now that they have resurfaced. One of the mantras echoes in his head like the crashing of surf inside a shell.

  “When a person sleeps, he floats through this sea and the waves forms shapes around him. The feeling is quite awesome, in the proper sense of the word. There is no escaping the sea, into which we must all fall when we sleep.”

  Seemingly on a precipice, he hovers outside the door. The suckered arm of the door knocker is cold against his skin and resistant when he lifts it from its place. Rust grows like algae between the joints. When he lowers it back to the door, the sound is soft with damp.

  He is not sure what he expected to happen. The silence stretches out, filled only by a faint sigh, which he presumes is the wind through the garden. His weight shifts, the porch groaning underneath him, and for a moment he thinks he sees the curtains shiver, disturbed not by the wind, or human hand, but a different current, running through the rotten fabric like fingers through hair. When they do not move again, he departs, leaving the house behind him; silent like a shipwreck lost to the bottom of the sea.

  The dour face of the town yields to darkness and with it the ghosts of a place he finds familiar. He walks until the streets give way to more patchwork fields, where he used to run with Harriet, chasing her through the yellow sheaths of corn, into the next field, and the next, until they collapsed from exhaustion into the crops. The fields are empty now. The tang of fertiliser stings the air.

  It is almost dark when he reaches the churchyard. The climb is slippery, the grass still wet from recent rain. He wonders if it was the same rain that fell over Oxford, hours earlier, the same rain that washes in from the sea over the city that has sprung up by the coast. It smells the same in his nose, looks just as wet against the glistening toes of his shoes.

  He wanders from the path, treading trails reclaimed by the undergrowth. Weeds fester in the darkness, and grasses, allowed to grow tall unchecked. As he moves deeper into the grounds, figures begin to emerge from the gloom; a glimpsed face, an armless bust, a severed head staring him out from its home in the hollows of a tree. He reminds himself that he has nothing to fear. They are just statues; stone chiselled into shapes that man might better recognise.

  The statues have suffered terribly in the years of his absence. Limbless, they regard him with the uncanny sightlessness of sculptures, while others watch from faces with no nose, or mouths that stretch too long from cheek to cheek. Harriet introduced him to them all, once, and their cherubim children; round faces peering up at him from the grass. They were her friends. Everyone needs friends.

  His feet pick careful passage through the graves. The headstones are broad, immodest slabs detailing names and dates, furry with moss and white bird-stains. As he makes his way towards a marker, near the church walls, a scratching sound reaches his ears.

  Like the school, this quiet corner, at least, seems to have survived. If it is strange that he feels relief at the sight of the school and the church, it is stranger that he should resent the way the town has changed. Had he not felt trapped by the school gates, the town’s old, tired ways?

  Movement draws his eyes to the dark roof of the church, where something pale is squirming against the slate. When it reaches the end of the roof, he fancies it leans forward; peering down from the guttering. Then it drags itself from the edge, tumbling through the space between the roof and the ground; falling heavily like a chick from its nest.

  As it tumbles
through the blackness, he is reminded of a cherub, brought to life by the dark and the rain. He doesn’t remember ever seeing the cherubim move before, but he still feels a swell of familiarity at the sight of the plummeting shape. Harriet believed. It is not such a stretch of the imagination to think that the angels’ children played with Harriet and their stone parents in the rain.

  It hits the ground with a soft thump. For a moment it lingers where it has fallen, on the earth beside Harriet’s grave. He wonders if it has always waited here; if this is where it once hatched and for a short while at least hopped through the wet grass in the tall shadow of the spire. The feeling of familiarity grows stronger, drawing him towards the solitary shape. He is several feet away when it turns from the grave in his direction.

  Cheeks still plump with childhood fill the face, no cherub but his own thirteen-year-old self staring up at him; Felix White as he last was before he lost himself, growing into the thin, misshapen thing that has haunted his waking dreams.

  He sees all this in a second stretched by shock and disbelief. Then he falls back from the boy into the grass.

  The boy watches him fall. Then he too crumples to his knees. With his face in his small hands, he begins to weep. Felix recognises the quiet sobs from a dozen sleepless nights and wonders how long the boy has been crying. He wonders if he cries every night and if anyone has ever noticed, before now. Something wells up inside him; an irrepressible wave of feeling, pushing at his chest until he thinks he might break, burst open, filling with water and night.