Featherbones Page 14

  “Some stories show them with the bodies of birds and the faces of women,” declares the boy, repeating a lesson committed to memory. “In others, they are depicted as beautiful maidens, with talons for feet and great feathered arms. Some say they devoured the flesh of those who were drawn to them, and that they sang out of hunger. Others portray them as victims of their own voices, for those who were drawn to them could never leave, and so starved to death on their island prisons, which became islands of corpses, carcasses resting amid the meadows and the flowers that grew from them.”

  The mention of the meadow no longer frightens Felix. He has seen the alternative, lived years in its shadow, and it means nothing. There is so much pain in the world. There is so much hurt. It is a wonder how one man can take it, how he is expected to live, to go on, when nothing is ever fair, or seems to make sense, or matters at the end.

  “They love the rain, you know,” says the small voice, and Felix’s hand moves to his mouth. “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.”

  The headstone seems smaller than he remembers. He has grown up since he was last here, and yet there is a part of him that has not grown; not properly, at least. For thirteen years it has lived on, becoming rank and rotten in the depths of his subconscious; the dream-sea that is torrents of nightmares, unspoken desires and human wishes. He breathes heavily.

  “I meant to tell you something that night, Harriet. I was scared, but I knew you’d understand. I think that if I’d told you, it would have made it real. It might have helped. But I never got the chance.”

  He realises he is happy for Harriet, because she was spared when the Sirens took her to that place which is sea and sky and blackness, filled with burning stars and coral fish and dancing dreams of the rotting dead. His own hands rise to cover his face. When he removes them again, the boy is gone.

  He says his goodbyes to Harriet and then he leaves. His feet retrace their steps; past the church, the hill, the fields that once seemed to stretch on forever. The town shines in the night. Light floods from the vast windows of the supermarket and above the nightclub, illuminating a high street alive with shifting silhouettes; the townsfolk awakened by night and the promise of dreams. Around Felix, litter bins overflow with water, gutters flooding with the dark. People step into one another and do not step back, so that the streets through which he walks turn into cloying, clay-like masses shaped by the slick hands of the town, wrung-out like sopping dishcloths, drained of everything except water, from which there is no end.

  He stops one more time on his way to the night bus, outside a manor house not far from St. Barnaby’s. There is a hedgerow beside the driveway where he waits, watching the well-lit windows for movement. It is a cloudy night, the blackness above seeming to frame the building. Time loses all meaning in the dark.

  It is difficult to see anything of the man who eventually draws the curtains. He moves from window to window throughout the house, dousing the lights one room at a time. His progress is slow but steady, and Felix sees a man trapped by ritual; re-enacting the same movements that he made eight years ago, and eight years before that. Even while the town around him has twisted and changed he has not; clinging to the same tired fabric of the curtains each night as he clung to his grief, preserved out of feathers and formaldehyde in the glass cases in the Aviary.

  “Are you listening to me? Because this is important. Don’t be frightened. 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.”

  As a boy, Felix remembers thinking about the man his father had become versus the short, skinny boy in the photographs on their mantelpiece. He wondered if he would grow up to be like William White one day; tall and thin and wise about the world. He could not imagine a life without his father watching over him, teaching him right from wrong. That is what fathers are for, after all. And yet he has managed it.

  When the man reaches the dining-room window he pauses, and Felix shivers with panic at the prospect of being seen. He knows that he is too far away from the house, and it is dark, but these rational thoughts do nothing to still his soaring heart. Despite himself he huddles further into the hedgerow.

  Then the man draws the dining-room curtains, and the front of the house falls into darkness. When Felix realises he will not see his father again, he turns from the town, as he turned from it once before, and walks away.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  The waterfront draws him across Queen’s Park, back to the place where he has spent so many happy nights. As he approaches the bar, he is struck by how different it looks in the light. It seems diminished, as though it is the dark, or perhaps the presence of its patrons, that revives the bar each night.

  He orders a pint and some lunch from the menu before finding a seat outside. The glass doors are open to the seafront, offering an uninterrupted view of the water. Settling into a chair by the smoking terrace, he relishes the peace and quiet.

  If Michael were here, this is where they would be sitting. He would probably be smoking. Felix can picture his friend’s cheeks, drawn as he sucks on a cigarette. His hair is tied back from his face, his eyes thin against the wind.

  Felix’s beer finds his lips. The drink is cold as it slips down his throat. He shivers in his seat but does not stop drinking until half of the pint is gone. Returning his glass to the table, he stares out over the water. The water stretches on, as far as he can see, until there is no sea, no sky, no white-tipped waves, only a distant blur that is all of these things bled together.

  By the time his food arrives, his glass is empty. He orders another drink, and another when the waitress comes to take his empty plate. With every pint the sky grows brighter, the sea darker, the bar around him less distinct, until he really could be in an ocean village, sunk far beneath the sea. Birds hover in the sky and he fancies they are Sirens, sprung from the depths to haunt him with their cries.

  Felix does not know what came over him the other night, standing in the corridor outside his flat with Michael, except that it felt right. He is not sorry for what happened. He is only sorry that it has taken him this long to realise who he is and what matters.

  ***

  “Three died that night. One of them a child, as well. Swept clean away by the waters.”

  “Clean? I saw one go myself,” said Mrs. Grantham, “and there was nothing clean about it.”

  “You saw one?”

  “With my own eyes,” she said. “Susan Stark. Thrashing in the cold and the wet, clothes soaked through, kicking her arms and legs right until she rounded the street and I lost sight of her. I tell you, there was nothing clean about it, or the remains.”

  “Goodness. The remains?”

  Mrs. Grantham shook her head and dabbed a small handkerchief to her mouth before speaking. “They found her in the school grounds, all limp and bruised. Then there was Jake, one of the Wilsons, though they’ve since moved away, bless them. And the Green’s young girl, face like a little cherub. Friends with that queer one, William White’s son. Terrible business, that winter. Cars, lifted straight down the roads. And the statues, from the churchyard! I don’t think I’ll ever quite forget it.”

  When they had finished speaking, Felix fled the sounds of their voices. He ran as far as the church, where he scrabbled over the old stone wall and hid among the headstones. His face burned, his sweat cold, his chest tight as though he was floundering amid the flood waters and every breath was a struggle for air. The enormity of that night washed over him; the village upheaved, the very angels that now watched over him swept on stony wings into the streets, and more than anything else the realisation that he was alone again, with only a dream of bird-shaped boys for company.

  ***

  Evening falls, then night, the waterfront lighting up, illuminated by the various other bars and restaurants beside it. He drinks until the bar blurs beh
ind his eyes. Slowly the smoking terrace fills with people, the sort who cannot wait for Friday, come to escape their homes, the streets, the city for a night. Content, he sits among them.

  Laughter fills his ears, seeming to carry across the sea. The sound belongs to three men, sitting across the terrace. As he finishes his beer, he wishes he could laugh as they are laughing. Instead he imagines Michael sitting beside him, spouting his typically blasé philosophies.

  Staring around, he realises he is the only one sitting by himself. If anyone is concerned for him, they do not show it. He might be Sam, forgotten by everyone except a statue; the angel who alone loves the city and the people who call it their home. He thinks about love and what it might feel like. He thinks about death and when it was that they all died. He thinks about the plant in the corner of his flat with its plastic fronds, its sterile soil, its bright, synthetic stem, until it is all he can do not to close his eyes, ball his fists and scream at the top of his voice.

  The men’s laughter begins again, rising uproariously across the terrace. Their eyes are creased, their white teeth gleaming, throats hollow holes as they laugh be-neath the stars. In that moment they could all be Sirens; every man and woman with blood in their veins and a hunger for singing, for screaming, for dancing through the iridescent night, and the grey days that follow.

  The buffeting of bird wings catches his attention. On the railings beside the waterfront a solitary gull struggles to maintain its balance. He does not look at anyone for a long time, instead staring out across the water. The gull is a small, pale shape against the vast blackness of the sea behind it, except not solely black but white and silvery, even gold where the light from the waterfront ignites the sharp tips of the waves, and all of it shivering beneath the moon.

  “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

  It is a moment before Felix realises the voice is real, and not imagined. Turning, he looks up at the man standing beside him at the table. Michael does not look back but continues to stare out to sea.

  “Michael?”

  With his head down, Michael laughs quietly. His breath is heavy with beer. Felix wonders what is so fun-ny, before realising that he is mistaken in the darkness.

  “Michael? What’s wrong?”

  Reaching across, Felix grasps his friend by the wrist. His fingers feel the sleek black jacket, the wrist bone beneath; hard from walking, from shaking. Here is a man laid bare, brought low by liquor and life. When Felix next speaks, the waves almost swallow his words.

  “What’s happened?”

  Michael’s head turns slowly. Glazed but honest eyes stare back at Felix. His silhouette trembles before the interior light of the bar. “I’m wildly unhappy.”

  The sea draws a cold, silent breath and seems to hold it.

  Michael lurches, stumbling into him. Felix sinks back into his chair, his head spinning as a quick mouth finds his. Shadows scatter like a flock of frightened birds around him.

  He allows Michael the kiss. He needs it just as much; to feel the drink-lacquered lips against his own. Mich-ael’s hand grasps his wrist, gentle at first, then suddenly tight, and under the warmth of his mouth and the grip of the hand Felix finally cracks. His heart races as he imagines something long-repressed pecking through his ribs and intercostal flesh, hatching from his hurried chest, rearing its fresh, amniotic face in the darkness –

  “You were right,” Felix says, too quietly for anyone to hear except the man whose mouth hovers by his own. “I was right. This is what it’s all about.”

  Light melts around them, and shadows, flapping in the glass terrace doors; silhouettes and reflections free to celebrate alongside the bodies that cast them. Inside, people bounce to the beat of the music, arms thrown in the air; plumage lank like those of seabirds washed up in oil. Others hold each other tightly, tattered wings linking shoulders, waists and withered chests, while beaked mouths stretch into grins. Still they dance because there is nothing else to do, no horror greater than that which they find themselves in; not the feathered bone-arms but the broken world, a decaying hull in which they are all trapped, except for these brief moments, glimmering like slimy pearls in the darkness.

  Michael’s mouth pauses, breaks away. His face glows by the bar light, and Felix realises it is easier here, that it would always have happened in this place where they come, not to lose themselves, but to find themselves by the roar of the sea. He is part of that sound, a speck of silt in Southampton’s muddy waters. They are all specks; swirling, sinking, rising in the sparkling oblivion of the depths. With the realisation comes laughter, bubbling up from inside him.

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