Featherbones Read online

  Hands pink from the cold clutch the wall for purchase as Sam struggles to his feet. Reaching down, Felix helps him from the pavement. The hands are much smaller than his own, and hard where they press into his palms. As they walk off together in the direction of East Street, he knows a cup of coffee cannot save those hands. Still, for an hour or two it might help keep them warm.

  Chapter Two

  Over the next few weeks, Felix feels drawn to the statue as he passes it by on his way into work and home again. In the mornings he has no time to stop and stare, but that does not prevent him from glancing her way as he walks through the shadow of East Park to London Road. Dawn illuminates her silhouette with its cold light, so that her slender arms appear severe, her skin sheer black and as devoid of warmth as the rest of the night-chilled city.

  In the evenings she bathes in a different light, and seems the more content for it. Dusk draws a coppery green to the sculpted shallows of her face and robes, an oceanic tint dredged from the depths of the black bronze. It is during this time that she seems most radiant; an angel as he has always understood angels to be, and on more than one occasion he finds himself wondering why such statues are so often shaped like seraphim. It seems the nature of man to surround himself with Heaven, as though by doing so the world might seem more divine, or less hellish, or simply better. He sees only metal, forced into the shape of something that it is not.

  When five o’clock on Friday finally arrives, the office empties. Felix remembers speaking to Michael, confirming their customary drinks, then walking home through the city. The high street stretches out before him; an endless parade of shop-fronts, multiplying in the gloom. It has stopped raining, although only recently. The ground glitters black with puddles.

  At his flat, he finds leftover lasagne and a half-drunk bottle of red in the kitchen. The mince is grey, the cheese rubbery, but as the dish rotates in the microwave it slowly becomes more appetising, until the aroma of hot fat and melted béchamel makes his insides moan.

  Taking himself to the balcony, he sits until the wine is gone, his stomach full, the sky a little softer at the edges. When the bottle is empty, he heads inside to get washed and changed, but not before undoing his tie and releasing it to the sky. The wind snatches the fabric, fluttering, from his hand, and does not give it back.

  The walk to Ocean Village passes him by. One moment he is leaving his flat and crossing Queen’s Park towards the water. The next moment, he is standing outside a bar. There are a number of bars and restaurants by the marina, each as busy as the next. Laughter spills into the cold night, which has fallen without him realising.

  He follows the murmur of conversation towards the nearest of the buildings. Orange light pours from its interior into the darkness outside. One side of the bar is mostly glass doors and these are open to the night air. He makes out the languid shape of smokers, reclining in the cold, and wonders whether Michael is among them. He will be on the smoking terrace or at the bar itself.

  As he enters the building he is hit by a wave of warmth and sound. Voices buzz in his ears, and laughter, and the unmistakable clink of bottles against glass. He smells cologne and wine and the freshly-chopped fruit they are slicing at the bar to put in cocktails.

  “What time do you call this?” says Michael, turning as Felix approaches. He is sitting at the counter opposite two towering drinks.

  “More like what do you call those?” The drinks at the bar are fiercely red, served in a fat glass brimming with fruit and ice.

  “Alcohol.” Grinning, Michael slides one of the drinks towards him. “Sea Breeze, I believe.”

  He sits beside Michael and takes a sip through one of several straws. The taste is sharp, though not unpleasant. He relishes the sensation of the cold liquid and the warmth of the alcohol inside it.

  “Sorry I’m late,” he says, withdrawing his mouth from the straw.

  “Your excuse, Mr. White?”

  Felix shrugs. “I was eating.”

  “The world?”

  “I was hungry,” he says, smiling.

  “Aren’t we all,” mutters Michael, scouring the crowds behind Felix. His heady aftershave fills Felix’s nose. “And thirsty, from the looks of things.”

  “What?”

  “I’d know those wine lips anywhere. You are betrayed. One glass or two? Couldn’t wait to get started, I suppose?”

  He realises that Michael is referring to the red wine he drank earlier that evening. “You’ve found me out,” he says, removing the straws from his drink and taking a large mouthful. Idly, he wonders how badly his lips are stained. He hears Michael laughing, sees his face creasing up over the rim of his glass, then the drink burns down his throat and he does not hear or see anything distinctly for the rest of the night.

  Michael’s delight echoes across the bar. Felix hears genuine laughter, the kind that bubbles up from deep within before spilling like foam into the air. There is nothing stilted about the expressions on people’s faces. Their smiles are savage, eyes sparkling, faces freed from conscious thought and consequence. All across Southampton, people are flocking to clubs and pubs to lose themselves beneath the stresses of modern life.

  “Outside.” Michael’s breath is heavy in Felix’s ear and down his neck. “Outside, I need a smoke.”

  They move from the bar, where Michael has been speaking with a woman, and onto to the smoking terrace overlooking the marina. As they step outside, the cold is bracing. Shivers slip down Felix’s spine.

  The calm takes his breath away. The blackness, too, stops him where he stands; a stretch of uninterrupted dark, which he knows to be the sea and the sky, though he cannot tell them apart. This is why they come here in the evenings, time and time again to the bar beside the sea: to drink and laugh and lose themselves in the clear breath of the ocean.

  He half listens as Michael tells him about the woman at the bar. There is a name, an age, a rough score out of ten. It is a story he has heard a hundred times before. He is listening to other things: the wind, the sea, an irregular fluttering sound overhead, which he supposes is gulls, settling into the grooves of the building to roost for the remainder of the night. Gradually his eyesight grows familiar with the darkness and he makes out other details; gradients of grey spilling through the cloud-cover, tiny flashes of light like a sea of scales, where moonlight catches the waves, and small shapes in the distance, more gulls gliding silently in the night. They drink and smoke and laugh until they can do none of these things anymore and then they leave. Arm-in-arm, one silhouette against the night, they struggle into the back of a taxi.

  The city streams past them, reduced to small lights, blurred lamps, an endless stretch of black that is the sky, beneath which buildings squat like old men with dour faces stationed by the sea. Felix sees his friend in flashes of illumination: strawberry stains down his white shirt, his eyes thin and wet with laughter, hair loose over his face where it has freed itself from the knot behind his head. In minutes, they are standing outside Felix’s block of flats. Michael pushes a crumpled note from his back-pocket into the driver’s hand. As the taxi pulls away, Felix and he stumble inside.

  The brightness of the foyer burns their eyes. For what seems like forever they try to work the lift. Michael falls asleep in one corner, his face pressing against the tarnished metal walls, before Felix abandons the lift for broken. Dragging his friend to his feet, they make the long climb up the stairwell to the top floor.

  When they reach his flat, Michael crawls from the corridor to the sofa and falls face down into the cushions. Felix waits until he can hear his friend snoring before taking himself to bed. He does not have to wait long. Stripping, he collapses into the coldness of the covers and closes his eyes.

  His rest is fitful. More than once he wakes, entangled in his duvet, as though he has been thrashing inside it. When his bed becomes too hot, he wanders into the kitchen for a glass of water. The coolness of the rest of the flat is refreshing against his slick skin.

  He fil
ls a second glass, which he leaves for Michael, on the floor beside the sofa. His friend is facing away, cur-led into his knees, clutching a leather cushion like a swimming float to his chest. He has shed his shirt, and his shoulder-blades jut sharply from the whiteness of his back above the harsh track of his spine. The thought of his face, were he to wake suddenly and find Felix stand-ing nude over him, draws quiet laughter in the dark.

  A strange sense of dissonance runs through Felix, as though the sky or the city under it is shifting. The laughter dies on his lips, leaving a hollow feeling in his chest. All of a sudden he feels ludicrous, standing here naked in the moonlight beside the oblivious form of his friend. Turning, he hurries from the room.

  Falling back into bed, he floats through the space between awareness and dreams. The sound of Michael’s deep breaths fill his ears, echoing those of the sea outside. Another noise accompanies it; soft, like a bird crooning, and he imagines the gulls again, settling into the gutters above Ocean Village. Something slightly rotten stings his nostrils.

  He has had a pleasant evening. If he is sure of nothing else, he knows this. Friday nights are always satisfying, when for a few hours each week it is possible to forget the rest of the world, drink, laugh and be content. The feeling is quite cathartic. He remembers the New Forest coven he researched for a university project; women who professed to channel the spirit of the Devil, who lived and breathed his name, while they raced naked through the trees. If it is the Devil who delights in dancing, who granted those women freedom from the strictures of their sorry lives, then he was there tonight, feet scratching out steps against the floor, tattered wings outstretched beneath his arms –

  Rolling away from the wall, he turns his face to the cold side of the pillow and finds himself staring at a silhouette in the doorway.

  For a few uncertain seconds he flaps like a newborn chick in his bed covers, before remembering that he is not alone in the flat. It is impossible to see Michael properly, but he makes out his friend’s thinness, his slender arms, the angular profile of his face in the darkness.

  “Michael?” he says, but the man is already moving away down the hallway. Sinking back into the covers, his head heavy, he wonders whether he should go after him, and with the memory of the night fresh in his mind falls into the blackness of sleep.

  Chapter Three

  The weekend passes Felix by beneath his bed covers, where he knows warmth and sleep, only vaguely aware of other things: a text message, the groan of the boiler, birds fidgeting outside the window. When he remembers that Michael spent the night on his sofa, he ventures from his bedroom but finds the rest of the flat empty. Standing in the main room, he looks out over the balcony. The evening and perhaps the drinks that helped make it have left him hollow and light-headed, as though he is not really in the room at all but a presence, viewing a moment in time.

  During one such waking moment, he reminds himself that this is what weekends are meant for. On these days the angels themselves settle like dark sentinels in their roosts, cooing soft hymns while dreaming of life, love and whatever else might haunt an angel’s sleeping thoughts. He dreams of similar things, until his alarm reminds him in its shrill way that it is Monday morning and he is due at work.

  He is conscious of eating, the feel of hot water against his skin, then clothes; soft socks, stiff shoes, the tightening of a tie around his neck. As he leaves his flat, the morning breeze blows cool against his face, and while it is not warm by any stretch of the imagination, the city does not seem as cold as it has previously. This close to the coast, they are rarely without a breeze; sea-currents stripping the air of heat as they soar inland. He wonders if this is spring struggling to emerge, carried on the blossom by the same sea-salt breeze.

  At the office, Maggie and Mr. Coleson are discussing the weather as though they have never seen the sun before, or felt rain against their faces. Michael appears at ten minutes past nine to find Mr. Coleson waiting for him. They re-enact their morning routine of reprimands and insincerity.

  “What is it today, Michael?”

  “Sorry, Mr. Coleson. Car trouble.”

  “I thought you caught the bus in the mornings?”

  “I do. The traffic was terrible.”

  “We’ve been through this before, Michael. Rush hour traffic doesn’t constitute ‘car trouble’. If the traffic means you’re going to keep on being late then you need to catch an earlier bus.”

  “Sorry, Mr. Coleson.”

  “You can’t keep being late, day-on-day.”

  “It won’t happen again.”

  Despite making good progress with his workload, Felix’s day drags on. It is the affliction of Mondays, to stretch well beyond their allotted time. On several occasions, he catches himself staring blankly at his desktop monitor, lost in the infinite pattern of the pixels, or perhaps the face staring back at him. His skin is pale, his hair thinner than he remembers it being and more scant about his temples than he has cared to admit to himself before now. His eyes look different, too. They seem stonier, the skin beneath them dark and tired. It is the face of a man with a hangover; not from drinking but from living. He considers the different lives he has lived, from his childhood in proper Crows Hill, to the dark liquor dreams of university, then working life afterwards; the sort that drained the soul until he was dried up and empty.

  When he tires of his reflection, Felix turns to the rain as it pours down the office windows, streaky and speckled against the glass. All of it stirs something inside him that he cannot place but feels strongly nonetheless. He was born in the rain. That night, his mother held him for the first time. Then she had died, and his father and he were alone. He had never known so much water before moving to the city, and yet he feels it is one of the things that drew him here; whether the sea, the sky or the mist that sometimes creeps across the waterfront in the mornings. Crows Hill is in Oxfordshire, far from the lick of the coast. The wettest he knew as a child was when the River Cherwell burst its banks.

  ***

  “To the ancient Greeks, the Sirens were figures of beauty and death. If the texts agree on anything,” said Mr. Stuart, “they agree on this. Half-bird, half woman, they inhabited various cliffs and islands along the Mediterranean from where they sang, and so haunting were their voices that passing sailors were helpless to ignore them, sailing to their doom, and the doom of their crews, their ships dashed to flotsam on the sharp island rocks. Classical texts are littered with their references.

  “Some stories show them with the bodies of birds and the faces of women. In others, they are depicted as beautiful maidens, with talons for feet and great feathered arms. While their physical forms vary, their songs always hold the same allure. No man who heard their songs could pass their islands without being drawn to them, giving rise to the term ‘siren song’, which we still use today, to describe something of great appeal but ultimate self-destruction.”

  When the bell rang for break-time and they rushed into the playground, Harriet would sometimes run from him, or seem to hide, or surround herself with other girls so that he could not go near her for fear of attracting their laughter, their eyes.

  If Harriet was his Siren then these shrieking things were the Harpies of Strophades. It was no wonder, he thought, that he had never really noticed them before. They were nothing beside Harriet, who was so different from the other girls.

  “The Sirens were wild figures. 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 while the Sirens sang, 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.

  “Whether flesh-eaters or not, it is difficult not to admire the Sirens, for they represented – like many of the Greek monsters – a force of nature, more wild and honest than anything left in the world today. They were figures of the earth and the se
a and the sky, tying these things together as they bridged life and death, revulsion and beauty. Every civilisation since has created their own deathly figures; their Valkyries, Blood Eagles, Santa Muerté, but none, I dare say, as visceral and triumphant as the Sirens, who sang because they could, and flew, and feasted on life with the birds.”

  Harriet’s whims were her own. For a week following their first meeting at the churchyard she would not sit next to Felix, nor permit him to sit beside her, when they found themselves sharing classes. He remembered hating Harriet for surrounding herself with those Harpies, then hating himself, then craving her and her voice, her company, her hand beside his. She was a wild spirit, like Mr. Stuart had said; a force of nature in Crows Hill, where everyone else was tame. For all their differences, the other girls only served to highlight Harriet. It seemed that an invisible tide emanated from her, drawing Felix closer then pushing him away. He thought it must be the way of tides, and girls, and love, though he never dared to speak such things out loud.

  ***

  He comes back to himself slowly, drawn to the office by the tapping of fingertips on keyboards, the gradual ebb of the clock on the wall and rainfall, striking the window at a slant. In the street, a gull is scavenging from a bin beside the road. The sky, just visible over the dark rooftops, shines brightly. Tarmac seems to splash as people hurry past.

  “Felix?”

  Two more gulls alight in the street, then a third, and a fourth, a squabbling mass around the bin; Mr. Stuart’s Sirens given feathered form, made real by the solidity of the city and the cold lash of rainfall on their backs.

  “Felix?”

  “Dreaming,” he manages, his breath catching in his throat, while behind his ribs something shifts uncomfortably. “Daydreaming.”

  “Reprobate. Meanwhile the rest of us are slogging away…”

  “I can see you playing Solitaire from here.”

  “I am not.”