Featherbones Read online

  “You really don’t remember them, do you?”

  At the sound of Michael’s voice, he turns back to the table. Michael is watching him over his pint.

  “Remember who?”

  “The band.”

  “Should I?”

  “December of our first year. We caught a train to Manchester. It was cold. The carriage was filthy. There was a woman with the drinks trolley. A pretty thing, really, looking back. Big eyes, foxy face –”

  “She obviously made an impression.”

  Michael stares at him a second longer, then turns his eyes to the firelight. Felix can see the flames dancing in his whites.

  “Outside was dark from about four o’clock. We were the only two in the carriage. It reminded me of the Tube, back home, going from borough to borough to see friends, eat out, hit pubs. I always hated the Underground.”

  “We were drunk on those cheap Polish beers.”

  “Yes! Too drunk for trains. We plugged in to my mp3, an earpiece each, stuck some music on to pass the time. You fell asleep almost straight away, but I made it through the whole album.”

  Realisation dawns on Felix, and when he turns back to the band he sees them with new eyes, or old eyes that remember what has been. They looked different back then, of course. They have aged. But it is them.

  “Featherbones,” he breathes. “We followed them up there.”

  “They were playing in the city, just for December. We used up the last of our student loan getting there and back. The next night we watched them play live. A pub, just like this one. I suppose they’re all the same, really, when it comes down to it. It was a good weekend.”

  “I’d forgotten. The band, I mean. The sound.” He struggles for the right word to express himself. It isn’t just the band he had forgotten, or their particular music, but the way they made him feel and what they stood for.

  “I thought hearing them again might help to take your mind off things.”

  “I think you can take credit for that.”

  In the corner, a man steps up to the microphone and begins to sing. His voice is sensitive but strong, its softness complementing the confident tone. It washes over Felix and through him, seeming to ache behind his ribs. Around him the shadows melt in the firelight. Darkness runs like oil from the four corners of the room, inside which people swim; pale arms, slender legs, white faces filled with whiter smiles behind which shine the black hollows of mouths wide with simple pleasure.

  For almost a minute the man sings alone before the assembly, although it seems much longer to Felix. Then he is joined by a guitar and the voice of the woman on his right, and the sharp cry of a violin, played by an older man with closed eyes and a slight smile. They sing and play together, making music that melts the dark, stoking the flames in hearth and hearts until the room seems to burn; a conflagration of good times relived, revived by two friends with laughter on their lips.

  When the set finishes at closing time, Felix and Michael are among the last to leave the pub. The walk back into the city is long. They find themselves wandering the streets, but the night is not so quick to leave them behind. Shadows flutter in the corners of Felix’s eyes. Michael’s laughter fills his ears, mingling with memories of the music, still audible in the quiet. They seem to glide through the cold air.

  “Come on, you!”

  “Hurry up!”

  “Time waits for no man!”

  He follows Michael as far as the Itchen Bridge before abandoning his friend in favour of bed. He is exhausted and Michael is not far from his own house. As Felix walks away from the bridge, he feels something inside him other than laughter or the music that still plays back in his head; about eight pints sloshing in his stomach. He waits until Michael is out of sight before rushing to the side of the bridge. Rough sounds of sickness echo in the night. He tastes bitter blackness, and relief.

  The river beneath him is a ragged thing. It shivers and crashes against the urban sprawl, for no reason in particular save that it is a river, and that is what it does. He remembers another river, no less temperamental. Most years it barely reached its banks, except once, the night he was born screaming into the rain, and again, when it returned to take his friend.

  ***

  “The Romans,” said Mr. Stuart, from the front of the classroom, “called the river ‘tamesis’, adopted from its old Celtic name, which was ‘tamesas’, or ‘dark’.”

  “Dark, sir?”

  “An apt name, don’t you think?” he said, moving to change a slide on the overhead projector. The light from the machine threw a long silhouette against the screen behind him. The room wavered with shadows.

  “Rivers aren’t dark, sir.”

  “They’re blue.”

  “No, they’re green! I’ve looked myself!”

  “Yes, George, yes!” said Mr. Stuart, gesticulating widely. “They are green and blue and a hundred other hues besides. We know about light and refraction and the transparent properties of water nowadays but to the Romans it was a mysterious thing. Water was life and death. They revered it and washed in it and worshipped it as a god, a secret-keeper, a source of worldly truth. I think,” he said, his glasses flashing as they caught the light, “we can call the river dark.”

  ***

  When he is sure his stomach is empty, he makes the rest of the way home through the streets. He should be feeling content, happy, exalted even. Instead he feels strangely hollow, as though at any moment he could throw himself from the bridge and be with the clouds in the night sky. He doubts he will be able to recall much of the evening in the morning but that doesn’t seem to matter. In this moment, nothing matters. His blood singing, he wanders through the night.

  Chapter Eight

  A new day struggles to dawn through the hazy fugue that inevitably follows a night spent celebrating life. Felix imagines himself sitting statue-like at his office desk while Friday speeds around him. Maggie’s crimson nails turn her hands into blurs of bloodied fists at her keyboard. When she flits back and forth between her files and the photocopier, she becomes a vague, ghostly shape. The antique machine flickers with near constant use like a strobe light in the corner of the room.

  Outside, London Road is much the same. Bodies whir past the window, pulled by an invisible current, except for one figure, stationary outside the office window. Rain reduces the onlooker to a streaky silhouette. Felix’s first thought is that it is Michael, recognisable by his lean shape and long black coat, except he knows that is not right. His friend is still sitting hunched at his desk, where Mr. Coleson left him that morning. Perhaps it is Sam, come to find him at work, or another of the many homeless who wander London Road. His arm moves slowly from his coat to his side, and Felix realises he is feeding the birds.

  He glances away, and when he turns back to the window there is only the silver sky, the dark street and the stark whiteness of the swarming birds. The sky flashes where clouds occasionally slide before the sun. Shadows spill like ink stains across the road before seeming to vanish like so much water down the drains. Sitting in the easy suspension of his swivel-chair, Felix wonders when it was that everything started to slip away.

  Once there had been a clear distinction between dreams and reality. Physically he was bound to Crows Hill, but dreams offered him something else; a place where he could run and shout and fly. Even when they turned to Harriet, slipping into the dark, swallowed by the black flood waters, it was all right because she had meant a lot to him and he was ‘dealing with her death’. Dreams, he learned, were not always happy things, but they were honest, and he would rather be upset and alive than indifferent, and not care at all.

  The rain stops just before lunch time. Felix and Michael buy sandwiches from the supermarket and eat together on the wall beside East Park. The wall is wet; the park behind reduced to glistening undergrowth filled with slick leaves and trees crocheted with bright cobwebs. Michael’s coat keeps the worst of the damp from their trousers.

  They eat in comfo
rtable silence. The street is surprisingly peaceful for a Friday, footfall no doubt driven away by the turn in the weather. Still, Felix finds it difficult to relax. Normally he would cherish rare moments such as this; the city softened, quiet, shining with water and light. Even the traffic seems regulated, as buses make their rounds at the stop across the road. Shivering inside his shirt, he casts a quick eye over his shoulder. Pigeons wander under the trees, and at the feet of the memorial statue. Otherwise, the park is empty.

  It is easy to think that he has only recently started dreaming again; that something here, now, has begun opening his eyes. He sees the city more clearly than he has ever seen it before, and yet it is also murkier, as though the sharpness of his clarity is cutting into the streets, opening wounds that bleed like black clouds of sediment in the sea.

  There were many dreams when Harriet drowned. He cannot remember them all but he remembers the pain, as though he too had drowned that night, and continued to drown ever since, sinking deeper and deeper beneath the black surface of the world, where everything is dark and muted, and he is alone.

  When he gets home from work, he heats some dinner in the oven and tidies the flat. Depositing half of the ready meal onto a plate, he takes himself onto the balcony to eat. Steam pours from the pile of hot food into the cold air. Like the waves below him, he shivers. Still, he lingers outside, where he feels the teeth of the wind and the screams of the birds that it carries.

  After dinner, a part of him wants nothing more than to curl up in bed, safe beneath his covers, and sleep. He contemplates calling Michael, before deciding that’s out of the question. Helen will have arrived by now. The two of them might be eating. More likely she is filling up on wine while Michael wrestles with their main course in the kitchen. Felix imagines dimmed lights, dark eyes and the floral scent of a sweet white, underneath which blooms the acrid tang of burning from the next room. Throwing on a jacket, Felix ventures into the city.

  He doesn’t think about where he’s going. There is no direction to his mind, let alone his feet, so he is unsurprised when they retrace the walk they make to work and back each day. He makes it as far as East Park before veering from the street. Sam is sprawled out beneath the memorial. He looks up as Felix approaches, breaking into an eager smile.

  “Felix.”

  “I thought I might find you here.”

  Sam stares back at the memorial. “I’m still waiting.”

  “Fancy a coffee? I could use a pick-me-up.”

  He doesn’t need to ask Sam twice. Gathering his loose coat about himself, the man struggles to his feet and they walk briskly in the direction of the café. They are sitting across from each other over their drinks before Felix begins to feel more like himself again. This late into the evening, they are alone. He clutches the cup close while blowing gently on the surface. The heat from the coffee warms his hands. “Still swimming?”

  Sam mirrors Felix’s pose around the drink. “Swimming?”

  “Keeping your head above the water.”

  “Oh, yes. Quite the swimmer, me.”

  The waitress appears with a bacon roll, announced by the aroma of hot fat and a kitchen timer from somewhere behind the counter. Sam eats slowly but with obvious pleasure, savouring the meal with his eyes as much as his mouth.

  “I looked for you earlier.”

  “I was up by Itchen this morning.” Sam tugs a napkin from a dispenser on the table beside theirs, wiping carefully around his lips before continuing. “Then the service, at Holy Waters, when it started to rain.”

  “What’s Holy Waters?”

  “The church, over by Old Town. I go there quite a lot, nowadays. Stopped by once, last winter. I only went inside to keep warm but I got talking with the vicar. A couple of others go too. I was never much of a church-goer before, but they’re a good bunch.”

  “That’s good, Sam. Really.”

  “It is. There’s a spread sometimes, and the vicar tells us about Jesus Christ and the angels. He says we’re his flock.”

  “Of birds?”

  The man shakes with quiet laughter, his face vanishing behind his small hands. “I mean His flock. He looks after us when it gets too much. It does get too much sometimes.”

  His laughter trails off but his hands do not move from his face. They sit like this for several minutes while an indifferent dusk fades across a city stirring with artificial light. In the alley outside the café, a deluge of shadows floods the wall, then drains away beneath glow of street lamps, scattering headlights and the light from wakening apartment blocks. Eventually Sam’s hands return to his saucer. His fingers, at least, do not look as pale as when they left the park.

  “He sounds like a good man, this vicar. Everyone needs someone like that.”

  “You know, I never used to think so. Not before. I didn’t need any of that back then. Who goes in for God when you’re on top? But now it’s different.”

  “How?”

  “He helps. It helps, to have someone to talk to, to listen.”

  “We’re talking, aren’t we?”

  “Yes! But sometimes I have questions that I can’t ask out loud. If you say something out loud, then that makes it real, doesn’t it?”

  “I think so.”

  “Well, He knows everything already. He’s always listening. I don’t go in for any of the biblical talk, except for what the vicar sometimes asks us to read, but it helps to know He’s there. Him and His angels, beside me in the cold and in the rain.”

  It is a pleasant notion. Felix can’t deny the appeal of an all-knowing, all-loving God, the belief that He is nearby, watching, caring. But he can’t buy into it. When Harriet drowned, He was not there. She died in His garden, surrounded by the angels, and they did nothing. He did nothing. Either He is not there, and they are alone, or worse still He does not care at all. Felix sips at his coffee, and studies its sheer black surface, and says nothing.

  Sam seems different this evening. When their cups are empty they order a second drink, but the caffeine doesn’t touch him. He remains calm, clear-eyed, as though he has resigned himself to something that has been weighing over him, and is at peace.

  When they are full of coffee they walk back together to East Park. Like a painting left too long in the rain, the city grows sodden, seeming to melt around them. Streets spill into the pavements that once marked them, forming endless rivers of dark grey. Buildings blur beneath the skyline, which seems to sag, then sinks beneath the sheer weight of water pressing down on it.

  Walking past rows of shop-fronts, Felix sees the mobile phone stand; its devices crawling with long crustacean limbs. In the windows of clothes shops, mannequins flounder desperately behind the glass. Plastic fingers press against their prison as they drown in retail depths, heads turning to follow Felix as he passes. Even gaudy banners appear distorted, drained of their colour, like a soluble dye, bleeding into a wash, or a fresh wound under water. He keeps walking until they reach the park.

  “Will you be okay from here?”

  Sam is not listening, staring instead into the darkness over Felix’s shoulder. Half-turning, Felix follows his gaze. East Park stares back at him, a stretch of blackness that is trees and bushes and the memorial.

  The angel does not look quite the same in the darkness. She seems smaller than he remembers, thinner. He cannot make out her face but he feels her eyes on him, staring with the blind intensity of statues. Her skin is black in the moonlight but weathered, warped by the very city that has done the same to him. Her pride seems diminished, defiance drowned beneath the anonymity of night and he wonders if this is her natural state now; if all things wither and die when they are forgotten by the world. A gull has settled on one outstretched arm. The vastness of the white bird looks obscene against her slender elegance.

  “Thank you,” says Sam suddenly.

  “What for?”

  “For listening. There’s not many who listen, who notice me. If they do, it’s to cross the street, or look the other way as th
ey walk past.”

  “Of course. Are you all right?”

  The breeze rushes through the park behind them. Felix can hear it against the leaves, sighing like invisible surf as it breaks against branches and trees. The sounds of the city well back in its wake but they are muffled, made distant as though he is hearing them through water. A car pulls past, followed by the frantic flutter of wings. He turns back to the park but can see nothing except the trees.

  “I think you know, Felix. I think you know what it feels like, maybe, to be invisible. People avoid anyone who’s different, like it’s catching, as though by speaking to the sick or the weak they might grow weak or sick too.”

  “I’m not different.”

  Fingers that have not known proper warmth for a long time reach out, closing around Felix’s wrist. They tremble wildly. “I’m all right. I just needed to say thank you.”

  “What’s brought this on, Sam?”

  “They love the rain. The water. They sing of it. I’m waiting. Beautiful voices. I’m waiting.”

  “You’re not making sense.”

  Releasing his hold on Felix’s wrist, Sam sinks his knees by the road. He throws his open palms into the air in a parody of worship, and Felix notices for the first time how black they are, how truly filthy he is. “I’ve waited,” he says, “I’ve waited with you. Let me sing. Please, let me fly. Let me live!”

  It occurs to Felix that Sam is no longer speaking to him. When Sam does not stop trembling, Felix walks forward and holds him. Unable to look down at the man by his feet, he stands stiffly, and bites his lip, and stares skyward. From its perch on the angel’s arm, the gull turns and stares down at him with the same child’s face Felix saw at his window. Incapable of moving, he clings to Sam, while the child’s small mouth opens and it cries for them under the vast starry sky.

  The initial awkwardness of their embrace gradually lessens. Discomfort slides into something else, almost a quiet relief, and only when he hears other people approaching do they break suddenly apart, and he realises just how tightly he had been grasping the man at his waist.