Featherbones Read online

  “It’s a graveyard without the graves,” she says. “You can sense what has happened there, even without headstones to inform you who died and when.”

  “I didn’t think anyone else noticed these things.”

  “I don’t think many people do.”

  In the last room, among the cabinets and artefacts, Felix catches sight of a familiar face, staring back at him from a photograph across the room.

  “The angel,” he says, drawn immediately to the display. Newspaper cut-outs date back to the first unveiling of the statue in 1914, and faded photographs from the same day, and a dozen clearer images, taken more recently. The weight of the angel’s significance hangs over him.

  “Nike,” states Angela.

  “Sorry?”

  “It’s not an angel. It’s Nike, the Greek goddess of Victory, blessing the engineers for remaining at their posts while the ship sank.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “It’s an easy mistake to make. If you see her as an angel, then that’s what matters. She’s kind of a classical antecedent of the angel anyway.”

  Choosing one of the clearer documents, detailing the script on the memorial plaque, Angela begins to read aloud. Together their fingers follow the lines of text through the glass.

  GREATER LOVE HATH NO MAN THAN

  THIS. THAT A MAN LAY DOWN HIS

  LIFE FOR HIS FRIENDS

  ST. JOHN 15TH CH. 13TH V

  TO THE MEMORY OF THE ENGINEER OFFICERS

  OF THE R.M.S "TITANIC" WHO SHOWED

  THEIR HIGH CONCEPTION OF DUTY AND THEIR

  HEROISM BY REMAINING AT THEIR POSTS

  15TH APRIL 1912.

  Angela’s finger catches up with his on the glass. For a second they touch, shivers trickling like cold water down his neck. Then she withdraws her hand, and he smiles, and they wander slowly back through the gallery.

  “Well, that was emotional.”

  “Sorry,” he says. “I’m not very good at this.”

  “The reading. It’s an emotional inscription.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “I’m sure the words don’t do it justice. I can’t imagine how frightened they must have been. Not just the engineers, but everyone. Watching the water rise around them like that.”

  He dares to think he understands. Not the Titanic specifically, but the nature of the fear Angela describes; to have the world spin around you, to see the fear of life and death in a person’s eyes, to watch water and sky become one vast fabric, a fine skin against which presses human distress, lively with flailing arms and kicking legs and icy breath –

  “Some of them saw Death,” she says, as they pass back through the first room. “They really believed they saw him, you know, floating beside them in the sea.”

  “Fear makes people see strange things.”

  The faces in the photographs watch them as they return through the gallery. They pass the young man again, and the small girl with her bear, and the dozens of others staring but not seeing from their mounts on the walls. Spotlights guide them towards the exit.

  “For the record, Felix, you are good at this.”

  “There was a flood,” he reveals, “when I was a child. I was there, in the middle of it. I suppose it’s given me some insight –”

  “Not this,” she interrupts, nodding towards one of the photographs. “This. I’m really enjoying myself.”

  He glances from the picture frame down to his hand, where her fingers have found his again. Silence floods the museum. Then, despite himself, he looks back to the image on the wall. For a moment he isn’t sure what he is seeing. When he can’t quite believe what his eyes are showing him, he takes an uncertain step closer. Angela’s hand slips from his as coldness descends the small discs of his spine.

  “Felix?”

  It is the photograph of the five boys in the flat caps. The boys are smiling, but their faces are changed. Loose flesh hangs from beneath their chins. Black eyes stare madly into his from above beak-mouths, their features brought to life in limp wattle and old bone.

  “Felix, what is it?”

  Stepping back from the photograph, he hears the shrieks of the boys as they flock from the playing fields. He feels the compressing blackness of the locker room, as though he is there again, alone in the darkness. The room brims with the smell of brine, and with a nauseating lurch he finally recognises what it is that has been haunting him.

  “I have to leave.”

  “What is it? What’s the matter?”

  Beside the photograph of the boys, the skinny figure of the girl with the bear studies him with bulbous eyes the colour of bruised fruit. Downy feathers emerge like fur down her thin arms. On the next wall, an elderly woman screams from behind talon-hands, gums pink where they are visible between black lips. The man with the striking features withers before Felix’s eyes, wasting away to feathers and bone, staring at him with a face that seems to smile.

  “Felix, what’s happened?”

  “I have to go.”

  He turns from the paintings to Angela, catching sight of the pale face at her shoulder as he does so. He barely glimpses it before it is gone again, but it is long enough to recognise the scrawny figure standing behind her, its expression pained, wide mouth gaping beside her ear.

  “Felix?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Running from the museum, he might be twelve again; a small boy fleeing from a town he did not recognise, from a life he did not understand. It is many years since he dreamed of the bird-boys. Not since leaving Crows Hill has he given them a thought. Dr. Moore was supposed to have made him safe from them, but it is clear now that they have survived with him, in some shape and form.

  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.

  At some point across the city, he does not know when for sure, the crescendo of sound breaks, or perhaps it is he that breaks under the sound, unable to listen a second longer. Perhaps he wonders, he broke a long time ago, and has been cracking ever since; the real rupturing like an eggshell, now broken around him, sticky and wet with albumen. He hears only white noise now. It might be a high-pitched ringing in his ears, or one long, avian scream.

  Halfway down East Street, he slips down an alley to catch his breath. The alleyway is narrow, his world spinning, and his speed carries him into a plastic waste disposal bin. The tall black bin rocks on its wheels before finally losing balance and toppling over. He stumbles away from it into the wall as rubbish scatters across the ground.

  At first it is impossible to tell what it is that spills from the bin. He recognises organs, orifices and glittering shells, like a rash of coral across the ground. He imagines he sees shellfish among the stew, and sticky, feathered shapes. Filled with a fascinated revulsion, he studies the floundering forms and the bin from which they spill, which seems to contain no bottom, no base, only a deep, singular blackness.

  There are bones in the debris; some bare, others with strips of pale meat still gripping them, and things that are more skin than bone, with eyes and yawning mouths, all of them carried in a grey liquid, which ebbs across the street into the gutter. Last to leave the mouth of the bin is a malformed shape, pulling itself into the alley. It flops pitifully onto the pavement, arms flapping weakly in the air as it seeks to right itself.

  Goosebumps prick his skin, his ears and nose numb. His arms shiver by his sides as the oceanic slime laps at his shoes. He can feel it on his skin and under it; a deep blanket that could swallow him up and save him from the rest of the world, if he would only let it. The water is a part of him, from the moment he was born, screaming, into the flood of ’88, to the night it took Harriet from the arms of the angels, to here, now, in this city that was built by the sea and has endured, through bombs and blood and human madness. Michael’s words come back to him through the soft slaps of the waves again
st the docks.

  “It’s this world, this life. It nurtures dreams, like a force of nature.”

  ***

  “Let me tell you about dreams, Felix,” said Dr. Moore one morning, when he came to Felix’s room after breakfast. With his father’s permission, Felix had spent the night in the great house where the doctor lived and worked, so that his sleeping patterns could be studied. Like the rest of the house, the bedroom was musty, filled with still air. The wallpaper might have been white once but had become an off-beige, whether from age or some other internal ailment he couldn’t tell. Pastel curtains complemented the blandness, between which sat a vase of tired-looking roses. It was a bright morning; Dr. Moore’s old, round face illuminated in the light by the window.

  “I would really like to go home now, please.”

  “Soon, Felix.”

  “How soon is soon?”

  “As soon as you’re feeling better. Your father is worried about you.”

  “I don’t want him to be worried. I’m fine. I told him I was strong.”

  “You’re very strong. I can tell. But sometimes even strong people need help. That is where I come in. Tell me, now, have you ever seen the sea?”

  “No.” He shook his head.

  “Never?”

  “Father used to say he would take me, one day.”

  “Well, isn’t that something? I grew up beside it. A small town, on top of white cliffs. It wasn’t warm, not like it sometimes gets here in the summer, but on bright days, when the wind allowed, I would occasionally walk the cliff-tops with my mother. I can still remember the coldness of the air in my face. The sounds of the water as it heaved its bulk over and over against the rocks. And the waves… You will never see anything so humbling as the sea, Felix.”

  “I’ve read about it. In school.”

  “Good, good. Imagine for me a sea, then. A vast body of water, so great that no shores are visible, only the deep, singular blue of the water and the sky. Sometimes this blue is calm, a stretch of sea undisturbed by wind or rain or anything at all, except small waves, which leap and shiver with life. When a person sleeps, he floats through this sea and the waves form 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.

  “A calm sea goes forgotten, the dreamer unknowing. He wakes with only the vaguest memories; of faces, or pale shapes seen in the water, at which he shakes his head and rubs his eyes and yawns these lingering things into oblivion.”

  At first Felix didn’t understand what Dr. Moore was talking about. Then he realised he had no reason to doubt this man, who was both a professional and his father’s friend. He was reminded of Odysseus, drifting peacefully to distant ports surrounded by the gentle slap of water and the sun. He shared this comparison.

  “Yes, you are quite right. I remember his travels well, from my own studies as a boy. But just as Odysseus sailed on still seas, Felix, he also encountered waves that were fierce. Winds battered his sails and monsters from the deep rose to snap at ship and men alike.

  “This was his Odyssey, and like his Odyssey, there are dreams that are not safe. These dreams are terrifying things, dragging darkness with them, and the cold. The shapes that form in these waters rise from cities of sunken spires to devour the dreamer whole. They are dreams of the self, and of other things as old as man, and older still. They steal the very breath from the dreamer’s lungs until he sinks into the blackness beneath them, small and alone in an ocean of fear, never waking, never fighting, until he really does wake, sometimes shouting, or thrashing in his covers, and finds his daytime thoughts turned dark and rotten. Such dreams change people. Over time they twist them, altering them in ways they do not even realise. That is why it is important we address your dreams, so that they do not take you over, and you remain Felix.”

  ***

  He does not know why the bird-figure is reappearing now. He imagines it growing with him, limbs lengthening, back breaking, feathers sprouting from beneath its tattered arms even as he himself grew into adulthood; a twisted symbiote, a fowl host, feeding on his fears as it had once fed on those of a frightened boy.

  His eyes scrunch shut. He listens to his pulse, thumping in his ears. Coldness from the brick wall seeps into his palms, and when he opens his eyes again there is only the alleyway, like a deep-sea chasm beneath a sliver of light, which could be the sky or the sea. Struggling for breath, he sinks against his frame, and considers again the simplicity of slipping, sleeping, into this light and not waking.

  Chapter Sixteen

  It is over a year since Felix has visited Michael’s house but his feet still remember the way. He used to come here often, when Michael first moved into the property. After graduating he was surprised to find himself unaccustomed to independence. University was preparation for life, they said, except there were no lectures on living, nothing to tell him how or why he should go on, or hint at where he might end up.

  He passes a garden, in which a dog, chained to a post, cries like a hungry gull, then he is standing outside a house. He stares up at the building, with its drawn curtains, its crumbling brick and overgrown garden, a residential reflection of more than just Miserly Road, before lifting the latch on the gate and walking up to the porch. The door is black, in keeping with everything else he has seen of the street, and the night sky above it.

  As he presses his finger to the bell, a weight of relief washes through him. He has never been happier to see Michael’s house, or the silhouette of his friend, visible through the foggy glass in the front door.

  The kitchen is a bright, modern place, clean-cut with sharp corners. Felix finds himself on a tall, metal stool, slumped over a bowl of cereal. His spoon dips in and out of the milk while Michael finds them each a beer. The floating wheat flakes form a misshapen face, smiling up at him from the table.

  “One for you,” says Michael, his head emerging from the fridge, “and one for me.”

  Felix pushes the grinning cereal to one side and takes the bottle presented to him. The brown glass feels cold, and wet with condensation. He takes a sip, swallows, then sobs into his hand.

  “I’m going mad.”

  “You’re not going mad.”

  “The world, then. The world is going mad, and I’m the only one who seems to see it. I felt fine, this week. After visiting the statue, I felt better. But I’m not.”

  Michael stares at him a moment longer, then takes a brisk swig of his beer. Pulling up a second stool, he positions himself next to Felix. His aftershave fills Felix’s face; a familiar smell from a hundred taxi rides after a hundred evenings spent beside the sea. The scent settles comfortably in his nose.

  “Do you remember that night in East Park, after Rachel had broken up with me?”

  Felix recalls the night well. It was almost dawn when Michael and he had found themselves by the docks. They had wandered the city for hours. Their path had taken them from their student house in Portswood, through London Road into Southampton proper. It was one of the first times Felix had walked the night-time city sober.

  They remained by the sea for almost an hour that night, talking, and listening to the supple slaps of the waves, before retracing their steps through the city. It was then, as they sought to avoid the clubs and pubs turning out for the night, that they found themselves in East Park. The street lights still persisted, poking their heads through the tree-tops, but it was quieter there, more peaceful behind the branches. At the time, that seemed important.

  “Yes,” Felix says, staring back at Michael beside him in the kitchen. “I remember.”

  “Rachel Lowe. She meant a lot to me, that one, and when she left, she took more than she knew with her.”

  “What did she take?”

  “I’m not sure exactly, but it was something important. She was everything, and then she was nothing, but I was still here. Left behind. That’s what it means to be mad. To be stripped of meaning, stripped so bare yo
u feel like the skin’s been torn from your back and you’re just bones. Bare bones and nerves, stuck out in the cold, where it stings, it burns like nothing you’ve felt before.”

  Michael’s words wash through him as another sob bubbles up from his chest. He feels giddy; light-headed with relief. “You understand.”

  “Of course I understand. And do you know why I wasn’t lost completely, wandering through the city that night? Because you were there. We sat by that memorial and we talked, about everything except Rachel, and you showed me that life went on without her. I don’t think you meant to, but you did. You were there beside me in the dark, Felix, so no matter how lost you feel, or how mad the world gets, or how dark, I’ll always be here too.”

  His eyes are burning, the kitchen swimming out of focus around him. He drinks until his bottle of beer is empty and then he goes to sleep. Michael makes him a bed on the sofa.

  “I’m in the next room if you need anything,” he seems to say, as Felix fades from wakefulness into what follows after. Michael’s smiling face blurs above him. “Stay as long as you need. I’ll square everything with work. Now try to sleep.”

  He spends the rest of the week at Miserly Road. In the mornings he tidies the house, and occasionally walks to the nearby shops in Woolston. The suburb is quieter than the Southampton he is familiar with, more distant, but still recognisable as part of the city in a strange, peripheral way. As he walks through its streets, he notices a kind of decay across the houses and gardens, the sort that is associated with all things marginal. The houses seem too tall, or squat, while others belong to a war-time city, or look even older. He studies crumbling wooden beams, walls flecked with smatterings of stones, and windows that seem to stare back at him; glassy sockets watching helplessly as the outside world passes them by. He wonders if he looks so different himself.

  It is both true and it is not. There are similarities between him and these ghost houses, yes; namely the sense of infringement he feels, lingering inside him. He expects that he will always feel this. He has stared too long into the abyss, filled with its shifting blackness and the distant flutter of wing beats. There is no coming back from such contemplation.