At her husband’s insistence, she’d gone to the doctor about the changes in her back. It had been such a waste of money for so little insight that she refused to go for a follow-up appointment. They need to save what little money they have for emergencies. Besides, the throbbing and aching reminds her of how she’d felt during her two pregnancies; it’s not the pain of deterioration but of life blooming inside her. Only this time the new life her body is sustaining is her own.
She straightens up, but her back feels heavy and she’s forced to hunch over again. The school gate is in sight now, surrounded by clusters of mothers, standing around talking. There are some kind eyes, of course there are; she gets one hello, one good morning. Some eyes don’t register her at all, they rush past, preoccupied with keeping to their stressful schedule, lost in thought, making plans, trying to catch up with themselves. Those people don’t offend her. It is the others. The cluster. The tennis bags on their backs, the white skirts stretched over their plump bottoms and gym leggings, flesh squished at the seams, squeezed so tight it is trying to find a way out. That group.
One notices her. Lips barely move as she speaks. The discrimination ventriloquist. Another set of eyeballs. And then another. Some more ventriloquism, less talented this time. The whispers to each other, the stares. This is the daily reality of her picked-over life; she’s observed in everything she does. She’s not from here, she could never change that, she doesn’t want to be like them, she doesn’t want to be part of their cluster, and they distrust her for that.
She is late this morning and she is angry with herself. Not because her children will be a few minutes late, but because she is arriving during the most dangerous minutes. The mothers, having delivered their children to their classes, now mill around the gates, heads together, making plans, organizing collections, playdates, parties that her children will not be included in. She can see no way of getting to the school without walking by them, but they are a large group and the path is narrow and so she would either have to squeeze by the wall, walking single file with her children, or by the cars, brushing up against the dirty SUVs. Or through them. She could go through them. All of those things would mean drawing their attention, possibly having to talk.
She is angry with herself for hesitating, for the growing fear inside her at a small cluster of silly women. She didn’t flee from a war-torn country, leave everything and everyone she loves behind, for this. She didn’t sit on that overcrowded inflatable boat with nothing from their old lives except the clothes on their backs, while seawater sloshed at their feet threateningly, and her children trembled under her grasp. In the darkness. In silence. Hoping for the coastline to appear. To endure that and then to sit in a container, in the dark, with no air, and not enough food, the stench of their waste in a bucket in the corner, and the fear in her heart – not for the first time – that she had sealed her children’s fate, that she had dug their graves with this decision. She didn’t go through all that so that she could be stopped in her tracks by these women.
The throbbing in her back intensifies. It spreads from her lower spine all the way to her shoulders. Shooting pain, that aches but also brings a strange relief. Like contractions during labour, coming and going but building in intensity all the time, powerful waves of super strength.
As she nears the women, they stop talking and turn to her. They are blocking the path, she will have to ask them to move aside. It is childish, but it is real. The pain in her back is so intense it prevents her from speaking. She feels the blood rushing to her head, her heartbeat loud in her ears. She feels her skin straining on her back, tightening. She feels as though she will be torn open, just as when her babies were born. And it is because of this she knows that life is coming. She lifts her chin, she straightens up, she looks the women directly in the eye, not afraid, not intimidated. She feels immense power, immense freedom, something these women don’t understand – and how could they? Their freedom has never been threatened, they have no experience of how effective war is in turning men, women and children to ghosts, in turning the mind into a prison cell, and liberty to a taunting fantasy.
The skin on her back is taut now and she can feel the fabric of her black abaya stretching and stretching. Then there’s a ripping sound and she feels air on her back.
‘Mama!’ her son says, looking up at her wide-eyed. ‘What’s happening?’
Always anxious about what’s next. She delivered him to freedom but he is still in custody, she sees it in him every day. Not so much her daughter, who is younger and adapted more easily, though both will forever see all life through the gauze of truth.
The abaya rips completely and she feels a violent surge from behind, as she’s pulled upward. Her feet leave the ground with the force of it, then land again. She takes the children with her.
Her son looks fearful, her daughter giggles. The women with the tennis bags look at her in shock. Beyond them she sees a lone woman, hurrying away from the school, who stops and smiles, hands to her mouth in surprise and delight.
‘Oh, Mama!’ her little girl whispers, letting go of her hand and circling her. ‘You grew wings! Big beautiful wings!’
The woman looks over her shoulder and there they are: majestic porcelain-white feathers, over a thousand of them in each wing, she has a seven-foot wingspan. By tensing and untensing her back muscles she discovers that she can control her wings, that all this time her body was working in preparation for flight. Her primary wings are at the tips of her fingertips. Her daughter squeals with delight, her son clings to her tightly, wary of the women staring at them.
She relaxes her muscles, folds her wings closer to her body and wraps them around her children, cocooning them. She lowers her head and huddles with them – it is just the three of them, wrapped in white warm feathery delight. Her daughter giggles. She looks at her son and he smiles shyly, surrendering to this miracle. Safety. The elusive treasure.
She slowly opens her wings again, to their full grand span, and she lifts her chin in the air, feeling like an eagle on top of the highest mountain. Proud, reclaimed.
The women still block the path, too shocked to move.
The woman smiles. Her mother once told her, the only way to the end is to go through. Her mother was wrong; she can always rise above.
‘Hold on tight, my babies.’
She feels their trusting grips tighten around her hands; they cannot be torn apart.
Her wingspan is enormous.
Those little hands gripping hers are all the motivation she needs. Everything was always for them. Always has been, always will be. A better life. A happy life. A safe life. Everything they are entitled to.
She closes her eyes, breathes in, feels her power.
Taking her children with her, she lifts upwards to the sky, and she soars.
She sits on the bench in the park every weekday at lunchtime, the same bench, the same park, beside the lake. The wooden bench is cold beneath her. She curses, stands, pulls her coat down lower over her rear end and sits again, the padding protecting her a little more. She unwraps her ham-and-cheese baguette and spreads the tinfoil open over her lap. A squished tomato oozes beneath the bread, causing it to become soggy. This tips her over the edge.
‘Fucking shitty motherfucking tomato.’
She could tolerate her intolerable colleagues at work. She could tolerate the disgusting man on the bus beside her this morning who picked his nose for the entire trip and rolled his snot on the balls of his fingers as if she couldn’t see him. But the tomato. The fucking tomato is the icing on the cake. She’d only wanted cheese and ham and this unwanted addition has turned her bread to mush, leaving the cheese squished and stuck to the bread as though it’s all one gooey substance.
‘Bastard tomato,’ she grumbles, throwing the entire baguette on the ground. The ducks can have it.
Every lunch hour she visits the city park. Her office is nearby. Stocks, trading, asshole colleagues. This bench is the quietest, it is set away from everybody else. Sh
e comes here to feed the ducks and as she does she mumbles about the people who piss her off. She vents her frustrations over her fuckwit boss, her delusional colleagues, the turbulent stock markets. Feeding the ducks is her punchbag.
Most of her colleagues go to the gym on their lunch breaks, run off their issues for forty-five minutes and return to their desks cocksure and smelling of active shower gel and deodorant, and throbbing with testosterone. She prefers the fresh air, the peace, no matter what the weather. She needs to grumble and rant, and with every piece of bread she throws, a problem is eliminated and a little of the frustration ebbs away. Only, she’s not too sure it works – sometimes she finds herself getting worked up into a seething frenzy as her head fills with all the things she should have said – valid points and arguments she should have made back in the office.
She stares at the lump of soggy bread roll she has thrown on the ground. A few ducks fight over it, peck at it, but ultimately it falls well short of the all-out battle she’d thought it would spawn, which only goes to prove how unappetizing the baguette is.
‘You should have broken it up into pieces,’ a male voice interrupts her thoughts. She looks up and around with surprise. There’s nobody there.
‘Who said that?’
‘Me.’
Her eyes fall upon a mallard, standing away from the other ducks that are pecking at the bread roll, and each other.
‘Hi,’ it says. ‘I’m guessing by the look on your face that you can hear me.’
Her mouth falls open. She’s speechless.
He laughs. ‘Okay, nice talking,’ he says, then waddles off towards the lake.
‘Wait! Come back!’ She snaps out of her shock. ‘I’ll give you some bread!’
‘Nah, thanks,’ he says, but he waddles towards her. ‘You shouldn’t feed ducks bread, you know. Aside from the fact that uneaten bread causes changes to the chemical and bacteriological content of the water, which in turn increases the risks of avian disease, it’s bad nutrition. The recommended food for ducks is defrosted frozen peas, corn or oats. That kind of thing.’
She stares at him, completely lost for words.
‘Don’t be offended, it’s sweet of you, all right, but white bread is the worst, it has no nutritional value whatsoever. Ever heard of angel wing?’
She shakes her head.
‘Didn’t think so. It’s caused by an imbalance of nutrients in a duck’s diet. It causes a deformity in ducks’ wings, can hamper our flight or stop us altogether, which is, you know, crappy.’
‘Gosh, I’m so sorry. I had no idea.’
‘That’s okay.’ He studies her. He can’t help himself. ‘Mind if I sit with you?’
‘Sure.’
He flies up to the bench. ‘Work getting you down again?’
‘How did you know?’
‘You’re here every day. Fucking Colin. Fucking Peter. Fucking world markets. Fucking Slimming World. Bastard tomatoes.’
‘You hear all that?’
‘Hear it? We feel it. Every time we hear you coming, we armour up. You fire those pieces of bread at us like grenades.’
‘Sorry,’ she replies, biting her lip.
‘That’s okay. We figure it does you some good, even if it takes a duck eye out here and there.’
‘Thanks for understanding.’
‘We’re all human, after all,’ he says.
She looks at him, baffled.
‘That was a little bit of bird humour for you,’ he chuckles. ‘But seriously, everybody needs to have a place where they can let loose. Where they feel safe.’ He has a faraway look.
She studies him. ‘Do you?’
‘Yeah sure, there’s this great river region in Senegal where I go for the winter. There’s a sweet little pintail that I meet up with. We watch the sunrise and sunset, we hang out by the river. That’s my place.’
‘It sounds beautiful.’
‘It is.’
They sit together in silence.
‘How about we reverse it?’ he asks suddenly.
‘You want me to fly to Senegal? I’m not sure I’m your pintail’s type.’
The duck laughs. ‘Let’s reverse the feeding.’
She giggles. ‘Are you going to throw bread at me?’
‘In a way. A little food for thought.’
‘Okay.’
‘It’s not my place to say it, which is why I never said it before, but you seem more open to it today, being able to hear me speak and all. You seem angry. Very stressed, frustrated. I get the impression you don’t like your job very much.’
‘I like my job. And if there was nobody in the office, I’d love my job.’
‘Hey, look, who are you talking to? If I was the only duck in this pond, life would be much easier, let me tell you, but I pass the time watching people and I’ve noticed you. You’re not very good with people.’
‘Or ducks, by the sounds of it,’ she says, trying not to take offence. She’d always thought she was a good people person. She stayed out of everybody’s way, never asked questions, never got into conflict with anyone …
‘You’ll be better with ducks after this. As for the people: you should tell Colin he needs to trust your instincts. Tell him you were right about the Damon Holmes account. The account taking that turn for the worse had nothing to do with you and everything to do with the earthquake in Japan.’
She nods.
‘Tell Paul to stop interrupting you in meetings. Tell Jonathan you don’t enjoy the dirty emails, that donkeys don’t do it for you. Tell Christine in Slimming World that you’d appreciate it if she stopped telling people your husband was her first boyfriend. She may have taken his virginity but you took his heart. And tell your husband you don’t like tomatoes; he’s adding them to the baguette because he senses you’re stressed. It’s his way of making things more special for you. He doesn’t know that your bread is soggy by lunchtime, or how much the sogginess bothers you.’
The woman nods, taking it all in.
‘Stop hiding here and making things worse. Deal with it head-on. Calmly. Stand up for yourself. Talk to people. Be an adult. Then come here and just enjoy feeding the ducks.’
She smiles. ‘Oats, corn and peas.’
‘That’ll do just fine.’
‘Thank you, duck. Thank you for the advice.’
‘Sure,’ he says, flying down from the bench to the ground and waddling into the lake. ‘Good luck,’ he adds, swimming to the centre and narrowly avoiding the piece of bread that flies from another direction, towards his head.
The woman stands, feels dizzy, and quickly sits down again. Something the duck said hit a nerve.
Stop hiding. Talk to people.
She’s heard those words before, but not in a long time. As a child the words seemed to pass everybody’s lips; from her mother at children’s parties, from her father when he took her anywhere, from teachers, from every adult whose path she crossed until she made it her intention at a very young age not to cross people’s paths. After that, the only time she’d heard the words as an adult was from her then-boyfriend, soon to be her ex-boyfriend, though his exact words had been, Stop hiding. Talk to me.
She had always been a hider and she never wanted to talk. As a child she was afraid to speak up because she knew she wasn’t allowed to tell them the things that she wanted to say. They wanted her to be normal and act normal, but nothing really was normal, and she couldn’t tell them that. If she couldn’t say what was real then there was nothing else to say, and avoidance became the name of the game. There was only one person who had ever truly understood her, never uttering those words, even in her childhood. Her eyes filled up at the thought of him: Granddad.
Her parents’ marriage had been a volatile one. She was an only child and whenever things fired up at home, her granddad would come to collect her and they’d go for a drive. They’d have chats, little ones, innocent ones. She felt safe in his company because she was safe in his company. She loved the smell of his wooll
en cardigans, and the way he removed his full set of teeth and chattered them in her face to make her laugh. She loved the feel of his fat wrinkled hands when her small hand got lost in his grip, and the smell of pipe smoke from his wax jacket. She loved being away from her house, even more being taken away. She always felt that he was rescuing her, showing up at the right time as if by magic. Only now did it occur to her that most likely he came because her mother had summoned him; a surprising revelation to have after so many years of viewing the same events with the same pair of eyes.
When she was with Granddad, he’d helped her to forget the things she was afraid of. It wasn’t so much that he didn’t shine a light on the darkened corners of her mind, more a case of making her forget such a thing as darkness existed.
He didn’t push her to explain anything. He already knew. He didn’t tell her to stop hiding because he helped her escape, and that escape in childhood had become her hiding place as an adult.
He used to take her to feed the ducks.
When the yelling started, and the banging, the insults and the tears, he would arrive, she’d hear the honk of his car horn, and she would run down the stairs and out the door, holding her breath like a soldier racing from a battlefield, ducking grenades, never looking back. She would hop into the car and there would be peace. Silence in her surroundings and in her mind.
They’d feed the ducks together and he’d make her feel safe.
He sounded very much like the duck she’d spoken with.
So now she sits on the bench in the park by the lake, stunned, remembering him, smelling him, hearing him, feeling him all over again. She cries through her smile, and smiles through her tears, and then, feeling lighter, she stands and walks back to her office.
She noticed the mark on her skin on her first day back at work after nine months’ maternity leave. It had been a stressful morning. She had packed and repacked her work tote the previous night like an anxious child before her first day of school, and still, despite the endless planning, the thinking and rethinking, the freshly puréed food in pots packed away in the freezer and one in the fridge for the next day, the lunches prepared, schoolbags ready, diaper bag packed, changes of clothes in case of after-school sports grass stains, potty-training failures and explosive diarrhoea due to new formula, the school uniform washed and ironed, afterschool tracksuit ready for activities – still, after all that organization, the constant run-throughs of what-if scenarios, they ended up late.
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