Gathering Evidence

by Martin MacInnes

  He walked back to the cottage, forming a list of everything he needed to do. He phoned the agent; when he explained what had happened she immediately told him she would pick him up and bring him to the site. He was in luck: building had resumed that morning.

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  He set Dorothy in her cradle on the table and she watched him preparing the evening meal, always at least double the quantity he and Shel would eat so they could store the remainder and heat it for lunch the next day. He avoided spices and anything with seeds, easily lost on the floor or on counter and table surfaces, hidden under appliances. He imagined Dorothy getting pepper seeds in her mouth, a sudden inflammation and the sensation, inside her, of burning. He changed her, fed her, lay her on the mat – she twirled her limbs like a turned beetle – and fixed the mobile into position above her, a fabric arch with pictures of birds and with a lever she could reach that had a rattle, three sound effect buttons and a small mirror.

  Shel returned from the university not long after six. She crept into the house so quietly he didn’t hear. He was surprised how suddenly the end of the day had come and resolved to plan things better the following day, to get a better measure of time, to be more productive. She inched forward and kissed Dorothy’s forehead. She teased him about the excessive heat – he always had the house warm – and asked how long she’d been sleeping. While she heated the food he lay down for fifteen minutes, and after they’d eaten she bathed Dorothy and he tried to stay awake, looking blankly at news sites and reading over his code.

  ‘You remember Mum’s coming tomorrow? John? Around ten.’

  He focused on the screen. He had forgotten. ‘How long will she be?’

  She tilted her head. ‘She wants to re-pot the plants. It will give you a bit of time away. I thought you’d be pleased.’

  *

  The smell of garlic spread through the house. Catherine repeated they’d get used to it; he could hear her three rooms away. Four terracotta pots lined the sill in the kitchen for the southern light. Perfect, she said, for growing green garlic and bulbs too. The cold bright skies gave them the six hours they’d need each day. ‘Just remember,’ she said, ‘and be careful washing so you don’t get suds in the pots – the chemicals kill them.’ Catherine came with fertiliser twice a month, tending to the green shoots, the first of which had come in in under a week, and to the cloves, bedded at a safe distance inches into the soil. ‘These will take longer,’ she said. ‘Look for the leaves turning brown, around eight or nine months I should think.’

  Every time Catherine saw him she gave him a big long hug – cardigans and scarves, thick grey curls bouncing on his shoulders, the smell of chamomile, earth, plants. At first, whenever she held Dorothy – Doll, as she liked to call her – she had burst into tears. Shel was irritated, but then something had switched and suddenly Catherine knew what to do. She was there for them; she made herself quieter, kept to the next room or sat outside on a chair or worked in the small beginnings of the garden, seeds under her nails, a presence, a visible means of support, proof that it was possible, someone, unbelievably, who had done all this before.

  She had pushed the garlic on them from the start. Good to have it around the place, good for the air, good for you both and good for Dorothy. She swore it reduced infection rates, strengthened immunity, that it would help ‘firm her up’.

  ‘Mum,’ Shel had interjected, staring at her, ‘don’t speak like that, like you’re describing cattle.’ He wasn’t sure. Maybe they should move the plants. Tell her Dorothy didn’t like the scent, it irritated her skin, though he could picture Catherine’s expression, shaking her head and telling him she’d seemed fine earlier.

  He waited an extra moment in the bathroom. He was being unfair; she was just trying to help. She’d told him to go out, see a film, go to a café, take a walk, and he had thought he would, it sounded reasonable, but when it came to it he was reluctant to go. He didn’t doubt Catherine – she’d be fine with her, of course – he just found that he couldn’t produce the energy needed to go out and do something. It was an effort to even imagine it.

  Catherine had used the garlic with Shel, as her own mother had with her, a tradition, but proven to work, she said. He entered the kitchen, watched her wiping strenuously along the sill. ‘It’s important in the first months, in any case, but especially with an early child. Look,’ she turned to him over her shoulder, ‘I know you’re sceptical, that you think there’s something alternative about this, but there isn’t. You’ll see garlic in all sorts of medications, John. I want to do the little I can to help, that’s all.’

  He quickly agreed, alarmed by the suggestion of emotion, then wondering whether this might have been the intended effect. ‘Your mother,’ Catherine said, bending down to Dorothy, in her cradle, ‘had the same plants in her house when she was just as small as you are now.’ He’d heard the story before; she enjoyed telling it. Shel’s father lined her room with plants. Ivan was not expressive, but he insisted on this, insisted on giving her plants. As an only child she might appreciate the company, but he maintained this was incidental. What he wanted was to take advantage of his daughter’s light. He told Shel the plants in her room were the most special and needed the greatest care. It was important they took light wherever they could; just her being there, thinking about something, even sleeping, unconscious, was helping them. She liked to sing, and hum, and talk to herself – all of this would help the plants. Shel wondered if he had got the idea after they first heard her talking alone through the wall. Commentaries and dialogues and experiments – she said she was testing whether the voice in her head had the same accent as her speaking voice – and the other earnest consolations of an only child. Putting the plants in, Ivan would be quietly endorsing her behaviour, supporting it, while giving her a kind of company. Catherine was sure – if she could have asked him – Ivan would have denied it, said it was all, simply, botany.

  Shel’s car was being serviced so she’d taken his to work and, because it was part of their routine, because he enjoyed it and it felt like the day would be missing something otherwise, he decided to take Dorothy to the shop by bus. Again, that extravagant sky over everything. Packed snow creaking under the tyres. The refracted sun glare slowed the traffic, light bouncing off the windshields and the frozen lake water. It was a small single-deck vehicle; he saw the driver’s eyes in the mirror monitoring them, making sure they were settled before restarting the electric engine and inflating the carriage. He realised midway through the journey they were in Shel’s seat, right-hand side, third from back. And not Shel’s seat really, Catherine had told him. It was her father’s seat – Ivan would take the bus almost every day, sitting in the same place whenever he could. ‘It’s probably not even a conscious thing,’ she said. ‘I doubt she realises.’

  The bus drew in to the next stop and a passenger on the other side rose to leave. There were only six on the bus, an equal distance apart. No-one spoke. Dorothy slept. He held out his arm, shielding her eyes from the sun. He looked through his backpack, though he knew he’d forgotten his glasses. The sky was cloudless. The clarity indicated enormous vertical distance.

  It was only because the passenger had got up, carrying his few items, walking unsteadily forward and then stepping off the lowered platform onto the pavement, that the sun now struck them. He watched through the window as the passenger gathered himself and looked ahead to the near cluster of houses. He wondered if, even for a little bit, just out of habit – it was a small village they had lived in – people had continued to keep Ivan’s seat free. The fresh, unoccupied space changing not just the light, but the balance, the distribution of weight on the vehicle. Maybe passengers had had to shield their eyes, like he was doing now, because of the new conditions under which the light travelled. The electric pulse struck up again; the carriage inflated. He kept looking at the seat below him, to his right.

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  It was an off-hand comment made d
uring one of the long video calls in the days after the park, before she was cleared to fly back, a suggestion in response to the brief and diluted account of the attack he had given her, but it stuck with him. He told her only that he had gone to visit the site; he had wanted to find out what was going on, why work had been suspended, why nobody was answering his calls. The fog, he said, came back suddenly while he was down in the foundations and, climbing out, heading back towards the car, something powerful had blindsided him, hitting him from above. Shel leaned in at the screen and asked him to repeat himself and say again what happened. He wasn’t making sense. So he adjusted it, reframed it, changed the terms, and found himself telling her that he was struck by a bird of prey, that it must have been the beginning of the nesting season and both the property developers in general and himself in particular had disturbed something, and the mother was attempting to drive them away, defending her territory. Shel waited for him to say more and when he didn’t she said, ‘John, none of that makes any sense.’ She seemed distant, mulling something over, seemed about to say something and then abruptly changed expression, almost physically removing what was anticipated on her lips and shifting the whole setting of her face and saying, ‘But you’re all right? You’ve had it checked? I mean, you’ve gone to the hospital, they’ve cleared you?’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ he said, ‘I’m fine,’ already regretting saying anything while they were still this far apart – he hadn’t meant to.

  ‘Anyway,’ she said, an afterthought, ‘I don’t think you disturbed a nest. I think it’s more likely, if it was a bird, that the developers brought it.’ She turned round. She was being called; another meeting was about to start.

  What she was suggesting, he found out, was that the developers were using birds of prey to clear nuisance gulls during construction. Left undeterred, seabirds would disrupt work and pose threats to the crew’s safety. Along with other measures – pyrotechnics, video, audio – firms were hiring specially bred raptors to hunt and terrify the gulls, driving them away. There was an array of dedicated falconry companies, each offering specialist services ranging from single ‘performance’ hunts to prolonged, intensive ten-day courses. Some firms stressed a single day’s hunting was sufficient, the gulls being so alarmed by the raptors’ sudden appearance they retreated from the area and didn’t return for months. Additionally, and as a contingency measure, the whole of the initial hunt was recorded, the audio played back during what had been peak daily periods of activity, the volume increased so the sound of the raptors soaring and diving was clear even at a distance, the gulls’ shrieks played out too to an emptying sky. This initial hunt was also recorded on video, available, in deluxe packages, as a further preventative measure, with giant screens showing longshots tracking the raptors who, though they seemed to be in flight, never appeared to move position, never arrived anywhere. The copy on one company’s website elaborated on the particular terror induced by the footage of such an apparently tireless, uncanny creature, always in flight and always pursuing, always on the cusp of striking. More commonly, a prolonged series of hunts was recommended, stretching from seven to ten days, enough to establish marked and lasting trauma in the gulls.

  Though all this struck him as unlikely, and baroque, Shel said he was naive, that the practice, though it had become popular recently, had been in use for decades. Companies were not legally obliged, she said, to publicise or even admit to hiring birds, so he shouldn’t be surprised if he got nothing from the agent. As he ended the call, he had a clear memory of the moment preceding the attack, a sound not only of wings fluttering but a strange, almost artificial whirring, and he thought of the possibility that at the same time as the bird was diving towards him a recording of a previous hunt was playing out, that the bird was antagonised and driven on by an exterior version of itself.

  He ordered industrial cleaning supplies and watched videos instructing him on exactly what to do as, fitted with a mask and wearing inch-thick plastic goggles, he treated what remained of the fungus on the walls. He spent two days working, keeping the house ventilated, doors and windows open, spraying and scrubbing and chipping away at the remaining hyphae, exhausted but determined to do a thorough job, to complete the process and leave nothing behind to remind him of the preceding three weeks, the doctor’s visits and the spreading rot. He was determined not to dwell on it and instead look exclusively forward, to Shel’s arrival, any day now. He arranged for the affected clothes to be picked up and treated by a specialist company, concerned that it would take longer than advertised and that when Shel returned she wouldn’t find even the few things that she’d left. But the items arrived the day before her flight; he hung her mauve coat back along the vestibule wall, noting the collar was upright and there was no sign of a mark anywhere at all.

  The morning Shel arrived he was restless in the cottage, distracted and uneasy and only feeling better when he was in motion, moving towards her. Looking out the tinted rear window in the black car, he noted the morning’s silence and stillness, the sharpness of the air, the distance in the light. Going over the marshes, he almost couldn’t believe this was the same place, that he and Shel had made this same journey only several weeks earlier.

  He clutched the complimentary bottle of water in both hands. The vehicle travelled at a constant level speed and, with the comfort of the leather seats, the sophistication of the suspension, the direct line of the route, he had the impression of being carried on tracks, of being conveyed automatically, of existing above the ground. The driver maintained a uniform posture, arms resting decoratively over the wheel. Earphones discreetly in place, eyes inscrutable in the mirror under opaque glasses. They continued over the marshes, coming into sight, for the first time, of the terminal’s signalling towers, the road now parallel to the tall fencing setting off the lengths of runway.

  He looked out at the airport complex, noting the absence of trees beginning several miles before the terminal, the lack of any depressions in the ground where water could gather. In looking into corporate use of birds he’d found several articles saying airports were designed explicitly with birds, or rather the absence of birds, in mind. Increasingly they incorporated special breeding centres for raptors. The layout of many airports, seen aerially, mimicked wings, while of course the whole thing was a monument to flight. But at the same time they had to repel birds. Aeronautics developed further after deviation from the instruction of wings in nature – in insects, in birds, in bats. Increasingly restless, thrumming with nervous energy as the car approached the drop-off point, he noted that airports were explicitly anti-nest, that specially bred dogs, with high muscle ratios and massive hind quarters designed for optimal acceleration, were also trained to hunt gulls, to locate their eggs, destroy their young, and he noted the series of giant hotels adjacent to the terminal that specialised in conference traffic, an industry and a way of life that was also ‘anti-nest’, given the prevalence of corporate boredom, restlessness, extramarital affairs.

  He continued waiting by Arrivals, trying to limit the number of times he looked at the screen. The terminal remained oddly quiet, almost deserted. A cleaner slowly pushing a brush along the reflective floor; a single server leaning against the café counter, phone nursed in both hands. The whole area seemed to have slipped into suspension. The time display on the listings must have malfunctioned; he got up and looked around but, unable to see anyone he could report the issue to, he sank back onto his seat. Finally he heard the distant rumble of an engine and, shielding his eyes, saw an aircraft gathering speed on the runway, lifting into the air.

  This seemed to break the spell. The announcements began, he heard the tracking sound of luggage wheeled across the concourse and gradually the seats began to fill around him. He waited on the row closest to the exit, looking directly onto the corridor where landing passengers would appear from. He closed his eyes, stretched and tipped his head back, breathed in. He extended his arms and set them arrow straight on his knees.

 
The screen confirmed she’d landed. He waited in a heightened state of agitation. Still no-one had come. He got up, checked the screen again, considered asking at one of the airline’s desks but decided he couldn’t move away from the spot. Finally the first passenger appeared, then another, now emerging in quiet drifts of threes and fours. He stood up, turned round, feeling something had passed him. The others waiting disappeared, merging with the airport’s flow. He looked in all directions, turned to his phone, snapped his head back up at the listings. He trained his eyes on the corridor exit. Something was wrong. She was not on the flight. As he got up and stood by the railing it seemed inconceivable Shel would appear, that she could come out of this place. He tapped his foot on the ground. He heard a voice, two voices, heard her boots on the hard floor; he called out.

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