by Ali Shaw
He smiled ruefully. ‘I suppose it’s to be expected. In retrospect I’m amazed that you stayed as long as you did.’
‘Well, I wish I’d at least stayed a bit longer.’
‘It’s probably best that you didn’t. Don’t take this the wrong way, but you shouldn’t come up here any more. It’s not that I don’t like you – I wish I could get to know you better – it’s just that ... it’s dangerous.’
She didn’t want to be asked to leave again. ‘Surely there’s no harm in a little more conversation?’
He sighed and placed a hand on his chest. ‘The harm is in here.’
She laughed. ‘What kind of threat is that?’
He put his hands sheepishly into his pockets. One of them was a torn pocket out of the bottom of which his forefinger showed. ‘I made something after we talked. I think I’d like to give it to you. Will you come in?’
‘I’d love that.’
He turned and she followed him into the bothy.
He had been crafting more paper since last she saw him. Birds formed a mound of wings and white tails on the table. Each, she felt, was a work of art, as delicate and innovative as any origami she had seen, but Finn dug through them as if they were waste paper, sending them gliding left and right down to the floor.
‘Here!’ he exclaimed, and held up a different kind of model. It was a paper skyscraper, built with a pointed paper spire and a roof of stepped tiers. ‘My mother showed me a photograph once, of New York. Is this right? Don’t you have towers there?’
‘It’s ...’ she said, but she had to stop because her lip was trembling. She was surprised at how upset she was to see the shape of it. In New York she had barely registered Manhattan’s height – she was so used to it after her first few weeks there – but this paper version felt as heavy as its inspiration. It trapped her hands at her sides and she could not move them. She was at once homesick and sick of the reminder of home. ‘You don’t like it?’
‘It’s not that.’ She spoke through a tight throat. ‘It’s so very sweet of you, but ...’
‘Here.’ He held it lightly on his palm for a second, then screwed it into litter. ‘Gone.’
After a while she said, ‘I’m really sorry. I don’t know what came over me. I don’t want to seem ungrateful.’
‘I understand. Sometimes there are things in life that you would rather forget. I apologize. I should have made you something different.’
‘No, it was lovely of you. I’m just ... a bit screwed up, that’s all.’
He threw the scrunched paper model across the room and into the bin. ‘Then you’re in good company.’
‘Do you know ... it’s weird, but I felt like I was. When we were talking yesterday.’
He didn’t say anything. She still hadn’t got used to the silences that he was so comfortable with opening up between them. She supposed they were to be expected: he was, after all, part weather, and weather was not renowned for its verbosity. She waited a minute before he spoke again.
‘Would you like to choose a paper bird instead? You can take as many as you like.’
She began to search through the ones on the table, inspecting each with the diligence of an auctioneer. ‘How do you get them so lifelike?’ she asked when she had chosen her favourite: a broad-winged goose with a neck straight as a ruler.
‘I don’t really know.’
She laughed. ‘That’s not a very good answer.’
He looked out of the window for inspiration. He had filled a clay jar on the sill with a spray of wildflowers, including one magnificent specimen whose dappled petals formed a yellow orb, like a world globe made out of gold. He touched its petals lightly as he thought, and she realized that that was how he made them, with a rare and gentle precision. ‘Okay, put it this way,’ he said with a shrug, ‘I just fold on a hunch, and I know there’s really no such thing as flight. That might sound crazy, but it’s true. There’s only really a kind of swimming in the air.’
She smiled. ‘My dad always used to say the air was an ocean.’
‘Yeah, exactly! Just like an ocean, with currents and tides. And people are like ... like the crabs and the worms on the ocean floor.’
‘That’s very flattering.’
‘I just mean that people are stuck on the bottom level. But to other creatures those currents and tides can be climbed just like a person climbs a tree or a hill. When you understand how that works, you can fold a paper bird. I’ve watched a lot of birds surfing the air up here on the mountain. I actually look after a few of them.’
‘You keep them? Here?’
‘No, farther up the mountain.’
She placed the paper goose gently on to the table. ‘Would you show me?’
‘Um, I’m not sure I should.’
‘Why not? You don’t want to?’
‘I’d love to, it’s just ...’
‘Then what are we waiting for?’
After a moment he shrugged and got up.
They stepped outside and she followed him uphill. He walked with a centre of suspension that made him look as if he were gliding. She plodded along beside him and paused now and again to catch her breath. The recent heat had papered the boulders with dust, and so dried out the grass that their shoes left crushed footprints in the turf. In the east, congesting cumuli teased the prospect of much-needed rain.
They walked in the kind of comfortable silence she thought it took people years, not days, to learn. Then, unprompted, he began to describe how last summer a field mouse had made her nest outside the bothy and he had learned to entice her inside with a trail of white chocolate. Once he had lured her in he had crouched beside her to make model after paper model. He said he got good at her tail – a long twist of paper instead of a fold. And then when he had finished the story he fell to silence again, and it delighted her that she could resist her natural compulsion to fill it.
Then they came upon the fringe of a wiry copse. Around the trees a ditch had been dug and around that a perimeter of razor wire coiled. Clumps of fur hung from its blades.
‘I’m guessing we’ll be trespassing if we go in there,’ said Elsa.
‘No,’ said Finn. ‘These defences are Daniel’s work. To keep goats out, not us. Goats would devour these trees in a day.’
He picked up a plank of wood and leaned it against the fence to create a rudimentary stile. He hopped over and turned to help Elsa. She enjoyed the smooth touch of his fingers as he took her hand and guided her over the step.
Under the copse’s foliage the world immediately cooled and quietened. The leaves had been parched by summer into early autumn’s hues, but enough still lined the branches to cast a pied pattern across the floor. Here they stopped, themselves dappled in light and shade.
‘Now, just listen,’ instructed Finn, holding a finger to his lips.
She heard the chirrup of birdsong, and scanning the intertwining branches saw in several places little yellow birds perched in threes and fours. One swept past her, warbling as it went.
‘You see them?’ he whispered.
‘Yes. Of course.’
He grinned. ‘They’re canaries. I’ve put up nest boxes for them. There are thousands of them on the mountains in the summer. My mother told me a story about them once. She said that on the day the floods finished off the mines, a tradesman was selling canaries in Candle Street. The water knocked his stall down and smashed his cages open. Out flew a hundred canaries, and they hatched a hundred more and so on. Ever since then there have been wild canaries in Thunderstown.’
‘That’s a nice story.’
‘But it’s not true, because they don’t hatch.’
‘What do you mean? Of course they hatch.’
‘No, they don’t. Look over there.’
She looked along the line of his pointing finger, and saw nothing.
‘You’re too slow, Elsa. Wait ... wait ... Now! Over there!’
At first she thought it was an optical illusion. A trick of the sunlight
playing on the fallen leaves. Then up out of a bright patch of loam shot a canary, to join its fellows in the boughs of the copse. She rubbed her eyes. ‘What did I just see?’
‘It’s happening again! Over there!’
He was pointing to a spot in the leaf litter that seemed more radiant than all the rest. It was as if an ember had touched down there and set the leaves to kindling. As she watched, the glow became intense. It formed a tiny orb of light that made the roots and twigs around it gleam, and left a sunspot in her vision. It began to shimmer and skew, and then the leaves looked like fiery feathers and she heard a bird cry out.
The light rose from the leafy floor with a hiss like a sparkler. Then it shot past her ear and she felt a hot breeze bristling her hair to its roots. Its shine dimmed as it flew, until she could clearly see its wings, a beak and tail feathers steering its ascent. It fluttered on to a branch, where it preened its plumage and tested its song.
‘Whuh ... what just happened?’
‘A sunbeam,’ Finn said, ‘came to life.’
She had too many questions to ask him any.
He grinned from ear to ear. ‘Would you like to catch one?’
‘What?’
‘They’re quite friendly. Come on.’ And with that he grasped the lowest boughs of the nearest tree and heaved himself up its trunk.
She was surprised that such a big man could ghost so easily upwards. He grinned down at her from the higher branches and asked, ‘What are you waiting for?’
She shook her head, still stunned by what she’d seen.
‘We won’t catch one on the ground, Elsa. They only like to perch among the branches.’
‘I ... I ...’
He glided back down as swiftly as he had gone up. ‘I’ll help you climb. Here, grab this branch.’
She took hold of its warm bark and stared up through the foliage at a trio of canaries who had squeezed on to a twig, watching her with cocked heads and cooing as if she were the most ridiculous thing in the world.
She hauled herself upwards with no real method, lifting her feet from the ground and pushing them against the trunk to try to find a foothold. She was surprised by how light she felt, then realized that Finn had cupped one hand beneath her foot to give her purchase. For a moment she wanted to leave her foot there. Then she pushed on upwards and got up on to one of the branches, after which it became easier to climb.
Finn floated up the trunk to overtake her and lead her gradually higher, until they sat facing one another on two high wooden arms.
‘Now we have to be quiet, and wait for the birds to resettle.’
She nodded, and they sat with the tide of leaves swaying back and forth around them. She knew he was looking at her and smiling, but she did not look back. She supposed that sights such as these were ordinary for him, but the strangeness had made her feel as if they had been through a momentous event together. It had always been her assumption that to connect with a person you needed to have shared so much. Yet here they were, still strangers, and she felt a connection to him as tangible as that between the branch she was sitting on and its trunk. ‘Now,’ he whispered, ‘hold out your hands.’
She did so, wondering if he was going to take hold of them. Instead he produced from his good pocket a sachet of seeds, and placed one fat grain in her palms. Then they waited. A canary bustled through the treetops, springing and zipping from branch to branch, getting closer in stops and starts. It paused for a while on the twigs above Finn’s head, leaning its head left and right, its eyes swivelling hard at Elsa. She smiled at it, in case that would help.
Then it flicked wide its yellow wings and whirred down to perch on her hands. She felt the pin-tip of its beak tapping against her skin as it gobbled up the seed.
‘Catch it,’ whispered Finn.
Nervously – it felt wrong to touch a wild creature – she slid her free hand over the canary and cupped it to trap the bird in her hold. It burbled at her furiously, and she yelped when its wings whirred and tickled her skin. Still she kept it trapped, and then she felt a change come over it.
‘Finn ... something’s happening!’
‘Don’t worry. It can’t hurt you.’
The canary had stopped struggling. It crouched still, virtually weightless in her hands. It was getting hot – not just with the compact warmth from its small heart and muscles, but with the penetrative warmth of a summer afternoon. And now around her hands a dim light glowed, getting brighter as she watched it, until golden shafts shone through the cracks between her fingers.
Some fearful switch tripped inside of her and she let go of the canary with a start. But her hands were empty and the bird had vanished, as had the light she had been holding, gone in a yellow shimmer of air. The only evidence that remained was the warmth in her palms, as if she had been holding them to a campfire.
Finn laughed and clapped his hands, but she needed a moment to compose herself. ‘I ... I ...’ she stuttered. ‘I didn’t kill it, did I?’
‘No, of course not. You can’t kill sunlight, can you? It’ll come back in a minute or two. Unless the sun stops shining.’
He started to climb down from the tree. She stayed put for a moment, then scrabbled after him.
‘Finn, I ... I saw a dog the other night. It led me to a path and then it vanished. There was only thin air and a wind that barged back past me.’
Finn nodded. ‘If you know where to look you will see other such things. They exist in these mountains. You might see a horse cantering out of a flood. You might see swifts and swallows vanishing on the breeze. Some will be manifestations of the weather. If we stayed here until sunset we’d see many of these canaries turn red, and if we stayed longer, until nightfall, most of them would disappear.’
She dwelt on this for a moment. ‘So ... what about you?’
‘I ...’ he started. He looked so crestfallen that she had made the connection that she wanted to retract it.
After a moment she tried to prompt him. ‘You said yourself that you are part weather. And I saw what happened to you at the windmill.’
‘Yes,’ he said.
The canaries trilled and warbled overhead. She wanted, she realized with a thrill like an electric shock, him to be the same as them. She wanted him to be weather entirely.
‘You want to know,’ he said slowly, ‘whether I am any different from the dogs and the canaries. I ... I feel like I am, although I’m not sure if that counts. There is one big difference: these creatures have materialized out of thin air, whereas I was born and grew up. There are photos of my pregnant mother, and pictures of me as a baby and a boy. So I must be a man.’
‘Of course,’ she said, trying not to sound disappointed. ‘Yeah, I guess that is different.’
‘But ... sometimes I don’t feel substantial enough to be a person. I feel too light, like I might be blown away at any moment. And I, um ... I ...’
‘You can trust me, Finn.’
‘I don’t have a heartbeat.’
‘But ... that’s impossible!’
‘Is it?’
She held a hand to her head. She had a feeling like vertigo. ‘No heartbeat,’ she repeated, and she found herself staring at his chest. ‘Then what keeps you going?’
He laid a palm on his breast. ‘Maybe the thunder.’
She licked her lips. She felt like she was standing on the edge of a precipice, and she had to either back off or let herself fall in. ‘Can you hear it?’
‘Yes. Sometimes.’
And because she knew no other way, she let herself tip forwards. ‘I want to listen.’
She held her breath. He looked at her as if she were mad. ‘I don’t want to scare you again.’
‘I won’t be scared this time. I know it.’
‘Then ... all right.’
She nodded, but did not move towards him. She was all of a sudden aware of his height and breadth, and of her own body and her hot pulse intruding through it, of a film of sweat on the small of her back, and of th
e air between them that had turned into a giant obstacle.
‘Now?’ she asked, to buy time.
‘Y-yes,’ he said. ‘Whenever you are ready.’
She took a deep breath then plunged forwards, bending in towards his chest so fast she almost headbutted him.
His chest was firm against her ear. She felt him tensing. She closed her eyes and listened.
It was like putting an ear to a conch shell and hearing the sea: through his breastbone she could hear a noise like a distant storm. The steady strokes of falling rain, the whistling of winds, the unmistakable base notes of thunder, then a whiplash fizzle of lightning. She didn’t flinch. She was as absorbed as she had been when she was a little girl, her hands and face pressed to her window to watch black clouds scud across the horizon.
‘Elsa ...’
His voice brought her back to her senses. Senses that were clearer now, clearer than they had been in a very long time. She felt as if she had just stepped in from a long and bracing walk.
‘Elsa ...’ he repeated.
She stood up straight. ‘Thank you,’ she said.
Then she kissed him.
At first he made a feeble resistance, but she could tell he didn’t want her to stop. Then he was kissing her back, wrapping his arms tightly around her even as she slid her hands over his shoulders and thought, Maybe I’m kissing a storm. Maybe I’m kissing the thunder.
Finn kissed with his eyes closed, she with hers open. Then after a minute he opened his too and she looked straight into those storm-tinged irises. She lost herself in the rough circles of his pupils, like the centres of a labyrinth, towards which she had been stumbling and lost for a very long time.
9
THE SOLEMN TEMPLES
Sunday morning had come around, and Elsa lay in bed thinking about Finn. She’d hoped to see him again today, but he’d said they should wait until Monday. In Thunderstown, he explained, the Sabbath was still a day of rest and observance, when families would come together. Daniel Fossiter would often materialize at the bothy, driven there by guilt to share an awkward meal. Finn thought it best that, for the time being at least, the culler did not see them together.