by Lucy Wood
I was about to get back in the car when I heard rustling further up the road. I hesitated for a second, then craned forwards, but the light coming from inside the car made everything else too dark. I closed the door and the light went out. There was a black and white feather in the road. It had a sheen to it, blue, maybe some purple. Further along, at the bottom of the low hedge, there were more feathers, a heap of feathers, which turned out to be a magpie that I’d hit with the wing mirror.
I stood still. I didn’t go any closer. A car went past, its lights picking out the road, a tree, and then making everything seem darker and closer again.
The bird shifted and raised its head up. One of its wings was hanging like a broken umbrella. I didn’t go any closer but I couldn’t stop looking at its wing. The magpie lifted it up then let it fall back on to the road. I heard the feathers brush against the tarmac; I thought I heard a faint snap, as if someone had stepped on a branch in a wood.
After a while, the magpie heaved itself up so it was standing. It looked ragged and unsteady. I wanted to say something to it, that I was sorry, I guess, that I was really sorry. ‘Birds don’t fly in the dark,’ I said instead. I hadn’t paid much attention at school but I knew most birds didn’t fly around once it got dark. ‘Birds aren’t meant to fly in the dark,’ I told the magpie. It came out sounding like an accusation. But what was it doing flying around in the dark?
The magpie’s eyes shifted but I couldn’t tell where it was looking. I looked away. I did that thing where you go ‘brrr’ and skip around on the ground if you get cold, hands clasped like you’re praying and running at the same time. It wasn’t even that cold, just a chill in the air that meant autumn was coming. I glanced back at the car, thought I heard another engine, but there was nothing. I heard something else.
‘What did you say?’ My voice was loud and sudden, disturbing the emptiness and the quiet. But the magpie had said something, I was sure. It tilted its head. The hedge was full of broom and the grey pods, like cocoons, kept swaying and shivering. I took a step closer. An image came into my head of the china clay tips I had to drive past on the way to work. They looked so desolate. They looked like mountains covered in snow but they weren’t mountains. I had always felt it was some kind of trick, the fact that they looked so much like mountains when, really, I was on the same flat ground as always.
‘What did you say?’ I asked.
It had sounded like, ‘This old place.’ I could hardly catch it. Maybe it hadn’t said anything, maybe it was just its feathers brushing against the road.
‘This old place again.’ Those were the first words Mae said when she walked into Herb’s and sat down opposite me. She looked the same, except that she’d cut off all her long hair, which made her face seem thinner, more severe, older than twenty-six. Her eyes were different colours: one blue, one grey – I’d actually forgotten about that, forgotten that she used to say things like, ‘I’m indecisive, can’t you tell?’ and point at them.
She ordered coffee and glanced around the café. ‘I can’t believe we used to come here all the time,’ she said. ‘Why did we?’
I shrugged. ‘We liked it.’
‘I remember it being bigger. I don’t remember it like this.’
The lights in there were dim and one flickered on and off. The plastic tables were stained and buckled; there was a crack down one window. From the kitchen, Herb bellowed along to a violin, his voice rich and scratchy.
‘Mum’s turned my bedroom into a study since I last visited,’ Mae said. ‘I have to sleep on the sofa.’ Her foot danced up and down with the music; I knew that she was already desperate to leave town, already thinking of the journey back.
‘My room’s exactly the same,’ I told her. ‘I went round there the other day and found all those badges I used to collect. They were piled up in a drawer.’
‘You gave me one,’ Mae said. ‘It had a clown on or something.’
‘Have you still got it?’ I asked her.
The guy with the motorbike helmet stood up and walked to the bathroom, knocking into chairs on his way. ‘Excuse me, excuse me,’ he kept saying to the chairs.
Mae watched him, sighed. ‘We should have gone somewhere else,’ she said. She sipped her coffee without really drinking any. We used to like Herb’s cheap, bitter coffee.
I put a sugar cube in for her and stirred it.
Silence on the road. An offshore wind picked up and swept in some clouds. I wanted to know what the magpie had said. I waited, but it didn’t speak again. Instead, it started to move along the verge, slowly, very slow. It tried to lift itself into the air, then it fell back on to the road, sideways. It dragged itself up and half stumbled, half hopped two steps forward. Then it tried to lift itself into the air again and the whole thing started from the beginning. It looked like a dead leaf skidding along the road. I didn’t want to watch the magpie struggling to move like that, but I did watch it.
After a few metres, it turned to the left and disappeared. The hedge was low and sharp. I didn’t hear the magpie pushing through it. I waited awhile. I watched the empty space where the magpie had been. Another car went past behind me but I didn’t turn round. The magpie’s words edged and circled in my mind.
I went up to the hedge and saw that there was a small metal gate. The magpie had squeezed under it. It was the sort of gate you would hardly notice; in fact, I’ve driven that road since and I manage to miss it every time. Beyond the gate there was a flat scrubby field with nothing in it except a few dark trees at the end. The magpie started to move across the grass.
I should have been home by now. I wanted to be home. Right then, my wife would have been sitting at the kitchen table reading, a mug of lemon tea in front of her, her hair damp and frizzy from the bath she’d just had. I could smell the lemon, her damp hair. I could picture the light from our kitchen window, how it would look from outside as I paused just before the door, wisteria climbing all over the walls.
I climbed over the gate. The metal hummed when I jumped off it. I followed the magpie. Now and then, I would pass small white feathers that curled up like burnt paper. I could hardly see the magpie itself, so I just followed those white feathers.
Another feather and then another. The magpie was already halfway across the field so that, in the dark, it was almost out of my line of vision. It seemed to be moving so slowly, it seemed to be struggling, but whenever I glanced away and then looked back again, it had moved further forwards, widening the gap. It was impossible to catch up with it. I imagined pain shooting through with each step, I imagined bone rubbing against bone, but at the same time I was trying to work out what the magpie had said. Was it something about the road? Was it actually something about the road?
I heard that noise again, the voice. I almost caught it that time. It moved quietly along the grass. It was as if the magpie was speaking from behind a door, or its voice was coming from a long hallway that I couldn’t see. There was a kid I used to know at school who said that he saw words as colours. He heard ‘fish’ and he saw gold flash and then ebb away. He heard ‘chair’ and there was a deep, calm green. I never understood what he meant before and I still don’t really, but when I think of the magpie speaking, it reminds me of him every time. The magpie spoke and maybe I saw a face, blurry and indistinct, beckoning on the other side of a road.
‘Where are you working now?’ Mae asked me.
The guy with the motorbike had left and we were the only ones in there.
‘Same place,’ I said. ‘I’ve started doing the orders.’ I work at the ice cream factory, have done for seven years. It was only meant to be a casual job for one summer but it’s close to where I live, and the work’s easy once you know what you’re doing.
‘I’m in between,’ Mae said. ‘I was temping on reception at a dentist’s.’
‘You hate the dentist.’
‘Yeah. I could hear drilling all the time. Apparently I started grinding my teeth at night.’ She glanced down at her hands
, then back up at me. She bit at her lip. She used to bite her lips till they bled. ‘I could be anywhere next. An office, catering,’ she said.
‘Do you want more coffee?’ I asked. ‘I’m getting one.’ I got up and went to the kitchen to ask Herb for more coffee. My mouth was dry.
He filled up two more cups, told me that he’d got one of those new grills I’d been telling him about. ‘You fold the top down like this,’ he said.
‘It looks good.’ I showed him how to work the timer.
‘They finally sent it,’ Herb said. He took an envelope out of his pocket and tipped a tiny green sliver on to his palm. A few months ago, someone had phoned him up and told him he’d won an emerald in a prize draw; all he had to do was send some money for postage. He’d been waiting every day for it. ‘Turned out to be a scam,’ he said. ‘I knew it would be.’ He’d been going on about it for so long he’d ended up getting both of our hopes up.
‘Those things are always a scam,’ I told him. The green chip was so small I could barely see it in his hand. I took the cups back in. ‘I got you more coffee,’ I said to Mae.
‘Thanks.’ She pulled the cup towards her, slopping coffee over the edge. ‘Do you know that joke about the cat and the saucer?’ she said.
I shook my head. I could smell strawberries on my clothes from work.
‘A cat goes up to its saucer and finds a delicious piece of meat on it. The cat eats it and goes away. Later, it comes back and there’s a big piece of fish. It eats that and goes away again.’
I watched her speaking, her small mouth, frown marks at the top of her nose, her voice slow. At school we’d told jokes all the time, thinking each one wise and magnificent.
‘It has a wash, it has a nap, then it goes back to its saucer.’ She stopped talking suddenly, her eyes wide, surprised. ‘I forgot how it ends,’ she said, almost smiling, the frown lines deepening.
The field was blue-tinged, everything around had a blue to it. The magpie blended into the dark. My eyes ached as I tried to see where it was going. The grass underfoot was dry and crunchy, as if it was covered in frost but there wasn’t a frost. There were thistles, spearing their way up through the ground. There were mushrooms too, fat and white and leaning out of the dark. The landscape was bare and open. One or two small lights from distant bungalows. I was so close to town and the sea was over there somewhere, but it felt like there was nothing near me, only this field and the magpie and the trees in the distance.
As I got closer to them, the trees stretched outwards and multiplied. I thought there were only a few of them, but now they thickened and spread backwards, gathering up the dark and the quiet. More clouds swept in and I started to zip up my jacket. I noticed that I was missing a couple of buttons off my shirt. There were gaps where the buttons should have been, but there weren’t any frayed threads.
The magpie moved forwards without pausing. I tried to focus on it. I looked down at my missing buttons, and just at that moment, the magpie disappeared into the wood.
The pine trees smelled like soap and cold air. I ducked under a low branch and then stepped over another. I could hardly see anything and kept tripping over roots and stones. There were roots everywhere. They looked like they were grabbing handfuls of earth and pulling them upwards.
I followed the magpie and the small white feathers. After a while, it stopped and I stopped, too. There it was again, the magpie’s voice, whispering. The rhythm of the words – what did they remind me of? Maybe the roots, weaving across the floor of the wood, all tangled up with each other. I saw myself tangled up in them, rooted to the spot.
The door opened and a middle-aged couple came in. The bell on the door used to chime but now it makes a tinny thud. They sat at a table in the opposite corner to us. After a while, Herb came over and I heard them order tea and toast. Once Herb had brought it over, the woman took out a small pot of jam from her bag and started to spread it on the toast and cut it into triangles. They looked tired.
‘I can’t stay late,’ Mae said.
Our coffee had gone cold by now and we had pushed it to one side. I’d crumbled a sugar cube over the table without noticing, and I started making patterns in the grains with my finger. ‘Have you heard from Si?’ I asked. ‘Or Ruth and Pear?’
‘A bit,’ she said. ‘Have you?’
‘They haven’t been back.’
‘I bumped into your dad,’ Mae said. She moved her legs out from under the table. She never liked to be in small spaces, always had to take the stairs rather than a lift. ‘I forgot to tell you. Outside the optician’s.’
‘He thinks he’s going blind.’
‘He said that. He said he gets you to drive him places, and read out bits of the paper.’
‘He’s not going blind,’ I said. I noticed that the couple in the corner were both leaning forwards over their table, talking in low voices. I wondered what they were saying. The man reached over and brushed crumbs off the woman’s cheek.
Mae checked her watch, then touched the sleeve of her coat. Herb’s music rang out from the kitchen.
‘Time to go,’ she said. She got her car keys out of her bag; same old bottle-opener key ring. She stood up and put on her coat.
The kitchen door swung open and Herb made his way over to our table. ‘The grill’s doing something funny,’ he said to me. ‘There’s a red light. It won’t cool down.’
‘In a second,’ I told him.
‘Something’s smoking on it,’ Herb said.
‘I’ll leave you to it,’ Mae told me. She tucked her chair under the table and said goodbye, said that she’d be back again sometime soon.
I watched her go, then turned to Herb and went to check the grill.
The trees were leaning in and dark all around. There was no sound except a faint wheezing which I thought was me but was actually the magpie breathing. It sounded like a struggle. I stood very still and listened to it, and to the wind finding its way through the trees.
The magpie kept tilting its head up towards a tree. After a while, it flapped its wings and rose about a foot off the ground. Its broken wing stayed locked to its side.
I moved forwards. The magpie flapped again, lifted itself up, then fell back, like a sheet of newspaper caught in a breeze. I thought about picking it up and putting it in the tree. I imagined holding it in my hands. I imagined its strange weight, its smoothness. The feathers would be smooth, but they would rasp against my hands, I was sure. I imagined its fluttery heartbeat. I didn’t go any closer. But all the time I was standing there, I felt feathers against my hands and my wrists as if I had picked the magpie up.
I looked down at my feet and noticed that all the metal eyelets from my trainers had disappeared.
The magpie had stopped looking at the tree. It tucked its head down into its chest and crouched on the ground. I stood there and wondered what the magpie would do next. I could still feel its feathers on my hands. I brushed my fingers, trying to get rid of them. The trees crowded in and I couldn’t tell which way we had come into the wood. The trees all looked the same, crowding in like that, but I just stood there, watching the magpie, and didn’t look for the way out.
‘What the devil,’ the magpie whispered, or it may have just been the wind finding its way through the trees.
Something silver caught my eye. There was a dull glint on the ground further into the wood. I walked past the magpie and sifted through pine needles. I found a set of keys, and they were my keys. My key ring was on them. My heart beat a little faster. I checked my pockets to make sure they were definitely mine. I hadn’t even been this far into the wood. My pockets were empty. I put the keys back in my pocket and zipped it up tight.
From where I was now, I could see a shape in the trees. At first, it looked like another tree that was leaning out at a strange angle, but then I saw that it was a triangle made up of thick branches. They were all leaning into the middle, like a tepee, and were tied together with rope. It was some kind of den. It blended into the trees
so well that it was almost impossible to see. Scanning your eyes across the wood, it would be easy to miss it completely.
I walked towards the den. There were a few trees with low branches that looked good for climbing. I used to climb trees all the time. Beech trees were best. When I was younger, I used to climb into a beech and stay there all day, sometimes into the night. I liked to go right into the middle so there were leaves above and below me. Sometimes, I’d go to sleep and wake up thinking I was in bed and wondering where all the walls had gone. I hadn’t climbed a tree in a long time. I stepped on to one of the pine’s low branches. It bent and swayed under my body. I took another step up, then another. The branches were thin and I knew, just as I was putting my foot on the next one, that it wouldn’t take my weight. I grabbed handfuls of pine needles and air on my way down.
I landed on my knees. The smell of damp earth and old leaves. When I got up, I looked back at the magpie. It had been watching me the whole time, its head tilted to one side. I could see its small chest heaving up and down, but its eyes were focused and still.
I ducked my head into the den. There were a few sweet wrappers glinting silver, pine needles everywhere, an old blanket and a mug. The ground was smooth, footprintless. The entrance was small but I stooped down and squeezed in, bumping my shoulders and the sides of my arms against the wood. Further in, I saw my buttons, and the eyelets from my trainers, and three small badges piled up in the corner.
I sat cross-legged in the middle of the den, my knees touching the sides. I looked out of the triangular doorway. It crossed my mind that I could light a fire; I knew how to do it. I pictured myself from far away: the den, a fire outside in the middle of all these trees, a thin thread of smoke rising, but I didn’t light one. I just sat there and a nice chill made its way inside the den and through my skin.
I don’t know how much time passed. Part of me wanted to get up and drive back home, part of me wanted to go in the opposite direction – I didn’t know where. I stayed sitting where I was, in between. I thought about the other lives I could have had. I thought about home. I didn’t get up. I touched my pocket to make sure my keys were still there.