I am to go by bus and plane, to return by train and boat. He gives me a carrying case which looks like a cat box and has another, smaller box inside which doesn’t have any air-holes, which rattles when it slides. Then he gives me instructions: for handling, for feeding, for calming down when in distress, and he gives me the name of the fourth bird, the lost and found bird, as if she might answer to it. Her name is Martha.
What about the baby, my boyfriend says. Because he earns a better wage than me, my boyfriend is the one who works full-time. He is an engineer. But he takes a half day every Friday and spends long hours every weekend watching the TV channel which shows nothing but sport. I’ll only be gone for one night, I say; you can look after her. I am annoyed with the baby because of something she has done to me; a small act of violence. Three mornings ago, as I bounced her on my hip and tried to single-handedly butter toast, she fastened her puny fist onto my earring, and pulled, hard. It was such a bizarre moment. My instinct to protect myself collided with my instinct to protect her; I dropped the butter knife and raised my free hand to slap her off, but stopped myself just in time. Instead, I blew hard into her face. I blew because this was something the family dog had been frightened of when I was a child, was the only way he could be made to surrender whatever forbidden thing he had clasped between his teeth. He’d flatten his ears and squint his eyes but open his mouth and back away. Something made me assume the baby would react as an animal would, and I was right. As soon as I blew in her face, she let go of my earring, and started to bawl.
3.
I try to carry the cat box onto the bus, but the driver says it is too big and makes me put it in the luggage hold. It’s a non-descript day in February; on every dual carriageway the sky is white as it always is, the grass is green as it ought to be. Whenever I take a long trip, which is seldom since the baby, I try to make the time pass by looking intently at the changing landscape; at each new, yet similar, segment as it arrives into and departs from my field of vision. Once, in secondary school, my biology class was taken on a field trip to a nature reserve where we were each given a small wooden square and instructed to toss it randomly into the air and chase it to where it fell. Then we had to get down on the ground and analyse everything we found in the plot of earth inside its frame, which at first looked like nothing but grass, yet on closer inspection became weeds, seed-heads, pine needles, three different species of tiny fly, and a woodlouse. Now, looking out the bus window, I try to see beyond the white and green, to single out the unexpected. I remember how my school friends were jealous of the plentitude of my squared-off plot of earth, of my woodlouse. I remember how our teacher said that plentitude was a reflection not of the plot itself, but of the person who analysed it.
From a seat somewhere behind me comes the sound of a computer game, its unmelodious yet cheerful tune. I wonder if there’s a child back there; everyone I am able to see is an adult who is attempting to sleep, as if to defy the arduousness of remaining conscious throughout this suspended period of time, this journey. After a while, I try to sleep too, but every time the bus stops, I wake against my will, like a doll with tipping eyelids. At every stop, I look out at people lingering on the footpath below the bus, saying hello or goodbye to their loved ones; they are people not watching and not waiting for me, not wishing I would wave. And this suddenly makes me miss my boyfriend, miss the baby, makes me finger my wounded ear. Though the hole was stretched beyond its limit, the lobe was not torn open, and I didn’t go to the doctor even though it bled and throbbed more than I thought such a useless wattle of flesh could. What still bothers me about the whole thing – what bothers me most – is how, for all the time the baby was pulling, I was mewling in distress, and she did not respond to this at all, even though I know she must be able to understand the meaning of someone crying out in pain, as every animal does.
The last thing I see before I finally fall asleep is the speck of a very high aeroplane, small as a stain in a fingernail, one of those ones which is meant to indicate that your body is deficient in calcium or zinc, or something else I can’t remember. And when my eyelids tip open again, the bus has arrived at Terminal Two.
4.
Again, my cat box is rejected by officialdom; I have to bring it to Oversize Luggage, to watch as a gigantic kitchen appliance encases it in super-strength cling-film. I find I have forgotten all the inane little protocols of flying. Before I am allowed through the security gates, I have to stand over the designated bins, throw away a perfectly good pair of tweezers, choke down a carton of pineapple juice. I have not boarded an aeroplane since I gave birth, and this makes me assume that the airport police will not frisk me. I’ve been frisked for almost every flight I’ve ever taken, but something makes me expect that I am no longer ineffably suspicious by virtue of having become a mother. The plastic archway doesn’t bleep, but the airport policewoman still draws me aside and invites me to raise my arms, to outstretch them as if I am pretending to be the aeroplane. As she runs her gloves up and down my body, I sing the soft, burring sound of an engine inside my head.
On board, I read the duty-free brochure from cover to cover; I pay full attention to the attendant who performs the safety announcement; I even study the In-Case-of-Emergency leaflet. I’m going to be the only one who survives this flight, I think. Then I look out my window and see the wing. I always end up in a seat where I can see the wing when I am flying; I always spend the entire flight watching for some part of my part of it to break off.
I’ve never understood how a building can be one hundred floors high, how a tunnel can travel beneath an estuary; I cannot picture what sort of crane-like machine it was that built the first crane, nor how an aeroplane is able to lift into the sky, and hold there, and climb and continue to climb for thousands of vertical miles, and finally to land again at its destination without any part of either wing breaking off. I am a social worker by profession; my domain is strictly human, and so, what I find most strange and fascinating is the way in which people, in which we, every single day, place our trust, our lives, in contraptions we don’t fully comprehend. Even though my boyfriend could easily explain all of these things, cement up the cracks in my perception, I never ask.
I look out the window as we fly, past the obtrusive wing. The movement of the wind and the rebound of the sun, their conspired optical illusion, makes it seem as if great swatches of grass have been cast in silver. How evenly shaped and neatly spaced the landscape seems. It makes me think about a project I did with a little girl as part of an art therapy session: together we made a garden on a tray with pebbles for paving slabs, moss for lawn, a tin-foil pond and matchbox shed. From the plane, the landscape is too placid and perfect to seem real; it seems instead like the set of a miniature railway, an architectural model, a garden on a tray. The little girl came into care that day because her mum had been evicted and needed some time alone in which to condense the contents of an apartment to the size of a single room in a B&B.
You don’t have to get up very high to meet the edges of this island. Soon all its even shapes and neat spaces have bled together into green and blue, into shadows of cloud on the surface of the sea.
As we begin to descend, my ears swell up with air. They have never hurt like this on a flight before; it is as though they are acting in sympathy with my great-uncle. For a while, the noise grows ferociously loud, until it seems impossible that I am the only passenger who can hear it, that it is still only inside me, until, at last, my ears burst, clear. I look around at my fellow passengers, see that they are all, again, either asleep or gazing directionlessly, distracted by their own swollen, blaring silence, stupefied by the in-flight air conditioning, the sculpted foam, the poetry of remaining still and the world remaining still but something in-between you moving, uncontrollably. Now we come down over the monstrously tall buildings of London city, drop below the birds in flight, the ones who flap and flap and never seem to get anywhere, the ones who glide and seem to get incredibly far with almost no
effort, now we land with all the landed ones.
I won’t be flying back again because Martha would not be able to tolerate it; ascending beyond the point at which her wings could ever reach alone inside the hold of a hollering machine would be too much for an already disorientated bird to bear. Her beak-magnets would be misbalanced beyond realignment, my great-uncle explained, in different words, and I am enthralled by the peculiarity of this, of the bird who cannot fly, either by its own aeronautics, or by ours.
5.
I am to follow the directions in my phone, to go first to collect my great-uncle’s pigeon, then to the flat of my friend where I’ll be staying the night. I have not visited London since I was a student, and I’d forgotten how much of the city is papered with advertisement panels, making it feel as if I’m walking through the pop-up pages of a magazine. There are a lot more squirrels than I remember, at least one in every tree I pass, and sometimes in the bins too, all of them grey, and there are even more pigeons, on every footpath, windowsill, phone wire or on no fixed thing at all, just treading air. There are so many pigeons in London, I suddenly realise how absurd it is to have come all of this way to retrieve a single, particular one. By the time I find the right address in Bethnal Green, I’m tired, thirsty, too hot from tramping around, from the streets and buildings and underground trains all crawling with moving bodies. I want to tell the woman who phoned my great-uncle that she should never have removed the band around its ankle; that she should have disregarded his pigeon like all of the others, but, of course, I only thank her and accept her tea.
I expect Martha to be somehow less pigeon-like, more special. I want her to be a bird-of-paradise pigeon, but she is grey like all the others.
My friend’s flat is in a Victorian terrace in New Cross, on the top floor. It’s terribly clean, and I hope she hasn’t cleaned for me. I always feel enormously guilty when my friends tidy up on my behalf, because cleanliness is not something I have ever noticed or appreciated in the way that other people seem to. My friend is single and childless, so we don’t talk very much about my boyfriend and the baby. Over the dinner she has prepared for us and glasses and glasses of wine late into the night, I’m happy to talk about the fine points of her life and feelings towards them. Only once it’s very late and I’m very drunk do I find myself chattering about homing pigeons, telling her the things I’ve learned from my great-uncle over the years. They’re the only bird able to recognise themselves in a mirror, I tell her. They mate for life, and when a squab is born, it takes three days for its heart to start beating, four for its eyes to open. The homing pigeon is a domestic species; her spirit of adventure has been selectively bred away, and so as soon as she finds herself removed from her nest box, I say, she’ll fly up to a thousand miles just for the quotidian privilege of sleeping there again. My friend seems genuinely interested, or at least, convincingly pretends to be; she fusses over Martha, wanting to know if I’m quite sure she is OK, not injured in any way, or excessively fatigued, dehydrated, hungry.
At first my friend says she thought that homing pigeons were extinct, and I explain that she’s thinking of the passenger pigeon; the last one died in Cincinnati Zoo in 1914 and now her sawdust-stuffed skin is on display in the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, and people make pilgrimages to see her. She is called Martha, I tell my friend, and this pigeon is her namesake. Now she wants to know how they’re trained, and I tell her that some breeders believe the best way is just to be nice to their birds, to build a bond strong enough for them to attempt to fly back to their treasured home and treasured human whatever the conditions: over channels, through storms, across the paths of peregrine falcons. But my great-uncle uses a different method, I tell my friend, the one he believes to be the most effective. My great-uncle only races hens, and each hen is first allowed to pick a mate and raise young, in order that, even after they’re weaned, she retains a powerful attachment to the nest box where they were raised, and then, only after she has returned intact from a race does my great-uncle grant her access to her box and mate, her promised land. He trains his birds by means of deprivation and reward, I tell her, and my friend says, isn’t that kind of cruel? And I agree; it is.
A couple of times over the course of the long evening, my friend suddenly stops speaking in the middle of a sentence. Her eyes widen and she holds a hand up to hush me, but after several seconds, she waves her upheld hand and says, never mind me, I’m sorry, it’s nothing. Just before we go to bed – she in her room, I on the futon – she explains that she has seen a mouse, and though she hasn’t been able to find any of its traces, though it hasn’t stolen any food or nibbled any wires, it still bothers her because she is afraid of things which scuttle, of things with naked tails. Now she tells me how, one night she attacked the flat with duct tape, sealing up every fissure and gap, every skirting board. If I happen to hear a mouse-like sound during the night, or see a mouse-like thing, my friend says, I have to promise to tell her. She is not absolutely sure she’s sealed it in instead of out.
I don’t fall asleep straight away; I lie on the futon feeling red-wine sick, studying the indeterminate shapes of someone else’s room in the dark, the unfamiliar shafts of light. I listen for the mouse, but all I can hear is the traffic passing, the pigeon shuffling and muttering in her cat box. I can’t sleep and now the drunkenness subsides and I start to miss my boyfriend again, to miss my baby, and I realise that this must be exactly how Martha feels.
6.
Martha seems perkier in the morning, but I feel abysmal, as though I have been beaten-up, poisoned, water-boarded. I haven’t drunk so much alcohol in a long time, not since before I learned that I was pregnant, and the hangover renders me vulnerable to all the slightest things which are wrong with my body: my earlobe throbs and my lower back begins to ache; I feel a cold sore coming. My friend says she’ll walk me to the train station; already I’ve forgotten the way.
Before we part, my friend and I agree to make that pilgrimage together some day, to Washington, to go and visit the original Martha. Standing on the platform with my bag and cat box after she has gone, I watch a man outside the station, down in the street below. He is wearing fluorescent yellow and trying to lift the cover off a manhole. He has a long metal gadget hooked into one of its dents but he is struggling to angle it properly; the cover repeatedly rises up about ten or twelve inches before clanging back down again, and each time it does, it pulls him down a fraction after it, causes him to stumble. For as long as it takes for my train to arrive, I watch the fluorescent man battling against this contraption invented and cast in iron and set into the street by other fluorescent men just like him.
I have to take three different trains before I arrive at the ferry port, and every time I’m out again in the open air, amongst the free pigeons, and then at the quay side, I think about the feathered missiles, the ashcoloured fireworks; I think about liberating Martha. But I know, of course, this would be pointless. On the ferry, I find us a quiet corner on the topmost deck, an empty bench in the shelter of the funnel. I place her down beside me and watch her tiny man’s bald head through the window of her cat box, the way her tiny man’s arms are hidden and bound. I extend my finger through the bars and stroke her grey plumage, clammy with salt and rain and spew.
Before I left for London, my great-uncle told me that he wasn’t going to race pigeons any more. The rules have changed too much, not just because of bird flu but because of pylons, masts, satellites. Nowadays, the air is full of radio waves and phone signals; it interferes with the earth’s magnetic field, with ley lines, with Feng Shui, with water diviners, with the tiny particles of iron inside a homing pigeon’s beak, my great-uncle told me – in different words. It was the only race in the world – he said, in these words exactly – with a single starting gate but a thousand different finishing lines. Now it’s just like any other race; now it’s just like all the other races.
ANIMAL HEART
Niven Govinden
Ligh
ter than he ever felt; in transit he’s free of the bulk that’s plagued him all his life. Through his weightlessness he understands how inconsequential he is as a form; one of a million sycamores scattered by the wind. His learning comes from nature: the animals that are bred and killed on his father’s farm; how one creature is replaced by another. Death, not of one’s choosing, but determined by others. He no longer has a voice, his throat raw from the pain he’s been made to express. Hoarseness too, from his captors. The fourth man, who stands at the bottom of the tower, who enjoyed his work more than the others, shouting now until his voice reduces to a whistle. Let this be the last time this bastard speaks to anyone. Let his vigour and greed rob him of that which his deems so precious: his righteous tone. Both his fear and hatred are finite: the length of time it will take him to hit the ground. He understands distance like never before; and how, in his case, the pull of both death and gravity are intertwined. The month before he butchered a goat with his father to celebrate the birth of his sister’s child. The two of them had stood apace from the animal, untethered in the yard, watching it gorge on a final meal of scraps; to their minds, oblivious to its fate. He watched his father’s movements: how he managed to be both fast and gentle as he crept towards the beast and scooped it up into his arms; the width of his palm as he stroked its head upwards from eyes to crown, firm and slow; words passing from his lips that he was unable to hear; soothing the animal the way he too had been soothed as a child. He understood in those five swift steps from the kitchen to the barn door, where the cutlass was waiting, that parenthood was itself a lie: its kindness could no longer be believed if soft words could belie violence so readily. When, at the top of the tower, one of his captors had said ‘We will get you something to drink soon. Pepsi,’ he knew then what he was in for. He did not need the blindfold removed to see the truth marked on their faces. He gives thanks that his family are not here; that the party he chose to visit was in another town that took half a day to travel to. He is proud that he withheld his name, and that he was unable to identify the others (nor they him, if they too were similarly rounded up on leaving). He is proud that he has cried and screamed, and uttered noises that made them uncomfortable; naturally effeminate notes that made them beat him more. He is still learning how the world works, no more so than in these past days; learning on his feet; aware that he too can instil a fear of his own; that it remains in his power to do all that he can to make them afraid. ‘Fifteen is nothing. If you are old enough to dance with these men, you are old enough for the punishment,’ the fourth man said as he was pushed up the tower steps to the balustrade. The shouts from below – cheers, screams, prayers; it no longer matters – recede into the distance as he travels; deafened by the rushing air and his heartbeat that races alongside. It is only now that he sees his body as a machine; how he has been engineered by something greater than physiology; streamlined and functional despite his defects. That only through levity, he is so capable. The mark he will leave. Flails. Flies. Falls.
A Kind of Compass Page 13