The Blackbird Singularity

by Matt Wilven

  It’s going really well. I’ve got every loose object packed up. The boxes are labelled with marker pens, stacked neatly. Everything is in its place. I just have the bulky furniture to deal with. Then I notice the windowsill. The retro 1960s robot should be in a toy box but the toy boxes are taped up and at the bottom of a pile of boxes in the attic. This single, defiant object brings the gravity of the situation falling upon me.

  In violent despair, I grab the wardrobe and heave it over. It crashes into the middle of the room. I grab the retro 1960s robot and jump onto the back of it, smashing the robot down again and again. Somewhere along the way the MDF backing cracks and I fall into the main body. Trying to destroy the rest is difficult. I keep stubbing my fingertips and knuckles. When my thumb cracks on a side panel I cry out in pain and stop. The robot doesn’t have a scratch on it. I drop it in with the rubble.

  My arms are full of adrenalin. I fall over trying to stand up. Looking at the mess I’ve made, I begin concocting the most plausible lie for Lyd: I had to smash it because it wouldn’t fit in the attic. All the dints on the main body, I’m not so sure about. I’ll probably have to work things so that it never sees the light of day again.

  By the time I hear the front door open downstairs I’ve taken up the sides and doors of the wardrobe, filled a bin bag with broken pieces of MDF and tossed the retro 1960s robot behind the piles of boxes in the attic. I’m in the process of taking screws out of the slats on the child-sized bed.

  I try to stay calm about Lyd being home but immediately fail. Blood rushes to my head as I hear her on the stairs. My arms feel light and jittery. My hands begin trembling. I try to maintain my conviction about my decision to do all this but I suddenly want to cry.

  She is craning her neck to see if I’m in my writing room as she passes but then stops dead, noticing that Charlie’s bedroom door is open.

  “No,” she says, looking through the doorway.

  She’s wearing her black trouser suit with a white blouse which either means she woke in a highly emotional state and needed the suit to feel solid and professional or she had an important and stressful meeting today. Whichever it was, there is gloom in her eyes and it’s rapidly expanding into damnation.

  “I can’t believe you did this.”

  She walks away.

  “It had to be done,” I call after her, getting up and moving into the corridor.

  She stops before our bedroom door and turns back to face me: vacant, inhuman. I stay by Charlie’s doorway, defending my decision to box up the room.

  “I know you’re not ready for this,” I say, “but we have to face what’s coming.”

  She walks up to me.

  “I don’t have to face anything,” she says.

  She punctuates the sentence by pushing me in the chest. I stumble back and jar my spine on the doorframe. After looking at the floor for a couple of seconds, trying to calm herself, Lyd launches at me, flapping her arms wildly.

  “Heartless. Bastard.”

  “Stop. Stop!”

  I grab her wrists and restrain her.

  “There was still time,” she whimpers, limp and instantly defeated now that I’ve grabbed her.

  “Time for what?”

  “It’s not too late.”

  I move my head, trying to gain eye contact. She evades my attempts.

  “I don’t have to go through with it,” she says.

  “Go through with what?”

  “I don’t have to keep the baby.”

  “An abortion?”

  “It’s my body,” she says, looking off to the side.

  “But… we told your family.”

  She turns away from me but doesn’t walk off.

  “Is that what you really want?” I ask, putting my hand on her upper arm.

  Her shoulder flinches. I take my hand away.

  “It’s too late,” she says. “We can’t keep him now.”

  She walks into our bedroom. I follow.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Forget it.”

  “It needed to be done. Baby or no baby. Do you really want an abortion?”

  She sits on the bed and puts her face in her hands.

  “I just want everything to stop, just for a minute. I’m tired, and nauseous. My whole body is sore. I have constant headaches. And you’re on me as soon as I get through the door. The house is never empty. I’ve got this thing inside me. I’m never alone.”

  I’m trying to make my face express sympathy rather than confusion.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “I’ll give you more time to yourself.”

  “You should have told me…”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye.”

  I sit by her on the bed.

  “I’m sorry,” I repeat. “I didn’t think. Do you want to look through some of the boxes?”

  “I don’t want anything to do with it.”

  It’s clear that she needs to be alone. I put my hand on her back for a moment. She looks repulsed by the physical contact so I stand up and leave the room. I think about going downstairs and making her a nice dinner but I have to stand by my decision so I go into Charlie’s room and carry on dismantling his bed.

  When I’ve put the pieces of the bed up in the attic and am in the process of sliding the ladder up into its mechanism, Lyd comes to the doorway. Seeing the room empty makes her turn her head away, raising one hand to her mouth and resting the other on her stomach.

  “You should come in,” I say.

  “I can’t even look at it.”

  I know what she means. My guts feel hollow. I step into the corridor and close the door behind me.

  “I don’t want an abortion,” she says.

  “No?”

  “I don’t know why I said that.”

  “No?”

  “I know it’s not… I need a drink. Do you want one?”

  “Sure,” I say, struggling not to reproach her for all the alcohol she’s still drinking.

  We go downstairs to the kitchen and she pours from an open bottle of Rioja. I wonder to myself when she opened it.

  We sit at the kitchen table. After a large first sip, Lyd sighs with relief.

  “I didn’t mean to go crazy up there,” she says. “I guess I thought we’d be using your study as the baby’s room.”

  “I’m sorry. I thought it was the right thing to do. What about this abortion? This idea must have come from somewhere?”

  “I’m tired. I was being spiteful. I hate feeling this irrational.”

  “Do you want to talk about it?”

  She thinks for moment.

  “The past keeps changing,” she says.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Everything’s slipping away. None of it’s real. Last time, we were so young, so wrapped up in ourselves. We had no idea what it meant to be a family. We changed so fast, learnt things so quickly.”

  “We had to.”

  “There were all these new, spaces, inside me… When he was taken away they didn’t disappear. I’m so lost inside myself. I’m a mother. You know? I never stopped being his mother.”

  “He wasn’t taken,” I say, correcting her.

  “No,” she confirms.

  “Sorry, but I can’t think of it like that.”

  “No. I know.”

  We pause.

  “You’ll always be his mother.”

  “But I’m not. I’m not a mother. Not anymore. Knowing that a part of our life with him was still here, that it was real, that was important to me.”

  “His room…”

  “It’s never going to feel like a baby’s room. It’s Charlie’s room.”

  “We have to start looking forward. We have to try to make it feel right.”

  “Something in me was kept alive, knowing that all his things were behind that door; it was like Schrödinger’s cat.”

  At this last remark she almost laughs but sighs grief through her nost
rils instead.

  “We can’t cling to our old life. We have to get ready for our new one.”

  “I don’t want it…”

  I sip my wine quietly.

  “The thing in Charlie’s room,” she says. “It’s gone for ever. That part of me. I can’t be that mother again. The mother I’m going to be. That’s somebody else.”

  “Whatever’s coming, we have to accept it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s coming whether we like it or not,” I say, raising my voice a little.

  This hint of aggression does nothing but subdue Lyd further.

  “I can feel it changing,” she mumbles, before slugging down the last of her wine. “He’s not here anymore.”

  “He was already gone.”

  “No, he wasn’t,” she says. “Not completely.”

  She stands up and leaves the kitchen. I look at the sliding door absently, wondering how much of him I took away from her. I can faintly hear Blackie whistling up on the drainpipe. It soothes me to think of him out there, alone in the world, singing in the face of it all. Listening to him, I’m slowly guided back to the idea that packing up the room was the right thing to do.

  FOUR

  Lithium was one of the three stable elements synthesised in the moments of primordial fusion after the Big Bang. It rarely occurs freely in nature but there are traces of it in almost everything. Nucleosynthesis calculations present a “cosmological lithium discrepancy” because, in the atmosphere of dwarf stars, lithium abundance is often three times lower than expected. The amounts of hydrogen and helium (the other two stable elements synthesised) tally perfectly with predictions but the irregular lithium levels throw all of stellar physics and Big Bang nucleosynthesis into question.

  Lyd is making a rocket, walnut and avocado salad. I’m pacing around the kitchen, being a bit useless. We’re listening to Robert Johnson on the stereo. Whenever Lyd moves I seem to be standing in her way. Things have been strained since I packed up Charlie’s room. Lyd seems to think that I’ve crossed a sacred line, undermined all the fundamental things we hold dear, and she’s now applying the theory that I lack empathy to almost everything I do.

  “I just think you should have told her in person,” she says.

  “What’s the difference? I probably would have waited another two months if I didn’t feel bad about the fact that your family already knew.”

  “You’re constantly punishing her for remarrying, without even thinking about it.”

  “It didn’t even occur to me that there was a proper way of doing it.”

  “Maybe it did,” she says, scooping out an avocado. “Maybe it didn’t.”

  “I’ve admitted that I’m not particularly bothered about seeing my stepdad and stepsister.”

  “John and Chelsea,” she corrects me.

  “She only ever calls me when they’re both out the house. She cuts me short if I call when they’re in.”

  “She’s just trying to keep everybody happy. You want her all to yourself, and they want her all to themselves.”

  “In her eyes, I’m part of a previous life.”

  “We all have our separate lives.”

  I turn the music off.

  “Are you ready?” I ask.

  “Not really.”

  “Come on, I’ve been waiting ages.”

  “Fine,” she says, putting down the knife, “but you can make the dressing.”

  We’re griping at each other but I’m not going to let this ruin all my hard work. I’ve been building up to this moment for weeks. Lyd has promised she’ll stay in the kitchen doorway, quiet and still. She moves into position.

  I leave a small pile of sultanas on our breakfast counter, open the sliding door, sit on the usual stool and whistle. Seconds later Blackie flies out from the evergreen, across the lawn, through the open doorway and lands on the edge of our breakfast counter.

  We’ve been eating our breakfast together like this most mornings. One day this week, when I slept in, I found him waiting at the sliding door and when I finally appeared he pecked at the glass to attract my attention.

  He sees me sitting on my stool with a bowl in front of me, the usual pile of sultanas at his end, and presumes everything is normal. As promised, Lyd watches him peck at the sultanas silently from the kitchen doorway but only for about fifteen seconds before she says:

  “This is really creepy.”

  Blackie looks at Lyd, back at me and releases a very angry and disapproving sound:

  – SEEEEE, POOK-POOK-POOK! –

  Then he flies back out of the sliding doors, across the lawn and into the evergreen.

  “You annoyed him,” I moan.

  “And he annoyed me,” she says. “I don’t want his gross little bird feet on my breakfast counter. I don’t know where he’s been. What if he craps in here?”

  “He doesn’t. He won’t. He’s smarter than that.”

  “He’s not smart. He’s just figured out a new way of getting food.”

  “No,” I say, “he likes coming in because he’s brave. He’s a risk-taker. He likes showing off.”

  “Why can’t you make real friends instead of pretending some flea-ridden bird loves you?”

  “I have real friends.”

  “I don’t want you encouraging wild animals to come into my kitchen,” she says. “It’s weird.”

  “Your breakfast counter? Your kitchen?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I think your parents are finally getting through to you.”

  “Don’t be stupid. Of course they’re not.”

  I realise that I want to talk about this even less than she does and so redirect our attention to the bird.

  “I like having breakfast with him. It feels special, like it’s a part of our new life.”

  She shakes her head and rolls her eyes.

  “That sounds like it could be your mum outside.”

  “Lyd, don’t be like this. I thought you’d think it was, I don’t know, cool.”

  “Go and let your mum in.”

  I stand looking at her. The doorbell rings.

  “Vince. Go.”

  “He’s a good omen. I’m telling you.”

  I hear her mutter as I leave the room:

  “Of course he is.”

  When I answer the door my mum’s face erupts into a happiness that’s going to be very difficult to follow through on. She rushes forward, puts her arms around my neck and makes a faux-excited vowel sound:

  “Eeeeeeeeeeeee.”

  “Hi, Mum.”

  She lets go and shuffles back with an excited wiggle to get a better look at me. She’s wearing this season’s Smart Look range from Next. Green and metallic tones, monochrome patches, premium fabric; she looks good but very much of the High Street. When I was little we were poor so now she treats herself.

  John is looking up and down the street, unimpressed (as he is by everything). He wears grey old-man trousers (he’s had them so long that I already know the rear seam is poorly restitched with white thread) and an untucked peach pastel shirt that the nineties forgot to take with them. If I had to signify the word boredom with one object it would be his large, drooping, grey moustache.

  “John,” I say, acknowledging him and holding out my hand.

  “Vinny,” he says, in his flat monotone, giving my hand one firm shake with a nod to match.

  (Nobody calls me Vinny.)

  “Little sis,” I say to Chelsea.

  She glances up from the screen of her mobile phone for half a second, screws up her face a little bit and then looks back down. She’s wearing blue Nike tracksuit bottoms, Reebok classics and a cheap stripy sweater that says C’est la vie across the front in a handwritten font.

  “Can I take madam’s bag?” I ask her.

  Chelsea takes a step away from me without looking up.

  “Are you two okay?” my mum asks, looking into the house. “Where’s Lydia?”

  “Good, thanks,�
� I say, taking her bag and grabbing John’s from him. “She’s in the kitchen.”

  “I hope she’s not going to any trouble. We had Kentucky on the motorway. Didn’t we, love?”

  “Aye,” says John. “We did.”

  “I’m sure it’s fine,” I say, ushering them in. “I’ll just take your bags up.”

  Charlie’s room is empty besides our visitor’s double mattress and a chest of drawers. I stripped the wallpaper and whitewashed the walls at the start of the week. Every time I walk into the room I feel like my heart has been scraped out. Lyd hasn’t even looked at it yet.

  I drop the bags by the mattress and rush down to save Lyd from any social calamity that might be ensuing but, on the contrary, she’s still in the kitchen and they have made themselves at home in the living room. The TV is already on and blaring out heinous advertisements. Lyd is putting cling film over the top of her bowl of salad. The kettle is on.

  “Just making them a brew,” she says, smiling at me with as little aggression as she can manage.

  “Did they even say hello?”

  “Your mum did.”

  “I can’t believe they ate fried chicken on the way here,” I say. “I told them you were making lunch.”

  “It’s just a salad. It will keep for tomorrow… Or whenever.”

  “But you bought all that nice fresh bread.”

  “Forget about it. They’re here now. Let’s just try and keep them happy.”

  “Good luck.”

  Lyd smiles. She likes how anxious and critical I become around my family. It’s a shame she’s struggling to forgive me for Charlie’s room.

  “Remember, it’s your mum you want to see. As long as she’s alright.”

  I nod and kiss her on the cheek.

  “Take these through.”

  I take the two teas to the living room and put them on the coffee table.

  John already has his laptop out. Chelsea is still glued to her mobile phone. Mum is watching the TV. Their lifestyle is like a chain restaurant; everything around them is completely interchangeable. They have the charmless ability to pick up their world and somehow dump it in your front room within five seconds.