The Blackbird Singularity

by Matt Wilven

  “Ta, love,” says Mum, smiling gently and then raising both eyebrows and smiling with an extra ecstatic theatricality.

  “Aye, ta,” mumbles John, his face made even duller by the light emanating from his laptop.

  “She drinks all this fancy coffee now,” says Mum, rolling her eyes happily (which means Chelsea won’t be happy unless she has a fancy coffee).

  “Oh, right,” I say. “What kind do you like?”

  “You haven’t got it,” states Chelsea. “I like Starbucks.”

  “Lattes?”

  “Aye, yeah, that’s it. Latty.”

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  I go back to the kitchen.

  “Chelsea wants a latte,” I say with a smirk.

  “Well, isn’t she a very sophisticated fourteen-year-old girl?” says Lyd.

  We eye each other wickedly. This visit could be good for us.

  I make a filter coffee and warm some milk in the microwave.

  “This is the best I can do, I’m afraid,” I say, passing Chelsea my concoction.

  Chelsea sneers over the rim of the cup, smells it and takes a sip. Pathetically, I’m eagerly awaiting her response.

  “It’s not like Starbucks,” she says.

  My mum lowers her head and smiles at Chelsea with a distinctly non-threatening face that nonetheless implies that she could perhaps, please, try to do a little bit better than that.

  Chelsea sighs and takes another sip.

  “It’s good though,” she says. “It’s better than what she makes.”

  I put my hands together like a camp waiter, almost say, Thank you, restrain myself, and then walk back to Lyd in the kitchen.

  “How long before they leave?” I ask.

  She laughs.

  An hour later we all get the Tube to Oxford Street. For Lyd’s family eating together and being social is the main event but for my mum it’s shopping – in this case, buying us lots of things for the new baby. We leave John in PC World (so he can stare dully at laptop specifications) and Chelsea in Starbucks (so she can drink lattes and get Wi-Fi on her mobile phone). We arrange to meet them in three hours outside Next (where my mum will have her final blow-out – buying something for everyone).

  Meanwhile, we go inside every baby shop we come across and visit the baby sections in all the big department stores. Me and Lyd both hate shopping (and it’s the last thing she wants to do whilst she’s pregnant) but we put a brave face on because it’s a good chance to communicate with my mum whilst she’s in her element.

  “So, what have Lydia’s parents bought you?” Mum asks, as she looks at overpriced wooden toys in a shop called E is for Elephant.

  “Nothing yet,” I say.

  “Nothing?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Nothing? Lydia? Is that right?”

  “No, they never take us shopping. Do they, Vince?”

  I shake my head with a smile. Lyd is great with my mum.

  “Well, we’ll have to fix that, won’t we? You’ll be needing all sorts.”

  Mum is full of provider’s pride now, and on a shopping mission that only a veteran shopper of her standing can complete within three hours. She rushes us to a more standardised baby shop and zooms around it.

  “Going to need one of them, definitely one of them, one of those… that’s nice… and one of these…”

  We fail to keep pace with her and end up standing by a play area where toddlers are grabbing at an oversized abacus and some giant square cushions that double as building blocks. We stare at the children playing, mildly depressed.

  “Charlie would have been six now,” says Lyd. “You forget they keep growing, don’t you?”

  I take her hand.

  When Mum finds us again she’s managed to attain a trolley. I haven’t seen anybody else with a trolley. God knows where she found it. She’s filled it with all manner of products. At a glance it seems to be a mixture of bare essentials and completely superfluous tat.

  “Mum. That’s way too much. We don’t need all that.”

  “Nonsense. This is just essentials.”

  “How is this essential?”

  I pick up a tacky-looking blue teddy bear.

  “Weeeell, they all need a teddy. Show me one baby without a teddy.”

  “It’s too much, Mum. You can’t afford all this.”

  “I can afford what I want to afford and don’t think I’m done affording things yet.”

  Me and Lyd look at each other and smile with affection.

  “We appreciate it, Linnie,” says Lyd. “But he’s right. It’s too much. Besides, we’ve still got a lot of this kind of stuff up in the attic… from before.”

  My mum’s face sinks.

  “Oh, yes. I’m not thinking, am I? I’m not thinking at all. I’m thinking it’s your first. But it’s not, is it? Oh dear. I’m sorry, loves. I just didn’t think.”

  “Mum, it’s okay.”

  She’s tearing up.

  “You’re just going to have to take out what you’ve already got. God, I’m sorry. I just didn’t think.”

  Lyd goes to the trolley feigning a deeper interest than she actually has.

  “It is lovely stuff you get here though, isn’t it?” she says. “And it’s nice to have some new.”

  My mum’s face immediately reverts from sad to excited.

  “That’s what I say. It’s nice to have some new, isn’t it? And it is lovely stuff.” She grabs Lyd’s elbow and pulls her away. “Come and have a look at this comforter. It’s a bit much but…”

  I’m left waiting with the trolley.

  In the evening Lyd gets out some takeaway menus and suggests we order a couple of large pizzas and eat them with the salad she made earlier. This idea sinks into the abyss without even being acknowledged. She puts the menus down on the coffee table and looks around to see what’s wrong.

  “What you getting?” Chelsea casually asks John, picking up the menu she deems appropriate, making sure Lyd knows that her salad idea has been derailed without debate.

  When the menu has been passed around I order for us all. John: stuffed-crust mighty meaty. Mum: medium Hawaiian. Chelsea: stuffed-crust double pepperoni. Lyd: medium vegetarian. Me: medium Mexican chicken. Then there are the obligatory extras: garlic bread, dough balls, chicken dippers and stuffed jalapenos.

  While we’re waiting for it to arrive we let Chelsea run loose with the remote control, signing us up for a “TV and film on-demand” service. It’s the only time she speaks with any enthusiasm to any of us about anything all day. My mum looks at me and Lyd sweetly, thanking us for making her so happy, which makes us both despair about the girl, but we both smile back awkwardly.

  When the pizza comes my mum rushes to the door to pay.

  Chelsea chooses the first film; a terrible coming-of-age comedy about a bunch of Californian girls with way too much of everything in their lives – like Clueless but without the irony. John chooses the second; an inane thriller set in Boston about a financially motivated kidnapping gone wrong.

  Both films are put together well enough to hold their own but the plots and characters are pitifully transparent. That seems to be part of the fun though. Chelsea, in particular, likes pointing out (in a semi-aggressive fashion) who is going to do what and how they are going to end up.

  “She’s going to be the popular one at the end.”

  “They’ll break up and he’ll get off with her.”

  “She’ll escape with him.”

  “It’ll be him fighting him at the end.”

  When all our pizzas are finished my mum pulls out a bag of chocolate that she’s brought from home and passes different bits around until at least a kilogram of sugar disappears into the spaces between the seemingly indigestible lumps of dough in our bellies. Throughout the night Chelsea gulps down a litre and a half of Coke, John empties six cans of bitter, my mum drinks four cups of tea and me and Lyd have a glass of Coke and a couple of teas.

 
By the end of the evening me and Lyd have terrible stomach aches and they seem to interpret this as a metropolitan softness and laugh at us. They’re not suffering in the same way and instead give heavy sighs and stifled burps that seem to signify deep pleasure.

  I’ve got through the day without any weirdness but, today more than ever, I’ve noticed that all three of my family members constantly deflect emotional contact. They hardly ever look people in the eye and rarely talk about anything except the things they want. It doesn’t seem a particularly healthy way to behave but it does create space for your own anxieties to float around freely, ungazed upon. When we say goodnight I realise that it hasn’t been a stressful day.

  An hour later, staring at an all-too-familiar watermark on the ceiling, I’m hoping that tonight’s wakefulness might be caffeine-related or due to the fact that I’m uncomfortably full. Maybe I’ll start getting drowsy after an hour or so. But the tiredness doesn’t come. Feelings of hopelessness sweep through me instead.

  The sight of Lyd sleeping by my side, growing a human being in her womb, fills me with guilt. Pregnancy is a real risk to her body and it will change the shape of her bones for ever. Meanwhile, I’m betraying her, taking a needless risk – skipping my lithium every day – and all in the name of rediscovering a version of myself that might not have even existed in the first place. Crushing that pink pill and rinsing it down the sink is just part of my daily routine now. It makes me a liar, a coward, a fool. Why do I even imagine that I deserve a life with her?

  I don’t know what day it is, what time, what year. I’m not thinking like that. My sleep has been broken at least four times. Yesterday and tomorrow are islands I’m swimming between. My brain is pulsing. I can hear the beat of blood between my ear and the pillow. The darkness is an alien blue. There’s a cold sweat on my back. A distant noise sounds on the edge of my senses, pulling me further into a waking state.

  A mouse in the walls?

  I sit up and sigh, reaching for the glass of water on my bedside table. I drink half of it and decide to relieve my bladder. Sometimes, even if I don’t need to, squeezing out a few drops of urine is enough to convince myself that I’ve only woken up because I needed the toilet. Afterwards, getting back to sleep is the obvious next step. I have to avoid thoughts like, Waking in the middle of the night is a symptom of the manic cycle. I have to think stealthily.

  I hear it again whilst I’m in the hallway, something shuffling somewhere. It’s an animal of some kind. It lacks the inane lifelessness of a house noise. I stop on the spot and listen quietly, poised, my perceptions soaring.

  There it is again.

  It has a distinct direction. It’s coming from Charlie’s room. I move towards the doorway. As my hand hovers over the doorknob it begins to shake. I’m looking at my vibrating hand but it doesn’t seem like my hand. I can’t feel the shaking. I can only see it.

  Another sound.

  Above me this time.

  Something scurrying in the attic. I rub my arm up and down and listen carefully but the noises seem to have stopped. The tremors in my right hand are settling down. The feeling is returning to my extremities.

  I begin to picture Lyd catching me standing in the hallway in the middle of the night, lurking by Charlie’s door, and I suddenly remember that it’s not Charlie’s door, my mum and John are in there. Chelsea is downstairs on the couch. Charlie doesn’t exist. I feel disorientated, aggrieved. It’s been a long time since I’ve had to realise that he’s dead. It used to happen every morning. This time it was smaller, less intense, but it was there.

  I go to the bathroom and then head back to bed.

  We planned to take my family for a walk on the Heath, let them stare down at London from Parliament Hill and bring them back for a healthy lunch before sending them on their way, but they all stay in bed until 11am. Chelsea goes upstairs to shower and then Mum and John come down with their bags packed. I offer them breakfast, drinks, anything, but they’re set to go.

  “Chelsea wants McDonald’s,” is all Mum says, clearly a little bit upset.

  On the doorstep Mum comes up close and sneaks fifty pounds into my hand.

  “No,” I say, trying to give it back. “You already bought too much yesterday.”

  She tenses her teeth and widens her eyes, begging me not to draw Chelsea or John’s attention to it, then clasps my hand around it.

  “It’s for that demanding TV thing. You didn’t have to do that. It made her night, that did.”

  “I’m far too old for this,” I whisper in protest.

  “You’re never too old for a treat from your mum.”

  She kisses my cheek and then pinches it and wobbles the flesh around with a wink.

  Getting into their car, Chelsea looks over at us, sizes us up, almost says something that looks like it could have been a compliment, sort of nods and then climbs in. John starts the engine and raises a dull salute. My mum gives Lyd an intense hug.

  “Look after him, won’t you, love?”

  “I will, Linnie,” she says.

  Mum comes back to me and squeezes her arms around me.

  “And you look after her.”

  “I will,” I say.

  “And at least think about getting a proper job, so you can take her out and buy her something nice.”

  “Okay, Mum. I’ll think about it.”

  After they drive away, I stumble into the kitchen, lean on the counter and begin despondently eating grapes from the fruit bowl.

  “That wasn’t too bad, was it?” says Lyd, following me in and quickly clearing up the last traces of having had guests.

  “No, I guess not.”

  “What’s up?”

  “Nothing. I’m just being dramatic.”

  “Go on.”

  “I don’t know. It’s just that I really want to be able to connect with her, but we never quite manage it.”

  “She seemed to have a nice time?”

  “I know. Like I said, I’m being dramatic. I didn’t sleep well. After I see her I can never quite shake this feeling that neither of us was really there. We try to reach each other but we can’t.”

  “That’s sad, honey. But everything seemed fine to me.”

  “Maybe I just want too much.”

  “I don’t understand,” says Lyd. “What isn’t there?”

  “Feelings, I guess. They’re there, but they’re behind glass. We can see them in each other but we just can’t feel them.”

  “Your childhood was quite complicated.”

  “I just wish we got more out of it. And I wish those two would respect her a little bit more, see how lucky they are to have her.”

  “I’m sure they do… People can’t go around feeling things and expressing things all the time.”

  “No. I know. But they’re so cold with each other. It scares me that families can be that way. They’re all so separate. They don’t even know they’re depressed.”

  Lyd finally understands.

  “It’s okay,” she says, coming to me and wrapping her arms around my shoulders. “Our family will be nothing like that.”

  This is the first time Lyd has referred to the future in a positive way since we found out she was pregnant. It’s the first time she’s held me since I packed up Charlie’s room. I grab onto her. I don’t want the moment to end.

  FIVE

  The Green Man, one of folklore’s oldest gatekeepers, is said to present his face in leaves and foliage. Those who see him before they enter a wood must beware the tricks he might play. His summer trees are catchers of light and beneath his green skin is a daytime twilight and a starless night of the truest dark. Though the gateway his face creates is impassable, and investigation reveals only dissolution, time spent in his shadows can unearth portions of his world beyond. He is sometimes said to send out woodland creatures to give obscure messages or play pranks and it has also been told that, on very rare occasions, he can blow the entire spirit of the natural world right through a person and shake them t
o the very core of their being.

  On my computer screen this morning there was a yellow Post-It note: Call Sergio. I first met Sergio living in a shared house in Hackney after university. He was having trouble finding a decent job and I was unemployed and struggling with my writing so we became daytime dependents, meeting up in the kitchen for chats and cups of tea. Despite being vastly different we formed a bond that mattered to both of us so, even when he became a wealthy business lawyer and I remained a destitute writer, we stayed in regular contact.

  When Lyd got close with Sergio’s wife, Gloria, we mostly started seeing each other as a group of four. Lots of couples become friends because their children are similar ages, or they have a similar income and like to do similar things. We got on well despite our differences. They are second generation British-Spanish, much richer than us, unable to have children and completely uninterested in literature or science. Yet, somehow, it worked from the outset. We always had good times together.

  When Charlie arrived we didn’t pull towards other couples with children and they didn’t pull away as a couple who couldn’t have children. Me and Lyd were insistent that parenthood wasn’t going to define us as completely as it did for others and Sergio and Gloria enjoyed the proximity to Charlie. The five of us were like an extended family. They babysat for us all the time. In some ways, they got to take on the portion of the parenting identity that we didn’t want and they couldn’t have. When Charlie died they were devastated and that kept us tight, even through the dark times.

  When I see Sergio, he’s walking towards the entrance of the café/bar where we always meet. He, or I, would usually just wait at the table. He’s wearing a designer polo shirt, beige chinos and brown, tasselled moccasins; the usual preppy stuff that I constantly mock him about.

  “Long time, buddy.”

  He offers me his hand with an intense smile.

  “Good to see you,” I say.

  But this handshake is slightly too formal. We usually hug.