The Blackbird Singularity

by Matt Wilven

  “It doesn’t matter,” I say, fighting the blood gushing through my veins, attempting to project an image of normality. “It’s mating season. I think he’s paired off.”

  She looks out through the patio doors as though she’s only just registered that it’s spring. The brightness makes her wince.

  “You okay?”

  “Just another headache,” she says.

  “Can I get you anything for it?”

  She shakes her head, puts her elbow on the breakfast counter and clamps her middle finger and thumb around her temples, moving them in tiny circles. With the other hand, she pushes her plate away. I start clearing up.

  When Lyd leaves the house it feels empty and I’m uninspired, almost afraid of writing. Words seem to have abandoned me. I stare at a blank page in my notebook and then check my email.

  The inbox is full of the usual stuff from websites I’m signed up to – books I should read, music I should hear, tickets I should buy, films I should watch, jobs I should apply for, clothes I should wear, old web accounts I should tend to, competitions I should enter, food I should order, discounts I should take advantage of – an algorithmic world scarily close to correct but, thankfully, just slightly wrong. There’s nothing from the magazines I sent the last batch of short stories to, nothing from old friends, nothing from an actual person.

  I check my junk mail.

  It’s even worse in there: offensively transparent scams and corporate click-bait that even my corporate email provider thinks is too invasive. I’m careful with my email address so it took them fifteen years but the Viagra spam I’ve heard so much about has finally started arriving. In amongst the devious titles designed to get me to click there’s:

  From: *CHARLIE*

  Subject: (1) Re: contact me please…

  I delete it along with all the rest of the junk.

  When I click back on my inbox my junk folder has (1) next to it. I click it and look.

  Email from: *CHARLIE*

  Subject: (2) Re: contact me please…

  I click delete again and it pops back into my junk inbox, instantly this time.

  Email from: *CHARLIE*

  Subject: (3) Re: contact me please…

  I start deleting it again and again until my head falls into a spiral. When I stop clicking it says:

  Email from: *CHARLIE*

  Subject: (56) Re: contact me please…

  It must be a clever new kind of junk mail, a tracker in it or something. I’m not technologically gifted but I know better than to open it.

  The word CHARLIE flashing back onto my screen again and again has made me feel like he’s in the house somewhere. Behind me. Around me. I need to get out, see a fresh face; somebody separate from the entanglements of my intimate life but close enough to understand them. The only person who fits into this category is Jamal. I stand up impulsively and leave, heading towards him.

  I don’t see a single blackbird on the twenty-minute walk over to his house but I can hear them everywhere; hiding in bushes, behind houses, in trees. My knock on the door is slightly desperate, like I need to escape the noise.

  Jamal answers the door with an unlit joint hanging out of his mouth, squints at outside’s brightest and motions for me to follow him inside. His long, greying dark hair is held back in a ponytail. He’s wearing his usual black T-shirt and ripped, oil-stained jeans. As always, the entire floor of his house is lined with newspaper and covered with small chunks of steel and aluminium that have neat lines of washers, pieces of plastic and nuts and bolts next to them. It smells of spray oil, tar and cannabis resin. There are carefully exposed foot-shaped holes in the newspaper to indicate how people must navigate the room. The couch, the chairs, the coffee table and the kitchen table (from a sideways glance) are all covered with newspapers and motor parts. Each stair has a carburettor sitting on a newspaper, pushed over to the right-hand side.

  Upstairs there are two bedrooms. He uses one as a workshop, for more serious work, but his actual bedroom is where he spends most of his time, polishing pieces of metal cross-legged on his bed and putting things together so he can sell them on the Internet and make his meagre living (he inherited his house from a childless, divorced aunty who always favoured him over her other nieces and nephews).

  A quick look into his bathroom reveals a bathtub full of engine parts soaking in a murky grey liquid which is giving off noxious fumes. I fleetingly wonder how he cleans himself but realise I haven’t seen him without oil-stained skin for almost ten years. I’m not sure he does wash.

  In his bedroom, he carefully takes the four corners of a newspaper, gathers up the pieces of a camshaft and puts the bundle in the foot of his wardrobe, revealing an old wooden chair for me to sit on in the process. He steps up onto his bed as though navigating the ledge of a fifty-storey building (there are lots of loose pieces of metal on sheets of newspaper) and gestures towards the chair. By the time I get to it and sit down he has relit his slightly oil-stained joint and is scraping rust from the main section of a crankshaft.

  Until now Jamal has been silent. He can only talk properly whilst he works. He’s better at engaging when his mind is diverted.

  “So,” he says, “what can I do for you?”

  “Just needed to get out of the house.”

  “Spliff?”

  He offers it to me and glances at my legs, jigging up and down.

  “No, thanks,” I say, putting my hands on my thighs to stop them moving. “Feeling a bit edgy as it is.”

  “Yeah? What’s going on?”

  “Nothing. The usual. Life stuff.” I stand up and walk over to the window, evading little piles of scrap on the floor. “Do you know Serge and Gloria are cheating on each other?”

  I met Jamal in the same shared house as the one I lived in with Sergio after university. Whilst Sergio was seeing Gloria in the evenings, we often smoked weed and had long philosophical discussions. Jamal and Sergio share a passion for vintage cars so they always stayed in touch a little bit. Occasionally, they go to a motor show or trade fair together. I sometimes think they keep it up because I’m an umbilical cord between them – this could be sheer narcissism though.

  “It was always going to happen,” he says.

  “You think?”

  “Yeah, man. She constantly forces her presence everywhere in his life, undermines him in front of his friends, emasculates him. He’ll be having a fling with someone who lets him cut loose a bit, most likely younger. And Gloria’s probably realised that she bullies Serge so much because she wants someone more macho, someone who won’t put up with all her oppressive shit.”

  “Do me a favour. Never tell me what you think about me and Lyd.”

  He laughs at this, but he’s also frowning at the way I’ve started treading back and forth across his room. I can’t help it though. I can’t stay still.

  “You two are a good match. Yin and yang. And probably not the way around you imagine.”

  “Maybe. And you’re bang on. Serge is running off with someone younger. East Asian girl. I guess he’s cutting loose but, in some ways, she seemed to have him by the balls too. Gloria’s been sleeping with Peter.”

  “Peter, Peter? Peter Bateman, Peter?”

  “Yep. The psycho himself.”

  Jamal shakes his head and scrubs with more ferocity.

  “Is there anyone that guy doesn’t end up fucking? He truly doesn’t know where to draw the line.”

  (Peter once seduced and had sex with Jamal’s little sister in Serge and Gloria’s downstairs bathroom when she was drunk at their summer barbeque.)

  “I try not to think about it,” I say. “The world’s depressing enough without wondering why all intelligent and beautiful women seem to want to sleep with him.”

  “Does Lydia know?”

  “No. Not yet. I told them I wouldn’t say anything but I can’t keep lying to her. With Lyd, it’s like the truth is always there, talking to her, even if I’m not saying anything. It starts twittering in
my ears. The only upside is that she’s pregnant, and I don’t want to upset her. So at least there’s actually a reason to keep quiet.”

  He raises his eyebrows and stops scraping at his metal.

  “Lydia’s pregnant?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You can’t just slip the P-bomb in like that. Pregnant?”

  “Yes. Pregnant.”

  “This is major, life-altering news, man. No wonder you’re treading the boards like a caged tiger… Unless you’re trying to talk it down? Is that what you’re doing? Do you not want to talk about it?”

  He starts scraping again. I continue pacing between the far wall and window, careful not to step on any motor parts.

  “I don’t mind,” I say. “But I think I might be unravelling a bit. Not because of the pregnancy. Well, maybe. I don’t know.”

  “So you’ve come to your guru for some sage advice.”

  “You wish you were my guru.”

  He smiles.

  “Congratulations, by the way.”

  “Thanks,” I say. “I think it could be good for us.”

  “So what’s unravelling?”

  I peer out the window. There’s a blackbird pecking for worms down on a bare patch of the mostly overgrown lawn.

  “Oh, nothing really,” I say, with an overwhelming and slightly frightening intuition that I’m not allowed to tell him about Blackie now that I’ve seen this blackbird. “Nothing specific.”

  The blackbird flies up into a tree. I feel a pang of relief and turn to face Jamal. He sucks on his joint a couple of times and puts it back in his ashtray, confused. I have to tell him something.

  “I stopped taking my lithium when I found out about the pregnancy.”

  This statement earns me a rare second of eye contact.

  “Good for you, man,” he says, nodding and then looking back down at his crankshaft. “That’s great. What does Lyd think about it?”

  “She doesn’t know.”

  “So that’s the real secret. Not this stuff with Peter.”

  “I just didn’t want to be… I don’t know.”

  “I never thought you should have been put on that stuff in the first place. You know how I feel about people medicating trauma and depression. All that chemical balance bullshit.”

  “Ironic given your lifestyle choice.”

  He lifts up his joint and smiles at it.

  “Hey, I’m not depressed, man. This stuff just helps me think straight. Most men need a woman. I need this. I thought you’d lost a couple of pounds.”

  “Really?”

  “You look less bloated. More like you. Do you want some chai?”

  “Sure.”

  He gets up and leaves the room, grabbing a darkly stained mug on the way.

  I look around with a sigh. The room, and the impossibility of a woman spending the night in it, make me feel momentarily sorry for him but I also empathise with the level of solitude he has sought out. On the surface it might seem like the house of a disturbed kleptomaniac but it’s also the systematic domain of a cleverly integrated and highly functioning recluse. There is strength and self-assurance in the environment, motivation and attainment. In his presence, I never feel pity or concern. In fact, I envy his resolve. It is only when he leaves the room that the loneliness of it creeps over me. And that is my loneliness, not his.

  He comes back with two cups of chai, strong and black. I take mine with a nod and he carefully gets back into his cross-legged position on the bed. He takes a sip, leans over and puts the cup on his bedside table (which is covered with miscellaneous washers and nuts and bolts). He picks up a small, curved toothbrush with metal bristles and gets back to scraping and scrubbing his crankshaft.

  “I’m so glad you’re off that shit,” he says. “It was no good for you.”

  I nod in agreement, quickly, anxiously.

  “If she finds out though…” I say, pausing with dread. “And, I mean, I can barely sit still. I’m awake all night. I feel like I’ve got electricity running through my veins.”

  “But that can’t last, can it? That’s not how you used to feel, before?”

  “I don’t think so. It can’t be. But if she finds out…”

  He pauses and takes a look at me, wondering if anybody could see anything but a nervous wreck. He doesn’t seem to decide either way but he’s excellent at concealing his thoughts when he wants to be.

  “How’s the queen of the subatomic dealing with being pregnant?” he asks, deciding to balance his view of the situation with an interpretation of Lyd’s current state.

  “She’s busy. Working all the time, as ever. I think she might be drinking too much. Well, for someone who’s, you know. But I can’t really get a handle on her. At the start it seemed okay. She seemed to be working it out. She’s gone more distant now. I thought I’d got through to her a few weeks back but I’ve started getting the feeling she’s not really there again.”

  “Sounds about right. She’s always been evasive. She likes to work things out on her own. But she always seems to get there in the end. She always comes back to you.”

  I nod, fearing the hope he’s trying to give me.

  Jamal always has a pragmatic and assured tone of voice. His words come out spoken as singular truths. More often than not, he’s extremely objective and insightful but he occasionally misses the mark completely. This tone of his is part of the strength that comes from his solitude, because he never has to mediate his opinion or compromise for somebody else, but I’ve come to realise that I can’t always trust it.

  I watch him scraping at his metal, grateful for his friendship. All the things that soothe and satiate his being happen with mechanical precision; rolling joints, cleaning scrap, fitting things together, taking things apart. Everything is always straightforward with him. The world holds no secrets. All the parts fit together.

  “And you’re alright?” he asks. “The withdrawals aren’t too bad? You’re not seeing pink elephants or anything?”

  “No, no,” I say, looking out the window. “Just, you know, a bit anxious. A bit mental. Because I can’t really show it.”

  He nods absently.

  “Good. That’s good, man. She can’t say your heart’s in the wrong place, can she? That’s what I’m taking from this. I know how she feels about you towing the line, and why she wants it that way, but you don’t want to be some kind of zombie-dad, do you?”

  This is all I wanted, to hear somebody say that I’m doing the right thing, but part of me is appalled that he can say I’m on the right track.

  “Thanks,” I say. “But please don’t tell anyone I’m off it.”

  “You know me better than that. You must think it’s the right thing to do though, for the baby.”

  “I just need to get back to me.”

  “Cutting out the lithium has got to be the best way to go about it.”

  I nod and start pacing back and forth again, taking compulsive sips of my chai. I finish mine before he even reaches for his second sip. He’s deeply engrossed in bringing the shine back to the surface of the curved hunk of steel he’s holding. He eventually puts it down, lights his joint and reaches over for his cup.

  “It’s such a relief to tell somebody,” I say.

  “No wonder you’re on edge, man, trying to keep something like this locked up.”

  “I hope you don’t mind. I feel like I’ve just got to…”

  I put my cup down on the windowsill and loosen my arms. I pivot on the balls of my feet, shake my hands and release a bizarre, nasal roar: “Uuuunnncchhhhrrrrrr.” Jamal puts the end of his joint out in the ashtray, exhales with a grin and takes a big gulp of his chai.

  “That’s it,” he says. “Wig out, man. Let it all hang loose.”

  I allow my arms to flop down and shake my body and head from side to side. Jamal laughs and starts making another joint.

  “That feels good,” I say. “I’m so coiled up.”

  “You’ve got to let out your weird, man.”


  “I really do.”

  I shake my face, bounce up and down and make more, strange guttural noises. Jamal is increasingly amused and impressed. He is the only person I know who I could behave this way in front of. A lot of the major decisions he has made in life have been due to his difference, and his fear of the normal. Moments like this only confirm the meaning of our friendship for us.

  Feeling accepted for who and what I am, I dance further into my weirdness. My meat and bones begin to feel slack and loose. I jolt and jerk, twist and spasm. My body is a living concept, nebulous and unique. I’m a demented ballerina, an electric chicken. I’m thrashing and twirling, shaking and writhing, completely lost in the pleasure of it all.

  When I finally stop, out of breath and pleased with myself, I notice that Jamal isn’t smiling anymore. He’s looking fixedly down at the fresh joint he’s making, reluctant to raise his eyes. I can see the wilfulness in his refusal to glimpse my way.

  My smile drops. I look at the floor. Somewhere along the way I’ve kicked one of his piles of scrap and scattered it across the floor, mixing it in with two other piles.

  “Shit, sorry,” I say, bending down, beginning to gather it up.

  He pulls up his right cheek in a tense, forced smile and continues to look down at his joint.

  I quickly pluck out the pieces of metal that look out of place, because they don’t fit in any neat lines. But once I’ve gathered up all the obvious ones the piles become confusing. Lines of bolts appear in two directions at once, crossing each other. Everything looks increasingly random. There’s no order. After moving a big piece of aluminium over to the kicked pile I begin to get anxious that I’m making things even worse, that I’ve completely shuffled the order of everything and it will be better if I just stop.

  “I think I got it back how it was,” I say, sitting back down on the wooden chair, knowing that there is no way that I’ve managed to put things back in their original place.

  He gives the same nod and forced smile, looking at his joint.

  I sigh and look towards the window. My legs are still and the anxiety has gone but it took too much. I went too far. There must be something wrong with me. Jamal is looking downwards too intensely. I think I’m going to leave.