by Matt Wilven
“Anyone could do it. Honestly. It’s nothing special.”
“I imagine it’s a very spiritual experience, writing a book.”
“People think writers are creative authorities who work up in the castle but really we’re just fools prattling around in the village. We spend our days chasing imaginary people, misinterpreting messages, doing dull chores. Have you read The Castle?”
She shakes her head.
“It’s good that you’re keeping on top of it,” she says. “With everything that’s going on.”
“I feel like, maybe, if I write a good book it might prove to Lyd that I’m on the right track. She’ll know I haven’t lost it.”
“I don’t think she’d care if you wrote a masterpiece.”
“Probably not.”
A tapping sound comes from the sliding door. My face jolts towards the noise. It’s Blackie, drumming his beak against the glass. My right eyeball flutters and my stomach turns. Jayne looks over, with normal curiosity. An unsettling sense of being watched comes over me. I feel exposed. I can faintly hear the birdsong on the other side of the glass.
“Oh, yes, that’s right,” she says. “Lydia told me about this little guy. Doesn’t he come for his breakfast or something?”
She walks towards the sliding door and Blackie flies away, back onto the lawn.
“Sometimes.”
“Look at his little kiddies badgering him. They’re almost as big as he is.”
I go to the cupboard, grab a handful of sultanas, pull the sliding door across and throw them out onto the lawn. Birdsong floods into the kitchen. Most of the birds fly up onto the fence or on top of the evergreen. Blackie stays on the lawn, quickly takes the opportunity to eat a couple of sultanas and then adds to the whistling rumpus:
– chink-chink, chook-chook, chink-chink, chook-chook –
(She can see your eye twitching.)
I quickly slide the door shut and turn my back to the garden. Jayne watches as the birds all fly back down onto the grass. My right eye is now twitching more than it’s still.
“Look at him feeding them all. Why can’t they just pick up the raisins themselves?”
“Sultanas,” I say.
“Do they always have so many chicks?”
“No. They usually just have two or three but a cat got the female from another nest so the male moved on. This one looks after their chicks as well as his own.”
“Aw, that’s sweet.”
“He looks after his people.”
Jayne turns towards me.
“You know, she’s miserable without you.”
“Really?”
“You don’t have to sound so happy about it.”
“Sorry,” I say, rubbing my eye. “It’s just… she left.”
“Yes. She left. But she could have kicked you out.”
“Do you think that means something?”
“Yes. Of course. Even if she’s too stubborn to admit it.”
“You think I have a chance?”
“Definitely.”
“What should I do? I don’t dare call her. I don’t dare do anything.”
“You could start by taking your medication.”
“That’s not going to happen,” I say, sighing.
“I know you think you stopped taking it for the right reasons but this pregnancy has brought a lot up for Lydia. It’s the worst possible time to try something like this.”
I grab a small glass from the draining board, walk to the fridge and pour myself some orange juice.
“I think it’s the best time,” I say.
I close my eyes for a second whilst I put the juice back in the fridge and my back is turned to her, trying to relax, but my eyeball jitters around behind my eyelid.
“This is why you’ve ended up living on your own. You think you’re doing this for Lyd and the baby but you’re doing it for yourself. You’re living on your own, you’re writing your book instead of looking for work, you’re not taking your medication, and you’re doing all this because it’s what you want. You’re going to end up on your own completely but you don’t see it.”
“I see it. I do. But it’s worth the risk. I don’t want us to live in the shadows.”
“Whatever that means.”
“It’s one of Lyd’s phrases.”
“Personally, I don’t think she’s ever really forgiven you for running off like that. Leaving her to deal with all that mess. This is just throwing it in her face.”
“I know you’re her sister, and I’m sorry to say it, but you don’t know her like I do. And you don’t know our situation, how it feels. She forgave me for all that. She had to, so we could grieve together. This is something else.”
“Forgiving and forgetting are two different things.”
I gulp down my juice, take the glass to the sink and look out the kitchen window. Blackie is still feeding his five pestering children. Jayne’s right. He shouldn’t have to feed them all. They’re big enough to feed themselves. Why does he put up with it? Why does he let them twitter at him and bounce around him and make him do whatever they want? It’s too stressful a sight. I have to turn my back to it.
“Vince… Do you have any plans?”
“When you look back at how she was when she was younger you all see the scientist in her, the high achiever, and that’s good because you’re proud of her, and you love the role she plays in your life, but she’s not really like that. Not at heart. None of you see how deeply sensitive she is, how soft her humour is, how forgiving she is, how she always puts those she loves before herself. The decisions she makes reflect who she is, how she thinks and feels. We would have never got back together if she hadn’t forgiven me.”
I turn to face Jayne. She’s looking at me, unsettled, because I’m resting the palm of my hand over my right eye. I’m not sure how long it’s been there. I lower it and my eye starts twitching again. I screw up my cheek to try to stop it in its tracks but it doesn’t work, it just makes me look like I’m pulling a strange face.
“You obviously don’t want to talk about your plans. But we can talk about Lydia if you want. Why do you think she left?”
“I don’t know.”
“I want to help you, Vince. That’s why I’m here. I think you’re good for her. I think you’re right for each other. You probably do know her better than I do. And with a baby on the way it makes sense for you to be together. But you have to face up to the reasons why she might have left you. You have to be willing to change.”
“Into what?”
“I don’t know. You know Lydia. She doesn’t talk about this stuff. But decisions have to be made. You’re living in a house she’s paying for, for a start.”
“Do you think you can get her to talk to me?”
“Do you really think you’re ready?” she says. “No offence, but you need to do something with yourself.”
“You mean get a job? That’s all it ever comes down to for you lot.”
“No. That’s not what I meant. But since you brought it up: what if Lydia did stop supporting you? How would you afford your own place? How would you be a father if you had to separate? These should be eventualities you’re preparing for. You have to be able to look after yourself. Otherwise, how will anyone think you can look after a child?”
“Charlie was happy and my life, the way I lived, was no different to how it is now.”
“When Charlie was born your first novel had just been published and your writing career looked promising. Mum and Dad had helped you both get on the property ladder so you were cushioned from all of that. When it turned out your books weren’t selling, Lydia’s book suddenly made lots of money. So it made sense for you to stay at home and look after Charlie, because you could. Everything’s changed since then. Lydia’s quite well-off but you’re back at the start again. Surely you see that?”
“I do. I know.”
“You have to start looking after yourself or you’re going to lose her.”
I s
uddenly decide that I can’t stand another second of this. I feel like my eye is going to explode. I approach Jayne, put one hand on her lower spine and the other on her shoulder and begin to usher her out of the house. Her eyes bulge with surprise but she accepts her fate without a challenge.
“Thanks for coming,” I say. “I’m really going to think this through. I’ll try harder. I promise.”
I open the door for her. All the brightness and birdsong rushes in. I screw up my face and urge Jayne out onto the doorstep. She steps out. I’m just about to close the door on her when she turns around and says:
“Vince.”
She’s holding something out. Her glass of water. I take it from her.
“Look after yourself,” she says. “Think about what I’ve said.”
I close the door.
I should have stayed crouched by the breakfast counter.
After Jayne’s visit I can’t concentrate on writing or editing so I turn off my computer and draw blackbirds in my notebook to pass the time, trying not to think about the version of me that Jayne would be happy with. The first image is a terrible attempt at a realistic depiction, unmeasured and mutant. The second actually looks like a blackbird but it’s more of a generic sketch. The third one is cartoonish and looks more like a crow.
It’s a relieving change to watch the black ink from the nib of my fountain pen creating lines rather than words. The twenty-six letters of the alphabet seem so oppressive compared to the casual strokes a picture uses to gradually acquire its meaning. The hand moves more freely. The system is less restrictive.
I gradually start producing smaller and more emblematic images until I’ve developed a simple glyph. It’s made up of two hooked and curved lines that give just the right impression. As I’m drawing these glyphs I start to hear Blackie up on the drainpipe. His whistle is entwining with the hooks and the curves of the lines. My mind is sinking and the symbols on the page are swelling and losing focus. I can’t see the nib of my pen. My writing hand is shaking.
When Blackie releases a distinctive flurry of tweets a thought strikes me, true and bold. I rush to the baby’s room, pull down the ladder and climb into the attic. The plastic white board is directly behind me, by the wall, covered by an old sheet. I grab the torch, fling off the sheet and illuminate Charlie’s family portrait.
He depicted the house from the back, not the front. You can see this from the amount of wall that the doorway takes up. The sliding door is the entrance to inside. He was by no means a housebound child, we took him out all the time, but to him the outside world is the back garden.
The first figure is Mum. Her arms are a horizontal yellow line: love, acceptance. He has been very careful to give her a red smile.
The central figure is Charlie. He also has a red smile. His head is oversized, bigger than either of ours, and his body is a tiny lump. His arms are black: one pointing up at his mother, one pointing up at me.
I have a smile too but mine is black. I’m very tall. Relatively, Lyd could be my child. She’s closer to his size. My arms are a purple diagonal line: one end points down towards him and the other up.
I follow the line of my arm up the image and there it is, the thing I’m looking for. I’ve stared at this portrait a hundred times and never made anything of it. Up on the top right corner of the house are two very small, very purposefully placed, hooked black lines. They are strikingly similar to my glyph. They represent a blackbird.
I stare at these two small, interlocking black hooks for three or four minutes. Did Charlie know about the blackbirds? Did Blackie speak to Charlie? Is Charlie speaking through Blackie? Is there a link? The picture provides no answers. It only adds weight to the creeping feeling that blackbirds are in control of my fate.
My contemplation is broken by the absence of solitude. There’s something behind me. Eyes are on me. I know it’s Charlie but I don’t want to look. My heart is racing. My hands tingle and begin to sweat. I can feel his smile in the air around me. Almost hear his giggle.
I slowly turn around but, as I do, the feeling goes, the smile wanes. It’s not Charlie. It’s Blackie, standing in the middle of the floor. He doesn’t move when I shine the torch on him. He must have got in through the cracked tile, the route the dead mother took to build her nest in here. His presence is filling me with dread. There is a plan and Blackie is a part of it. He opens his beak:
– chink-chink, chook-chook, chink-chink, chook-chook –
FIVE
Photons, the principal particles in electromagnetic fields, transmit electromagnetic radiation. A small frequency of this radiation is called the visible spectrum, or light (waves of which interact with retinas and amass into the sensation of sight). For this reason, photons are often referred to as “messenger particles”. In laboratory settings, human exposure to certain frequencies of electromagnetic fields produces altered emotional states including fear, panic and disorientation, or relaxation, relief and contentment. Tests have also stimulated hallucinations and feelings of being watched, talked to or followed, in both malevolent and comforting contexts. This is to say, electromagnetic fields and their photons don’t just affect what people see and believe, they are what people see and believe. Yet, their messages, when perceived, are not necessarily aligned with the objective truth. Subtle fluctuations in a brain’s electromagnetic field changes the way the photons’ “reality message” is received and interpreted.
Lyd’s standing in our doorway with a lonely and angry look on her face. It’s the day of the anomaly scan and she’s come to pick me up. She’s wearing a yellow-green chiffon maternity dress and, despite her despondent mood, she’s glowing and looks beautiful. Her life-forming, five-month bulge makes me feel like I’m emerging from a world where nothing real grows.
“You look rough,” she says. “Have you lost weight?”
“It was the medication, bloating me up. I’m slowly getting back to my old shape. Do you want to come in for a minute?”
“No.”
“Okay.”
I follow her out to the car, ignoring the birdsong in the air and Blackie on the telephone wire across the road.
It’s all under control, I tell myself, as I get in the passenger seat. Act normal, don’t freak out and everything’s going to be fine.
The fact that Jayne created this opportunity doesn’t necessarily render it meaningless. There’s a slim chance Lyd could be ready, piece by piece, to let me back into her life. Of course, she might want nothing to do with me but think that I deserve to be part of the major moments in our child’s development. Whatever the answer, I don’t want to get off on the wrong foot. As Lyd drives I move over safe ground and don’t mention the fact that I’ve got a feeling we’re being followed by the red car behind us.
She’s been out to the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva doing freelance work for CERN (she’s been going once or twice a year since the second year of her PhD). She loves it there (it’s her only chance to get away from numbers and do some “real engineering”) so I stay conscientiously quiet and coax her into talking about her trip. I manage almost five minutes before making a huge blunder.
“It felt strange,” I say, “not quite knowing if you were away or not. We’ve never been apart like that.”
She glances at me harshly and then looks back at the road with amused disbelief.
“That’s funny,” she says, “because I have a distinct memory of planning a child’s funeral without quite knowing where you were.”
Again, it’s that skill I have for drawing attention to exactly the wrong thing. We drive in silence for a few minutes.
“So was there anything interesting at this conference you mentioned?” I ask. “After Geneva?”
“I went to see an astronaut speak,” she says.
I wipe my palms on my thighs and look over my shoulder through the rear windscreen. The red car is still behind us. The driver is a shadowy blur.
“An astronaut?”
“Really charismatic for
an American guy.”
“Uh-huh.”
“It was supposed to be a respite in the schedule, something non-taxing in the middle of all the serious science, but he ended up getting the majority of the press.”
“How come?” I ask, watching the red car turn right in the side mirror.
“He was speaking about his perspective after being up in space so many times. Mostly the reformed environmentalist stuff you’d expect – beautiful blue ball, terrible wars, pointless borders, reckless use of resources, all that. Obviously, being American, he didn’t politicise any of his views, he just kept talking about now being the time to act, but he did have a couple of interesting ideas.”
“For example?”
“Like, in the twenty first century, Western children grow up with interactive, digital images of Earth at their fingertips and, whilst they’re barely beyond the mirror stage before most of them have met people outside the family, a lot of them are self-identifying as citizens of a planet floating in space. For the first time, a toddler’s conception of the world is finite. Earth is their home. He thinks this is an unprecedented conceptual upheaval that will change the way future generations will come to think of their identity and where they live.”
“There’s only one place a toddler really knows about,” I say, “the centre of the universe.”
My witticism doesn’t even earn me a grin and, under the circumstances, I felt like I’d done spectacularly well. Lyd continues talking as though I’m not really involved in the conversation.
“He was quite eloquent about how the sky isn’t a limitless expanse and how, when seen from above, our atmosphere is a relatively thin collection of gases hugging the earth, protecting our entire ecosystem from the decimation of outer space, and how it’s completely conceivable that we’re changing the nature of this minuscule force-field by filling it with the wrong kinds of gases.”
“Sounds like a soft-pot,” I say, trying to amuse her again. “Don’t they weed out the jelly brains in these astronaut programmes?”
She smiles this time, so quickly it could be a twitch. She doesn’t want us to enjoy each other’s company. She just wants to avoid talking properly by talking about this astronaut. Whilst this is relieving (because I don’t want to have to lie about how I’m feeling and what I’m currently going through) it’s also agonising because important things are purposefully going unsaid and our relationship feels all the more hopeless for it.