The Hummingbird and the Bear

by Nicholas Hogg

  If the numbness of life against death is grieving, then yes, I was.

  She smoothed her skirt, picked up a fallen leaf that twirled from a branch to her feet. ‘And what, so your way of coping is wait twenty years, see another woman who sparks something, and then think by sleeping with her you can resurrect the dead.’

  I didn’t know what she meant.

  ‘Really?’ She took off her sunglasses. Her bloodshot, pale blue eyes. ‘You have this mother-shaped hole in your universe, and for a while, when you were buying houses and cats, planning a wedding for God’s sake, I thought I might have actually filled it.’

  She folded her sunglasses. She said, ‘Sam.’

  Then she finally reached out and put her hand on mine.

  JENNI GOT ON A plane without me. After the touch in the park, almost a holy laying on of hands, she said she was going. Before the steps of a museum where huge wooden doors opened on to hallways lined with the silver breastplates of conquistadors, she told me that she’d done all she could and that whatever happened next I had to bear alone.

  ‘I can’t stay here,’ she said, gesturing at me, the sky. ‘In this. I’m being overwhelmed. I thought I’d be stronger.’

  I told her she’d saved my life.

  She shook her head. ‘You have to do that, not me.’

  She was right.

  We walked back, miles across town through an orange, powdery dusk hanging in the glowing streets. At times on that walk I thought I might not see the morning if she left that night. Then I thought about what she said about me being a coward. And I thought of her, living on should I die.

  That evening Jenni packed her case and allowed me to carry it for her from the hotel to the taxi. ‘Not the airport,’ she’d said. ‘Not that far.’ Her eyes watering at the thought of me driving Kay to Heathrow, the crash which started a chain of events that led from a wedding in the Cotswolds to a hotel foyer in Monterrey, the woman I’d proposed to flying home without me.

  Then she was a face in a car window.

  Like a stranger’s face on a painting carried from a house.

  I returned to the empty hotel room, picked up the spare clothes I’d bought from the department store, put them in a plastic bag and checked out. Half a life on from wandering the streets as a teenager, here I was again. Watched by a mountain shaped like a saddle.

  On a map in the station I saw a coastline, and took a bus to Veracruz for no better reason than that it was by the sea. Beaches of black volcanic sand, hotels facing the Gulf of Mexico. I waved the driver past the air-conditioned foyers of plusher accommodation and took a room in a crumbling guest house. For the first few days I couldn’t sleep, and instead climbed the fire escape on to the roof and sat wrapped in a blanket until the morning sun came hard and bright. By looking at the mass of stars wheeling across the sky I tried to console myself by feeling small, insignificant. If I slept I dreamed I was on the surface of a barren moon. And if I was awake this was what I tried to imagine, that I was the lone being on a pockmarked satellite, hoping that the theory of infinity was true. Because that would mean I hadn’t done what I had in a different life. On another earth Kay was still alive, and I was now at home in bed with Jenni because I had, in this version of who I was, the sense and wisdom to know that what we had was so very precious. A love to be treasured, not discarded, abused.

  But then the morning, the world and all its drama. Dashing taxis and honking horns, gaggles of laughing children walking to school.

  If I stayed in the room my mind would play tricks. I’d turn and see her in the corner. Right there. Sitting on the wooden chair with her legs crossed. Standing naked in the bathroom, the gleam of light on her wet black hair.

  Then gone.

  I walked. I drank cans of Coke from vendors riding tricycles pulling ice boxes. Then I walked some more, along the black sandy beaches for miles. Lost my body in the pounding surf. Lost thought. I sat and studied shell fragments, fans of ceramic pink. Cold to the touch. Not a body, the warmth of another.

  There was a night I went from bar to bar knocking back doubles. In a marble-tiled square women danced and sang. Men smoked cigars. But the tequila jumbled my thoughts of Kay, made me angry. And made me think of him. Death and murder. Drunk enough to ring his office in New York and leave blood-curdling threats with a polite secretary.

  Pain, like a scalding, searing the back of my head.

  One grey dawn I sat on the swings in an empty playground watching the sun rise, a cold white pearl in the morning haze.

  I swam in the sea until I was exhausted, let myself sink and look back at the refracted surface. I tried very hard to kill myself. Then each time I came up for air, the gasping breaths.

  If I closed my eyes I could smell her, the scent that had lifted me from my bones. I had flashbacks of tiny, forgotten moments. The way she turned her collar against the cold in Central Park, picking up a pine cone in the Catskills.

  And scenes we hadn’t lived. Walking a kitchen in a robe, her bare feet on a stone floor. Opening French doors on to a verdant garden. Pure fantasy.

  Kay is dead, gone. I spoke the words aloud. An attempt to accept the bare truth, the plain fact. While I didn’t kill her I must be responsible. Added to the blame of her murder is my betrayal of Jenni. I’d told her, as if it made an iota of difference to how she felt about what we did, that Kay too had spoken of her guilt over the affair.

  But not over Segur. A killer. An unhinged man. Though to call another man that after what I did felt hypocritical.

  The odd thing was that Jenni knew before I did that a man had been sitting and plotting my death. And she knew that a woman was involved, a body floating down a river. Yet she still paid a bribe and flew across an ocean to make sure I was okay.

  If I’d had a call about Jenni and another lover I doubt I’d have reacted as nobly as she did on hearing where I was, days after I’d been too cowardly to call her and admit what I was doing.

  And perhaps this was the flaw. No, not the flaw, but one of the flaws. That she was too good for me.

  A ‘mother-shaped hole in your universe’, she’d said.

  Was this the reason Kay and I were compelled towards each other from the beginning? Two people with black holes at the core of who they were, two stars swirling until one finally devoured the other.

  Again, Jenni was probably right. A daughter, secure in the love of her family, certain that love was something good. Not a twisted fiery emotion that could burn whatever it touched.

  With a sense of true grief I thought about her mother and father, people I came to love, then cut from my life. I hoped that when Jenni was ready to see me again, Philip and Freya and I could at least meet and talk. Though perhaps that was wishful thinking. I wouldn’t blame her parents for never wanting to lay eyes on me again. I was the man who betrayed the love and trust of their precious daughter. Her father joked that I was the son he’d always wanted, and the pride he showed when I announced promotions or performed well on the cricket pitch was genuinely paternal. I imagine he felt my actions as a slur against all the family.

  I had never doubted how Jenni felt about me, but I had doubted whether it was truly for the man I was, I am. I was wrong. She knew my darkest corners. And she knew I kept those places hidden from myself, so she in turn kept them hidden from me. Like the caretaker of a building upon a labyrinth of secret passages known only to her.

  Why did I keep them hidden? Fear? Because I’d never escaped the death of my mother, the memory of her kisses on my head before I went to school, the softness of her touch, my hand in her palm?

  But this was no excuse. A reason, maybe. But not an excuse for abandoning what Jenni and I had.

  I put all this down in a letter to her. Pen on paper. An attempt to say what I couldn’t in Monterrey, when emotions tangled with the words. When I read back my crooked writing I hoped it would explain me, make everything okay. However, I could only fail if I tried, and that trying, I’m afraid, was the best I could do.
<
br />   The day after I posted the letter to Jenni I watched the fishermen fixing nets, sanding down boats and drinking coffee before sailing their puttering trawlers into the fiery dusk, returning only in the morning light when sagging catches of wriggling silver were hoisted on to the wharf, packed in ice and trucked over to the seafood market. Once I stopped sleeping on the roof and watching the stars I took some comfort in being part of something bigger than myself by following the comings and goings of the fish market, the plumbed depths brought to shore and unpacked by men listening to tinny radios pumping out rumba and old mariachi tunes as they wheeled barrows full of shrimp and lobster and brightly coloured fish alongside octopus and squid to the wooden trestles of the stalls. And behind the array of gleaming scales the salesmen and women stood. Boning fillets with flashing knives, weighing up the price then wrapping the cuts in paper to exchange for a few pesos. This greater rhythm of life that has thrummed along for billions of years without me, Kay or Jenni, the thought that our very minds and bodies have blossomed from organic molecules that rained on to the oceans before evolving beyond the haphazard drift of a single cell into beings capable of such profound grief, joy and love, seemed once again utterly remarkable.

  Up until that night I’d kept the shutters in my room closed. I couldn’t bear watching the cats step across the tiled roofs, the mother and her daughter in the apartment opposite sitting and chopping onions together, laughing at the TV, before welcoming home a husband, a father, with a glass of cold beer and a kiss.

  When I opened up the shutters I believed I took a step back into the world, towards feeling again.

  Believing I could be a better man. Not redeemed or saved. Just better.

  In the last phone call Jenni said that she may one day forgive, but what does it matter if she can’t forget. The truth is that I don’t want to forget. I promised Kay I wouldn’t.

  I think back to the day in Central Park, when she showed me the lifeline on her palm, the abrupt end. I’d told her it was nonsense, superstition. I try to picture her hands, but I can’t. When I imagine her now I feel so close to her that I can barely see her. Because she is in me, part of who I was, who I am. That I can’t escape. No more than someone can escape the bones of their ancestors. From when I first saw her at the wedding I knew she always would be. And if I’m looking for a definition of love then perhaps this is it. That another person can help fill the empty space inside us. Even when they’re gone.

  EPILOGUE

  A STORM BLEW IN off the Gulf, and the trees that line this quiet street thrashed in the thunder and lightning as if tormented and flayed by an invisible hand. The rain came hard in stinging drops, soaking my shirt to my skin, flooding the narrow alleys where water streamed down the steps.

  For days a humid air had hung upon the coast like a damp and fetid cloth draped over the city. The palm leaves flopped with a pallid languor, and the flies buzzed about with a pestering vim, perhaps aware that the oncoming weather was about to wash them from the sky.

  First the wind picked up, a heated draught of oven-baked air slamming shutters and chasing plastic bottles along the cobbled streets, blowing hats off the younger men and leaving them clutching at nothing. The older men, long ago knowing what wind would steal their straw crowns, hung on tight to the wide brims.

  Just as the rain came down in pellets, fired from the black clouds that tumbled off the ocean to the shore, I was walking along the wharf. And instead of running back to my hotel I stood for a while and watched the fishing boats rock on the choppy water, the harbour wall flare with the white of breaking waves. Gulls arrowed with the gale or beat their wings against the rain, heading out to the seamless horizon where sky and sea drew no lines but for the cracks of lightning.

  I returned to my room, opened up the shutters and watched the veins of electricity illuminate the dark. When the storm finally abated I slept through till the morning, for the first time.

  After a night of rain the streets gleam as if freshly painted. Monochrome into colour. But this may have more to do with my dream of Kay. A dream so vivid that to call it one seems wrong. Even though I leave this continent, I’m not leaving her.

  Two days ago I booked a flight to London, departing from Veracruz this afternoon. By now Jenni will have read my letter. Though it’s with more fear than relief that I will board the plane. It’s all well and good for me to sit and grieve alone, to counsel myself, but she will be my judge, juror and jailer when I return. I do not say return home. She’s taken the kittens and moved in with her friend, calling our flat as cramped as a coffin.

  My final task is to pack the cheap suitcase I bought at the market. Not that I have anything but a few pairs of underwear, a couple of shirts and a razor. I bought the case because I need the act of carrying luggage, a semblance of normality.

  After zipping it closed I open the shutters to the incandescent blaze of morning sun. A stark negative of a bare room. The wooden bed and dresser. A cracked mirror and a wardrobe full of wire hangers. I make sure I have my passport, still wrinkled from the river. I turn to the photo, the stranger in a shirt and tie. Then I check the bedside drawers one last time. Outside my window, past the rusting iron balcony, a cat walks the rooftops.

  As I turn to pull the door shut the phone rings. An old-fashioned dialler and receiver, rattling with the call.

  I pick up, say hello. No answer. I say hello again. Crackle and static, the faint murmur of a city in the background, traffic. Then nothing.

  I put the phone down, grab my case and walk downstairs to the reception, a square-cut hatch in what looks like the family’s living room wall. I can see the clerk, possibly the manager’s son, watching a football game on a portable TV. He sees me at the counter and saunters over. I point at the phone on the desk, ask if he called my room. He shrugs his shoulders and shakes his head, then looks past me to the entrance of the guest house and says, ‘You taxi?’

  A white sedan is parked out front. I thank the clerk in Spanish, and have the thought that I’ve been here before. A man clicking across the marble floor of a hotel foyer, the night in New Orleans, the flowers on the table, Kay, the weight of her in my arms as I carried her along the corridor.

  ‘Mr Sam, yes?’

  The driver is slim and tall, well dressed, a white open-necked shirt and a dark blazer. I see my emaciated reflection in his mirrored sunglasses, the pounds I’ve lost. He takes my case and fiddles with the keys to the boot. ‘Momentito.’ He leans back inside the driver’s door and flicks it open. I go through the charade of securing my nearly empty case, then walk round to the front passenger door.

  ‘Please, señor.’ The driver quickly opens the back door and says, ‘More comfort.’ He smiles, pats me on the back as I climb inside.

  I take a last look at the guest house. The neighbour’s cat on my balcony, watching us leave.

  The driver smells of cheap cologne masking something else, maybe fire smoke. He pulls on to the highway, switches lanes by sticking his hand from the open window and waving with his palm inward and fingers to the sky, as if he were the president or the pope. At a bus stand he swings over and stops, turns and says, ‘My brother,’ then points through the windscreen at another man approaching the car. He’s a little portly, squeezed into a shirt too small. I hope he doesn’t want conversation.

  He doesn’t. The men barely nod at each other before the portly brother turns to me and briefly grins.

  We pull away. The driver flicks the wipers on instead of the indicator. The blades judder on the dirty glass, and he mutters something in Spanish. When he misses the slip road back on to the highway I lean forward and say, ‘We are going to the airport?’

  The driver turns. ‘Si, si. No problem.’

  ‘Short cut,’ says the portly passenger, a gold tooth flashing.

  We take another highway, still under construction, the opposing lane coned off to traffic. Then another road, unpaved, veering from the elevated highway. The men talk quietly, nod to each other. I know the st
ories of kidnappings and extortion, the robberies. But this is something else.

  By my feet is the driver’s ID card. I pick it off the floor, and before I hand it over I see the smear of blood. The wet thumbprint. Then the mugshot, neither of the men in the front seats.

  And when the driver crunches gears, again, I realize it’s the unfamiliar gearbox, not a mechanical fault.

  We head further from the highway, past a warehouse and a landfill. Dumper trucks filled with rubble. Beyond this spit of land is the sea, a band of electric blue. When I lean back from checking if the central locking is activated the portly man has already turned, the snub-nosed muzzle of a pistol jutting from his fist.

  Segur has not let go of her. He never would.

  But the final thought is mine.

  I say, ‘Tell him this.’

  That last night I dreamed I was walking beside a river where great boulders had been washed down a mountainside. Stones from a different millennium shaped by seas and rain and the scouring wind. I hopped over the rocks then followed a dirt path across roots and pebbled shores towards the roaring sound of crashing water.

  Like a long white ribbon dangled from the sky, a river fell from a cliff at the height of clouds. Mist swirled and smoked, rose from a pool of such clarity that she looked as if she were swimming in air.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  The Hummingbird and the Bear would not have its wings without James Gurbutt, David Miller and Alex Goodwin, whose input and editorial verve proved vital to publication. A special thanks, too, to Amy Montminy, not only for her fine work on the US side of the narrative, but also for sharing her drive and focus to ensure I finished the manuscript with the attention it deserved. I am also indebted to the sharp eyes of Nancy Webber and Jo Stansall for their expert help in preparing my words for the printer, and to the trustees of the K Blundell Award.