A Box of Birds

by Charles Fernyhough

  And then all those hours of blackness. An empty box. An emergency exit left open to the wind. All the birds flown away.

  ‘And after they’d put this thing in? Where did they take me?’

  ‘To the Royal Infirmary. You were in Room 6, Armstrong Ward, all that time.’

  I shouldn’t be surprised. Vivisectionists are targeted all the time. Theirs is a Conscience household. You have to expect them to keep their hell-fires burning.

  ‘That’s why I didn’t question it. I assumed it was Aslan’s Law who’d attacked me, like everyone was telling me. So you knew nothing about it?’

  ‘Of course not, Yvonne. I went back there and I screamed at them. They’d hurt the person I cared for most. You have no idea how much this destroyed me.’

  I look out through the beginnings of drizzle. We’ve circled the town and are now coming back in on the ring road. The abbey smokes distantly in an amber mist.

  ‘You’ve lied to me from the start, James. Why should I start trusting you now?’

  ‘Don’t shout...’

  I grab the door handle. ‘Let me out.’

  The van thuds to a halt. I can hear the Mercedes braking violently behind us.

  ‘We need to stick together. You’ll never find him on your own.’

  ‘But it’s not just me, is it?’

  I pull the amulet from its pocket in my satchel and hold it up to the light from the windscreen. He stares at it, weighing its significance, wondering what space it leaves him for more pretending.

  ‘OK. I’ll hold him off. You just get out of here.’

  He gets down from the van and starts walking back towards the Mercedes. I hear shouting, and then I’m running as fast as I can.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  The Memory Centre

  ◉

  I crash through the foliage onto the road. Up at the top of the bank, I can hear the skids and scrapes of their fighting. Neither of them can have seen me go. I slipped down behind the van, blindsiding them. Then I was just falling through the undergrowth, ground alder and ivy ripping at my bare ankles. The riot is a dull roar over the town. I start walking, fast, along the road leading back towards the abbey. The moment I realise that I’ve stopped crying is the moment I become that new thing, whatever version of me lives through this. I’ve evolved into an exotic organism, with a dry-weather metabolism, re-using water from the inside. Like those mice in the desert that never need to drink. Subsisting on their own tears.

  James seems to have stuck to his word. He knows that I’m the one who needs to get away. He’s fixed the security guy, somehow, and no one’s coming after me. If I can get a taxi, I can get back to Effi’s place in Southside. Usually I would head for the taxi rank in the market square, but no one will be picking up fares from the old town tonight. A siren pedals across an intersection ahead of me. I can see a parade of burnt-out cars, steaming in the fine drizzle coming out of the sky.

  I see a taxi approaching. It has its light on, although it’s travelling fast and the driver looks in no mood to stop. I put out my arm, hailing it, and it speeds by in a throttling squeal. I’m wet, and the scratches on my ankles have started to fizz and sting. Even with this thin cardigan to cover my burnt arm, I’m a late-night fright, conspicuously damaged.

  I keep walking along the road towards the abbey. The rain is getting heavier, and the soles of my sandals are slippery under my toes. There’s no traffic coming this way, which makes me think they must be sending cars out onto the main ring road, bypassing the town centre. I glance back. There’s no sign of the white van. To my left, the townhouses are ranked in terraces down to the river. The abbey is floodlit on the other bank. There’s no one on the footbridge. They seem to have shut down the entire city centre, and somehow spirited the rioters away, those that aren’t still fighting in the market square.

  I hear laughter up ahead. Some Pelton fans are walking up the hill towards me, high on drunken swagger. I pull out of view behind a yellow hoarding panel, and find myself stumbling over the rubble of a building site. Wet dust grits my foot-soles. I sigh and shiver, feeling the unpleasantness of this night on every inch of my skin. I look up at the shell of a building. There’s a sign bearing a mission statement and the logos of the investing partners. Celebrating the Lycee’s contribution to the neuroscience of memory. I can’t suppress a bitter laugh. I’ve come round the back of the building, which is why I didn’t recognise it at first. I follow the hoarding panels round to the south side, high above the river. They’re building a concourse that will link up to the riverside walkways, knitting this grand statement of the Lycee’s achievements into the fabric of the ancient town. They’ve had no time to adjust to the fact that, thanks to my carelessness, they’ve lost the very thing they were supposed to be celebrating. The map is in pieces, scrambled on a server no one can unlock. The secrets of the Lorenzo Circuit are in the pockets of a madman. Even in its unfinished state, the Memory Centre draws the eye to the Lycee’s ambitions, but also to its loss.

  The door in the hoardings is still unlocked. I duck into the darkness between the scaffolding, half-expecting Gareth to step out of the shadows. In a moment I’m inside the circular shell of the Centre, looking up at the metal skeleton of the building. The floodlights are bathing the outer shell in light, but in here it’s twilight. It’s the light for seeing ghosts in, for seeing the reflections of things, if not the things themselves.

  I look up into the roof space. They don’t seem to have added much since I was last here. The girders still jut into nothingness. A tarpaulin flaps, straightened by the wind.

  But Gareth could see something. He stood here next to me, his face a silhouette. Watching something moving in the space above our heads.

  I pull the amulet from the pocket of my satchel and turn it in my hands. In the dim light, the almond eyes of the figurine peer back at me. The warm metal holds a gleam of firelight. My fingertips are cold, but I can just manage to unclasp the chain and fix it around my neck. I’m aware of nothing except the weight of expectation. My fingernails sting where I’ve prised the clasp apart. Apart from that, I don’t feel any different. That’s Gareth’s point. My consciousness is a blind machine. Any cog will fit. I could have been wearing this all my life, and I wouldn’t have known.

  I look up again. I still can’t see what Gareth saw. The cables hang down idly in their insulating sheaths. The building forgets. But the building never had memories in the first place. I made sure of that.

  The thoughts crowd and scatter. I’m waiting, patient for the end of this.

  The birds flew away. That’s what James told me. He let them go, and Gareth said he was going to get some more. He was going to do it better this time.

  I’m tired. I don’t know what I’m remembering, but knowledge here is pure sick hunch and I have to follow it wherever it takes me. My fingers wander up to the ear of the figurine. I catch myself, alarmed. I’m falling into their trap. I’m going to end up doing exactly what they wanted me to do. And yet I have to find him. I’m the only one who can do it. No one else has forgotten what I’ve forgotten.

  I twist the thumbwheel. I have that image again of Gareth in my office, talking about his imaginary aviary. Each bird is a thought, a memory. That’s the point of materialism. Everything Gareth has told me comes back to this. Wisdom is getting to know your birds, finding a way to make them come to you. I twist the wheel again, feeling the facts morph together, the dizzy tilt of understanding on the move, shifting, breaking away, starting to slide. Bridge’s face in the hallway. Something moving deep inside me, like butterflies, a tiny beating of wings.

  Then the space is empty again. I like it that way. An exit kept clear for an emergency. So, when the thought hops up for attention, it might catch my eye.

  A bird comes to me. I don’t have thoughts; they have me. Processes you don’t understand, shaping a consciousness, making the flesh-and-blood machine think and feel, billions of numb reflexes fashioning a mind out of data.

&nbs
p; The bird is behind me. I don’t turn around; I don’t want to scare it away. It says, If you turn around you will understand everything.

  ‘Go on, then,’ I say. ‘Tell me what it is that I’m supposed to remember.’

  My fingers touch the amulet. Their tips are numb, and I can hardly feel what they’re pressing on.

  ‘You know it already,’ the bird says. ‘It’s all in there. You just have to catch it.’

  There’s a stinging across the back of my neck. The amulet is in my hands. The chain is broken, snapped by the force of my anger. I drop the figurine to the concrete, my insides lurching. The figurine gleams in the darkness, and then vanishes under the heel of my sandal. I stamp on it with all my weight, feeling the shell crack, grinding the entrails with my heel. It can’t control me. There is no ‘me’ to control. I don’t have thoughts, I have wildlife. I live through the wildlife, discrete pointless happenings beyond my control. I stand straight, breathing hard, and stare at the lights outside. I hear them chirping, all the unconscious decisions that I am.

  Where did Gareth see the birds in their cages? What did he tell me that time, when he came alone to my lab?

  A haze of tears clears slowly. I have a sense of being suddenly lifted into consciousness, of watching automatic routines from the inside, of being those routines, all the trillions of reflexes that make up me. Sparks of ghostly activity in systems that act without knowing, siren warnings from a storytelling machine.

  I know where he is. That’s the point. I have always known.

  PART FIVE

  ◉

  James

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  All'estero

  ◉

  I am wearing sunglasses. The train is rattling through brilliant daylight. The sunlight hits me side on, making the insides of my sunglasses reflective. I can see this nameless part of my face, the patch of skin on the outside of the eye, where you tell a woman’s age. The skin there is slack and wizened, and squirms in constant motion. In the little smoked-glass mirrors of my sunglasses, the sunlight picks out a curve of wet flesh inside my lower eyelid, the part that betrays that you’ve been crying. Next to that, a rounded darkness, with a faintly windowed gleam of sky. My own eye, looking in on itself.

  I think about what Gareth told me. It was the clue that would explain everything, although I didn’t realise it at the time. The innocuous story from his childhood; the birds in their cages, stacked high above his ten-year-old eye-line. He wanted me to remember. He was telling me where he would be. But it took me this long to understand it. I knew it, but I couldn’t make sense of it. I couldn’t do that until I’d seen what he wanted me to see.

  I think about what I said to James. I told him that I had to leave, that we should travel separately. He knows where to meet me, but he doesn’t know that it’s hundreds of miles from where Gareth actually is. The wound on my skull tingles. Have I told him too much? I don’t know. But I realise that I’ve stopped checking the face of everyone who passes. I look out of the window at the ghosts of mountains. I pretend to read.

  At two in the afternoon we reach Rosenheim.

  ‘Allo? Oui. Non. Je suis dans le train. Non. Personne. Personne ne sait.’

  No one. No one knows but me.

  Forests brush by. The woodlands of Bavaria rise to the pined slopes of the Tirol. Every time the train stops I fear the new influx. I fear it, but I stay on the train.

  The forces that carry you resist understanding. The things you want are things you don’t even know about. But now and then the light is reconfigured by a hurtling copse of trees, and you catch a glimpse of how the facts are truly aligned. It’s like that breathless moment when you’ve almost understood a problem, and you pray that the world will freeze the way it is, with everything fixed in that arrangement: the phone won’t ring, the letterbox won’t go. You know no more of this train than the length of this carriage. You could go the whole journey without knowing more. But then the tracks swing around a curve and you see the yellow locomotive, the car transporters and freight trucks way out ahead, all the baggage you’ve been hauling through space, oblivious, all this time.

  I’m on a long subway. The walls are yellow with painted-tile motifs. I hear the drone of a didgeridoo. A considerate neohippy has turned his instrument parallel to the wall so that people won’t trip over it. There’s another sound, a tiny harp played by a young conservatoire type. The miniature strings sound like the soundtrack to wizardry. As I walk between them, one instrument slowly fades into the other, with people’s voices on either side, echoing off the curved walls. Then the didgeridoo stops and it’s just the sound of the young woman’s harp, brittle and exquisite, like the tinkling of the fairy orchestra at the end of the story.

  The station concourse is a hive of taxis. I climb into one and dump my rucksack on the floor. My satchel feels almost weightless without my FireBook. I am in Vienna.

  The hotel reception is full of luggage. A queue rope steers a line of beardy youngsters towards the plastic counter. I await my turn, reeling with sleep deprivation. I show them my passport and tell them that I’m cancelling my reservation. I ask if there are any messages for me. There’s a letter from James. He used to word-process all his essays. Amazing how close you can get to someone without ever seeing their handwriting.

  ‘Tell him I had to check out early,’ I say.

  I read the last paragraph in the taxi to the Südbahnhof. James says he’ll meet me in Vienna. He’ll be at the hotel on Wednesday afternoon. Today’s Tuesday. He says to wait for him there. He warns me not to phone anyone, not to go out, not to answer the door.

  He’s written eight, nine pages. I know half of it is lies, but I don’t know which half. Faced with uncertainty, all a scientist can do is test her hypotheses. Make a risky guess, and see if it’s proved true.

  There’s a short wait at the ticket counter. The woman in front of me is arguing with the ticket officer about her reservation for the overnight train. She’s been given a berth on Romulus when she asked for Remus. The ticket man is shrugging it all away. I read James’ last paragraph again. Stay in Vienna. Don’t move. Wait until you know where he is, then call. When I look up I’m at the front of the queue. Stay in Vienna. Do not depart immediately for any Italian city.

  The expressionless ticket officer is waiting for me. I have to tell him something.

  ‘Verona,’ I say.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Bigger Than Your Heart

  ◉

  Yvonne,

  Stay in Vienna. I mean it. Don’t move. Wait till you know exactly where he is, then call.

  Babe, if you can actually read what I’m saying then I’m better at doing this handwriting shit than I remember.

  There’s stuff I haven’t told you. There are things I couldn’t tell you. I’ve thought of you all the way. I didn’t want you to be hurt, and this would have hurt you. It’s up to you. If you decide you don’t want to hear all this about me, you don’t have to. You can tear this letter up. You know where Gaz is. You don’t have to call.

  I’ve been playing a game, Yvonne. Not with you: with me. Hide-and-seek, if you like, with the real James. Sometimes you can get a better idea of who you are by being someone else. The gods have always known that. The avatars, the incarnations: anyone but who they really are. But the soul underneath doesn’t change. The thing that makes you what you are stays the same. I wanted you to find yourself. It would have been enough if I’d got you just to ask the question. Challenge a few of those assumptions you’ve been basing all that arrogant certainty on. You could do that. It’s not too late. If you can only open your heart and be honest, you can get there. But honesty’s hard. Honesty has to be fought for. Not everyone has the strength for that kind of battle.

  I tried to kill myself, Yvonne. I was seventeen and I couldn’t see any way through this emptiness. I couldn’t see any meaning. I was still living at home. My parents couldn’t think beyond their next executive holiday. I wanted them to see
what they were doing to me; I wanted them to feel the pain and fury I was feeling. They’d done this to me, with their dinner parties and the whole sick rigmarole of suburban fakery; they’d made it so that being alive was no different to not being alive. At least I could make that call. I went down to Bankstown Underpass on a Saturday night, emptied everything out of my pockets and walked out into the traffic. David saved me. He was driving one of the cars I was trying to get hit by. But it was like he knew this was going to happen, and he was ready. He was like a god in that sense. Clairvoyant. Attuned to the amazing story that’s unfolding around us. He didn’t say anything; he didn’t ask any questions. I just sat in his car and watched his reflection in the windscreen, the lights on the dashboard, the needles going up and down, the whole beautiful secret regularity of it. People were coming out of the pubs, caught up in the relentless chaos of being alive, and I suddenly understood what was happening for them, how they all fitted together. Reality hit me with such force it made me cry. I knew I was here. I knew I was part of this crazy privilege that is life.

  You’re here too, Yvonne. That’s what I keep trying to tell you.

  He took me back to the squat. He gave me a room. I had a bath and a smoke. I met Bridge. She winds you up, I know, but she gave me love like it was falling out of the sky. Grandstand was there. Level Ten came later. David found him on top of the Byggate multi-storey, about to do a birdman stunt. He was dressed up for it. He wanted to die fully feathered.

  We were all suicides, more or less. People who’d given up, and then found hope in despair. David was like that angel on the bridge, you know, who’s supposed to stop you jumping? He always left it a bit late. He wanted us to taste the fear. He thought it was good that we got so close, because it gave us a chance we wouldn’t have got otherwise. We could be born again as someone else. That’s what it felt like. When I opened my eyes from the lies I’d been living through, everything was different. I felt I could make anything happen. We all did. We wanted to share that feeling around. We wanted people to see the truth in front of their faces, the possibility of happiness. The possibility of love.