Furnace

by Wayne Price

  I turn on the TV. Leeza’s talking. She introduces a new guest and the audience start clapping and hooting. The guest is some earth-mother type woman, big as a bus, dressed in a long white kaftan. She walks awkwardly, like her hips are damaged. At the bottom of the screen the words WORLD-RENOWNED MEDIUM keep flashing. The studio sofa’s too little and low for her really and she doesn’t look happy seating herself down.

  They get talking and the medium tells Leeza that the spirit world flows all around us, two feet above ground level. She says that on the spirit side, the TV studio is the site of a great temple. There are spirits, she says, passing in and out of the temple.

  What, right through us? Leeza wants to know.

  That’s right! Right through us, she says, eyes popping wide.

  In the audience, hands shoot up. I would like to ask the lady, a young black guy in a Bulls vest breaks in, why do they need a temple? I mean, if they’re already in the afterlife?

  Someone starts to clap but stops when nobody else joins in.

  The big lady leans forward, eyes screwed up. The need to worship is not a fleshly need, she tells him.

  The young guy nods and shrugs. Okay, he says.

  She turns on the rest of the audience. This is not more real than the temple, she scolds, waving a puffy finger at everything round about her. This is not more real.

  I look at my bare feet laid out on the couch, big and cold and white at the ends of my legs. I can move them but I can’t feel them. I lift one onto the other, heel to toe, trying to picture how deep two feet is. I think from where I’m lying it’d be over my face. Over my mouth and nose and everything.

  Listen to this, Francis says, his voice slow and slurring. ‘To say I think he is in pain is like saying I think my teeth are in his mouth.’ He stops and looks up from the book, staring at me, like he’s waiting for something. That’s Wittgenstein, he says.

  Oh. That’s good, I say. My teeth in his mouth. I like that.

  He laughs into his book again.

  When I shut my eyes my heart feels like it’s swaying instead of beating. Just a slow, swinging bag of blood, bumping against the ribs. I think about it bursting and the blood coming loose, flooding me. The medium’s still talking but I’m having trouble sorting one word from another. In my head I’m back at the river, high up, circling really slow, round and round, just like the guy above the pool, looking down at everyone – Francis, the old man with his dog, teenagers hand in hand, kids paddling – all fixed there under a big, blazing sun. The brown river looks smooth and still but I know it’s moving. I feel sick with fear. I need to shout a warning, but I don’t know what about, and no sound comes anyway. It’s something about the river moving, but it’s something and it’s nothing – just panic. Just a kind of dread. Their faces are all turned up to me, white and tiny. Even if I could shout, they’d never hear a word.

  Francis, I say, forcing my eyes open, what’s that river where they put all the dead?

  What? he says. He peers at me, squinting hard, like the sun’s right behind me for real. The Styx?

  No. A real river. In India.

  The Ganges, he says. And it’s just the ashes, ya dumb mutt. He shakes his head at me. And listen – don’t start with that morbid shit. He rubs his eyes with the palms of his hands. When he stops, he stares at the TV. There’s a strange, ill look in his face.

  Right here, the medium says. Right here is a temple.

  Turn that off, he says. And listen, Robbie, he says, for Christ’s sakes go.

  RAIN

  It must have been rain that brought the pigeon down – a sudden, furious April downpour that overtook and drenched Ahmed just as he drew close to home. He had bowed his head into the wild drive of it, a fusillade of water and stinging hail pounding the bulging shopping bags that swung from his numbed hands.

  Indoors, as he dried his head and changed his clothes in the bedroom, he listened to the rapid march of the storm passing over and fading. By the time he got to the kitchen to unpack the groceries the wind was already drying the garden outside. A low, late afternoon sun, free of clouds now, was casting a watery, unconvincing sheen across the lawn. The grass was still sprinkled with white peppercorns of ice and in the midst of them stood the pigeon, motionless and cowed, as if stunned. Slim and pale, almost white, it was clearly not one of the wild scavenger pigeons his wife often tossed bread into the garden for. It was a racing bird, Ahmed decided, noticing the tin band on one leg and the blue plastic ring on the other. He lit a cigarette and watched the bird for a while. Every time the wind gusted and swirled its feathers ruffled along its back and nape, but it made no attempt to find shelter. It seemed oblivious to his movements behind the window.

  The next day, a cool, blustery Saturday, the bird was in the garden again. Ahmed stared from the kitchen window as it strutted tamely behind Rana when she went out to fill the long tubular bird feeder she had hung on the garden shed half way through their first, shockingly cold, Scottish winter. Taking up position below the feeder it picked at whatever seeds were spilled by the squabbling sparrows and finches.

  Ahmed pointed out the pigeon as Rana stepped back indoors. Did you notice? he said. It was here yesterday, too.

  She nodded. It belongs to somebody – it’s tame and there’s a number on one of the leg-rings.

  He sipped his coffee. It’s either lost or resting.

  She agreed and washed her hands, then left the kitchen.

  Ahmed stayed at the window, watching. He opened it a crack and the sounds of the garden filtered in on chilly air: the cheeping of the sparrows at the feeder and, when the wind rose, a thin whisper in the bare branches of the nearby trees. More pigeons landed clumsily beneath the feeder. They jostled a little and the racer gave ground to them but in general the heavy, slate and cement-grey city birds seemed indifferent to the smaller visitor. A sharper gust of wind set the trees hissing and with a slapping of wings the high-walled garden emptied.

  Over the next week the bird was an almost constant presence in the garden, either patrolling under the feeder or simply standing alone and still in the middle of the neat square lawn, as if lost in thought. Just before dark it would disappear to roost somewhere in the near gloom but each morning it was back, unafraid when they entered the garden, but growing more wary with each day if they drew too near.

  Towards the end of the week they noticed its left foot was growing lame. From the window they could see the clawed toes bunched arthritically and as the days passed it moved around under the feeder with an ever more obvious limp.

  Though he kept it to himself, this new development bothered Ahmed. When Rana was out of the house he indulged a growing interest in the bird and would sit the back step to observe it, smoking and keeping watch for the neighbours’ fat tomcat. It also occurred to him that the lameness might draw the attention of the other pigeons. From the same kitchen window he had once wasted an afternoon watching a crippled blackbird in the garden, one foot a simple, toeless peg, being harried to exhaustion, and no doubt death in the end, by its own kind. And another worry was the rain. When it fell heavily and the other birds found shelter the racer, bewildered, hunched on the lawn as it had that first day, easy prey for any cat or hawk, if hawks hunted in Scottish rain. And underlying all this, more unsettling somehow, was the sense of hopelessness, of doom even, that these occasions evoked in Ahmed. The strange docility of the bird, its passivity, seemed awful to him, so much so that once he stepped out himself, arms waving under the beating rain and tried to scare it into self-preservation. Reluctantly, it hopped to the far end of the small garden but refused to fly. Disgusted, his thin house shoes already soaked through, Ahmed let it be and hurried back indoors.

  We should try to find its owner, Rana suggested on the second weekend. It can’t still be resting, and it’s going lame. We could try to read the number on its leg.

  You try, said Ahmed. It knows that you fill up the feeder. It’s used to you.

  He watched from the window as she
stalked it, slowly and patiently, crouching low, her back to him. Like a big, shy bird herself, she cocked her head, poised and still, close enough now to reach out and touch it if she chose. Instead she backed away, still crouched, then straightened and wrote on the back of her hand. She stood watching the bird for a while longer until, impatient, Ahmed tapped the glass.

  Who will you call? he asked when she came back in.

  There’s a royal society for birds. I’ll get their number.

  A royal society?

  They might want to come and rescue it, she said, ignoring the derision in his voice. She watched for his response.

  He shrugged.

  She turned to the window again. I think the band on his leg is too tight. I think it’s cutting off the blood. I don’t think I could catch it, though, to take it off.

  No, he agreed.

  She went through to the living room and soon Ahmed could hear her voice, formal and halting but, as far as he could tell, very correct. Whatever she was arranging seemed to involve more than one call. He lit a cigarette and opened the door into the garden. Their pigeon was still feeding alone on the ground though above it quick relays of sparrows were flitting to and from the feeder. A crow had perched on the ivy-strewn back wall of the garden. It watched him as he smoked with something like intelligence, or at least curiosity, Ahmed thought.

  After a while he sensed Rana behind him and half turned his head.

  They gave me the number of the pigeon club it came from, she said. I had to phone the secretary and he gave me the owner’s number, so I called and spoke to him. He sounded nice. An old man, I think. She was speaking rapidly, still flustered. Ahmed knew it was a great strain for her to speak and listen over the phone. It tested her English to the limit. He wondered if he should have offered to do the phoning for her, but instantly decided he would have felt too absurd. Besides, the garden and the birds were her interest, her domain. And using the phone to speak to strangers was exhausting for him too.

  He said he’ll come through from Inverness on Monday evening.

  Inverness? All that way?

  She shrugged.

  Does he expect us to catch it?

  No. The man says he can do that if it hasn’t got too wild yet.

  It’s not wild yet.

  It’s getting more shy, though. Every day.

  But it’s not wild yet. Look at it.

  They stared as it limped amidst the husks and seeds, remaining calm even when the other birds scattered at sudden shadows or shifts in the spring breeze.

  The man says it’s a young bird and they can turn wild quickly.

  We’ll see, he said doubtfully.

  The next day, very early, Ahmed watched it feeding as usual but by the middle of the morning it had disappeared and he saw nothing more of it through the afternoon and short evening. Rana too was clearly looking out for it more attentively than usual, and as it grew dark he saw her scatter a handful of seed over the middle of the lawn before collecting the washing from the clothesline.

  On the Monday it was back but hopping, awkwardly – perhaps with exhaustion – rather than limping.

  Don’t watch it all day, Rana said when she came downstairs to find him. You have to get some work done.

  I know, he said, stung, but when she left for her classes he carried his books through to the narrow breakfast bar in the kitchen and settled to work there in sight of the garden.

  When he stopped for lunch he decided to sit a while outside with his cigarette and coffee. It was a cool but bright, windless day and the bird, when it wasn’t feeding, seemed content to sun itself on the low roof of the garden shed. Ahmed carried out one of the tall bar stools, returned for his cup and cigarette and then perched himself on his high seat, enjoying the sun on his hands and face. He thought about the arrival of the bird’s owner later that day. It was a long drive from Inverness, much of it through the highlands, he supposed. They had never travelled any way other than south from Aberdeen in their eight month stay but he imagined vaguely the north and west as a sunless, grim landscape this early in the year, its narrow roads hemmed in by giant, naked flanks of rock and scree. He pondered what method the old man might use to capture the bird. The closest he had seen Rana get was on the day she had noted the number on its leg-band. It would be less trusting now, he suspected. He let his thoughts run on for a time as he finished his coffee and cigarette, then took his empty cup indoors. The pigeon was still settled on the shed roof, awake but basking. He would test how wild the bird had become, he decided. He would see whether its lameness, surely critical now, made it more wary or more resigned.

  From an open bag in one of the kitchen cupboards he took a fistful of birdseed and carried it out into the garden, moving slowly across the lawn towards the shed. He held the seeds up to the bird, catching its attention, then furled his palm to a funnel and poured them in a thin trickle as he backed away, laying a short trail in the grass. Then, squatting on the balls of his feet, he waited, a few seeds still sticking to the moisture on his open, upturned palm.

  Soon, the long muscles of his thighs began to burn. The bird, after stirring a little at first, now seemed sleepily indifferent again. Ahmed rose, his knees cracking. Here, he said, self-conscious at the sound of his voice in the empty garden. He moved forward, arm outstretched and with a sudden, soft clatter of wings the crippled bird launched itself and flapped swiftly out of sight over the roof of the house. For a moment Ahmed froze, then slapped the last of the seeds off his palm and went back indoors.

  At four, when Rana returned home, Ahmed said nothing about scaring the bird. It still hadn’t returned, he knew, but when she came through to the study to tell him so he widened his eyes, as if surprised.

  That poor old man, she said. I’ll put out more seed.

  There’s still time, he said.

  She hurried back to the kitchen.

  Soon after six he answered the doorbell to a heavy, crop-headed elderly man and, half hidden behind his bulk, a much younger boy of sixteen or so. The youth was pale and skinny and a flat fall of long brown hair narrowed his face even more. Ahmed offered his hand and the older man, after a moment’s pause, took hold of it, grasped firmly and released.

  You’re here for the bird? Ahmed said.

  Aye. The loon here’s my grandson, ken? He helps me out with them. The old man seemed to be focusing on a point just beyond Ahmed, as if distracted or unwilling to meet his eyes. It unnerved him until he guessed that Rana must be at his shoulder.

  Hello, he heard her say, shyly.

  Ahmed made room for them to enter the hall, backing into Rana. He turned his head to follow the man’s gaze and realised he was staring at his wife’s head covering.

  Eh, the man said to her, from your accent you sounded French on the phone, ken? I thought you must be French.

  Oh, she said, her mouth still smiling, yes we can speak French. She darted a glance at Ahmed.

  The man grunted, his own big-featured, square face relaxing a little. Aye, well.

  Come in, anyway, Ahmed interrupted, and ushered them through the hall and living room to the kitchen.

  The youngster, Ahmed noticed, was carrying a small cardboard box in one hand and a dirty white plastic tub in the other. He wore a loose black T-shirt and on its back was a timetable of dates and places. Slipknot European Tour 2003. The numbers were drawn as if they were frayed lengths of rope.

  At the back door Ahmed slipped past them both and unlocked it to let them through into the garden.

  Would you like tea? Rana asked, hanging back on the threshold.

  Aye, said the man. Just a droppie milk. Thanks.

  Aye, thanks, said the boy, blushing faintly when she turned her eyes to him. Milk and two sugars, please.

  The early evening air was cooling rapidly after the fine weather of the afternoon and there was no sight or sound of bird life. Even the sparrows had abandoned the feeder. Ahmed looked up at the sky and saw that just a narrow band of tired blue remained in t
he west above the roof of the house. The sun had already dipped behind the tiles. From the east a cold colourless emulsion was spilling slowly across the city skies. The air was oppressively still.

  It’s not here for once, he said. He made a show of scanning the nearby rooftops. It’s normally here until dark.

  The man grunted. I can see fine why she settled down here, right enough. He gestured at the bird feeder. Fond of the birds, aye?

  My wife, said Ahmed. She has an interest in them.

  Aye, well well. He followed Ahmed in surveying the sky and the roofs all about them.

  The young boy wandered towards the centre of the lawn. She might be roosting nearby, like, he said and shook the tub a few times. It was full of seed.

  Aye, well, give us that then, the old man said and went over to him to take the tub. He walked to the back of the garden where, beyond the ivied wall, a cluster of hawthorns, nameless shrubs and crab apple trees had been allowed to run tangled and wild. Coom on, he urged, up at the empty branches. Coom on. He rattled the tub slowly and rhythmically, shuck – shuck – shuck. After a while he crossed the length of the garden and faced the near gable of the house, staring up as if the bird might be hidden behind the chimney pots. Coom on then, he called, and again jolted the tub.

  If she’s close enough to hear that she’ll come down, the boy explained.

  Ahmed nodded, watching the old man’s heavy, deliberate movements, his big steel-toed boots, soiled cardigan and slack workman’s denims. Already he was impatient, jogging the tub more sharply, clearly wishing it could all be over and done with. The boy was still peering hopefully at the tops of the scruffy trees beyond the wall or turning on his heels to scrutinize the wide, blank skies and deserted rooftops surrounding them.

  Rana came out with the teas and the old man gave up shaking the feed while he sipped at his mug.

  No sign yet? she asked, pained.

  The grandfather shook his head. She’s been here every day, though, aye?

  Oh yes. Every day. For about two weeks. She glanced at Ahmed for support and he nodded.