Furnace

by Wayne Price

  Aye. Well well. He squinted up at the last streak of blue in the sky then lowered his face to the steaming mug again. They go wild, see? he said. Feral, ken?

  There was quiet for a while. A lone gull swept into view and took up station on the high roof of the Catholic school at the head of the street. They all watched it settle. As if following its lead a scatter of pigeons hove into sight before circling away back towards the heart of the city.

  Your bird’s a fine looking pigeon, said Ahmed. Quite different to the wild ones.

  It was the boy who responded. Aye, he said with feeling. Most racers are just blues like the wildies. Nothing to rest your eye on.

  Ahmed smiled at the youngster. Yes, he said. Nothing to rest your eye on. He relished the phrase for a moment. Are your birds valuable? he asked, turning his face to the grandfather.

  Oh aye, he answered quickly. They were my brother’s birds to start with, ken? He had a triple bypass and wisnae allowed to keep them for a long whiley after that.

  Too sensitive to infections, the boy added.

  Yes, said Ahmed.

  But he didn’t want to just get rid of them, ken? the old man finished.

  We’ve lost quite a few this year, eh granda?

  The man grunted.

  Lost fifteen to start with on the Alloa race, eh granda? Only three of them ever got back, like.

  Fifteen? Ahmed repeated, shocked.

  Aye, well maist of them young birds, ken? the grandfather cut in. Like this one now. Inexperienced. Disnae take much weather to bring them doon, ken? And the weather that week was gey fierce.

  What happens to them? Rana asked.

  Both grandfather and grandson shrugged. Some rest up and get home days later, like, the boy said. Some of them get killed off or go wild and some of them join up with other flocks of racers out getting trained. Then they get taken in by the owners, like.

  Valuable birds, ken? Mind, some fanciers’ll get in touch and see you get your bird back.

  Aye, the decent ones, the boy intoned in an oddly sombre voice.

  Again there was silence while the callers sipped at their tea.

  If it doesn’t show this evening I’ll try to catch it tomorrow, offered Ahmed, unsettled by the turn the conversation had taken. There was something depressing about the old man’s detachment in the face of his losses. It was confusing, too. Why had he bothered coming all this way for one lame bird when the next month he might lose another dozen and react to it with nothing more than this fatalism? At least the boy had some feeling for the things. Some enthusiasm. The exchange had left Ahmed feeling rebuffed, and somehow exposed. He cleared his throat, wishing he knew of a courteous way to bring the whole futile episode to an end. His offer to catch the bird seemed to have met with silence but then the grandfather spoke up.

  Aye, well, I’ll leave you the feed here and the box. If you can get close enough you might be able to grab her.

  To grab her?

  Aye. Be quick. You won’t hurt her, ken? He signalled to the boy who handed over the small box they’d brought with them. It was branded Fed-Ex and the lid folded somehow into a basic cardboard carrying handle. There were air-holes in each side and a printed warning that shipping should not exceed forty eight hours. She’ll be fine in there for a whiley, the old man said. It’s designed for pigeons, ken?

  I’m sorry you’ve had a wasted journey, said Rana. It must take hours. She stared pensively into the sky. The high cloud cover had thickened and darkened already.

  Well well, the old man murmured. Eberdeen is where we cry from originally, ken, so it’s nae too bad. He nodded towards the boy. The loon here was born at Forester Hill. The infirmary, ken?

  Oh really? she said, brightening, but Ahmed noted that she didn’t mention she sometimes worked there.

  Three dark pigeons appeared over the roof line and landed, scuffling for position on the slope of the gable.

  Wildies, said Ahmed, and as he spoke a sudden fat drop of rain plashed on the left lens of his spectacles. In a moment the air was filled with the quick ticking of water striking the rooftops and ground around them. Bowing their heads like pilgrims they filed indoors.

  Two days passed before the bird returned and Ahmed had all but given up on it. He was standing on the back step, smoking in the sunshine, enjoying what felt like the first truly warm morning of the year, when it flapped down, clumsily, to its usual place under the feeder. It could hardly stand now and half-hopped, half-lurched from seed to seed.

  Slowly, Ahmed stubbed out his cigarette, edged indoors and found the white tub of corn and grain left behind by the old man. Shaking it with the same slow rhythm the grandfather had used he advanced on the bird, crouched low, murmuring self-consciously: coom on; coom on. The bird stopped its feeding to observe him. Gently, he reached into the tub and scattered an offering of grain. There was a long, still pause, then it hopped lopsidedly forward, pecking at the seeds, almost within reach. Coom on, he urged, and rested the tub on the grass between his knees, freeing his sweating hands. He lunged, but without conviction, and the bird escaped easily to the roof of the house.

  Ahmed straightened and turned towards the kitchen window. Rana was standing behind it, frowning anxiously. Don’t watch me, he said, loud enough for it to carry through the glass. She turned away and busied herself at the washbasin. Just grab it, he thought with some bitterness, though he knew his nerve had failed him. At the last instant he had flinched back from contact, hadnt closed his hands as if for the kill but had jerked them forward, uselessly, as if shooing it away. It was the injured leg, he reasoned to himself. Part of him was fearful of damaging it further. But he knew that really he had dreaded the prospect of contact. He had never handled a bird before and had always, even as a boy, hated the sensation of an insect or any other living thing cupped in his hands. The frantic batting of a trapped moth on his palms repulsed him and always lingered on the nerve endings long after he had disposed of it under Ranas watchful eye. It was a petty but somehow shameful weakness that he liked to think Rana was completely ignorant of.

  The sun, almost at its full height now, was unseasonably warm. Ahmed sighed and with his sleeve wiped the sweat from his forehead. The bird seemed calm again and unlikely to fly off, at least. It watched him from the safety of the gable.

  As he entered the kitchen, Rana said: You’ll need to be quicker than that.

  Ignoring her, he took a chair from underneath the dining table and carried it outdoors. He collected the tub of grain from where he’d left it on the lawn and sat on the chair facing the bird, the sun beating on the back of his neck.

  After a while, from the garden next door came the sound of a door opening and children’s voices, a boy’s and a girl’s, spilling into the mild air. Home for their lunch, thought Ahmed, and found the idea oddly calming. Soon, the pok of a tennis ball on concrete punctuated their conversation. Their accents were too broad and their chatter too quick and muffled for Ahmed to follow much more than a few phrases. Then the father, home too for some reason, warned them to move away from there, now and they bickered a little over who should move where. A sudden stink of drains – puzzling – wafted to Ahmed. An opened manhole, maybe. An unblocked gutter? The smell faded again and the father spoke more cheerfully to the children, teasing them about something before going inside and thumping the door shut behind him. Ahmed frowned, but the bird seemed not to notice. Soon the boy and girl were quarrelling again. One more time, the boy warned, in a cross, shrill voice, one more time…

  After a hurried lunch Ahmed saw Rana off to the college and then returned to his vigil. The children from next door were back at school – they had passed him, hurrying and giggling at some shared joke as he closed the front door behind Rana – and the garden was peaceful. Perhaps because of that, the bird was feeding again and reachable.

  This time there was no mistake. A trail of corn and grain brought the bird almost into his lap where he knelt, patient, for several long, uncomfortable minutes. He was be
tter balanced this time, and all the force of his will directed the simple, smooth movement that pinned the creature under his trembling, wet hands. One wing he managed to clamp tight to the body, the other had already sprung open for flight and now projected at an odd, quivering angle. He hugged the body close to his chest, trapping it there, while he adjusted his grasp and folded the wing flat again. Then, still kneeling, a cold wetness chilling his knees from the soft ground, he stared at the bird and took stock, elated and a little stunned by his success, his sudden mastery. There was no resistance from the thing in his hands: a faint warmth reached his fingers from beneath the flattened spines of its feathers but no quiver of panic or struggle. His first flush of triumph ebbed away and Ahmed wondered at the creature’s apathy. Upending it, he inspected its crippled leg. Still there was no reaction, no twist of the neck to find and stab at his fingers. Ahmed could make nothing of the balled foot. Other than being curled unnaturally tight, the sharp pink toes looked healthy enough. The plastic leg-ring looked secure but not constricting. Righting the bird again he rose painfully to his feet.

  Indoors, he lowered the bird into the Fed-Ex carton and half-secured the lid, folding the cardboard tabs loosely enough to allow a narrow view of the white head and nape bobbing and shifting in the dark of the box. He watched the bird for a while, again struck by its calm acceptance, then left it alone to call the old man.

  There was no reply and no answering machine. When Rana arrived home he tried again, and again every hour or so throughout the evening but each time the phone rang on without reply.

  Leave it, Rana said at last, exasperated. You can try again tomorrow.

  Where is the old fool? said Ahmed.

  It’s late now, come to bed, she said, her calmness irritating him even more.

  You go. I’m checking the bird, he snapped.

  Deep into the night after hours of restless, dream-filled sleep, Ahmed was woken by rain battering at the window. He lay hunched, his shoulders knotted and aching, listening to its loud, gusting fall. The warm, summery promise of the day before seemed absurdly distant, a memory of another season altogether, another country. His chest, like his shoulders, was painfully tight and his pyjamas, wet with night-sweat, clung to his arms and thighs like bandages. Twisting to lie flat on his back he gasped and stared up into the dark. He put a hand to his heart and with his fingertips massaged the hollow of bone there. Rana was snoring gently at his side but no part of her body touched his. Time passed so quickly here, he thought, season to season in a kind of windswept turmoil. And his work progressed so slowly. His mouth was parched.

  He had been dreaming about the holding centre where, after entering the country, they’d been separated and held for a day and a night while their stories and papers were checked and cross-checked. At the time, still dislocated by long travel, he had accepted it all with tired resignation. The officials had been cold but not aggressive and when he wasn’t being questioned he’d been allowed to kill time playing chess, rustily, with a glum, middle-aged, overweight, Algerian doctor. The Algerian claimed to have been invited to a medical conference in London which had begun and ended during his detention, but beyond that complained very little. Privately, Ahmed hadn’t believed him: his pale suit had been shabby and his teeth were very bad, though he played chess well enough to beat Ahmed easily in every game and had, impressively, guessed at heart disease in his family after just a casual inspection of Ahmed’s clumsy, overlong fingers as he moved the chess pieces. It had occurred briefly to Ahmed to test the man’s story himself, but then he had thought, what difference did it make to him? He had enjoyed his brooding, gloomy company; had been fascinated by him, in fact.

  You know, my friend, the Algerian had said, inexplicably using English instead of Arabic or even French, you know the latest research in my field shows that the heart doesn’t simply wear out with age. He’d glanced again at Ahmed’s hands. The cells of it, they are triggered at some point, you understand, and they cease to renew themselves. They simply cease. That is the truth. He’d paused to play his move. And the other vital organs, too, he’d added, and gestured vaguely at his own rounded trunk. They are trying to explain this finding, he’d said. But they are scientists so it makes no sense to them how a living, beating thing of muscle, without thought or feeling, can somehow choose to stop living. How? he’d asked in mock amazement. Then he had wagged a curved, fleshy finger at Ahmed. But it’s no mystery, my friend. He had widened his puffy, baleful eyes, fixing Ahmed with his gaze. Allah chooses, he had said. The will, and the hand, and the eye, they are disobedient. But the heart, he had finished triumphantly, even in its cells – that is obedient.

  Ahmed had smiled and nodded, not knowing what to say.

  The first dreams he’d had of the holding centre all involved the Algerian and had left Ahmed feeling thoughtful and sometimes confused, but with no strong emotions. In them, the doctor was garrulous but cryptic and Ahmed’s dream self quickly became tangled in long, intense dialogues, the trailing ends of which lingered on as teasing, surreal puzzles after waking.

  This night’s dream had been different, and darker, though Ahmed could remember very few of its details. The Algerian had been there to begin with, but had been replaced by, or had become, some kind of interrogator. Ahmed could remember none of his accusations and questions, but knew they had filled him with humiliation and rage.

  To calm himself, he tried to fix his mind on the bird and the satisfaction of capturing it, but that too seemed to lead him only into a web of weakness and defeat. He saw it dazed under the rain and felt again its unnatural, deathly lack of fear when trapped in his hands. Even a spider, even a mindless fly would have struggled more.

  Rana groaned at his side and suddenly it occured to Ahmed that the accuser in his dream had been the bird’s owner, the old man. He strained to recall more details but nothing came. Instead he found his thoughts drifting to the old man’s brother, whoever and wherever he was, awake like him, maybe, flat on his back in the dark with his butchered, makeshift heart. He moved his palm from his chest and breathed deeply, closing his eyes. Where the weight of his hand had been a vague pressure remained as if a great, shadowy finger had found him out and pinned him there. He was sweating again and knew he had to move. Rana woke briefly as he slid from the bed and he heard her murmur her older sister’s name. Then she was lost again in sleep and Ahmed padded quietly out of the bedroom.

  In the kitchen he made himself a strong black coffee and lit a cigarette. Part of him expected the bird to be dead and he shrank back from checking its flimsy coffin. Instead, he opened the back door and finished his cigarette whilst staring out into the garden. Somewhere in the darkness gulls were quarrelling. The earlier rain had passed over but the wind was still squalling and in the east a faint bar of light revealed the underbellies of rank upon rank of rolling storm clouds. From one of the back bedrooms of the house next door an electric light shone but there was no other sign of life and the weak, cold glow was cheerless and somehow unwholesome. The coffee was bitter but warming and he drained the last of it before tossing away his cigarette butt and stepping back inside.

  Now, finally, he went to the box and eased open the lid. The delicate pale head was already cocked to meet him with a wakeful stare. Its eye, just a few inches away now, regarded him, but without feeling or intelligence, Ahmed was sure. It glittered with life but was hard and depthless; just a tiny, bright black mirror. A soft tremor of sound seemed to ripple in the bird’s throat, but so briefly Ahmed wondered if he’d imagined it. Turning its head from him it tapped with its beak at the cardboard wall in front of it, but without urgency. Was it standing, or sitting to protect its injured leg? The walls were too tight to its body for him to see. In the gloom of the cramped box the colourless head dipped and swayed.

  New rain was spattering at the kitchen window and above him Ahmed could hear Rana moving on the upstairs boards, awake and anxious, dressing to search him out. His fingers were cold and cumbersome and he fumb
led to fold the lid.

  WHERE I LIVE

  It was midday, end of August, and for one last time I was riding the Amtrak north out of New England. I had a letter I needed to write, things that needed to be said, and I was thinking I’d have more chance if the guy two seats back would just shut the hell up a while and let me think straight, let me hear what I was trying to say. He’d wandered into the carriage an hour before – a skinny, thirty-something red-head with a scrap of beard, dressed loose and carrying an army stores pack like he should be hiking some trail, not riding the Boston to Burlington commuter line. He made his way to the seat behind me where the young girl was sleeping and joined her. When she woke he started talking in his low, sleepy monotone, hardly waiting to hear her answers.

  Where I live, he was saying now, we get trains passing through maybe once, maybe twice a week. Way up country, that’s the way it is. It’s pretty lonesome. But pretty peaceful, too. He paused. I guess it’s both.

  The girl must have been about thirteen or fourteen and I’d wondered what she was doing alone, but she looked neat and clean and well-cared for. It wasn’t my concern. Other than us, the carriage had been clear and I’d taken a good look at her sleeping when I boarded. Long, straight blond hair; cool, pale doll’s face; doll’s hands. So still, you wouldn’t think there was breath in her body, let alone a baggage of words.

  I don’t think I’d like that, she replied.

  No, he said. I guess you might not. You like the country, though?

  Mmm, she hummed, like she didn’t want to say.

  You don’t like the country?

  No, she laughed, embarrassed.

  I love the country. I couldn’t live anywhere but the country. You really don’t like the country?

  No, she said again, sounding a little discomforted now. I don’t like bugs and stuff, she apologised.

  Oh I get it now, he said, his tone brightening. You’re right not to like the bugs, he said. He whistled a single trailing note. Where I live, the bugs sometimes, they can eat you alive.