A Thousand Paper Birds

by Tor Udall

  Peter Trestley has the dignity of a sixty-year-old man who has held the same, beloved job for decades. He prides himself in telling Jonah that he knows these birds as well as the weight of his balls in his hand. While he scatters grain, Jonah listens.

  ‘I was a whippersnapper back then.’

  Two swans float by like sheets of ice. Pete has the cough of a man who spends too much winter outside; he doesn’t even notice he’s doing it.

  ‘Ask Hal about any species – he had the answer and then some. He was obsessed with his seedlings. No woman got a look in. They all thought he looked like a matinée idol; what was the name of the guy in that film – the one about outlaws? Anyway, who wants to know?’

  ‘My name’s Jonah.’

  Pete ignores the extended hand and throws a fistful of grain. ‘He served in the war but never talked about it. He worked with the Victoria. But everything excited him – the first sighting of blossom, the magnolias. They got blight one year – you should have seen him: devastated.’

  ‘But did he have family?’

  ‘Don’t think so. If I remember rightly they died in the Blitz.’ Pete sniffs deeply; a nasal mark of respect. ‘He was in the Berberis Dell when he keeled over. Heart attack, they said. That’s the way he would have liked it, the sky staring down at him.’

  Both men look out over the lake.

  ‘He had this potting shed but no one could find the damned key. Would have expected someone to break down the door, or knock the thing to smithereens. But it’s not in the way . . .’ Pete becomes distracted by the antics of a couple of geese. ‘Bloody teenagers! Why do you ask, Mr . . .?’

  ‘Wilson. I’m trying to track down another Harry Barclay. I thought he might be a descendant.’

  ‘Sorry, guv. That’s it.’

  ‘Thing is, there’s no record of another Barclay that worked here.’

  Pete rubs his hands vigorously. ‘Maybe someone’s using a false identity; you know, an alias. Perhaps someone’s stolen poor Harry’s name to get up to mischief.’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  A few days later, fireworks scatter the sky. As the world enters 2006, Pete sits by the darkened lake, clutching a flask of whisky and a packet of digestives, while in a flat on Kew Road Jonah watches a television overflowing with streamers. As he listens to the swaying notes of ‘Auld Lang Syne’, he doesn’t know what he should remember about his wife.

  It is a bright, white Saturday in January. By 11 a.m. Jonah is still in bed, mesmerised by the mix of sun and snow outside his window. After an hour he gets up and peers down the street. A boy is trying to skateboard along the pavement while Milly is leaning against the garden wall, shivering in a T-shirt. Why doesn’t her dad ensure she is better dressed? Jonah decides to meet him, play the concerned teacher, then goes for a piss. After making some coffee he returns to the window to the same scene. The slush is drenching the boy’s jeans and Milly is trying to engage with him. Jonah bangs on the window but the girl is too far away. He presses his palm against the pane.

  The next day there is a fresh fall of snow, and Milly is wearing a red duffel coat. After thanking Jonah several times, she stretches out her arms to admire herself.

  ‘We should show your dad.’

  ‘He’s in the nurseries today. You’re not allowed.’

  ‘What time does he finish?’

  She pulls a face. ‘Dunno.’

  As they walk towards Temperate House, Milly talks earnestly about what she has learnt about the politics of birds.

  ‘They move about in tribes. If you look carefully you can tell who the leaders are . . . who are the look-outs or guards.’

  They stop at a temporary ice rink, packed with people nudging their weight forward with nothing more than air, or each other, to hold on to. When one youth throws himself into a grandiose spin, there is the muted sound of gloved applause.

  Milly and Jonah circle back towards the lake, where the ducks are also slipping on frozen water to reach freshly thrown grain.

  The Bird Keeper raises his arm. ‘Mr Wilson.’

  ‘Pete.’

  Jonah steers Milly in the opposite direction, hoping to ward off conversation.

  She tugs on his sleeve. ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  He pauses. This white sky is good for him. He enjoys the fact that he can’t feel his fingers. He raises his shoulders then drops them, testing the frozen ache of his muscles.

  The child is still peering up at him, worried.

  ‘I’m fine, sweetheart, really. You’re too young to . . .’

  She runs off, tripping up over the snow. Berating himself, Jonah watches her become smaller; then her weight buckles. He breaks into a trot, worried she has fallen. By the time he reaches her, she is lying on her back, moving her limbs to push the snow away, creating miniature mountains and avalanches.

  ‘Come on, Joe. Join me!’

  ‘There’s no way I’m lying in that.’

  Her legs move fervently, her determined face blushed with cold. At least she’s not sulking. Resignedly, he drops his bag and lies down. The damp soaks into his back, his buttocks, then he feels something touch his face, as ephemeral as feathers, like the ghosts of Audrey’s fingers. Opening his eyes, he sees flakes falling from a vast, light sky. It feels like he is upside down in a snow globe. He opens and closes his legs, his wet jeans chafing his groin.

  After a minute of Jonah gritting his teeth and forgetting to flap his arms, Milly shouts, ‘Time out.’ They haul themselves off the ground, him dusting the ice off his arse; then they gaze down at Jonah’s snow angel – a six-foot creature with feeble wings and a wide skirt. He squints at the place where Milly lay but struggles to find the imprint.

  ‘The new snow must be covering your tracks.’

  Milly’s cheeks are flushed.

  ‘Why don’t you try again? Sweetheart?’

  They stand together in their loneliness. Physically they are close, but the distance between them feels impassable, as if the snow is creating radio interference. The wide horizon tempts Jonah to melt into this whiteness . . . like the final page of Audrey’s diary.

  ‘At school I learnt about the water cycle,’ says Milly. ‘Do you know how it goes?’

  ‘Try me.’

  ‘It rains. Then the puddles evaporate and become clouds again. Round and round it goes. It got me thinking how nice it must be for a raindrop to become a snowflake. For months you’re just rain and everyone hates you. But then one winter the weather gets chilly and you become a snowflake with its own shape and pattern. And you’re the only one of your kind of snowflake and everyone loves you. I reckon snow must be God’s gift to the raindrop.’

  ‘That’s a great idea, Mils. I love it.’ Jonah considers the ceaseless cycle of a raindrop, the losing and gathering of itself.

  ‘I hope,’ says Milly, ‘that when I leave for good, I’ll become snow.’

  ‘Right.’ Jonah has no idea what she’s talking about. He searches the white sky. ‘I reckon we’re going to have to deal with being raindrops for now. Accept our humble lot.’

  On the eleventh of February Jonah goes to Tesco Express near Kew Gardens station and is inundated with window displays full of Valentine cards and teddy bears. Clutching a plastic bag containing a loaf and several tins of soup, he hovers outside the bookshop where a couple are peering into a volume of poems. She is obviously whispering something funny and seductive in his ear, and Jonah can’t help it. He taps on the window.

  ‘Excuse me, did you know that St Valentine was the saint of epilepsy?’

  The startled couple gesture that they can’t hear him.

  ‘Love is an illness,’ he mouths. ‘Comes in fits and spasms.’

  The couple edge away, leaving him to stare at his own tired reflection. Jonah presses his nose against the pane but no longer recognises the man in the shop window; the one who has started to smile and cry at the same time, the carrier bag digging violent red marks into the joints of his fingers.<
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  Half an hour later he has dropped off the shopping and walked to the Gardens. It has begun to rain, so he makes his way to the Princess of Wales Conservatory, and as soon as he opens the glass doors he can smell the orchids. Beyond the dry tropics and beds of cacti, he enters the annual display. From floor to ceiling, orchids are interwoven through wire structures, their potting hidden by clumps of moss. Flowers hang from immense voluptuous bowls, the glasshouse bedecked with petals. It doesn’t matter how many times Jonah has seen them; he remains overwhelmed by their lush beauty. Brightly coloured bromeliads are speared through the orchids, and carnivorous, glossy anthuriums bustle for space among delicately spotted petals. The vividness of scarlet and tangerine wars with lilac, pink and velvety purple. Jonah reads the labels with their hint of eroticism: slipper orchids or Paphiopedilum; the Enycylia, the speckled moth. He walks through a tunnel of Vandas shining brighter than the sun and each flower is curiously alluring, their petals unfurling like labia. Among them, phallus-shaped spadices are erect or malformed and perhaps this is why Jonah loves them; they hold the idiosyncratic flaws that make the human body so tantalising. If flowers could have tongues and lips, lust and talons, these would be it. He likes that he doesn’t trust them.

  Once he has drunk in this paradise of enchantments, he walks through a set of doors and enters the Zone 2 display. At the rear of this glasshouse stands an immense circular structure, almost as wide and high as the room. Inside a huge hoop of willow, string has been threaded into an enormous Native American dreamcatcher. Hanging from this web are origami birds folded in an array of colours. But some of the wings are crumpled, the beaks torn.

  Jonah had forgotten about Chloe’s artwork. He looks around, concerned he’ll bump into her, but of course she’s not there; the exhibition is a month long. He walks towards the stand and reads the title.

  A PLACE FOR LOST THINGS

  He can’t believe Chloe remembered his whimsical idea. He turns around, taking it in. Trestle tables stand along one side of the room, and next to them are two large buckets. Both are filled with sheets of paper: the first, titled LOST, holds green, grey and blue squares, while the second bucket, FOUND, contains the warmer end of the spectrum; reds, pinks, oranges and yellows. On the wall above is a set of instructions. WHAT HAVE YOU LOST? WHAT HAVE YOU FOUND? People are invited to write on the paper, and, intrigued, Jonah peers over strangers’ shoulders. My rite glove, writes a child on sky-blue paper. I found my husband, scrawled on joyful red by his mum. Missing for years – or perhaps it was me that was lost. Further down, an old man sucks on the end of his biro. Eventually he lists names under the heading ‘Dead Friends’; then he writes about jokes he has stumbled upon and used as his own. On another sheet he describes the ring his wife lost down the sink, and the love of his dog, Agnes.

  There are clear diagrams, describing how to fold the paper into a crane. Each step is followed carefully, the mother using her wedding ring to flatten down a stubborn crease. Once the birds are complete, two Kew volunteers are there to help. The first uses a needle to thread the paper, and the second climbs a ladder to hang each bird. The colours are no longer separated, but intermingle so the web is as vivid as a rainbow. Hopes, celebrations and griefs entwine, as if this dreamcatcher is salvaging wishes, stopping them from blowing away in the wind to be forgotten by time.

  As Jonah reads fragments of folded words he discovers what people have found in Kew Gardens: the time to breathe, or the name of a particular tree that has bothered them for years. Friends have been reunited, the pagoda a focal point in a sprawling London. Jonah tries to find something equally positive, but ends up snatching a handful of the ‘lost paper’ and, on a grey page, he writes TRUST. Then he crumples it up. Starting again, he writes a series of random musical notes on a stave then folds so hurriedly that the bird is mangled. He slams the creature into the assistant’s hand then walks out of the conservatory. The landscape is sodden.

  Jonah didn’t see her among the stupid orchid-gazers, but for once Milly doesn’t care. Everything is blurring, her tears turning paper birds and people to mush. A woman pushes past, her handbag bashing through Milly’s chest, and it hurts, the leather and studs. It feels like her legs won’t hold her. Yet she remains motionless, staring up at the dreamcatcher.

  Birds hang from the strings, and in the holes of the netting there’s something sparkly, like dewdrops on a web. As Milly blinks, these drops become seeds that spiral in, until they form the centre of a sunflower.

  The stem is in Milly’s hands, her grip tight. She is trying to pick the flower but it won’t let go of the soil. Now she’s broken only half the stem so she has to keep on ripping and ripping, and the flower is screaming – it’s like bludgeoning something to death that won’t die. She was only trying to rescue it, to keep it safe, but now there’s a woman with black hair. It’s cut into a bob, but it’s definitely Chloe – crouched beside her, worried.

  Milly’s eyes are misty; she can’t see. There’s a paper boat sinking, but the lake is full of dust and weeds. She blinks away the dank water then studies the words that triggered her memory. At the bottom of the dreamcatcher is a plaque.

  For Emily Richards

  1995–2003

  FOUND in my heart, always

  Jonah walks without direction, gulping down the fresh, wet air. He sees signs of Chloe everywhere. Exotic paper birds perch in the trees, and he stops to watch the rain falling from their wings. He doesn’t understand what the birds are made of to resist this weather, but he continues to stumble over Chloe’s creativity, the evocative and sensual. Vivid flowers float in the lake; then, among the reeds, he spots an origami heron. It is exquisitely crafted, each fold not just creating the limbs of the bird, but the poise of patient waiting.

  Jonah wipes the rain from his beard then sees Milly, in her red coat, running down Syon Vista. She looks upset. He starts to follow then loses sight of her among the holm oaks. He sees her again a little further away. After fifteen minutes of chasing her, Jonah loses his bearings.

  He is near the main gate, an area of the Gardens he doesn’t know intimately, but he can’t piece the landmarks together. He walks along a path of sentinel stones that leads to a gigantic woman made of clay and moss. She is lying on her side, her eyelids closed. Her arm is crooked around a breast made of dirt.

  ‘I don’t know if she’s sleeping or dead.’

  He whips around to see Milly, her eyes puffy.

  ‘Sshh,’ she says. ‘She’s dreaming.’

  Not for the first time, Jonah ponders her strangeness. He wonders if his insomnia is denting his reality, or if he’s drinking too much; then he focuses his attention back on Mother Earth, her knees bent in towards her turfed stomach. Her pose is both sensual and foetal, but the soil around her mouth is dripping. Milly reaches out to touch the rain damage. With her other hand, she presses her fingers down on the pulse of Jonah’s wrist, as if worried that a hug might hurt him. They stay like that for a minute, a statue of friendship.

  ‘Can you feel it?’ she whispers.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Me.’

  He is about to say yes then stops to pay attention. ‘Must be a dead arm or something.’

  As he squats down to match her height, he notices the sign with W.B. Yeats’s poem: ‘The Stolen Child’. Jonah feels dizzy. Perhaps it’s the way he’s crouched in the rain, or he’s too unfit for running. It doesn’t feel right being in such a secluded place with Milly. In an attempt to straighten himself out, he pushes back her messy fringe, then notices a scar on her temple. She starts talking very quickly – something about a paper boat. A flower press.

  ‘Chloe told me to keep away.’

  ‘From the flower press?’

  ‘No. It was my mistake.’

  ‘You’re not making any sense.’

  ‘It’s why Chloe’s got all those pictures on her walls.’

  There’s no logic to this conversation . . . or the lack of sensation in his face. He can’t even fe
el her muddy palm on his cheek.

  He can see her trying to articulate, but all she can say is one word.

  ‘Please.’

  The Ruined Arch

  HB. 31.03.06 Broad Walk

  Be still. Let every sense

  quiver with awareness . . .

  in the tiny hairs on your arms,

  the nape of your neck.

  First there is the breaking through

  of the green, hopeful tip.

  What audacity to nudge its way up,

  its soul aching for sunlight.

  There it is, pushing through the soil –

  the very first crocus.

  1. Prune the roses

  2. Mulch the herbaceous beds

  Over 100,000 daffodils have bloomed.

  They’re like sunlight in a jar . . .

  The flowers glimmer as day turns to dusk, the evening as tender as a lover. Harry tucks his notebook inside his breast pocket and strolls towards the lake. A breeze sets free a haze of pollen. He is drawn towards the Tsuga canadensis, a coniferous dome with overhanging branches. Its other name is the weeping eastern hemlock and Harry is surprised to hear crying emanating from its leafy cave. When the sobbing becomes louder it’s as if the leaves are shuddering with tears. Pushing back its branches, he discovers Milly huddled on a bench.

  ‘There’s no need for that.’

  She hugs her knees tighter as if trying to make herself disappear. Harry stoops under the tree then sits beside her, his eyes trying to acclimatise to the darkness.

  He rubs her hand, waiting for her to speak. He knows this bench well: ‘Wherever in the world we are, this is a piece of our love that we built in England’. He wonders if the couple are still together or bitter with recrimination.

  ‘I went to see Chloe,’ the child splutters. ‘Three times I’ve been to her studio, but she never listens.’

  ‘She’s a well-adjusted, rational woman. She can’t hear you—’

  ‘But it wasn’t her fault.’

  The light through the leaves scatters the darkness, highlighting patches of her expression, her naivety. Harry leans forward.