A Thousand Paper Birds

by Tor Udall

  Time stands still. Even the breeze stops. And this is the devastating gap where someone once was. Harry is left alone with the scattered wind, his exhilaration and loss. All that remains on the ground is a flower press. Harry already misses her dirty kneecaps, the dried snot on the back of her hand. He hasn’t a clue where Milly is, or how something can become nothing. He just remembers all the lies he told her about her destination, as if he were someone wise.

  Part VI

  A Song in Q

  We do not remember days, we remember moments.

  Cesare Pavese, found on a bench in Kew Gardens

  A Misfit

  Jonah wanders down the A307, unable to find a place that brings rest. He is still on sick leave, his sleep slashed with nightmares of bones, flowers and murky water. He thinks about the aquarium and the old couple staring; was he talking to thin air about fish? The truth is indigestible. Jonah has returned to his therapist who logically explained that the insomniac, unable to dream, hallucinates.

  ‘Did you see the girl when you were most exhausted? And only then?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Paul Ridley’s blond eyelashes quivered. The hypothesis was simple: what Jonah’s subconscious knew about Milly’s death became bound with his grief. He only imagined this child and the man by the lake. It was a manifestation of his recent obsessions. But this doesn’t explain the mysteries surrounding Audrey’s stranger. It’s impossible for an intelligent man to fathom.

  His loyalty to Audrey still feels misplaced, but something jars him. Harry was at Audrey’s grave, on the island with Milly, as if he were some kind of angel of death. Jonah feels as crazy as the strays he sees on the tube, digging their fingers in their ears to poke out the voices that chant and curse; a chorus of derangement. He recalls, again, the man wearing Audrey’s scarf, then evidence of Milly’s existence: her smacking her lips together to imitate a clownfish, or scratching her earlobe when she was thinking.

  Jonah can’t help it; he turns into the Gardens. At the lake, damselflies skirt between the nettles, and a pond skater walks across the surface, not caring that it’s performing a miracle. Nature hums and buzzes. Putting on his headphones, Jonah listens to Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins in D Minor, but the strings’ cries feel distant. What he needs is the warmth of a human being. Finding Chloe’s number on his phone, he wants to talk about Milly but doesn’t trust his memories. The dreamcatcher, which became heavy with things lost and found, has been dismantled, but he has read about Chloe’s work in the newspaper, her career blossoming like the orchids. He wonders how her life has changed, and shocks himself by wishing her well.

  Jonah walks away from the lake and the memories of a little girl kicking. He tries to shuffle off the sense of insanity that follows him like a headache. The dim light of the Redwood Grove gives him some comfort, so he sits on a bench and lets himself be soothed by these American giants. The only truth is his smallness.

  Jonah smells smoke. The air begins to bristle with an incessant whisper. Someone is stroking his temples. It’s so precise, the soothing spiralling of a finger. The aroma of tobacco . . . Audrey? Life buckles Jonah enough to surrender. As he weeps, he recalls a foetus in his palm, his wife’s face cut by the windscreen, the splintered glass studding her cheeks like tears. He remembers the musty smell of her diary, the yellow cover thumbed by Chloe, a woman who breathes life into paper. Then he thinks about the snow, the endless snow, and Milly leaving no footprints.

  His sobbing comes in waves. When all beliefs have been smashed what is left of a man? His convictions crack and collapse until he finds himself beyond grief. He rests, worn-out, in a silence that demands nothing. It has no answers, only arms that hold him. It cradles him like a boat floating to shore. As Jonah wipes his face on his sleeve he wonders if tears are the most necessary thing of all. If there is a God perhaps it is his greatest gift.

  Jonah stays for an hour, letting the feelings sway and subside, and when he feels dry enough and steady, he stands up and leaves the grove. The bench remains under the redwoods, the inscription faint from age, forgotten by most.

  Harry Barclay

  1918–1969

  Twenty years of service to Kew

  In May Chloe walks through the Gardens. She hasn’t been to Kew since her work was removed, but now she returns to test her belief that she’s recovered from Jonah Wilson. Almost six months ago she’d left his flat riddled with guilt, but this turned to the rage and resentment of a lonely Christmas. She ate packets of biscuits to stifle the hurt. Then, hauling up the drawbridge, she focused on work.

  Huge squares of paper covered her floor. She needed assistants to pick up each corner, the paper becoming smaller as they made each fold. Despite the intricate mathematics, creases were pressed down with knees and elbows. Chloe grappled with flimsy sheets that billowed and tore. But, finally, in her studio, stood a heron, ninety centimetres tall.

  After her success in Kew, Chloe was offered many new commissions, and now only temps one day a week. She walks through the Rhododendron Dell, her hair grown into a long, choppy bob, her shape a little softer from lunches with the artistic elite. But as she leaves the dell, the sunshine scuffs. A mother and child are sitting on the grass, cocooned in their private world, their hands gently clapping and parting. Between them the air vibrates with a love that knows each other’s faces in detail. It leaves Chloe wanting.

  A while later she is walking through the conservation area near Queen Charlotte’s Cottage. A guide is talking to a school group, her voice lost under the drone of a passing plane. Chloe catches names such as fiddle dock and knotted clover.

  ‘It’s important to leave fallen trees for insects. We encourage brambles and stinging nettles. I’m sure you’ll be pleased to know that, for once, it’s not about being tidy.’

  Many of the young listeners are carrying sticks they have picked up on the way. Others are touching the bark of a nearby hawthorn. Chloe is intrigued by how they explore the world around them; then a boy viciously chases some wandering geese, and she moves away. A few minutes later, her eyes are drawn to a couple leaving the woods, looking strangely luminescent. There is a savouring to their movement. It tempts Chloe to enter the same tree-lined avenue where a corridor of sunshine is banked with hundreds of bluebells. It is wild. Lush. Ancient. Amid this sea of flowers are shafts of lime from the yellow perfoliate alexander, and white petals that smell of garlic. A few people stand gawping as if they are paused in grace, taking in one time-stretched moment.

  Chloe pulls out her camera. She’s so enamoured with what she wants to capture that she doesn’t feel the raindrops. As she crouches down to take a close-up of the belled beauty, the storm drenches. While she rushes to protect her equipment, the others run from the woods, clutching bags or newspapers over their heads, the sky shifting to darkness. Alone, Chloe raises her arms, letting the rain soak her dress, the thin fabric clinging to her torso. Water cascades down her chin as she looks up, losing her edges. She blurs with the rain, for a moment, a year, a lifetime, then the deluge stops. The weather simmers, undecided. Once again, there is brilliant sunshine. The bluebells, now radiant, glisten with raindrops.

  There is magnificent quiet. As Chloe walks through the woods there is no soul to be seen, and it feels as if the entire world is breathing in time with her, or her with it. She pauses by a splintered bench.

  Set free to enjoy these flowers for ever

  In loving memory of Violet Marshall 1881–1978 and sister Daisy Slight.

  Painters for many years of these bluebells

  Chloe cherishes the smell of the wet earth; the way the rain has polished the petals. Then she notices a man, with his eyes closed, sitting on a bench. It is the only seat situated squarely in the light, and his face is tilted up towards the sun, like a flower craning towards what nourishes it. He doesn’t seem to mind that the bench is wet, but, as Chloe moves closer, she hesitates. There is mud on his trousers, and even from here she can smell the age in his suit; autumn leaves
mixed with the dankness of a charity shop.

  Pulling out her camera, Chloe takes a photo but the click wakes him up. As he startles away from the lens, she tries to reassure him. It takes a while for their gaze to meet. His blue eyes have a twinkly charm; but in that glint is a sad compassion, the weight of someone who has seen too much.

  ‘I’m sorry I disturbed you,’ says Chloe.

  She feels dizzy, as if the world is turning too slowly, or her thoughts too fast. His ever-changing gaze is like a flock of sparrows, re-forming and gathering in the air – a murmuration. He opens his mouth, but no words come out. It’s so awkward that Chloe apologises and walks away.

  The sound of her feet on the gravel, her head down. Chloe tries to move as quickly as possible. Anyone could have taken his wallet, his hat. His hat – an old, tweed cap had sat beside him like a loyal lover. Chloe stops. She fumbles with her camera, finds the photo, but there’s a blur in the middle. She can only see the hat, the bluebells and a sunlit bench. As she makes her way back, her heartbeat quickens.

  ‘Harry? Mr Barclay?’

  There is no one there.

  ‘Wait!’

  Chloe breaks into a run, but she doesn’t find him at Queen Charlotte’s Cottage or the waterlily pond. She walks back to the woods, beyond the bench he was sitting on. There is a thud behind her. She turns around to see a boot lying on the ground. Then another falls out of the air and lands on the gravel path with a clatter.

  Chloe peers up into the trees; it’s probably those school kids playing a trick. But there are no flickers of uniform, no muffled laughter. When she searches the beds, the bluebells shudder. She returns to the path and picks up a boot. There’s Sellotape around one lace and the leather is as wrinkled as old skin, the studs caked with soil. Collecting its partner, Chloe feels a pull, as if her soul has snagged on something sharp and if she moves too fast she will unravel. She teeters back from the edge and returns to the bench where she sits down, clasping the muddy boots to her chest. If that was Harry, what did Audrey fall in love with? A fantasy? A man? Or something that felt like her own death?

  Harry followed her through the bluebells. He kicked off one boot, then the other. Nothing worked. Just twenty minutes ago, in the rain and bluebells, Chloe was so vividly awake that she could see him. He silently rummaged through so many things to say and how to explain them, and when she walked away, he stumbled after her with yells. But she could no longer hear him.

  She is hugging a pair of dirty boots and shivering. The sun isn’t warm enough to dry her dress; her skin is goosepimpled. As Harry sits beside her, he resists touching her cheek. Perhaps it’s a good thing she can no longer see how dishevelled he is. Since Milly left, he hasn’t combed his hair, and the lining of his suit is growing mildew.

  He can’t believe he chose these trees, these weeds, over Milly. Constant in his mind is her hope-drained face, her saying to the ground, ‘But, Hal, I can’t make anything better.’ All those times he told her she mustn’t interfere, but Harry is sick of watching and waiting: he has to, at least, try to help. Perhaps if he’s brave enough, Chloe might listen. But he isn’t sure how to let anyone know him. Even when he was alive, he poured all his love into trees and reading, things that wouldn’t challenge him to show himself. It’s always been safer to pretend that he is self-contained, impervious, unloving – but the only way to explain that would be to start at the beginning.

  Perhaps he should tell Chloe that he was born in the year that the Great War ended – that his dad died in battle, soon after Harry was conceived. When he grew up, he almost shared his father’s fate, in El Alamein. He could tell Chloe about the bombing in ’42 that killed his mum in the house she’d always lived in, and that his brother died in the same year, fighting in Europe. When he returned to London there was no one left. Not even a neighbour.

  This garden became his salvation. Bombs had damaged many of the buildings. Plants were being replaced and the herbarium specimens returned from temporary storage. During the war, Kew had been busy finding alternatives: coconut water for saline drips, belladonna as an antidote to nerve gas, nettles to strengthen the plastic in planes. Kew was now working with the Commonwealth War Graves Commission to advise on suitable plants for the new cemeteries. Harry was part of a team that researched the impact of bomb blasts on trees. Dormant buds were suddenly growing and their resilience inspired him. He began to believe that, together, he and the plants could survive the thrall and challenges of each season.

  He wonders if he should tell Chloe about the bicentenary celebrations – how he had met the Queen. But the story he really wants to share begins ten years later. On an April morning in 1969, he was digging in a remote part of the Gardens. He describes the moment when he fell to the ground, his heart clapping the strangest beat. As he looked up at the trees, it was as if a drunk was striking his chest in some euphoric devil-spun trance. Then his heart simply went kaput. Jesus, what a sky there was. Harry swears that it winked: the shutter of its heavy blue eyelid closing and opening, its lashes draped with bird wings that looked like tiny sequins. He remembers thinking of the arteries in his heart spreading like branches across his chest, the sunlight dissolving him. But he couldn’t let go of the thought that a hose needed fixing. It niggled him so much that he turned away from the light, and as he made that choice he felt the ground beneath him. Then he did what he always did; he taped up the punctured hose, and tended to some pruning.

  It wasn’t unusual for him to spend weeks without conversation, so for a while he continued unknowing. He could still smell and taste, or, at least, he held on to the memory of these senses, but gradually he lost interest in eating and drinking. Needing the toilet became a habit like the itch of a phantom limb. People came into his home and sent his books to landfill. The Banerjee family moved in.

  He continued to hope that something had happened that had scrambled his brain cells; that he was simply a missing person, alive and vagrant. But when the staff put his bench in the Redwood Grove, the dates felt definitive. Part of him was pushing up the daisies, or kicking the bucket. Somewhere in Mortlake Cemetery, his body was rotting. He’d always thought his ashes would be scattered under his favourite tree – the North American tulip – but he never got around to making a will. He set up a cautious camp in the Redwood Grove, the one place where part of him was still rooted in the earth. Lying next to his name on a plaque, he huddled under the stars with his mattress of duff. Trying to enjoy the Gardens’ simple pleasures, he waited for something, or someone, to guide him.

  At first he saw his predicament as proof that heaven was a figment of the world’s imagination. But as the months went by, he feared that he had been abandoned. Often he would gawp up at the night sky and ask, ‘What is this?’ Looking for answers, he ventured into Richmond Library, a quaint nineteenth-century building. He read about death and the afterlife, but nothing matched his experience. He was leafing through some old LIFE magazines when he stumbled over the photograph of the falling woman. He became transfixed by this moment between life and death, a person frozen between heartbeats. He didn’t think about her being scraped off the pavement; she was still alive enough to touch him. As Harry ripped out the page, he began to weep. It was the first time he realised he could still do that, that tears could fall from his ducts like a kid.

  Harry had no road map. But as he returned to the Gardens, he realised he could either wallow in self-pity or continue root-balling plants and checking on the Victoria. The annual schedule of work gave his days a much-needed framework. He would tag a potentially dangerous branch, log it in the mess room, the staff too busy to realise that it wasn’t one of their colleagues. He often worked at night, trying to save plants from dying. Each time he mended an apprentice’s mistake, the minutiae of survival relaxed him.

  Sometimes he explored areas that he hadn’t specialised in. One night he sneaked into the herbarium and found himself walking into heaven. In a vast, triple-levelled wing was a multitude of wooden cabinets. Inside w
ere over seven million dried plants pressed on to paper. The type specimens, in red folders, were miracles – an official discovery of a new species.

  The files were oily to the touch, covered in hundreds of years of layered dust. As he struggled to read centuries-old handwriting describing family, region and genus, a museum beetle scuttled across the table. He smashed it flat with his palm. Taking in the smell of musty paper, he gazed up at this library of plants. So many lost things gathered: an ark.

  Harry spent hours opening drawers full of carp – strange fruits and seeds that looked like they came from another planet. Then he found the spirit collection containing fragile items in jars. He studied the pickled orchids then stumbled over a specimen collected by Darwin. Harry was sitting inside the story of evolution. He remembered an old wives’ tale about the herbarium suffering bomb damage to the ceiling. Apparently when the rain came in, some of these pressed seeds started to germinate. He pictured them now, tender green shoots pushing away from the paper, coiling out of the cabinets. Extinct species awakened.

  The next morning, Harry woke up with renewed belief that he had a mission. There were times when he missed drinking hot mugs of tea, or the satisfaction of having a piss; but each day he wrote in his notebook. He wanted to preserve the passing seasons, each flower, even himself. He wrote about the altered states that allowed people to see him – the drunks and insomniacs – then there was the unblinkered innocence of the very young. He also described the deaths he’d witnessed. Each time he found himself sitting next to a corpse, he wondered why he was different. If the Japanese tourist had only lingered because Harry interfered, then why was he still here? No one had struck his chest, or ripped his soul from his body. As the family of another dead person wept and wailed around him, Harry came to an uncomfortable realisation: when it came to his time, no one grieved.