A Thousand Paper Birds

by Tor Udall

  Beside him, Chloe has taken out her sketchbook. He tries to explain what it’s like to fidget in eternity, to be out of step with time.

  ‘I’m a misfit, Chloe.’

  But she doesn’t hear him. Instead, she draws the bluebells; then she writes a note to herself among the scribbled petals. What happened to Audrey?

  Audrey didn’t know what she was going to do when she saw Harry. Shout at him, or simply stand there, letting his light soak into her being. He’s probably not at home, she said to herself, as she applied her lipstick, or I’ll discover he’s married with six children.

  She kissed a tissue, picked up her keys, then remembered earlier that week, when Jonah had bought tulips. She had taken a vase from the piano then paused in the doorway. Jonah was studying his reflection in the bathroom mirror. He examined a blemish on his arm, then pulled in his stomach and grimaced. She hadn’t wanted to laugh. She had yearned to hold him and whisper that she loved his flaws too. That she could learn, again, to appreciate the shorthand of a marriage. But she didn’t say a word. Standing there, framed in the doorway, she could love him immaculately, without him knowing. Or either of them ruining it.

  The moment had filled her with expectant happiness. She promised she would return to her husband as soon as she had confronted Harry. As Audrey climbed into her Ford Ka, she felt exuberant. But as she got closer she kept thinking about Harry’s eyes, his mouth. As she drove through that blue-sky morning, she was singing along to a CD: ‘Oh! You pretty things, don’t you know you’re driving . . .’

  They helter-skeltered towards their tragedy. Harry rushed down the street to get to his old house before she did; Lord knows what the Banerjee family would say. He planned to meet her on the pavement and pretend that he lived there, to steer her away from the door and the truth. But there wasn’t any logic. There was just the need to be with her, the excitement scatting in his groin like some hopeless, hope-filled adolescent.

  At his grandparents’ house on Mortlake Road, James Hopkins was celebrating his ninth birthday. When he unwrapped the red skateboard, he begged his parents to let him go outside on the pavement. Unsteady, yet jubilant, he lifted one foot, raced forward, then lost his balance. Moving precariously down the street, he became aware of a car driving towards the T-junction. In front of him a hat appeared, falling through the air with elegance.

  Harry was still running when Audrey’s car reached the T-junction. As she looked in his direction, his hat slipped from his fingers. The boy on the skateboard wobbled to dodge it and it was those few inches that did it. He skated straight through the gardener’s body. The whoosh of another’s limbs careered through Harry’s liver, his ribcage. He was doubled over, winded and staring at the pavement, when he heard the shriek of brakes locking. The sound of the universe screaming. His ears bleed, remembering it.

  When Audrey spotted Harry, her foot hesitated, but she continued to turn the car. Then she saw a boy skating right through him. What had she seen? An accident? A trick of the light? Her vehicle pulled right, her heart pulled left . . . then there was no control, just endless panic: a never-ending second when she tried to haul herself back to safety. As the white wall loomed she felt the familiar flicker in her belly. She saw the fluttering eyelids of a child on the other side of the windscreen – then everything faded into white. Her last thought: is this what obliteration feels like?

  The entire world had been crushed into a ball of glass and metal. But the car stereo was still playing the song as if nothing had happened. A woman got out of a Nissan Micra and began screaming. As more vehicles pulled up, someone called 999, and others argued about lifting Audrey from the debris.

  ‘She just drove into the wall,’ said a witness, ‘it was so quick, I . . .’

  Harry peered through the window. Splinters of glass had shredded Audrey’s face, her head cocked to one side, revealing her beautiful, broken neck. She looked like a startled dreamer, her gaze wide open. If he had got there in time, perhaps he could have wrenched her free from her body – please, Lord, let her linger. But Audrey was pinned in time, her last minutes repeating like a stuck record, the scratch scratch of the same second. As her carcass lay motionless, Harry felt human for the first time in thirty-four years. Small. Useless.

  While the medics worked, Harry felt the pitying gaze of heaven, then realised that the boy with the skateboard was gawping at him.

  ‘Clumsy,’ he yelled. ‘Why didn’t you look where you were going?’

  Even through the spit of his shouting, he knew that the boy wasn’t to blame. But Harry couldn’t take the words back. As they both stared at Audrey, Harry wanted to tell him her name. He needed to confess – this woman never knew that I loved her – but all the boy could see was a crushed car and a dead person. They were both accidental perpetrators, both victims.

  James didn’t remember seeing the man before. The hat had been falling on to the pavement; but now this man was holding its rim in his hands and worrying it between his fingers. What had happened? This hat had tumbled through the air, then there was the sensation of skating through something that felt like blossom . . . then a clod of earth on a coffin. The scream of brakes, a silver car, the hollow of hollowest thuds, as if the earth hadn’t dared echo, but held its breath, just like the boy had done. The day stuttered.

  There were many people. His parents were flapping like crows, and he could see the smallness of his grandmother watching in the doorway, but that man standing there, that everyone was ignoring . . . the tears were dropping from his chin, as if he might turn into a man of rain.

  ‘Clumsy,’ he was shouting to himself. ‘Clumsy. Clumsy . . .’

  James buried his head against his mother’s chest, but she held him too tightly. When he looked again, the man wasn’t there. As his parents led him back to the house, James suspected with a child’s instinct that his confidence would become muted, that his shine would turn into a dark shyness. Somehow he knew that he would skate each day, like clockwork, waiting for the tick-tock of time to lead him back to that man with the hat. He didn’t know why or when. Perhaps it would be on his dying day, as either a nightmare, or a friend.

  The sunlit tide washes over the bluebells. Harry sits on the bench, nursing his shame. If he had revealed himself to Audrey, things might be different.

  Chloe stares into the blue-flowered distance. She has been drawing the belled petals, each stroke of her pencil bringing her back to the known boundaries of perspectives and colour. But perhaps it doesn’t matter that she can’t hear. Harry feels lighter in the telling. It might still be worth something to the trees, or the sky – and finally, this is his story, as slim as light. His confession.

  The Patterns that Make Us

  As Jonah gets on the train at Paddington, laughter erupts from a bunch of drunk, wide-eyed girls; he puts on his headphones and listens to Stabat Mater. He’s been back at school for a couple of months. There is chewing gum stuck to the opposite seat, and dirt on the windows. A depressed-looking woman holds on to the rail and several cramped businessmen struggle to read the Evening Standard.

  Having researched the newspaper articles about Emily Richards, he’s discovered that Chloe was the last person to see her. It took him weeks to steel himself to ring on her doorbell, but there had been no answer. In a moment of madness, he climbed up the scaffolding around her warehouse, in case she was refusing to open the front door. Not knowing which studio was hers, he passed several windows, then came across the room. He almost fell off the scaff. There were drawings of Milly everywhere. They mapped what Chloe had lost, but in the following weeks, he was too dazed to call her. He held on to his discoveries, as she did with the diary; but now, as he sits in the carriage, all he thinks about is the anticipation of regret. The idea grows in him like a cancer.

  Harry’s shed has been wrenched open. The books he read to Milly, from Roald Dahl to Paul Gallico, have been thrown into black sacks, his tools removed, and it’s no longer a safe place to hang up his suit. He sits on hi
s bench in the Redwood Grove, the slats cracked, the wood green with mould. Nearby some children are playing hide and seek. There is noise, a count to ten, then quiet – just the caw of an invisible bird. As the Kew Explorer trundles by, a small boy waves at him through the glassless window. Breathing in the thick, moist air, Harry tries to not think about forever.

  As the skies open, he notices the mildew on his trousers, the hems thick with moss. Perhaps his toes will grow roots into the earth, but he doesn’t deserve to be a tree or anything good. Looking up at the dripping branches, he prays that Audrey is playing with her children; but to believe that would require a faith in heaven. Filling his lungs with smoke, he hunches under the hood of the weather. There is rain in his bones. He is shoeless, his socks sodden.

  Wrapping Audrey’s scarf closer, he tries to conjure up her image but all he sees is bent light, her shimmering bone. What comes into focus is Milly. Harry leans against his love for a little girl. She’d always held a faith that he had lacked: a belief in people. She yearned to participate, to help. His socks are in tatters as he runs past the lake, the Mediterranean Garden, the Temple of Bellona, until he finds himself at the London Underground. When he disembarks at Earl’s Court, he finds a landslide of people, the ticket gates opening and closing as if herding cattle. Using umbrellas as weapons, the passengers shove forward with their deadlines and agendas. As Harry waits for his connection, some are paralysed by indecision, while others are running so fast they have lost sight of where they are going. ‘Who would venture towards this life of love and loss?’ he asks. ‘Who would choose it?’

  During his journey to Paddington, he overhears a woman complaining about the weather. Harry whispers, ‘This here is the breath that matters.’ He wants her to know about the nature of time, how the years pass as slippery as quicksilver, as fleeting as sand. At Bayswater he rushes up the stairs, then crosses the bridge to get on a train going in the direction he came: the 4.19 from Paddington. But despite searching each carriage, Jonah is not there. Harry gets off at Ravenscourt Park, then waits for the next train and walks its entire length. He begins to despair as he jumps on to another train, and another – until after three more attempts, he finds Jonah slumped in a carriage.

  Under the hood of his fisherman’s jacket, Jonah observes the faces that watch his in the window; then the strangers glance down at their shoes, avoiding eye contact. They don’t notice a man, his suit growing weeds, shuffling down the carriage. He sits next to Jonah.

  ‘If Milly was here,’ he nudges, ‘I bet she would have ignored the dirt on the windows. She would have pointed out that woman opposite. How the wrinkled tights around her knee look like a face of smiling nylon.’

  As the train lurches, Harry talks about the chipped plate that remembers the kiss after a fight, the rust on a much-loved bike, or the childhood story behind a scar . . . the flaws that hold the staggering beauty; then he notices Jonah’s headphones. They tune out his surroundings so Jonah can’t see a man looking homeless, buttonless, ancient.

  It’s only when Jonah smooths out the creases in his trousers that Harry’s plan comes into focus. Reaching into his pocket, he takes out the visitor map of Kew Gardens and tears it roughly into a square. As he folds, he fumbles, unaccustomed to corners. He knows more about spirals: how a sunflower grows, the habits of plants – the patterns that make us.

  Leaning on the rules of Fibonacci, petals eventually bloom from Harry’s fingers. He drops the paper flower into Jonah’s lap. The lights flicker. When Jonah looks down, the filthy train becomes licked wet with hope.

  Jonah feels as if he has been drunk for years and is recovering from a hangover. Sitting in a grubby park near the Paddington comp, he holds an origami flower. He is moved by the frown of a woman reading a novel on a nearby bench, a pigeon feather in a puddle, a man’s cigarette smoke becoming blue against the light. He yields to a world that is supple and changing.

  He doesn’t know if the origami is a message or serendipitous litter. Last night he unfolded it to discover the pale lake standing out from shades of green, but what is this map telling him? What direction should he take? He has folded the paper back into its original form, religiously following each crease and hearing Milly’s words.

  ‘It was my mistake. Jonah?’

  He has a thought so fragile even to remember it is a risk. Chloe in a blue dress . . . or was it red? The low-cut back, the flexing of her shoulder blades – he can recall the feel of it, the swish, then the image fades into the distance.

  Once school breaks up for summer, Jonah stares at the rain like an eternal student squandering his holiday. Paul Ridley has persuaded him to take meditation classes and every now and then he practises, becoming aware of the relaxation of his muscles. Occasionally he jogs, the flab rubbing against the waist of his tracksuit. On his fortieth birthday he goes to bed, and hears the first three chords of Purcell’s Abdelazer Suite so clearly he becomes convinced that someone is playing his piano. He finds the living room empty, but sits down and repeats the same three chords over and over.

  The next night is the same. He lies in bed, listening to the notes, then he settles himself down on the stool, where there’s the faint aroma of tobacco. Jonah repeats what he has heard, then plays a new phrase that sounds like the beginning of ‘Space Oddity’, the baroque mixing with Bowie until it grows into something battered but hopeful.

  Note by note, he builds architectures of sound, that don’t need applause or recognition. The more he explores the possibilities from one chord to the next, the more he remembers: Chloe’s sleepy smile in the morning, the night’s crust in her eyes, her face indented by the stitching on a pillow.

  As July turns to August he takes a pad of paper and writes freehand, not letting the pencil stop for twenty minutes; then he rereads it and circles, in red, possible lyrics. He plays arpeggios so fast his fingers stumble into new patterns. Each time he leaves the stool, his jaw feels bloodied. But he returns the next day, hammering out chords until something breaks – and finally his body remembers how to be relaxed at the piano. He loses himself in a glorious mess of sound.

  In the early hours of the morning, his memory is subtle. Chloe changes in his mind like a square of paper into a secret box, a dove, a kimono. Hands paused on the keys, Jonah remembers the small of her back . . . her scent, as discreet as dew or the juice of a melon, so delicate it must have been something he imagined.

  ‘What’s your favourite smell?’ she had asked.

  ‘Tears. Salt. Skin.’

  Jonah stares at the rug where she practised yoga. It was never self-conscious, but as if something was stretching her. She thought with her body, even when she sketched; yes – she would sketch, he would play the piano, and now he recognises how their bodies and habits fitted together. Her belief in him now hurts. What wonderful thing could they have become if he had really seen her? He didn’t appreciate her creativity, her sense of adventure, her deceit. The thought slashes like whiplash.

  He remembers an evening last September when he had caught her unguarded. She was staring out of the window towards the Gardens. Wearing only his T-shirt, her bright bravado was gone. Her body was curved, as if she was trying to embrace something he couldn’t see. It was the same concave posture as Milly’s mother.

  The next day he clears the files from Audrey’s study and paints over the names of their unborn children. From that blank wall, the world shifts. A friend from uni gets in touch, saying he’s been commissioned for a documentary and needs some help. Jonah is about to say he doesn’t have the time, or the chops.

  ‘The project doesn’t start until December. They only need seventeen minutes of music. It’s right up your street – oceans, coral reefs. I can send you some files. C’mon, Joe, what do you say?’

  ‘Sounds great.’

  In the last week of the holidays, he volunteers again at the community centre, working with sufferers of dementia. He returns home and clears the unread post off the piano then replaces it with manuscript p
aper. As the days go by, he is so lost in the process that he constantly forgets where he placed his pencil. By the time he returns to school, he has completed three songs and a bridge.

  One Sunday in October, he is supposed to be marking essays, but begins to fold paper aeroplanes. He launches them around the kitchen, experimenting with aerodynamics, then chastises himself and settles down to a paragraph about Bach. Five minutes later he is folding again, and remembering Chloe’s graduation project: a thousand cranes made out of newspaper. Jonah can see her now, eating an apple and leaning against his sink. She was describing a famous origami master.

  ‘At the end of his days, Yoshizawa said: “I’ve spent my entire existence trying to express with paper the joy of life . . . or the last thought before a man dies.”’

  Chloe spat out the pips.

  Tearing out a page from a Sunday magazine, he begins to fold, his mind tracing Chloe’s angles and edges. But as the paper resists, he begins to doubt his chances; he’s hardly a stable proposition.

  ‘Shit!’

  He cries out – a paper cut on his finger. The precise pain wakes him up to the present, and wrapped inside that moment is one word: Yes. There’s a scrambling in his gut as he realises, with that one small syllable, how many more things there are to say yes to. They could kiss, start a family, move to the coast – but what if Chloe says no? Jonah takes some manuscript paper and writes down dots and rhythm. Everything is in the attempt after all.

  The artist has become formidable. Dressed in a black polo neck and trousers, her raven hair is tied back into a severe ponytail. Chloe opens the door of her warehouse, looking civilised and cynical. The postman passes her an innocuous cardboard box, but when she climbs back up the concrete steps, she stops. Jonah’s address is written on the side in black felt tip.