The High Places Page 14

  ‘But she didn’t walk out the door?’

  ‘That’s what she couldn’t forgive, she said it one day – “Bob, I’ve left it too late, I could walk out the door but there’s nowhere to go,” and I tell you, I could’ve killed that bird, but she wouldn’t leave it alone with me. She died later that year, unexpected, never saw England, and I still remember coming home after the funeral and there’s the bird sitting on the back of a kitchen chair. I hold out my hand for it to come over, I was ready to snap its neck. But I got to thinking about something she’d said when we had the fight. “Have you ever heard it sing?” she said, and I thought, Nope, not a note. Budgies don’t sing, do they? But it gave me pause, and next day I went off to a pet shop and listened to all the budgies squawking and chattering and chirping away, and it was true, I’d never heard the bird make a single sound like that. So what I did was, I bought a cage and some seed from the shop, I took it all home and set it up, and waited to see what happened.’

  ‘What happened?’ asked Christopher, because Mr Kidd was very still on the bed and seemed to expect it. The vacuum sounds had stopped. Christopher noticed the rising of a sour smell from somewhere in the room, which might have been drain or birdcage or something worse.

  ‘It hopped right in and played with the seeds all right, but it didn’t eat them. It washed itself in the water dish, but it didn’t drink a drop.’

  The bird on the wardrobe puffed out its chest.

  ‘And that was twenty years ago,’ said Mr Kidd. ‘It’s never eaten a bite or sung a note. Never even dropped a feather. That bird, my friend, is over a hundred and fifty years old.’

  He slapped his knees and shook his head; these were gestures of such pride and pleasure, and they suggested such cheerful submission to the surprises of life, such joy at having been wrong, that Christopher was tempted, for a moment, to believe Mr Kidd, to believe the bird as it twitched on the wardrobe, to walk through the lobby and out into the unknown city looking at everyone he passed, to believe in them, to find some steadfast one to love and trust, to burn with something – anything – in the bright, blank holiday afternoon.

  The bird flew down from the wardrobe and onto Mr Kidd’s shoulder. It beaked his beard. It ticked and trembled. Christopher wanted to touch it.

  ‘What’s it made of?’ he asked.

  ‘You’re the expert,’ said Mr Kidd. ‘You tell me.’

  Christopher stood and stepped close. He held out a finger; the bird, quizzical, looked at it. He touched the bird’s back and felt ridged softness.

  ‘Feathers,’ he said.

  Mr Kidd nodded. ‘I figured as much,’ he said. ‘But how’re they fixed in?’

  ‘If I could look ––’ said Christopher, but Mr Kidd jumped and the bird, too, jumped, and flew back into its cage, because the pile of magazines on which Christopher had been sitting had collapsed from the chair and slid onto the floor, and over them skated his photocopied pages of waxwork women, disembowelled.

  ‘Funny sort of line you’re in, Chris,’ said Mr Kidd, but he seemed unfazed; he had followed the bird to its cage and closed the door.

  ‘You get used to it,’ said Christopher, gathering the magazines.

  ‘Leave it, leave it,’ said Mr Kidd, and when Christopher looked up he saw the cage swinging before his face. ‘Now, I’ve never been game, but you’re a professional. How’s this: I give you the bird for a day or two and you take it apart, you figure out how it works and you put it back together exactly as it was. You can write it all up for your thesis – fair’s fair.’

  Mr Kidd held the cage at arm’s length from his body. His hand shook, and the cage, and the bird inside it. The cage was clean, except for scattered seed. A small bell rang beneath the tiny mirror. Mr Kidd shone above his offering. The bird said, ‘Violet! Violet!’ and Mr Kidd closed his eyes for a moment; his face when he opened them was both happy and grave.

  ‘You want me to … open this bird?’ asked Christopher.

  ‘You’ve got the experience,’ said Mr Kidd, nodding at the photocopies in Christopher’s hand.

  It occurred to Christopher that he could accept the cage, as Mr Kidd suggested, keep it for a night or two, and return it with a theory of a thousand moving parts. He could, in this time, watch the bird shit in the crumbs of its shucked seeds. This would be the kind, the generous thing to do. He took the cage from Mr Kidd, who dusted his hands as if free of a beloved burden.

  ‘This is nice of you,’ said Christopher.

  ‘I’ve waited a lifetime,’ said Mr Kidd, and Christopher nodded, said goodbye, entered his own room – vacuumed, apparently – and placed the cage on the writing desk.

  He spent the afternoon reading at the desk; the bird stood on its perch and appeared to watch him. It neither ate nor drank, and it didn’t speak, although Christopher looked up from his work at intervals and said, ‘Hello? Hello?’ The pigeons vibrated in the eaves.

  When Christopher went out to buy a kebab for dinner, he saw the people of the city drinking and walking and eating together. Even those alone in the streets had some purpose: they hurried toward a beloved, an appointment; they were on their way to a house, an intimate room, they would enter the room and be unfastened. The lounge of the St George Hotel flickered at the corner of his eye as he crossed the lobby. He climbed the stairs to his floor. Fifth floor. He pulled some chicken from the kebab and offered it to the bird, which inspected and refused it. For hours he sat by the cage composing an anatomy for the bird – rubber hoses, bellows, wires, tiny gears and springs, silk feathers – he was absorbed in this work as he no longer was in his thesis. Mr Kidd, from next door, contributed his serial cough.

  If it would just unleash a torrent of shit, thought Christopher. If it would just sing. It was so imperfectly a bird without the shit and the song. He covered the cage with a towel before going to bed, where he lay for some time, tucked into scrawny sheets, listening to passing feet in the corridor for evidence of drunkenness or injury. He slept until he was startled awake by the sound of buses as they took their nocturnal route through that part of the city. His mind had continued to work during sleep; he now saw a diagram of the inner bird, polished and bronze, and the bird itself opened out like a doll’s house. The economy of the design delighted him. To have fitted all that inside such a tiny object! To create such a masterpiece in order to conceal it!

  He went to the desk and began to draw; this drawing came so easily, and each minute part of it was the source of such serious pleasure for Christopher, that he grew anxious. A suspicion rose each time he heard Mr Kidd’s cough through the flimsy walls: that all this, the bird, Mr Kidd’s request, this beautiful, careful task, was a kind of joke, played upon him because he had slighted Mr Kidd in the hotel lounge that morning. It became clearer, as the night persisted and he continued to draw, that Christopher had been arranged, somehow, for sacrifice, and the bird along with him, so that Mr Kidd might walk freely through the lobby and into the lounge; might remain on first-name terms with Lori, the maid; might still be permitted to approach newcomers and startle them with his friendliness; might do all this under the watchful eye of the other men of the St George Hotel.

  The bird rustled under its towel; Christopher uncovered it. It moved the waxen fingernail of its beak without producing any noise, and the lamplight lit its glassy eye.

  ‘Hello, hello,’ said Christopher, opening the cage.

  The bird jumped down to the desk and onto Christopher’s arm. It throbbed there, motionless.

  ‘Hello, hello,’ said Christopher, rubbing its tidy head, feeling the spidery weight of its claws. It was so living, there on his arm, so compact, so close: the strangest thing he had ever seen, blue and yellow and white and black; a sidling, a sitting, a lifting of the wing.

  The bird remained on Christopher’s arm as he gathered his slippers and papers, his third of a wardrobe’s worth of clothes, and packed them into his suitcase. To perform these tasks one-handed gave them a steady grace. In order to change into h
is daytime clothes, he placed the bird on the end of the bed where the sheets were tucked so tightly his feet hadn’t creased them. When he was dressed, he took the bird and wrapped it in the folds of his pyjama shirt. He placed this bundle of bird and shirt in the suitcase, which he closed and locked.

  The hallways of the St George Hotel were quiet; there was no one to see Christopher slide his diagram beneath Mr Kidd’s door. The stairwell was empty. The clerk at Reception seemed used to the furtive departure of paying guests. The St George, as Christopher left it, felt collegial to him, and he loved its tender, threadbare enterprise. Outside, the streets lived their constant life, but the men of the hotel were safe within, with their lukewarm lounge and their curtain-lit rooms. Mr Kidd would stir into this morning just beginning, and the pigeons at his window would lull and soothe him. The sky to the east was lightening into colour. ‘Violet, Violet,’ said Christopher, and he stepped with purpose into the street. He became, then, any traveller on his intimate way through the early city, groomed for the street and taking care not to bump his suitcase.

  The Movie People

  When the movie people left, the town grew sad. An air of disaster lingered in the stunned streets – of cuckoldry, or grief. There was something shameful to it, like defeated virtue, and also something confidential, because people were so in need of consolation they turned to each other with all their private burdens of ecstasy and despair. There was at that time a run of extraordinary weather – as if the blank blue sky, the unshaded sun, and the minor, pleasurable breeze had all been arranged by the movie people. The weather lasted for the duration of filming and then began to turn, so that within a few weeks of the close of production a stiff, mineral wind had swept television aerials from roofs and disorganised the fragile root systems of more recently imported shrubbery.

  My main sense of this time is of a collective mourning in which the townspeople began to wear the clothes they had adopted as extras and meet on street corners to re-enact their past happiness. I didn’t participate. I was happy the movie people had left. I was overjoyed, in fact, to see no more trucks in the streets, no more catering vans in the supermarket car park, no more boom lights standing in frail forests outside the town hall. The main street had been closed to traffic for filming and now the residents were reluctant to open it again. It’s a broad street, lined with trees and old-fashioned gaslights (subtly electrified) and those slim, prudish Victorian shopfronts that huddle graciously together like people in church, and as I rode my scooter down it on those windy days after the movie people left, it looked more than ever like the picturesque period street, frozen in the nineteenth century, that brought the movie to us in the first place.

  I rode my scooter to the disgust of women in crinolines with their hair braided and looped, men in waistcoats and top hats: citizens of some elderly republic that had been given an unexpected opportunity to sun itself in the wan light of the twenty-first century. I knew these people as butchers, plumbers, city commuters, waterers of thirsty lawns, walkers of imbecile dogs, washers of cars, postmen, and all the women who ever taught me at school. They stayed in the street all day. They eddied and flocked. Up the street, and down again, as if they were following the same deep and certain instinct that drives herring through the North Sea. They consulted fob watches and pressed handkerchiefs to their sorrowful breasts. The wind blew out their hooped skirts. It rolled the last of the plastic recycling bins down the street and out into the countryside, where they nestled lifelessly together in the scrub.

  I rode my scooter to the home of my wife’s parents. She was sheltering there, my wife – Alice – because the movie people had left. She loved them, you see. Not her parents – that tranquil couple of bleached invertebrates – but the director, the key grip, the costume ladies, the hairdressers, the boom operators, most particularly the star. The whole town loved the star. Even I succumbed, just a little – to the unpredictable feeling we all had in the weeks he was among us that he might at any moment emerge from a dimly bulbed doorway or unfold his long legs from a rooftop. We’d never seen anyone so beautiful. He shone with a strange, interior, asexual light, and his head seemed to hang in midair as if it required nothing so substantial as a body. Looking at him was like entering a familiar room in which you see everything at once, and at the same time, nothing.

  I rode to my wife and said, ‘Alice, darling, he’s left now, they’ve all left, so can you please come home and love me forever, entangle your limbs in mine on the sofa while watching television, pluck your eyebrows in the bathroom mirror while I’m trying to shave, go running with me in the gorgeous mornings, and dance to bad disco music in your underwear?’

  But Alice, who now wore the costume of a sexy, spinsterly librarian, was trim with repressed desire and lit, at her throat, by Edwardian lace; she only sat on her parents’ chaise longue embroidering silken roses with inconsolable fingers. Her parents sat nearby: her father, that placid old sinner, was dressed as a country parson with a monocle in his crooked eye, and her mother peered out at me from the battered piano, which until recently had been nothing but a prop for picture frames. Now she played it with a watchful plink and plunk, with maternal suspicion tinkling over the expanse of her oatmeal-coloured face, a frill of veil in her ornamental hair.

  Other times I visited, the door was opened by a sour maid who informed me that my wife was not at home.

  ‘Is she not at home?’ I asked. ‘Or is she not at home?’

  The maid, with a grim, polite smile, shut the door in my face.

  The mood of the town improved with the success of the movie. A special preview was held just for us, in the town hall; we sat in the municipal pews and called out the names of everyone who appeared on screen in a long and lustful litany. We laughed and teased in order to conceal our bashful pride; it felt as if finally the world had reached a solicitous hand into our innermost beings and, liking what it found there, held us up for emulation and respect. We were so distracted that, afterward, nobody was sure what had actually happened in the movie. A forbidden love, generally – something greenish and unrequited – one of those glacial fin de siècle stories in which the tiniest gestures provoke terrible consequences about which no one in polite company speaks.

  At the premiere party, the townspeople danced the gavotte and the quadrille, they waltzed among potted palms with a slow, bucolic concentration, and they feasted on tremulous dishes of jellies and aspic. All throughout that strange, orchidaceous, combustible room, women fainted into arms and onto sofas, and a tiny orchestra of men with Dickensian whiskers played endlessly into the night as Alice – my Alice – danced time and double time and time and again with the star, who appeared to have flown in especially for the occasion. Her parents nodded and smiled and accepted the nods and smiles of other doting gentry, and Alice flew over the carpets, her face alight.

  I demanded of everyone I met, ‘Who does he think he is? Just because he’s famous, he can dance all night with another man’s wife?’

  Unlike that decorous crowd, I was insensible of my own dignity. Finally, the man who used to service my scooter (dressed now in the handsome uniform of an English corporal, which made of his red belly a regimental drum) drew me aside to tell me that the man Alice was dancing with wasn’t famous at all; was, in fact, Edward Smith-Jones, a man of the law, and selected from among the townspeople as the star’s stand-in. Apparently it was obvious to everyone that the entire scene in the stables featured this man and not the star, who was nervous around horses, especially during thunderstorms. So there he danced, lordly Eddie, with another man’s haircut and another man’s wife; but as my kind corporal pointed out, Alice wore white in the film and her hair on her shoulders, was unwed, available, and Edward’s hand rested on Alice’s supple back, and my heart was filled with hatred for the movie people.

  When I asked Alice for a waltz she told me, with a demure shake of her head, that her card was full.

  I lost my job when the graphic design firm I worked for was as
ked to move elsewhere. Certain other sectors of the citizenry were also politely dissuaded: the Greek fruit shop became a dapper greengrocer’s, manned by a portly ex-IT consultant with Irish cheeks and a handlebar moustache. He measured out damsons and quinces on gleaming bronze scales. Unless they were willing to wear their hair in long plaits, the Chinese people of the town were encouraged to stay off the main street between the hours of eight-thirty and six, and preferably to remain invisible on weekends. The gym was forced to close for lack of customers, and the Video Ezy. The tourists came in excitable herds, transported from the nearest town in traps and buggies. They mistook me for another tourist, and I was comfortable walking amongst them, watching as my wife strolled in the botanical gardens, her face in parasol twilight, a brass band playing in the rotunda, a British flag afloat above the trumpets, nannies sitting with their neat ankles crossed on benches as children toddled near duck ponds. Alice walked with her Edward, and her parents followed close behind. She tilted her head this way and that. In the movie she had been one of those extras who almost have a speaking part, the kind the camera focuses on to gauge the reaction of a comely crowd.

  When I heard they were engaged, Alice and Mr Smith-Jones, I retired my scooter. I took a job at a printer’s, and the finicky hours of setting type gave me time to think things over. On the day of their wedding I dressed in costume. In the movie I play the role of a man about town; you can see me in the lower right at 20:16, loafing with friends on a street corner while gauzy women flutter behind us, in and out of seedy cottages. Yes, right there – I’m the one watching the dog. I walked to the church among applecarts and small sooty boys, and there was a yellow quality to the air, a residual loveliness, as if the sun had gone down hours before but stayed just below the horizon. The church doors swung open before me, revealing soft pale heads among bridal flowers. The parson – my father-in-law – trembled in the moment when I should speak or forever hold my peace. I spoke. Eddie and I met in the aisle; he swung and I dodged and I swung. Alice shook in her slim white dress, and roses fell from her hands. I floored Eddie; he pulled me down. We rolled on that ecclesiastical carpet, up and over and around and down, while flustered ushers danced at the edges of our combat. Ed would be on the verge of springing up, a lawyerly Lazarus, but I clawed him back down; I, on my knees, would be making my way altar-ward, only to find him wedded to my foot. The organ began to play. The congregation piped in alarm. An elderly woman keened among her millinery. Finally we exhausted ourselves, and it was me – me! – Alice came to comfort. Edward loped away into the high noon of heartbreak. Her counterfeit father had been ready to join them in mock matrimony, but with a merry shake of his worldly head he rejoined us instead. The sun set, and the moon rose. We ate ices at the reception, and great silver fish surrounded by lemons, and that night my wife gave a virginal shudder as she withdrew her slender foot from her slender slipper.