The High Places (18 page)

‘So the boys grew up, and when the first one got married I asked Vi if she was going to give him the bird, and she said no, and I asked if it was because he wasn't a girl. And she said it was because he didn't believe it was mechanical. I was glad to hear it, but I said to her, “You told me you'd be out the door if I didn't believe you,” and she said, “I'm his mother, not his wife.” And the second boy got married and he didn't get the bird either, but I knew better than to ask. All this time, it's still going into the bath with her, sitting on her shoulder all day. It'd perch on the telly at night while we watched. It wasn't till after both boys left home that it started to talk – Hello! Knock! All of that, and her name too. So I figured she'd finally bought a smart one.'

‘Violet! Violet!' said the bird.

‘It used to come on holiday with us, camping and road trips, but then we planned a trip to England – Vi always wanted to go to England – and I found her putting it in her suitcase. So I said, “You can't do that,” and she said, “I have to, they won't let it on the plane with us,” and then it all came out, Chris – that I'd never believed her, that I thought it was a game, that she fed it in secret and bought a new one every ten years. She was spitting mad, and I said to her, “Well, take it apart, show me its insides,
prove it
,” and she refused to go on the trip, shut herself in the bedroom, and wouldn't come out. It was all I could do to make her eat. The boys came over and talked her out of it, but it was never the same after that, she never really forgave me.'

‘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 his 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.