Just now.
Just for now.
Even the mother blackbird was silent and unmoving.
It was as if simultaneous fears — the birds’ and his own and the world’s — had created a mutual understanding and therefore a pause to take stock.
And then Jon blinked.
Which broke the moment.
Reality tumbled on again.
‘Well. OK. Then …’
And he let go, came quite near to a sigh, opened his hand and watched for the whole wide instant during which the chick didn’t leave him and its dark gaze rested on him and shone.
A schoolboy hope appeared in Jon that perhaps the animal was grateful to him and would stay, perch on his finger, groom its disarray.
Oh.
But it left him.
Oh.
Naturally.
Oh.
It lurched up in a flurry of speed, crying in a manner which implied it had been wounded most severely at the last. Yet it was patently fit enough to escape him and entirely free and saved. He had saved something.
Jon watched the bird dart hard up into the small box of sky fixed there above Valerie’s patio walls.
Oh.
And then it was as gone as gone. The mother, too.
His palm turned cold.
His usual tensions reasserted.
A panic arrived, or something like that, something like being nervous but in the absence of one’s nerves, something like being stripped of interior wiring and feeling one’s gaps. There it was. Here it was.
I think I may have to be sick.
Half a dozen parakeets slipped by above him, high enough to show in silhouette. They had harsh wings and tails drawn to a long, narrow point — one could imagine — by sheer speed, the violently straight flight. And they produced this din — tsseuw, tsseuw, tsseuw. They made a noise like wives.
No, I withdraw the remark. They sound like the fear of wives, the fear of one wife, my fear of one wife, of my wife, my fear of my wife, of that wife.
Tsseuw, tsseuw, tsseuw.
I don’t, I don’t know. I don’t know about wives, or parakeets. I ought to know what they sound like, but I don’t. I could be mistaken. I have an ape’s hands and no wiring. I am a tall child in a man’s suit and unfit for purpose.
Tsseuw, tsseuw, tsseuw.
And now I am late, really. And I’ve got to have time today, I’ve got to make time, because then I’ll be able to … There are things that I need to finish and they shouldn’t be rushed.
But I think I’ll manage. Truly. I swear. I’m going to punch a hole clear through my schedule and everything, so that I can breathe and operate as I should and I’ll make it possible to see and see and see what I do next.
Tsseuw, tsseuw, tsseuw.
The sound of being laughed at.
Here it is.
Tsseuw, tsseuw, tsseuw.
Yes, here it is.
06:42
BECAUSE LYING IN bed when awake was inadvisable, she’d come up here to see the dawn arriving. The council left the Top Park open, even at night. The qualities of the view it offered made constant access a must. People felt they might have to nip round any time and check on the metropolis where it lay uncharacteristically prostrate at their feet. And wasn’t it flat — the city — when you saw it like this, so plainly founded on a tidal basin, rooted in mud? Strangers would remark to strangers about that. Inhabitants of the Hill didn’t need to, they were used to it. They could stroll along, perhaps through music — the Hill is a musical place, people practise instruments — and they could hope for the startle of a good London sunset, the blood and the glitter of that splashing on banks of distant windows, making dreams in the sky. Or else they might get the brawling roll of storms, or firework displays, or the tall afternoons when the blues of summer boiled and glared like the flag of some extraordinary, flawless nation. Even on an average day, the city needed watching. You shouldn’t turn your back on it, because it was a sly old thing.
She’d wanted a sunrise. Or rather, she’d wanted to be out and it had been very early and she’d had no choice about what she would get — at dawn the sunrise is reliably what will arrive, you can be calm about that, no fear of disappointments. You’re all right.
She’d cut in and taken the broad path, safe between distantly dozing trees, no shadows to hide any bother. A woman by yourself — you didn’t want to feel constantly threatened, but you’d no call to be daft about things, either. You don’t like to put yourself at risk. Well, do you? No, you don’t. You shouldn’t. At risk is no way to be.
Then she’d gone round past the silent tennis court and headed — with fair confidence, even in the dimness, because she was here a lot — headed over the oily-feeling grass to the absolute highest point on the slope. Foxes had been singing, screaming, somewhere close.
It was traditional to hate foxes, but she wasn’t sure why. She guessed it was a habit to do with guilt. They always sounded injured, if not tormented, and that could get you thinking about harms you’d done to others in your past. The foxes perhaps acted like a form of haunting by offering reminders of sin and that was never popular. Or perhaps there was no logic involved, only free-form loathing, picking a target and sticking with it.
She enjoyed the warm din of the foxes, the bloody-and-furry and white-toothed sound — it was intense and she appreciated intensity. This was her choice. In the same way, the Hill was her choice. The open dark had given her a clifftop feeling as soon as she came within sight of the big skyline. It provided the good illusion that she could step off from here and go kicking into space, swimming on and up. Below her, opened and spread, were instants and chains of light apparently hung in a vast nowhere, a beautiful confusion. It was easy to assume that London’s walls and structures had proved superfluous, been let go, and that only lives, pure lives, were burning in mid-air, floating as stacks of heat, or colour, perhaps expressions of will. What might be supporting the lives, you couldn’t tell.
Then, during the course of an hour, the sun had indeed pressed in at the east, risen, birds had woken and announced the fact, as had aeroplanes and buses, and the world had solidified and shut her back out. It was like a person. You meet someone at night and they won’t be the same as they will if you see them in daytime. Under the still-goldenish, powdery sky, buildings had become just buildings, recognisably Victorian in the foreground and repeating to form busy furrows, their pattern interrupted where bombs had fallen in the war. These explosive absences had then been filled with newer and usually uglier structures, or else parks. There were also areas simply left gapped. They had been damaged and then abandoned, allowed to become tiny wildernesses, gaps of forgotten cause. Rockets had hit in ’44 — V-1s and V-2s. Somewhere under the current library — which wasn’t council any more — there’d been a shattered building and people in pieces, dozens of human beings torn away from life in their lunch hour. It didn’t show. There was a memorial plaque if you noticed, but other human beings, not obviously in pieces, would generally walk past it and give it no thought.