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.