Away from the Scrivenery, Winceworth felt the muscles in his shoulders loosen and he was able to take deeper breaths. The air of the park helped clear his head and of course with this came a certain new confidence and l’esprit de l’escalier. He imagined potential, missed ripostes: Look here, Appleton, you ridiculous bore, Coleridge probably died before Frasham’s father was even born. Bielefeld, you daft-necked carafe of a man, don’t peacock about romanticise (v.) to impress Miss Cottingham; Coleridge also came up with bisexual, bathetic, intensify and fister if you thought you had an interesting weekend.
The birthday cake made his back teeth sing with sweetness and he closed his eyes against the pain. His day had already taken its toll on him. Pons pons pons. Toothache would have to wait its turn.
Somewhere across the way an unseen bird was trilling. Weak sun fooled something light across his face, and he felt a yawn slip electric beneath his tongue – he shook his head, dog-like, to summon alertness, but then drew out his watch for nap calculations. Waning nausea and exhaustion had caught up with him. All he wanted right now was to sleep, to curl up like the cat in corners of the Scrivenery without a care for anything.
But falling asleep now would muddy the rest of the day and spoil any chance of rest this evening. Finish the cake, he told himself, take one more turn about the park to get the blood going and face the day renewed. He dug his glasses into the bridge of his nose and winched his face to the sky, willing himself into wakefulness. Two birds veered overhead, chatting and braiding the air. It might have been his imagination, but a dandelion seed seemed to drift through his line of sight and join them. He wondered whether anyone would miss him if he just stayed put amongst the weeds, kicking the clocks of dandelions until facelessness and spending the afternoon not amongst paper and letters and words but instead here, head to and in and of the clouds counting birds until the numbers ran out. There were funny, oily little wild birds in the park, some of which he recognised. Surely too early for starlings. Starlings with feathers star-spangled and glittersome. One brave bird hopped about his feet for cake crumbs while still more were flitting above his head with the dandelion seeds, blown wishes finding a smeuse in the air. The best benchside exoticisms January could offer were all on show – the starling, the dandelion, the blown seeds and the birds skeining against the grey clouds, hazing it and mazing it, a featherlight kaleidoscope noon-damp and knowing the sky was never truly grey, just filled with a thousand years of birds’ paths, and wishful seeds, a bird-seed sky as something meddled and ripe and wish-hot, the breeze bird-breath soft like a – what – heart stopped in a lobby above one’s lungs as well it might, as might it will – seeds take a shape too soft to be called a burr, like falling asleep on a bench with the sun on your face, seeds in a shape too soft to be called a globe, too breakable to be a constellation, too tough to not be worth wishing upon, the crowd of birds, an unheard murmuration (pl. n.) not led by one bird but a cloud-folly of seeds, blasted by one of countless breaths escaping from blasted wished-upon clock as a breath, providing a clockwork with no regard to time nor hands, flocking with no purpose other than the clotting and thrilling and thrumming, a flock as gathered ellipses rather than lines of wing and bone and beak, falling asleep grey-headed rather than young and dazzling – more puff than flower – collecting the ellipses of empty speech bubbles, the words never said or sayable, former pauses in speech as busy as leaderless birds, twisting, blown apart softly, to warm and colour even the widest of skies.
Winceworth awoke with his head slumped to one side, rumpled and oblique on the park bench. A boy was standing in front of him, holding a toy boat and staring. Presumably the boy had been staring for quite a while, for as Winceworth shivered himself more upright and an involuntary harrumph left his body, the little spectator started. The wooden boat fell from his arms onto the path and its mast snapped the moment it hit the gravel. Winceworth’s apology knotted in the air with the boy’s yelp of surprise.
Dropping the boat and howling, however, did not break the child’s staring. His eyes were wide, mouth slack and he looked as if he had seen a ghost – the wail carried an edge to it, a cry not borne of anger nor shock at the self-scuttling of his boat, but a shriek of real horror.
Winceworth shook the sleepiness from his head and stared back. The child was looking through Winceworth. He had finally become invisible. His colleagues might overlook him or hardly ever notice that he was there, but since leaving Swansby House something had obviously changed in him, had gone further or had clarified – Winceworth had finally, somehow, been tempered into nothingness, thin air with no more traction than a breath. The child’s mother drew up beside her staring charge, and as she came level with Winceworth her face too registered the same look of shock. He must just be a suit and clump of birthday cake suspended in the air on a bench in the park.
Winceworth trialled a gentle, spectral wave.
Both faces’ expressions changed to one of distracted displeasure. It then occurred to Winceworth that perhaps he was not the object of the boy and mother’s attention, and he pivoted in his seat to follow their eyeline.
Some feet beyond his bench, one of the Royal Park’s huge white pelicans was rearing up and silently hissing. Not only that – it appeared to be covered in blood, and a woman was strangling it.
The pelican was huffing, straining, its absurd head bent upwards and pale eyes rolling back and forth. Both bird and attacker were making grim little growls and burbles with effort as they circled across the lawn. The woman’s hat had been knocked off and sat trampled between them.
The woman had her hands about the bird’s neck and her fingers were tucked under its wagging pink dewlap pouch – she had to keep rocking on her feet and ducking to avoid the panicked beating of bloody wings hitting her face.
Winceworth heard the mother say behind him, ‘They can break a man’s arm!’
‘You are thinking of swans,’ corrected her staring son in a high voice.
Both woman and bird were strangely matched in appearance and there was something ridiculously ballroom about their skirmish – the bird’s plumage was stained red, its bill a hot yellow, while the woman’s skirt was made of some candy-stripe coloured stuff and she carried a yellow umbrella wedged beneath her arm. They waltzed, irregularly, tugging and gasping, moving closer towards Winceworth and his companions.
The pelican made an obscene, wheezing call.
‘Ought we to call—’ said the mother, pulling closer to Winceworth’s bench.
He fiddled with his glasses, still groggy from his nap. ‘I really have no idea who—’
‘She must be mad!’ interrupted the mother and pulled her son closer to her side. The boy struggled and in turning his head, caught sight of his broken boat on the path. He let out a screech and Winceworth found he was all at once caught between two quiet, ludicrous brawls. His mind turned to how best to slip away.
‘Do something!’ The mother clearly had decided that Winceworth was the one who should take charge of the situation. She looked at him with stern expectation as her scarlet child jigged up and down.