Feather Boy (18 page)

She moves in and he does put his arm around her. The sight is so strange and tender that for a moment I don’t see the panel that Mavis’s movement reveals. It is the third panel. The end of the story. It comes to me
slowly across that divide. A frail but beautiful bird flying up into an arcing sky. The arc is a rainbow, brilliant sun but also a shower of rain. Least it should be rain, but there is a boy there crying. And the rain is his tears.

Niker grins. The photographer clicks. Grin, grin, grin. Click, click, click.

“Could that be enough now?” Catherine is hovering with a second sheet.

“Are you the artist?” the photographer asks.

“No,” says Catherine, “now if you’ll excuse me.” She throws the sheet over the Firebird triptych.

Only when the piece is covered does my body unlock. I’m swiftly along the corridor and into Edith’s room. By contrast with the residents’ lounge, Edith’s bedroom is graveyard quiet. There is no movement here at all. Just a tableau in the centre of the room. The bed. Edith. Ernest. It’s difficult to know which is the stillest: the iron bedstead, the barely breathing Edith, or Ernest, frozen in a posture of utter dejection. I have a long moment to take in the scene before Ernest finally lifts his head. When he sees who it is, he says: “Robert.” And then: “Thank God.”

I go at once to the bed. “Mrs Sorrel, it’s me. Robert. I’m here.”

No response.

“I’ve finished the coat. It’s finished.”

No response.

“Mrs Sorrel,” I pull the coat from the bag, “feel this!”

No response.

I look at Ernest. He shakes his head.

Edith’s breathing is shallow but noisy. I’ve heard Mum speak about this. It’s the breathing people do when they are close to death. Nurses call it the death rattle.

“Mrs Sorrel!” I scream and I take her limp, white hand and I plunge it into the coat of feathers.

“Ah – ha,” she says.

Ernest seems to wake up then.

“Edith?” he says.

We both see her hand move, just the slightest push deeper into the feathers.

“Aaah.” Another, longer sigh.

“Do you want it on?” I say. “Do you want to put the coat on?”

She makes another noise and, although it does not sound at all like “yes”, both of us know what her answer is.

I unbutton the pearls.

“I’ll lift her,” says Ernest. “Edith, Edith darling, I’m going to lift you now. And Robert’s going to help you with the coat.”

He puts his arm under her neck and around her bird-like shoulders, then very gently he lifts her to an upright. Her head lolls and she still doesn’t open her eyes. But I work to get the coat on. I hold her hand and guide it through the sleeve, I pass the back of the coat around her thin nightdressed shoulders. Ernest manoeuvres his hands, never once letting her slip from his embrace. Then I go around to Ernest’s side of the bed and help with the second sleeve. Edith sighs as Ernest lowers her down on to the bed again. But it is a more contented sigh. I do up the buttons then, my fingers fumbling. I touch the skin of her neck.

“Sorry,” I say.

“Love…” she replies.

Ernest gasps. “Edith? Edith we’re here. Robert and I are here. You’re all right.”

“Yes…” she says and opens faraway eyes. “Yes.”

For a moment she stares at the ceiling and then, painfully slowly, she moves her head first towards Ernest and then towards me. “Hold me,” she says. I
take her left hand and Ernest her right. Her skin is dry and paper thin but oh – so warm.

“I’m going…” she begins then.

“No,” says Ernest. “No, no, no, no, no.”

“I’m going…” she repeats and then smiles a sweet, surprised, angelic smile, “to sing.”

Ernest looks stunned. Terrified even. She opens her mouth, clears her dry throat. Then she begins. Makes a painful, rasping noise, the hoarse cough of an instrument on which dust has lain for decades. She shuts her mouth, licks her lips and begins again. A gasp, a croak and then a warble, tremorous, sad and old. She grits her teeth and begins again. And again.

Ernest listens, his face contorted with grief. Even I want to stop her, because she seems to be straining for something so impossibly long gone. And I fear she will burst with the pain of it. But we both just sit and hold her hand as asked until a different sound comes.

And I do not know, even now, where that sound came from. The forlorn stuttering of an old woman giving way to a single note – and then a run of notes – so beautiful it would make you cry to hear them. Pure, clear notes coming not from a dry throat but from a soul in joyous flight. And Ernest is crying.
There are tears pouring down his cheek but he looks, for the first time I’ve known him, happy.

Then the notes stop. Edith takes a breath and Ernest holds his, and then she begins one final note. Holding her one-note song in a smile which she bestows on Ernest so that they seem, hand-joined there on the other side of the bed, a couple. On my side of the bed, on my hand, I feel the faintest of touches. I can’t call it a squeeze, though I want it to be a squeeze, I want it to be her holding me. But she hasn’t the energy now. I don’t think she can turn her head even. And yet still the note sustains, though fainter now. And fainter. Until it ceases. A last outbreath, and we both wait for her to breathe in again. But she does not.

“Edith!” Ernest’s head drops on to his wife’s breast. He buries his face in the feathers. “Edith.”

And I know that the bird is dead.

My Firebird is dead.

I let go her hand, feeling each of her fingers fall away from mine. Then I stand up. The bedroom door is open though I never heard the catch. Niker is in the doorway. If he opens his mouth, if he says a single word, I will kill him. But he says nothing. Just swallows, and I know he’s heard. He must have come because of the song. Niker.

I walk past him into the hall. He doesn’t follow me, for which I’m glad. I don’t know where I’m going. There doesn’t seem any place for me to be now. I’m just walking, wandering. I wander to the open mouth of the resident lounge. Pausing there only because it’s somewhere to lean. To rest my body. Catherine is speaking. She’s telling a story. The words float towards me.

“And what happened to the little boy?” asked the Silent Prince.

“Some say,” replied the adventurer, “that he cried so long and so hard for his Firebird mother that he lost his voice and became silent. Others say, when he awoke the following morning he found two golden feathers shining on his pillow, and these feathers brought him courage and love and luck for all of his life.”

Someone is walking through the words. A man appearing from the edge of the room. His height and gait look familiar. He stops in front of me. It is my father.

“Hello, son,” he says.

My head is at the level of his chest. Arms come about me. He holds me warm and tight. Someone begins to sob. It’s me.

Two days later, Sunday, I’m standing outside Chance House. It was Kate who tipped me off, saw the notice. Re-development work is due to start, apparently, in a week’s time. Chance House is going to be a Youth and Unemployment Centre. There will be offices, computer facilities, a games room with snooker, table football and ping-pong, a canteen selling cheap food. I look up at the Top Floor Flat. What, I wonder, will they put in David Sorrel’s room?

“So,” says a voice. “Another goodbye.”

I don’t have to turn to know who it is. But I turn anyway.

“Hello Mr Sorrel.” It’s the first time I have seen Ernest since the Sharing. I expect him to be bowed but he is not.

“Are you going in?” he asks.

I hadn’t been thinking of doing anything of the sort, but one look at his face and I say: “Yes.”

We walk around the back together. He’s brought a cane, an ebony one with a silver knob. He uses it to steady himself on the tussocky ground. He skirts the bottles and the beer cans and the microwave with barely a glance. Nothing seems to surprise him in fact and I realise, as he passes into the kitchen, that the territory is quite familiar to him. He crosses the kitchen floor and bends to move the brick.

“It was you,” I exclaim. “You all the time. Moving the brick!”

“And you,” he replies. “You moved it too.”

He straightens up, holds the door for me. “After you.”

I go into the corridor. A faint drip, drip, drip.

“Where does the water come from?” I ask.

“That,” he says, “I never managed to understand.”

There is morning light in the house and, with Ernest beside me, it seems impossible to imagine that one could be frightened here. He moves with care across the smashed-tile hallway and he pokes the wallpaper on the stairs with the stick, just to be sure where the treads begin and end.

“I always expected squatters to move in,” he said. “But they never did.”

“How long have you been coming here?” I ask.

“Only since the mesh got pulled off the kitchen, about a year I suppose. On and off.”

I look at him and he knows what I’m thinking.

“No, of course I didn’t pull it off,” he laughs. “That’s why I expected squatters.”

We ascend the final stairs, passing through the fire door and on, up to the landing. He pauses there, but only for a moment and then he goes into the room with the million ducks. I follow, keeping behind him as he makes his way to the window. He looks out.

“This is the room it happened in,” I say. “Isn’t it?”

“Yes,” he says with his back to me.

Then I can’t not know for any longer. “Why did he do it, Mr Sorrel? Why did he jump?”

“Jump?” Ernest turns around. “David never jumped.”

I stand stupefied. Underneath me the floorboard creaks.

“That’s just an old story,” he adds, not without kindness. “Houses like this attract stories. Especially houses where there has been tragedy.” He pauses.
“David died of an asthma attack. He couldn’t catch his breath.”

“Asthma!”

“Yes. Asthma. Just asthma.” My face must be registering disbelief because he continues: “It was different in those days. Preventative drugs were not as they are today. He had an attack, a very severe attack…” he trails off. “There was nothing to be done.” Ernest taps the floor with his cane. Tap. Tap. Tap. “Nothing and no-one could have saved him.”

There’s a hint of aggression here, the glitter of the crow. He thinks I’m going to contradict him. When I don’t, he says into the silence: “But Edith couldn’t accept that. Edith thought if she’d been with him, he wouldn’t have died. She thought she could have – should have – saved him.”

“She wasn’t with him?”

“No. He died here. In this room. Alone.”

“I don’t understand.”

“This flat belonged to Marigold Linley. A friend of Edith’s. She left David with Marigold when she went for her singing lessons.”

“I thought you said you stopped her singing,” I whisper.

“I did. Or tried to. More fool me. That’s why it was a secret. Why the tutor couldn’t come to our house. Why Edith had to go out to his house and David – be left here.”

“You bullied her!”

“Bullied?” he repeats. “No… no, I don’t think so. Well… oh, it’s difficult to understand now. But women didn’t have careers in those days. They were wives and mothers. That’s what I wanted her to be. I couldn’t see that her sights were – set somewhere else. That she had a star. She had to follow her star.” He’s leaning on the stick now, his thin body looking suddenly as if it needs support. “Afterwards, when I met the tutor, he said she was very good. He said she had a great talent. A great future.”

“But she gave it all up!”

“Yes. After David died, she swore she would never, ever sing again. Not a note. And there was to be no music in our house. Even the sound of other people singing, whistling in the street drove her into a frenzy. She was quite mad,” he says meditatively, “for a while.”

Sunshine comes in at the broken window and behind Ernest’s head, dust motes dance.

“And then?”

“She pushed it all away. Pushed us away. The singing, David, me – we didn’t exist any more. She lived on some other plane, inhabited a different part of her mind. And she wasn’t unhappy. She was all right. So I went along with it. I thought it was her way of healing. So I played along.”

“You divorced her,” I say harshly, although it’s none of my business, although it’s not my parents’ divorce.

“Yes. Because she asked me for that. She wanted it. The final break with the past. I had to go.” He smiles wearily. “But I never left her in my heart. And some deep part of her I think, I hope, understood that.”

“I’m sorry,” I say then.

“Why?”

“I thought the coat would cure her. I really believed it.”

“I know.”

“And it would have done. But I got involved in a fight. One of the feathers got broken. One I got from this room. A Chance House feather. I broke it. And then I couldn’t find it and that’s why she died.”

“No,” cries Ernest, “don’t you dare say that! You must never say, never even think such a thing again.”
He shakes the stick at me as if it were a fist. “It was not your fault. Edith died of cancer. It happens. People die and it’s nobody’s fault. That’s what Edith refused to accept. For thirty years she blamed herself. Because she wasn’t there. Hadn’t saved David. But that was rubbish. All the doctors told her so. Nothing and no-one could have saved him. But she let her guilt dominate her life. Her music, her talent, her energy, the love we shared, all of it got buried with David.

“And David himself. The son we had both adored. She couldn’t even say his name. Until she met you, Robert. All those years and I wanted so much to talk of him. My boy. My son. If it was anyone’s fault it was mine. Not that she didn’t blame me. And rightly so. That’s why I took everything, the silence, the pushing away, the divorce. I deserved it all. But don’t you dare blame yourself, Robert Nobel. You gave Edith everything.”

“That night at the Sharing then,” I say slowly, “it was the first time…”

“Yes. The first time she’d sung. For thirty years. That’s what you gave her, Robert. You gave her back her singing. Her song. Returned it to her. Returned her to herself.” He draws a deep breath. “And you
returned her to me.” Then he adds, stiffly, “For which I will never be able to re-pay you.”

“It wasn’t all one way,” I say then.

“What?”

“She gave me stuff too.”

“Yes?”

“She is – was – the first person who ever made me think if I wanted something, I could go for it.”

“I wish she could hear you say that. I think that would make her the proudest woman on earth. That opportunity is all she ever really wanted for herself, for David.”

“You’re the sort of boy who can fly,” I say.

“Yes,” he says. “She was always saying that to David. You can do it. You can fly. Whatever you want, David, you can make it happen.” He sighs. “And I should have let her fly. That’s what love is. Letting your loved ones fly.”

He moves away from the window. “Will you come to the funeral?”

“Yes. Of course.”

“Thank you. She would have liked that.” He pauses. “I wish I could give you something… something of hers…”

“Why?” I say. “When she’s given me so much?”

“Thank you,” he says, all choked up for a moment. “Thank you.” Then he recovers himself, tap, tap, taps with the stick. “Well, perhaps we could meet sometimes. Have tea maybe? Or hot chocolate. What would you say to a hot chocolate, Robert?”

“Good morning, hot chocolate.”

“I’m sorry?” says Ernest.

“It’s one of my dad’s jokes. Not brilliant, I admit. But he does have other qualities. Oh,” I look at my watch. “I almost forgot. I should be leaving. I’m meeting him for lunch today.”

“Another time then.”

“Yes.”

We leave Chance House together. I say a silent goodbye to the million mother ducks and the three million ducklings. Ernest taps his way downstairs and out into the spring. As we come round the side of the house, a man with a clipboard shouts: “Oi – this is private! Private property!”