Black Feathers: Dark Avian Tales: An Anthology(78)

Barrow tilts the camera to show the birds as they pull together into a tight formation and fly toward him. He nearly drops the phone, and the view swings to show him in profile as the birds stream around him. Their wings brush his hair, his skin. His cheeks are wet.

The murmuration flows through the theater. The birds make no noise in their flight. Barrow steadies the phone, turning the camera to face him again. The birds are gone. He is alone.]


BARROW: It’s the same thing every night. Every goddamn night for fifty-seven years. I tried to set her free, and she came back. She came back, Will, so why the hell didn’t you?

[Barrow fumbles with the camera for a moment. The rustle of wings sounds and the starling lands on Barrow’s shoulder. The recording ends.]





Isobel Avens Returns to Stepney in the Spring

M. JOHN HARRISON



The third of September this year I spent the evening watching TV in an upstairs flat in North London. Some story of love and transfiguration, cropped into all the wrong proportions for the small screen. The flat wasn’t mine. It belonged to a friend I was staying with. There were French posters on the walls, dusty CDs stacked on the old-fashioned sideboard, piles of newspapers subsiding day by day into yellowing fans on the carpet. Outside, Tottenham stretched away, Greek driving schools, Turkish social clubs. Turn the TV off and you could hear nothing. Turn it back on and the film unrolled, passages of guilt with lost edges, photographed in white and blue light. At about half past eleven the phone rang. I picked it up. “Hello?”

It was Isobel Avens.

“Oh, China,” she said. She burst into tears.

I said: “Can you drive?”

“No,” she said.

I looked at my watch. “I’ll come and fetch you.”

“You can’t,” she said. “I’m here. You can’t come here.”

I said: “Be outside, love. Just try and get yourself downstairs. Be outside and I’ll pick you up on the pavement there.” There was a silence. “Can you do that?”

“Yes,” she said. “Oh, China.” The first two days she wouldn’t get much further than that.

“Don’t try to talk,” I advised.

London was as quiet as a nursing home corridor. I turned up the car stereo. Tom Waits, Downtown Train. Music stuffed with sentiments you recognise but daren’t admit to yourself. I let the BMW slip down Green Lanes, through Camden into the centre; then west. I was pushing the odd traffic light at orange, clipping the apex off a safe bend here and there. I told myself I wasn’t going to get killed for her. What I meant was that if I did she would have no one left. I took the Embankment at eight thousand revs in fifth gear, nosing down heavily on the brakes at Chelsea Wharf to get round into Gunter Grove. No one was there to see. By half past twelve I was on Queensborough Road, where I found her standing very straight in the mercury light outside Alexander’s building, the jacket of a Karl Lagerfeld suit thrown across her shoulders and one piece of expensive leather luggage at her feet. She bent into the car. Her face was white and exhausted and her breath stank. The way Alexander had dumped her was as cruel as everything else he did. She had flown back steerage from the Miami clinic reeling from jet lag, expecting to fall into his arms and be loved and comforted. He told her, “As a doctor I don’t think I can do any more for you.” The ground hadn’t just shifted on her: it was out from under her feet. Suddenly she was only his patient again. In the metallic glare of the streetlamps, I noticed a stipple of ulceration across her collarbones. I switched on the courtesy light to look closer. Tiny hectic sores, closely spaced.

I said: “Christ, Isobel.”

“It’s just a virus,” she said. “Just a side effect.”

“Is anything worth this?”

She put her arms around me and sobbed. “Oh, China, China.”

It isn’t that she wants me; only that she has no one else. Yet every time I smell her body my heart lurches. The years I lived with her I slept so soundly. Then Alexander did this irreversible thing to her, the thing she had always wanted, and now everything is fucked up and eerie and it will be that way forever.

I said: “I’ll take you home.”

“Will you stay?”

“What else?”

My name is Mick Rose, which is why people have always called me “China.” From the moment we met, Isobel Avens was fascinated by that. Later, she would hold my face between her hands in the night and whisper dreamily over and over—“Oh, China, China, China. China.” But it was something else that attracted her to me. The year we met, she lived in Stratford-on-Avon. I walked into the café at the little toy aerodrome they have there and it was she who served me. She was twenty-five years old: slow, heavy-bodied, easily delighted by the world. Her hair was red. She wore a rusty pink blouse, a black ankle-length skirt with lace at the hem. Her feet were like boats in great brown Dr. Marten’s shoes. When she saw me looking down at them in amusement, she said: “Oh, these aren’t my real Docs, these are my cheap imitation ones.” She showed me how the left one was coming apart at the seams. “Brilliant, eh?” She smelled of vanilla and sex. She radiated heat. I could always feel the heat of her a yard away.

“I’d love to be able to fly,” she told me. She laughed and hugged herself. “You must feel so free.”