Feather Boy (15 page)

The Mayfield door has a bell for new visitors and a security code lock for patients’ friends and relatives. I paid careful attention last time Catherine pressed the buttons. 1,9,1,7. Nineteen seventeen. Possibly the birth year of one of the residents. I press the numbers and the door buzzes. I’m quickly in. From here I have to pass through the dining room in order to get to Mrs
Sorrel’s room, but it’s past the residents’ eating time and in any case Matron is never involved in kitchen duties. So it’s just a matter of slipping quietly through. Which I do. Then it’s only half a corridor. I’ve already decided not to knock on Mrs Sorrel’s door. I don’t want to draw unnecessary attention to myself. So I just walk casually down the hall and let myself into her room.

She’s asleep of course. Breathing lightly, little flutters of air coming from her mouth. But she doesn’t look natural. She looks like a Snow White in a glass case, her body lying like someone else has arranged it and then brushed her hair while she was asleep, so that it lies too straight on the pillow.

“Mrs Sorrel.”

She does not respond.

“Mrs Sorrel,” I say louder, “it’s Robert.”

“Mmm?” She says from a long way out.

“Robert. Robert Nobel.”

“Mmm.” Her voice sinks away again.

‘I’ve done the coat. Well, started it. It’s here. I’ve brought it.”

“Ah?”

I unwrap the fledgling thing. Lift it to her hand that lies so still on the bed. I run one of the soft,
white feathers against her finger. Her hand twitches and she reaches, scrabbles for it. A hold, then a relax, a stroke.

“You are such a good boy,” she says and her eyes open.

I lift the coat up, show her glazed eyes the downy breast, the grey white sleeves, the strong, thick undercoat.

“It’s beautiful,” she says.

“It’s not finished,” I say quickly.

“Beautiful,” she repeats. “Let me…”

I bring the coat close to her hand again and let her hold it, stroke it. I watch her manoeuvre herself upwards, so as to see and feel it better. Is it just my imagination that thinks she moves more easily for the touch of it? She turns it over, feels the weight of it. Now she is almost upright, and I haven’t helped her at all. Nor have her eyes expressed pain.

“When will it be finished?”

“Soon,” I say. “Soon as possible. I work on it day and night.”

“God bless you, Robert Nobel.” She smiles. The whole of her pale face lit by that smile, as if someone has put a match to a candle deep inside her. I wish
Ernest was here to see this face of hers.

“Is it dark?” she asks then.

“Sorry?”

“Outside,” she says, “is it dark, is it night?”

“Yes.”

“And is it clear? Are there stars?”

“Yes. There are stars.”

“Then take me out,” she says.

When I don’t reply immediately – because I cannot see how I can possibly take her out – she adds one word: “Please.”

And then I know I will move heaven and earth to take her into the starlight.

“There’s a chair,” she says simply. A wheelchair by the side of her bed which I haven’t noticed until this moment. She pushes aside her bed covers. She’s wearing a thin white cotton nightdress.

“It’s cold,” I say, in a tone that makes me sound a little like my mother.

“There are rugs,” she says.

The bed is higher than the chair and I don’t see how I can get her from one to the other. But, of her own accord, she swings her legs over the edge of the bed. Maybe they have given more of those drugs for pain. Maybe it’s the
coat, which she still has clutched in her hands.

“Bring it closer.”

I locate the brake of the chair and wheel it alongside the bed.

“Put your hands round my waist.”

I do as she asks. She can’t weigh more than a sparrow. I lift her into the chair.

“Now the rugs.”

As I get them from the cupboard I think this is the first time I have ever been with her and she hasn’t been angry. Her calmness, her gentleness is strange – but also sweet.

I wrap four rugs about her, over her knees, around her shoulders, I cocoon her in warmth. Under the rugs, clasped on her lap, lies the unfinished coat.

“Now,” she says. “Are we ready?”

We are. I wedge the door open so I can get the chair out.

“Left,” she commands. “Go left!” Do I detect an urgency now? Or is it just that, like me, she’s alert to the danger of encountering Matron? As I push her quickly down the corridor, I feel like an escapee.

“Use the fire door. It isn’t alarmed. Just push it. Now.”

I brake, push the double iron bar and the door swings wide. The cold assaults us but I see her nostrils flare and she breathes hard in, as though it’s years since she last inhaled the night.

“Through,” she says. “Now!”

I wheel her out. Behind us the door closes soundlessly. It is just the back of the Home, flat concrete paths, a spill of light from nearby windows, some straggly plants in bare earth beds, a wooden bench. But it is immediately clear that these earthly things do not hold Edith Sorrel’s attention. She leans backwards, her neck lengthening, her chin up, because she’s looking up, up and beyond. Edith Sorrel’s body is not bound by this chair, this earth. She’s not of these paths, she’s reaching up, travelling up towards those bright and far-off stars.

“Edith,” I cry.

“Yes?” she says and turns a radiant face to mine. Then she adds, “Won’t be long now.” Her eyes are dark and sparkling, as though some part of that sky and those stars have entered her head. And I want to pull her back, from whatever brink she’s on. Just as Niker wanted to pull me back from the window in Chance House. But Edith doesn’t want to be pulled,
just as I didn’t. Edith is happy, just as I was. Just as we both are. Inhabiting our nights.

“I love you, Robert Nobel,” she says.

And I don’t say “I love you” back, because that would be mad. But somebody says it. “I love you, too.”

And afterwards I don’t know whether it’s me or Ernest. But I don’t think it was him because he comes pouring through the door and this is what he says:

“Oh my God, Edith. Edith! I went to the room. You weren’t there. You were gone. I thought… I thought…”

Edith looks at him cascading there and she says, lifting her hand to me: “He’s come back.”

And Ernest says: “Yes.”

Then Edith looks at her husband, concentrates. “And you’ve come back,” she says, with an air of mild astonishment.

“I never left,” he answers.

And I think then he might lean and kiss her and that maybe she will accept that kiss, but it doesn’t happen because Matron bulls through the doorway.

“Are you insane!” she says.

“Not any more,” says Edith Sorrel.

And that shuts Matron up, not least because, as Ernest tells me later, it is apparently four days since
anyone in the Home has heard Edith speak a word.

But Matron still needs to do some spluttering and I am the obvious target.

“You!” she splutters. “It’s you again!”

“Take me in, Robert,” says Mrs Sorrel. And I do. Ernest flows quietly behind us.

“She could catch her death out there,” continues Matron, shutting the fire door.

“I don’t think so.” That’s Ernest, supporting me.

We wheel her back to her room.

“We can manage, thank you,” says Ernest to Matron. Matrons huffs but that is all she can do. She is not needed and not wanted. She leaves.

Together Ernest and I remove the rugs and lift Edith back on to the bed. She is still holding the coat of feathers. Her eyes are shut. She looks exhausted but peaceful.

“I have to go now,” I say. “I promised my mum.”

“You were right,” says Ernest. “You do make her better.”

“It’s the coat,” I say.

“It’s you,” says Ernest. He eases the coat of feathers from Edith’s embrace and hands it to me. She sighs as it leaves her.

“It will be better still when it’s finished.”

“Maybe,” he says. And then, “Don’t leave it too long before you come again, Robert.”

“No,” I promise him, “I won’t.”

You know how bearing grudges is
bad
for you? Does you more damage than the person you’re bearing the grudge against? At least that’s what the average adult would have you believe? Well, Miss Raynham bears grudges. She’s bearing one this morning. Against me. I think it may have something to do with the “or else” situation in the playground on Friday – you know, when I ran and I didn’t stop? Today is pay-back time. So far this bright Monday morning my forgiving form teacher has jabbed chalk in my neck for not knowing the capital city of Ghana (as my English teacher, I’m not sure this is any of her business but, for the record, the answer’s Accra and the languages they speak there are English, Akan, Ga and Ewe); yelled at me for
fiddling with my bag (I was only checking on the coat); and scrawled “untidy” over my English homework. I wouldn’t have minded the “untidy” (to be honest I did write the poem in rather a rush, under the bedclothes, at about midnight, when I remembered) except that you should see Miss Raynham’s writing. It’s the sort of mess two drunk spiders might make if they decided to dance on a piece of paper after climbing out of an inkpot. Anyhow, none of this would matter if it wasn’t for the moment just before the bell when Miss Raynham says:

“One minute, class. The Mayfield work. Despite my announcement before break that Catherine was in the Art Room eagerly awaiting all outstanding pieces of work for the triptych, it appears that some of you have still not delivered. I don’t think you have to be Einstein to understand that Catherine cannot glue work to a board if she does not have work to glue.” Miss Raynham pauses. “Tell me you understand that,” she scans the room, “Robert?”

“Yes, Miss Raynham.”

“So you have handed in your work?”

“Erm…”

“Would that be a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’, Robert?”

“Erm…”

“I’ll have to hurry you, Robert.”

“Er…”

“I’ll take that as a ‘no’.”

“Yes, Miss Raynham.”

“Oh. The boy speaks. Now Robert, is your failure to deliver the work due to your general failure to do anything I ask of you at the moment or is it just bone idleness?”

“Bone idleness, Miss Raynham.”

“So it’s certainly not that you simply haven’t finished the work, Robert?”

“Erm…”

“Put simply, Einstein, is your Mayfield work finished or not?”

“Er… no,” I say. “Not yet.”

“Thank you, Robert. Now. Have you any idea why every other child on the project has managed to finish work and you haven’t?”

I don’t have a reply for that. Not one that would make any sense to Miss Raynham anyway. This gives Niker his opportunity: “Because you can’t finish what you haven’t started, Miss Raynham.”

The class titters.

“I don’t remember asking for your opinion, Jonathan Niker,” says Miss Raynham swiftly, and I think for a moment that I’m off the hook. But then she turns, with a kind of inevitability, to me and says, “I trust Mr Niker’s assertion is incorrect?”

“Yes! No! I mean…”

“You mean?” continues Miss Raynham relentlessly.

“I have started.”

“Started?”

“No, not started… made…”

“Made? What exactly have you made, Robert?”

“Erm…”

“Robert!”

“Something.”

“Something,” Miss Raynham repeats. “You have made something.”

“Robert’s Elder’s been ill,” says Kate.

“Yes,” says Miss Raynham. “I should think she has. Well, Robert, perhaps you’d like to take the little something you’ve made down to the Art Room. And, Robert, may I suggest you do it
right now
!”

The bell goes.

I pick up my bag. I only have one option – to throw myself on Catherine’s mercy. Catherine’s a
storyteller, she will understand, she will know, won’t she, that the coat of feathers cannot be glued to a piece of plyboard?

“I said, are you all right?”

“What?” It’s Kate asking. “Yes. I’m fine.”

“Wesley says something’s going on.”

“Does he?”

“Says Niker hasn’t been the same since you two went to Chance House.”

“Oh? He seems much the same to me.”

“And he says that you haven’t been the same either.”

“Leave me alone, Kate.” I’m astonished to hear this remark come out of my mouth. It’s not so very long ago that, if Kate had merely glanced in my direction I could have lived off the experience for a week. And if, in that same not so very long ago, she had come this close and breathed this concern about me, I might have burst from joy. So maybe I have changed. Maybe I am just exhausted. Yes, I think that could be it. Now I think about it, my legs are poles of lead. As I clank my way to the Art Room, I want to shut my eyes. To sleep. But there’s no chance of that. My restless brain has my eyelids stitched open.

The Art Room door is ajar. I brace myself before pushing it wide. But the room is empty. At the far end, the tables have been moved to make room for Catherine’s panels. There are six panels, each only slightly smaller than a door. They lie on the floor in two hinged groups of three. I haven’t thought at all about the work the others have been making and am drawn immediately by the form and colour of the first triptych. Three quarters complete, it’s a paradise garden with Albert’s path walking through it. The garden is made of leaf prints, hand prints and drawings of birds: sparrows, robins, a parrot, Mavis as an angel chicken. Written on Albert’s paving stones are fragments of song, memories, statements about the future. “When I am eighty,” it says in Weasel’s writing, “I will still support Man U.” One stone says in wobbly old-person’s writing: “I didn’t deserve this life” underneath which someone else has graffitied, “Yes, you did.”

The second screen is much less finished. There are large white gaps where work should be. The colour of it is also quite different. Instead of the browns and greens of earth and garden, this triptych is the colour of fairy tales, gold and silver and electric blue. On the left-hand panel is a picture of a prince with a gloved
hand over his mouth. It’s obviously the Silent Prince and the work is Niker’s. The Prince has that exact and haunting beauty that all Niker’s drawings have.

Around the Prince is a crowd of lesser people, their gifts of wisdom speech-bubbled over their heads: “Little piggies have big ears, that’s what”; “If you can’t do a good turn, don’t do a bad one.” A painted parchment scroll flows like the path in the other triptych to join all three panels together. On the left-hand panel, someone, Catherine presumably, has written in copperplate: “The King and Queen had all but given up their quest to make the young Prince speak when, from the woods nearby, came one last adventurer. This young girl, having consulted her grandparents, told the Prince this story…”

On the central panel, in the same copperplate hand, the young girl’s story is written. It is the Firebird story, and it is told, almost word for word, as Edith Sorrel told it. And as if this was not enough, above the story is a white gap the exact shape and size of the coat of feathers. It could not be more accurate if the coat was a jigsaw piece and this the puzzle from which it had been cut. My heart begins tom-tomming, just as it did when I ascended the steps to
the top floor of Chance House. Part of me wants to lay the coat in this space, torn, torn, torn, part of me doesn’t. All of me wants to read on.

“I have a question,” the young girl says on the central panel. “Now that the woman has found her coat of feathers again, what should she do?”

“Then the Silent Prince opened his mouth and he spoke.”

And there the story stops. The scroll on the third panel is blank.

“Robert.”

“Catherine!” I wheel around, but it is not Catherine. It is Kate.

“What happens?” I yell.

“I’m sorry?”

“In the story, Kate. What happens in the story? Does she go, does she fly away? Does she leave the boy?”

“What are you talking about, Robert?”

“The Firebird story, Kate! The Firebird story, what happens?”

Kate has now arrived beside me. She looks down at what’s written. “That’s it. That’s as far as Catherine told it.”

“Catherine told it?”

“Yes, the last time we were at the Home. You know she did. You were there.”

“I wasn’t there. I was with Mrs Sorrel. And she told it, too. The same story. Exactly, exactly the same!”

“Oh – right.”

“And Mrs Sorrel stopped in the same place. Didn’t go on, didn’t finish the story, didn’t say what happens in the end.”

“I’m not sure the ending matters, does it? I mean isn’t the point that the girl gets the Prince to speak?”

“No. No! That’s not the point at all!”

“Oh – so what is the point?”

“The point is… is she going to die?”

“What?”

“Is she going to die?”

“Who? What are you talking about? It’s not even a story about dying.”

“It’s not even a story.”

“OK. It’s not even a story. In fact it’s not a story. It’s a flowerpot.”

“This isn’t a joke, Kate.”

“I never said it was.”

“You think I’m mad, don’t you?”

“I never said that either.”

“Mum said it. Robert is an obsessive. Robert’s gone bonkers. Told Dad on the phone, your son is bonkers. But you’re a fair-minded sort of person, Kate. You’ll need proof. Well, here it is.” I pull the Sainsbury’s bag out of my backpack, unfold the coat of feathers and lay it in the space above the Firebird story. It fits. Perfectly.

“What on earth… oh,” Kate crouches down to look. “Where did you get this? It’s amazing.”

“I made it.”

“Made it!” She can’t help her hand reaching. She touches one of the pure white feathers, then goes deeper, burying her hand in the darker feathers. “Amazing,” she repeats. “It’s as though it’s, it’s… it feels…”

“Alive,” I say.

“Yes. That’s it exactly. Like a real bird.” She looks up at me. “It’s warm!”

“Yes, I know.” And I do know, though I’ve been trying not to notice. Trying to believe that the warmth is just the weight of feathers. And maybe it is just the weight of feathers, or the layering, or… But Kate feels it too. I crouch down beside her and put my hand next to hers. Touch her pale and slender fingers.

“I’m sorry,” I say then.

“What for?” She doesn’t move her hand.

“… Stuff.”

“Do you want to tell me what all this is about?” She smiles, hope and anxiety mixed, but the dimple comes anyway and of course I want to tell her everything. But I don’t have the chance because Niker comes in. He looks at me, at Kate and at the coat of feathers and he says: “So that’s your game.”

The words are simple but the venom is like a snake bite. I jump up, stand in front of the coat of feathers like I was standing guard.

“You’ve been planning this, haven’t you? It’s what you were doing in the toilets that day.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Oh, yes you do.”

“Trust me, Niker, I don’t.”

“OK. Let me spell it out for you. I’m talking about that putrid pile of chicken shit.” He points past me to the coat of feathers.

I snatch up the coat, hold it to my breast. “This has nothing to do with you.”

“Glad to hear that, Norbert. Because I’ve been working long and hard on the Firebird coat. The coat that Catherine specifically asked me to make. The one
that the editor of the local rag is interested in photographing, alongside its talented creator. And I am not looking to be upstaged at the last minute by some creep with a bunch of chicken feathers.”

“Pigeon,” I say. “Seagull.”

“Oh Jonathan, is it finished?” Catherine billows into the room with her long swirling skirts and a huge pot of glue.

“Yes,” Niker says. “It is.”

“Come on then. Let’s see.”

From beneath his arm Niker takes a roll of paper which he unfurls to reveal a vivid painting in red and yellow and gold. It is the suit of golden feathers, the storybook Firebird coat, intricate and fabulous and, to my eyes, totally lifeless.

“Oh my,” says Catherine, “that is completely wonderful. Look at the colour!”

“Thank you,” says Niker. “Thank you, fans.” He takes a bow.

“What happens next?” I ask Catherine.

“Next? I stick it to the board, I suppose.” Catherine waves the glue jovially.

“No. In the Firebird story. What happens…” I point to the third and final panel, “… there?”

“A good Scheherazade keeps the punters guessing.” Catherine taps the side of her nose. “All will be revealed at the Sharing.”

“No,” I say. “You don’t understand. I need to know. Now. Does the woman fly away? Does she leave the boy?”

“Questions, questions.” Catherine smiles.

“Tell me!” I yell.

Catherine puts down the glue pot. “A story,” she says, “may end many ways.”

“But how does this one end?”

“Depends who’s telling it,” she says. And, when she sees me about to protest, she adds seriously, “You need to listen to the storyteller as well as the story.”