Feathertide Page 19

  We left the boat and walked back along the canal. The bird I had heard before was silent.

  ‘He looked like he was dying,’ I said, choking on my words.

  ‘The others will be here soon. They will know what to do.’

  I nodded.

  I could feel Leo watching me warily. He was trying to find the words to make me feel better, but the image of the Sky-Worshipper, lying there, cold and featherless, was hard to shake. How delicate birds are, I thought, and how easily they can be broken.

  ‘Can you believe that soon you will finally meet your father? All that waiting will be over.’

  I smiled and shook my head at the enormity of what was happening, like something was hatching after years of incubation. ‘It doesn’t seem real. None of it does.’

  ‘Well, it is,’ he reassured me with a nudge of my arm, and I nudged him back.

  The boat stop was up ahead and we slowed our pace. Leo had moved imperceptibly closer to me, but my senses were heightened and I could feel his breath warm against my cheek. He was going to kiss me, I felt certain and shaken by the idea. My second kiss in this city. Did I want him to? I didn’t know. I was confused by the moment and before I could decide, the moment was gone as the gypsy woman and her cart squeaked past.

  I stepped back, startled by the interruption of this unexpected intimacy. Setting down her moveable stall, she smiled her toothless grin at us and began rummaging in amongst all her parcels and pots. Leo and I smiled shyly at each other, perhaps in relief at her sudden distraction. She pulled out a bunch of half-crumpled roses and, mistaking us for lovers, tossed them at our feet before picking up her broken cart and squeaking away towards the Bridge of Storms.

  Nothing had actually happened, but something was different; something between us had shifted. She had broken a spell and I couldn’t decide if I wanted to blame her or offer her my gratitude. It was as though I had been woken suddenly, and when I opened my eyes, I was no longer in the place in which I had fallen asleep. Like reaching beneath a wave for a shell that wasn’t quite where you thought it had been.

  Leo’s boat arrived and at last we parted.

  CHAPTER 26

  I told myself there was no other way home, but of course it wasn’t true; there were countless other streets I could have taken, and most of them would have got me there in half the time, but once I had crossed the Bridge of Longing, there was no going back. Secretly, the heart navigated you to where it needed you to be. To my astonishment and complete delight, the shutters had been pushed wide open in invitation, and she was right there in the window as though she had been expecting me all along. Her hair tumbled around her as it always did, spilling like golden coins over the ledge.

  With a thudding heart, I watched Elver. Then somehow she seemed to know I was there, standing in the dark street, where the sun didn’t reach, and the algae grew wet and slippery. In my sudden haste to reach her, I lost my footing and fell with a heavy splash into the water.

  The water was icy and bit into my bones. I opened my eyes to find something to hold onto, like a desperate cat clawing its way out, but it was too dark and murky and I didn’t have enough air left in my lungs. I lunged to the side with open-mouthed gasps, but felt myself sinking. I tried to kick to the surface, gasping again and spluttering, before returning to the darkness. Then out of nowhere came wisps, like tiny feathers tickling my and arms, then they were suddenly long and strong, tangling themselves around my body like reeds. Something had hold of me and it wasn’t letting go, but I still couldn’t breathe. Then to my relief, whatever it was began to lift me up to the surface towards the shimmer of light.

  She hauled me over to the stone steps, where I coughed up the muddy water from my lungs. Once recovered, I was suddenly shy, barely able to look at her. I wanted to see her – it’s what I’d been waiting for; a flaming desire, heart ablaze like a midsummer sun – but not like this, not half-drowned like a drenched canal rat. My hair slapped across my face like treacle. Her eyes searched mine, far reaching and with her arms wrapped around me she led me up the steps and into her room.

  Inside, she removed my clothes. Beneath them she found my bandages, and paused for a moment before unwrapping them, layer by layer. I tried not to flinch, but the jeers and shouts of the circus tent were never far away. She paused again, wondering if perhaps she had hurt me. My skin was too cold to resist the dry warmth of a blanket, so I nodded for her to continue. She had glimpsed my feathers before but it was only a quick peek, and now they were visible in their entirety. There was nowhere left to hide. She didn’t gasp, and her eyes didn’t fly open in horror or surprise, but I thought I saw the corners of her mouth lift into a tiny smile of pleasure. At least that’s what I hoped it was. I imagined her own body was just as strange and secretive as mine, and it chased the shyness away. She tilted her head and gently turned my body until she could see the length of my back; it was the place where my feathers grew the longest and the thickest. I could feel her gaze linger on them and I shuffled awkwardly wanting her to fill the silence.

  After a while, she lifted a blanket from the bed and wrapped it around my shoulders before crossing the room to the kitchen. It was then I noticed how yellow everything was: the walls, the light, the flowers spilling from a jar on the table, the cups – dainty enough to be given to a doll, the cloth covering the table and her hair, always her hair, the streaming yellow light of the sun. I watched as she slowly stirred a teapot. Inside this room, there was a quiet stillness as though we were far away from everything. There wasn’t even the ticking of a clock to remind me that time was passing, and for a moment I was suspended weightless; timeless; fearless. Here all the clocks had stopped and it would be our time for ever – just us.

  It was simply furnished: a bed, low to the floor; a table and two chairs and a woven mat in the middle of the room, perfect for a cat, but there was little else. It felt too temporary, as though no one really lived there at all. I was suddenly overcome with unknown fear. The yellow room ceased to be bright and happy and instead became sickly and faded like a letter whose words had been destroyed by time. I was glad to be distracted by the lights of a passing boat, which swept the walls and trickled back onto the floor, illuminating a large jar of shells; it was just like the one I had at home. I stood up in my hunch of a blanket and lifted one out, holding it against my ear. A rush of memory; swept away by the reminder of a different life. I felt her hand on my arm and she handed me a cup filled with tea and I could smell the sugar. Gratefully, I held it warm in my hands before tilting it to taste its sweetness.

  ‘I’m glad you came,’ she said.

  ‘I’ve been before.’ Our words tiptoe around the room.

  Professor Elms, despite all his lessons, had not prepared me for this. He had taught me about losing a heart, not discovering one.

  ‘Yes, I know,’ she said, and the way she smiled made my feathers quiver, like arrows ready to shoot at their target.

  She nodded towards the long bandage that now lay unravelled at my feet, like the peel of some strange white fruit. ‘You do not need to wear that. You must find a way to heal your own wounds,’ she said quietly.

  Before I could take another sip, she lifted the cup from my hand and placed it on the table. The blanket slipped from my shoulders as she gently pushed me onto the bed. No one had seen me naked before, except the whores when they washed and scrubbed me in the kitchen, but I was just a small child then; they knew nothing of my body now. Although my feathers ruffled and sang, her touch on my back made me flinch. She didn’t withdraw her hand, but her fingertips seemed to hesitate and lighten, and I found myself wanting more. I guided her hand with my own and when I let go, it was lost deep inside my feathers as she stroked each one in turn.

  She stepped out of her clothes and kissed me. Soft and warm and long and deep. I responded with a kiss of my own and watched her body move next to mine, her breasts like two anchored boats, rising and falling as she breathed.

  ‘Does it hurt?’ I
asked, running the pads of my fingers along the skin of her legs. I hadn’t expected it to be so sharp. It felt impenetrable, like beautiful nacreous armour.

  She mumbled and shook her head, and when at last I lifted my fingers it was my own skin that stung, as though I had a hundred tiny paper cuts. Where scales once grew, there were now raised calloused whorls, the scars of what she used to be. Her foot felt wet against my leg, but when I reached down to check, I realised that it was just cold. I was curious about her difference and in amongst all of it I saw beauty and wondered if I would ever learn to feel that way about myself.

  Her mouth met mine again. It curved wide like the smile of an oyster shell, so soft and fleshy inside. We moved together until she was familiar to me; soon I knew where she dipped and rose, and dipped again to meet the rising tide, where ammonites gathered in swirls. I couldn’t get lost; I tried, but I surfaced and she met me once again with her mouth. Nothing here was forbidden. My feathers pulsed and frothed, and it felt as though they were stretching and doubling in size, no longer shrunken and flat from the canal water. Wordlessly, I collapsed, tangled in her limbs, where we lay on the bed like driftwood, shaped by an invisible sea, my fingers quickly lost in her hair, her own lost in my feathers. I felt no shame, and, for the first time since I was a child, my feathers gave me pleasure, and it was all because of her.

  ‘We understand each other because we both belong to different worlds,’ she murmured sleepily.

  She slept then and I watched how she twisted like a coral reef. Her spine, the impression left by an eel gliding along the seabed. Her feet long and wide with their translucent webbing between each toe. I was too fascinated to sleep and stared out of the half-open shutter to the sky above. It was black and empty, and I thought how wrong she was; I didn’t belong to a different world, I belonged right there. In that night, in that room, we’d both revealed our hidden past. In sleep she drifted away from me and I reached for her hair as though I could pull her back. It was warm to the touch, and, lifting my fingers to my face, I smelled a mixture of salt, starlight and thyme, a comfort which finally brought sleep after so many days of longing.

  A single shaft of early morning light shone through the window. From somewhere below, I could hear the slow movements of the boats. Reaching for Elver, I was startled to find the bed was empty; I hadn’t felt her leave my side. Last night I had slept beside an ocean, but when I woke, the tide was out and I had been washed ashore. As I surfaced, I realised it wasn’t just the bed that was empty, so too was the room. Tangled in my hair, I felt a starfish; a gift, an offering, an apology perhaps for not being there. Caught between my fingers were a few golden strands of her hair. I must have held on too tight, but still it hadn’t been enough, and now she was gone. On the table, I found an abandoned cup of tea, half drunk and still warm to the touch. I felt strangely bereft.

  Had she sat and watched me sleep? When had she left and why? When will she return? But my questions remained unanswered, for there was nobody there to hear them. I waited, with the sound of Sybel’s warning ringing loud in my mind: Beware of the mermaid whose heart is made of nothing but water, for it will quickly flow away. In that moment I felt bewildered and lost. I had fallen asleep so safe in a beautiful tangle of knots from which I thought there was no escape, but in the darkness, she had quietly loosened the ties and released me just in time for morning. Did that always happen after a night of such pleasure? My coat was still a sodden puddle on the floor, but I threw my arms into the sleeves anyway and hunched its heavy coldness over my shoulders. Bundling the bandages into my pocket, I quickly left the room as empty as I had found it.

  CHAPTER 27

  A few days later there was still no sign of Elver and no mention of the night we had shared. I filled my time trying to learn more of my father’s language, but it proved too difficult without Elver’s words of encouragement. To release my thoughts, I walked the dogs, pounding my frustration into the flagstones. Sometimes I would walk them twice, once in the morning and then again later in the afternoon during the golden hour when the light polished the city and everything was bathed in a warm glistening light like a drizzle of syrup. I would stretch myself under a lemon tree not far from the water’s edge, wait for him near the ship to which he would return, and watch the water sparkle in the sunlight.

  I brought The Sea with me and read it sprawled on a blanket while the dogs scratched the flies from their bellies, and collapsed in snoring bundles on the grass. The night of the ball, I had slipped the book into the inside pocket of my cloak, and every time I picked it up, I was convinced it held her scent and the memories of the other night surged. I studied the pictures: the sea, at its cruellest and then its most peaceful, full of emotion and quick to turn like a scorned lover. Its hidden depths were revealed page after page and famous quotes and poems filled the rest. In the last section, I read about the mermaids that inhabited the darker, deeper waters of the city. Here they were described as beautiful monsters with hearts of cruelty. Until I arrived, I thought a mermaid was just a beautiful girl stitched into a sequined tail, but now I knew the truth. Like me, she was neither one thing nor another, caught somewhere in between – a lost soul – and I felt even more drawn to her.

  The City of Murmurs was a place of wonder and my feathers would not gain much attention here, yet still I held back. When I had first seen the boat, I had confessed my fear to Sybel. That boat is nothing more than a wreck, she had told me. We only have fascination for what we have never seen before and here in this city we have seen it all. Besides, the wait is always worth more than the reveal. But I’ve been on board and I’ve seen their exhibits, I had whispered, in tiny trembling syllables. You may well have done, she had replied, but you’ll never see its circus performing on this shore. Sybel fumed at the thought, and I knew that if they tried to pitch their tent anywhere near this city, she would tear it from the ground herself and fling it far into the sea.

  Leo and Elver had both made me less fearful of who I really was, but my feathers were my wonder and I wasn’t brave enough to share them with the rest of the world just yet. Childhood fears of being displayed in a large glass cabinet or whipped to perform in a circus while some master greedily collected coins in his upturned cap still plagued me. I was not a spectator sport, nor a performer, and I had been taught to hide.

  Leo often found me lying on the grass in a small park. I chose this spot because it was close to the boat and we were ever-watchful, both anticipating the arrival of my father. Sometimes we sat in companionable silence; other times we spoke about our future plans. How one day I would open a shop selling hats and scarves made of beautiful feathers and he told me his dream of travelling to faraway forests to discover unnamed birds, but there was hesitancy when he spoke, as though he was no longer sure if that’s what he wanted after all. Neither of us spoke about the kiss we almost had, but unspoken things are not necessarily so easily forgotten.

  I watched as he lay next to me, hands behind his head, idly chewing on a piece of grass, which made the muscles in his jaw flex through the dark beginnings of a beard. I could see dark coils of hair through the thin cloth of his shirt. He shifted onto his side and tilted his face towards mine and the light revealed flecks of green in his eyes. I had never noticed them before. He smiled and I smiled back, before pretending to return to my book. I always seemed to find myself caught between two things and my heart was no different.

  ‘Who was your first?’ he asked unexpectedly.

  ‘My first what?’ I asked confused.

  ‘The first person you ever fell in love with?’ He nudged my leg playfully.

  I laughed nervously, not sure I had an answer to give.

  ‘I loved a married woman once,’ Leo confessed.

  ‘Really?’ That surprised me, and I lowered my book, resting it in my lap, curious to hear more.

  ‘She taught me to play the piano in her house by the sea. It had floor-to-ceiling windows, but there was no one to see us.’

  �
�Apart from her husband?’

  He shrugged and told me how her husband took long business trips, and neither of them really knew what he did. Leo’s mother had wanted to find something to distract him from his obsession with birds and decided to pay for music lessons instead.

  ‘It didn’t work, of course,’ he said. ‘I just developed another interest.’

  ‘How did it end?’

  ‘I had learned all I needed to.’

  ‘Did that include the piano or not?’ I teased.

  ‘I learned to play the piano – very badly. Whenever I hear music, I still think of her sitting in that house by the sea.’

  ‘So, you miss her then?’

  He paused. ‘In some ways I do, but I was too young and she was too old. We fell though the gap in between.’

  ‘Did your mother ever find out?’

  ‘No; at least I hope not,’ he exclaimed, laughing. ‘I don’t think she’d be very pleased to find out what her money was actually buying. I heard she left her husband and a few months later the house by the sea was sold.’

  ‘She just left?’

  ‘We both did,’ he replied wistfully. ‘My mother still receives cards on special occasions, my name is always written in them. Her handwriting is more familiar to me than anyone else’s.’

  My memory returned me then to all those years before where I was on my knees in a circus tent. It was there amongst the freaks and oddities that I felt my first pang of desire for something that wasn’t even real. It was so long ago, but still I could feel it.