Feathertide Read online

  Professor Elms shook his head, and patted me a little awkwardly on the shoulder. ‘I feel responsible,’ he said solemnly. I realised he looked even more worried than I did. ‘After all,’ he continued, ‘it was me that put the notion of going outside into your head in the first place.’

  ‘I won’t do it again,’ I promised, but as soon as the words left my lips, I tasted the lie.

  Professor Elms remained silent for a few moments and I thought perhaps he was going to change his mind and tell Lemàn everything. ‘Do you remember what I told you the first time we met?’

  I paused. ‘That you come from a place without clocks?’

  Professor Elms laughed. ‘Yes – I did tell you that, but what else?’

  He always made me think. ‘That the best place to learn about birds was by going outside.’

  He waved away my answer. It wasn’t the one he wanted. ‘You’re right, I did tell you both of those things, but I told you something else, something much more important.’ He lowered his voice. ‘Remember that I told you I can keep a secret.’ His eyes glittered with mischief. ‘So, let’s make this a secret worth keeping.’

  A few days later I was woken by a gentle tapping at my window, and to my surprise I found Professor Elms was outside, crouching on all fours. He told me to dress quickly, bring my cloak and meet him at the kitchen door. I smiled nervously as we both pressed our fingers to our lips. Sssh. I kept mine there to stifle the giggles I could feel rising in my chest. If they escaped, I wouldn’t.

  ‘We are going on a little outing to see the birds,’ he said. ‘They always wake up before the rest of the world.’

  Five minutes later, Professor Elms was leading me out of the whorehouse, past all the apple barrels and the upturned wheelbarrow and the piles of wood to the lane that sloped away from the town. It was only once we had gone around the hedgerow that I dared to breathe again. As long as we went early and stayed in the back lanes, there was no one to see us, only the occasional rattle of a passing cart or a herd of slow-moving cows with their sad blinking eyes. A farmer would mistake us for father and daughter out for a walk, and I wanted a father so much that I liked to pretend it was true. Being seen with a whore from the whorehouse was another thing entirely and couldn’t be explained away so easily. Whores were not meant to be mothers, and, if they were, then they certainly weren’t expected to keep their children with them.

  I cherished those early mornings when the birds were the only ones awake and their happy chatter brought the woods to life. I thought the sound came from the trees themselves, or maybe from the stolen children in Lemàn’s stories, but the rustle in the leaves and the sudden flaring of wings revealed the true source, and I could breathe again.

  I loved it most of all when the inquisitive rain rummaged through the ground, unearthing the damp smell of leaves. It filled the lane and the woods and clung to my skin all the way home. I could still smell it long after I had closed the door behind me. Sometimes, I mistook fallen leaves flattened in the lane for giant paw prints, and, rushing nearer, I was always disappointed to see it was just a footprint left by autumn. Later, under snow-filled skies, I would gather up fallen pine cones and keep them in a box under my bed. Whenever I sensed a change in the air I would reach inside and lift one out to examine its scales, and, like my feathers, they were always closed against the rain, long before it arrived.

  During that first outing to see the birds, I found a fallen egg; it was a dull speckled thing but to me it was remarkable. I slipped it gently in my pocket and made a nest for it in a box of socks. Each night I made a wish in my bed that the egg would hatch and I’d dream that there was a bird flying around my room. In the morning the egg looked exactly the same, not a single crack had appeared. I tried to push away my disappointment; instead I thought what a shame it would be for something so perfect to break apart. In the end I picked it up and hid it under the bed in the box of pine cones.

  After one particularly long hot walk we flopped down in a meadow under a tree, and I let the leaves sieve the sunlight onto my skin. Sitting cross-legged, blowing the floss off the top of a dandelion stalk, I noticed the birds glide silently between the trees, resting then taking flight then resting again. Lying back, I watched them lift themselves off the branches with an easy, gentle flap of their wings. A sudden feeling of enormous longing swelled inside me and I stood up. I could taste the fantasy of flight. Hastily brushing the grass from my cloak, I went to the nearest tree and felt around its trunk, but I was disappointed not to find a foothold; its nearest branches too high to reach. Pleased to see that Professor Elms had fallen asleep in the shade, with his hat covering his face, I wandered further into the wood. A little way in, I untied my cloak and let it drop to the ground. If I had feathers like a bird, then surely I could fly like one too? I had wondered about that often, but whenever I had asked Lemàn, she’d just laughed or changed the subject; I don’t think she really knew the answer, and perhaps she thought that finding it would be too dangerous.

  Finally, I found a tree I could climb, and began to pull myself up into its twisted tangle of branches, higher and higher until I could see the whorehouse perched on the hill in the distance. I steadied myself on the widest branch and tentatively stepped out a little bit further, feeling the shape of it underneath the curve of my feet. In the distance, there was a scattering of farmhouses, and then just the endless blue of sky and sea. Like a beautiful painting, nothing moved, and time stopped ticking. I knew that if you followed the lane back up towards the whorehouse, and continued a little further along, it would suddenly widen and drop down the other side towards the cacophonous chaos of the marketplace, and beyond it to the vast sweeping sea.

  I wasn’t sure what to do, being so high in a tree. Birds didn’t just jump out of trees; they spread their wings and flew. I might have had feathers, but I didn’t exactly have wings, just two feathery stumps sprouting from my shoulder blades. Still determined, I stretched out my arms and lifted them up and down until I found my balance and my rhythm. They might not carry me far, but surely, they would be enough to carry me somewhere. My feathers tingled, as though they were warning me of the danger, but I couldn’t stop. I had to know if I had flight within me.

  Professor Elms woke at the very moment I dared to step off the branch. I saw his eyes widen in alarm, but it was too late; my feet had already left the branch. No amount of furious flapping kept me in the sky for long, and I felt myself plummet to the ground. Professor Elms rushed towards me in open-mouthed terror, holding out his arms to try and catch me, but the force of my landing sent us both to the ground. Miraculously, I was unhurt. Not everything with feathers can fly, he warned, and we never mentioned it again.

  Another secret kept.

  CHAPTER 5

  Inklings of winter crept closer on silent feet. First came the unmistakable crisp bite of autumn, when I would wake to find my window sparkled with frost. It left behind its strange handprints on the glass. Its icy breath decorated my window with its swirling patterns and coded messages, but I knew what they meant: my thirteenth birthday was coming. A special day brought to me soon after the first snowflake, when the world outside was half hidden under a ghostly lilac light.

  This year I knew with absolute certainty what I wanted to buy; a piece of my own coral. Professor Elms had told me it was a self-healer, able to regenerate from the smallest fragment of itself. A miracle. Lemàn decorated the house with bowls of it, like other people might keep bowls of fruit or pots of flowers or fancy ornaments. She believed it could purify the house, but I doubted there was enough coral in the whole of the world’s oceans to cleanse us of our visitors.

  I chose my coral carefully, feeling the power of the sea. An ocean bloom eternalised. Walking along the bustling sea wall, away from the hollers and bellows of the herring-sellers and cockle merchants, we didn’t stop until we reached the last bench. Here the only cries flew from the beaks of the hungry gulls circling above us, waiting for the return of the trawlers. My ey
es never grew tired of watching the sparkling expanse of blue. I would wait for the boats to appear as though out of nowhere, like a mirage in the vast gleaming desert. I let my tongue taste the salt on the air; it filled me with excitement.

  Lifting my coral to the light, I marvelled at the pinkish tinge of its rough ridges in my hand, shaped and sculptured by the sea, astonished by how this strange, twisted rock could rebuild itself and grow anew.

  ‘It’s too big to fit in my jar,’ I said in sudden dismay. There was no room left for something so big, especially now my jar was over half full.

  ‘Let me see. Perhaps we could break a piece off.’

  I handed the coral to Lemàn and she examined it carefully, looking for a sign of weakness. She laughed. ‘It’s a tough old thing.’

  Looking down, something in the harbour caught my eye. Then its shape became familiar. ‘Look!’ I cried.

  ‘Hmm?’ she replied, too distracted to lift her eyes.

  This time I could make the letters into words and I read them aloud: ‘The Boat of Floating Freaks and Oddities.’

  Her eyes flew wide then, full of terror. In shock, she dropped the coral and it smashed into pieces at our feet. The shards scattered and flew, blowing out across the water. I bent down to pick up a fragment before she clutched at my hand and dragged me away, just as before, up the hill and into the swirls of people. This time, however, we were too late; the boat had already docked, and showed no sign of activity. Whatever it had been carrying had already been brought to shore.

  In her panic, she seemed to have once again forgotten all about her own rule – arm’s reach, arm’s reach – and I felt her grip tighten. I tried to keep my hood in place, but the speed and jostle of people made it impossible, even with my free hand flattened hard against the top of my head. Just for a moment, I let go of Lemàn’s hand to pull my hood tighter around my face, but when I reached out to take her hand again, I felt nothing but the snapping jaws of winter air and the whoosh of heavy coats. Swept up in a sudden blizzard of people, Lemàn was nowhere to be found. For a moment I was seized by panic; the only thing I knew how to do was hide. Looking around, I realised everything was familiar to me: the stalls; the shop windows; the crowds. I knew all of it. Excitement and uncertainty tugged me in different directions, but suddenly I wasn’t afraid. I knew where I was, and, more importantly, I knew the way home, but I wasn’t ready to go there just yet. I wanted to explore.

  Just then, two girls skipped past, with strings of liquorice dangling from their mouths, cheeks flushed from the cold. They seemed to be in a hurry to get somewhere, one buoyed along by the other. Everything about them bounced: their feet; their shoulders; even their perfect little curls. Curious to know where they were going with such urgent delight, I followed them through the crowded market towards the edge of the town where the trees began to grow into a forest, and I wondered if the lonely woman from Lemàn’s story was watching me. Here the girls stopped abruptly in front of a large blue and white striped tent, where a crowd of people had begun to gather.

  I heard a voice shout out, ‘Sixpence for admission.’

  A man in front of me jeered. ‘It’s these freaks that have got some admitting to do.’ He laughed at his own joke and slapped his friend’s back in mirth, coaxing a splutter of a laugh from his lungs.

  The girls both pulled out coins from their pockets and clutched them tightly as they edged further into the growing crowd, all waiting to get inside. I desperately wanted to join them, but my pockets were empty. To the side, a group of boys were all nudging each other and whispering, then one of them gave a signal and another dropped to his knees and began to burrow under the tent flap like a fat rabbit. Instantly, a man saw what was happening and started to shout. The boys whistled their warning and ran, but it was too late for the fat rabbit, and the man marched over and hauled him to his feet. Somehow, he managed to wriggle free and panted after his friends. Seizing the opportunity that the distraction had brought, I sprinted round the back of the tent, and quickly lifted the flap and dived underneath, before anyone had time to notice me.

  I don’t know what I expected to find there, but if I thought I would escape the crowds, then I was wrong; it was crammed full of people, almost as many inside as there were waiting outside. A circle of seats was fast-filling with men, women and children, all bustling and jostling for a place; excited murmurs swirled through the air. It didn’t take long for every seat to be filled, and still more people were pushing to get in. A sudden hush descended then, broken only by a nervous shuffling; eyes darted round the tent in search of whatever it was their sixpence had promised.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls …’ The voice came from a squat man, bulging and popping at every seam and buttonhole. His long tailcoat flapped with the flamboyance of a Lady Amherst’s pheasant. ‘Welcome to the show. The Boat of Floating Freaks and Oddities has been brought to shore just for your delight.’ He twirled then to address the other side of the ring. ‘You won’t believe your eyes, but believe them you must.’ Then he lowered his voice to a whisper and the shuffling stopped. ‘What you will see here today will shock you … it will astound you … it might even frighten you.’ His voice rose to a crescendo.

  The two girls I had followed were giggling, and I watched them nudge each other nervously. The air was thick with intrigue.

  ‘But I can promise you one thing: you will never forget it!’

  Then, from the shadows, there was a scuffle as a cage was wheeled into the inner circle. The girls’ giggling stopped, and they suddenly grew quiet, reaching for each other’s hands. People muttered and bottoms lifted from seats in the hope of a better look at whatever had just arrived. Through the gaps between the petticoats, I could see there was something moving in the cage. I crawled forward on my hands and knees. It was crouched, animal-like and cowering, but this animal wore a waistcoat and a pair of checked trousers. The master unhooked the door and the audience gasped and then gaped in astonishment as the creature’s eyes shone in terror, amber in the darkest cave. It sat motionless.

  ‘Please welcome the Bear Boy!’ cried the master in jubilation, yet there was no applause, only an air of uncertainty. He lifted a long cane and rattled it through the bars of the cage. The Bear Boy turned and snarled, revealing a set of vicious pointed teeth, which made the audience gasp again and cringe. The master prodded at the Bear Boy until it leaped through the door of its cage. Its feet were paws, with their unclipped, gnarled claws.

  ‘Freak!’ The word exploded into the air loud as gunpowder.

  ‘What is it?’ cried a voice at the front. ‘It’s hideous!’

  There was a rumble in the audience. Many of the women gathered their children into their skirts and buried their faces into the arms of their husbands. I didn’t turn away; I watched, stunned. Not at the Bear Boy, with his face and body covered in fur, but at the master and the audience for their cruel taunts. The master reached into his bag, and lifted what could have been the raw red heart of a deer, high above his head. ‘Watch it devour this in a single bite! Look at the power of its jaws!’ He threw the slimy object to the dirt and the Bear Boy growled and pounced. One woman turned her face, wincing in pain and retching uncontrollably into a handkerchief. It was too much for another, and she promptly fainted to the floor.

  The Bear Boy suddenly rose, and his front legs revealed themselves to be arms, which had been bent under him in ursine pretence. He stood, now a boy. Taller and older than me, but not by much. The audience grew silent, not quite understanding what they were seeing, but I did. From his skin grew the fur of a bear and from mine grew the feathers of a bird. He was different, just like me. The Bear Boy ran around the ring to a hesitant ripple of applause. He slowed then to let the braver members of the audience reach out and touch his fur. Some flinched, others stroked it and nodded approvingly at its softness, others tugged at it, not believing it to be real. I wanted desperately to reach out and touch his fur, to make sure he was neither boy, nor bear, but
a mixture of the two, something in between, something other. In that moment, I knew I wasn’t the only one, but the quick relief this knowledge brought me was instantly forgotten as I realised how he suffered for his difference. With a sudden bow and a cheery wave, he skipped away, but as he did I thought I saw sadness shining in his eyes. These people had called him a freak, and, when they realised he was just a boy with fur, their disgust and fear had turned instead to disbelief and suspicion, then to amusement. Instinctively, I pulled my hood tighter; suddenly I wanted to shut out the world. The master began to announce the next act: Frogman; a man whose skin could almost stretch from one side of the tent to the other, and a woman so small she could pirouette in the palm of your hand, but I had seen enough of people being ridiculed and displayed for the amusement of others.

  ‘I heard you’ve got a mermaid?’ shouted an impatient man. ‘I’ll pay double to see that.’

  A couple of voices rumbled their agreement. The circus master held up his hand and waited for quiet. ‘You heard right, but first you must be patient. We are saving the best till last. No one eats the pudding before the main dish.’

  The crowd wasn’t listening and driven by the heckler, the whole tent erupted with the same chant: Mermaid! Mermaid! Mermaid!

  In that moment, I understood at once why I had been hidden all this time. It wasn’t because I was too beautiful for the world at all; it was because I was too ugly. I was deformed; I was a hideous creature and, just like the Bear Boy, I was a freak. What would they do to me if they discovered my feathers? Hoist me to the rafters and watch me fly? My eyes swept the full height of the tent and dropped back down again; it was a fall I wouldn’t survive.