Feathertide Page 6

  ‘Some are held together by seaweed and cartilage, their towns are protected by the ribcage of something much bigger than a whale; others tumble down ochre rocks, too steep and creviced to climb. There is one conjured from mist and another shaped only by the rain.’ He paused then for a moment, as though he had forgotten something, or all of a sudden had lost his way in a place of tangled cobwebs. ‘Many were once stars that burned so brightly, they fell from the night sky in an explosive burst of light, where they were cooled and hardened in the sea.’

  He made these islands and floating cities sound so magical, and I couldn’t imagine anything existing like that somewhere out at sea. It was just an endless blue, but I supposed the boats that arrived must have come from somewhere. Absentmindedly, he reached into his top pocket for a watch that had stopped ticking long ago. I wondered why he carried a watch at all, and thought it was perhaps because he had lived so long without one.

  ‘Why do you check the time on it if it’s broken? I asked.

  ‘I’m not checking the time – it’s a reminder,’ he replied, dropping it safely back into his pocket with a gentle pat; I could see its round shape bulge beneath the cloth.

  ‘A reminder of what?’

  He looked weary, as though his own mechanism suddenly needed winding again. ‘Someone I once lost.’

  I frowned. ‘You can’t just lose a person; it’s not like a coin that falls out of your pocket or a button that comes loose from a coat.’ His expression told me I was wrong, and I wondered then what he knew of love and loss. Like me, the world seemed to have rejected him. He smelled like a rainy day, or a dusty armchair that nobody sat in any more: musty and damp in the first moments, then the senses would grow accustomed to it, and it was only when a sudden draught rushed from under a door or through an open window that you would be reminded of just how abandoned he had become. I imagined that if you patted his jacket, great choking clouds of dust would float off into the air. But underneath all of that, I knew there was in fact so much there to be loved. It made me happy and relieved to think that someone, somewhere had loved him once. Love was the only topic that seemed to confuse him. The one topic for which he didn’t have all the answers.

  Glancing over I saw that he had been drawing something, and a place had begun to emerge on the paper. He brought it to life with the strokes of his pencil, telling me of long stretches of water and bridges that took you over them; of domes and spires high enough to pierce the moon; of narrow twisting streets and tall bell towers; of morning mists like returning ghosts and damp evenings; of water washed stone and sunlit squares. Buildings, like fresh loaves rising and shaping, baking in the slow warmth, and by mid-afternoon everything would be golden with sun-glazed roofs, too hot, even for the cats’ paws to prowl upon. A place where the weather was dependent on the emotions of its residents rather than any atmospheric shift. There, the sky was not bound by the changing seasons. After the death of a child, dark clouds mourned the loss. It always rained longer and harder then. The sun gleamed like a medal during celebrations, and weddings were always shiny and warm and bright. A humid tension hung in the air just before a wife discovered a husband’s betrayal, and when he got home, lightning would rip open the sky and a storm would rage long into the night, and sometimes into the next.

  My mind was tangled. Barely able to breathe, I traced the images he had drawn with my finger, until there was a smudge of grey left on its tip. ‘Is it one of the Scatterings?’

  The professor nodded. ‘They say there are mermaids living in its waters.’

  ‘Mermaids? But that can’t be true; there is no such thing.’ All those years ago, in the gloaming, floating half-light of a circus tent, I had learned that mermaids don’t really exist. ‘They are just an illusion,’ I said, as though he was a fool to suggest otherwise.

  ‘An elusive truth, perhaps … but just because you have never seen one doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Believing in magic is the only way you’ll ever find it. In this place, there are brightly painted doors where you would least expect to find them, slotted in between a drab shoemakers, and a cluttered apothecary. These are called the wishing doors; different colours grant different wishes.’

  ‘Have you been there?’ I asked, excitedly. ‘Did you make a wish?’

  Professor Elms quietened and, reaching into his pocket, he pulled out a large handkerchief, which he then dabbed at the sudden sadness in his eyes.

  ‘Yes, I made a wish.’

  I frowned. ‘And did it come true?’

  He smiled. ‘In a way, I suppose it did. What I really wanted was to find the love I lost; instead I found a different love.’ Absent-mindedly, he patted at his pocket watch. He did this often like a nervous habit, to check that it was still there.

  ‘How does your watch remind you of loss?’

  ‘It is set to the moment I first saw her, one minute before seven. It was a warm spring evening in the lively square of a faraway city.’

  ‘But how can you be sure it was one minute before seven?’ I asked.

  ‘Because I can still hear the pretty chimes of the towering clock above us. I often fall to sleep with the sound of them in my ears.’

  ‘But you lost her and it makes you so sad?’

  ‘Sad?’ he asked, in confusion. ‘I’m not sad. I will never lose that moment. All I have to do is close my eyes and I can see the smile of delight on her face as she looked up at the clock face with its blue background speckled with stars. The hand of my broken watch always brings her back to me. Sometimes there is beauty in broken things.’

  He closed his eyes and seemed to be breathing in her memory. I closed mine too and tried to imagine a beautiful girl and a glittering clock and the professor’s face, much younger than the one l knew.

  ‘They also talk of Sky-Worshippers, bird men who come from the mist.’

  My eyes flew open and my mind was caught on the word bird. Bird men – people just like me, out in the world. ‘I have to go there. Where is it? Tell me where it is.’ I was clutching at his arm so fiercely that I made him wobble off his chair. Just then the air filled with the delicate scent of lemons and Lemàn appeared at the door dressed in her loose flowery robe.

  ‘Professor Elms is telling me about a place of magic,’ I said, loosening my grip.

  Lemàn rolled her eyes playfully. ‘And what place might that be?’

  Turning my gaze towards the professor, we both waited for his answer; it seemed to take forever to come.

  He looked at me and then back at Lemàn, and, like migrating swallows, the words flew gently from his lips: ‘Ah, well – that is not so easy to answer. The city changes its name depending on what you will find there. Follow the accordion player to the night shops and there you will find your token, which will reveal everything.’

  ‘A token?’

  ‘Yes, they are small stones collected from the canals. I still have mine somewhere,’ he said. I watched as he patted at his pockets and began fumbling on the inside of his jacket. A moment later he retrieved a flat silver stone upon which I noticed there was an inscription: The City of Water. ‘This is the official name for those who have yet to be touched by its magic, and it is always the same, but a token always has two sides and if you flip it over you will find another story waiting for you.’

  I watched as he turned it over in his narrow palm and held it out for me to see: The City of Awakening swirled its way around the edge.

  ‘So, it’s like a prediction?’ I queried. ‘And the inscription changes for every person?’

  Professor Elms nodded. ‘Yes, that is how I knew I would find love there, and that my heart would be woken. A heart never goes back to sleep after that.’ Quickly he slipped the token back in his pocket. ‘It is a place of difference.’

  Lemàn’s face lit up, then her smile faded. ‘I lost mine.’

  ‘Have you been there?’ I asked, staring at her in disbelief.

  She nodded. ‘Yes, a very long time ago.’

  ‘What’s it
like?’

  ‘Hush, now my little firecracker, I have business with the professor,’ she said, hastily returning from wherever her memory had pulled her. She smiled in his direction, and his face seemed suddenly content. Then she stared into the distance again, drifting in and out on a tide of memories. I waited until the waves washed her back to shore. Finally, she looked at me and uttered something quite unexpected, ‘It’s where I met your father.’

  Then before I could utter another word, she was ushering the professor out of the door. They both disappeared up the stairs with their matching smiles and happy eyes. I had seen the whores blink strange liquid into their eyes on the nights of the great parties as though it was some kind of perfume. Seconds later their pupils would swell like a dark hypnotic spell. Now when I looked into Lemàn’s eyes, they were already full without the pretence of a potion, like juicy dark berries of desire. I thought then that it wasn’t just Lemàn who had mended the professor’s heart, but that perhaps in some way he too had mended hers.

  CHAPTER 8

  Later that evening, I found Lemàn in the kitchen wringing out a bowl full of stockings over a bucket. Steam billowed around her from two giant cooking pots, which dampened her hair to her neck. There was moisture in the air and a light sheen to her skin. She looked like she had been walking on a desolate winter moor, a long way from home.

  ‘You should be in your room,’ she said, recognising my footsteps before I had even got through the door. She was grumbling, but she wasn’t angry. ‘You know that Sorren doesn’t like you wandering the corridors by yourself.’

  ‘But I’m not wandering the corridors by myself; I’m here in the kitchen with you,’ I replied, settling onto a stool.

  She shook her head at me, but I could see her eyes dance in amusement.

  ‘Why does Sorren hate me so much?’

  ‘Nonsense, she doesn’t hate you.’ I could hear her tutting from across the room.

  ‘Then why is she so mean to me?’

  Lemàn sighed. As I grew, she found my questions more difficult to answer; they often chased her from my room.

  ‘Loss can make good people seem cruel, when really they’re just sad.’

  ‘Like the woman in the forest?’

  ‘What woman?’ She looked confused, forgetting her own story.

  ‘The one you told me about, the one who was so lonely that she stole all those children.’

  ‘Ah, yes – that’s right.’ She nodded, and smiled affectionately at my innocence.

  ‘Is Sorren the reason I have feathers? Did she put a curse on me when I was born?’

  Lemàn clicked her tongue. ‘You and your fairy tales. If anything, it was you who put a curse on her; you make her remember things she’d rather forget. Besides, I already told you – they were a gift.’

  I watched as she lifted another pair of stockings from the bowl, rolled them between her huge hands and twisted out the water.

  ‘A gift from my father?’

  Lemàn paused, but her face revealed nothing. She lifted the bucket and threw the soap suds out the back door. ‘Yes,’ she replied simply, bolting the door shut again.

  ‘Tell me about him.’

  The pots bubbled and hissed on the stove, and she moved between them, stirring the contents with a large wooden spoon. From the way she gripped the handle, I could tell that the mention of my father had deeply unsettled her.

  ‘There really isn’t much to tell,’ she protested.

  ‘But there must be!’ My voice grew desperate, wanting to collect her memories.

  ‘All right,’ she sighed, reluctantly. ‘I will tell you what I remember, but it isn’t much.’

  I watched and waited as she went back to pegging her stockings onto the clothes line which stretched the full length of the kitchen. Water dripped slowly from the toes onto the stone floor. I willed her to hurry up, impatient for the story to be told, but she seemed to be taking much longer than was necessary, pegging each one with deliberate precision. Perhaps she was trying to decide how or where to begin. When the last pair of stockings was finally secured, she still didn’t come to the table; instead she crossed the room, reached high on the shelf in the alcove, and grabbed a bottle of rum and a glass. Uncorking it with a squeak, she sloshed the contents into the glass before sitting down opposite me, finally ready. Between great gulps, she unravelled her memory like a ball of wool, her words knitting together something soft and warm.

  ‘I don’t remember his name.’ She paused and corrected herself. ‘Actually, I don’t remember it, because I never knew it. How can you remember something you were never told?’ She laughed, but the sound of it was too shrill and brittle to be real.

  ‘You never knew his name?’ I wrinkled my face in disbelief, wondering how that was possible.

  ‘There wasn’t time. I met him at the market in a square filled with the flutter of birds. It was more of a glimpse than a meeting.’ She stopped, closed her eyes for a moment, and when she opened them again, they glistened like distant stars. I shuffled restlessly on my stool, eager to hear more of the story. She smiled at the memory and the skin around her eyes crinkled softly. ‘The birds were everywhere; on the rooftops, on the window ledges, circling the sky and strutting over the stone slabs on the ground. They seemed to come out of a strange silvery mist.’ She gazed around the kitchen as though they were here now and she could still see them. I checked the beams just to make sure, but we were quite alone, apart from the scuttle of a mouse.

  ‘Then what happened?’ I suddenly realised how much colder and darker the room had become and I shivered. Lemàn pushed back her stool and it scraped against the floor. In the corner, the fire had fallen asleep, and, with a great iron poker, she provoked the flames until they snarled back to life.

  I watched her from behind; the crooked slope of her back and the heave of her chest. Her once silken hair had become a bramble brush that she let grow wild and free, like an offering to a nesting bird. Cow-thick lashes still shaded her eyes, but she never really looked out to see what was in this world. I ached for her loss then, and, even though it wasn’t my own, I felt it just the same. She was a hollow vessel with only the occasional rusty rattle of escaped memory. It was as though she had left herself behind, and someone had scooped out the flesh of her happiness. A fruit pecked empty by a bird; a gutted fish, a withered leaf on a winter path. I tried to imagine her as a young girl, but it was impossible; time had puffed her up like a pigeon and ruffled all her feathers. But it wasn’t just time that had left its mark.

  ‘That night,’ she continued, ‘quite by chance or fate or magic we found each other again. He came to the window of the Uccello Hotel where I was staying; it was as though he was floating in that same silver mist I had seen in the square.’

  Her expression changed then, lit by happiness. Something had been unlocked inside her and her face was more animated than I had ever seen it before. Her thoughts were full and frothy, like a saucepan full of boiling milk about to spill over.

  ‘I don’t remember going downstairs to open the door, or him knocking to be let in, but somehow, moments later, he was right there with me in the room. It’s as though he had flown right through the window.’ She laughed at how absurd it all sounded and her eyes grew forest dark. ‘The rest you can imagine.’

  ‘What was he like?’ I asked, not willing to let go of the story just yet.

  She hesitated, smiling sadly at a memory untold. ‘I remember him as though I saw him yesterday. You are very much like him, with the sunset in your feathers and the sky in your eyes – the same clear, infinite blue. I remember lying in the tender cradle of his arms. They were like warm wings covering me in a quilt of feathers, and there we nested through the night. When morning arrived, I awoke to find he was gone, not realising he had left a part of him behind.’

  Wings! I couldn’t imagine it.

  The room flickered and grew silent apart from the slow steady drip, drip, drip of Lemàn’s wet stockings creating puddles of water
, which ran into the cracks in the floor. The only other sound was the sigh of the wind collapsing in the chimney. Even the mouse seemed to have fallen asleep.

  Finally, I spoke. ‘I want to find him.’

  Lemàn sighed a deep and heavy sigh.

  ‘I’m afraid that is all I can tell you. The story is short. I wish there was more.’ She closed her eyes and tried to wipe a tear from the corner of her eye, but it fell too fast and splashed onto the table. It was then I caught sight of the bird tattoo pulsing on her wrist, and finally understood its meaning.

  Lemàn seemed so far away then. For too long she had given all her colour to keeping the memory of my father alive, and now she sat like a lost ghost. Eventually, she reached out her hand and tenderly stroked the soft feathery down on my arms. ‘I know you feel it,’ she said.

  ‘Feel what?’

  ‘The connection to the birds outside.’

  ‘Yes,’ I admitted, thinking about all the hours I spent watching them and drawing them and how, whenever we passed the farm gate, I lingered a little longer when the hens were strutting around the yard. Deep within I had always known I was connected to birds, and now I was old enough to know the full story, it all made sense.

  ‘The birds gathered on the roof the night you were born, watching and waiting for you to arrive. I tried to shut out the sound of their wings, but flight is within you, and I was mistaken to think I could stop it. I should never have even tried.’ Her face flickered with regret for a moment, but then it was gone. ‘I have something to show you,’ she said, rising from the stool and disappearing from the room.

  I reached across and dipped my finger into the large teardrop left on the table, and with it I traced the outline of a small feather. Moments later, she returned to the room and handed me a book I had never seen before; The Art of Hot Air Ballooning. ‘Open it at the beginning – go on,’ she urged.

  I took it gently into my hands like a prayer book, and did as she requested. There between the pages lay a glossy copper-gold feather; an offering. ‘It’s all I’ve got left of him.’ She sighed sadly. ‘And, of course, I have you.’ Then I felt her hand upon my back and my feathers rose, craving her touch.