Chapter 34

After the funeral, I begin obsessively tracing and retracing my encounters with Heathcote. I see the dozens of missed opportunities, the openings I failed to spot, the overtures he made that I willfully ignored. I berate myself for not having tried harder. I should have tried to call more. I should have just turned up at his house. He had an open-door policy, after all. An open-door policy that everyone knew about—everyone except me. I was the one he couldn’t be around. If, after Heathcote’s death, feelings eluded me, they’ve all come knocking now. His final vanishing act has thrown me backward. I keep thinking about the helpless look in his eyes as I told him about cremation, his gory explosion when I turned up by his bedside, the letter I wrote him in blood, and memories happily suppressed come spurting up, too. The time, approaching psychosis, when I wished him dead, and believed my wish had the power to come true. A feeling of terrible responsibility consumes me. I did it. My fault.

I didn’t think grief would be like this: a never-ending trial, with myself acting as prosecutor, judge, and hapless defendant all at once. But that’s how it plays out. I go hunting for evidence to explain Heathcote’s absences, and it’s not hard to find. All the terrible things I’ve done in my life, real and imagined, come crowding into my head, from birth to present day. It’s like having a mob of scolding crows flapping noisily around in there. They strike whenever they feel like it, no respect for time or place. At night when I’m trying to sleep I suddenly curl up in agony like I’ve been poisoned; on the top deck of the bus I beat myself around the head; hunched at a table in the café at the end of our street I start clawing at my face and rocking back and forth in my chair; while doing the dishes I hurl abuse at myself, forgetting there are other people in the house. “You stupid fucking cunt,” I yell at a dirty saucepan as the memory of wetting myself in kindergarten spreads like a stain across the inside of my skull. I feel like an ant under a magnifying glass—but as well as being the ant I am also the boy aiming the fire. I plunge my fists into inanimate objects until the skin breaks and blood drips down my fingers. At times I feel like I’m a heartbeat away from seriously hurting myself or, worse, someone else.

Sometimes the awareness that Heathcote was at least partly to blame breaks through. At the supermarket, in the fruit aisle, I spot a packet of red grapes and feel a flash of anger at the memory of his tragic belief that red grapes could cure his incurable condition. “You stupid old man,” I shout at the grapes, kicking at the fruit stand. A frail-looking gentleman shuffling down the aisle toward me stops in his tracks and edges nervously away. I add scaring vulnerable retirees to my list of crimes.

These feelings, though unusual in their severity, are also very familiar, and I reach for familiar solutions. I drink too much, smoke too much cannabis, overdo it with codeine and sleeping pills, and this creates its own ecosystem of regret. My paranoia—hardly a placid beast under normal circumstances—grows wings.

Yana tries to help, or at least tries to get me to talk about what’s going on, but I seal myself off from her, both physically and emotionally. And if discussing parenthood was difficult before, it’s now become completely impossible. I spend more time than ever shut away with the bird. With Benzene on my wrist, thought escapes me. I lose my sense of loss in the blackness of her eyes. The vengeful voice inside my head is hushed by the beat of her wings, if only for a while. She prods the open wounds on my knuckles with her beak and samples the residue with her thin black tongue. Food, she thinks. Maybe there’s something I can learn from her unsentimental attitude. After all, what’s death—or a dead body—to a magpie but an opportunity to grow?

The more time I spend with the bird, the more I begin to wonder if she might have the power to lift me permanently out of the trap I’ve thrown myself into. I remember reading Helen Macdonald’s H Is for Hawk, a book by an academic who, in the wake of her father’s sudden death, trained a peregrine falcon to fly from her wrist. I seem to recall that the bird’s killing weight on her arm helped her somehow; took her out of herself. I think back to the magpie’s days on the farm, remember the thrill of her flying away and the even greater thrill as she soared back. A bird that always returns could be an antidote to loss. It makes perfect sense, in a dream-logic sort of way.

A magpie is no falcon, of course. But a professional animal trainer I’ve befriended—a rather odd man who lives with a pair of crows—has told me that it’s possible to train a magpie to have perfect recall using falconry techniques. He did so a few years ago for a jewelry commercial, and I’ve seen further evidence online. A while back, he sent me instructions and links to all the equipment I would need. Now, I decide, the time has come to give it a go. Benzene’s new flight feathers are just asking to play against the sky; and I have an urge to escape myself. I imagine my fantasy finally coming true—of being able to stretch out my arm in the park and a bird appearing like magic on the end of it; of sending her flying back up over the trees and part of me soaring away with her. On the farm she’s always come back—although only in her own sweet time. Flying her in the city comes with a few more risks—eight million of them, and growing by the day—but the rewards, I am certain, will be even greater.

When Benzene sees the falconry equipment—the leather anklets, the long spool of nylon string, the metal clip, and the little leather leash—she immediately takes off to her highest branch. This is not unexpected. She fears the new, and any novel object, such as a toy or perch, is always initially treated with suspicion. This is fine. I have patience, and I have worms. Every day for a week I spend a little time trying to familiarize her with the leather anklets, letting her nibble and play with them. I create positive associations with them by giving her plenty of live treats. The first step is fitting the anklets. Then I’ll fly her on the end of a string, like a kite; and once she’s proven that she always comes back, I’ll do away with the string and fly her free. With a little training, a little love, she’ll come whenever I call. Then she can accompany me wherever I go; a constant companion. A bird on the head keeping thoughts at bay.

Benzene is happy about the extra worms and the attention; and she always enjoys chewing on a bit of leather. But if I so much as think about fitting the anklets around her legs, she shoots out of reach. If I persist, she begins flying back and forth from one end of the aviary to the other, springing off the wire so frantically it starts to feel like she’s bouncing around the inside of my skull.

Eventually I snap. Early one morning I catch her in my hands and, ignoring her angry shouts and snapping beak, I fix the anklets in place. The animal trainer told me I might have to resort to this. “She’ll thank you once she understands what they’re for,” he reassured me. But Benzene never gives me the chance to show her what they’re for. She stops talking to me, won’t even come near me, no matter how many worms I wave at her from beneath her branch. It’s as if, with a single act of betrayal, I’ve severed the bond between us.

She spends days obsessively tugging at the leather thongs around her matchstick legs, and then just sitting, worn out and depressed, on her branch. After a week of this, she comes and finds me at my desk and sits on my wrist. She looks up at me in silence and simply stares. It’s like being locked in a no-blinking competition with your own guilty conscience. I feel terrible; here’s yet another bad thing I’ve done. I catch her gently in my hands. This time there are no angry squawks as, using a pair of nail scissors, I carefully cut her free. The bird nibbles her shins, quacks like a duck, and flaps off, leaving me even more miserable than before. I can’t fly my way out of this or punch my way through it. I’m stuck in a trap of my own making.