Chapter 40

It is August on the farm, unmistakably so: the lavender beds are softly humming to themselves, the lawn is dying for a drink, and the spindly old greengage tree has crowned itself with emeralds again. But which August is it, exactly? I feel like I’ve stood in this exact spot, at this exact moment, every summer for a hundred years. The landscape seems like a rolling backdrop: always changing, always repeating; an eternal loop. I have to remind myself that it’s an illusion. There are no true repeats in nature. I pick out the threads of the particular. The fist-sized holes in the trunk of the greengage tree, calling card of the local woodpeckers; the high-pitched keening of a red kite coming from somewhere beyond the horse paddock—the first, my dad claims, he’s spotted here in twenty years; the shifting society of crows, rooks, magpies, and jackdaws, individuals all, living their complex lives alongside ours.

The ecology within me has shifted too. Heathcote’s death has, in a strange way, washed the landscape clean. Picking over his entrails made me feel sick at first, but then I arranged them in a pattern that made sense and I began to feel a whole lot better. Madness doesn’t run in the blood and it doesn’t just strike like lightning. It too has its threads, its deep roots in the particular. Clearly, I’ve had my own moments of mental volatility, and perhaps I always will. A crack, once made, is hard to fully close. But it’s not because of the blood that runs in my veins. We all have our own deep roots grounded in the past, darkly guiding our present. You can’t sever yourself from your past but perhaps, if you dig around a little, you can excavate some of its power. Expose those roots to the heat of the sun. Let them wither.

This very simple and obvious realization has made me feel lighter again, as if a weight I didn’t even know existed has lifted from the top of my head. Heathcote’s ghost is finally beginning to evaporate—the phantom I’ve been trying to grasp hold of for so many years is beginning to let loose its hold on me. When I first wanted to get to know him, back when I was a kid, it was partly because I wanted to get to know myself. I thought that in him I could see my own future, my own nature. Now that I’ve gotten to know him, it has helped me to know myself, but not in the way I imagined. Who your father is isn’t who you have to be. Nurture trumps nature. It has to.

I look back toward the house. The magpie is watching me through one of the ground-floor windows, a sentient shadow. Her nest and eggs are long forgotten. It happened in an instant. One day she was a protective mother guarding her clutch, the next I woke to find her jumping on my head demanding to play, and the next day her molt began. Worn black feathers fall and are replaced. She sheds her past, long past its use, and grows anew. Tomorrow, she flies free. Except for a few accidental excursions out through the front door and onto the street, she hasn’t flown truly free since the Christmas before last, when the experts on the Crow Forum warned us that, for a bird as tame as her, freedom could spell death. I’ve been a willing accomplice in her confinement, only too ready to agree that the world is a dangerous place. Over a year indoors. It doesn’t seem fair. She’s been a prisoner of my anxieties long enough. It’s time to let go and have faith that she’ll come back, if that’s what she wants. There won’t be any harnesses, or tethers, or falconry techniques. Happiness, freedom, these things involve risk. Sometimes safety can be a padded cell. I’ve taken what measures I can. It might not be entirely scientific, but I’ve been using the wild crows and magpies as a sort of barometer: recently they stopped attacking each other on sight, a sign that the warlike mentality that accompanies breeding season has begun to soften, which I’m hoping means it’s a good time to fly an unattached bird. It’s to be an exercise in trust—although whether it’s more for her benefit or my own I’m not entirely certain.

Yana emerges and joins me where I stand by the garden gate. She too has undergone changes. She’s slowly growing as round as the pears that are just starting to ripen on the trees in the orchard. Small things make her lachrymose: the sound of a baby crying; a video of an orphaned monkey that someone posts on Facebook; people who offer up their seats on the bus. We take the dirt track down to the river. It allegedly follows the route of an old Roman road, and every time I walk it I keep my eyes to the ground at least part of the way, hoping for a hairpin, a ring, a coin, a horseshoe. One year we even probed it with a metal detector but the only trinkets it seems to hold are old bottle caps and discarded sections of pipe and wire. Magpie treasures.

Around the bend we encounter a family of roe deer; a doe in her red summer coat and two fawns half her size who do their best to hide behind her as they dash to the safety of an island of young oaks and brambles. All three watch us from the shadows. From somewhere to our right, a buzzard mewls. When I look back to the deer, they’re halfway to a distant hedgerow, their three white tails bobbing through the air like doves in flight.

In front of us, the water meadow has been dashed black by a crowd of rooks, crows, and jackdaws. All these birds have their own collective nouns: a murder of crows, a parliament of rooks, a clattering of jackdaws. But how to describe corvid conferences such as these? Seeing our approach, they all take off as one, as suddenly as if we’d run at them screaming and shouting and clapping our hands instead of strolling sedately in their direction as we are. A sprinkling of feathers remains where they were gathered, as if they’d been in such a hurry to leave that they forgot to get properly dressed. Late summer is to corvids what autumn is to trees. I pick the feathers up as I come across them and press them to my nose. Crow feathers stink, or at least these long, sturdy wing feathers do, like unwashed hair and mutton grease. The smaller flight feathers I find, jackdaw feathers, have a quite different aroma: hot from the sun, they give off a sweet, somewhat heady scent that is strangely familiar. Jackdaw feathers smell just like church incense, as if they all roost above altars. At the center of their parade ground, a small, sad object lies coiled up in the grass: the head and torso of a fawn. Its limbs—the profitable parts—have been hacked off and carried away by the poachers who shot it. Scavengers are making quick work of the rest. Its eyes are gone, its rib cage unzipped, its lips pecked away to a snarl. I remember another collective noun I’ve heard people use for carrion birds that seems appropriate for the coroners’ feast that we appear to have interrupted: a wake of corvids. It’s an ambiguous augury.

The grass on the riverbank’s gentle slope seems confused by its own proximity to water, scorched brown in places, lush green in others, as if sewn from a huge strip of army camouflage material. Yana lies down in the shade of a willow and soon falls asleep. She sleeps a lot these days and I wonder if her naps correspond to the baby’s—whether the other person living inside her is sleeping now too, or whether the unborn is simply sucking the energy out of her, draining the grid like an electricity thief and diverting it toward some sort of secret project, like the construction of a brain.

I slip out of my clothes and approach the water. Nettles tower along the edge, woven together by creeping bindweed, a plant prettier than its name. It flowers here and there, soft white trumpets that hypnotize bees with their sweet, silent tune. Damselflies flit between garish spears of purple loosestrife, snapping their mandibles at the mosquitoes and gnats that hover over the slowly flowing river.

I take five quick breaths to prepare myself for the cold and slide into the water, my flesh leaping like a scalded frog as I breaststroke inelegantly to the far bank and come to rest by a patch of water lilies. With the tips of my toes, I can just about touch the bottom. I root myself there and look about with eyes just above the water’s surface, froglike. Lily pads as big as dinner plates play host to resting damselflies, their capillaried wings tucked neatly behind their backs, and fat, lazy hoverflies. The sun is pouring into the river at a slant, lighting up the lilies’ long, slimy stems, which vanish nevertheless into darkness, as spooky as anchor chains or deep-sea pipelines.

I push off back out into the middle of the river and tread water. Here the riverbed is far out of reach. I expel the air from my lungs and allow myself to sink. This dirty river has washed so many moments clean. I descend slowly, but the light fades fast, from golden brown to murky green to inkwell black as my feet hit the bottom and my body falls slowly backward. I feel the soft riverbed with my palms, the backs of my arms, my legs; it cushions my spine, a silky membrane of sediment. The sun is hidden away behind the thick blanket of water that covers me, barely prickling through. I am cocooned. In my ears, the double rhythm of my heartbeat thuds faintly and the current seems to murmur as it passes. From somewhere, I hear—or I imagine I hear—the voice of a woman. The words, if they are words, are garbled and indistinct. This, I think vaguely, must be what it’s like to be in the womb. And then: no more thoughts. Silence floods in; the internal silence I crave, as addictive as any drug. I don’t know how long I remain like that: perhaps seconds, perhaps minutes. My mind is totally adrift. I feel like I could happily stay down here for hours. And then, suddenly, something shifts. The darkness that was so comforting is now terrifying. The bottom of the river is the last place on earth I want to be. I squirm upright and kick my way back toward the light, sucking air into my lungs as greedily as someone resurrected.

Up on the bank, Yana is still asleep, softly snoring while in the background the eternal soundtrack plays: a wood pigeon trills and coos, a buzzard blows the same two notes over and over again, rough as a recorder or a pennywhistle, and the crows and rooks rasp away at the bass notes. Yana’s rounded belly is bare to the sun, terrifyingly exposed, like an egg without a shell. Her skin ripples as, beneath the surface, something stirs and kicks with life.

That evening, we make a fire up by the house and wait for the barn owl to start its waking rounds. My dad is busy greasing a frying pan and stoking the fire; my grandmother sits in the middle of a wooden bench blasting Icelandic rock music through a pair of leaky white headphones; and my mum is over by the garden gate smoking. Behind her, hidden in the thick wisteria that hugs the house, a wood pigeon rustles around.

“They build their nest there every year,” my mum says, “and every year that fat cat reaches out the window and swipes their chicks.”

Yana sits by the fire with a bundle of sticks in her lap, lengths of ash that we collected from the woods earlier in the day. Using a small, sharp knife, she shears off the bark, exposing the clean white wood underneath, ribs for the crib we are building. I join in and my dad, unable to resist an opportunity to show off his tools, fetches an old cast-iron plane from his shed and does so too. Here and there, small holes appear in the wood—it’s already nursed numerous beetle larvae through their early stages of life—and soon the grass beneath our feet is covered with long, thin strips of bark. Yana gathers the shorn sticks and demonstrates how they will slot together, neater and cleaner than the pigeon’s nest, certainly, but not—to my mind—so very different in principle.

Conversation somehow turns from the cradle to the grave. My parents seem to see their own end in this new beginning. My mum starts issuing instructions for her funeral, pointing out where exactly on the farm she’d like us to bury her body—ideally right next to the dogs—and which poems each of her children is to read. My dad claims he wants to be thrown on the compost heap and left there for the worms, and my grandmother pops off her headphones to ask if there’s room for her on the compost too. Like the ticking clock inside the crocodile, this baby-to-be seems to have set the older generation’s thoughts to death, as if the planet has a one-in-one-out door policy. The old must be shed—or thrown on the compost—so the new can grow. They seem happy about it, though: happier, perhaps, than I’ve ever seen them.

The wood pigeon rustles around again in the wisteria and then flies from its nest. Even with my eyes closed I could tell what sort of bird it is. Its stiff flight feathers sing through the air. It whistles and hums over our heads, its chest a smear of pastel pink, heading out to forage seeds and grain for its two chicks. They haven’t been eaten by the cat this year—at least not yet.

The next morning I seek out Benzene. I find her in the living room, gazing out across the valley from atop a pile of books. Outside the sky is overcast; spittle flecks the window. Perhaps conditions aren’t quite right, I think hopefully. The bird flies from my hand to the windowsill and back, squeaks. Impassable chasm of language and species aside, it’s obvious what she’s saying.

I walk through the house with the bird on my wrist. She bobs up and down, trying to see all things from all angles, her talons pressing into my flesh. Every time we round a corner, I feel her grip tighten as she braces for the unknown, and then as shapes and shadows resolve into harmless objects she slowly lets go. In the kitchen her eyes absorb the familiar faces of Yana, my mum, and my dad. They follow behind as I pass through the library toward the double doors at the back of the house. The bird sharpens to a point, like a spear threatening the sky. I think of everything she has given me, say a prayer that she will remember the same, and then throw open the doors. She may return. She may not. Her choice. I’m letting go.

The bird shoots out and up. The touch of an unfamiliar easterly breeze causes her to wobble in the sky but she soon corrects herself. She’s a natural. I’ve learned more from this bird than I can possibly say. She’s taught me new ways of seeing, new ways of caring; and the limits of care too. There are mistakes I’ve made with her that I’ll have to make sure not to repeat in the future. Care can be taken too far and become captivity. Now, as she soars above our heads, she conducts a master class in the joy of simply being. That’s what flying is, or at least what it is to me. Flying is to exist in nothing but the moment; to be present without a thought of the past, the future a wing beat away. I sprint after her, underneath her, flying along with the bird as she passes over the top of the greengage tree, loops around the crabapple, over the ditch, and into the field beyond. I crash through the flower beds, leap the fence, and wade out into the waist-deep greenery, grinning in her wake. The magpie rejoices in the air. It is her element.