A Box of Birds Read online

  ‘We need more. What you were saying the other night about animal models of Alzheimer’s being a waste of time. We need someone who can explain that.’

  I stare at the poster tube propped up in the corner. I was tempted to leave it revolving on the baggage carousel, as a somehow apt valediction to my old career. But it’s followed me here, to this nerve centre of antivivisectionism.

  ‘You don’t need me. Your friends don’t want me here. Bridge wants me dead.’

  ‘All right, then. I need you.’

  He glances at me and reaches into the pocket of his jacket. He opens my hand and fills it with something warm and metallic. A golden amulet. It’s the figure of a woman, of Asiatic features, her curves exaggerated like a fertility goddess.

  ‘A friend of mine made it. I wanted you to have it. Forget about the others. Do this for me.’

  He takes the amulet from me and lifts it to my throat. I feel his fingers at the back of my neck, tracing the soft hair in front of my ear.

  ‘Sounds like I don’t have a choice,’ I say.

  I hear his voice from the bathroom. I turn off the taps and the backflow starts to sing in the pipes, and I can hear James above the clatter of the Edwardian plumbing, talking to someone on his mobile, his voice filtered, muffledly calm. I wipe the steam from the mirror above the sink, still somehow amazed that there’s a mirror here, that a squat has a washbasin that works. Under this bare electric bulb I look as white and unforgiving as a suicide. My boobs seem to be giving up the struggle, but my legs are OK. I must be eight years older than Bridge. That’s a lifetime in the history of a woman’s body. I’m pretty sure they used to have a thing together. Perhaps he’s talking to her now, getting the report on today’s protest, telling her he’s got his tutor just where he wants her in the bathroom across the corridor. Correction. I’m quitting, aren’t I? I was his tutor. He was my student.

  The voice stops, and I freeze. There’s no lock on the door. I hear movement on the boards outside, and then his voice through the thin panelled woodwork, telling me about a towel. His weight creaks off the boards and there’s just the sound of a tank filling. I climb into the bath through a fug of my own smell, sink into the hot greenish water with a gasp, and with someone else’s soap I wash away the last of America.

  The only clean thing in my flightcase is a black long-sleeved top which comes down to the tops of my thighs. I put it on, and cross the corridor.

  The slideshow has ended. There’s firelight, then just the glow of a terminal screen. James is watching something on his computer. It’s a video file, shot in a hurry and without the luxury of lighting. It starts with a rectangle of pure black, unscrolled by a blurry band of light when he presses PLAY. Some sort of lantern splashes light into deep space, and you can make out the pitted back wall of a low-ceilinged room. Figures jut out of the shadows and shuffle towards the source of the glow. Almost human faces, but not human. The light is turquoise. As I watch, the figures on the screen jerk and stumble over a few scraps of food. Some cower in the middle distance, hugging their knees and rocking on their heels. One flaps half-paralysed away, twisted and antic as a shell-shock victim.

  ‘These are the videos that were smuggled out of Sansom?’

  ‘Yeah. They were shot in the mines. Trouble is, Sansom’s PR team have got hold of them and they’ve already countered. They say they’re fakes. The kind of “evidence” that any half-intelligent twelve-year-old could fabricate using MovieStar 5.0 and a reasonably powerful laptop. What do you think? Do you think someone’s just mashed these together from old footage?’

  I see a bonobo grabbing at the camera, knocking it out of focus then scurrying away into darkness. In the next shot, three juveniles are being hauled into daylight, screaming.

  ‘They’re not fakes. Mateus believes in this, and he used to work there.’

  In this shot the camera is trawling along a row of cages, each of which holds a stunned bonobo. The scene cuts to the sign outside Sansom’s ultra-modern forest HQ. I feel the heat of James’ body just in front of me, the sweet pressure of his breath reflecting back at me.

  ‘OK,’ he says, ‘I can see what we’re looking at now. We’re going to have to do what Mateus said. We have to get down there, and be very persuasive when we get there.’

  A bottle smashes into the recycling pod in the street below.

  ‘Into the mines?’

  ‘Yeah. It’s the only way.’

  He closes the viewer. The blue desktop spreads an aqueous light. It’s a fullness to his cheeks, I think, which makes him look so young. He gazes at the screen, calling up a blank document, not yet ready to look at me. His breathing is deep and audible. I feel that if I spoke now, said a single word, this would all go wrong. He’s wearing a brushed cotton shirt with several buttons undone. I can see the gleaming dip of skin behind the collarbone and, lower, a thread of dark chest-hair.

  ‘Good bath?’ he asks.

  ‘Yeah. Nothing on me now.’

  He’s still not looking. His hand moves to the keyboard, little-fingers ⇧ and presses a single key.

  ?

  A spurt of heat breaks across my face. It’s happened. I’ve crashed in flames.

  He waits, still turned to the screen, and taps ↩. I reach over and press a key.

  y

  He takes my hand and holds it there, his fingers hard on my knuckles, his thumb burrowing into my palm. My heart sucks on its drug. The key stays down and I can see its endless reaffirmation spreading out across the screen: yyyyyyyyyyyyyyy. Yes, yes, yes. Slowly, firmly, he fucks my hand with his thumb, digging deep into the soft nerve-lines, itemising each knuckle and tendon. I kiss his smoky mouth, and he twists around for me with all the grace of a boy dancer, opening his mouth for a song. I feel his hands lift the hem of my top, raising it an inch or two, then hesitating, uncertain. I laugh and tear at the buttons of his shirt, and he shifts up and lets me work at his buckle, ease down his jeans. He’s not hard; I haven’t given him time. I hook up my arms and let him lift my top away, and then he reaches around and pulls the wet bobble from my hair, only now registering my nakedness. I kiss him again and feel his filling cock cranking up against my knee, and I bring my foot up to play with his balls and I feel my wetness breaking, shivers up my back, desire roaring in my brain. I try to pull him onto the bed but he resists, and for a moment we’re at cross-purposes. It seems like failure, and my heart starts to fall.

  ‘Wait,’ he says, and for a moment I think he wants to leave it there.

  His thighs unlock from mine. He swivels back to the computer and jerks the mouse over the dock. Our bodies explode into brightness. The projector whirrs into life and sprays colour over every inch of skin, just random patternings at first, and then the brain gets to work and picks out fragments of medieval art, snippets of childish handwriting, colour stills of household objects, magnificent trees. Each second the slideshow clicks forward one frame, and I can just make out the fine microscopy of a botanical histograph, the hugely-magnified honeycomb of phloem and xylem. Next he’s an eighteenth-century world-map, covered with the watercolour bruisings of continents and seas. The shapes slip and warp, stretching in and out of meaning, looming large and shrinking away. I look down at my own body, adorned for a moment with black-hearted sunflowers, and he laughs at the gift he has given me. He rears up on me, tattooed with light, his body a fresco, his hard cock veined with the obscure gradients of human portraiture, and I lie back and spread my pages wide, let him taste my illustrated skin, read my tangled arguments with his tongue.

  In the morning he is gone. The window is open and I can feel the faint otherworldliness of fresh air. Sunlight tingles on my bare arm. March has turned warm in my absence, and it looks like staying that way.

  The house is quiet. There’s a demo at Sansom and they’re all going. I put my glasses on and smile briefly at the note James has left me. I pull on the shirt I pulled off him last night and pad gently down the stairway of death. The hall is full of sunlight. T
here’s a pile of mail on the bare tiles, but it won’t be for me. I go into the kitchen and switch on the kettle, hallucinating the buzz as the power surges into it. I watch the water boil, mesmerised by the play of bubbles in the clear filling-strip. The slightest details waylay me, as though there’s a question about every minuscule fact of existence and I need answers to each one. I pour water on a tea bag and look out onto the yard, where a kid’s trike has been abandoned to a creeping tide of rain-grime. Did David Overstrand have children? I’ve never seen any here.

  I was wrong about the mail. There is something for me.

  As I bend down I feel it again, this faint dizziness, an empty-headed tingling like a virus starting to prickle at my insides. I have to put a hand down to steady myself. The pattern of the tiles stills into a yellow after-image, which shifts with my eyes and nets out across the floor, overwriting the reality beneath. The package is light, and I cling to the airy certainty of it. As I stand up again the warmth shivers across my shoulder-blades. Is this how it feels? Is this the stir of a body forming inside you? It couldn’t be gentler, I think, or less frightening. And then, when you do the test and it’s all confirmed, does the body whisper: I told you so? You thought you knew your own heart, but life knew it better. It gave you what you wanted, when you didn’t know you wanted anything at all.

  That tingling again. I lean back against the wall with the package clasped across my chest. I can see my face in the oval mirror on the other wall. I look young, unready, scared. Jetlag and breathless sex have cut holes out of me. I can’t be pregnant. This is all a bizarre daydream, the wrecking telepathy of a child who wants to be born.

  The package is marked Yvonne Churcher, 76 St. Lawrence Road. The postmark is Fulling. I know it’s strange, but I’m too far gone to question it. I start to pick at the tape. Inside the padded envelope is a shallow rectangular tin, decorated with Chinese enamelling. There’s a golden wire latch making an airtight seal. It smells of incense. It hardly weighs anything. Frail, full of air, like the thoughts that would interpret it. The envelope I’m dropping to the floor had more substance to it.

  Open it, says James’ child.

  I lift the latch. The breath rises from my lungs and bursts. All the light of the universe is in this box: all the stars, planets, streetlights, computer screens. It’s like that dream of wakefulness, the light of God shining into my soul. Then darkness, as the whole brilliant universe shrinks to a dot of pain. There’s a smell of gas and burning. Is there a way out of this? I ask, as the blackness fills up with tears. Follow your nose, replies the unborn child. Love my father. Don’t wait for the truth to come to you. Go after it now, or it’ll be gone.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Are You Going With Me?

  ◉

  A voice reels me in.

  ‘Yvonne...’

  For hours I’ve been dodging the light, clinging to pre-conscious shadows. Even in that airy darkness I was physically joined to something, a metallic edge of pain which meant that I was never quite asleep, never quite cut free of my body. It was cold, dull, peripheral, like a handrail in a cave, something for me to cling to and haul on. Now the light finds me out, seeps into my sleep with gauzy clarity, and shows me the unplugged clutter of a hospital ward.

  ‘You’ve got visitors, Yvonne.’

  ‘Oh, good,’ I murmur, trying to hitch my way back into a dream.

  The light stands its ground. I can see the folds of a hospital sheet, a big bunch of flowers, a plastic water jug with a blue lid. Since I last opened my eyes, someone has ignored my need for chocolate and brought me some magazines. Dad has turned up in his vicar’s jeans and home-knitted jumper. His dog collar is a wonky Möbius strip. The news must have caught him on his way somewhere.

  ‘Is this business or pleasure?’ I ask him.

  ‘You’ve no need for a priest yet,’ he says. ‘You’re going to be fine.’

  ‘My poor sweet girl...’

  Mum breaks away and comes over to hug me. She’s been crying, probably since Gloucestershire. Her neat auburn bob is wisped with silver. Her eyes seem crowded with worries about what she’s left untended, an oven left on, a bill not paid, as though something worse than parcel bombs might be happening elsewhere.

  ‘You got here quick,’ I say.

  She looks puzzled. The last few hours don’t seem to have passed quickly for her. That’s the least of her troubles, though, and she blinks it away.

  ‘Yvonne, do you understand what happened to you?’

  ‘I don’t know. Someone wants me dead?’

  I sense her tender impatience. Her face has that puffed-up gleam of certain-aged womanhood. I sometimes wish age didn’t have to come upon her so slowly; I wish it would do its work and move on.

  ‘We spoke to a policeman. He said you were probably targeted for being ... because of what you do. The research. You know, the animals. Apparently they were expecting that one of the groups was going to declare a new campaign. They’ve been tracking one lot in particular, called Aslan’s Law. A really nasty militant splinter group. They think it was they who sent you the...’

  She can’t say it. There’s something missing from this family scene, but even if I could explain it to her, I’m not sure she’d understand.

  ‘That makes sense. I screw up animals’ brains and then laugh at them. I’m one of the people they’re trying to punish.’

  I look down at the burn on my arms. My body and legs feel fine. There’s a buzz in me, a need to get going.

  ‘You were lucky,’ Dad says. ‘The bomb seems to have been intended to scare you as much as anything.’

  ‘I smelt gas...’

  ‘They were trying to knock you out. That’s why your injuries are only light.’

  I remember the moments before the explosion, my own face looking in on itself in the oval mirror. I’m thirty, I was telling myself; old enough for this. That feeling of completeness. The voice in the hallway, urging me on.

  ‘Who are the flowers from?’

  Tiny wings flutter in my womb, zygotic echoes.

  ‘Gillian. We didn’t get a chance to talk to her. James did, though.’ ‘You’ve spoken to James?’

  ‘It’s been hard to avoid him. He’s been phoning non-stop. Your dad had a long talk with him. James says it was his house you were staying at. He feels responsible, daftly enough. He’s says you’ve got to call him when you’re feeling better.’

  ‘Did he say anything about Gareth?’

  She hesitates, grappling with the facts she’s been entrusted with.

  ‘He says Gareth didn’t show up when he was supposed to. He says you’ll understand.’

  He’s heard nothing, then. Gareth will still be out there somewhere, trying to talk his way into the Echofield mines.

  ‘Whoever Gareth is,’ Dad says, ‘he’s not your concern right now. We’re going to take you back home and get you fixed up. You can worry about Gareth later.’

  By the window next to my bed, his beard and trendy vicar’s jeans, the tank of his body blocking out the light. I have a sudden, vivid memory of us in my childhood lab at the vicarage, his weight creaking on the stool, the dregs of my chemistry experiments cracked and whitened in the test-tubes. I used to make myself cry, thinking about him dying. In some weird way I wanted the proof of the pain; I wanted to put my fingers in the wound, feel the huge torn-out imprint of my love.

  ‘Who found me?’

  ‘One of your friends. Bridget, I think she’s called. She discovered you in the hallway. Thank goodness she turned up when she did.’

  Of course: Bridge. I remember her taut, thin face, swimming inches from mine. I wondered if I’d dragged her down with me, whether we were fighting underwater, or whether she had dived in here to save me. We need to know, Yvonne. We’ve got to find the people who did this to you.

  ‘Someone sent me a parcel bomb. I’ve got to find out why.’

  ‘You can let the police do that. They’ll catch these people.’

  ‘How d
id they know where I was staying?’

  ‘They think you must have been followed. These people are determined. It would have been pretty easy for them to track you down.’

  I push myself up on my elbows and look around. The ward is empty. There was a crowd in here last time I looked. Everyone gets better, it seems. Nothing wrong with us that a good night’s sleep can’t fix.

  ‘When do I get out?’

  ‘The doctors are happy with you. You recovered consciousness quickly and you had a comfortable night. You’ve had a lucky escape. You can come back with us as soon as you feel ready.’

  I swing my feet onto the floor and test them with my weight. The bed is firm behind me, and I can stand without holding it.

  ‘What time do you want to go?’

  ‘If we get an early start tomorrow we can be home by lunchtime.’

  I stare up at the curtain with my one good eye, pulling the rustling plastic shut in my mind. I need to be alone with these thoughts.

  ‘Give me a moment,’ I say.

  I tell them I’m going to have a bath. I go out into the corridor and call James from the card-phone. I tell him to pick me up from the hospital entrance in an hour. He sounds surprised when I explain where we’re headed.

  ‘I thought you weren’t going back there. I thought you’d quit.’

  ‘Yes, but that was before someone tried to maim me with home-made explosive. Have you heard anything? Did you know that Aslan’s Law were going to start attacking people?’

  ‘No, I didn’t, Yvonne, and they’re nothing to do with me. What are you going to tell your folks? They seem convinced that they’re taking you back to Gloucestershire.’

  ‘I’ll think of something. I’m not going back with them. There are things I need to do.’

  ‘Jesus, Yvonne, I’m so sorry.’

  ‘It’s not your fault. It’s a risk you take, doing this kind of research. Look, they’ve checked into a hotel in Fulling. I’ve persuaded them to put their rescue mission off till tomorrow.’