A Box of Birds Read online

  James is on the balcony, composing messages on his phone.

  ‘Sleepyhead ... ’

  In my dream, Gareth was not Gareth any more. The form he’d left behind was a magnificent long-necked bird, purple plumage soaked black with rain. I held its beautiful curved head and cried for its strangeness, its shabby iridescence. It was a joke played on nature, a proof of what could not survive.

  ‘It was Gareth,’ I tell him.

  James stands in the doorway, uncertain about entering this aftermath.

  ‘What was Gareth?’

  ‘I’ve found him,’ I say.

  The connection timed out hours ago. The lilac banner flickers across the wall of my living room, awaiting my username and password.

  ‘You had a rough night,’ he says.

  ‘Where were you?’

  ‘I went for a long walk. Just me, my self, and this atmosphere there is between us. It was pretty illuminating.’

  I ease the virtual lights down over my ears and hit LOGON. The galaxy of people I’ve been trading with flickers up in front of me. There’s nothing new, no friendly icon sparking recognition. I follow the warmest links, the paths I’ve trodden most recently. There’s a cam of the West Gate of Sansom, where the Conscience protestors gather on Saturday mornings. The dome of the main building is a distant smear. I try to move towards it, like I was moving last night, but the cursor keys are dead. The surge of memory that first tipped me over into that new consciousness has faded back to nothing. I’m back where I started: a newcomer, dreaming of what lies beyond.

  ‘So where did you get to? On your long walk?’

  He sighs. ‘Bankstown Underpass, as usual.’

  ‘You walked a long way. Bankstown Underpass is in Pelton.’

  ‘No,’ he says, touching his chest. ‘It’s in here.’

  I take the lights off and look up at him. I’m touched by how he can cling on to sincerity, push himself beyond self-consciousness through sheer force of will. He really believes in what David Overstrand has taught him, and it’s a belief he wants to shout about. I can argue about his grounds, but that’s all.

  ‘So this true self of yours. Is it still a crazy mixed-up kid?’

  He sits down on the other sofa and looks at what he has thumbed into his phone.

  ‘I had a good look at it. I didn’t like what I saw. I saw something way down, underneath all the layers of fear and pretence, a fact about me which is absolutely true. I can’t let anyone else see it. But I can’t hide it, so I have to push people away.’

  He’s trying to say sorry. Whatever happened to him at Bankstown Underpass, I’m going to have to wait until he’s ready to tell me. If you ask me, it’s so much simpler being an empty network of connections. You can save yourself so much heartache.

  ‘Come here,’ I say.

  But it’s me who’s moving. I snib the FireBook shut and go over to where he’s sitting. There’s a funny plumpness in his white, unshaven cheeks, the ghost of puppy fat. A bitter, disappointed frown. He takes my hands and holds them, not looking at me but cellularly aware of me, stricken by my closeness. He opens his thighs, thick inside his jeans, and I move in between them and wait for him to bring me into this, give up whatever it is he’s circling around.

  ‘Are you pushing me away?’ I ask him.

  ‘We all hurt the ones we care for most, Yvonne.’

  ‘Are you trying to tell me that you care for me?’

  I touch the amulet on my chest, just to give him the courage to look at me.

  ‘That I love you,’ his quiet voice says.

  The amazing hangover cure of hills in sunlight.

  We’re in Grandstand’s car, high on the ridge that runs under Torn Cloud. James hasn’t been out of third since we left Scarf, half an hour ago. What we’ve left behind is now below us as well. To the south and left, the land drops steeply towards the coal-bright Churl, the lush grasslands of the river plain. To the right it’s sheer rock, opportunistic grasses, protective netting that’s torn and useless against an endless drift of scree. Long-haired sheep with shitty dags drift across the road between bristly pads of turf. If you looked back now you’d see the forest spread across one wall of the valley, with the plasma-gleam of Sansom in the far distance. Today you can see all the way to the spires of Fulling.

  ‘Gaz wants us to go into the mines. He says he needs us to see what they’re doing down there. He said we should talk to the Saxons to find out how to get down there without anyone noticing. So that’s where we’re going.’

  He loves me. He said he loves me.

  The road levels out onto high moorland, crumbling to asphalt gravel at its edges. Pipe-cleaner lambs spring away from under our heels. Their mothers stare, desolate. The road tips away into a shallower valley, lined with faded rugs of purple-brown heather. Curlews rise as we pass. At a bend in the road below us, a sealed track splits away towards a modern one-storey building set apart from a group of thatched huts. A few tourist buses nuzzle in at the end of an empty car park. A steady breeze sweeps wood smoke from the scene.

  ‘The Saxons?’

  ‘Welcome to the ancient Kingdom of Esha,’ he says.

  The girl on the turnstile seems to know him.

  ‘Brunhild,’ he barks. ‘Do you wear pants under that?’

  She tugs at the bit of sackcloth she’s dressed in and fakes a smile.

  ‘Get lost,’ she says. ‘It’s closing time.’

  Her voice has a buzzy looseness to it. She’s small, blush-flecked, with a tender, bruisy colouring. I wouldn’t have thought she was James’ type. She stares at the dressing on my arm, probably wondering the same thing.

  ‘How’s uni?’ she says, pressing the button to let us through.

  ‘Jacked it in. Couldn’t stand the teachers.’

  He squeezes my hand secretly and pushes me forward onto the approach path. The sunlight hits me like laughter.

  ‘Brunhild used to work in a call centre. Found the people a bit too modern.’

  We cross a drawbridge over a moat and climb to the top of a ring of earthworks. From the rampart you can see the reconstruction of a Saxon farm, dotted with livestock specially bred for authenticity. Everything looks windswept, battened-down. I’d want to be battened down up here. I count five thatched huts, outhouses to the larger hall in the middle. Beyond them are the watchtowers of a Saxon fort. Cagouled time travellers are wandering from one numbered feature to the next, listening to the commentary on rented headphones. Brash modern children are petting eighth-century ducklings. Some Korean students are being taught to operate longbows by a thegn in a leather tunic. To the left of the fort, a boarded-up area leaks the sounds of construction.

  At the doorway to the Great Hall, a blond-bearded Saxon is talking to a tourist in a faded red anorak. The Saxon sounds Australian. He tells the tourist that his name is Aelfric, that he lives here with his wife and daughters, and that he is the thegn of this burgh. He recognises James and waves us inside. After the sunlight the gloom is blinding. Aelfric is just a voice.

  ‘Fucking prick,’ he says to the anorak receding into daylight. ‘Of course Aelfric’s a Saxon name.’

  ‘But you’re from Coff’s Harbour,’ James says. ‘That’s what he was quibbling.’

  The Saxon’s dark-adapting eyes pick out the dressing on my arm.

  ‘You’ve met with the Norsemen, my child.’

  ‘Aslan’s Law,’ James says. ‘I reckon she got off lightly. Have you heard anything?’

  The Saxon shakes his head.

  ‘They were making noises about starting a new campaign. Looks like you were an unlucky bystander.’

  He grins. It’s stifling in here. My burnt arm is a salty, blistered agony.

  ‘Come over to IT Support,’ he tells James. ‘They’ve got information for you.’

  He leads us through a low doorway at the back of the hut and across a paddock scattered with straw. The sound of hammering echoes across the valley.

  ‘Making your schedule?’
James asks, looking across at the taped-up construction site.

  ‘We don’t do schedules. We finish it when it’s ready.’

  Another busload of visitors is queueing to get past the security checks at the entrance to the Fort. With the thegn of the burgh leading us, we’re waved through. Inside it’s cinema-dark, blue with VR ghosts. Full-sized holograms of instances of the Saxon populace move slowly through a dry-ice mist, rehearsing their tasks in perfect historical detail. Several VR booths have schoolkids enthralled behind virtual lights. A display describes the harsh realities of life in Saxon Northumbria. There’s a showcase of real-life treasures from the original eighth-century burgh. Some kids are engrossed in a themed Des*re play via a link-up to another faux-Saxon community in Germany. After the Sansom car park, it looks dull.

  Aelfric taps a code into a door at the back. Beyond it there’s a dim stairwell, a narrow descent. At the bottom of the stairs is another doorway. A casing mounted to the woodwork holds an old cathode-ray tube, scribbled on in wipeable pen. Back in a Viking’s heartbeat, the message says. We wait. Saxon time drags on. Aelfric has to go and see a man about a horse.

  ‘He was here,’ says the Saxon in the chain-mail vest. ‘He wanted to know where all the shafts were. He looked pretty serious about getting down there.’

  The basement buzzes with tube-light. A shoal of delicate blue fish circles around a fish tank constructed from a gutted iMac. The Saxon’s face is arctic, leonine, grooved with deep folds and framed with premature white.

  ‘He didn’t manage it,’ James says. ‘Too many people trying to hurt him.’

  ‘How did he seem?’ I ask the Saxon.

  ‘Exhausted. He’d walked here from the twenty-first century.’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘A couple of weeks ago.’

  James sits down on a chair woven from the tails of computer mice.

  ‘So it must have been before the news about the data broke. I think that means he could be anywhere.’

  ‘Why do you think he’s in danger?’ the Saxon asks.

  ‘He’s got something other people want. People who don’t ask nicely.’

  ‘He was known to us. He was here last year, wanting to know where he could pick up several thousand second-hand laptops. He wanted to connect them all up. Get them talking to each other at the same time. Kept saying something about the possibility of an artificial consciousness...’

  ‘That sounds like Gaz,’ James says.

  The Saxon looks mournful. I can see that his chain mail is woven of thousands of electronic components: brightly ringed resistors, thick blue-and-white capacitors, the tiny grey leaf-buds of old-style transistors.

  ‘Did he look as if anyone had tried to hurt him?’

  ‘He was walking with a limp. Could have twisted it in a badger hole. He’d walked a long way.’

  The Saxon goes over to his workbench and comes back with a bright thread pincered between finger and thumb. It’s a bracelet. He’s taken the beads from scores of disused optical drives and soldered them together on a chain of blue and green resistors. It’s beautiful. He takes my hand and fastens the bracelet around the bit of pale skin between my dressing and the back of my hand. I can feel his quiet satisfaction.

  ‘Where are our cathedrals?’ the Saxon says. ‘They gave us football stadiums. Retail pavilions.’

  ‘Go on,’ I can hear James urging him. ‘Show her.’

  At the far end of the basement are some wooden steps leading up to a hatch door. Outside, the sun is setting over the half-finished shell of a Saxon church. We climb over a nave wall made of polyurethane CPU housings, Dells and Compaqs and Packard Bells, glued and bolted onto a framework of server-cabinet girders. The banging I heard earlier was the sound of circuit boards being smashed with a hammer. On the nave floor, a girl in a hair shirt is sorting the fragments and adding them to a huge floor-mosaic depicting the Passion of Christ. Shards of printed circuitry craze in the beery evening light. The face they’ve made for the Christ figure reminds me of something, an obscure benevolence, a connection I can only grasp at. I feel a dull ache, the memory of a not-happy, not-sad childhood.

  ‘Yvonne? Are you OK?’

  I finger the warm metal of the amulet, grateful for its intimate weight, the feel of its solidity amid this dizzying strangeness. There’s something loose on the top of it, like the winder of a watch, and I realise that I’m twiddling it nervously, hanging on the routine of it. From my standpoint in the nave, I can see someone soldering microchips onto a rood screen made of upright nineteen-inch racks. A weaver is making an altar cloth from coloured cables, the veins and arteries of thousands of obsolete machines. The facts are known to me before I can even process them. It seems impossible, but this place is not new to me. Then another memory comes in, and I’m powerfully conscious that I am alive in this moment, as though a lens were turning and bringing everything into focus, lifting me into clarity. Dad, in the doorway of my childhood lab, talking to me about science and faith. That warm, agonising premonition of him dying. Suddenly my legs won’t hold me any more.

  ‘Should she be doing this?’ the Saxon is saying. ‘There’s no shelter up there.’

  The warning snaps me back. ‘I’m OK. I’m fine.’

  The tourists have gone. The Saxon Kingdom winds down. In the lee of the half-built church, people in rough jerkins are making preparations for a feast. A pig turns slowly above a pit of charcoal.

  ‘Did Gareth see this?’ I ask.

  The basement Saxon nods, his concern turning slowly to satisfaction.

  ‘He had an eye for crazy dreams. He was desperate to know what they were doing down there. Go down there and find your destiny: it’s up to you. First you need to find the Broken Twins. You can stay here tonight and get going in the morning. It’s a day’s journey across the top.’

  ‘By car?’

  He smiles and points to his leather-strapped feet.

  ‘Welcome to the Dark Ages, baby.’

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Whole-World Window

  ◉

  Up here, the view is hills within hills. From this first rise your brain is stretched by nested horizons, purple-brown landscapes fanned out across a clear midday sky. Ten miles away, as sure as geometry, there’s a valley floor and an old drover’s hut by a burn. Make yourselves at home, the Saxons said; you’ll be in the mines tomorrow afternoon. We’ve brought sleeping bags, a primus, some dry pasta and a chunk of cold pig roast wrapped in computer foil. James and I lug it all, plus the mining gear we borrowed from Aelfric, in a couple of rucksacks our bodies hardly feel. We’re high on sleep and sunshine and the whole-body aftermath of a night of starry love. The Pennine permagale has dropped to a heathery breeze. In weather like this you could trust the land, give yourself to its slopes like a ball on a pinball machine, and let its massive embedded energies pull you down along lines of least resistance, placing your feet for you, making decisions that you thought would be your own.

  ‘Tell me about David,’ I say.

  He stops, scanning distant layers of haze.

  ‘David gave me this...’

  ‘Really?’ I follow his gaze over the treeless scene. ‘I always thought it was four billion years of planetary cooling.’

  ‘He didn’t make the world. He showed me how to see it.’

  ‘He was your god?’

  He denies it impatiently. ‘Gods aren’t human beings. The thing that blew you away about David was his humanity. He had so much compassion. He filled us with love.’

  ‘I know who to thank, then.’

  The wind mutters in our ears. I remember how he found me, in the light of the Saxons’ fire. Just the two of us, prickling with the static of sleeping bags, tipsy and joyous under a star-creamed moorland sky.

  ‘Get one thing straight, Yvonne. The guy with the insatiable lust for you: that was me.’

  I laugh, showing my true vicar’s-daughter colours. I know he’s putting it on, trying to shock me. Perhaps this too
will turn out to be a pretence, like the Fred Flintstone mask he used to wear to tutorials, or his offended denial that he was ever a Conscience activist. Or maybe his love of play-acting is part of something more interesting, a genuine vulnerability that will betray itself in a million slow ways. As he starts laying out the threads of another story, I realise that he’s proving me right. It’s not what’s beneath the layers, it’s the fact that the layers are there at all. He’s like me, in that respect. The layers are what he is.

  ‘David told me I needed to see the big picture. He said I was like a man trying to read a book one letter at a time. I was puzzling over these individual shapes and wondering why they didn’t make any sense. The first thing I had to do was stand back and read the whole page. When I’d done that, I could put the story together.’

  ‘What if we haven’t got a story, though, James? What if we’re just molecules?’

  ‘We see the world in different ways, babe. You’re a materialist. You want to believe that there’s nothing more to us than networks of nerve cells. But if you want to do that, you’ve got to explain how you’re going to live your life. Where does your moral sense come from? What are you going to do about love, and compassion, and humanity? Or are they just molecules as well?’

  ‘I don’t believe that because I want to believe it. I’ve got no choice. I believe it because the evidence proves it.’

  ‘Your “evidence” is a fairy tale, Yvonne. There’s a deeper truth about this world of ours, if you only want to let yourself see it.’

  I’m trying to rise above this, but still it’s getting to me. ‘You might not have noticed, James, but my evidence matches up with the way things actually are.’

  He sets off up the slope, strenuously dismissing me. ‘There is no “way things are”. There are just people who get attached to their stories.’

  ‘So what are you, then? A storyteller, like David?’