The Sound of Wings

              She dreams in tongues. Not always, just sometimes, when the message needs to be sent but not made clear. Old faces appear from other places, other lives, murmuring things that she half understands but cannot hold in her mind when she wakes. Je ne t'aime qu'en Français, one tells her via text, while another wipes tears from her face in a dark drunken night somewhere on the other side of the world, saying over and over, bixu de, mei you banfa, you yuan wu fen. She meets another in a bar in a waste-of-time city somewhere along the shinkansen line, but he reminds her only that au wa wakare no hajime before turning back to his beer and his friend – like a sister – who he can only love through the lens of a camera. Si, si, another murmurs into her neck as he comes, spinning down into a night of sweat and confessions that began somewhere near the equator and was resumed a year later with the help of whiskey and a Spanish father and R.E.M. sung in duet. She is whisked off by a train shortly after kissing him goodbye, and finds herself inscrutable, her Dongbei dialect melting in the southern sussurus and lack of pirate ers as she wanders nightmare streets that twist her around, failing always to reach the one person she came here for: one who deals only in riddles and power plays, a game of chess laid out in text that she doesn't know the rules to, but that she knows she will always lose.

               She longs for an interpreter, someone to step behind the scenes and swing up into the metatext, to find her dangling from the stage machinery as she watches herself below playing out all the parts she is required to play. But all she gets is translation, translocation, swept off to one part of the globe or another to be rendered in another's voice, another's tongue, to become a part of someone else's mythology: the muse, the saint, the angel, Mary Poppins, or an imaginary friend. Still, she dreams at least, so maybe we can credit her with some inner life, this girl with no tongue of her own who declines to tell her own story.

              Cold night. Winter's on its way. He knows they're hungry: he can feel it tugging at him as he pulls on his coat, picks up the bag of bread. No crusts for them: he leaves those for himself, for those days when he remembers to eat at all. Only the best he takes to them. Morning, noon and night he performs his duty, summer or winter, rain or shine. It has become the rhythm that rolls him through his days. He feeds them, and he waits, morning, noon and night. He waits for them all to come back to him.

             He might as well be talking to himself. In effect he is: she has failed to materialise fully this time, in spite of all the summoning spells, and it seems to be taking all of her energy just to remain a filmy apparition at his side. She did solidify for a while earlier in the evening, drawing warmth from the crowd at the bar, lilting out ballads in a drunken contralto and then resting her head on his shoulder, reassuringly heavy, while he ordered her another pint. But now, back out in the cold with only him to draw on, she seems almost to vaporise, condensing only in the breath he exhales to form the words that bind her there. A one-way conversation, like the ones he has with the voices on the radio that talk over the other voices that he's not supposed to hear any more. It's self-medication, like the pipe waiting back on the boat. Self-stimulation with Radio 4. Masturbatory linguistics. Barthes would be proud.

              But there is something more he wants from her: the sensation of his words slipping into her ears, finding their way into her deepest recesses and being held there, warm and understood, while he pours himself out again and again in uncontrollable bursts of lyricism and revolutionary propaganda. She reminds him so much of her sometimes: the fairytale beauty or the wicked queen (depending on which version he's telling today) that he was married to once upon a time. He wants her to hear everything that she didn't want to listen to, to stand as witness to their on-going war of attrition – as the only person he knows who can evaporate on command and teleport thousands of miles away on the ether, he doesn't have to worry about her getting caught in the crossfire. He even blind-carbon-copies her into their emails sometimes, pitching to her like to an invisible jury inhabiting the breaks between the lines, knowing that she will always take his side.

He's not sure when she ceased to be material. Sometimes he's not convinced she ever was. There was a time when he could feel her beside him every night, wrap her up in his arms, smell her on the sheets the next morning. He wooed her with parlour tricks – alchemising tears into gold, survivor's scars into red rubber bands – and breathed spells over her while she lay in the sun, recovering strength after days and nights spent foraging through the sub-plots of the zeitgeist with fanatical zeal for gems whose facets they would both admire, tossing them back and forth. They were inseparable throughout that long summer, the stage magician and his familiar, the gypsy girl spreading her skirts on the grass for them both to lie down on and read fortunes in her cards.

              But like all good mythological summers, it came to an end. One day she was there, sparkled on pixie dust, black holes for pupils sucking him in; the next she was as gone as the sentence structure demanded. He could still conjure her up sometimes, but more often than not she did not appear in person, only in texts sent from endless different throwaway phone numbers around the globe, like some post-modern ouija board pieced together with sim cards. Her timing was generally impeccable, so much so that it made him suspicious, and he wondered sometimes if he had only invented her out of necessity, for the sake of the narrative. But then there were those nights when she was there indisputably, flesh and bone wrapped around his in the dark, leaving traces of teeth-marks on his throat that were still there the next morning for him to explain away. No mean feat for a fictional creation, or so he'd say to his friends when once again she disappeared just in time for them all to fail to meet her. They of course thought he was, as usual, making it all up as he went along.

             He couldn't blame them really. Sometimes he was inclined to agree.

            One or two of them are waiting for him when he arrives. Ghosts in the dark water, black eyes glinting in the glow of the streetlights. They are starting to know him now, his charges, his brothers. They are starting to remember when he will come.

           He breaks up the bread and throws chunks over the fence into the water, watching as they dip their long necks to siphon it up with their orange bills. More arrive, the clatter of their wings like a panic in the quiet night, their bodies scattering ripples in all directions as they land on the water. The younger ones squabble with each other over a morsel, while the elders hold themselves aloof, expertly catching what he throws to them out of the air with all the dignity of their former station. Somewhere behind those dark eyes they know, even as their webbed feet plough through the mud and weed at the bottom of the river, even when they forget themselves and snatch up worms and beetles, making him cringe and hurry back all the faster with more food. Somewhere inside they know who they are.

And so he returns, morning, noon and night, to watch, and to feed them, and to wait for them to be restored.

           By the time they hit the river he can just about feel her hand in his. A stretch of the imagination, a whispered incantation or two, and there it is: warm, tangible, a presence and solidarity focused on five fingers clutching his own. He raises this hand to his lips and kisses it for luck, for reassurance, feeling invisible lips returning the gesture before his arm returns to his side. Not far to go now: he can feel her shivering a little, remembering how much she hates the cold. A cup of tea, spliff, a warm bed, and maybe, just maybe, she'll appear out of the blue for him again, curled up under the blankets ready to welcome him in.

          He wishes he could see her face, catch her eyes, work out from her smile or her silence whether she would stay with him tonight or not. But there is nothing there now except the shimmer of his breath in the cold air tracing out the features that he wishes to see. He knows not to ask too much too soon. So he squeezes her hand, and carries on walking, waiting to see how this part of the story will pan out.

          Cars rush by on the bridge above his head in a comforting rhythm, two-and-one-and-two-and-two-and. The bread in the bag is almost gone. His brothers still circle in search of more, the younger ones stealing right up to the fence to peer up into his face with questions or maybe accusations. He smiles benevolently down at them, knowing that he has almost done his duty for the night, that soon it will be time to go home to a narrow bed in a cold house and dreams full of the sound of wings. Sooner or later it will be over, he knows. Sooner or later someone will come to break the spell. But for now he has his duty, the rhythm of his days that keeps him on his feet and walking while others sink under the weight of their own untold stories and disperse into the cracks in the pavement, running down with the rain to join the muck at the bottom of the river.

          Something, some unfamiliar note amongst the usual chorus of night sounds, makes him raise his head, and through the streetlight glow of his contentment at first he cannot work out why. Between the cars and the soft ruffling of feathers all seems right with the world. Then the note becomes a whine, a wiry dischord that can mean only one thing, and all at once he sees, and hears this thing for what it is. Swan-song. He sees a shape up on the bridge, one of his brothers, pale against the metal railings, neck arched back as the first notes spill from his open beak. It is low at first, hesitant, and he prays that it will stop. Prays that it will stop in time, because he knows that this same song lies coiled up inside each of his brothers, that this is the first, last and only thing they will ever sing. If they were to hear the singer on the bridge, if they were to join in...

 

         Almost home. She keeps telling herself that, every time she hears that clack! that tells her there's no way her bike's gonna get her there. Been a long day in the kitchen. She doesn't need this shit. Can't wait to get off her feet, lay the bloody bike to rest in the garage, whack the TV on and zone out until bedtime. But thinking about it ain't gonna make it happen any faster, so she keeps walking, pushing the bike along like the useless bit of dead weight that it is, and whistling under her breath to make the time go faster. Just a bit further, just a bit further. Almost home.

         They're almost there. He likes that 'they', the reassuring plural: he makes a mental note to use it more often. They are still walking hand in hand (at least he assumes she's walking; it's quite possible that in her less material aspect her feet don't actually touch the ground), coming up to the last bridge before their bridge, the millennium-imitation cycle bridge that used to mark the crossing from her part of town to his. Now complete with artificial sun on the other side (he has yet to see God in this one though, thank Buddha). They clock the swan-man at a dozen paces, providing a bit of local colour to lend the story more authenticity in the re-telling. Which isn't to say that he wasn't actually there, feeding the birds with all the determined benevolence of a Disney-character-cum-saint that she liked to style herself on from time to time.

        Then they clock the guy up on the bridge.

        He's playing his part pretty well: wrong side of the railings, alternately looking down at the water and metaphorically upwards to whichever god is supposedly watching from the rafters, giving some final soliloquy that they can only catch snatches of from this distance. Smatterings of English interspersed with some other language (Polish?) that neither of them can understand. Like quotations from somewhere: the foreign phrases resound with proverbial wisdom, as only phrases spoken in an unknown language can. It's all a bit too staged, really: the man on the bridge (Elizabeth Way bridge, no less), their timely arrival, the swans below, the swan-song soliloquy above. It's verging on melodrama. He would've jazzed it up a bit, thrown in some metatextual nudges, maybe a joke or two, to shake the reader out of narrative complacency. This kind of tragic inevitability stuff was more her scene. Still, it's catchy enough to keep him watching: that whole will-he-won't-he deal – a cheap hook, but catchy nonetheless.

       The singing won't stop. He knows it now, though he does his best to pretend not to hear, to will himself and his brothers on the river not to hear. The figure up on the bridge keeps shifting in and out of focus with his efforts to ignore it: sometimes it is just a man's silhouette, or not there at all, but then he'll catch a glimpse of white feathers, a glimmer from a jewel-black eye, and the song burrows back down into his brain until there is nothing else there and even he thinks of joining in. He knows he must be strong, for his brothers, for himself, but if the singing doesn't stop, he can't be sure that he won't...

       Coming up on the river now. Tired as hell, but still warm enough from the kitchen to not be too fussed about the cold. She's counting streetlights as she goes, dodging from one circle of light to another like a kid playing hopscotch: don't step on the cracks; don't step in the dark. Something like that. Keeps her amused. She's half-tempted to just ditch the damn bike in the grass and come back for it tomorrow, except she knows this place too well to expect it to still be there. There's no one much around: even the cows are nowhere to be seen, and she misses them, their big solid shapes in the grass, chewing the cud and gazing at her like it made no difference that the sun went down. It's kinda spooky sometimes, walking across the common on her own at night. She's glad the streetlights are there to point her in the right direction.

        She can tell something's up before she even gets to the bridge. There's a couple of people standing around, all staring at something. It takes her a minute to work out what they're looking at, then it registers. Fuck. This is so not what she needs right now. Up on the bridge some guy's standing on the wrong side of the railings, giving his speech, like he's really gonna do it. She's tempted to just keep walking, put her head down, let the other people deal with it. Today's been quite long enough, thank you. But something makes her stop: curiosity, maybe. Maybe just a little twinge of guilt. And then one of the guys standing around locks onto her, makes a space for her in their little huddle, and that's it, she's involved. She's gotta stick around to see what's gonna happen here.

        A small crowd has gathered around him. He's finding it hard to work out how many. The alchemist, the magician, he's sure of: there's no mistaking the robes, bespectacled eyes too used to peering into tomes instead of looking at the sky, that acrid scent of burning chemicals that embraces him like a cheap mistress. And the kitchen girl too, with her greasy apron and smells of fat and meat and spices: she has an indisputable earthy solidity. But there is one other, or not, as the case may be: a figure that flickers at the corner of his eyes, takes shape one moment and then disperses the next as he struggles in vain to fix her in his gaze. There is something familiar... but then she's gone again, lost in the ether, waiting on a prayer or a spell or something to drag her back into focus.

        The singer on the bridge carries on his requiem, sometimes louder, sometimes more softly as he falters in his tune. There is no stopping it now: he has gone too far, it must reach some conclusion, some crescendo, before the song can be laid to rest. At least the other brothers have moved to a respectful distance, looking on impassively at whatever is to come with cold black eyes that give nothing away.

       Finally the one up on the bridge seems to reach some sort of conclusion. His voice grows thin and then dies out altogether as he arcs back his neck to take one last look at the sky. Then slowly, ponderously, as if a great weight lay upon them that he was somehow reluctant to shake off, he spreads his wings...

       And he's falling. Fuck. Somehow they didn't really think he'd go through with it. Too much of a cliché. Even the fall happens in slow motion: that little gesture of prayer before spreading his arms wide, tumbling through the air like some Messiah unbolted from his cross. He can almost hear him whispering: Father, into your hands...

        By the time he hits the water the audience are getting bored of the whole deal: they were looking for something punchier, more dramatic than the slow-moving sludge of the Cam on a Wednesday night. Even he seems to realise it, surfacing quickly and muttering apologies to a girlfriend who never appeared onstage, fervently reiterating his wishes for death as if giving one last un-called-for encore. The whole thing is rapidly turning into farce. He is almost embarrassed on the man's behalf.

         As if to reclaim the whole affair, to prove the sincerity of his intentions, the man rolls himself over so that he is lying face-down in the water. Not really a fitting end for a tragic hero. Tragi-comedy maybe. It takes the audience a while to make sense of recent developments: swan-man is still caught up in his own little fairytale, the girl from the restaurant looks like she'd rather be at home watching Casualty than getting treated to a live extemporé version on the banks of the Cam. He has a nasty suspicion that he may soon be called upon to take action, to call in the remaining cast to wrap things up: the words 'police' and 'ambulance' are already getting bandied about, even finding their way into his mouth – it's all he can do to set them loose without spitting them out in a stream of bile and barely-latent paranoia. He doesn't like the way this story's going. It seems to have run away with him, cast him in a part that he wouldn't dream of writing for himself, not now, just meters away from a warm bed and an evening of peace and quiet distinctly not featuring flashing blue lights and men in uniform. He's hoping for a short-cut, a deus ex machina to descend and resolve this dramaturgic tangle approaching gordian proportions. He feels a flutter by his side, a subtle change in the solidity of the air, hears a rustle that could be the sound of wings...

            And then she is there. And that changes everything.

           Breathe. Feel it. Feel the pull, the thickness of flesh and muscle and bone wrapped around you. Your chest expands and contracts, lungs bound in by ribs and skin. Slowly, ponderously, your heart starts to beat. Blood begins its warm, throbbing journey through every artery and vein, picking up pace with each pulse, filling you out. Feel the clench and squirm and roil of organs carefully wrapped in layer upon layer of fat and tissue, connected by a worm's nest of tubes, shot through with nerves that electrify the slightest sensation and send it racing up your spinal chord. Feel the barrage of signals that shoot into your brain, insistent, demanding rapid response. Feel that grey matter sift and shift, directing each impulse down a labyrinth of neural pathways, trying to make sense of them all...

           But now is not the time for internal monologue. Now it is time to act.

           Cold. The thought registers before she can stop it. Then she is in the water, swimming out to where a man lies face down, slowly sinking. She turns him over and slaps his face, making him gasp and open his eyes.

          Breathe, damn you.

          He sucks air into his lungs, and pushes it out again through gritted teeth, repeating over and over his bitter mantra: let me die, I want to die, you should have left me, let me die.

           Not on my watch, honey. This girl's got to earn her wings.

           She holds his head out of the water and starts swimming towards the other side. He fights her, trying to turn himself over, but she holds him steady and maintains her pace, shouting back to the figures on the riverbank by the railings to come and help her drag him out.

            Time slows down. There are times when he stops breathing and she slaps at his face again: come on, come on, breathe for me, just keep on breathing. There are times when his eyes unglaze and he looks up at her, tells her to leave him, tells her to say sorry for him to a girl whose name she doesn't remember.

            Her feet find the silt at the bottom of the river and she wades towards the other bank, pulling him along, looking for a spot low enough to drag him up. Concrete walls. No easy exit. As if on cue he stops breathing again. She puts a finger in his mouth this time, trying to find his tongue, flick it out of his throat. Afterwards there is a trail of vomit on his cheek and she turns his head to one side to let him throw up the rest of it.

             Two people have arrived on the far bank, waiting for her. She manoeuvres him towards them and they try between them to lift and pull him out of the water, but the wall is too steep and they are forced to give up. A little shot of panic runs through her then as his body slides back into the water. She wants to cry as his breathing stops again. Cry for everyone who didn't make it, all the souls who had nothing to break their fall. Cry for the pain and the people lost in their own darkness, backed into corners, windows shut and curtains drawn. For the magic man, age 47, writing stories about the amount of tamazepam it would take to end the narrative for good while she made peace with his ghost at a waterfall on the other side of the world. For the friend, age 21, with all the pills and drugs she needed, stumbling out of the bedroom where they made something like love to play Suicide is painless on constant repeat. For the girl, age 19 and not far off 4st7lb, wishing for dissolution as she carved her longed-for fleshless purity into her arm.

              But introspection, hesitation and desolation end the same, so she forces herself to keep moving, losing her footing and cursing these feet that insist on touching the ground as she swims him around the corner and into a marina overlooked by the apartments of people far too polished and well-to-do to sully their hands with this drama being played out in the sludge of the river beside which they posed themselves.

             The other two are there already, the man who feeds the swans and another girl who she doesn't remember seeing before. They have found a pontoon that sinks lower with their weight, and are ready to try and pull him out again. She finds a foothold in the mud under the water and on tiptoe she pushes him up while the other two hook their arms under his and heave, dragging the deadweight of his body and his sodden clothes clear of the water at last.

             He starts shivering then, violently, so she wraps herself around him, willing warmth into his body with every shudder that threatens to take him back over the edge. The other girl does the same, and this is how they find them when they arrive, the men in uniform whose job it is to pick up the pieces and make all this fit into the 324 words of a newspaper story.

             Situation under control. Casualty in the early stages of hypothermia, requires immediate medical assistance. 'Rescuer' – female, late twenties – also mildly hypothermic. Requesting back-up from medical team. Let the drunks and crazies fend for themselves, St John: we need you here.

            She is still very much there when he arrives. Wrapped in an oversize yellow jacket bequeathed by one of the ambulance crew, shivering slightly, her feet thawing out in a pair of navy Crocs that someone lent her. In the flesh, so to speak: hair hanging in wet shards over eyes that glisten as they meet his, lips parted in a smile. He had forgotten the way she glows sometimes. He's almost afraid to step into her light. He's carrying the things she discarded by the riverside: wallet, phone, passport, the trappings of identity that she likes to keep in her pockets for when she materialises unexpectedly. She accepts them like offerings, and allows him to take her into his arms.

             Around them the 'situation' (as our friend from the bridge is now known) is being resolved by an army of uniformed men who circle around the body of the guy on the ground like they're cordoning off a crime scene. She whispers something about body heat, human warmth, but they're not programmed to respond: they've got their own flowcharts of if/then/else. They hook him up to wires and gauges, turning his life into numbers, trying to shock his heart into action again. At first he fights back, refusing to breathe, spitting out death between clenched teeth. But eventually they force his lungs to do their job, and he finally resigns himself to going along with it, giving them his name as he settles back into the tedious business of breathing once again.

              As he is carried off-set on a stretcher still shivering, her eyes follow him, shooting out rays of compassion that will warm him through a long night. Then she is led away by one of the uniforms and put into a squad car to be warmed up herself. She always hated the cold. He shrugs and slings her bag over his shoulder, enjoying its solidity, its unspoken promise. And he quickens his pace, heading home at last to get the fire burning and set up the bed. She will be there, tangible, indisputable as the eyewitness reports that the uniforms will no doubt need to gather, in need of warming (at least until the morning). He doesn't want to keep her waiting.

            He didn't stay to watch how the whole thing ended. The men in uniform, the flashing lights, it made him edgy, made him want to get away. He'd been there long enough to drag his brother from the river, to watch the swan turn man and nearly drown. It was her doing: he'd known it from the moment she materialised climbing over the railing to slide down into the water. She'd come for his brothers. She'd come to break the spell.

             At first he was pleased, believing she was everything that he had been set to wait for. But then he saw how it would be: his brother's white feathers dissolving in the filthy water, broken wings torn off by the current and carried away. It was all he could do not to cry out against this terrible rebirth, this stripping down in the dirt of the river that threatened to be the end of it all. She must have seen it too, the horror of it, that prince of the river floating face down in a body too big and thick and unwieldy to keep itself above water for long. Realisation must have dawned, for she clambered in after him, fought to keep him alive.

             She should have known what would happen when she came for them, this sister of theirs with no voice of her own. She should have known that it had been too long, that their feathers had grown deep into their flesh, that they had become accustomed to fly. She should have left well alone and not tried to effect that transformation that bound him back in a body that he had long since forsaken. She should have left well enough alone.

             He staggers home, fists clenched, hackles raised, and hopes against hope that she will not be there in the morning. He has his duty to perform, morning, noon and night, and he doesn't want her disrupting the flow with her promises of a salvation that is too hard and cold and ugly to be worth fulfilling. If he sees her again he will drive her off with all the force of his indignation. He's sure his brothers will understand.

            Home at last. She leaves the bike leaning against the wall of the garage and takes a moment to breathe before she unlocks the door. Fuck me, she thinks, what a way to end an evening. One minute she's walking home from work, minding her own business, the next she's helping to drag some nutcase out of the river and hold him down so he doesn't shiver himself straight back in again. She's pretty sure she didn't sign up for any of this. No one's ever gonna believe her when she tells the story to the other guys in the kitchen tomorrow. Must be a bit of the good Samaritan in her after all. Hell, she even leant that other girl her shoes when she realised she was standing there barefoot and freezing after putting all that effort into saving that guy's life. Made sense at the time.

             She wanders into the kitchen to put the kettle on, pours herself a well-earned cup of tea, then plonks herself down on the sofa and flicks on the TV. Time for a bit of R&R before bedtime. This whole thing's put her in the mood for a bit of George Clooney in his doctor's outfit, and why the hell not? It's been a long day.