The boys at school had laughed at him, but they had never known how to hurt him, not really. They had never known what he was. They said he had no mother, but that wasn’t true. Arnold had had a mother once, although she had given him up. He often imagined her doing it, a woman without a face handing him over like an unwanted parcel, her other hand still clutching tightly onto another hand . . .
He could not remember his sister. He only remembered her existence, like a fact written in one of his books and nothing more. She was the good chick his mother had kept. He was the bad chick she had given away.
He didn’t feel anything about it, not really, not now. It simply was.
He stared down at the feathers on the shore, the leavings of all the good chicks who had been nurtured and who had grown and eventually flown. The sky was the same as always: grey and flat and featureless. Under it, birds sang and hissed and clicked. He could hear them but he couldn’t see them in their hiding places among the reeds.
The one in his hand pulled and spat and made an almost eerie wailing that rang out across the water. He had covered her mouth and thrown her into the back of the Land Rover, knocked out by chloroform. Arnold had obtained it long before on the grounds of subduing samples for his art but it still worked. She had woken on the way back and she had cried then too, but it hadn’t taken long. Now he was by his own quiet lake, wearing his wetsuit, sleek and dark. He turned to her and smiled. He knew she could see everything in that smile, if she looked properly.
She had fought and kicked and screamed. Bad chick.
He waded into the water. His feet were bare and mud oozed and slid beneath his toes. Her cry grew louder but he didn’t stop, just took her with him, and her teeth began to click with the cold of it. He steadied himself against a low branch and went deeper still.
Beneath the surface, in the cold, the others were waiting. He could feel them. When he attained the right depth, a mass of bubbles spewing from her lips, he went in closer than he had before. He could see where their eyes had been. No trace of them remained but they stared anyway and he remembered the glutinous globes, round and ripe. The fish must have taken them first.
Now, not even their clothing looked the same. The water had claimed everything; they were stained and dark. Particles drifted before his eyes, blurring everything but not hiding it.
He pushed the chick into the hole with the others, in among the stones and rot and slimy things; in among the loak. She still clutched and grasped, but she was weak and he pushed her in deeper. He seized a pale arm, wrapping it around her for company—the skin was torn and nibbled, mottled with fish eggs—and he shifted a branch to cover them both. He held it in place for a while, not really looking at anything, and then he drifted into the darkness and the grief.
He could feel them watching him still, watching without eyes. He knew that they knew him for what he was; what he had always been. He was one of them, the bad chicks. This was his home. Now it was their home too.
All the bright children with their bright stares, bold and mocking and knowing. It was surely only their parents who could ever mistake them for good chicks, surely only their parents who would ever call them that. It did not matter. A bad chick could never be made good, could not be made to feel at home in the air and in the light; he knew that. But a good chick could most certainly be made bad, and he had made them, again and again.
At least she was with her sisters and brothers. She need never be alone, not like him.
Later, he finished off his painting of the bittern. This time there were no smudges and no smears, nothing at all to mar the perfect surface.
Arnold had gone back only because he had been curious about the kitten. He climbed the stone stile and went down to the riverbank. The kitten was still there. Its skin had been opened like a bag that had been unzipped. What was in there was like white worms, bloodied and mauled. The clean ginger fur was bloodied too. It no longer had any eyes.
Arnold was leaving soon, transferring to a home somewhere else, somewhere he might fit in. He already knew that he would not. There was never any use in flying away; he would still be the bad chick, the one who wasn’t wanted.
As he thought it, a fist bashed him around the ear. “Fight,” a voice shouted, in the way that boys did when there was a fight.
Arnold whirled to see Batty’s face up close. “Fight, fight,” Scott and Dale chanted as Batty grinned and lashed out, catching him under the chin. Arnold’s teeth clicked together painfully.
Batty hit out again and Arnold stumbled, driven back farther and farther, until his leg slipped from beneath him and he took another step to regain his balance and found there was nothing there. He went over, flailing, and suddenly he was in the water.
The boys laughed, leaning with their hands on their knees, slapping and jeering. Arnold couldn’t make out the words. He pushed himself up, his hands clutching at the slippery stones. The water no longer felt cold; it was warming against his skin, running down his face and into his eyes. His fist had closed around a smooth rock; it was shaped a little like an egg. He pushed himself up and climbed out of the water. The boys didn’t move. They didn’t see the rock until he reached Batty and hefted it and brought it down on the taller lad’s skull.
There was a sharp, loud crack, and Batty stopped laughing. He stopped doing anything at all. He fell to his knees on the grass. His mouth hung open, a dribble of spit suspended from his lip.
Arnold raised the stone to strike again. Batty didn’t move. The only thing that did was a line of blood that emerged from the cut on his scalp and trickled slowly onto his forehead. His eyes swivelled up to the rock—the egg—in Arnold’s hand.
Arnold looked at it too. Then he let it fall to the ground. He walked past them, not looking at them; he did not even glance over his shoulder. Batty wasn’t at school the next morning, although he did go back. The three friends never told on Arnold for what he’d done that day; perhaps it would have been better if they had.
It didn’t matter. It wasn’t as if it was something he could ever know. The black and the white of it would never be printed in any book. It was better not to think of it; better not to wonder.
It wasn’t bad, at the bottom of the lake. It was dark but the chicks didn’t mind that. They didn’t cry and they didn’t go hungry and they didn’t thirst.
In a way, Arnold’s mother had done only what was best for him. She must have known he would prefer it where he was. He didn’t like being out in the world. That was where the foxes were, things that were ready to rend and bite and stare with their unblinking eyes.
He turned in the water and rose to the surface. Water bubbled from his ears and sound returned: the hooping call of a curlew somewhere on the riverbank, perhaps searching for a mate. The harsher grating of a crow, looking for carrion. The frantic cheeping of hungry chicks, hidden within the reeds.
Arnold knew that the Orphan Bird didn’t exist, at least not in the way that Pierre de Beauvais might have imagined. But then, who would know? Historians had been able to discover nothing about the man’s life. They said he had intended the bird as an allegory for good and bad souls and what became of them, but Arnold didn’t think it was an allegory for anything. Things were as they were, as they had to be.
He felt that certainty again, the moment he saw the boy.
His parents had their backs turned, tending to his sister, because his sister was screaming. She was in a rowing boat and would not get out. Arnold could not hear her cries because of the summer crowds, everyone gabbling, gabbling, like a flock of geese; but he could see the sound. Her mouth was stretched wide open, screwing her eyes into slits.
He glanced around. Police had been watching the place for weeks, but most assumed the girl had drowned and there was only one officer there now, standing by the jetty, wiping sweat from beneath his hat and looking bored.
It was the boy who chose Arnold. It usually happened that way. He just walked straight up and said, “What’s that?”
The boy was portly with sun-reddened cheeks, his hands thrust into his jeans pockets. He had orange hair and a T-shirt with the name of a band Arnold didn’t recognise.
Arnold looked down at the object in his hands. It was a brass compass, its shell marked with an intricately etched design representing the heavens and the earth, all laid out in neat geometry. He still didn’t know why he’d bought it. He’d seen it in the window of an antiques shop and had loved it at once, enough to overcome his reluctance to go inside. All he’d been able to think about was de Beauvais, the shadow of a man nobody knew anything about, except that he’d also written some lives of saints and a mappemonde, a work of geography and cosmology. Perhaps he would have been able to read the lines, to explain what they meant.
Arnold held it out, not wanting to speak. He hadn’t planned this, hadn’t wanted the contact with the surly shopkeeper, didn’t want the contact now. But the child drew in close, his eyes widening. He reached out, stretching his index finger to touch the dial, and Arnold snatched it back.
“Can I see?” The boy’s voice was breathy. He didn’t look around at his parents, didn’t seem to care about his sister. He had forgotten them just like that, and Arnold found himself wondering how he’d done it.
He turned away, starting to walk towards his car, leaving it up to the boy. The boy made his decision: he chose to follow.
He didn’t scream, not like the others. His face creased in anger as Arnold clamped a chloroformed rag over his lips, and he struggled, though he couldn’t make a sound. Arnold threw him into the back of the Land Rover. As he drove away, he saw the policeman watching him, his eyes narrowed. Had Arnold exposed himself somehow—should he have looked about more, smiled more? He didn’t know; then the policeman rubbed his eyes, and Arnold realised he had only been dazzled by the sun.
He drove straight to the lake. He didn’t have his wetsuit, but he would have to do without it, just this once. It wouldn’t matter. He belonged to the water and the boy had come to him, and that showed it was meant to be. The boy was a bad chick, like the others. He needed to be with his brothers and sisters.
Arnold kicked off his shoes, shrugged his shirt over his head, and removed his trousers. He folded the clothing and placed it carefully on the passenger seat before taking off his socks and putting the left one in the left shoe, the other in the right. Then he stepped over the gritty surface, flexing his toes, and unlocked and opened the back door.
The boy glared, blinking as if he had just awoken. Arnold got him out of the gap behind the seats, pulling on his legs, then twisting him and grasping his flailing arms. He was solid but light, as all of them were. He glanced around but he knew the only eyes watching him were those of birds and insects, the things that belonged in this place. The sky was the drained white of a new sheet of paper.
He waded into the shallows, clamping his arms tightly around the boy, sinking into the mud. The chill was familiar, but he had no wetsuit to capture his own warmth and insulate his skin. He took another step, sinking more deeply until the water was above his knees. Another, and he started to shiver. He pushed forward anyway, until he was floating, the boy frozen in his arms.
The chick’s eyes were closed. His eyelids were almost transparent and Arnold could see the veins within them. It was fascinating. He thought for a moment of painting him, then pushed the idea aside, remembering the policeman’s look. He reminded himself that he never had been that stupid.
Arnold swam towards the place where the trees reached down into the water. Then he drew in a deep breath and ducked under, shocked by the cold. The boy accepted it. He struggled briefly and then he stopped. Arnold hooked his toe under a loop of branch he knew was there and used it to pull them both down.
The overhang was waiting, its dark hole a mouth waiting to be filled. He pushed the boy inside. The cold was everywhere, enveloping him, and he shivered as he quickly shoved in a heavy branch after him and turned, pushing himself away, thrusting himself back towards the surface.
He hurried back to the car, heavy and earthbound once more. He was shuddering. His clothes stuck to his skin as he pulled them on, fighting him. He was still shaking as he drove away, turning on the heat as high as it would go.
Back in the cabin, all was quiet. Arnold placed the brass compass on his desk and stared at it for a long time. It was only lines, he thought, not the world, nothing real, and he did not know why, and he did not like the silence in the house and did not know why that was either; only that it was a lifeless, dry, dead sound. It wasn’t like the silence in the lake.
He showered, turning up the water as hot as he could bear. Then he dried himself and put on fresh clothes. He went downstairs and looked at his desk. His brushes were ready, beside the compass, but he knew he would not be able to settle to his work.
He sighed and put on his coat. He had to do something. If he had done with the bitterns, he could research the next painting; he would stand among the birds and build a new image in his mind.
It felt better, being outside, though he still wasn’t warm and it wasn’t a warm day. The sky was as white as dead eyes, but that was all right too. It wasn’t long until he approached the lake, the grass whisking past his legs in loud whispers. The water was grey, just like always, and he stared at it. Something had changed, but he did not know what it was. It was something he could feel but not see until he turned and looked at the trees.
There, just above the waterline, stood a small boy with hair that had once been orange and was now plastered to his skull. He stared straight at Arnold. His eyes were small but brilliant, like drops of water; like a bird’s.
Arnold looked at the boy and the boy looked back. He could no longer read the words that were written on his T-shirt. Everything was dark and clinging and covered in filth and dripping with water, and it was only when the boy tried to climb up through the branches that Arnold realised he was not a ghost.
His heart beat painfully. He did not know what he was supposed to do. He started to walk towards the boy, who didn’t scream and didn’t run away. He only stood there and opened his mouth. Arnold half expected to hear the cry of a bird but there was no sound at all.
He went to the trees and reached down through the branches, his face pressed into the slimy moss. Cold fingers clasped his own.
He pulled the boy up through the rustle and snap of twigs and deposited him on the banking. The boy sank to the ground and looked at Arnold from the dark hollows of his eyes.
“You took me under there.”
Arnold nodded.
“Why?”
“I had to.”
When the boy spoke again he whispered, and Arnold strained to hear the words. “Am I going back in the water?”
Arnold did not answer. He did not know what the answer was. Then he said, “You can’t. It wouldn’t keep you.”
The boy began to sniffle, all air and water. Arnold didn’t say anything else and he didn’t try to comfort him. All he could think was, The good chicks float. He did not know how the boy had done it. He must have woken beneath the water, but how had he held his breath when Arnold had taken him down? Now the water had given him back.
The good chicks floated and hatched beneath the mother’s wings. Then she led the chick, with great rejoicing, back to its father.
He looked across the lake again, making sure they were alone. But they were never alone, were they? Pond skaters made minuscule ripples across the surface. Leaves stirred as an unseen bird darted away. Somewhere, a bittern was raising its chicks.
He looked at the boy, whose face was blurry with tears. “You need to go home,” he said.
They walked side by side, the boy occasionally stumbling. Arnold put out a hand to steady him, feeling the small, round bone in his shoulder. As he went, something lifted inside him. He was doing the right thing. The good chick floated; it would be raised in the light. He would never shout at other boys and he wouldn’t bully them and his hands would be gentle. When Arnold thought of the child being that way, in the world, where he was supposed to be, he felt something he hadn’t experienced in a long time; it was more than contentment, lighter than peace.
At the cabin, he brought the boy a towel and rubbed it vigorously against his scalp. The feathers were clumped and he could see white skin between them, naked and vulnerable. He brought him food and watched him gulp it down, his throat bobbing.
“Am I going back to my mum now?” the boy said.
Arnold frowned. “You have a sister, don’t you?”
The boy nodded. Arnold remembered the girl’s scrunched-up face, her mewling mouth. It seemed this time the bad chick had escaped. He went to his desk and picked up the brass compass and passed it to the boy, who turned it in his hands. He was getting fingerprints all over it, but that didn’t matter, either.
“My mum’s called Sandra,” the boy said. “I have her number. Or if you called the police, they’d know what to do.” He spoke casually, as if he was saying something that wasn’t really important. “My name’s Todd.”
Arnold stared at him. Slowly, he shook his head.
“My sister’s Sophie and Dad’s called John.”
Arnold shook his head again. “You don’t have a name.”
The boy pouted. “I do so.”
“You don’t need a name. There are only two of us.” It didn’t matter about his name. Birds didn’t have names, but they knew each other anyway. They knew who and what they were, and they knew what they were supposed to do. They knew their place in the world; no one needed to tell them what it was, except, perhaps, this boy. But that was what the parent did, isn’t it?
“You have no name now,” he said again, and the boy stared at him. Some kind of understanding began to dawn on his face and his lip trembled. The lesson was already being learned, Arnold realised. Some lessons were hard, but they were necessary. Soon he would learn a new language too, the only one he needed; the language of fish and trees and beasts and birds. He would learn how to be; he would learn how to fly.
The Orphan Bird never had been an orphan, not really. It’s just that it didn’t have anyone who was prepared to nurture it. The good birds raised only the good chicks, who went on to raise more good chicks. The other ones, the bad ones—they weren’t supposed to have chicks of their own, were they? And yet it seemed they could.
Condemned to live and die in darkness and in grief, he thought. But maybe it didn’t have to be that way.
A tear slipped from the boy’s eye and ran down his cheek. Then he screwed up his face and he suddenly looked like the other, like his sister. “Don’t do that,” Arnold said sharply. The boy began to cry harder and so he grasped his puny shoulders and pushed him ahead of him, up the stairs. He pulled open the door to the store cupboard. It was dark in there and there wasn’t much room, but the boy fit easily. He shoved the door closed after him, pressing his hands against it. Inside, the boy fluttered, banging against the sides, throwing himself against the walls.
Arnold leaned his cheek against the door. Parents had to show the way, didn’t they? And he found he knew how. It was all instinct, after all. He would keep him quiet and keep him safe. Eventually, the chick would learn.
He reached out and turned the key in the lock. The first lesson was silence. When he had learned that, he could come out; and silence would keep him safe. It would keep them both safe.
He walked away down the hall, ready to resume his work at last. New energy was coursing through him. It was good to have responsibility, to take care of something other than himself. Above him, the door rattled. He smiled. He knew that he had patience, and patience, above all things, is what he would need. All young birds needed a nest; and this one would not be ready to fledge for a long, long time.