Raymond Barrow
December 26, 2012
[The image swings, showing the floor, a man’s feet, and a desk cluttered with papers. A starling perches on a corner of the desk, briefly visible before the camera turns to show the face of Raymond Barrow.]
BARROW: There, you see, Will? I’ve been dragged kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century after all. My great-niece, Sarah’s daughter, gave me one of those infernal iPhone things. They were all over for Christmas yesterday, and spent most of the day showing me how to use it. Sarah suggested I might like to record some of my personal recollections of the good old days, something to preserve for generations to come. Ha! If the future is interested in a washed-up old has-been who failed at every important thing he ever turned his hand to, then I pity them. But there is something I want to show you, so maybe this thing will be good for something after all.
[The camera turns to face outward again, the image bouncing while Barrow holds the phone in front of him as he walks. The camera catches glimpses of an ornate entryway, a crystal chandelier, a sweeping staircase. Carvings, hangings, sketches, and paintings on the walls depict birds of all kinds. The camera approaches a massive grandfather clock standing next to a door set beneath the curving staircase. The wooden case is chased with mother of pearl, showing a heron standing placidly among a cluster of reeds.]
BARROW: You see, I did all right for myself in the end. Not that I deserved to, but life isn’t fair, is it?
[Barrow reaches for the door, holding the phone steady in his other hand. A flight of stairs leads down. There’s a rustle from behind the camera, and Rackham, the starling, flies past Barrow’s shoulder, disappearing down the stairs. Barrow stumbles, catching himself against the wall, but doesn’t fall.]
BARROW: Damn bird will be the death of me.
[The image is dark as Barrow gropes his way to the bottom of the stairs and flicks on a light. The camera shows rows of red velvet seats on a raked floor, facing a stage. The curtains are open, the set bare save for a painted screen backdrop, meant to look like a window.]
BARROW: It’s the Victory Theater. I bought up everything they could salvage after the fire and had it all restored. What they couldn’t restore, I had rebuilt, exact replicas.
[The image wavers again as Barrow moves to a row of seats halfway to the stage. He sits, steadying the camera against the back of the chair in front of him.]
BARROW: I salvaged too much, Will. I was right, all those years ago when I said leading ladies are a disease. I’ve been carrying Clara in my blood for fifty-seven years, and there isn’t any cure. All I ever wanted to do was help her, Will, but I think I know why she chose me. It’s what she said about ghosts, and loss, and sorrow. A man can’t change his own nature, but the world can change it for him if he lets his guard down. I let my guard down. I fell in love with you. I left myself open, and where did it get me?
[Barrow doesn’t move, but the house lights in the theater dim, and the lights begin to rise slowly on the stage. As the lights reach full, they reveal a woman with dark hair, wearing a beaded gown, standing center stage.]
BARROW: That’s her, Will. It’s Clara.
[There’s a faint translucence to Clara’s form, but the starling flies from behind the camera and lands on Clara’s shoulder. She smiles.]
BARROW (softly): That’s what all my love earned me, Will. A ghost, but the wrong one.
[Clara turns toward the camera, and the man behind it. Her expression is sad but fond. She smiles, but it’s pained. Clara raises her arms. As they read their full extension, birds pour forth from the spot where she stands. Her dress falls, crumpled, to the floor. Dozens, hundreds of starlings boil up toward the ceiling like a cloud of smoke. When they reach the ceiling, they spread outward.
Barrow tilts the camera to show the birds as they pull together into a tight formation and fly toward him. He nearly drops the phone, and the view swings to show him in profile as the birds stream around him. Their wings brush his hair, his skin. His cheeks are wet.
The murmuration flows through the theater. The birds make no noise in their flight. Barrow steadies the phone, turning the camera to face him again. The birds are gone. He is alone.]
BARROW: It’s the same thing every night. Every goddamn night for fifty-seven years. I tried to set her free, and she came back. She came back, Will, so why the hell didn’t you?
[Barrow fumbles with the camera for a moment. The rustle of wings sounds and the starling lands on Barrow’s shoulder. The recording ends.]
Isobel Avens Returns to Stepney in the Spring
M. JOHN HARRISON
The third of September this year I spent the evening watching TV in an upstairs flat in North London. Some story of love and transfiguration, cropped into all the wrong proportions for the small screen. The flat wasn’t mine. It belonged to a friend I was staying with. There were French posters on the walls, dusty CDs stacked on the old-fashioned sideboard, piles of newspapers subsiding day by day into yellowing fans on the carpet. Outside, Tottenham stretched away, Greek driving schools, Turkish social clubs. Turn the TV off and you could hear nothing. Turn it back on and the film unrolled, passages of guilt with lost edges, photographed in white and blue light. At about half past eleven the phone rang. I picked it up. “Hello?”
It was Isobel Avens.
“Oh, China,” she said. She burst into tears.
I said: “Can you drive?”
“No,” she said.
I looked at my watch. “I’ll come and fetch you.”
“You can’t,” she said. “I’m here. You can’t come here.”
I said: “Be outside, love. Just try and get yourself downstairs. Be outside and I’ll pick you up on the pavement there.” There was a silence. “Can you do that?”
“Yes,” she said. “Oh, China.” The first two days she wouldn’t get much further than that.
“Don’t try to talk,” I advised.
London was as quiet as a nursing home corridor. I turned up the car stereo. Tom Waits, Downtown Train. Music stuffed with sentiments you recognise but daren’t admit to yourself. I let the BMW slip down Green Lanes, through Camden into the centre; then west. I was pushing the odd traffic light at orange, clipping the apex off a safe bend here and there. I told myself I wasn’t going to get killed for her. What I meant was that if I did she would have no one left. I took the Embankment at eight thousand revs in fifth gear, nosing down heavily on the brakes at Chelsea Wharf to get round into Gunter Grove. No one was there to see. By half past twelve I was on Queensborough Road, where I found her standing very straight in the mercury light outside Alexander’s building, the jacket of a Karl Lagerfeld suit thrown across her shoulders and one piece of expensive leather luggage at her feet. She bent into the car. Her face was white and exhausted and her breath stank. The way Alexander had dumped her was as cruel as everything else he did. She had flown back steerage from the Miami clinic reeling from jet lag, expecting to fall into his arms and be loved and comforted. He told her, “As a doctor I don’t think I can do any more for you.” The ground hadn’t just shifted on her: it was out from under her feet. Suddenly she was only his patient again. In the metallic glare of the streetlamps, I noticed a stipple of ulceration across her collarbones. I switched on the courtesy light to look closer. Tiny hectic sores, closely spaced.
I said: “Christ, Isobel.”
“It’s just a virus,” she said. “Just a side effect.”
“Is anything worth this?”
She put her arms around me and sobbed. “Oh, China, China.”
It isn’t that she wants me; only that she has no one else. Yet every time I smell her body my heart lurches. The years I lived with her I slept so soundly. Then Alexander did this irreversible thing to her, the thing she had always wanted, and now everything is fucked up and eerie and it will be that way forever.
I said: “I’ll take you home.”
“Will you stay?”
“What else?”
My name is Mick Rose, which is why people have always called me “China.” From the moment we met, Isobel Avens was fascinated by that. Later, she would hold my face between her hands in the night and whisper dreamily over and over—“Oh, China, China, China. China.” But it was something else that attracted her to me. The year we met, she lived in Stratford-on-Avon. I walked into the café at the little toy aerodrome they have there and it was she who served me. She was twenty-five years old: slow, heavy-bodied, easily delighted by the world. Her hair was red. She wore a rusty pink blouse, a black ankle-length skirt with lace at the hem. Her feet were like boats in great brown Dr. Marten’s shoes. When she saw me looking down at them in amusement, she said: “Oh, these aren’t my real Docs, these are my cheap imitation ones.” She showed me how the left one was coming apart at the seams. “Brilliant, eh?” She smelled of vanilla and sex. She radiated heat. I could always feel the heat of her a yard away.
“I’d love to be able to fly,” she told me. She laughed and hugged herself. “You must feel so free.”
She thought I was the pilot of the little private Cessna she could see out of the café window. In fact I had only come to deliver its cargo—an unadmitted load for an unadmitted destination—some commercial research centre in Zurich or Budapest. At the time I called myself Rose Medical Services, Plc. My fleet comprised a single Vauxhall Astra van into which I had dropped the engine, brakes, and suspension of a two-litre GTE insurance write-off. I specialised. If it was small, I guaranteed to move it anywhere in Britain within twelve hours; occasionally, if the price was right, to selected points in Europe. Recombinant DNA: viruses at controlled temperatures, sometimes in live hosts: cell cultures in heavily armoured flasks. What they were used for I had no idea. I didn’t really want an idea until much later; and that turned out to be much too late.
I said: “It can’t be so hard to learn.”
“Flying?”
“It can’t be so hard.”
Before a week was out we were inventing one another hand over fist. It was an extraordinary summer. You have to imagine this— Saturday afternoon. Stratford Waterside. The river has a lively look despite the breathless air and heated sky above it. Waterside is full of jugglers and fire-eaters, entertaining thick crowds of Americans and Japanese. There is hardly room to move. Despite this, on a patch of grass by the water, two lovers, trapped in the great circular argument, are making that futile attempt all lovers make to get inside one another and stay there for good. He can’t stop touching her because she wants him so. She wants him so because he can’t stop touching her. A feeding swan surfaces, caught up with some strands of very pale green weed. Rippling in the sudden warm breeze which blows across the river from the direction of the theatre, these seem for a moment like ribbons tied with a delicate knot—the gentle, deliberate artifice of a conscious world.
“Oh, look! Look!” she says.
He says: “Would you like to be a swan?”
“I’d have to leave the aerodrome.”
He says: “Come and live with me and be a swan.” Neither of them has the slightest idea what they are talking about.
Business was good. Within three months I had bought a second van. I persuaded Isobel Avens to leave Stratford and throw in with me. On the morning of her last day at the aerodrome, she woke up early and shook me until I was awake too.
“China!” she said.
“What?”
“China!”
I said: “What?”
“I flew!”
It was a dream of praxis. It was a hint of what she might have. It was her first step on the escalator up to Alexander’s clinic.
“I was in a huge computer room. Everyone’s work was displayed on one screen like a wall. I couldn’t find my A-prompt!” People laughed at her, but nicely. “It was all good fun, and they were very helpful.” Suddenly she had learned what she had to know, and she was floating up and flying into the screen, and through it, “out of the room, into the air above the world.” The sky was crowded with other people, she said. “But I just went swooping past and around and between them.” She let herself fall just for the fun of it: she soared, her whole body taut and trembling like the fabric of a kite. Her breath went out with a great laugh. Whenever she was tired, she could perch like a bird. “I loved it!” she told me. “Oh, I loved it!”
How can you be so jealous of a dream? I said: “It sounds as if you won’t need me soon.”
She clutched at me. “You help me to fly,” she said. “Don’t dare go away, China! Don’t dare!”
She pulled my face close to hers and gave me little dabbing kisses on the mouth and eyes. I looked at my watch. Half past six. The bed was already damp and hot: I could see that we were going to make it worse. She pulled me on top of her, and at the height of things, sweating and inturned and breathless and on the edge, she whispered, “Oh, lovely, lovely, lovely,” as if she had seen something I couldn’t. “So lovely, so beautiful!” Her eyes moved as if she was watching something pass. I could only watch her, moving under me, marvellous and wet, solid and real, everything I ever wanted.
The worst thing you can do at the beginning of something fragile is to say what it is. The night I drove her back from Queensborough Road to her little house in the gentrified East End, things were very simple. For forty-eight hours all she would do was wail and sob and throw up on me. She refused to eat, she couldn’t bear to sleep. If she dropped off for ten minutes, she would wake silent for the instant it took her to remember what had happened. Then this appalling dull asthmatic noise would come out of her—“zhhh, zhhh, zhhh,” somewhere between retching and whining—as she tried to suppress the memory, and wake me up, and sob, all at the same time.
I was always awake anyway.
“Hush now, it will get better. I know.” I knew because she had done the same thing to me.
“China, I’m so sorry.”
“Hush. Don’t be sorry. Get better.”
“I’m so sorry to have made you feel like this.”
I wiped her nose. “Hush.”
That part was easy. I could dress her ulcers and take care of what was coming out of them, relieve the other effects of what they had done to her in Miami, and watch for whatever else might happen. I could hold her in my arms all night and tell lies and believe I was only there for her.
But soon she asked me, “Will you live here again, China?”
“You know it’s all I want,” I said.
She warned: “I’m not promising anything.”
“I don’t want you to,” I said. I said: “I just want you to need me for something.”
That whole September we were as awkward as children. We didn’t quite know what to say. We didn’t quite know what to do with one another. We could see it would take time and patience. We shared the bed rather shyly and showed one another quite ordinary things as gifts.
“Look!”
Sunshine fell across the breakfast table, onto lilies and pink napery. (I am not making this up.) “Look!” A grey cat nosed out of a doorway in London E3.
“Did you have a nice weekend?”
“It was a lovely weekend. Lovely.”
“Look.” Canary Wharf, shining in the oblique evening light!
In our earliest days together, while she was still working at the aerodrome, I had watched with almost uncontainable delight as she moved about a room. I had stayed awake while she slept, so that I could prop myself up on one elbow and look at her and shiver with happiness. Now when I watched, it was with fear. For her. For both of us. She had come down off the tightrope for awhile. But things were still so precariously balanced. Her new body was all soft new colours in the bedside lamplight. She was thin now, and shaped quite differently: but as hot as ever, hot as a child with fever. When I fucked her she was like a bundle of hot wires. I was like a boy. I trembled and caught my breath when I felt with my fingertips the damp feathery lips of her cunt, but I was too aware of the dangers to be carried away. I didn’t dare let her see how much this meant to me. Neither of us knew what to want of the other anymore. We had forgotten one another’s rhythms. In addition she was remembering someone else’s: it was Alexander who had constructed for me this bundle of hot, thin, hollow bones, wrapped round me in the night by desires and demands I didn’t yet know how to fulfill. Before the Miami treatments she had loved me to watch her as she became aroused. Now she needed to hide, at least for a time. She would pull at my arms and shoulders, shy and desperate at the same time; then, as soon as I understood that she wanted to be fucked, push her face into the side of mine so I couldn’t look at her. After awhile she would turn onto her side; encourage me to enter from behind; stare away into some distance implied by us, our failures, the dark room. I told myself I didn’t care if she was thinking of him. Just so long as she had got this far, which was far enough to begin to be cured in her sex where he had wounded her as badly as anywhere else. I told myself I couldn’t heal her there, only allow her to use me to heal herself.
At the start of something so fragile, the worst mistake you can make is to say what you hope. But inside your heart you can’t help speaking, and by that speech you have already blown it.
After Isobel and I moved down to London from Stratford, business began to take up most of my time. Out of an instinctive caution, I dropped the word “medical” from the company description and called myself simply Rose Services. Rose Services soon became twenty quick vans, some low-cost storage space, and a licence to carry the products of new genetic research to and from Eastern Europe. If I was to take advantage of the expanding markets there, I decided, I would need an office.
“Let’s go to Budapest,” I said to Isobel.
She hugged my arm. “Will there be ice on the Danube?” she said.
“There will.”
There was. “China, we came all the way to Hungary!” She had never been out of Britain. She had never flown in an aeroplane. She was delighted even by the hotel. I had booked us into a place called the Palace, on Rakoczi Street. Like the city itself, the Palace had once been something: now it was a dump. Bare flex hung out of the light switches on the fourth-floor corridors. The wallpaper had charred in elegant spirals above the corners of the radiators. Every morning in the famous Jugendstil restaurant, they served us watery orange squash. The rooms were too hot. Everything else—coffee, food, water from the cold tap—was lukewarm. It was never quiet, even very late at night. Ambulances and police cars warbled past. Drunks screamed suddenly or made noises like animals. But our room had French windows opening onto a balcony with wrought-iron railings. From there in the freezing air, we could look across a sort of high courtyard with one or two flakes of snow falling into it, at the other balconies and their lighted windows. That first evening, Isobel loved it.
“China, isn’t it fantastic? Isn’t it?”
Then something happened to her in her sleep. I wouldn’t have known, but I woke up unbearably hot at three A.M., sweating and dry-mounthed beneath the peculiar fawn-fur blanket they give you to sleep under at the Palace. The bathroom was even hotter than the bedroom and smelled faintly of very old piss. When I turned the tap on to splash my face, nothing came out of it. I stood there in the dark for a moment, swaying, while I waited for it to run. I heard Isobel say reasonably: “It’s a system fault.”
After a moment she said, “Oh no. Oh no,” in such a quiet, sad voice that I went back to the bed and touched her gently.
“Isobel. Wake up.”
She began to whimper and throw herself about.
“The system’s down,” she tried to explain to someone.
“Isobel. Isobel.”
“The system!”
“Isobel.”