I stared at her. “Christ,” I said. “Who?”
“Just someone I know.”
“Who?” I said. And then, bitterly, “Who do you know, Isobel?” I meant: “Who do you know that isn’t me?”
“It’s only an affair,” she said. And: “You must have realised I wasn’t happy.”
I said dully: “Who is this fucker?”
“It’s David Alexander.”
“Who?”
“David Alexander. For God’s sake, China, you make everything so hard! At the clinic. David Alexander.”
I had no idea who she was talking about. Then I remembered.
“Christ,” I said. “He’s just some fucking customer.”
She went out. I heard the bedroom door slam. I stared at the books on the bookshelves, the pictures on the walls, the carpet dusty gold in the pale afternoon light. I couldn’t understand why it was all still there. I couldn’t understand anything. Twenty minutes later, when Isobel came back in again carrying a soft leather overnight bag, I was standing in the same place, in the middle of the floor. She said: “Do you know what your trouble is, China?”
“What?” I said.
“People are always just some fucking this or that to you.”
“Don’t go.”
She said: “He’s going to help me to fly, China.”
“You always said I helped you to fly.”
She looked away. “It’s not your fault it stopped working,” she said. “It’s me.”
“Christ, you selfish bitch.”
“He wants to help me to fly,” she repeated dully. And then: “China, I am selfish.”
She tried to touch my hand but I moved it away.
“I can’t fucking believe this,” I said. “You want me to forgive you just because you can admit it?”
“I don’t want to lose you, China.”
I said: “You already have.”
“We don’t know what we might want,” she said. “Later on. Either of us.”
I remembered how we had been at the beginning: Stratford Waterside, whispers and moans, You help me to fly, China. “If you could hear yourself,” I said. “If you could just fucking hear yourself, Isobel.” She shrugged miserably and picked up her bag. I didn’t see her after that. I did have one letter from her. It was sad without being conciliatory, and ended: “You were the most amazing person I ever knew, China, and the fastest driver.”
I tore it up. “Were!” I said. “Fucking were!”
By that time she had moved in with him, somewhere along the Network South East line from Waterloo: Chiswick, Kew, one of those old-fashioned suburbs on a bladder of land inflated into the picturesque curve of the river, with genteel deteriorating houseboats, an arts centre, and a wine bar on every corner. West London is full of places like that—“shabby,” “comfortable,” until you smell the money. Isobel kept the Stepney house. I would visit it once a month to collect my things, cry in the lounge, and take away some single pointless item—a compact disc I had bought her, a picture she had bought me. Every time I went back, the bedroom, with its wooden chests and paper birds, seemed to have filled up further with dust. Despite that, I could never quite tell if anything had changed. Had they been in there, the two of them? I stayed in the doorway, so as not to know. I had sold Rose Services and was living out in Tottenham, drinking Michelob beer and watching Channel 4 movies while I waited for my capital to run out. Some movies I liked better than others. I cried all the way through Alice in the Cities. I wasn’t sure why. But I knew why I was cheering Anthony Hopkins as The Good Father.
“You were the most amazing person I ever knew, China, and the fastest driver. I’ll always remember you.”
What did I care? Two days after I got the letter I drove over to Queensborough Road at about seven in the evening. I had just bought the BMW. I parked it at the kerb outside Alexander’s clinic, which was in a large postmodern block not far down from Hammersmith Gyratory. Some light rain was falling. I sat there watching the front entrance. After about twenty minutes Alexander’s receptionist came out, put her umbrella up, and went off toward the tube station. A bit later Alexander himself appeared at the security gate. I was disappointed by him.
He turned out to be a tall thin man, middle-aged, grey-haired, dressed in a light wool suit. He looked less like a doctor than a poet. He had that kind of fragile elegance some people maintain on the edge of panic, the energy of tensions unresolved, glassy, never very far from the surface. He would always seem worried. He looked along the street toward Shepherd’s Bush, then down at his watch.
I opened the nearside passenger window. “David Alexander?” I called. I called: “Waiting for someone?” He bent down puzzledly and looked into the BMW. “Need a lift?” I offered.
“Do I know you?” he asked.
I thought: Say the wrong thing, you fucker. You’re that close. I said: “Not exactly.”
“Then—”
“Forget it.”
He stood back from the car suddenly, and I drove off.
Christmas. Central London. Traffic locked solid every late afternoon. Light in the shop windows in the rain. Light in the puddles. Light splashing up round your feet. I couldn’t keep still. Once I’d walked away from Isobel, I couldn’t stop walking. Everywhere I went, “She’s Always a Woman” was on the radio. Harrods, Habitat, Hamleys: Billy Joel drove me out onto the wet pavement with another armful of children’s toys. I even wrapped some of them—a wooden penguin with rubber feet, two packs of cards, a miniature jigsaw puzzle in the shape of her name. Every time I saw something I liked, it went home with me.
“I bought you a present,” I imagined myself saying, “this fucking little spider that really jumps—look!”
Quite suddenly I was exhausted. Christmas Day I spent with the things I’d bought. Boxing Day, and the day after that, I lay in a chair staring at the television. Between shows I picked up the phone and put it down again, picked it up and put it down. I was going to call Isobel, then I wasn’t. I was going to call her, but I closed the connection carefully every time the phone began to ring at her end. Then I decided to go back to Stepney for my clothes.
Imagine this—
Two A.M. The house was quiet.
Or this—
I stood on the pavement. When I looked in through the uncurtained ground-floor window I could see the little display of lights on the front of Isobel’s CD player.
Or this—
For a moment my key didn’t seem to fit the door. Imagine this—
Late at night you enter a house in which you’ve been as happy as anywhere in your life: probably happier. You go into the front room, where streetlight falls unevenly across the rugs, the furniture, the mantelpiece and mirrors. On the sofa are strewn a dozen colourful, expensive shirts, blue and red and gold like macaws and money. Two or three of them have been slipped out of their cellophane, carefully refolded and partly wrapped in Christmas paper. “Dear China—” say the tags. “Dearest China.” There are signs of a struggle but not necessarily with someone else. A curious stale smell fills the room, and a chair has been knocked over. It’s really too dark to see.
Switch on the lights. Glasses and bottles. Food trodden into the best kilim. Half-empty plates, two days old.
“Isobel? Isobel!”
The bathroom was damp with condensation, the bath itself full of cold water smelling strongly of rose oil. Wet towels were underfoot, there and in the draughty bedroom, where the light was already on and Isobel’s pink velvet curtains, half-drawn, let a faint yellow triangle of light into the garden below. The lower sash was open. When I pulled it down, a cat looked up from the empty flower bed: ran off. I shivered. Isobel had pulled all her favourite underclothes out onto the floor and trodden mascara into them. She had written in lipstick on the dressing table mirror, in perfect mirror writing: “Leave me alone.”
I found her in one of the big blanket boxes.
When I opened the lid a strange smell—beeswax, dried roses, vomit, whiskey—filled the room. In there with her she had an empty bottle of Jameson: an old safety razor of mine and two or three blades. She had slit her wrists. But first she had tried to shave all the downy, half-grown feathers from her upper arms and breasts. When I reached into the box they whirled up round us both, soft blue and grey, the palest rose-pink. Miami! In some confused attempt to placate me, she had tried to get out of the dream the way you get out of a coat.
She was still alive.
“China,” she said. Sleepily, she held her arms up to me. She whispered: “China.”
Alexander had made her look like a bird. But underneath the cosmetic trick she was still Isobel Avens. Whatever he had promised her, she could never have flown. I picked her up and carried her carefully down the stairs. Then I was crossing the pavement toward the BMW, throwing the nearside front door open and trying to get her into the passenger seat. Her arms and legs were everywhere, pivoting loose and awkward from the hips and elbows. “Christ, Isobel, you’ll have to help!” I didn’t panic until then.
“China,” whispered Isobel. Blood ran into my shirt where she had put her arms round my neck. I slammed the door. “China.”
“What, love? What?”
“China.” She could talk but she couldn’t hear.
“Hold on,” I said. I switched on the radio. Some station I didn’t know was playing the first few bars of a Joe Satriani track, “Always with You, Always with Me.” I felt as if I was outside myself. I thought: “Now’s the time to drive, China, you fucker.” The BMW seemed to fishtail out of the parking space of its own accord, into the empty arcade game of Whitechapel. The city loomed up then fell back from us at odd angles, as if it had achieved the topological values of a Vorticist painting. I could hear the engine distantly, making a curious harsh overdriven whine as I held the revs up against the red line. Revs and brakes, revs and brakes: if you want to go fast in the city you hold it all the time between the engine and the brakes. Taxis, hoardings, white faces of pedestrians on traffic islands splashed with halogen pink, rushed up and were snatched away.
“Isobel?”
I had too much to do to look directly at her. I kept catching glimpses of her in weird, neon shop-light from Wallis or Next or What She Wants, lolling against the seat belt with her mouth half open. She knew how bad she was. She kept trying to smile across at me. Then she would drift off, or cornering forces would roll her head to one side as if she had no control of the muscles in her neck and she would end up staring and smiling out of the side window whispering: “China. China China China.”
“Isobel.”
She passed out again and didn’t wake up.
“Shit, Isobel,” I said.
We were on Hammersmith Gyratory, deep in the shadow of the flyover. It was twenty minutes since I had found her. We were nearly there. I could almost see the clinic.
I said: “Shit, Isobel, I’ve lost it.”
The piers of the flyover loomed above us, stained grey concrete plastered with anarchist graffiti and torn posters. Free and ballistic, the car waltzed sideways toward them, glad to be out of China Rose’s hands at last.
“Fuck,” I said. “Fuck fuck fuck.”
We touched the kerb, tripped over our own feet, and began a long slow roll, like an airliner banking to starboard. We hit a postbox. The BMW jumped in a startled way and righted itself. Its offside rear suspension had collapsed. Uncomfortable with the new layout, still trying to get away from me, it spun twice and banged itself repeatedly into the opposite kerb with a sound exactly like some housewife’s Metro running over the cat’s-eyes on a cold Friday morning. Something snapped the window post on that side, and broken glass blew in all over Isobel Avens’s peaceful face. She opened her mouth. Thin vomit came out, the colour of tea: but I don’t think she was conscious. Hammersmith Broadway, ninety-five miles an hour. I dropped a gear, picked the car up between steering and accelerator, shot out into Queensborough Road on the wrong side of the road. The boot lid popped open and fell off. It was dragged along behind us for a moment, then it went backward quickly and disappeared.
“China.”
Draped across my arms, Isobel was nothing but a lot of bones and heat. I carried her up the steps to Alexander’s building and pressed for entry. The entryphone crackled but no one spoke. “Hello?” I said. After a moment the locks went back.
Look into the atrium of a West London building at night and everything is the same as it is in the day. Only the reception staff are missing, and that makes less difference than you would think. The contract furniture keeps working. The PX keeps working. The fax comes alive suddenly as you watch, with a query from Zurich, Singapore, LA. The air conditioning keeps on working. Someone has watered the plants, and they keep working too, making chlorophyll from the overhead lights. Paper curls out of the fax and stops. You can watch for as long as you like: nothing else will happen and no one will come. The air will be cool and warm at the same time, and you will be able to see your own reflection, very faintly in the treated glass.
“China.”
Upstairs it was a floor of open-plan offices—health finance—and then a floor of consulting rooms. Up here the lights were off, and you could no longer hear the light traffic on Queensborough Road. It was two fifty in the morning. I got into the consulting rooms and then Alexander’s office, and walked up and down with Isobel in my arms, calling: “Alexander?” No one came. “Alexander?” Someone had let us in. “Alexander!”
Among the stuff on his desk was a brochure for the clinic. “. . . modern ‘magic wand,’” I read. “Brand-new proteins.” I swept everything off onto the floor and tried to make Isobel comfortable by folding my coat under her head.
“I’m sorry,” she said quietly, but not to me. It was part of some conversation I couldn’t hear. She kept rolling onto her side and retching over the edge of the desk, then laughing. I had picked up the phone and was working on an outside line when Alexander came in from the corridor. He had lost weight. He looked vague and empty, as if we had woken him out of a deep sleep. You can tear people like him apart like a piece of paper, but it doesn’t change anything.
“Press nine,” he advised me. “Then call an ambulance.” He glanced down at Isobel. He said: “It would have been better to take her straight to a hospital.”
I put the phone down. “I fucked up a perfectly good car to get here,” I said.
He kept looking puzzledly at me and then out of the window at the BMW, half up on the pavement with smoke coming out of it.
I said: “That’s a Hartge H27-24.”
I said: “I could have afforded something in better taste, but I just haven’t got any.”
“I know you,” he said. “You’ve done work for me.”
I stared at him. He was right.
I had been moving things about for him since the old Astra van days; since before Stratford. And if I was just a contract to him, he was just some writing on a job sheet to me. He was the price of a Hartge BMW with racing suspension and 17-inch wheels.
“But you did this,” I reminded him.
I got him by the back of the neck and made him look closely at Isobel. Then I pushed him against the wall and stood away from him. I told him evenly: “I’m fucking glad I didn’t kill you when I wanted to.” I said: “Put her back together.”
He lifted his hands. “I can’t,” he said.
“Put her back together.”
“This is only an office,” he said. “She would have to go to Miami.”
I pointed to the telephone. I said: “Arrange it. Get her there.” He examined her briefly.
“She was dying anyway,” he said. “The immune system work alone would have killed her. We did far more than we would normally do on a client. Most of it was illegal. It would be illegal to do most of it to a laboratory rat. Didn’t she tell you that?”
I said: “Get her there and put her back together again.”
“I can make her human again,” he offered. “I can cure her.”
I said: “She didn’t fucking want to be human.”
“I know,” he said.
He looked down at his desk; his hands. He whispered: “‘Help me to fly. Help me to fly!’“
“Fuck off,” I said.
“I loved her too, you know. But I couldn’t make her understand that she could never have what she wanted. In the end she was just too demanding: effectively, she asked us to kill her.”
I didn’t want to know why he had let me have her back. I didn’t want to compare inadequacies with him. I said: “I don’t want to hear this.”
He shrugged. “She’ll die if we try it again,” he said emptily. “You’ve got no idea how these things work.”
“Put her back together.”
You tell me what else I could have said.
Here at the Alexander Clinic, we use the modern “magic wand” of molecular biology to insert avian chromosomes into human skin cells. Nurtured in the clinic’s vats, the follicles of this new skin produce feathers instead of hair. It grafts beautifully. Brand-new proteins speed acceptance. But in case of difficulties, we remake the immune system: aim it at infections of opportunity; fire it like a laser.
Our client chooses any kind of feather, from pinion to down, in any combination. She is as free to look at the sparrow as the bower bird or macaw. Feathers of any size or colour! But the real triumph is elsewhere— Designer hormones trigger the “brown fat” mechanism. Our client becomes as light and as hot to the touch as a female hawk. Then metabolically induced calcium shortages hollow the bones. She can be handled only with great care. And the dreams of flight! Engineered endorphins released during sexual arousal simulate the sidesweep, swoop, and mad fall of mating flight, the frantically beating heart, long sight. Sometimes the touch of her own feathers will be enough.
I lived in a hotel on the beach while it was done. Miami! TV prophecy, humidity like a wet sheet, an airport where they won’t rent you a baggage trolley. You wouldn’t think this listening to Bob Seger. Unless you are constantly approaching it from the sea, Miami is less a dream—less even a nightmare—than a place. All I remember is what British people always remember about Florida: the light in the afternoon storm, the extraordinary size and perfection of the food in the supermarkets. I never went near the clinic, though I telephoned Alexander’s team every morning and evening. I was too scared. One day they were optimistic, the next they weren’t. In the end I knew they had got involved again; they were excited by the possibilities. She was going to have what she wanted. They were going to do the best they could for her, if only because of the technical challenge.
She slipped in and out of the world until the next spring. But she didn’t die, and in the end I was able to bring her home to the blackened, gentle East End in May, driving all the way from Heathrow down the inside lane of the motorway, as slowly and carefully as I knew how in my new off-the-peg 850i. I had adjusted the driving mirror so I could look into the back of the car. Isobel lay awkwardly across one corner of the rear seat. Her hands and face seemed tiny. In the soft wet English light, their adjusted bone structures looked more rather than less human. Lapped in her singular successes and failures, the sum of her life to that point, she was more rested than I had ever seen her.
About a mile away from the house, outside Whitechapel tube station, I let the car drift up to the kerb and stop. I switched the engine off and got out of the driving seat.
“It isn’t far from here,” I said. I put the keys in her hand. “I know you’re tired,” I said, “but I want you to drive yourself the rest of the way.”
She said: “China, don’t go. Get back in the car.”
“It’s not far from here,” I said.
“China, please don’t go.”
“Drive yourself from now on.”
If you’re so clever, you tell me what else I could have done. All that time in Miami she had never let go, never once vacated the dream. The moment she closed her eyes, feathers were floating down past them. She knew what she wanted. Don’t mistake me: I wanted her to have it. But imagining myself stretched out next to her on the bed night after night, I could hear the sound those feathers made, and I knew I would never sleep again for the touch of them on my face.