Oh, I think, as I pick it up. It is strange to see it again, because I’ve not thought of White for a while. As I grew happier his presence receded, his world more and more distant from mine. I look at the scuffed spine, open it, and flip to the very end. I want to read the very last page, where White lists all the things Gos was: a Prussian officer, Attila, an Egyptian hieroglyph, a winged Assyrian bull, ‘one of the lunatic dukes or cardinals in the Elizabethan plays of Webster’.2 A litany of human things in stone and armour, in marks on pages and dints in sunbaked clay. I peer out of the dusty window at Mabel in the garden. She has bathed and preened and now she’s leaning backwards to the oil-gland above her tail, nibbling it gently, then pulling each tail feather through her beak to make it waterproof. I know she is content: the half-closed, happy eye, the rattling of her feathers: these are signs of raw good humour. I cannot know what she is thinking, but she is very alive.
I think of White’s list of things and what a strange, sad ending it is. I swear to myself, standing there with the book open in my hand, that I will not ever reduce my hawk to a hieroglyph, an historical figure or a misremembered villain. Of course I won’t. I can’t. Because she is not human. Of all the lessons I’ve learned in my months with Mabel this is the greatest of all: that there is a world of things out there – rocks and trees and stones and grass and all the things that crawl and run and fly. They are all things in themselves, but we make them sensible to us by giving them meanings that shore up our own views of the world. In my time with Mabel I’ve learned how you feel more human once you have known, even in your imagination, what it is like to be not. And I have learned, too, the danger that comes in mistaking the wildness we give a thing for the wildness that animates it. Goshawks are things of death and blood and gore, but they are not excuses for atrocities. Their inhumanity is to be treasured because what they do has nothing to do with us at all.
I put White’s book on the shelves, make myself a cup of tea. I’m in a contemplative mood. I’d brought the hawk into my world and then I pretended I lived in hers. Now it feels different: we share our lives happily in all their separation. I look down at my hands. There are scars on them now. Thin white lines. One is from her talons when she’d been fractious with hunger; it feels like a warning made flesh. Another is a blackthorn rip from the time I’d pushed through a hedge to find the hawk I’d thought I’d lost. And there were other scars, too, but they were not visible. They were the ones she’d helped mend, not make.
30
The moving earth
IT IS 27 February, and I’m feeling distinctly wobbly. Tomorrow I’ll be driving Mabel to my friend Tony’s house. He’s a very old friend of mine, a gifted falconer and a deeply generous man. He lives with his family in a little lemon-coloured house in the flat lands of south Suffolk half an hour from the sea. I’m looking forward to seeing him but am wobbly all the same, because this will not be a flying visit for Mabel. Tony’s giving Mabel a spare aviary for the moulting season. Tomorrow I’ll be driving back here and leaving her behind.
I have to do it. It’s time for her to drop all her feathers, one by one, and grow new ones. She needs to be fat and full of food to grow her new plumage, so all week I’ve been giving her as much quail and pheasant as she can eat. She’s round as a turkey now, and part of me has been waiting for her to get wild. A fat goshawk is a wild goshawk, say the books. They are wrong. Of course they are. Mabel’s less willing to tolerate strangers in this fed-up state, but she’s still as tame as a kitten with me. This morning we played throw and catch with paper balls, and for the last hour she’s been snoozing on my fist while I watch bad TV. ‘Right, Mabel,’ I say. ‘Bedtime.’ I put her on her perch in the other room, switch off the light and go upstairs to bed.
Some things are too terrifying to comprehend. Seconds can pass in disbelief as the world you live in turns into a lie. At just past one in the morning I’m having one of the worst nightmares of my life. My dreams lately have been small and full of light, but in this one, someone – something, for it cannot be human – has taken hold of the end of my bed and is shaking it, shaking it hard, trying to pitch me to the floor. It is the feeling in the dream that terrifies me most of all. It is not like a nightmare. It is worse. I wake with a start.
Something is still shaking my bed. I can see it move, hear it creaking. There is no one in the room.
Every inch of my skin crawls with terror. I am shaking and unable to move. The wrongness is indescribable. The fear is falling through a thousand feet of air. The bed is still shaking, senselessly, violently, horribly, impossibly.
Then it stops.
For a few seconds I lie there, stricken. I have not been breathing, I realise. I take a vast gulp of shuddering air. The lampshade above me is swinging in circles still.
Then a flash of understanding.
An earthquake. It was an earthquake. Here, in England. They hardly ever happen here, do they? Was it definitely an earthquake? It must have been. Yes. I still can’t quite believe it. I jump out of bed and peer through the curtains. Lights are on in all the houses. People in the street are wandering fearfully in pyjamas. The phone rings, and I pick it up, and it is Christina.