I know why this is happening. To begin with the hood was a welcome refuge, but now she’s decided I’m harmless it is merely something that stops her seeing, and she wants to see. Now, unhappy, unsettled, lifting one foot then the other, the hawk looks about the room for somewhere to go. Her mood is contagious; my heart flutters tightly, heavily in my chest. I have lost the ability to disappear. I try to remove myself by listening to the cricket on the radio but can’t understand what the commentator is saying. I can only turn my attention from my unhappy hawk by thinking about the hood I’m holding. It is all she is thinking of too.
I remember hauling this hood out of my bag while looking for a pen before a university seminar a few months ago. ‘What’s that?’ asked a colleague.
‘A falcon hood,’ I said, not looking up.
‘Have you brought it in to show it to people?’
‘No. It was just in my bag.’
‘But can I look at it?’
‘Absolutely, go ahead.’
She picked it up, fascinated. ‘What an amazing thing,’ she said, frowning under her straight-cut fringe. ‘It goes over the hawk’s head to keep it quiet, right?’ And she looked inside, where the moulded leather was stitched with lines of hair-fine thread, and then turned it over in her hands, examining the bevelled opening for the hawk’s beak and the plaited Turk’s-head knot you hold it by, and the two long braces at the back that pull the hood open and closed. She set it back on the table reverently. ‘It’s so beautifully made,’ she said. ‘It’s like a Prada shoe.’
Indeed. This hood is among the best of its kind. It was made by an American falconer called Doug Pineo and it weighs almost nothing. A few grams. That is all. Something about its perfect lightness set against the heaviness of my heart makes me giddy. I shut my eyes and my head is full of hoods. Modern American hoods like this one. Loose-braced Bahraini hoods of soft goatskin for passage sakers and peregrines. Syrian hoods. Turkmen hoods. Afghan hoods. Tiny Indian hoods in snakeskin for shikras and sparrowhawks. Huge eagle hoods from Central Asia. Sixteenth-century French hoods cut from white kidskin embroidered with golden thread and painted with coats of arms. They’re not a European invention. Frankish knights learned how to use hoods from Arab falconers during the Crusades, and a shared love of falconry made hawks political pawns in those wars. When a white gyrfalcon owned by King Philip I of Spain broke its leash during the Siege of Acre and flew up to the city walls, the king sent an envoy into the city to request its return. Saladin refused, and Philip sent another envoy, accompanied by trumpets, ensigns and heralds, offering a thousand gold crowns for the falcon. Was it returned? I can’t recall. Did it matter? No, I think savagely. They’re all dead. Long dead. I think of Saladin taking the king’s falcon onto his own hand and covering its eyes with leather. I own this. It is mine. I think of fetish hoods. I think of distant wars. I think of Abu Ghraib. Sand in the mouth. Coercion. History and hawks and hoods and the implications of taking something’s sight away to calm it. It’s in your own best interest. Rising nausea. There’s a sensation of ground being lost, of wet sand washing from under my feet. I don’t want to think of the photographs of the tortured man with the hood on his head and the wires to his hands and the invisible enemy who holds the camera, but it is all I can see and the word hood like a hot stone in my mouth. Burqa, the word in Arabic. Hood.
I start speaking to the hawk – I think to the hawk – in a voice as low and reassuring as I can make it. ‘When you travel in the car, Mabel,’ I say, ‘there’ll be lots of frightening things out there and we can’t have you crashing about while I drive. It is just to keep you feeling safe.’ And then, ‘It is necessary.’ I hear myself say it. It is necessary. That is what I am telling myself. But I don’t like it. Nor does she. Patiently I offer it again. ‘Look,’ I say carefully. ‘Just a hood.’ I move it slowly up to her feathered chin. She bates. I wait until she settles and move it up to her chin again. Bate. And again. Bate. Bate. Bate. I want to be gentle. I am being gentle, but my gentleness is a veneer on raging despair. I don’t want to hood her. She knows it. On the radio the cricket commentator explains in gleeful detail why a batsman’s defensive stroke has failed. ‘Shut up, Aggers,’ I snap, and try once again. ‘Come on, Mabel,’ I say beseechingly, and in another minute the hood is on, she is back on her perch, and I am slumped on the sofa. The world is burning and I don’t want to touch it. This is a disaster. A disaster. I can’t do this. Not any of it. I am a terrible falconer. I burst into tears. The hawk dissolves. I curl up, bury my face in a cushion and cry myself to sleep.
Forty minutes later Stuart is assessing the hawk with narrowed, practised eyes. ‘Small, isn’t she?’ he says, dragging four fingers thoughtfully down one stubbled cheek. ‘But she’s a good-looking gos. Long body. Long tail. Bird hawk.’
By this he means my goshawk might be better suited to fly at pheasants and partridges than rabbits or hares.