The anger was vast and it came out of nowhere. It was the rage of something not fitting; the frustration of trying to put something in a box that is slightly too small. You try moving the shape around in the hope that some angle will make it fit in the box. Slowly comes an apprehension that this might not, after all, be possible. And finally you know it won’t fit, know there is no way it can fit, but this doesn’t stop you using brute force to try to crush it in, punishing the bloody thing for not fitting properly. That was what it was like: but I was the box, I was the thing that didn’t fit, and I was the person smashing it, over and over again, with bruised and bleeding hands.
Rage crouched inside me, and anything could provoke it. One weekday morning I laboured into town under a sky the colour of wet cement to meet an Uzbek student I’d worked with on a research trip to Central Asia the previous winter. A quiet, neat man, a nice man. I’d camped with him in frozen deserts, eaten lamb-stuffed quinces at roadside shacks on the Silk Road, stood with him on the banks of the Syr Darya river. He had lately arrived in Cambridge and he wanted to see me. I sat down with him at a café table. I liked him. I knew I should talk to him, but couldn’t remember how. I tried a few words. They sounded wrong. I stuck a watery smile on my face and turned my head towards the window, desperately trying to remember how to have a conversation. And there, behind the plate glass of the bank across the street, a woman in a grey uniform was standing on a chair in her stockinged feet, reaching up to peel a huge vinyl sticker of a singing skylark from the glass. It had been advertising some kind of financial offer. Now the offer was finished, and so was the lark. She picked at its open beak with her fingernails, then started pulling its head from the window. Inch by inch the bird disappeared; first it hung there, decapitated, printed wings spread wide, then each wing was stripped from the glass, hacked at with fingers and a plastic scraper, until the last feather of its tail was gone. She screwed the skylark into a ball, and threw it to the floor.
Blind, cold, shaking fury. I felt it rise. I hated that woman. I wanted to burst into the bank, scream at her, pick up the tangled ball that was a skylark and take it home. Smooth it out, save it from harm. Across the table my student friend was looking at me with the same expression of baffled concern that the waiter had worn on the night my father died. That also made me angry. I was angry with the woman for tearing down the skylark and angry with this nice, innocent man who gave me no cause to be angry at all. I mumbled an unsatisfactory apology, told him that ‘things have been hard since my father died’, and ‘it isn’t your fault’ and ‘I’m sorry, and this is awful, but I really have to go’. I walked past the window as I crossed the street. The woman was back on her chair, smoothing a new sticker out against the glass: a giant arrow that pointed at nothing. I could not meet her eye.
Then I started crashing my father’s car. I didn’t mean to: it just happened. I backed up against bollards, scraped wings against walls, heard the sound of metal squealing in agony over and over again, and I’d get out of the car and rub the new gouges dumbly with my fingers, as if somehow that might fix them, though they ran through the paint to the metal below. ‘Are you punishing your father’s car because he left you?’ asked a psychoanalytically-minded and fairly tactless friend. I thought about that. ‘No,’ I said, embarrassed because my answer was so much less interesting. ‘It’s that I don’t know what shape my car is any more.’ It was true. I couldn’t keep the dimensions of the car in my head. Or my own, for I kept having accidents. I cracked cups. I dropped plates. Fell over. Broke a toe on a door-jamb. I was as clumsy as I had been as a child. But when I was busy with Mabel I was never clumsy. The world with the hawk in it was insulated from harm, and in that world I was exactly aware of all the edges of my skin. Every night I slept and dreamed of creances, of lines and knots, of skeins of wool, skeins of geese flying south. And every afternoon I walked out onto the pitch with relief, because when the hawk was on my fist I knew who I was, and I was never angry with her, even if I wanted to sink to my knees and weep every time she tried to fly away.
15
For whom the bell