My job was over. It was time to move. I was already an emotional mess, but the stress of the move pushed my dysfunction to spectacular proportions. The new house in the suburbs was nothing like the old house in the city: it was huge and modern, with a vast front room for the hawk to sleep in and lawns to sun herself upon. I filled the freezer with hawk food and a stack of frozen pizzas. Dragged my clothes upstairs in their plastic sacks, dumped them in a pile by the bedroom door. The rain came again, thin and sour, and I spent my first day there sprawled on the sofa with a notepad on my knees, failing to write my father’s memorial address. I have five minutes, I kept thinking, dully. Five minutes to speak of my father’s life.
The house was full of toys: alphabet blocks and jigsaws, plush animals in boxes, pictures in felt-tip pen and glitter pinned to the kitchen walls. It was a family house and there was no family in it. The emptiness I felt was my own, but in my madness I began to feel the house didn’t want me, that it missed its family and was mourning their loss. I stayed out longer with Mabel, found it harder and harder to return, because out with the hawk I didn’t need a home. Out there I forgot I was human at all. Everything the hawk saw was raw and real and drawn hair-fine, and everything else was dampened to nothing. The landscape built meanings in my head that felt like pressures, like light, like gifts: sensations impossible to put into words, like the apprehension of danger, or someone reading over your shoulder. Everything became more complicated but strangely simple too. The hedgerows that were once hawthorn, blackthorn, maple and ash were now all of a piece and nameless, wrought of the same stuff as me; they felt like inanimate people, no more or less important than the hawk, than me, or anything else on the hill. Sometimes my phone rang and I’d answer it. The effort to drag myself out of the bright nimbus of land cut with lines of strategy and hawkish desire was terrible. It was usually my mother. She had to say everything twice, to begin with, as if she were coaching me in how to return from this strange hedgerow ontology to more ordinary humanity.
‘Hello!’ she’d say.
Silence.
‘Hello?’
And Mabel would be on my fist, tail fanned, shoulders dropped, staring through me and the phone, and her attention catching on everything serially. Fieldfence-fieldfare-wingflick-pheasant-feather-on-path-sun-on-wire-twelve-woodpigeons-half-a-mile-distant-tick-tick-tick and Mum’s saying:
‘How are you?’
‘Fine, Mum. How are you?’
‘I’m OK. Have you heard from James?’
Her voice was slow and deep compared to the constant indexical chatter of things and I couldn’t hear what she was really saying because there were twelve woodpigeons half a mile away and the hawk was looking at them and so was I. I could not hear my mother’s pain. I could not feel my own.
We’d come to a different place today, a field on the other side of town overrun with rabbits. It took less than a minute for Mabel to grab one deep in a drift of nettles. Hawks don’t retrieve their prey: you must run to them, let them eat a while, then take them back onto your fist for a reward of food. I ran, bent down, parted the stinging stems, picked the rabbit up with the hawk, and put them both down on the grass. Now the rabbit is dead, its pelt bunched between the hawk’s gripping talons, but blood upwells as she breaks into its chest, and I cannot stop watching it, this horrible, mesmerising, seeping claret filling up the space, growing jelly-like as it meets the air, like a thing alive. It was a thing alive. I want to sit and think. This is a great mystery. I feel something pressing against my own chest, leaning in, a question wanting an answer. But there’s no time for contemplation: I have to get her back on the glove, or she’ll stuff her face and won’t fly tomorrow. It’s time for the ancient falconer’s trick to stop a hawk from feeling she’s been robbed of her prize. First I cut off one of the rabbit’s hind legs and hide it behind my back, then lay handfuls of grass in a stack by my side. Then I hold out the leg in my glove, throwing the grass over the rabbit to hide it. The hawk looks down, sees grass at her feet, looks up, sees food, leaps straight to my fist and eats.
And as I tuck the rabbit into the back pocket of my waistcoat the noise begins. First it is a low, dopplering growl. It dies away, returns. Engines. Big engines, growing louder. The note climbs to a vast marine roar – and a Second World War bomber, a Flying Fortress, emerges from behind the trees. Woodpigeons spray from the tops of the oaks in terror. Pheasants crow, shadows flicker, the remaining rabbits bolt to their holes. I feel an urgent need to hide. But Mabel gives the monstrous thing a single, indifferent glance and continues to eat. I’m astonished. How can the hawk not see it as a threat, this vast, impossibly heavy whale of a plane? She comes right overhead, absurdly low; she is painted a deep USAAF wartime green, and as she banks through the sun-furred air I see the bomb bay and the gun turret on her belly. The size of her, the deep thrumming drone of her four Pratt & Whitney engines, the sense that she is alive, an animal – all these things hold me transfixed. I sit back on my heels and stare, my fear forgotten. And two lines fall into my head.
Consider this, and in our time