That story made me shiver when I read it, because that was what it was like. I’d turned myself into a hawk – taken all the traits of goshawks in the books and made them my own. I was nervous, highly strung, paranoid, prone to fits of terror and rage; I ate greedily or didn’t eat at all; I fled from society, hid from everything; found myself drifting into strange states where I wasn’t certain who or what I was. In hunting with Mabel, day after day, I had assumed – in my imagination, of course, but that was all it could ever be – her alien perspective, her inhuman understanding of the world. It brought something akin to madness, and I did not understand what I had done. When I was small I’d thought turning into a hawk would be a magical thing. What I’d read in The Sword in the Stone encouraged me to think it, too, as a good and instructive thing; a lesson in life for the child who would be king. But now the lesson was killing me. It was not at all the same.
Two days before the service something very strange happened on the hill. We’d been walking up a hedgerow running down the edge of a field of undersown stubble. There was a pheasant in the hedge; I’d heard it cluck and run, rat-wise, along the damp and nettly ditch, and Mabel had heard it too. She’d crashed over the hedge and perched out of sight at the top, facing away from me. Her blood was up and mine too. I shouldered my way into the hedge, knowing that any second now the pheasant would rocket out in front of me in a burnished clatter of feathers. I pushed my head through the hedge. Heard a whoosh of air and felt a staggering blow. I reeled. Coshed by a goshawk! First only blackness, then a field of stars. Then a weird proprioceptive sense that I was wearing a crown of thorns; a complicated halo of pain around my head. She’d bounced off me, left eight talon incisions behind, and was back at the top of the tree, craning to see the pheasant, which had done what all pheasants do best: escape. I shook my head dully. She thought I was the pheasant. She didn’t know it was me. A strange buzzing in my ears, and then a muffled calm as the endorphins kicked in. I held my hand out and whistled her down to my fist, then mechanically started working the rest of the hedge-line. We were walking into the sun at this point, and I started taking a warm, distinct pleasure in the fuzzy gold aura that bathed us. Light-headed, slightly unsure of my footing, I finally wondered, Why is my vision strange, and why do my eyes sting? Then, Why is the goshawk bating at my face?
It took me a while to work out why both. I rubbed my eyes and my hand came away soaked, dramatically and Shakespearianly, in blood. I pulled off my glasses. They were covered in it. Blood was running in streams down my forehead, into my left eye, and was now attracting the attention of a hungry goshawk.
Christ, I thought, this is a bit Edgar Allan Poe.
I used my sleeve and some wet grass to get the worst off. Luckily this was sufficient to make the goshawk uninterested in eating me. I felt for the talon incision: a half-inch long, deep slash right between my eyes. Ah, yes, the sixth chakra, the seat of concealed wisdom, now rouged with an austringer’s bindi. I pressed the place hard with my fingers until it stopped bleeding.
And then I kept on hawking, stumbling across the fields in a haze of pained euphoria. The sun had descended behind sheets of cinereal stratus to become a luminous disc glowing through talc-filled air, and it was exactly the same colour as Mabel’s eye. I held her up, comparing sun with goshawk eye and marvelled at their correspondence. By the time we’d reached the top of the hill my legs rebelled. Enough, they said. Enough walking. Sit down. Have a nap.
So I sat in the stubble, woozily glorying at the beauty of it all. The mist rising in the hollows. Flocks of golden plover pouring over in sheaves. The way the bluish new rapeseed leaves contrasted with the vertical straw of the stubble at my feet. The glow of the lost sun beneath the ridge. Crickets beginning to sing. Rooks on their way to roost passing over us in moving constellations of small black stars. And perhaps that cosh to the head had knocked some human sense back into me, because when I got home I sat on the sofa and wrote my father’s eulogy, straight out, in twenty minutes, with a small round plaster stuck on my injured forehead.
23
Memorial
I SAT ON the train clutching the folder with the speech inside, ankles burning from the heater on the floor. Outside, winter breathed in. Papery skies. Glittering trees. A wash of backlit fields that folded and shrank as the city grew. Then I was at the church, folder in hand, staring at hundreds of feet on the black and white floor, hundreds of shoulders and ties and points of collars, hems of skirts, clicks and echoes of tiny black heels. I worried I hadn’t dressed smartly enough. I was wearing a black cotton dress from Debenhams. Maybe it was the wrong thing? Why hadn’t I gone and bought a proper outfit? Something expensive, and smart, and sharp around the edges? It took a few seconds before it struck me that my panic might not be about clothes at all. I sat down in the stalls between my mother and my brother, took their hands, light-headed with love and sorrow. My aunt was here, my brother’s partner and her parents too. We were a family. We were. I looked around for the other speakers: Ron Morgans and Alastair Campbell, who’d worked with Dad for years, and Jeremy Selwyn, another photographer, biting his lip and watching the crowds pour in.
I walked up to the lectern with the paper in my hand. I had given so many lectures, so many talks, that I’d thought this would be easy. But it was not. I was terrified. I grabbed the lectern’s wooden edges to stop me from swaying. How can I do this? Don’t look at the audience, said a voice inside me. Pretend they’re not there.