Gos never died. He was only lost. For all White’s certainty that his hawk was dead, there was always a chance, even to the very end of the book, even further, that the hawk might return. In the childish depths of my mind the hawk was out there, still in the wood, his yellow toes clutching rough bark and his pale eyes watching me from a dark tangle of branches somewhere in the multitudinous sea of hundred thousand trees.
Melanie Klein3 wrote that children go through states of mind comparable to mourning, and that this early mourning is revived whenever grief is experienced in later life. She thought that adults try to manage newer losses the way they managed older ones. I thought of that drawing of a kestrel, its carefully worked jesses pencilled over and over again by my six-year-old hand with all its desperate insistence on the safety of knots and lines.
Gos was still out there in the forest, the dark forest to which all things lost must go. I’d wanted to slip across the borders of this world into that wood and bring back the hawk White lost. Some part of me that was very small and old had known this, some part of me that didn’t work according to the everyday rules of the world but with the logic of myths and dreams. And that part of me had hoped, too, that somewhere in that other world was my father. His death had been so sudden. There had been no time to prepare for it, no sense in it happening at all. He could only be lost. He was out there, still, somewhere out there in that tangled wood with all the rest of the lost and dead. I know now what those dreams in spring had meant, the ones of a hawk slipping through a rent in the air into another world. I’d wanted to fly with the hawk to find my father; find him and bring him home.
24
Drugs
SOMETIMES WHEN LIGHT dawns it simply illuminates how dismal circumstances have become. Every morning I wake at five and have thirty seconds’ lead-time before despair crashes in. I don’t dream of my father any more; I don’t dream of people at all. I walk over winter sandflats, past storm-pools of fog-reflecting water packed with migrant birds stranded by the weather, unable to fly south for winter. Sometimes I dream I’m climbing trees that crack and fall, or sailing tiny boats that overturn in frozen seas. They are pathetic dreams. I don’t need an analyst to explain them. I know now that I’m not trusting anyone or anything any more. And that it is hard to live for long periods without trusting anyone or anything. It’s like living without sleep; eventually it will kill you.
I have spent my evenings playing with Mabel. I’ve made her toys out of paper and tissue and card. She turns her head upside down, puffs out her chin-feathers, squeaks, picks up the toys in her beak, drops them, and preens. When I throw her balls of scrunched-up paper she catches them in her beak and tosses them back to me with a flick of her head. Then she crouches, waiting for me to throw them to her again. It is as good as it gets. When I told Stuart I played catch with her for a while he didn’t believe me. You don’t play with goshawks. It’s not what people do. But I have had to, to somehow leaven the chill. Because other people with goshawks have people too. For them their goshawks are their little splinter of wildness, their balance to domesticity; out in the woods with the hawk, other falconers get in touch with their solitudinous, bloody souls. But then they come home and have dinner, watch TV, play with their kids, sleep with their partner, wake, make tea, go to work. You need both sides, as they say.