A Thousand Paper Birds Read online

  For Tom

  In memory of

  Hiromi Kawabata

  1965–2015

  CONTENTS

  Part I The Opposite of Gravity

  Audrey’s Smile

  A Book of Kisses

  Practising Gods

  A Place for Lost Things

  The Gardener’s Bible

  Bird Life

  A Guitar Riff

  Beautiful Collisions

  Part II Falling

  RIP

  A Dress Falls

  A Sheet of Paper (can become many things)

  A Day in September

  Part III What We’re Looking For Lies in the Space Between Us

  Chess

  A Piece of String

  How to Not Say I Love You

  The Wounded Angel

  Part IV A Difficult Art

  The Garden of Eden

  Homing Pigeon

  A Game of Conkers

  Interludes in Late October

  The Stillbirth of Anything that Craves to be Born

  Part V The Flower Press

  The Dreamcatcher

  The Ruined Arch

  Part VI A Song in Q

  A Misfit

  The Patterns that Make Us

  The Last Thought

  Credits

  A Note on Kew Gardens

  Acknowledgements

  A Note on the Author

  Doesn’t one always think of the past, in a garden with men and women lying under the trees? Aren’t they one’s past, all that remains of it, those men and women, those ghosts lying under the trees . . . one’s happiness, one’s reality?

  Kew Gardens, Virginia Woolf

  Part I

  The Opposite of Gravity

  Written in pain, written in awe

  By a puzzled man who questioned

  What we were here for

  ‘Oh! You Pretty Things’, David Bowie

  Audrey’s Smile

  Jonah stands at the threshold. His wife’s scent hangs in the air, a perfume she has worn for years. He remains in the doorway, surveying the chalk-white walls, the varnished floorboards, the embroidered red throw. The shelves are crammed with books and the memories of reading them; times spent together yet alone, separated by different characters and continents. His gaze rests on a bunch of flowers that he bought three days ago, the yellow petals drooping.

  Sun streams through the large sash windows, creating ghosts from avenues of dust. Particles shimmer. The room looks preserved, the tulips jarred in an antique glow. When Jonah steps inside he is unmoored in a place that should feel like home. Anything true is a memory.

  Bile rises in his throat. He wades through the sunlight, searching for comfort. Here is a paperback splayed open across the arm of the sofa to bookmark her page. A cardigan on the back of a chair, a lipstick stranded by the kettle, a shopping list posted on the fridge; her handwriting hasty, impatient, her thinking perfect. Here is the laundry, his jeans with their stubborn, ink-stained pockets. These are the things she touched. Her fingers . . .

  What she has left behind is delicate. It makes him feel oafish, his hands useless, mammoth. A photograph shows Audrey walking away, glancing back towards the camera, her red hair. Her hair that he remembers tangled against their pillow or salt-drenched from the Sicilian sea. She had burnt her nose that day.

  This is the crease of time. The sag of an hour. Everything is so still it feels wrong to breathe. The silence stretches seamlessly through the flat while Jonah stands, gathering dust. He waits for Audrey to come in with a crooked smile and a mug of tea. The gap between her front teeth – beyond beauty.

  The head of a tulip releases its grip. Jonah stands amid the petals, the dead light. But his wife never boils the kettle, or enters with that wonky, luminous smile.

  Outside the window, Kew Road is dappled in spring and passing people. The sky is in its rightful place, as are the tops of the trees he can see behind the wall of the botanical gardens. Inside the flat, the fridge is still stocked with milk, the crockery still red. The furniture hasn’t been moved, nor the streetlamps, or the bins on the pavement, but Jonah can no longer recognise this place. It is as if overnight the world has been rearranged.

  A Book of Kisses

  Harry Barclay catches sight of himself in the Paperchase window. Astonished. Wrecked. It’s familiar, the face he has always worn, the blinking blue eyes – but he looks like a man who is lost, unable to find a way out. Pull yourself together, Hal. He plunges his hand into his pocket, where there’s a roll of industrial tape, some litter (a lollipop wrapper, foil from a fag packet) and then, caught in the bottom, several seeds. Patting his other pocket, he finds his notebook.

  It is soft-backed, the colour of cardboard. Inside is a bookmark of a black and white photo. Decades ago, Harry ripped it from a magazine, the well-thumbed page now folded into quarters. It marks the passage he is looking for: a list of train times from Paddington.

  HB. 07.06.04.

  District Line to Earl’s Court

  16.07

  16.27

  Every 10 minutes

  Not knowing when Jonah will leave, he wants to get there early. It’s only been twelve days, but Jonah is teaching. Undoubtedly he said something brave, like the kids need him, the exams are coming. A woman knocks into Harry. Unapologetic, she rushes across the forecourt, struggling to balance a takeaway coffee with her purse, her phone, her ticket. Harry feels someone watching: a boy in a pushchair a few feet away. What is the child looking at: a man in his early fifties, a well-cut suit that has seen better days? He hopes that his rusty-orange scarf marks him as artistic, but the kid is gazing at the darned elbow of Harry’s jacket.

  He stuffs the notebook into his breast pocket. Nodding goodbye to the infant’s stillness, he enters the chaos: the shudder and snap of ticket gates, the rush-hour tide. The escalator takes him down into the filthy veins of the city, the lifeblood of London. He pulls off his hat, a gentleman’s flat cap, and anxiously rubs the rim.

  On the District Line platform, posters tell him what to buy and how to escape to ‘A Heaven Called Florida’. While commuters fan themselves with newspapers, Harry searches for a man in his late thirties, carrying a beige satchel stained with red ink. It will probably be full of school reports, examples of Mozart minuets, a rondeau. He spots Jonah’s head above the crowd – his hefty frame, the bag. As the train pulls into the station, Harry rushes along the platform. He elbows his way into the same carriage, his face pressed into another man’s armpit.

  Jonah Wilson is wearing a dowdy brown suit, and bowing his head as if trying to be the same height as the others. Through the array of limbs and luggage, Harry catches glimpses – the beard, jam on his shirt cuff. But nothing is the way Harry imagined. He weighs up the difference between this man and Audrey’s description. He had expected someone smaller, not this reliable back, these broad shoulders. How can such an oak of a man be felled?

  The tube stifles; the stench of communal sweat, smoke-stained clothes, the reek of takeaway cartons. It’s tinged with a sweetness Harry can’t put his finger on. Bubble gum, perhaps. Crammed against others, he notices the fractured intimacy between friends, a smile across someone’s shoulder. He misses her – those unguarded moments. The way Audrey picked up a mug, or tucked her hair behind her ear. How she touched her lips with the back of her knuckles . . . her yawn building from a blink, to a gasp, as if her body’s need for oxygen had ambushed her.

  At Earl’s Court, they change trains. As Jonah sits down, his sadness spills on to the upholstered seats; it leaks and drips. Harry remains at a distance, his tongue dry and useless. The first time I met Audrey I saved her life. As they continue their journey past Hammersmith, the crowd thins. News
papers lie strewn on empty seats. When they finally cross Kew Bridge, there’s a sense of space. Relief. Harry thumbs through his notebook.

  . . . the alarming destruction of the world’s flora. Rare palms are disappearing for ever. Our Madagascar periwinkle is one of two left in the world. Five years ago we rescued the lady’s slipper orchid from extinction. This is what we do, we stop things from dying.

  No. No, I don’t.

  The entry was written three days ago. Harry has kept this journal for years, methodically charting the progress of plants, noting which trees are starting to weaken. On the next page is tiny scrawl.

  They come to Kew in their millions – to appreciate the quality of time and their part in it. Some shoot the breeze with God, a bud or a falling leaf. This is a garden of grace . . .

  The words blur, Harry’s eyes cataracted by grief.

  Kew Gardens station. Harry looks up and notices again the undeniable attraction of the man Audrey said yes to. As both men walk into the sunshine, the weight on Harry’s back is heavier than all the rain in the world. How can a man made of mist shoulder it? Impossible.

  Half-hidden among the cool green of the reeds, a heron stands on one leg, watching the sun glint on the water. Its wings are the colour of a bruise as it waits silently, like an old man wearing a coat of straggly feathers. There are four wooded islands on the lake, undisturbed by humans; stamping grounds for coots, moorhens and Canada geese. The air thrums with birdsong and damselflies darting between the campion and blanketweed. Around the water, benches offer sun or shade, solitude or company, but each bears something in common: the name of someone who has died.

  Under the sweet chestnut is Eliza Wainwright, ‘who so very much loved these gardens’. Around a large English oak, a circle of benches faces outwards, naming the crew of Flight 103, who died in the Lockerbie bombing. On the westerly side of the lake, a concrete platform ventures ten feet out across the water. A solitary man sits on its wooden seat. His brown suit looks out of place with his matted hair, as if he is a tamed Samson from The Book of Judges. He has the same colossal bones, the beard, but without his wife, he has lost his energy, his talent.

  An hour before closing time, this is the only place Jonah can bear to be, worlds away from the Paddington comprehensive. This morning, he believed he could do it – Sophie was struggling with her chord progressions, Ben needed a letter for his mum – but even taking the register made him want to weep: Present. Present. Absent.

  As Jonah leans down for his satchel, the size of his back tests his suit’s seams. After taking out a pile of essays, he tries to decipher a teenager’s sloppy handwriting. He rubs his itchy eyes, tries again, but it’s like he’s suffering from sunstroke. He has no armour against the way the light is dripping through the trees, the day’s warmth an insult. The simplest things injure: a damselfly landing on a reed, a drawing pin stuck to the sole of his shoe – Audrey had pointed it out a few weeks ago. Even drinking his bottle of water stings. Without her, he has no pivot to give sense to the day’s existence. What right, he asks, has the world to be beautiful today?

  A mallard waddles out of the lake while a swan bullies two geese. The hole she has left stretches and crystallises, crushing his lungs until he can barely breathe. Without her, the air has thinned. The funeral is in two days. He still hasn’t chosen the music. The floors in his home are covered in CDs: a ‘no’ pile, a ‘maybe’. A friend had suggested a track from Jonah’s old LP.

  ‘C’mon, there are twelve songs to choose from—’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Twelve different Audreys—’

  ‘For Christ’s sake, how could I pick?’

  Sitting by the lake, Jonah hums, yet again, the same four notes of an elegy, but can’t compose the next phrase.

  ‘I know nothing about Schubert,’ she had said on their first date.

  ‘Says she, who can speak five languages.’

  ‘Six.’

  They were standing in this same garden, fireworks lighting up her wine-flushed face. The strains of ‘Ave Maria’ still lingered in the air, and now the idea forms as if Jonah is hearing it. Inspired by a quote from Schubert, he knows what the inscription will be. But how do you order a bench for the deceased? Should he ask at the information desk or is it best to call – and will they, like the undertakers, bombard him with choices between mahogany and oak?

  Jonah sneezes with hay fever. Head down, his eyes focus. A cigar butt litters the foot of the bench. As he nudges it with his heel, he recalls Audrey’s lips around a cigarette. He said he despised her addiction, but perhaps he was just jealous that her lips weren’t pressed against his. How many times did they kiss in the nine years they were together? A thousand times, a million? In his mind’s eye he makes a list of all the kisses he has loved; the kiss hello that told him about her day, the sleepy satisfaction of their mouths after sex . . . a luscious lingering. There was the salt tasted on her cheeks after a fight, the I’m-late-but-I-want-to-stay kiss, or her lips on the back of his neck that suggested how many possibilities there were for the next. Then there was the kiss he hadn’t known was their last.

  Was it an accident? The witnesses said there was no reason for her to swerve the way she did. Jonah remembers the uncomfortable shrugs. ‘It’s not your fault. Depression is an illness.’ Her friends talked of the waste, the fact that she was only thirty-six. But Jonah can’t comprehend his wife choosing to leave. All the years he assumed were theirs, all that future taken for granted. He tries to imagine Audrey at eighty, how her mouth might then feel against his. Jonah gazes up at the sky. But look at all the kisses you gave up.

  On the morning of the funeral, Harry scrubs the mud from his boots, hoping to scourge out the blame. Even at 5 a.m. he knows the day will be humid. He finds some tape to bind a fraying lace. As he threads a carnation through his buttonhole, the irony of wearing a dianthus – the so-called ‘Flower of God’ – does not escape him. He thinks about it for the entire train journey to Cornwall.

  The church is close to the sea. Audrey spent her childhood summers here, and Harry imagines her running barefoot through the poppy meadow, a graze on her knee. But today there are only her family and friends, overheating in their Sunday best. The afternoon reeks of honeysuckle and sweat. Men, sutured up in suits, are restless. The headstones seem to be the only ones relaxed, leaning into the sunshine like drunkards.

  The rhythm of waiting shifts, noise levels increasing and diminishing, as people talk about the weather then stop to stare across the meadow for Audrey’s imminent arrival. Her mother, Tilly, circulates as if she’s at a cocktail party. She talks loudly about Audrey’s ‘illness’ as if she could erase the word ‘suicide’. She keeps playing with the pearls around her neck, and her constant, lipstick-smeared smile makes Harry think of a turkey. It’s the creases around her throat, the way her smile pecks and grabs. She waves at her younger lover, but he’s looking for a place to scrape off some dog muck, his foot hesitating against a gravestone.

  The others continue their asymmetrical, repetitive dance. Scratch burning arm, look at watch, smile at someone in the crowd. Try to blink away the heat, the disbelief. ‘Audrey never did anything unexpected.’ Her father, Charles Hartman, walks up to the church, a debonair gent, once a fiend with the ladies. He now seems like a scuffed shoe in need of a polish.

  The woman they are waiting for arrives. A second car pulls up and Jonah steps out, shielding his eyes from the sun. His hair is tied back.

  The family walk behind the coffin. Once they have proceeded through the vestibule, Harry files in with the rest of the congregation. As he sits down in the pew, he realises that he’s still waiting for Audrey to come down the aisle. He imagines her blinking as she leaves the bright day, her summer dress framed in the doorway. But she is already at the altar, inside that box, and no one else appears in the arch of light at the entrance.

  The vicar takes his place in the pulpit and describes Audrey’s academic brilliance, her excellent taste, her desire to be
buried in Cornwall. When he sidesteps the suspicion of suicide and speaks of a car accident, two women begin crying. But it doesn’t sound human. It’s a strange kind of singing that echoes around the church until it sets off a domino of emotion. The organ begins, and the congregation cries in arpeggios, their resolutions not to weep breaking when they reach the high E. ‘He who would valiant be ’gainst all disaster’. Harry’s hymn sheet trembles, the words scattering and blurring into nothing. He gives up and studies Jonah’s father. An old man, who has also lost his wife, reaches out and puts all his bony strength into his son’s hand. As they both teeter, Harry catches himself thinking how wonderful this is, how wonderful to be grieved. What must this be like, Audrey? Can you see?

  The wake is almost jolly; they have a picnic and a marquee. There’s a low hubbub of polite conversation while hot red faces nibble on sandwiches, and bored children moan that there is no jelly. There are photographs of Audrey in a file, and people flick through, reminiscing.

  ‘My goodness, doesn’t she look young there?’

  ‘I never knew she went to Israel.’

  ‘Do you remember when . . .?’

  ‘I’m sure Jonah took that one.’

  ‘How’s he coping?’

  At least Jonah’s dad knows there is nothing to say. He sits on a deckchair, nursing a beer, then a small child climbs on to his lap: ‘Grandpa, play horsey with me.’ On the other side of the marquee, Audrey’s parents are enduring a polite conversation. Harry notices their other halves flirting with each other, then realises that Jonah is missing.

  As he leaves the tent, the light is turning, the grass becoming wet. Harry walks through rows of gravestones, the names scrubbed away by sea-salt and wind. A silhouette hangs over Audrey’s grave. It seems like Jonah is carrying the burden of the sky on his shoulders, then he glances up, and stares.

  Harry’s mouth opens. He’s a stranger at the funeral, a gatecrasher, but Jonah raises his arm halfway and gives an unsure wave. Harry can sense his sleeplessness, his incomprehension. They both blink at the demi-light, the evening’s veils shrouding them. Harry wants the ground to swallow him, or to duck behind a gravestone. Instead he attempts a smile as if he’s supposed to be there. Perhaps he can be a distant uncle – someone who remembers a girl Jonah never knew. The air thickens, as if the gaze of two men is forming a bridge . . . an invitation to travel between here and there. Perhaps Jonah feels it too. Aware of the danger, Harry doffs his hat. His action disturbs an intricate balance, and Jonah turns away, the atmosphere broken.