There was a week of rain. Sim was out most days. At night Maggie heard him working in his room, long late hours.
She was startled when, one morning, he sought her out.
“I’m sorry I’ve been a miserable git,” he said. “I’ve been fucked with work and just feeling crap, you know? Anyway, sorry.”
“No worries,” she said. “How’s it going?”
“I’m tired. But it’s OK, actually.” Sim sounded surprised but sincere. He smiled. “It’s started going well. Really well. I think I’ve had a bit of a breakthrough. Been nose-to-grindstoning.”
“Good.”
“I’ve been doing some comics too.”
“Cool, I remember you did that in uni.”
He showed her. To her it looked like lackluster work, pen-and-ink of his inevitable rabbit figure in various pop-surreal situations.
“Cool,” she said.
“I know it looks a bit flat like this,” he said, “but when you present it right …”
“He seems really excited by it,” she said to Ricardo. “I don’t see it myself, but if it’s going to make him easier to be around, I’m all for it.”
“You don’t see it? I think he’s got a lot better.”
He showed her the website again. The rabbit. The garish landscape. There was the digitized house. The colors, the designs, the story lines, were more or less as they had been, but there was a new confidence. Where before there had been hesitation disguised as hip mannerism, now there was a frightening fluidity. It was easy to see that the objects that inhabited this boisterous landscape had agendas.
“Jesus,” Maggie said.
The rabbit crept across the lawn again. It climbed into a window. It crept out, holding a motionless human child. It stole away.
“See?” said Ricardo. “Not just better but genuinely scary.”
“Stop,” Maggie said. She put her hands in front of the screen.
Maggie took Mack in her arms. She stood outside Sim’s room. She had heard him leave but she waited and listened and when she was certain he was gone she bit her lip and entered.
Sim had propped the frame, its glass removed, on the edge of his desk against the wall.
His laptop was open, its screen dark. There were pictures and pages of writing all over the desk. Images of grotesque adventures, as absurd and sometimes as pathetic as they were horrifying, which she assumed was the intent. Scraps of writing, overworked poems in cramped penmanship. They were pushed by wide margins into the center of their pieces of paper.
Maggie examined them. Around every one, at the papers’ edges, were scratches. Lines where something had been pressed.
The frame was precisely the same dimensions as these marks. Sim had been holding it onto the paper. He had been writing and drawing through it, within it.
Mack fussed. Maggie looked through the frame, at the wallpaper, the four blue trees it contained.
On the wall the blue trees were mid-writhe as if they were dancing, as if the wind was stroking them. The trees within the frame, identical trees, curled slyly, gathering for something.
She phoned Ricardo. “Where are you? When are you coming home?”
“What’s up?” Ricardo said.
“Can you come home? Just come back, please.”
She saw on her phone that Sim had re-cut his urban videos. A new narrative, a new succession of images. The same characters she had seen many times, cutting across the city in ways that were not allowed. Familiar shots of Sim edited so now he was an operative on some bad mission.
The way it was cut, the explorers glanced, repeatedly, in shot after shot, at the corner of the screen. The lower right. As if at something welling up.
“No,” Maggie said. She turned Mack away from the window. Twilight was starting and the railway tracks were shining.
She touched the track pad on Sim’s laptop. In the light of its screen saver she saw two buds of Blu Tack on the base of the screen. Something had been pressed into them. She picked up the frame and ran her fingers around its interior, the channel cut just behind a little overhang of the wood, where the art would sit. The frame’s corners fit in the marks in the putty. Its dark sides contained the center of the screen.
Within the frame, the screen saver’s shapes involuted in terrible ways, like sea animals bursting. Sim had propped it against his screen and made his new work inside the frame.
Mack began to cry and Maggie rocked him till she could put him to bed. She took the frame downstairs. She held it out as if it was dirty and set it on the nearest shelf. She wiped her hand and called Ricardo again.
“Whoever made this, it’s not right. Sim won’t even tell us where it’s from. It was never the picture that was fucked.”
“OK,” he said. “OK, what are you telling me?”
Maggie looked through the empty wood at the books behind it. Framed by it.
Pride and Prejudice, that spite on those slave bones. One of Mack’s favorites, Goodnight Moon. The universe closing on a sick void.
She took the frame to the kitchen and held it up in front of the toothpaste advertisement again.
Three girls with white teeth. They wanted to do something bad. The one in the middle with gusto and without remorse. The one on the right would hit a woman with a brick. The last, in a bright zigzag jumper, would put spikes in strangers’ shoes and fly through the night over her small town with her teeth dripping spit. She would cut down all the trees. The girls would bring the counterman rings from the fingers of those they drowned and he would put poison in the Coca-Cola.
Mack had started crying again. Maggie heard Ricardo’s voice. She still held the phone to her ear, she realized, and he had been shouting.
She tried to answer several times. “You need to come home,” she managed at last to whisper. “Mack’s in his cot and he’s waiting for you.”
She broke the connection over Ricardo’s shouts and she heard Mack crying but she fled the house. She had to take the frame as far away as she could, to keep her son safe. To keep the girls safe. Maggie ran.
There was still a little light. The canal was a few streets away. She ran past pubs, past drinkers who glanced up and watched her sprint.
When she heard footsteps behind her she was not surprised.
She turned through the yellow lights of off-licenses and newsagents. “You alright, love?” someone shouted. She ran and Sim ran behind her. He would catch her. He knew where she was going. She turned onto a darker, quieter street that rose over a railway tunnel in the lights of residential blocks. He would catch her before she reached the water.
Maggie got to the crest of the hill and could not run any more. She turned and Sim was not running any more either. He was walking toward her, the last of the sunset behind him.
He held up his hands. He looked at her through the rectangle he made with his fingers. He came slowly closer. She watched his face through his hands.
Maggie slammed the frame against the bricks of the bridge. Sim screamed.
She swung it as hard as she could and with a great crack it snapped into two pieces. She pulled them apart and held each in one hand and flailed them again and broke them more, along their imperfectly glued joins.
The frame broke into pieces and Sim howled.
Maggie threw the broken wood over the wall. It scattered onto the tracks a long way below and on slants of trash, to become pieces among many pieces, with the plastic, the detergent bottles, the glass, to be bleached by the sun.
“No no no!” shouted Sim. “What did you do? My work …” He stared over the edge of the bridge. He looked at her in grief and fury and there was no one there to come between them.
He ran to her and smacked her in the face and she reeled and turned back to face him, holding her cheek.
“You brought that into my house,” she said, and her voice was almost steady. “I have a child.”
“Hey!” someone shouted from an overlooking window. “I’ve called the cops, mate!”
&nb
sp; “Stay out of my house,” she said. She staggered up to him and spat and said, “It helped your work? You should be on your knees thanking me for saving you from whatever that shit was. Stay the fuck out of my house.”
He stared at her and she thought he would hit her again but for a long time he didn’t move.
A police car turned whooping up the street. Officers took him and he did not fight them. They came to her and took care of her. They drove the streets until they found Ricardo, desperate, Mack in his arms, phoning, shouting, trying to find her.
“I thought he might try to explain,” Ricardo said. “Try to talk to us. Through the police. Send a message.”
“Explain what?” Maggie said. They cleared the last of Sim’s belongings from the house.
“Are you worried?” Ricardo said.
“I don’t think so,” she said. “No. Fuck him.”
The charge was Actual Bodily Harm. They had been astonished that he was not remanded, but the police had explained that they had no grounds to hold him. He had to report to them regularly. They saw him all the time, they were keeping an eye.
“He needs to be off the streets,” Ricardo said. “You know what he did.”
“He’s a bit of a broken man, to be honest,” said the liaison officer.
“My heart bleeds,” said Ricardo.
“Oh, absolutely,” the woman said. “I’m just saying he’s had a bit of a breakdown. My point isn’t poor baby, it’s that I wouldn’t worry. There are people I do worry about. To be honest. He isn’t one of them.”
Maggie checked his website. The work was still online, unchanged. The last time she had watched it had been a sinister, brilliant coagulation of images, the sense of a plan. The rabbit in its landscape. An explorer on a mission, unclear in a rough photograph, in her attic.
Now she saw videographic cliché. Infantile shock animation.
“I know the wheels grind very slow,” the officer said. “He hasn’t tried to contact you? Because that would …”
“No.”
Sometimes Maggie ignored it all. Sometimes she followed links and tried to remember the look and feel of the frame in her hand. It had been simple, without molding. All wood. She strove to remember the shape of the glued joins when the thing sprung apart. She looked at diagrams and learned a new vocabulary. The float. The lip. The rabbet.
Sitting at her computer, Maggie considered trying to track the thing’s history. A bad death, or two, or many, in that room full of discarded art. What else had that chisel, along the gouges made by which she had run her fingers, cut? There had been stains in the rabbet, the channel in which the artwork sat.
As if she would ask Sim where he had been, where he had found this. If she were a true researcher, she might find some carpenter to the art world guilty of murder. And what if she did?
Or the wood. It might have come from an evil tree. Or the varnish, full of spite. Or nothing. What would change?
She closed her computer.
“He took his website down,” Ricardo said one day. “It’s still registered in his name, it’s just gone. Fucking coward.”
They were pinched, but they did not take on another lodger. When Maggie imagined Sim, it was in the dirtiest streets of London, covered in muck, drawing images on bricks.
She stood in what was now a spare room. One day they would make it a study.
She watched the evenings framed by the windows.
Late at night, deep in the summer, Maggie woke.
Ricardo slept sweaty and fitful beside her. She listened but Mack was not awake.
Her eyes itched. She tried to sit up. The house made its noises. Through the monitor Mack spoke in his sleep. In the streets she heard catcalls and laughter of young people coming home.
Sleep hung heavy on her but she had woken at a sound from the stairs.
Her breath stopped in a fear so total she could not move.
The bedroom door opened and someone came in. Someone walked through the doorframe as though from behind a canvas.
A streetlamp shone between the curtains, and lit him, not enough. He was a darkness, an intention.
Someone had been crawling down inclines to railway lines. Someone had been sifting through trash. Collecting, sorting. Foraging for ruined wood shoved aside by trains.
Someone stood at the foot of her bed looking at her, and she couldn’t move. Around his face he held the frame. He looked at her through it. She saw the new nails that studded it. The industrial tape that wrapped it. The clots of glue that scabbed it. Its new, even more imperfect lines.
He framed his face for her. The bottom of his chin was mottled on the right as if with lichen or an illness or shadow. Maggie could not wake Ricardo. She could not move.
Someone held the frame around his face. He looked at her through it, yes, but he held it front out. He was presenting himself to her. He was what the frame contained. He looked at her and she could not look away, and he had made himself the work of art.
LISTEN THE BIRDS
A TRAILER
0:00–0:03
Two tiny birds fight in the dirt. There is no sound.
0:04–0:05
A man in his thirties, P, stands in undergrowth. He holds a microphone. He stares.
0:06–0:09
Close in on the birds. They are European robins. Their red chests flash. They batter each other in a flurry of wings. There is a noise of feedback.
0:10–0:11
Close-up of the man’s microphone.
0:12–0:15
The robins’ fight fills the screen. The feedback grows painfully loud.
0:16–0:19
Blackness. Silence. Then birdsong.
Voice-over, man’s voice, P: “Its territory. Listen.”
0:20–0:24
Messy apartment. P looks through LPs. A younger man, D, watches.
P says, “These are rare old field recordings.” He shows a record to D. We can’t see the cover.
D says, “What’s with the title?”
P says, “A translator’s mistake, I guess.”
0:25–0:27
A glass-topped kitchen table, messy with the remains of a meal. Fixed shot. The table is vibrating. Silence.
0:28–0:31
Close-up, P’s face.
Voice-over, D: “And you’re doing something like that?”
Voice-over, P: “Something like that.”
0:32–0:35
The table again. Now in its center two robins are fighting.
They spasm furiously amid plates and glasses. A candlestick falls. Cut to black.
0:36–0:38
P stares at his television. The screen is blue, text reads, “Scanning for Signal.”
P’s own distorted voice comes out of the speakers: “… like that.”
0:39
Close-up of a robin’s eye.
0:40–0:42
P walking down a crowded city street.
Voice-over, P: “There’s a signal and I can’t tell if it’s going out or coming in.”
Unseen by P, one person, then two people behind him raise their heads and open their mouths skyward as if shrieking. They make no sound.
0:43–0:45
D whispers, “What are you trying to do?”
0:46–0:48
Darkness. A thud.
P stares at a window. On the glass is a perfect imprint of a flying owl, in white dust—powder down.
Cut to the earth below the window. An injured owl twitches.
0:49–0:50
P in a cafe, talking to a young woman. We hear the noise around them. P’s words sound distorted. They are not in synch with his lips.
He says, “There’s a problem with playback.”
0:51
A man and a woman roll on the ground, battering each other. Their faces are blank. We hear the sound of wings.
0:52–0:57
Voice-over, D, whispering: “Would you recognize a distress call?”
D puts earphones
on. We hear the crackling audio of a bird’s song. It grows louder, is joined by others, becomes a white noise of calls.
Cut to: a weathervane twisting on a steeple; a sped-up sequence of a plant changing the direction it faces; a battered old satellite orbiting earth.
The birdsong gets louder. On the satellite, a light comes on. It shifts, points its antenna at the world and sounds below.
0:58–0:59
D sitting opposite P at the kitchen table. He leans in.
He says, “Listen.”
1:00
P stares at a computer screen. A message reads: “No files found.”
1:01–1:02
Close-up of D’s face.
He says, “Listen.”
1:03
Night. P stands naked at the foot of his bed. He raises his head and opens his mouth and his throat quivers as if he is howling. We hear only feedback.
1:04–1:08
D shouts, “Listen!”
P shouts, “No you listen!” He slams his hand on the table.
D looks down. There is a perfect imprint of P’s palm on the glass, in white powder.
1:09–1:14
Undergrowth. Close-up of the robins’ fight.
Cut to P, holding the microphone, staring. He is naked. His skin is covered in tiny scratches. There is no sound.
The robins abruptly stop fighting. They separate. They stare at P.
1:15–1:19
Blackness. The sound of a needle hitting vinyl. A crackly robin’s song begins to play.
Voice-over, P, whispering: “You listen.”
Title card: “Listen the Birds.”
A MOUNT
Framed in a small rear window in the building’s ugly yellowish brick, behind its single pane of frosted glass, stands a porcelain horse. It is a foot high, shiny and white and speckled with green designs, stems and leaves clustered around tiny white flowers. Its head is down, its forelegs up, a low boisterous rearing, an eternal china prance.
There is a boy in the street, weeping quietly before the horse. His crying embarrasses people. They don’t want to ignore him: one by one those who notice him out of their own windows or passing by come to ask him if he is alright, where his mother is, where his father is, what they can do, what the matter is. He will not answer them except with a brief shake of his head, a motion of his hand. He has no bruises, his clothes are not torn or dirty, and though he is plausibly as young as thirteen he might be seventeen—not a boy at all but a young man of his own agency and majority and this intercession a presumption. Still, if he does not stop crying someone will call the police or beg him to come with them inside or summon an ambulance, but his sobs are almost silent and the way he shuffles and ducks his head you have to watch him closely to see how stricken he is. Everyone who does see hesitates.