She took the book inside, checked it, and went to deal with a customer. I grabbed the book from the white plastic wheelie cart they use to trolley the books back to the shelves. Just as I was heading for the Reading Room, an assistant with a moustache – she was a woman but she had a moustache, which is usually a bad sign – this assistant pulled the book from my hands, and said it was reserved for a customer.
‘I’m a customer,’ I said
‘Name?’ she said, as though it were a crime.
‘I’m not on your list.’
‘Then you will have to wait until the book is returned again,’ she said, with evident satisfaction, and that’s the thing about some librarians – they love telling you a book is out of print, borrowed, lost, or not even written yet.
I have a list of titles that I leave at the desk, because they are bound to be written some day, and it’s best to be ahead of the queue.
That evening I followed the librarian home, because I had got used to following her home, and habit is hard to break. She went in, as usual, and when she came back out to sit in the garden, she was carrying her Own Copy of Death In Venice. All I had to do was to wait for the phone to ring, which it did, and then I ran across the front lawn, and grabbed the book.
Suddenly I heard her screaming into the phone, ‘There’s an intruder – yes, it’s the same one – get the police!’
I rushed to help her, but she wouldn’t stop screaming, so I searched all over the house, and I couldn’t find anybody, which is what I told the police when they arrived. They took no notice, just arrested me, because she said I was the intruder – when all I had wanted was to borrow her book.
After that, things got tougher, because the police discovered that as I had no mother or father, I didn’t officially exist. I asked them to telephone Miss Pinch, but she claimed never to have heard of such a person as myself.
The police had me interviewed by a nice man who turned out to be a psychiatrist for Young Offenders, although I hadn’t offended anyone except for the librarian and Miss Pinch. I explained about Death in Venice, and the problems I had had joining the library, and the psychiatrist nodded and suggested I come in once a week for observation, like I was a new planet.
Which, in a way, I was.
Dark was looking at the moon.
If the earth’s history was fossil-written, why not the universe? The moon, bone-white, bleached of life, was the relic of a solar system once planeted with Earths.
He thought the whole of the sky must have been alive once, and some stupidity or carelessness had brought it to this burnt-out, warmless place.
When he was a boy he used to imagine the sky as the sea and the stars as ships lit up at the mast. At night, when the sea was black, and the sky was black, the stars ploughed the surface of the water, furrowing it like a ship’s keel. He had amused himself by lobbing stones at the star’s reflections, hitting them and bursting them, watching them steady and return.
Now the sky was a dead sea, and the stars and the planets were memory-points, like Darwin’s fossils. There were archives of catastrophe and mistake. Dark wished that there was nothing there at all; no evidence, no way of knowing. What Darwin called knowledge and progress, Dark understood as a baleful diary; a book that had been better left unread. There was so much in life that had been better left unread.
It is good to wander along the sea-coast, when formed of moderately hard rocks, and watch the process of degradation. The tides, in most cases, reach the cliffs for only a short time twice a day, and the waves eat into them only when they are charged with sand or pebbles; for there is reason to believe that pure water can effect little or nothing in wearing away a rock. At last, the base of the cliff is undermined, huge fragments fall down, and these remaining fixed, have to be worn away, atom by atom, until reduced in size, until they can be rolled about the waves, and then are more quickly ground into pebbles, sand or mud.
Dark put the book aside. He had read it so many times, and seen in himself all the marks of gradual erosion. Well, perhaps he would be found later, unrecognisable but for his teeth – yes, his stubborn jaw would be the last thing to go. Words, all words, scattered by the waves.
I sometimes think of myself, up at Am Parbh.
The Turning Point, knowing I was going to leave. Going to leave, would have to leave, subtle changes in inflection, denoting different states of mind, but with the same end in view, except that there is no end, and when it is in view, it is always a sighted ship that will never come to shore.
Still, the ship must be sighted, we must pack for the sailing. We have to believe in our control, in our future. But when the future does come it comes like the McCloud, fully equipped with the latest technology and a new crew, but with the old McCloud riding inside.
The fossil record is always there, whether or not you discover it. The brittle ghosts of the past. Memory is not like the surface of the water – either troubled or still. Memory is layered. What you were was another life, but the evidence is somewhere in the rock – your trilobites and ammonites, your struggling life-forms, just when you thought you could stand upright.
Years ago in Railings Row, on two kitchen chairs pushed together, under Miss Pinch’s One Duck Eiderdown, I cried for a world that could be stable and sure. I didn’t want to start again. I was too small and too tired.
Pew taught me that nothing is gone, that everything can be recovered, not as it was, but in its changing form.
‘Nothing keeps the same form forever, child, not even Pew.’
Before he wrote On the Origin of Species, Darwin spent five years as a naturalist, aboard HMS Beagle. In nature, he found not past, present and future as we recognise them, but an evolutionary process of change – energy never trapped for too long – life always becoming.
When Pew and I were spun out of the lighthouse like beams and sparks, I wanted everything to continue as it had. I wanted something solid and trustworthy. Twice-flung – first from my mother, and then Pew – I looked for a safe landing and soon made the mistake of finding one.
But the only thing to do was to tell the story again.
Tell me a story, Silver. What story?
The story of the talking bird.
That was later, much later, when I had landed and grown up.
It’s still your story.
Yes.
TALKING BIRD
Two facts about Silver: It reflects 95% of its own light. It is one of the few precious metals that can be safely eaten in small quantities.
I had gone to Capri, because I feel better surrounded by water.
As I was winding down one of the whitewashed alleys on the hillside overlooking the Grotto Azzurro, I heard someone calling my name – ‘Bongiorno, Silver!’
In the window of a small apartment was a big cage, and in the big cage was a beady beaky bird.
I know it was a coincidence – even though Jung says there is no such thing, I know it wasn’t magic – just a trained voice-box with feathers, but it matched a moment in me that was waiting for someone to call my name. Names are still magic; even Sharon, Karen, Darren and Warren are magic to somebody somewhere. In the fairy stories, naming is knowledge. When I know your name, I can call your name, and when I call your name, you’ll come to me.
So the bird called, ‘Bongiorno, Silver!’ and I stood and looked at him for a long time, until the woman inside thought I was a thief or a madman, and banged on the window with a little statue of the Madonna.
I motioned for her to come outside, and I asked her if I could buy the bird.
‘No no no!’ she said, ‘Quell’uccello è mia vita!’ (‘That bird is my life!’)
‘What, your whole life?’
‘Si si si! Mio marito è morte, mio figlio sta nell’esercito e ho soltano un rene.’ (‘My husband is dead, my son is in the army, I have only one kidney.’)
This was not looking good for either of us. She clutched the Madonna.
‘Se non fosse per quell’uccello e il mi
o abbonamento alla National Geographic Magazine non avrei niente.’ (‘And without that bird and my subscription to National Geographic Magazine, I would have nothing.’)
‘Nothing?’
‘Niente! Rien! Zilch!’
She slammed the door and put the statue of the Madonna in the birdcage in the window. Wingless and grounded, I slunk off for an espresso.
Such a beautiful island – blue, cream, pink, orange. But I was colour-blind that day. I wanted that bird.
That night, I crept back to the apartment and looked in through the window. The woman was lolling asleep in the chair watching Batman dubbed into Italian.
I walked round to her door and tried the handle. It was open! I let myself in and crept forward into the little room full of hand-crocheted lace and plastic flowers. The bird regarded me – ‘Pretty boy! Pretty boy!’ Who cares about gender at a time like this?
On tiptoe, ridiculous and serious, I went to the cage, unlatched the wire door, and seized the bird. He jumped onto my finger quite happily, but the woman was stirring, and then the bird began to sing something dreadful about going back to Sorrento.
Quick as a dart, I slid a lace doily over his beak, and slipped out of the room and into the alley.
I was a thief. I had stolen the bird.
For six months I lived nervously on my part of the island, refusing to go home because I couldn’t put the bird in quarantine. My partner came out to visit me and asked me why I wouldn’t come home. I said I couldn’t come home – it was a question of the bird.
‘Your business is failing and your relationship is failing – forget the bird.’
Forget the bird! I might as well try and forget myself. And that was the problem of course – I had forgotten myself, long since, long before the bird, and I wanted, in a messy, maddening way, to go on forgetting myself and yet, to find myself too. When the bird said my name it was as though I had just heard it, not for the first time, but after a long time, like somebody coming out of a drugged dream.
‘Bongiorno, Silver!’ Every day the bird reminded me of my name, which is to say, who I am.
I wish I could be clearer. I wish I could say, ‘My life had no light. My life was eating me alive.’ I wish I could say, ‘I was having a mental breakdown, so I stole a bird.’ Strictly speaking that would be true, and it is why the police let me go, instead of charging me with the theft of a much-beloved macaw. The Italian doctor put me on Prozac and sent me for a series of appointments at the Tavistock Clinic in London. The woman whose bird it had been, and was again, felt sorry for me; after all, she might have lost a parrot but she was not cuckoo. She gave me a pile of old National Geographic magazines to read in the loony bin, which is where the nice man at the pizza place told her I would be spending the rest of my life.
The rest of my life. I have never rested, always run, run so fast that the sun can’t make a shadow. Well, here I am – mid-way, lost in a dark wood – this selva oscura, without a torch, a guide, or even a bird.
The psychiatrist was a gentle, intelligent man with very clean fingernails. He asked me why I had not sought help sooner.
‘I don’t need help – not this kind anyway. I can dress myself, make toast, make love, make money, make sense.’
‘Why did you steal the bird?’
‘I love the stories of Talking Birds, especially Siegfried, who is led out of the forest and into the treasure by the Woodbird. Siegfried is stupid enough to listen to birds, and I thought that the peck, peck, pecking at the pane of my life might mean that I should listen too.’
‘You thought the bird was talking to you?’
‘Yes, I know the bird was talking to me.’
‘Was there no human being you could have talked to instead?’
‘I wasn’t talking to the bird. The bird was talking to me.’
There was a long pause. There are some things that shouldn’t be said in company. See above.
I tried to put right the damage.
‘I went to a therapist once, and she gave me a copy of a book called The Web Not Woven. Frankly, I would rather listen to the bird.’
Now I had made things much worse for myself.
‘Would you like another bird?’
‘It wasn’t any old bird; it was a bird that knew my name.’
The doctor leaned back in his chair. ‘Do you keep a diary?’
‘I have a collection of silver notebooks.’
‘Are they consistent?’
‘Yes. I buy them from the same department store.’
‘I mean, do you keep one record of your life, or several? Do you feel you have more than one life perhaps?’
‘Of course I do. It would be impossible to tell one single story.’
‘Perhaps you should try.’
‘A beginning, a middle, and an end?’
‘Something like that – yes.’
I thought of Babel Dark and his neat brown notebooks, and his wild torn folder. I thought of Pew tearing stories out of light.
‘Do you know the story of Jekyll and Hyde?’
‘Of course.’
‘Well then – to avoid either extreme, it is necessary to find all the lives in between.’
The seahorse was in his pocket.
Dark was walking along the beach.
The moon was new, and laid on her back, as though she had been blown over by the wind that gusted the sand round his boots.
He looked out towards Cape Wrath, and thought he saw the figure of Pew in the glass of the light. The waves were fierce and rapid. There was going to be a storm.
1878. His fiftieth birthday.
When Robert Louis Stevenson had asked if he might visit him, Dark had been pleased. They would go to the lighthouse, and then Dark would show him the famous fossil cave. He knew that Stevenson was fascinated by Darwin’s theories of evolution. He had no idea that Stevenson had a particular purpose to his visit.
The men had sat on either side of the fire talking. They had both drunk a good deal of wine, and Stevenson was flushed and animated. Did not Dark think that all men had atavistic qualities? Parts of themselves that lay like undeveloped negatives? Shadow selves, unpictured but present?
Dark felt his breathing shorten. His heart was beating. What did Stevenson mean?
‘A man might be two men,’ said Stevenson, ‘and not know it, or he might discover it and find that he had to act on it. And those two men would be of very different kinds. One upright and loyal, the other, perhaps not much better than an ape.’
‘I do not accept that men were once apes,’ said Dark.
‘But you accept that all men have ancestors. What’s to say that somewhere in your blood there isn’t a long-gone fiend that only lacks a body?’
‘In my blood?’
‘Or mine. Any one of us. When we talk about a man acting out of character, what are we honestly saying? Aren’t we saying that there must be more to the man than we choose to know, or indeed more than he chooses to know about himself?’
‘Are we so utterly lacking in self-knowledge, do you think?’
‘I wouldn’t put it like that, Dark; a man may know himself, but he prides himself on his character, his integrity – the word says it all – integrity – we use it to mean virtue, but it means wholeness too, and which of us is that?’
‘We are all whole, I hope.’
‘Do you wilfully misunderstand me, I wonder?’
‘What do you mean by that?’ said Dark, and his mouth was dry and Stevenson noticed how he played with his watch chain like a rosary.
‘Shall I be frank?’
‘Please do.’
‘I was in Bristol…’
‘I see.’
‘And I met a sailor by the name of – ’
‘Price,’ said Dark.
He got up and went to look out of the window, and when he turned back into his study, full of well-worn and familiar things, he felt like a stranger in his own life.
‘I will tell you then,’ he said.
r /> He was talking, telling the whole story from beginning to end, but he heard his voice far off, like a man in another room. He was overhearing himself. It was himself he was talking to. Himself he needed to tell.
If I had not seen her again that day in London, perhaps my life would have been very different. I waited a month for our next meeting and I thought of nothing else that month. As soon as we were together, she turned round and asked me to unhook her dress. There were twenty hooks; I remember counting them.
She stepped out of her dress and uncoiled her hair and kissed me. She was so free with her body. Her body, her freedom. I was afraid of how she made me feel. You say we are not one, you say truly there are two of us. Yes, there were two of us, but we were one. As for myself, I am splintered by great waves. I am coloured glass from a church window long since shattered. I find pieces of myself everywhere, and I cut myself handling them. The reds and greens of her body are the colours of my love for her, the coloured parts of me, not the thick heavy glass of the rest.
I am a glass man, but there is no light in me that can shine across the sea. I shall lead no one home, save no lives, not even my own.
She came here once. Not to this house, but to the lighthouse. That makes it bearable for me to go on living here. Every day I walk the way we walked, and I try and pick out her imprint. She trailed her hands along the sea wall. She sat by a rock with her back to the wind. She made this bleak place bountiful. Some of her is in the wind, is in the poppies, is in the dive of the gulls. I find her when I look, even though I will never see her again.