Dazzling the Gods Read online

  Despite their working relationship – almost a decade if you discounted the two-year forced sabbatical – he had only actually met Pollex a handful of times. As writers went he was the usual mix of awkward outsider and engaging conversationalist, part romantic, part pragmatist. He came late to words, at least in terms of fiction, had lived several lives before early redundancy from a teaching post forced a replotting of the vocational odyssey. What struck him most when he first read Pollex was that he could write, really write; so many books he edited were conceptually and structurally and tonally strong, would sell in significant number, but which neglected the music of a sentence, its ability to be affective rather than merely expository. Abstract instead of just literal. Pollex, he felt, troubled his sentences into existence, cared for them as one might a prized possession, or one’s child. He was a stylist who, until Lucca at any rate, knew when to get out of a sentence, knew when lyricism became onanism. The ­editor’s role, of course, was to collaborate in this alchemy, a dance partner who neither led nor followed. An objective (though it rarely is) vision for the work, uncluttered by ego.

  The boy has had some success and, after several abortive attempts to launch the glider, looks around for a parent to assist. Watching the scene play out, he feels only moderately saddened by the absence of his own children, is perhaps curious at the omission. In the end he had begged, sensed in that moment all the grief to come.

  He wonders why Lucca. Why Pollex chose here to unravel a marriage. This Renaissance town of a hundred churches, so often besieged and occupied and sold. He wonders what fraught and terrible thoughts played out in the man’s mind during those final hours.

  The softest of breezes brushes across his forearm, gustless, barely anything. He pictures the jay in its nest opening up the live gecko, the skin easily penetrated, its warm, sinewy interior shared among the bird’s young. He thinks of the lovers he is yet to have, whether such presumption is arrogant at this stage of life. Wonders if the protective layer around his heart is any more substantial. He would like to have come here with her, perhaps in a cooler season, climb the tower, hire a tandem and slalom along the fortress wall until the cicadas quietened and gave way to a distant aria.

  Fly, Icarus, Fly

  They set out, five of them, across barleyed fields, tamping down pathways like arteries, idling in the warmth of early summer. The others insisting on a con­voluted route, sometimes backtracking, as if leading them to some clandestine camp, and the power that came with this. They were in his brother’s year, the other three, boys with an aura of menace, who could lurch from matey to malevolent and back again in a breath. Volatile, like a gas. They swaggered like gangsters, smoked as if it was something they’d always done, the hierarchy among them today unsaid yet irrefutable, he and Blue underlings. An initiation of sorts, he supposed, prospect of entry to their number.

  He understood none of the in-jokes or slick catchphrases, assumed his brother did. Violence, or a version of it, was ritualistic, regular. Punches to arms, headlocks, displays of martial arts moves that looked half-learned, mostly against each other, but then every half-mile or so these aimed at Blue, who shrugged them off like someone refusing a dance. Himself more a target of words than assaults, mockery that called into question his sexual experience, or lack of, his undeveloped body. When offered a cigarette he went to take it, his brother snatching it away, answering for him, the others laughing as Blue, to appease them, lit it himself, stifled the cough as best he could.

  ‘Soft cunts,’ the tall one said, the words to him seeming unsustainable together, like butter in a hot pan.

  The others boasted of winnings from the alleyway behind the school sports hall, coins tossed to a wall, a successful trajectory coming from the wrist, as if the activity rivalled for technique sports played on the other side of the brickwork. He wondered what size their egg collect­ions were, whether they dwarfed his brother’s, if today would grant permission to view them.

  At one point, where a quadrant of fields met, they discovered an adder furled beneath a sheet of corrugated iron, its dorsal patterning confusing the eye, as if it had no end or beginning. A prehistoric thing, it seemed to him, at once fascinating and unsettling, and for a moment they all stood in silence beguiled by its strange beauty. An inert creature and yet they could sense its great kinetic energy, felt it worthy of their respect. It was both vulnerable and imperious, and whereas another animal would likely have been extinguished at their hands, the sheet was merely laid gently down.

  Further on, the woods spiced by pines, summer a promise you could believe, the tall one every now and then taking his knife to bark, marking territory like a dog. Still the criss-crossing, doubling back, the promise of some great treasure, a rare species perhaps, a nest site you trusted to no one.

  They arrived at the foot of a tall beech, the others pausing, announcing wordlessly that this was their destination. His brother put a hand to the bark, smoothed it like a horse’s mane, and they all looked up, saw that it rose to another world.

  ‘Just rooks up there,’ Blue said. ‘We came this far for that?’

  ‘It was a matter of trust,’ the tall one said. ‘This first, then we’ll show you something good.’

  ‘There are no branches,’ his brother said, meaning nothing to get purchase on, and one of them produced a rope from his pack and threw it at their feet, and Blue took it.

  ‘Not you,’ one of them said, ‘him,’ and this fear rose in him at all that height.

  ‘Told you they’re chicken shit.’

  ‘He’ll take too long,’ his brother said. Said it would be boring to watch.

  The rope’s length was enough to loop over the lowest branch and fall back to them, his brother fashioning a slipknot, easing it upwards until tight. They could have helped, the others – offered bunk ups to give him a start – but didn’t. On his third attempt, Blue found enough height to reach over the lowest bough and heft himself up.

  ‘If you touch him when I’m up there,’ Blue called out, ‘I’ll fight you all when I’m down. I’ll lose but so will one of you.’

  And so he watched as his brother rose through the latticed cluster of limbs, bobbing and weaving like a boxer, testing potential routes in his mind before committing. Neither was he too proud to retreat a few steps, recalibrate the course as a climber would a rock face.

  Blue was high enough now that the rooks got some sense of his presence, a mammal-like volume rising from morsels of chatter to bursts of serrated chiding. Wing beats starting up in applause, alarm caws issued like spitting fat.

  By the time his brother was parallel to the first nests, the sky had darkened to a formless mass, bird morphing with bird, chaos and order. Still he progressed, edging out along one of the tapering boughs, hands and feet like an efficient but slow piston. Blue had told him his theory once, inherited from the badlands of home, a calculation to test the weight-bearing property of a branch. Once you could touch forefingers and thumbs around it, you went no further. It was why they build their nests that far out. A compromise. Exposed to the elements and predation from the air, but nothing without wings gets to them.

  He tried to calculate the height of his brother: 40 feet, perhaps more. The rooks mobbing him now, this strange new predator inching itself amid their colony, shredding the air around his brother in furious sorties, a rhapsody of shrieks, strident and demented. This innate, mechanical response of all things, he thought, to protect their young. An ancient calling, diminishing your own worth for the sake of the species.

  And still his brother there, holding his head tight to the branch, unable to risk freeing an arm in defence, waiting for a pause in the onslaught that wouldn’t come. One or two rooks venturing close enough to jab and claw at flesh, like a film. The lads beside him, now grinning, entertained by the spectacle they had engineered. And himself, unable to find breath or to blink, both horrified and enthralled at Blue’s exploits, this gesture undertaken in his stead.

  On and on, they kept
at him, the birds’ programming knowing only this. And his brother docile now, the torque in him gone, but still calculating the odds, still thinking it possible. Six feet from the nearest nest now, a few more shuffles through this storm of birds, what seemed now like the entire rookery coming at him, the attack a thing of synchronicity and wonder. One egg, he thought. He is only going to take one egg, and he almost spoke it as a plea. Beside him, the others had quietened, even they in thrall of his brother’s bravado, perhaps scared of it. The noise everything now, barbed and colliding with itself, no start or finish to it, the sound of life resisting death, genetically coded survival.

  When the branch cracked it registered as an intrusion, a catalyst to something else. The rooks, too, sensed it, easing their intensity, perhaps knowing that a shift had occurred. And the second crack, louder yet ushering in a near silence as bird and branch and brother began their dispersal. A shower of everything from this display now falling to them, nests and tree and Blue, rooks treading air above this and the silence thickening. Every now and then a branch toyed with his brother, altered his shape, had its say in the route he took.

  Blue hit the ground a dozen or so feet from them, an unnatural sound, of two things coming together that shouldn’t, his shoulder folding in on itself, a flail of limbs, head claiming its own patch of ground to collapse into. A crumpling, and in that moment all humans’ failed attempts to fly.

  And then a stillness, save a cluster of twigs and leaves confetti-ing him, birds alighting onto branches, laying fresh claim to the tree, those with nests intact returning to them, the others ponderous then indifferent. A dozen or so broken eggs garlanding the ground around his brother, embryonic forms emerged from shells, featherless and translucent, some with small movements. Flight never known, only plummet.

  And his brother, this indomitable warrior, now unmoving and silent, the air between them thick with an awfulness, and it seemed so silly that this thing had ­happened. This shifting of one world into another, and himself witness to this juncture, to birds dead and dying, all their evolution undone, his brother somewhere between these states.

  Waves of nausea now, almost separate from him, a pulsing of their own, and his knowing there was both something he should be doing and nothing that could be done. He sensed the others running, as if in trouble and that putting distance between them and this place was an effective tactic, and for a second he thought to do the same, to flee what had built all day and had concluded in a few seconds. To be no part of it or of what would follow.

  Then some instinct forcing him towards his brother, this abomination of reconfigured bones, misshapen yet intact, like something thrown there. A thing in need of fixing. He tried to recall the direction they’d come, figured they’d walked a couple of hours. The sun should be a clue, but not one he could decode. If he walked an hour, there would be something to recognise, the gulley they’d ran through, a couple of coast-bound gulls. He could not assume the others would fetch help.

  Instead he sat down against the tree and hummed a tune their mother taught them as children, hoped Blue could hear it.

  And his brother now a young adult, stricken within himself, how it wasn’t right to keep someone like that: you would finish it off, were it an animal. Allow the thing its dignity. The law, though, clear: enough life to preserve, a carcass that with nutrients administered could continue a functioning of sorts. These early days of wires and tubes and hope alternating with despair, his parents drinking from lunchtime, though never together, more unsaid than said from now on.

  When the petrification in him receded that day, he had stroked Blue’s head, told him it would be alright, then he did run, picked a direction in his head and propelled himself.

  It must have been two hours before his brother got to the hospital, perhaps three. His pelvis shattered, left arm and leg broken, none of which could be treated until he was stable, could be sedated. A coma induced, the bleed on his brain their focus. A man came out of the theatre, talked them through it. How the scalp was sliced and peeled back, a section of the skull cut away to relieve pressure. He found comedy in this, that they would glue the piece back at a later date, like a broken vase. The scalp then pulled back, secured to itself again.

  And then they waited, watched the ventilator rise and fall, his brother this fleshly thing kept alive by pumps and prayer.

  They visited twice daily to begin with, frequency diminishing as progress did. At first he saw his parents beg for the removal of danger, pledge to accept anything in return for this. Let him just survive this, they said, unknowing or uncaring of what this could mean.

  Then a slowness to things, his brother in time having to learn anew, reconnect muscles with signals, or signals with muscles, he forgets which. Some small speech returning, more a noise than words, something creaturely, a thing with more vowels than it should. Finally a transition off the acute ward, returning for operations when he was able to. He can, with effort, feed himself on a good day. They even took him out for his 18th, pushed the wheelchair up to a table in a beer garden, half a pint via a straw.

  And then the lexicon shifting, his brother airbrushed a little each day from the future.

  You’re an only-child now, his mother had said to him one saturnine evening as she watched the sea squall from her window, and he turned the phrase over in his head for days, knew it in time to be both true and false. Knew the absence would grow and grow, that his brother would become folkloric, vaporous, life defined as either pre-or post-that day, not just for Blue, for all of them. Forever an approximation of himself, this boy, now a man, who hadn’t cheated death but merely borrowed something from it.

  And now an adult in his thirties, but with only 15 years of living to show for that. A dilution of one half, and the knowledge of this. A boy in man’s body, mind consigned to – to what? The thoughts of a child? Or worse, of mental processes that were lucid and mature, yet beyond expression. Communication reduced to a primitive exchange, a pre-language where Blue’s words – so often a sequence of profanities – took minutes to form, brief windows sanctioned when fatigue and despondency receded. Movement coming vicariously, limbs lifted to be washed, torso turned like a pig on a spit, cavities eviscerated. Weekly visits to a common room, where he would be ­lowered into a window-side chair, head supported by a horseshoe cushion. Spoon-fed and another form of protest as he spat food over a tireless nurse. Comatose patients, he supposed, at least had insentience going for them. It seemed unfathomably cruel that Blue should have lived every one of the days to have passed since that day in the woods.

  And today’s visit, he watches as his brother stares vacantly into mid-distance, perhaps registering a pigeon scull by, climbing in his mind one of the tall pines across the lawn. Could climb anything, he could.

  Does he remember the fall? They said he probably doesn’t, that the anchoring memory of his former life was likely moored somewhere earlier that day. A dream sequence, repeating, forever inconclusive. And his own replaying of Blue’s descent, looping ceaselessly in those first months, the silence of it, the un-noise of the fall, a thing beyond comprehension.

  He asks the nurses if their father had visited, more from habit than hope, knowing the man came to terms with the past by not revisiting it. He reads to his brother from the newspaper, tells him about the village he lives in along the coast. The kids ghillying for crabs off the sea wall there, as they once had.

  And later, when it is just the two of them, a silent entreaty issued from Blue’s eyes, to do the right thing, and he wanted to give this finality to him, but all he could do was hold his brother and promise not to let go.

  Upgrade

  There were no more jobs for life; he’d been told as much.

  ‘We don’t owe you a living, Roland,’ the woman half his age had said. ‘There’ll be a fair package and with outstanding leave you can finish Friday.’

  ‘Could I still come in some days?’ he asked. ‘You wouldn’t have to pay me.’

  He was gi
ven a brass carriage clock and a blended whisky, the presentation of which spanned the last five minutes of the working week. Colin, Bex the new girl and Jeremy were there, but everyone else was in a meeting, which he knew was code for at the pub. I should make a speech, he thought, but by the time he conceived of anything to say, the room was empty. He placed the accoutrements of 35 years into a plastic box, coughed his nervous cough and slunk home to see how life played itself out.

  Tens of accounts jobs were applied for, a few of which yielded interviews, but the other candidates were ­invariably in their twenties or thirties, devoid of the doleful expression that now greeted Roland in the mirror each morning. The company’s looking for fresh ideas, came the euphemistic feedback. Your maturity would be wasted here.

  Walking home he had to concede that indeed he didn’t have any ideas, fresh or otherwise. Instead he told himself that he had his health, which was something to be grateful for.

  ‘You’ll have to retrain,’ his wife said that evening. ‘I’m not doing extra hours just because you’re useless.’

  Such castigation had become frequent since she’d started an evening class titled ‘Elementary Magic’. Stefan, the course’s facilitator, who’d self-published three volumes of his methods, used magic to ‘help you transform your life’.

  ‘It’s all about asking the universe for what you want,’ Greta said. ‘About unlocking the power within. I’d take you along were you not such an embarrassment.’

  ‘Abracadabra,’ he said under his breath.

  Where possible Roland maintained routine. The alarm still shrilled at seven-fifteen, whereupon he would shower and shave before preparing their porridge or scrambled eggs on granary toast, although his wife was increasingly stocking the cupboards with food he couldn’t pronounce: quinoa, açai, kimchi, baobab. He wasn’t even sure it was food. In the end they agreed on separate cupboards, sep­arate mealtimes.