This Could be Everything

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  For Claire Paterson Conrad. Agent, friend, keeper of the faith.

  ‘The canary is like a man’s soul. It sees bars around it, but instead of despairing, it sings.’

  NIKOS KAZANTZAKIS

  ‘Live baby live

  Now that the day is over’

  INXS ‘New Sensation’

  1 Yellow

  Yesterday evening, something happened. And I don’t like things happening to me, it’s why I stay put, so that they don’t. But when I walked downstairs at eight minutes past eight for a glass of water, I saw a small yellow bird standing on top of a packet of Weetabix in the corner of the kitchen.

  An instinct made me look behind me, as if someone might be standing there watching me watching the bird, but there was no one; Ann had forced Robert to the theatre, and they wouldn’t be back for hours. The bird took off again, and this time it flew across the room towards me, and I stepped back in alarm, then felt a wave of fury, as though the bird was mocking me for being afraid of it, and it was right, I was afraid. It flew onto the salad bowl in the middle of the kitchen table, and it scraped its beak against the green china edge, and then it lowered its yellow head in quick, jerky movements down into the bowl and took a bite from a lettuce leaf. Then it looked up at me with black eyes, and I heard a light buzzing in my ears, the sort that you have if you’re going under an anaesthetic or you’re about to faint, and I felt one of those Mexican waves of anxiety that started deep in my toes and swooshed up my body to the top of my head.

  I walked around to the other side of the table so that if the bird took off again, it would fly back towards the window, and out again the way that it had come. But it didn’t. Even when I flapped my arms around a bit, and tried to wave it out, it wouldn’t leave. It couldn’t seem to fly great distances; it was as if it didn’t know what to do with all the space. It settled briefly on a tube of cling film on top of the fridge, and shook itself, seeming to take stock, like good old Dennis Rodman pulled out of a Pistons game, pausing for a moment to think. I gulped into the room. There was a tightness inside me, a vertigo, like that time on the high ropes at Casey Finch’s sixth birthday party when I went up and up and up without Diana and looked down to see her crying on the ground below, and the earth had swum and sickened me.

  I felt an urge to lie down in the middle of the kitchen floor with my eyes closed. I closed my eyes and strained to hear Bruno on the radio and the song coming from the stereo in my bedroom upstairs, but instead I could hear the noise of fluttering wings, primitive, frightening little wings, and I opened my eyes again. Then the bird made a sound, a chirp, if you will, and I drew in my breath and went still as still, because honest to God, it felt like a lion had roared.

  As I lay there, I decided I would just walk away. This creature had come in; it had to be able to get out. It flew back onto the kitchen table and stood on The Times. My uncle had finished the crossword and he always likes to leave it out on view for us, like a child hoping for praise for a painting. The date of the paper startled me, as dates always do now.

  May 18th, 1990.

  It had been six months now. Six months. That’s twenty-four chart countdowns on a Sunday night with Bruno Brookes on Radio 1. Ten number ones. Lisa Stansfield the week that it had happened in November, Adamski and Seal now in May. From upstairs I could hear the sound coming from my stereo, faint but clear.

  ‘And it’s a non-mover at number 4 for New Kids on the Block with “Cover Girl”…’

  The cassette would click off after this song; it would need to be turned over. It had to be turned over. But if I moved, what would happen? The bird was back on top of the cereal boxes now; the window was still open, yet the bird wasn’t interested in going back to where it had been before. Outside, fighting with the Top 40 from my bedroom, I could hear the sound of a fuzzy radio tuned to sport, as Kelvin had opened his window to let in the night air, and let out the sticky smell of spliff and black coffee. My sister had loved Kelvin. Actually, let’s be honest, for loved, I actually mean fancied. He’s very hip and magnetic as anything, and his father still shouts ‘Pray for the sister!’ every time my aunt Ann walks out of the front door.

  The bird flew from the table towards the shelves and landed on top of a framed photograph of Ann and my mother as children. I wanted to stretch out my hand and touch Mama’s face in the picture. I wanted her to talk to me, to tell me why the yellow bird had chosen this kitchen, why it had chosen me to find it, where it had come from, when it would go back to wherever that was and leave me alone again. Mama would know.

  But Mama wasn’t anywhere to tell me anything. And the yellow bird just went right on looking at me.

  And the yellow bird seemed to laugh.

  2 Knight of the Burning Pestle

  When the telephone rang, I jumped out of my skin, and the bird flew right across the room and landed on top of a coffee jar. I raced back upstairs, four at a time, jumped into bed and pulled the covers over my head, stuck my right arm out towards my stereo, felt for eject, flipped over the cassette, pressed play, buried my arm back into the bed, and waited for the music to start again. Breathe. Breathe. Heart thumping, jumping in my shirt, like the song said. The ringing stopped. I drew in my breath. Still, the image of the bird on the frame downstairs. I looked at the clock beside my bed. Twenty to eleven. Ann and Robert would be back soon, and they would know what to do with yellow birds. Then the telephone started up again. Again! Now it needed to be answered, it was imperative. Something must have happened – but no sooner had I gathered these thoughts than a new sound joined the telephone and the Top 40. Loud, persistent singing, punctuated with trills and elaborate melody-on-melody, like a Whitney Houston outro chorus. Birdsong. It sounded like it meant something; it was trying to tell me something, I swear it. Kylie Minogue’s new single struck me with previously unearned depth.

  It was trying to tell me something, I swear it.

  I pulled a pillow over my head and wrapped it around my ears, but it didn’t work, because, like Daddy used to say, when you are truly afraid, that means you are truly alive, and there is no comfort in hiding because everything is too big to escape from. Still the telephone rang on. I had to stop it. I had to. I took a deep breath and ran from my bed and into Ann and Robert’s room where there was a telephone beside the bed. I picked up the receiver.

  ‘Hello?’ I closed my eyes, felt my heart stamping around, awaiting fresh disaster. Something had happened. The IRA had bombed the theatre. My aunt had been mugged and knifed in Soho—

  ‘Hello?’ It was a man’s voice. A policeman? A member of the fire service? It had to be.

  ‘Is Ann with you?’ I spoke with that dumb crackle in my voice that happens when I’m all keyed up. I could hear my breathlessness. ‘Is she OK?’

  ‘Er – no, she’s not with me. Who am I talking to?’ The voice on the other end was American. A New Yorker. I knew that much at once.

  ‘This is her niece,’ I said.

  ‘Her niece! Ah! The niece from Austin, Texas! How are you?’

  ‘I’m—’ I stopped. I didn’t know what to say. How I was, was hardly the point. ‘I’m only half Texan,’ I said quickly. ‘I haven’t lived there since I was nine.’ Briefly I held in my mind an image of my paternal grandmother, Abigail Kingdom, shaking her head at me for denying my roots even the tiniest bit.


  ‘Well. I can hear Texas in your voice.’

  ‘And I can hear Manhattan in yours.’

  ‘Ha! Touché!’

  I swallowed hard.

  ‘So, she’s out, then?’ He was persistent, that was for sure. I tried to catch up with myself, but it was hard. Answering the telephone was hard, I hadn’t done it for months on end, with good bloody reason.

  ‘She’s gone to the theatre,’ I said. ‘I thought she might be back by now.’

  ‘Ah. The theatre. Of course. I forgot. Les Misérables!’ He pronounced it with the full force of French melodrama.

  ‘She’s seen it before,’ I said.

  ‘Four times, so she says. I wasn’t keen on it myself. If you insist on watching musical theatre, it must be entirely lacking in sentimentality or you’re dragged down, and you can’t ever look yourself in the eye again.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Look, kid. I’m sorry to call so late – Jesus! I didn’t realize it was gone ten-thirty! I’m a work colleague of Annie’s.’

  ‘You work at the school?’ Somehow it felt unlikely.

  ‘Oh yes. But just for now. Temporary. Acting head of drama.’ I think he wanted me to say that I’d heard talk of him at home, but I hadn’t, so I said nothing. He coughed a bit as if to give me more time to think. Still nothing from me.

  ‘Could you leave a message for her?’ he asked. I’m sure I could hear disappointment in his voice. I looked down at my pink and white feet, cold on the wooden boards of the bedroom floor.

  ‘Yes. Sure.’

  ‘Could you tell her that I have a copy of The Knight of the Burning Pestle? She was going to get it from – ah – it doesn’t matter. The message is: I found it, with all my notes inside.’

  I blinked into the darkness of the room. There was a pen beside the bed. When I picked it up, it felt alien in my hand.

  ‘What was the book called again?’

  ‘It’s a play, dear girl, not a book. The Knight of the – no. Scrap that. Tell you what, kid. Just leave her a note that – uh – Gregory called, and write her that I have what she’s looking for. I’ll bring it into school.’ He paused. ‘Wow. Does Annie keep birds? I didn’t know that—’

  ‘You can hear it?’ I could detect a certain reverence in my voice. It wasn’t my imagination. Not only could I hear the bird, but the birdsong was travelling down the telephone and into the unknown space where the American was.

  ‘Yeah. I can hear it.’ He laughed.

  ‘We don’t have any birds. Only there’s one sitting downstairs in the kitchen. I just found it.’

  ‘Oh?’ he said. Just like that, more interested than surprised.

  ‘I don’t know what it is. Or where it came from. It’s yellow all over.’

  ‘Yellow all over, singing fit to burst, it’s a canary.’

  There was a pause.

  Canary. Can. Ar. Y.

  ‘A canary?’ I repeated.

  ‘Hush a second, kid. Let me hear it.’

  I held the telephone away from my ear, out into the room. From downstairs the singing grew louder still.

  ‘You see?’ I whispered into the mouthpiece.

  ‘I hear,’ he said. ‘Anyone keep canaries round your way?’

  ‘How would I know?’ It came out sounding rude, but I know for sure that I’ve forgotten how to talk to people. Any case, he just laughed.

  ‘My cousin had a canary in New Jersey,’ he said. ‘I’d share a room with it when I went to stay. Used to wake me up as soon as it grew light. It’s all longing, you know. My God, that song takes me back. Let me listen.’

  So, we sat together, the American man I’d never met, and me, and we listened to the canary singing, like it had all been planned just for us, and all I wanted to do was ask him what he meant about longing. And to where, exactly, this longing took him back.

  ‘It must have escaped and found its way to your kitchen.’

  ‘I guess,’ I said.

  ‘You’ll pass on the message?’

  ‘Yes.’ I’d said too much. I’d talked too much. I wasn’t used to it.

  ‘Thanks, kid. You can always rely on a Texan.’

  I’d never heard that expression before. I reckon he’d made it up on the spot.

  I put the phone down and sat still, waiting for my heart to shuffle down a few pegs from the state of high alert. It can take a while. Ann keeps a photo of my parents on her bedside table, taken in my grandparents’ garden just before I was born, and most times I never look at it now, as it’s just more pain on more pain. But I picked it up, and I stared right at them, and I spoke out loud, just so I’d make it truer.

  ‘There’s a canary in the kitchen.’

  There he was in the picture, my daddy, Richard, a quiet, dark-haired Texan of six foot six, laughing and holding a handkerchief in one hand and his wife’s hand in the other. Even in old photographs I can feel him wrestling with the complexities of Mama, with all her curious demands and her blue-eyed English beauty. Mama took to Texas like a duck to water, but Daddy had wanted to live in Oxford ever since he’d read Brideshead Revisited in his teens. In the end, Mama, who had grown up in Dorset and had no interest in Waugh’s version of England, went along with what Daddy wanted, so when us twins were nine, they moved back to her home country. But I swear to God, the way she talked about the place, Mama would have stayed in Austin forever if she could. Poor Lily, my grandmother Abby used to say to Daddy. You married a Texan bluebonnet trapped in the body of an English rose. Why d’you wanna take her back to that place, huh?

  If Mama hadn’t wanted to please Daddy so much, maybe we’d all be there still. Maybe we’d be all grown Texan, with no proper notion of England, and London, and Ann and Robert would have stayed oddities from the other side of the world, a couple we knew to be related to us, but with whom we had little else in common.

  Downstairs, the bird had stopped singing. Was it still there? Damned if I knew. As I walked past the table in the hall, I deliberately avoided looking at the post, because I knew there would be envelopes with my name on, from Lisa. Lisa and her blue ink, always trying to contact me. Every week. But I can’t open the letters. I can’t see her. Not yet. Maybe not ever. She walked away, she survived. There in the kitchen was the bird, back on the edge of the salad bowl, eating again. It looked so… what was it? Cheerful. As though it knew exactly what it was doing, as though this whole thing was part of some perfectly pitched plan that was going very well, thanks very much. Nothing about it seemed troubled. It looked up at me with those little black eyes.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ I asked.

  But before it could answer me, like I knew it would if I stuck around, I ran back upstairs again, as though I were being chased.

  I got into bed. I keep an old T-shirt of Diana’s under my bed, and I pulled it out, and up to my face. I closed my eyes and breathed her in, but it was the image of the bird that was imprinted on my eyelids. It was the unexpectedness of it, the brightness of it, that shot of colour, near fluorescent, like the yellow brick road in The Wizard of Oz when the film jumps out of black and white, cartoonish in its brightness. So, I lay still, and waited for my aunt and uncle to return, but I think that the adrenalin must have given way to sleep, in the way that it does when I get afraid on aeroplanes, and I didn’t hear the two of them come back. Instead, I had one of my psychedelic dreams. I dream a lot more since everything happened, and most of the time there’s strange, vague comfort in among all the weird shit that goes on. This time I dreamed about yellow birds growing to the size of polar bears. I saw the words of the note that I had written for Ann printed as a headline on the front of The Times.

  Gregory called. He has what you’ve been looking for.

  Just before the point that I finally woke up, my grandma Abby appeared in my sleep. She was way smaller than me – the size of an eight-year-old child – but her face was older than I’d ever known it, that of a ninety-year-old woman, and she was pressing something into my hands and smiling as though she felt sorry for me.
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  ‘Don’t forget to carry a knife,’ she said quietly.

  ‘Why?’ I asked her.

  ‘To open the Weetabix,’ she said. Then she laughed, and vanished again, and in the odd, bleary context of the dream, when I looked down at my hands, they were bleeding.

  In the morning, when I woke up, Ann and Robert had left for work. I could hear the whirring of the washing machine coming to the end of a cycle. I took a deep breath and walked into the kitchen. The salad bowl had been washed up, and Ann’s mug of tea left empty on the table. The window was shut.

  The yellow bird was gone.

  3 The Trench Effect

  My name is February Kingdom, and although I spent the first nine years of my life in Austin, Texas, and lived for the next seven in Oxfordshire, England, I tell everyone I’m a Londoner, born and bred. I feel London in my bones, you see, and I think that’s enough to make it true. I fear it, of course, like everyone with any sense does. Even the people who go around saying that they couldn’t live anywhere else are mostly liars, but I’ve never been afraid of London for the reasons that others are – the expense, the traffic, the constant sense of something rising up, a little out of your reach that’s cooler than you that you will never be a part of – that’s the stuff that I like about it, that’s the stuff I respect. No. I fear London for another reason. I fear London because it took the lives of both my parents and thirty-one others in November 1987, in a fire that started when a cigarette was tossed onto the escalator at King’s Cross tube station. I fear London because it didn’t give a damn. It woke up the morning after this happened, sighed, dusted itself off and carried on. My sister said London was too old to care, and too young to apologize. Maybe that’s true. Maybe she just knew how to say things that made me feel better somehow, and maybe because I still had my sister, I was just about all right.

  According to witnesses at King’s Cross, Dad had become separated from Mama and had escaped the fire to start with. Realizing she wasn’t following him, he had gone back into the station to look for her. His timing was terrible. Months later, we were told what happens when a small, manageable fire is given a sudden surge of oxygen and air up an inclined surface – how it spreads violently, at breakneck speed in the blink of an eye. The people who worked these things out named it the Trench Effect, and no one stood a chance once it had roared into life that cold night in 1987. Dad and Mama were pulled from the flames and taken to hospital but couldn’t be revived. There’s irony in every agony. Just before they had left Oxford for London on the day that they were killed, Mama had told me that she was going to ‘make the house safer’, as she didn’t trust the boys Diana brought home with her after school not to light cigarettes in our bedroom, and cigarettes in bedrooms might very well burn the house down. So, assuming she did what she had set out to do, Mama died in a fire, holding a shopping bag containing two smoke alarms.