I.
What actually woke him was the unearthly sound itself – a mournful shatter of frozen midnight falling to earth to pierce his heart and lodge there forever, never to move, never to melt – but he, being who he was, assumed it was his bladder.
He huddled under the covers, sending out mental feelers to see how urgent the call was. Urgent enough. He sighed. Forty-eight still seemed too young to be having to get up in the night so often to relieve what was patently an old man’s need, but there would clearly be no getting back to sleep until the matter was addressed. Maybe if he was quick about it he wouldn’t even really need to wake all the way up. Yes. All right, then. Here we go. Upright, down the hall.
He gasped as he stepped onto the bathroom floor, cruelly cold against his bare feet. The room had no radiator, just a mysterious flat pad-type thing on the wall – he could never describe it adequately to other people – that, when turned on, grew too hot to touch while also managing to not even vaguely warm the surrounding air. He’d been meaning to remedy the problem since he’d moved here after the divorce, but a ninth year had just passed, a tenth begun, and here he was, still freezing his toes and the surprisingly soft skin of his arches as he stood, naked, at the toilet.
‘Cold,’ he murmured, using the glow of moonlight through the window to more-or-less aim into the bowl, guiding the rest by sound once he’d got a stream started.
The winter had been strange and contradictory, as if it were battling with itself. Mild days, even sometimes gloriously sunny, but nights that were particularly bitter, the damp of the house making them seem even more so. A huge city allegedly thrummed and dazzled just metres from the man’s doorstep, yet inside might as well have been draped in the chill fog of a hundred years past. At her last visit, his daughter Amanda had stopped halfway through taking off her coat and asked if he was expecting a plague cart.
He finished urinating, shook off the last few drops, then tore a square of toilet paper to gently dab away the excess from the tip of his penis, a habitual action that his ex-wife had inexplicably regarded with enormous affection. ‘Like pretty eyelashes on a bear,’ she’d said.
She’d still divorced him, though.
He dropped the square of paper into the bowl, leaned forward to flush, and in that ignominious moment the sound came again, heard consciously for the first time.
He froze, hand mid-way to the flush handle.
The bathroom window faced his small back garden, a narrow one that elongated back in perfect mirror of the two on either side, and the sound had clearly come from there, somewhere beyond the marbled glass.
But what on earth was it? It matched nothing in the hurried catalogue of plausible things it might be at this time of night in this particular neighbourhood: not the unnerving scream of a mating fox, not the neighbour’s cat trapped in his garage (again), not thieves because what thief would make a sound like that?
He jumped as it came yet again, slicing through the night, clear in a way that only very cold things are.
A word sprang to his groggy, shivering mind. It had sounded like a keen. Something was keening and it welled him up with entirely unexpected, in fact, frankly astonishing tears. It tore at his heart like a dream gone wrong, a wordless cry for help that almost instantly made him feel inadequate to the task, helpless to save whatever was in danger, pointless to even try.
A sound which, later on, when he remembered this night forever and always, thwarted all sense. Because when he found the bird, the bird made no sound at all.
He rushed to his bedroom to dress: trousers without underwear, shoes without socks, jacket without shirt. He didn’t look out of any of his windows as he did so, the one logical action, simply checking on what the sound might be, left bafflingly undone. Instead, he moved with instinct, feeling somehow that if he hesitated, it – whatever it might be – would somehow slip away, dissipate like a forgotten love. He merely moved, and quickly.
He bungled down the stairs, fiddling his keys out of his trouser pocket. He stepped through the cluttered sitting room and into the kitchen, angering himself at how loudly the keys banged against the back door lock (and who had a key lock on the inside of a house? If there was a fire, then whoof, you were gone, banging on a door that would never open. He’d meant to fix that as well, but ten years later . . .).
He opened the door, swinging it out into the freezing night, knowing that whatever had made that noise must be gone, surely, in all the racket he was making from his clumsy door-openings and key-clatterings. It would have fled, it would have flown, it would have run–
But there it stood. Alone in the middle of the modest stretch of grass that made up the modest back garden of his modest detached home.
A great white bird, as tall as he was, taller, willowy as a reed.
A reed made of stars, he thought.
Then, ‘A reed made of stars’? Where the hell did that come from?
The bird was illuminated only by the moon in the cold, clear winter sky, shades of white, grey and dark against the shadows of his lawn standing there regarding him, its eye a small, golden glint of blinking wet, level with his own, its body as long as he’d been when he was at his teenage gangliest. It looked somehow, he stupidly thought, as if it was on the verge of speaking, as if it would open its pointed, clipped bill and tell him something of vital importance that could only be learnt in a dream and forgotten on the instant of waking.
But he felt too cold under his one layer of clothes for this to be a dream, and the bird, of course, remained silent, not even a repeat of the keening that could only have come from it.
It was magnificent. Not just in its unexpectedness, its utter incongruity in the backyard of a London suburb celebrated for its blandness, a place from where native-born artists were noted for moving away. But even in a zoo, even to a non-bird lover, this bird would have caught the eye. The staggering whiteness, even in the dark, of its breast and neck, a whiteness that seemed as much a part of the cold as the frost on the grass behind it. The whiteness flowed down into its wings, the one on the side facing him dipping almost low enough to brush the grass.
Triangles of black pulled away from its bill on either side, and a startling cap of red crowned its head, distinguishable even in this low light, like a military insignia for somewhere impossibly foreign. Its stare was commanding, unyielding in that way of birds. It knew he was there, it met his eye, and yet it didn’t start or fly away or show any fear.
Or rather, he thought, the fear it showed wasn’t of him.