MAYBE THE BIRDS
I watch the dog. The dog watches something through the patio doors to the backyard. Every now and then his head tilts to one side in the way it does when I talk to him or sing to him. Although there is no sound that would make him do that now. Not that I can make out anyway. But dogs have better hearing, don’t they? They hear things no human ear is capable of detecting.
Like dog whistles.
The low growl of thunder from five miles away.
A million voices screaming from the other side of the world.
Maybe the birds are singing but I just can’t hear them. Maybe there is someone out there shuffling about. Maybe, maybe . . . But this is all just wishful thinking – the birds, someone being out there. It’s the way your mind gets in the quiet. He’s probably just got his eyes on all the brown leaves in the yard and wondering why they’re there. ‘Why all these brown leaves in the spring, Ma?’ I imagine him asking in the human voice I have given to him. But I haven’t got any answers. None that he would understand anyway. And so I keep quiet, and just carry on watching as he tilts his head the other way. Not once looking at me. Eyes full on whatever has got his attention through the grey dust coating the glass on the patio door. The little dots of his pupils as black as the night used to be.
*
Every day I tell the dog I will leave him the birds. It’s what I do. It’s part of our routine now. I get up, get dressed then stand in front of him as he stares up at me from the settee where he and I have been trying to sleep all night and say, ‘Well, Sleepy Harry, whatever happens I’m going to leave you the birds, OK? If nothing else you’ll get those at least.’ And he tilts his head, first one way and then another before jumping down off the settee and sitting at my feet. Not sure what it is I am telling him but hoping, no doubt, it is to do with food. Or perhaps the river – where Richard used to take him sometimes. Or a long walk over the moors on those frosty mornings when his breath would puff out like little ghosts as he ran on ahead of us, searching for rabbits, for rats.
I don’t like to go so far with him now though. You never know what might be out there. So I just take him while the sun is still low and murky, then around the fields of dust that used to be yellow with rapeseed at the back of the house. Watching while he sniffs at the shrivelled scrubs of green there, not sure whether he should pee on them or not, if it’s alright to do his business on such open ground. But nobody ever comes out of the farmhouse like they used to. And so I just give him the nod, tell him, ‘Go on boy, it’s OK’. Him looking up at me before lifting a leg or cowering down, the green plants trembling as he wets them, small clouds of grey puffing up from the blighted dry of the land.
*
The dog is not called Harry, despite all the times I refer to him as Sleepy Harry or Barking Harry or, yes, even Dirty Harry. His name is Bear. It’s the name Richard gave him because of how he looked when we first went to pick him up from Cumbria – hair brown and fluffed so it made his face round as a bear’s, body fat as a belly filled with fish. He was the only brown pup in the litter, the only one with a longer snout and those brown human eyes. All the other pups were black, same as the mother, more square-faced and short-snouted like the breed is supposed to be. But Bear was different, the odd one out. He was the only one that wasn’t spoken for when we got there, but we’d have taken him anyway. And Bear seemed to sense that. He just sat and watched us as the woman talked to us; the other pups pawing and jumping, eager to get our attention. But that little brown
misfit was the one for us. He knew it. And those eyes of his told us we were right.
‘I think he’s a throwback,’ the woman said. ‘Probably some funny business somewhere, way back, perhaps with an Irish Terrier . . . a Lakeland.’
Richard picked him up, held him. Put his nose down to Bear’s mouth until the pink tongue came out and licked at the skin. ‘Doesn’t matter to us.’
‘He’s pure though,’ she said. ‘It’s just one of those things. He might look a bit . . .’
‘Doesn’t matter to us,’ Richard said again, scrunching at Bear’s ear. The dog stopped licking him before pushing his head back to sniff at something in the air, something neither of us could smell.
The woman scratched the top of her arm, the small bloom of pink there – the first I’d seen on anyone. ‘He’s a strange one,’ she said, scratching harder. ‘Those eyes. It’s like he can see through you. Makes you feel –’, she shivered.
‘Maybe you’ve got something to hide?’ I asked with a smile.
She glanced at her arm, pulled at the sleeve of her top. ‘No,’ she said, serious. ‘I haven’t. What you see is what you get with me.’ Me and Richard glanced at each other, trying not to smirk. She went through to her kitchen then, came back a few minutes later – sleeve all the way back down, a pinprick of blood just visible at the edge of one cuff. ‘Aye. What you see is what you get. Don’t hide anything, me.’
What you see . . .
Her eyes were not yet glazed as they would have been just a few weeks later, as Richard’s own eyes had become not long after the pink first showed itself to him. But we didn’t know about any of that then – it was just the very start of things. But we would come to know it before long, when the reports started to come in. First from some small country on the other side of the world that neither of us had heard of. Then from other places too, ones we had. Gradually getting nearer. Closer and closer to our own little home.
*
Bear doesn’t always follow me into my workshop when we get back from his walk. He often just gets on his bed and curls up with his fluffy
, pushing his long snout into the near-bald of its belly, his eyes closing to sleep. He knows our routine now. That I will go in there for a few hours and work at the clay on my bench. Making it into small shapes he hasn’t seen before. And that when I have a few of them I will leave them to dry for a while before getting the ones from the day before to take to the kiln, placing them on the shelf, ready to fire. Feeding the kiln with wood to get the temperature up. Then keeping it going until day turns to night and the clay starts to set and harden to ceramic.
It might seem gruesome but what I make looks like rows of torsos when you line them up; torsos with thighs, no heads, no arms, no calves, no feet. Just the middles of bodies with all the interesting bits gone. Another way to see them though – a better way, perhaps – is as a wide pipe that separates into two smaller ones lower down, which of course is what they are. But it’s hard not to see the body-ness of them. The way they sit humanly in the kiln while the fire licks up around them. The ashes from the wood clinging to the clay – marking each one in a different way, until they are small, pale artworks… only pieces of art that nobody but us is likely to see.
Bear doesn’t know it but these shapes are the way I will keep my promise to him – about the birds. He has always loved watching them, listening to them in the time since we got him. So, making my own version of these syrinxes – these bird voice boxes – is how I will keep them alive for him now. That is why I go into my workshop every day and work at them with my fingers, with the fettling knives and loop tools, the wooden moulders and scrapers; to bring the sound of the birds back for us, but ultimately for him. To make the air around the house vibrate with some kind of song once more, after too many weeks of all this silence.
*
I go to my workshop and check over all the fired and finished syrinxes, tilt some of them to see if there are any cracks or chips in the ceramic. Stroke my finger over what should be bony cartilage, those vibrating rings and half-rings that hula hoop their song into life. When I first thought about doing this a couple of weeks ago, after the skies grew quieter, but before the electricity stopped coming through,
I searched for photos and articles online about how to make them. Marvelling as I wandered from one page to another at how remarkable the syrinx was – a lower larynx in the chest, different to ours, and which could only be found in birds; an organ which enabled some to sing with two voices at the same time. With air from one lung making one song, air from the other a second. The internet told me the syrinx was an evolutionary wonder, that more research was needed to find out how it had come to be, that there was no evidence of it anywhere else; in non-avian dinosaurs, or crocodiles – the bird’s closest living relative. But that research won’t happen now. The origins of that larynx will never now be found. It is not the only setback of course. There are so many other things we’ll never know. The age of discovery at an end. After all this time. After so many millennia of breakthroughs and progress. So many brains searching for answers.
These syrinxes are not the pots and vases and kitchenware I am used to making – they’re new, more of a challenge. Something my hands didn’t immediately know how to begin when I first picked up the clay, because there was no muscle memory for them, no felt familiarity. But I wanted to do it if I could – for me, for Bear. And making them was a way to fill these long, slow hours. To make day turn to night, turn to day again. To keep on. Stop my brain from dwelling on what has happened, what might still be happening. To give my fingers something other to do than scratch.
*
I stand back and look over the syrinxes – there are about a hundred of them now. I pick one up and blow into it. It does not, of course, sound completely like birdsong because of the lack of membrane and muscle, the absence of a brain orchestrating things. It is less clear, less acrobatic. More whispery like the memory of that which no longer exists and cannot now be recalled. But it is something. It gives the impression of song at least, of what was. Like those paintings by Monet with their hints of waterlilies and ponds, the poppies at Argenteuil; those ladies whose faces are shadowed by cloud or umbrella. These syrinxes can never be the same as what existed before. ...
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