H Is for Hawk (28 page)

When I was writing the speech, still a little concussed, I reached for the phone to call my father and ask what type of plane it was, and for a moment the world went very black.

A hand fell on his shoulder, and a voice said, ‘Come with me, laddie.’ They frogmarched him to the guardhouse, pushed him through the door, and there, behind a desk, a sergeant-major type with a moustache and a frown stood up, barked at him, ripped the page out of his notebook, screwed it into a ball and threw it in the bin, shouted some more, took the back off the camera, exposed the roll of film, pulled it out in loops of falling acetate and dumped that in the bin too.
I was crying my eyes out
, Dad said.
They said, ‘Go home. You didn’t see anything. Forget you were here.’ And they dumped me back at the perimeter and I stood there with my notebook and the Brownie, sobbing away. But then I stopped crying, because I’d thought of something. Something out of
Dick Barton
or the
Eagle.
Maybe I’d written hard enough
. Using his pencil, he shaded the page of his notebook with graphite, and there, white on grey, impressed on the paper from the missing page above, was the registration number of the secret plane. He stopped crying, he said, and cycled home in triumph.

I sat down, dazed. Sun through windows. Things, one after another. The achingly beautiful singing of the choir. The canon’s prayers. Eulogies praising my father’s photographic skills. When Alastair Campbell walked to the lectern he read Wordsworth’s ‘Composed upon Westminster Bridge’ and prefaced it with a short speech in which he said, with decided emphasis, that my father was a Good Man. This broke me. I hadn’t expected this. Or not
this
much this. Everyone sang ‘Jerusalem’ and I forced my mouth to move, but nothing came out but whispered fragments. And afterwards, out in the shaded churchyard under the trees, a young guy with misted glasses and a purple knitted cardigan walked up, shying nervously, and said, ‘You don’t know me. I don’t know anyone in there. They’re all the big guns. But I wanted to say that . . . well. I’m a photographer now. I’m making a living out of it. I moved to London to try and make it, and I didn’t know what I was doing. And I met your dad out on a job once and he talked to me. He gave me lots of advice. He helped me. He didn’t have to, but he did. He saved my life. He was amazing . . .’ And he tailed off, and looked embarrassed, and I stepped forward and gave him a hug, because I didn’t know what to say. And more and more people came up and talked about Dad; and all the old guard were there, snappers from back in the 1960s, and I finally got to put names to the bylines I’d seen so many times. They told me they liked the story. They said it was nice to know that my father was a born journalist. That the boy in short trousers was already the man they’d known, the man who had always got the picture, had always pulled the story from the jaws of defeat.

Down in the Press Club after the service the drinks were poured. And poured. And poured some more. Everyone became increasingly expansive, rushed up to tell me stories about my father. The stories got more slurred as the drinking went on, and the hugs and cheek-kisses increasingly off-target. ‘Another drink?’ said one pressman. ‘Just a soft drink,’ I said, and back he came with a vast glass of wine. ‘Um, is there any soft drink?’ I said, embarrassed. He frowned. ‘That’s what I brought you. This is a soft drink.’

I left with a song in my heart. I felt my family had expanded by about two hundred people, and everything was going to be fine.
Bless you, Dad
, I thought.
I always thought you were a legend, and it turns out you really, really were
.

All the way home on the train I thought of Dad and the terrible mistake I had made. I’d thought that to heal my great hurt, I should flee to the wild. It was what people did. The nature books I’d read told me so. So many of them had been quests inspired by grief or sadness. Some had fixed themselves to the stars of elusive animals. Some sought snow geese. Others snow leopards. Others cleaved to the earth, walked trails, mountains, coasts and glens. Some sought wildness at a distance, others closer to home. ‘Nature in her green, tranquil woods heals and soothes all afflictions,’
¹
wrote John Muir. ‘Earth hath no sorrows that earth cannot heal.’
²

Now I knew this for what it was: a beguiling but dangerous lie. I was furious with myself and my own unconscious certainty that this was the cure I needed. Hands are for other human hands to hold. They should not be reserved exclusively as perches for hawks. And the wild is not a panacea for the human soul; too much in the air can corrode it to nothing.

And by the time I got home I’d worked out, too, why Mabel had been behaving so strangely. She’d grown heavy with muscle over our weeks on the hill, and though she was flying at a higher weight than before, over this last week she’d got too low. She was
hungry
. Hunger had made her aggressive.

I was furious with myself when I realised that first great error on the train. But this second realisation brought self-hatred. I’d been so blind, so miserable, I’d not seen my hawk was miserable too. I’d not seen her at all. I remembered the man I’d fallen for after my father died. I’d hardly known him, but it didn’t matter. I’d recruited him to serve my loss, made him everything I needed. No wonder he had run away. And now I’d made the same mistake again. I’d fled to become a hawk, but in my misery all I had done was turn the hawk into a mirror of me.

The next evening, weak with relief and the sense that something huge, something tectonic, had shifted in my world, I gave Mabel a whole dead pigeon to eat in the grey, cool evening. We sat on a chair under the apple tree, listening to blackbirds chinking in the hedge. The house didn’t seem unfriendly any more. The kitchen window threw a soft square of light into the garden. Huge frosty piles of pigeon feathers accumulated on the lawn. And then she ate. Every last scrap. When it was finished her crop was so full she could hardly stand.

With the plucking of the pigeon came more revelations, as if with its uncovering other things were uncovered. I thought of the dreams I’d had that spring of the hawk slipping away into air. I’d wanted to follow it, fly with it, and disappear. I had thought for a long while that I was the hawk – one of those sulky goshawks able to vanish into another world, sitting high in the winter trees. But I was not the hawk, no matter how much I pared myself away, no matter how many times I lost myself in blood and leaves and fields. I was the figure standing underneath the tree at nightfall, collar upturned against the damp, waiting patiently for the hawk to return.

Mabel was cutting through the crisp ribcage of the pigeon now. She was pulling at the thin intercostal membrane.
Snap
. I thought of my father shading a pencil over ghostly impressions on the page.
Snap
. I thought of White and the reasons why his book had haunted me all this time.
Snap
. Another breaking rib. It wasn’t just that I saw in his book, reflected backwards and dimly, my own retreat into wildness. It was this: of all the books I read as a child, his was the only one I remembered where the animal didn’t die.

Gos never died. He was only lost. For all White’s certainty that his hawk was dead, there was always a chance, even to the very end of the book, even further, that the hawk might return. In the childish depths of my mind the hawk was out there, still in the wood, his yellow toes clutching rough bark and his pale eyes watching me from a dark tangle of branches somewhere in the multitudinous sea of hundred thousand trees.

Melanie Klein
³
wrote that children go through states of mind comparable to mourning, and that this early mourning is revived whenever grief is experienced in later life. She thought that adults try to manage newer losses the way they managed older ones. I thought of that drawing of a kestrel, its carefully worked jesses pencilled over and over again by my six-year-old hand with all its desperate insistence on the safety of knots and lines.

Gos was still out there in the forest, the dark forest to which all things lost must go. I’d wanted to slip across the borders of this world into that wood and bring back the hawk White lost. Some part of me that was very small and old had known this, some part of me that didn’t work according to the everyday rules of the world but with the logic of myths and dreams. And that part of me had hoped, too, that somewhere in that other world was my father. His death had been so sudden. There had been no time to prepare for it, no sense in it happening at all. He could only be lost. He was out there, still, somewhere out there in that tangled wood with all the rest of the lost and dead. I know now what those dreams in spring had meant, the ones of a hawk slipping through a rent in the air into another world. I’d wanted to fly with the hawk to find my father; find him and bring him home.

24

Drugs

SOMETIMES WHEN LIGHT
dawns it simply illuminates how dismal circumstances have become. Every morning I wake at five and have thirty seconds’ lead-time before despair crashes in. I don’t dream of my father any more; I don’t dream of people at all. I walk over winter sandflats, past storm-pools of fog-reflecting water packed with migrant birds stranded by the weather, unable to fly south for winter. Sometimes I dream I’m climbing trees that crack and fall, or sailing tiny boats that overturn in frozen seas. They are pathetic dreams. I don’t need an analyst to explain them. I know now that I’m not trusting anyone or anything any more. And that it is hard to live for long periods without trusting anyone or anything. It’s like living without sleep; eventually it will kill you.

I have spent my evenings playing with Mabel. I’ve made her toys out of paper and tissue and card. She turns her head upside down, puffs out her chin-feathers, squeaks, picks up the toys in her beak, drops them, and preens. When I throw her balls of scrunched-up paper she catches them in her beak and tosses them back to me with a flick of her head. Then she crouches, waiting for me to throw them to her again. It is as good as it gets. When I told Stuart I played catch with her for a while he didn’t believe me. You don’t play with goshawks. It’s not what people do. But I have had to, to somehow leaven the chill. Because other people with goshawks have people too. For them their goshawks are their little splinter of wildness, their balance to domesticity; out in the woods with the hawk, other falconers get in touch with their solitudinous, bloody souls. But then they come home and have dinner, watch TV, play with their kids, sleep with their partner, wake, make tea, go to work. You need both sides, as they say.

I don’t have both sides. I only have wildness. And I don’t need wildness any more. I’m not stifled by domesticity. I have none. There is no need, right now, to feel close to a fetch of dark northern woods, a creature with baleful eyes and death in her foot. Human hands are for holding other hands. Human arms are for holding other humans close. They’re not for breaking the necks of rabbits, pulling loops of viscera out onto leaf-litter while the hawk dips her head to drink blood from her quarry’s chest cavity. I watch all these things going on and my heart is salt. Everything is stuck in an eternal present. The rabbit stops breathing; the hawk eats; leaves fall; clouds pass overhead. A car drives past the field, and there are people in it, held securely on their way somewhere, wrapped in life like a warm coat. Tyre sounds recede. A heron bows overhead. I watch the goshawk snip, tear and wrench flesh from the rabbit’s foreleg. I feel sorry for the rabbit. Rabbit was born, grew up in the field, ate dandelions and grass, scratched his jaw with his feet, hopped about. Had baby rabbits of his own. Rabbit didn’t know what lonely was; he lived in a warren. And rabbit is now just a carefully packed assemblage of different kinds of food for a hawk who spends her evenings watching television on the living-room floor. Everything is so damn mysterious. Another car passes. Faces turn to watch me crouched with rabbit and hawk. I feel like a tableau at a roadside shrine. But I’m not sure what the shrine is for. I’m a roadside phenomenon. I am death to community. I am missing the point.

There is a point? White said that training a hawk was like psychoanalysis. He said that training a goshawk was like training a person that was not a human, but a hawk. Now I see that I am more of a rabbit than a hawk. Living with a goshawk is like worshipping an iceberg, or an expanse of sliprock chilled by a January wind. The slow spread of that splinter of ice in your eye. I love Mabel, but what passes between us is not human. There is a kind of coldness that allows interrogators to put cloth over the mouths of men and pour water into their lungs, and lets them believe this is not torture. What you do to your heart. You stand apart from yourself, as if your soul could be a migrant beast too, standing some way away from the horror, and looking fixedly at the sky. The goshawk catches a rabbit. I kill the rabbit. There is no lust for blood in my heart. I have no heart at all. I watch it all as if I was an executioner after a thousand deaths, as if all this was just the inescapable way of the world.
I don’t think it is. I pray it isn’t
.

I have scared myself. I go to the doctor. I drive to the surgery with no hope of rescue, but I can’t think of anything else to do. The doctor is a man I have not seen before; small, dark-haired, with a neat beard, red braces and a crumpled cotton shirt. He sits behind a wooden desk. ‘Hello,’ he says. ‘Take a seat.’ I sit on a chair. I look at the desk. It is oak. I think of winter trees. ‘What seems to be the trouble?’ he asks. I say I think I might be depressed. That some things have happened over the last few months. My father died.

‘I’m so sorry,’ he says.

Then I tell him I have no job any more and no money coming in. And no house either. It doesn’t sound convincing. So I tell him more. And more. Now it’s hard to stop talking. But when I do, he says some words. I can’t hear them clearly. I am watching his eyebrows. Sometimes they are frowning, sometimes very high. He hands me a multiple-choice questionnaire. This strikes me as grimly funny. I sit in front of it for a very long while, fiddling with the pen, worrying that I’m not getting the answers right. When it is finished it is hard to give it back: I’m convinced I’ve done it wrong. I don’t cry. I hand him the piece of paper and he takes it, turns it over and regards it for a while. He puts it down. He moves a pen from one side of the sheet to the other. He leans across the table. I see his face. I turn away. It is too unbearably kind. ‘Helen, we can help you,’ he says, in a low voice. ‘We really can.’ There’s a kind of tingling astonishment when I hear his words. It’s something like hope. I start to sob.