And as he watched, the crane took a single step to the side, and stumbled.
He leapt forward to catch it, and like that, it was in his arms, the surprising weight of its upper body and its reaching neck (so like a swan’s but so different, too), its good wing flapping and out.
And the smell! Of panic and shit. Of blood and fear. Of the impossible labour of flight that seeps through every atom of a bird. The smell, more than anything, convinced the man this wasn’t a dream. Even in his worry about hurting the crane, even in the sudden calamity of flapping wings and flying feathers and the stabbing of a beak that looked as if it might well be able to go straight through his chest and into his heart, he knew that his brain – likeable though it was – was incapable of conjuring a scent this crowded, this peopled by so many different spices.
‘Whoa, there,’ he said, the bird twisting, fighting, perhaps realising too late that a separate, possibly predatory creature now had it in its grasp. The beak poked again, notching his cheek, drawing blood. ‘Dammit!’ he said. ‘I’m trying to help you.’
At which the crane leaned back its neck, its head reaching to the sky, and it opened its beak to call.
But it didn’t call. It gaped silently at the moon, as if breathing it out.
The crane’s full weight suddenly pressed against the man’s chest. That long neck fell forward like a ballerina’s arm accepting applause, and it wrapped around him, its head hanging down his back, as if embracing him. Only the heaving of its narrow breast told the man that the bird was still alive, that in its exhaustion it had given itself into his keeping, that it would hand over its life to the man if that was what was required.
‘Don’t die,’ the man whispered, urgently. ‘Please don’t die.’
He knelt down into the grass, the frost instantly wetting his knees, and with one arm still around the body of the crane, he used his free hand to gently grasp the arrow-pierced wing and unfurl it.
The span of a bird’s wing is mostly feather; the meat of the muscle that regularly performs the casual miracle of self-activated flight is entirely in a long, narrow arm above the spray of feathers below. The arrow had pierced this length of sinew on the underside, catching quite a lot of white feather but still hitting more than enough muscle to have lodged, seemingly irrevocably, through the crane’s wing.
The man wondered if he should call someone who’d be about eight million times more qualified to help than he was. But who? The RSPB? A vet? At this time of night? And what would they do? Would they ‘put it down’? A crane so gravely injured?
‘No,’ whispered the man, though he was unaware of doing so. ‘No.’
‘I’ll help you,’ he said, more loudly. ‘I’ll try. But you have to hold still for me, okay?’
Foolishly, he found himself waiting for the bird’s response. All it did was continue its desperate breathing against his neck. The arrow had to come out, and the man had no idea how he was going to do that, but that’s what needed to be done and he could feel himself already manoeuvring the crane to do so.
‘All righty then,’ the man said, and then he said it again. ‘All righty then.’
He cradled the bird’s weight away from him, and with no small amount of awkwardness, he worked his way out of his jacket, gently moving the crane’s head and neck to slip the cheap fabric from underneath. One-handed, he stretched the jacket out on the frost and laid the crane down onto it, folding its good wing beneath it. The crane acquiesced with an ease that terrified him, but he could still see it breathing, its chest rising and falling, more rapidly than seemed right but at least still alive.
The man was now naked from the waist up, kneeling in frozen grass, on a clear night in a cold season that could very well kill him if he stayed. He worked as quickly as he could, keeping the crane’s injured wing unfurled in a vertical from the ground. He – along with conceivably everyone else in the entire world – had only ever seen arrow injuries in the movies. The rescuers always broke the arrow and pulled it out the other side. Was this even the right thing to do?
‘Okay,’ the man whispered, taking hold of the arrow’s end in one hand and slowly letting go of the injured wing with the other, so that all that was holding up the crane’s wing was the arrow itself, now in both his hands.
It felt shocking against his fingertips, even though they were quickly numbing in the cold. The wood was surprisingly light, as it would have to be for an arrow, but still signifying strength with every inch. He looked for a weak spot, found none, and felt increasingly sure of his inability to break it, certainly of his inability to break it without having to try several times and cause the creature unthinkable agony.
‘Oh, no,’ the man mumbled to himself again, starting to shiver uncontrollably now. ‘Oh, shit.’
He glanced down. It looked back at him with that golden eye, unblinking, its neck curved against his coat like a question mark.
There was no solution then. It was too cold.
He
was too cold. The arrow obviously too thick and strong. It might as well have been made of iron. The crane was going to die. This reed made of stars was going to die right here, in his sad little back garden.
A tidal wave of failure washed over him. Was there another way? Was there any other way at all? He turned back to the door to his kitchen, still open, letting out every bit of meagre warmth from the house. Could he carry the crane back inside? Could he lift it and get it there without hurting it further?
The crane, for its part, seemed to have already given up on him, to have already judged him, as so many others had, as a pleasant enough man, but lacking that certain something, that extra little ingredient to be truly worth investing in. It was a mistake women often seemed to make. He had more female friends, including his ex-wife, than any straight man he knew. The trouble was they’d all started out as lovers, before realising that he was too amiable to take quite seriously. ‘You’re about sixty-five per cent,’ his ex-wife had said, as she left him. ‘And I think seventy is probably my minimum.’ The trouble was, seventy per cent seemed to be
every
woman’s minimum.
Seventy seemed to be the crane’s minimum, too. It had made the same mistake as all the others, seeing a man when, upon closer inspection, he was only really a
guy
.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said to the crane, tears coming again. ‘I’m so sorry.’
The arrow moved unexpectedly in his hands. The crane, seemingly in an involuntary shudder, nudged its wing forward and the arrow slid through the man’s fingers.
And stopped.
The man felt something. A small crack in the wood of the arrow. He looked closer. It was hard to see in such dim light, but yes, definitely a crack, one big enough to follow even with frozen fingertips. It spliced through the shaft, no doubt broken there by the struggles of the crane’s great wing. The man could even feel that the arrow was at slightly different angles on either side of it.
He looked back down at the crane. It regarded him, thinking who knew what.
An accident, surely. Absurd to think that the animal would have led his fingers to it.
But also absurd that a crane with an arrow through its wing had landed in his back garden.
He said, ‘I’ll try.’
He gripped the side of the arrow closest to the pierced wing and held it as steadily as he could. He took the other end in his fist near the crack. The cold was so fierce now that he was feeling actual pain in his hands. It would have to be now. It would have to be right now.
‘Please,’ the man whispered. ‘Please.’
He broke the arrow.
A massive sound rent the air, not from the breaking arrow but as of an enormous flag slapping in a gale. The crane surged to its feet, flinging wide both its wings, and the man fell back in surprise onto the concrete slabs at the edge of his lawn. He threw up an arm to protect himself as the pointed end of the arrow flew free, bouncing harmlessly off his arm and leaving a smear of the crane’s blood across it, the other half disappearing into darkness. He would never find either, always firmly believing that the blood had been too tempting for a starving winter fox not to carry them off.
The bird stood above him now, reaching its head up into the night and calling silently again at the moon. Its wings, fully unfurled, were wider than the man was tall. The crane flapped them in long, slow, powerful movements. It shook the damaged wing once, then once more. The man could still see blood staining the feathers from the wound, but the crane seemed satisfied with its performance.
It stilled itself, its wings reaching out as far as they could go.
It turned its head to regard him with that unblinking eye, a shock of gold under its dark, red crown. The man wondered for a fanciful moment if it was going to reach down and scoop him up in those wings, as if this was some kind of test that he’d passed, one that, had he failed, he would never have remembered taking.
Then he found himself saying something stupid, something that made no sense at all.
‘My name,’ he said, ‘is George.’
He said it to the crane.
As if in answer, the crane bowed its long, long neck low towards the ground, keeping its shoulders up and wings out. It began flapping them in a different way, one that caused it to almost fall forward onto the man. He scooted back some more, and when the crane left the ground its burning white breast soared an inch from the man’s upturned nose. He looked back to watch it veer sharply upwards to avoid running into his house, carrying on up to the peak of his roof and alighting there for a moment. The moon was bright behind it, cutting it into a frozen silhouette.
It ducked its head once more, unfurled its wings, and swooped down over the back garden, its thin black legs trailing behind it, then up and up and up and up and up, until it was nothing more than one star among many in the night sky and soon not even that.
The man, George, rose slowly from the icy ground, a worrying ache starting to curl through his bare torso. He was shivering so badly now it was all he could do to stand, and he wondered if he was falling into shock. He would need a warm bath, and he’d need it soon, though he was already wondering if he’d have the strength to make it back inside–
A jolt ran through his body as he heard it, one more time. The
keening
, the mournful call that had brought him out here in the first place. It echoed through the frosty, clear air, as if it was the night itself calling out to him. The crane was saying its goodbye, its thank you, its–
And then he realised that the call hadn’t come from an impossible bird vanishing from his garden and life and out of the whole world for all he knew. The keen had been set free from his own body, cried out from icy blue lips, torn from a chest that suddenly seemed to hold his irreparably broken yet still beating heart.
‘B
ut this says
Patty
.’
‘Yes, that’s what it says here on the order form, too.’
‘Do I look like a Patty to you?’
‘I suppose they could have thought it was for your wife.’
‘My wife is called Colleen.’
‘Well, then, Patty would have clearly been wrong for
her
–’
‘I saw the man type it in myself. Pea, ay, double dee, why. Paddy. And yet, follow along with my finger here as I underline the letters, this very, very unambiguously says
Patty
.’
‘Which is what it says here on the order form.’
‘But which is not what I saw the man type.’
‘I’m guessing maybe they looked at the vest and thought that since it was so
pink
–’
‘They? Who are they?’
‘The printers.’
‘This isn’t a printers?’
‘Not
that
kind of printers. We’re more of a flyer, poster-design kind of–’
‘So you’re a printing shop that doesn’t do its own printing.’
‘Not at all, as I say, we’re more of a flyer–’
‘Regardless, for printing onto running vests–’
‘And t-shirts.’
‘What’s that?’
‘It’s not just running vests we send out. T-shirts, too. Hen nights, stag dos, that kind of–’
‘You send them out.’
‘We send them out.’
‘With specific orders that someone in this shop types into a form on your screen there.’
‘Yes.’
‘So when I saw the man, quite a bit older than you, which is to say a grown-up, he typed in, before my very own eyes, Pea, ah, double dee, why–’
‘That would have been the specific orders to the outside printing company, yes.’
‘Which they didn’t follow.’
‘According to you, anyway, but it clearly says
Patty
on the order form–’
‘DO I LOOK LIKE A PATTY TO YOU?’
‘There’s no need for the shouting. We’re just trying to solve a problem, two reasonable men–’
‘Neither of whom are called
Patty
.’
‘I’m from Turkey. We don’t have Paddy versus Patty, okay? So how am I to know? Like I said, they probably saw the colour of the vest–’
‘That’s the colour of the charity. Pink is the colour of the charity. Breast Cancer. Pink. Because it affects women. Mostly women do the fundraising, but some men do, too. We run, we raise money. It’s the colour of the
charity
. It has nothing to do with the gender of the vest.’
‘Well, now, see, that’s interesting. Would you say vests
had
genders?’
‘Yes, I
would
say that. Men’s extra large. It’s right there on the tag. Men’s. Extra. Large. Really, am I being filmed? Is that what this is? Ah,
here’s
the guy–’
‘What’s going on, Mehmet?’
‘Customer here not happy with his order, Mr Duncan.’
‘Do I look like a Patty to you?’
‘I couldn’t really say without knowing you better, but I’m guessing no.’
‘Then why does this say–’
‘Obviously an error. I very clearly remember typing in Paddy with two dees.’
‘
Thank
you.’
‘We’ll get that fixed for you overnight.’
‘The race is on Sunday.’
‘And overnight will be Friday. It’ll be fine.’
‘I’m just saying there’s no room for error. Any
more
error.’