Authors: Polly Samson
A blackbird flutters up before him and he swerves to avoid its mate on the road; in his mirror he sees the little blackbird darting at the spatchcock of gore and feathers.
There is not a breath of wind. The tarmac shimmers as he comes over the brow of the hill to the village.
At Firdaws he struggles inside with his shopping, leans against the door to close it and stays there a moment, catching his breath.
He chucks a couple of his beers into the freezer, takes a long tepid gulp from the neck of another. In the sitting room he throws open the door to the garden before slumping in the window seat. As far as he can tell no one has been near apart from another delivery man who has left a large crate in the back porch, which he already knows he won’t find the energy to open.
His head is thumping. The dog cowers, quivering and miserable, in the corner behind a chair; the birds grow silent. He smells the storm before he hears the first timpani echoing around the valley, nothing more than a rumour playing through the leaves of the trees before a blast from the east inks the sky and lacerates it with a crack of lightning. The rain comes beating and sizzling.
Drops the size of marbles bounce from the grass as the storm rips through the valley. Trees lose control of their limbs, every leaf an electric green so against the black sky they appear luminous as stars. He is unconcerned by the din of the thunder, the whining dog, the ringing phone. Vines batter the window and rain slashes to the glass. He watches drops break and scatter, their trails mesmerising, his fingers pressed to his cheeks, almost peaceful. The air is fresh with earth and electricity and he’s transfixed by the liquid motion. The drops collect and burst and skedaddle, tadpoles of rainwater flickering before his eyes, transporting him to another night. Karl’s student room. The night before he first laid eyes on Julia.
Karl clicked the Anglepoise off and beckoned to Julian. On his desk the microscope glinted in the high-tech promise of its own light. Julian handed the joint to one of the girls lolling among the cushions and Indian bedspreads on Karl’s bed, felt himself sway as he rose to his feet.
‘Here, be my guest,’ Karl said with open palm, prompting him to step up to the microscope. Julian found himself more self-conscious than he could remember and stupidly nervous, not helped by the CD, which took a momentous turn with massed strings and oboes exalting him onwards. He felt ridiculous, stalled in the spot between the girls on the bed and Karl’s desk, struck by something like guilt or stagefright. And also quite stoned. The music crashed and crescendoed, propelling him forward like a wedding march in hell, and vampiric bridesmaids – the girls – clambered up and hovered behind him, so close he could feel their breath at his neck.
Karl checked his viewer once more, minutely twisting a dial back and forth, humming tunelessly under his breath. ‘There, that should be focused for you now.’ He glanced over his shoulder and something about Julian made him reach out and hold him, to take his weight, as he had that day in the park. ‘It’ll be OK,’ he said, his shoulder steady. ‘I’ve set it at 400 times magnification on a dark field. It’s like an aquarium in there.’
‘Hurry up,’ Verity was poking him in the shoulder. ‘I’m dying to look.’
They were a strange gang that summer, united only by their parts in Julian’s earlier little anaphylaxis drama in the park.
Almost everyone else had scarpered when term ended, but Julian was staying on until at least the middle of August to clear his debts working shifts at the Crown. Cara too.
‘Save a life and it’s yours for ever, something like that.’ Cara tried to remember a Chinese proverb for Karl, and looking sidelong at Julian, deliberately provocative: ‘And by the way he’s been carrying on, you’re welcome to him, I say.’
Karl had his research project and Verity was too hooked on Medicine to leave the faculty after her first year. She turned up wherever Karl went, nodding at every word that fell from his lips, positioning herself by his side whenever possible, picking his considerable brain. Verity had what Karl called a ‘laboratory tan’ and a bubbling complexion that betrayed a diet of wine and crisps. Most of her clothing in some way of cut or colour resembled hospital scrubs or doctor’s coats. Cara, by contrast, was slinky. That night at Karl’s she wore a black satin blouse with buttonholes crucially just a little too generous for its pearl buttons and a stolen black bowler hat that gave her the look of Sally Bowles.
‘I was the one who found the lady with the EpiPen,’ she was reminding them for the hundredth time, cocking an eyebrow with mocked indignation. ‘I keep telling you it’s me you need to thank.’ She twirled the ill-begotten hat on the end of her index finger. ‘Not Karl.’
Karl was grinning at her, intoxicated. Steady on, Julian wanted to tell him, you’ll frighten her off. He had yet to discover that women rarely resisted Karl. It was not the way he looked – girls didn’t, on the whole, favour short untidy men with comedy eyebrows. It was something else.
They’d finished the bottle of brandy one of Karl’s housemates had swiped from a party. Cara prowled the borders of Karl’s room, pulled books from shelves, studied the random objects ranged around. Picked up some old vertebrae and put them down fast, blew dust from flowers desiccated in wine bottles, her hat fixed at a jaunty angle. She came to a standstill at Karl’s microscope: that’s what started it. Tracing her finger along a box of slides and looking back at them over her shoulder but addressing only Karl: ‘Someone I know had a boyfriend who liked to study his own sperm under the microscope.’ Outrageously flirtatious: ‘Do you ever do that, Karl?’
‘I do it every day,’ he replied, suppressing a smile. He’d unhooked his glasses and was polishing them on the hem of his shirt. He looked up, stopping to meet her gaze, blinking in that way he did without his specs. ‘Mine and other people’s.’ His face was bare without them, vulnerable like a boy who has lost his mother.
Verity stopped leafing through piles of CDs and rocked back on to her heels, alert as a terrier at the rattle of the biscuit tin. ‘Really?’
‘Yeah, that’s what I’m researching. We’re testing sperm and its reaction to various chemicals and drugs.’ He grinned at Cara again. His chevroning eyebrows were the most attractive thing about him. ‘Motility, it’s called. Or not. It’s complicated.’
‘You’ve kept that quiet,’ Verity said. ‘Is it a contraception research project?’
‘Yeah, that’s why I’m still here.’ Karl gestured at the room and shrugged. ‘It’s got a small grant, so I get paid.’
‘And you collect your own samples?’ Cara looked sideways at him from beneath the brim of the bowler.
‘We work from frozen mainly,’ Karl shot a quick glance at Julian and grinned. ‘Though we’re always looking for donors.’ Julian snorted, felt himself grow hot. Verity plonked herself close beside him among the cushions, rubbing her hand back and forth along the inside seam of his jeans. A sample was needed.
Another bottle of brandy was discovered, followed by chasers of ouzo from Karl’s housemate’s holiday. On repeat was that tape of Karl’s favourite soundtrack,
The Mission
. Julian could hear it through the wall as he sat on the edge of the lavatory, his jeans round his ankles, Verity on her knees keen to assist, tugging at him with all the delicacy of a milkmaid. He looked at the glass jar in his left hand and thought of Cara in the other room with Karl. Somehow that helped. Cara had a gap between her front teeth and swingy hair that smelled of apricots, and that shirt on the verge of unbuttoning all evening. Karl had been leaning over her, finally removing the hat as Verity led him from the room with the jar. There was one last look as Cara edged herself up Karl’s desk, her skirt sliding to the top of her thighs, Karl’s hands already in her hair and Cara leaning back so Karl had to stoop over her to kiss her and at last her shirt fell open and yes, no bra . . . and with that Verity got her sample.
The extractor fan whirred and clanked as Verity inspected his cloudy offering, holding the jar to the light, tipping it this way and that until he begged her to stop, felled by pudeur and suddenly sober.
Karl prepared the slide and set up the microscope. He slooshed the sample with saline, telling Cara: ‘It has to be around the same salinity as sea-water because the sea has the same mineral balance as our bodies. If I mixed it with plain water they would die.’ On hand beside him, Cara was like a dental nurse in disarray, her shirt buttoned up wrong.
Verity hovered, refusing eye contact with Julian, while Karl continued making tiny adjustments to the microscope, peering through the eyepiece, raising and lowering the platform. Julian was almost tapping his foot with impatience when Karl started jigging, doing a ‘pee-pee dance’. ‘Sorry, I’ll be quick,’ he said, dashing from the room. ‘Don’t touch anything.’
While he was gone Cara rolled a spliff, Verity slumped beside her. Julian fiddled with a deck of cards, trying to remember a trick that his old friend Peace Convoy Raph had shown him the summer he first came in his brightly coloured wreck of a van to his verge on the road out of Horton.
Raph’s was a good trick because not many people knew it. If he could remember how, he’d make all four aces rise from the pack. Cara and Verity kept spluttering with laughter. Cara put her hat on to Karl’s skeleton. The joint was finally passed back to him and tasted hot.
They heard the chugging of the flush and Karl sidled back looking flustered: ‘Why don’t the three of you finish smoking that thing while I sort this out.’ He resumed his work with the microscope. ‘I might need to change a bulb. Never had one go before,’ he said, mumbling, shaking his head over the thing.
Julian really was very stoned by the time Karl called him over. Karl gripped him by the shoulder. ‘Take a look,’ he said. ‘All swimming around with no particular place to go.’ And he shushed Verity, telling her to wait her turn.
Julian bent to the eyepiece. He was oddly moved by what he saw. This constellation – no, more than that, so many of them, each with its own halo as though lit from within – sparkling, darting, flickering. His very own universe composed entirely of comets. They seemed so purposeful, so bright and full of promise, that for a moment he felt sad for each and every one of them, for their urgency, for the messages they would never get to deliver.
Julia arrived in his life the very next day. It was as if she had sprung fully formed from his forehead. Julia, like a prize for the climb he’d taken to get there, standing on the crest of the Downs with three counties falling away behind her and her long hair flying. Just moments before he had been dreaming her up, this very woman, as he clambered up the chalk path, his shame receding as he climbed higher but still a little breathless from Karl’s brandy and ouzo of the night before. He’d summoned her from the depths of his hangover. Wished her into being. Ta-dah! She was everything he desired: right down to the muscular brown calves that emerged from her cut-off blue jeans.
The wind blew in chaotic gusts, bowling him along the grassy ridge towards her. She was walking with her back to the wind, chin tipped to the sky, and didn’t notice him until he was close enough to make her jump.
‘Hi,’ he called out and as she turned with startled brows he saw that her face was just as he’d dreamt it, neatly featured with a tan skin and, out of dark lashes, her eyes as unexpectedly blue as a Siamese cat.
‘Whoa, it’s blowy,’ he said, amazed to find he could speak. She nodded and gestured to the sky: ‘Hey, look out.’ And only as she raised her left arm did he notice the leather gauntlet. He followed her eyes skyward to a bird that was falling, turning and turning, like a heart that had leapt free. It fell, and as it did it became a falcon. He was transfixed. His was the raptor’s gaze. He was hurling himself straight at her from the heavens. The beat of its wings was the beat of his heart. It landed on her outstretched arm, claiming her, snatching her wrist with its yellow and black feet, jealously shielding the meat she gave it beneath a mantle of wing and tail feathers.
‘Wow, a falcon, I’ve never seen one up close.’
She laughed at his astonishment. ‘Manners, Lucifer,’ she said as it tore the meat from her. ‘Actually, he’s a Harris hawk.’ The bird looked at her with psychopathic eyes.
‘Don’t be so greedy,’ she scolded, and Julian noticed her shirt billowing, the sheen of her skin. She held a second morsel of pink stringy meat in the gauntlet. A leather tassel dangled from her wrist, jerking as the hawk stripped the meat.
‘What’s that you’re feeding him?’
‘Don’t ask,’ she wrinkled her nose in a way that made his heart tender. It was delicately freckled just across the bridge. Another mischievous gust revealed a leather belt and above it the momentary distraction of a long narrow stomach, smooth as new brown paper. Perhaps he was dreaming?
‘All the way up here to fly him, and it’s perfect, this wind, but he hasn’t caught a thing this morning.’
He listened for clues to her exotic looks in her accent but found none. She pulled a face at the hawk and it took the cue to fly from her, imperious feathers ruffled, reeling away to the trees. ‘Off he goes again,’ she said and Julian watched the swing of her walk as she headed for the copse, the loose folds of white shirt gathering at her waist. The pouch from which she’d taken the bits of meat bounced against her hip. The gauntlet was comically large at the end of her slender brown arm.
The hawk landed in a tree and Julian found he was holding his breath, his own arms outstretched, cruciform, willing it to fly to her, his every muscle tensed. It veered off and Julia started to lollop, then to jog, following the flight of the bird.