Weyward — Chapter 6: Kate

6

KATE

Kate burrows under the duvet to muffle the clink of beak on glass, waiting for the crow to give up its assault on the window. She takes deep, shuddering breaths, gagging on the musty scent of the bedding. Eventually, the sound fades, and she imagines that she can hear the cut of wings through air as the crow flies away. Her breathing settles, the thrum of her pulse slows.

She lifts her head and looks about the room: the stooped ceiling, the green-painted walls that are almost convex with age, closing in. Framed photographs stare down at her, along with sketches – all of animals, insects, birds. One image looks three-dimensional; sculptural, almost: a tawny snake, gleaming beneath its glass frame. Struck by its russet glimmer, she takes a closer look. It isn’t a snake at all, she sees, but the preserved body of a centipede: shining wetly in thick segments, caught forever in glass.

She shudders as she reads aloud the curling script on the frame, the

words strange as a spell. ‘Scolopendra gigantea.’ The thick silence makes her dizzy. Sick, almost, with the unfamiliar feeling of freedom. It sits uneasily, like rough cloth against her skin. It needs adjusting to.

This is the longest she’s gone without speaking to Simon since they met six years ago, when she was twenty-three. Thinking of that first night makes something in her stomach hurt. She can see herself clearly: impossibly young and shy, standing with her friends in a pub in London.

Though she wonders now if ‘friends’ was ever the right word for the women she met at university. She never managed to match her speech to the

cadence of theirs, never quite correctly timed a joke or a laugh. It’s a feeling she’s had since childhood: that she is somehow separate, closed off from everyone else.

The feeling of separateness had been particularly strong that night, because her mother had just moved to Canada with her new husband, leaving Kate all alone. It was no more than she deserved, but it still hurt.

She remembers looking down into her pint glass, full of the heavy, sour ale she pretended to like, trying to think of an excuse for leaving early.

She’d looked up, with the idea of heading to the toilets for a reprieve, when she’d seen him. It was his posture she’d first admired. The easy, leonine grace with which he leaned against the bar as he surveyed the room.

Flushing with surprise and pleasure, she had realised that he was looking at her. A deep, primal part of her had recognised something in his slow, sensuous smile when their eyes met. Had known what would happen, even then.

There’s a rushing sensation inside her skull, and Kate shuts her eyes.

She breathes deeply and listens. If she were in the flat, she’d be able to hear traffic, the laughter of the post-work crowd drinking outside the pub on the corner, a plane rumbling overhead. The double glazing on their trendy Hoxton high-rise was no match for the soundscape of London, for the hum of eight million lives.

But here there are no cars, no planes roaring overhead, no distant drone from a neighbour’s television. Here there is just … silence. She can’t tell if she likes it or finds it eerie. If she strains, she thinks she can hear the distant babble of the beck, vegetation rustling with the local nightlife. Caterpillars, stoats, owls. Though of course that isn’t possible. She draws back the faded curtains from the window and sees that it is securely shut. There’s no way her hearing is that good. She’s imagining things, like she used to as a child. ‘Come down from those clouds,’ her parents used to say, catching her in one of her reveries. ‘And while you’re here, do your homework!’ But she never listened.

No matter where they were, she was always letting things distract her … a worm, glimmering pink in the sand at the playground; a squirrel, streaking up a tree on Hampstead Heath. The birds, nesting in the eaves of their

house.

If only she’d listened.

She was nine the day it happened. Her father was walking her to school – a summer morning; hazy with heat. They took their usual route, a road shaded with lush oak trees, their leaves dappling the light green. Her father held her hand as they approached the pedestrian crossing, reminding her to look both ways, to pay special attention to the blind corner on the left, where the road curved away in a sharp bend.

They were halfway across the road when a bird call tugged her back, pulling at some strange, secret part of her. A crow, she thought, from its husky caw – she had already learned to recognise most of the birds that sang in her parents’ garden, and crows were her favourite. There was something intelligent – almost human – about their sly voices and dark, luminous eyes.

Kate turned, scanning the trees that lined the road behind them. And there it was: a velvet flash of black, shocking against the lurid green and blue of the June day. A crow, just as she’d thought. Pulling her hand free of her father’s, she ran towards it, watching as it took flight.

A shadow fell across the road. There was a distant roar, and then a monster – the kind that she pretended she was too old to believe in, with red scales and silver teeth – appeared around the corner, bearing down on her.

Her father reached her just in time. He shoved her, hard, onto the grassy verge. There was a sound like paper ripping, like the air tearing in two. She watched, stunned, as the monster ploughed into him.

Slow, then fast, he fell.

Later, when the emergency services had arrived – two ambulances and a police car, a convoy of death – Kate saw something gold on the tarmac.

It was her bee brooch, the one she always carried in her pocket. It must have fallen out when her father shoved her away, saving her from the monster – the monster that she now knew was really just a car, with chipped red paint and a rusted grille. She looked around and saw the driver, a thin- shouldered man, sobbing in the back of one of the ambulances.

A stretcher bearing something black and shiny was being loaded into the other ambulance. It took her a moment to realise that the thing on the stretcher was her father; that she would never again see his smile, the crinkles around his eyes. He was gone.

I killed my father, she thought. I am the monster.

She picked up the brooch and turned it over in her hand. There were ugly gaps like missing teeth where it had lost some of its crystals. One wing was

dented.

She put it back in her pocket as a reminder of what she had done.

From that day on, she kept away from the squirrels and the worms, from the forest and the gardens. Birds in particular were to be avoided. Nature – and the glow of fascination it had always sparked in her – was too

dangerous.

She was too dangerous.

As her fascination turned to fear, she stayed inside, putting herself behind glass. Just like her great-aunt’s framed centipede. And she didn’t let anyone

in.

Until she met Simon.

In the cottage, she chokes down tears. Her throat feels parched and narrow. She can’t remember when she last had a drink: she needs some water, something. Vodka would be better, but her aunt’s spirits collection – crammed into the kitchen cupboard along with jars of instant coffee and Ovaltine – hasn’t yielded anything so pedestrian, only unfamiliar words curled on yellowed labels: arak, slivovitz, soju. Languages Kate doesn’t even recognise. And anyway – she’s not sure it’s a good idea. She remembers the chardonnay, with its stink of rot. The decision she has to make, about the baby, sits heavy inside her.

The shadowy shapes of the kitchen loom out at her in the second before she switches on the light. She averts her eyes from the pale rope of cobwebs hanging from the ceiling and turns to the chipped enamel sink.

Taking a mug from the rack on the windowsill, her knuckles brush against something: a jam jar full of feathers. White and delicate, tawny red.

The largest is glossy and black – almost blue with iridescence. Looking closer, she sees that it is speckled with white, as though it has been dipped in snow. Just like the crow from the fireplace, which, she realises now, was flecked not with ash but with similar white marks. Perhaps it is some sort of disease that afflicts the crows around here? The thought spikes the hairs on the back of her neck. She turns on the tap, gulps the water down as if it could cleanse her, from the inside out.

Afterwards, she takes a moment to look out of the window. She can see the moon clearly, so full that she can make out the dips and ridges of its craters. It casts its yellow light on the ramshackle garden, landing on the leaves of the plants, on the branches of the oaks and sycamores. She is

looking at the trees, wondering how old they are, when she sees them … move.

She can feel her heart beating in her ears. Her breathing grows shallow, the panic washing over her like a tide. Then, as she watches, dark shapes – hundreds of them, it seems – rise from the trees in unison, as if pulled by a puppeteer’s string. Silhouetted against the moon.

Birds.

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