RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR. Philip Hoare
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Название: RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR
Автор: Philip Hoare
Издательство: HarperCollins
isbn: 9780008133696
isbn:
So I waited to see what happened next.
The following day it reappeared on the shore, as if it had climbed down overnight. It was accompanied by a carrion crow, tentatively but intimately pecking away at the flesh, performing the last rites. I wished the bird well, and a good breakfast.
I’d forgotten about the carcase when, a week later, I came across its remains in the surf. By now the body had been reduced to a single strand of vertebrae, picked clean by crabs and gulls. It was down to its essential scaffolding, its skeletal beauty twisted like the ghost of a horned sea serpent lolling in the water. The stubby antlers sprouted from the bulbous, rough-edged rings on the forehead; caught between them was a scrap of fetlock-like fur. Skeins of grey flesh still hung about the skull, scrappily attached to the thin white bone. I had to have it, this grotesque piece of flotsam, something to add to the pile back home, the fragments of blue-and-white china, the clay pipes with the bloom still on them, the shards of misty sea-glass, the chunks of green-glazed medieval pots, the stones pierced with holes.
Using a bit of driftwood to hold down the spine, I pulled at the antlers, twisting and wrestling with them as with a bull. It occurred to me, as I did so, how easy it might be to detach a human head. With a stagger, I succeeded in wrenching off my trophy, my prize for having watched so patiently. I had to gouge out a gelatinous eye before stuffing the skull into a plastic bag and tying it to the back of my bike.
I rode away from the beach, passing walkers who wouldn’t guess at my cargo. Back home I opened a hole in the warm brown earth and buried the head up to its antlers. They stood proud of the soil like a pruned rose bush. I piled rocks on top to guard against predators and went back indoors to wait till the antlers sprouted and grew like branches, and as below the surface the skull grew roots which became bones, its lost vertebrae, femurs and ribs all restored, ready to rear up out of the earth, a resurrected, a newly-grown deer of my own.
The runway is spattered with coloured lights, a constellation fallen from the sky. I’m led out into the sharp night air, and take my place beside the pilot. He tells me to slide my seat forward and strap myself in. The dual controls move over my lap, operated by a ghostly co-pilot; incomprehensible dials and LED displays tick and flicker on the console. The plexiglass windows shake with the propellers as we taxi onto the airstrip. We stand ready for takeoff, behind a huge airliner, the kind in which I’ve just spent six hours getting here. But these last few miles seem the most difficult.
The little plane follows the behemoth, drawing courage from its slipstream. The pilot mutters into his microphone, the runway clears and the wings wobble. Suddenly we are rising over the dark city, made darker by the sea at its edge.
I have to catch hold of my breath, like a child on Christmas morning. I want to turn to the pilot and say, Isn’t this amazing? But he just stares ahead, wearing his white pressed shirt, quietly suppressing his ecstasy. Everything falls away, all the houses and streets and offices and institutions, leaving only the black water.
The airstrip lights vanish, replaced by winter stars. Orion lurches over the horizon, lazily rising into position, echoing Cape Cod’s fragile shape in his starry frame. The night is so clear, made clearer by the cold, that I can see through the Hunter’s spaces to the stars he has swallowed, the stars that are being born. We’re astronauts for twenty minutes, inside the sky, flying into another system. I look up and down: there’s no difference above or below. The sea is full of stars; the stars are full of the sea.
Out of the blackness ahead a line of red lights appears, trembling, beckoning us down. It is a tentative landfall: the only thing below us is sand. We return to earth with a bump. For all I know we might have arrived on another planet. Then the pilot turns round in his seat and says, ‘Welcome to Provincetown.’
These past few days the bay has been filled with mergansers. They’re saw-beaked, punk-crested birds, forever roving over the sea in their search for food or sex. Just offshore, three males arch their necks in lusty splendour, fighting over a female. Pat says black-backed gulls sometimes take them. Pat is my landlady, although sealady might be a better term. She’s lived here for seventy years. She knows this place as well as her own body. It is through her eyes that I see it.
Close up, red-breasted mergansers are even more extreme: big, pugilistic, as though they’re cruising for a fight. I see the detached head of one rolling in the tideline. I pick it up, running my index finger along its velociraptor teeth. This winter beach is no place of innocence and play, but a site of carnage and slaughter.
From my deck I hear the forlorn calls of loons drifting across the bay. In the mid-distance is the rocky, guano-spotted breakwater. It was built to protect the harbour, but it was soon colonised by cormorants. They’re despised for their droppings that dribble like fishy porridge, and for their supposed depletion of the fishermen’s catch; so greedy that they dislocate their jaws to swallow fishes whole. Only Pat sees them for what they are: sentinel creatures she has drawn over and over again, kayaking out to the breakwater and tethering to a lobster buoy, Zeiss binoculars in one hand and a black marker pen in the other.
Pat – who resembles a bird herself, with her shock of silver hair, intense brown eyes and high cheekbones – channels these charismatic spirits. Haughty of our disdain, they pose in portrait after portrait, a cormorant lineage, each profile worthy of a Hapsburg prince. Clamped to the rocks by their claws, heads bent to preen or raised to the sky, they hold out their wings – to cool their bodies as much as to dry their feathers – casting shadows of themselves. Some saw the crucifix in the shape they threw, a symbol of sacrifice; others discerned something darker.
In the opening pages of Jane Eyre, published in 1847, Charlotte Brontë’s young heroine takes Thomas Bewick’s A History of British Birds from a library shelf on a winter’s afternoon, and hiding in a curtained window seat, loses herself in descriptions of ‘the haunts of sea-fowl’ in the Northern Ocean, surrounded by ‘a sea of billow and spray’ and the ‘marine phantoms’ of wrecked ships.
Bewick’s engravings of ‘naked, melancholy isles’ echo Jane’s abandonment as an orphan, ‘an uncongenial alien’. Later, when she meets Mr Rochester, she shows him three strange watercolours she has painted. One portrays a woman’s body from the waist up, seen through a vapour as the incarnation of the Evening Star; another depicts an iceberg under a muster of the northern lights, overloomed by a veiled and hollow-eyed head. In the third allegory, a cormorant perches on the half-submerged mast of a sinking ship. The bird is ‘large and dark, with wings flecked with foam; its beak held a gold bracelet set with gems, that I had touched with as brilliant tints as my palette could yield, and as glittering distinctness as my pencil could impart’. Below it, ‘a drowned corpse glanced through the green water; a fair arm was the only limb clearly visible, whence the bracelet had been washed or torn’.
The double-crested cormorant’s binomial, for all its Linnaean rigour, is resonant of such gothic airs. Phalacrocorax auritus conflates the Greek for bald, phalakros, and korax, for crow or raven, with auritus, the Latin for eared, a reference to the bird’s breeding crests. Its common name also reflects the same allusion, if not confusion, as a contraction of corvus СКАЧАТЬ