Little Bird. Camilla Way

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СКАЧАТЬ conversation she’d say something dumb, he’d notice that when she stayed she’d leave her things all over the bathroom floor. Suddenly, reality would come screaming into focus and the relationship would become instantly and irretrievably intolerable. Pretty rich, he knew: he was hardly catch of the year. But there it was.

      When he was ten, something happened to Frank that would stay with him forever. It was a few weeks after his dad had left and his Aunt Joanie had taken him and her spaniel Bongo to Greenwich Park. It was a beautiful day and the place had been full of sunbathing tourists, picnicking families, kids playing football. The dog had been running in circles at their feet as they walked, and Frank remembered thinking how strange it was that the sky was so blue and the air so warm when inside he felt so horribly cold, so horribly grey.

      ‘You’re going to have to be a big, brave boy now Frankie,’ his aunt was saying as they tramped along. ‘The thing is, sometimes grown-ups find life difficult …’ He tried his hardest to block out her voice but suddenly he couldn’t bear it any more. Why was everyone talking like his dad wasn’t coming back? Why had his mum not gotten out of bed for three weeks? It was disgusting, stupid the way they were all talking. He pulled his hand from Joanie’s and throwing a stick for Bongo, began to run.

      Ignoring his aunt’s call he threw the stick further and further, tearing after Bongo up the steep hill, on and on until he’d left the crowds and Joanie far behind. Of course his dad was coming back. Of course he was. He ran until he was in a part of the park secluded from the rest, on the heath side, near the deer and the big oak trees. And then he’d seen her. Under a tree twenty yards away was a girl of about seventeen, her legs stretched out before her, a book resting upon her lap. Bongo was sitting next to her, his big stupid tongue lolling out. Both of them watched him as he approached.

      ‘Hello,’ she said, when he reached her.

      He had opened his mouth to speak, but it seemed he’d forgotten how. The sun was low in the sky behind her and shone through her curls so her face was framed in a flaming halo of golden red. Her eyes were luminous; dragon-fly green. Never, never had he seen anything so beautiful. He could barely breathe, certain that if he even blinked she’d disappear, or he’d wake and find himself back in his bedroom, staring at his collection of dinosaurs. A feeling of perfect calm settled upon him.

      She was very slender, across the pale skin of her chest was a faint sprinkling of freckles. Through the thin white cotton of her top he could just make out the swell of her breasts and he felt himself flush red as something unrecognisable began to stir in his underpants. He gazed at her. Everything – the green of her eyes, the golden red of her hair, the blue of the sky – was supernaturally bright. With a little sigh, Bongo had flopped down and rested his head in her lap, and Frank had almost groaned with jealousy when her small, white hand had reached over and stroked the dog’s ears.

      ‘Are you lost?’ she’d asked.

      And even though he wasn’t, not really, he had nodded. She’d smiled, and after considering him a while said, ‘Don’t worry. I’m sure you’ll find your way back.’

      He felt as if he could stand there looking at her for the rest of his life. The world was perfectly silent, perfectly still. The sun sank lower in the sky. Just at that moment he heard Joanie’s voice calling him. ‘Frank! Frank!’ His name drifted to them like a sound from another world. He held his breath and willed her to go away.

      ‘Who’s that?’ asked the girl.

      ‘Auntie Joanie.’

      ‘Ah.’ She continued gazing at him for a while, and then smiled. ‘Well then, Frank,’ she said, ‘give me a kiss and then you’d better go.’

      As if she was an exotic bird that might take flight at any moment, very, very slowly he had knelt down and carefully kissed her cheek.

      She smiled. ‘Bye then, Frank. Be good.’

      And then he had turned and run towards Joanie’s voice, Bongo racing after him.

      ‘Did you see her?’ he asked urgently, when he reached his aunt. ‘Did you see her?’

      ‘Who?’ Joanie had squinted over in the direction he’d run from, scanning the grass. ‘No dear, I don’t see anyone.’

      He had turned and raised his hand to shield his eyes from the sun, but Joanie was right: there was nothing there. The girl had vanished.

      Since that day he had tried to find her again, had got into the habit of searching for her in crowds, of scanning the faces of every passing woman, but nothing. Sometimes in his dreams he would find himself back there, under the tree the summer he was ten, but just as he was about to kneel down and kiss her, he’d wake. Occasionally, listening to music, he would come close to finding again that sense of beauty – there amongst the notes and melodies and beats – but it was never quite enough: the thing he was searching for was always just out of his reach. His whole life he had been trying to find that perfection again, and in Kate he knew he had found it; he had found her.

      At first, their meetings were maddeningly infrequent. Kate was the most evasive person he had ever met. She had no mobile phone, moved from job to job, avoided talking about her home (to which he was never invited). And yet, just when he was about to give up hope of ever seeing her again she would appear at his door or at the record shop where he worked, saying simply, ‘Hello, Frank,’ with that same, breathtaking smile of hers beneath that same, steady gaze.

      But still she would offer nothing concrete for him to hold onto, and he was always under the impression she might disappear at any moment. Whenever they parted she would leave no trace of herself. And he had never met anyone who talked so little about themselves – women, in his experience, always liked to talk about themselves. For hours. In contrast, Kate’s silence was like a blank sheet upon which people were invited to draw whatever version of her they wished.

      ‘Your accent,’ he said, the second time they met. ‘Sometimes you sound American. Did you used to live there?’ Her response – a short, blithe account of a New York childhood, a car crash that had killed her parents, her move to London to live with an aunt – was so brief and delivered with such a lack of detail that he had hardly been able to land on any part of it and, almost without him noticing, she had asked a question about the record they were listening to and he had been talking enthusiastically about it for a full ten minutes before he realised the original subject had been abandoned.

      And he didn’t press her. Frank was good with mystery, with a feeling of being always slightly in the dark. He was used to it, knew where he stood with it. Ever since his father had disappeared – seemingly slipping between the gaps in the pavements one day without so much as a backward glance – he had spent much of his life since wondering what the hell had happened. It was how he loved his father now; in the absence of the physical man his affection had become coloured and finally replaced by a vague, persistent bafflement.

      Once or twice he would come across Kate lost in thought and it was like glancing through a window at something he shouldn’t see, something private. With her guard down, just for a second, he would see an altogether different girl looming into view behind those dark blue eyes, like something emerging suddenly from behind a tree. It was like catching sight of a fox streaking down a London street at night; an unexpected glimpse of something wild. But the moment would pass, she would sense his presence and alter instantly back into Kate. These moments would provoke in him an almost unbearable protectiveness, and yet a part of him would be relieved too, frightened of having to deal with something he wasn’t sure he was ready for, something that might demand unknown, difficult things from him.

      He СКАЧАТЬ