house? If there was a fire, then whoof, you were gone, banging on a door that would never open. He’d meant to fix that as well, but ten years later . . .).
He opened the door, swinging it out into the freezing night, knowing that whatever had made that noise must be gone, surely, in all the racket he was making from his clumsy door-openings and key-clatterings. It would have fled, it would have flown, it would have run–
But there it stood. Alone in the middle of the modest stretch of grass that made up the modest back garden of his modest detached home.
A great white bird, as tall as he was, taller, willowy as a reed.
A reed made of stars, he thought.
Then, ‘A reed made of stars’? Where the hell did that come from?
The bird was illuminated only by the moon in the cold, clear winter sky, shades of white, grey and dark against the shadows of his lawn standing there regarding him, its eye a small, golden glint of blinking wet, level with his own, its body as long as he’d been when he was at his teenage gangliest. It looked somehow, he stupidly thought, as if it was on the verge of speaking, as if it would open its pointed, clipped bill and tell him something of vital importance that could only be learnt in a dream and forgotten on the instant of waking.
But he felt too cold under his one layer of clothes for this to be a dream, and the bird, of course, remained silent, not even a repeat of the keening that could only have come from it.
It was magnificent. Not just in its unexpectedness, its utter incongruity in the backyard of a London suburb celebrated for its blandness, a place from where native-born artists were noted for moving away. But even in a zoo, even to a non-bird lover, this bird would have caught the eye. The staggering whiteness, even in the dark, of its breast and neck, a whiteness that seemed as much a part of the cold as the frost on the grass behind it. The whiteness flowed down into its wings, the one on the side facing him dipping almost low enough to brush the grass.
Triangles of black pulled away from its bill on either side, and a startling cap of red crowned its head, distinguishable even in this low light, like a military insignia for somewhere impossibly foreign. Its stare was commanding, unyielding in that way of birds. It knew he was there, it met his eye, and yet it didn’t start or fly away or show any fear.
Or rather, he thought, the fear it showed wasn’t of him.
He shook his head. These thoughts weren’t helpful. The cold, far from waking him, was so ferocious it was actually making him sleepier, and he thought for a moment that this must be how people die in snowstorms, this lethargy which felt warm against all available evidence. He rubbed his arms, then stopped should the action startle the bird away.
But the bird remained.
A heron? he thought. A stork? But it was nothing at all like those hunched, purplish grey birds he sometimes saw skulking around the city like unwashed old gentlemen.
Then, for the second time that evening, the word came to him. Who knew if he was right, who knew such things any more, the right words for birds, the right words for anything, who bothered to remember them in an age when knowledge was for putting into a cloud and forgetting, then forgetting again that you ever needed to remember it? But the name came to him, and regardless of where it might have come from or how it might be right, it was right. He knew it, and speaking made it more so.
‘A crane,’ he said, softly. ‘You’re a crane.’
The crane turned, as if in answer to his naming of it, its eye still on his, and he could see that the wing the bird had kept behind it wasn’t folded down like the nearside one. It was outstretched, awkwardly.
Because it was shot through with an arrow.
‘Oh, shit,’ the man whispered, the words appearing before his lips in a fruitless puff of steam. ‘Oh, no.’
The arrow was long, extraordinarily so, at least four feet, and the more it resolved in the man’s vision, the more he could see that it was some kind of terrifyingly proper arrow, too, with crisply cut feathers fletched up in three evenly spaced rows around one end and a glinting, shiny arrowhead easily the width of two of his fingers at the other. There was something weirdly ancient about it as well, something that hinted at its carving from authentically expensive wood, not balsa or bamboo or whatever chopsticks were made of, and it was a whole world more serious than the businesslike rods you saw fired on the Olympics coverage of smaller nations.
This was an arrow for killing. An arrow for killing men, even. An arrow over which a medieval archer might have prayed that the grace of God would bless its arc and send it straight into the rancid heart of the infidel. The man could see, too, now that he was looking for it, the dark stain at the crane’s feet where its blood had dripped from the arrow’s tip onto the frosted grass.
Who in the world would fire such a thing these days? And where? And, for God’s sake, why?
He moved forward to help the crane, not knowing what he might do, feeling certain he would fail, but he was so surprised when it didn’t back away from him that he stopped. He waited another moment, then found himself addressing it directly.
‘Where have you come from?’ he asked. ‘You lost thing.’
The crane remained silent. The man remembered again the keening he’d heard, felt an echo of the mournful pressure of it in his chest, but no sound came now from the bird. No sound came from anywhere. The two of them could have been standing in a dream – though the cold that shifted through his shoes and bit at his fingers suggested otherwise, and the quotidian leaking of a stray drop, despite his best efforts, onto the crotch of his underwear-less trousers told him definitively this was still real life, with all its disappointments.
But if it wasn’t a dream, it was one of those special corners of what’s real, one of those moments, only a handful of which he could recall throughout his lifetime, where the world dwindled down to almost no one, where it seemed to pause just for him, so that he could, for a moment, be seized into life. Like when he lost his virginity to the girl with the eczema in his Honours English Class and it had been so intensely brief, so briefly intense, that it felt like both of them had left normal existence for an unleashed physical instant. Or that time on holiday in New Caledonia when he’d surfaced from snorkelling and for an oddly peaceful moment or two he’d been unable, due to the swells of the ocean, to even see the boat from which the divers had leapt, and then the angry voice of his wife had shouted ‘There he is!’ and he’d been sucked back into reality. Or not the birth of his daughter, which had been a panting, red tumult, but the first night after, when his exhausted wife had fallen asleep and it was just him and the little, little being and she opened her eyes at him, astonished to find him there, astonished to find herself there, and perhaps a little outraged, too, a state which, he was forced to admit, hadn’t changed much for Amanda.
But this, this moment here, this moment was like those, and more so. The gravely injured bird and him in a frozen back garden that could have been the borders of the known universe for all he knew. It was in places like this that eternity happened.
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
