Every day, when Cal came back to the house in Chariot Street – a house he’d thought to have left for good half a decade ago, but which his father’s isolation had obliged him to return to – it seemed he found Brendan slightly smaller. Not hunched, but somehow shrunken, as though he’d decided to present the smallest possible target to a world suddenly grown hostile.
Murmuring a welcome to the forty or so birds in the loft, Cal stepped inside, to be met with a scene of high agitation. All but a few of the pigeons were flying back and forth in their cages, near to hysteria. Had the rats been in, Cal wondered? He cast around for any damage, but there was no visible sign of what had fuelled this furore.
He’d never seen them so excited. For fully half a minute he stood in bewilderment, watching their display, the din of their wings making his head reel, before deciding to step into the largest of the cages and claim the prize birds from the mêlée before they did themselves damage.
He unlatched the cage, and had opened it no more than two or three inches when one of last year’s champions, a normally sedate cock known, as were they all, by his number – 33 – flew at the gap. Shocked by the speed of the bird’s approach. Cal let the door go, and in the seconds between his fingers slipping from the latch and his retrieval of it, 33 was out.
‘Damn you!’ Cal shouted, cursing himself as much as the bird, for he’d left the door of the loft itself ajar, and – apparently careless of what harm he might do himself in his bid – 33 was making for the sky.
In the few moments it took Cal to latch the cage again, the bird was through the door and away. Cal went in stumbling pursuit, but by the time he got back into the open air 33 was already fluttering up above the garden. At roof-height he flew around in three ever larger circles, as if orienting himself. Then he seemed to fix his objective and took off in a North-North-Easterly direction.
A rapping drew Cal’s attention, and he looked down to see his father standing at the window, mouthing something to him. There was more animation on Brendan’s harried face than Cal had seen in months; the escape of the bird seemed to have temporarily roused him from his despondency. Moments later he was at the back door, asking what had happened. Cal had no time for explanation.
‘It’s off–’ he yelled.
Then, keeping his eye on the sky as he went, he started down the path at the side of the house.
When he reached the front the bird was still in sight. Cal leapt the fence and crossed Chariot Street at a run, determined to give chase. It was, he knew, an all but hopeless pursuit. With a tail wind a prime bird could reach a top speed of 70 miles an hour, and though 33 had not raced for the best part of a year he could still easily outpace a human runner. But he also knew he couldn’t go back to his father without making some effort to track the escapee, however futile.
At the bottom of the street he lost sight of his quarry behind the rooftops, and so made a detour to the foot bridge that crossed the Woolton Road, mounting the steps three and four at a time. From the top he was rewarded with a good view of the city. North towards Woolton Hill, and off East, and South-East, over Allerton towards Hunt’s Cross. Row upon row of council house roofs presented themselves, shimmering in the fierce heat of the afternoon, the herringbone rhythm of the close-packed streets rapidly giving way to the industrial wastelands of Speke.
Cal could see the pigeon too, though he was a rapidly diminishing dot.
It mattered little, for from this elevation 33’s destination was perfectly apparent. Less than two miles from the bridge the air was full of wheeling birds, drawn to the spot no doubt by some concentration of food in the area. Every year brought at least one such day, when the ant or gnat population suddenly boomed, and the bird life of the city was united in its gluttony. Gulls up from the mud banks of the Mersey, flying tip to tip with thrush and jackdaw and starling, all content to join the jamboree while the summer still warmed their backs.
This, no doubt, was the call 33 had heard. Bored with his balanced diet of maize and maple peas, tired of the pecking order of the loft and the predictability of each day – the bird had wanted out; wanted up and away. A day of high life; of food that had to be chased a little, and tasted all the better for that; of the companionship of wild things. All this went through Cal’s head, in a vague sort of way, while he watched the circling flocks.
It would be perfectly impossible, he knew, to locate an individual bird amongst these riotous thousands. He would have to trust that 33 would be content with his feast on the wing, and when he was sated do as he was trained to do, and come home. Nevertheless, the sheer spectacle of so many birds exercised a peculiar fascination, and crossing the bridge, Cal began to make his way towards the epicentre of this feathered cyclone.
‘Is it possible …?’ she murmured to the shadows that held court in the corner of the room. There was no answer to her question forthcoming, nor did there need to be. Unlikely as it seemed the trail had incontestably led here, to this dog-tired city, lying bruised and neglected beside a river that had once borne slave ships and cotton ships and could now barely carry its own weight out to sea. To Liverpool.
‘Such a place,’ she said. A minor dust-dervish had whipped itself up in the street outside, lifting antediluvian litter into the air.
‘Why are you so surprised?’ said the man who half lay and half sat on the bed, pillows supporting his impressive frame, hands linked behind his heavy head. The face was wide, the features upon it almost too expressive, like those of an actor who’d made a career of crowd-pleasers, and grown expert in cheap effects. His mouth, which knew a thousand variations of the smile, found one that suited his leisurely mood, and said:
‘They’ve led us quite a dance. But we’re almost there. Don’t you feel it? I do.’
The woman glanced back at this man. He had taken off the jacket that had been her most loving gift to him, and thrown it over the back of the chair. The shirt beneath was sweat-sodden at the armpits, and the flesh of his face looked waxen in the afternoon light. Despite all she felt for him – and that was enough to make her fearful of computation – he was only human, and today, after so much heat and travel, he wore every one of his fifty-two years plainly. In the time they had been together, pursuing the Fugue, she had lent him what strength she could, as he in his turn had lent her his wit, and his expertise in surviving this realm. The Kingdom of the Cuckoo, the Families had always called it, this wretched human world which she had endured for vengeance’s sake.
But very soon now the chase would be over. Shadwell – the man on the bed – would profit by what they were so very close to finding, and she, seeing their quarry besmirched and sold into slavery, would be revenged. Then she would leave the Kingdom to its grimy ways, and happily.
She turned her attentions back to the street. Shadwell was right. They had been led a dance. But the music would cease soon enough.
From where Shadwell lay Immacolata’s silhouette was clear against the window. Not
