The Migration, page 14
“So what am I doing here?”
“It’s different for you. You’re not from here. Your accent doesn’t give you away, where you were born, who your parents were and how much money they had. You can be anything you want.”
“And them?”
“They were Jamie’s friends. And—Astrid’s.”
“She was a student?” I peer at him, surprised he’s willing to talk about her. But the wine and Martin’s scotch have left him relaxed.
“She started a year ago. With some of this lot. She was young for it but clever.” A note of pride creeps into his voice. “Sorry,” he says after a moment. “I don’t mean to go on about her.”
“We don’t have to stay, not if—”
“It’s fine. Jamie would’ve been glad for me to be here. And Astrid too.” He touches my hand. “Besides, it’s good to see you smile.”
* * *
—
After another pass of the scotch, it seems as if we’ve all been friends for ages. Liv has us all playing a drinking game where we take a swig holding the bottle with our left hands. The rules are complicated, and anytime someone screws up we have to beat our fists against the dirt like maniacs as a penalty.
The world has gone bright around the edges. Redmond has taken a gulp with the wrong hand and now we’re all crashing our palms into the ground and hollering loud enough to wake the dead.
Faces and bodies blur, and I remember parties in the Rosedale Ravine in Toronto, me and Jaina and the others laughing and drinking beneath the overpass. Time slows and I close my eyes, lean back against the chapel’s wall. My body seems made up of a different composition than before. It floats and sinks.
Bryan nudges me awake. “It’s not so bad,” he whispers or maybe he doesn’t. Maybe that’s just what I’m thinking. A weird sense of déjà vu like all this has happened already.
“Remember how Jamie ran to the Porter’s Lodge starkers in January?” Redmond has made a scarecrow of a nearby sapling with his jacket. “His cock had shrunk down to the size of a pencil stub and there was Rowena Higgs laughing her head off! Thought she was gonna piss herself! And Mysie Ardrey chasing him across the quad, screaming ‘That’s not how the French do it at all!’ ”
“Mysie Ardey!” Martin laughs. “Everyone told him she would be trouble.”
“Aye, but Jamie was crazy for her. Serves him right.”
“A fool in love, our poor James,” says Liv.
Lit cigarette tips punctuate the darkness, as they trade stories back and forth. Their voices go softer, an incantation to call up the ghost of the dead boy.
* * *
—
The crowd has thinned out, about thirty or so left in small pockets, tangled together on blankets. Redmond croons a filthy song to a trio of dishevelled girls who add their own discordant tooraloomaloomas to the chorus. Bryan is lying near me, his head propped up on his elbow. “It’s past curfew. Your aunt will be wondering where you’ve got to. I should get you home.”
Home. The word has the mass and weight of a stone. “Soon. Not yet. Besides, she’s gone for the weekend. No one’s waiting for me.”
Now Redmond has left off singing so he and Martin can join an animated argument with one of the girls, Caitlyn, a pug-nosed brunette sitting opposite them. “I swear it’s the truth,” she’s saying. “All those tunnels beneath the Bodleian Library? They’ve emptied them out completely. They’re being used for storage. Body storage.”
“Nonsense.” Martin pushes his glasses back up his nose. “How would you even know?”
“Terrence Arbon told me so. His brother, Westie, works in the archives. He used to fetch and carry the books they kept in storage. But he says they’ve cleared them all out.”
“It could be just because it’s a flood risk,” he argues. “You know what it was like over the winter. All those tunnels? They must’ve moved the books somewhere above ground. Terry needn’t have pretended it was anything so drastic.”
“That’s what I said, but Terrence said that Westie’d seen people. Not the library staff. And they had the old conveyance system up and running again, the one that was supposed to be used for carting around loads of books. Terrence said they were using it to move these bags, right? Like so.” She sketches out her own height. “He said the whole place smelled like it had been scrubbed in vinegar.”
“But they’d have to keep the bodies cold, wouldn’t they? I don’t understand how they could do that beneath the Bodleian. Besides, it’d be illegal.”
“They have to keep them somewhere, don’t they?” the pug-nosed girl retorts. “If they’re experimenting on them.”
One of the other girls breaks in. “Do you remember that study in bio?” I haven’t caught her name but she reminds me of Jaina, the same bob haircut. “About the origins of certain hormones in insects, you know? These blood-sucking things. You remember, Liv, we did that tutorial on it together. What was it?”
“Rhodnius prolixus,” Liv supplies.
“That’s right. They cut off their heads with little bits of waxed thread. And then they did it with caterpillars too. And blowflies. To see where it was the hormone was coming from and what exactly it did. To see if the body would moult if the brain wasn’t attached. Then they stitched them together, body to body, two bodies to one head. Just to see what triggered the changes.” She shivers.
“You think the Centre is doing that legally? Come off it,” Martin says.
“Enough now,” Liv sniffs. She rests her head against Redmond’s shoulder. “Of course they wouldn’t. The Centre is taking samples for testing, that’s all they’d be legally allowed to do.”
“All I’m saying is that maybe it’s good, that James, you know, that they cremated him.”
A long silence falls until Liv breaks it. “I don’t understand all of you.”
“What?” says Redmond.
“You all walk so softly around this. Death.”
As Liv speaks, we all lean in to listen.
“When I was a very small child,” she says, her accent thickened with alcohol, “I developed rheumatic fever and I had to stay in bed for weeks. My father brought me a kitten to keep me company. She was very sweet, very soft, with grey fur like a cloud. I loved her. But just as I began to recover the kitten got sick. Eventually she died, but I didn’t know. So I went looking for her—and then I found her.”
A burst of laughter floats across the churchyard. A slim boy in an unbuttoned dress shirt struggles to keep his seat atop his friend’s shoulders, as they charge toward another pair in the same position.
“I cried all day and all night too. Then my mother said to me, ‘That’s enough crying now. Your kitten has gone to heaven!’ But my father didn’t believe in God, so my mother had to tell me. ‘Heaven is the place where everything is nice for the kitten. From now until forever it will be nice for the kitten, so don’t cry.’ I said to her, ‘Forever? My kitten will wake up and it will be the same forever?’ My mother didn’t understand why I was so upset. But I was upset because I don’t like forever, the idea of it. Tomorrow is good. Maybe I’ll be happy or maybe I’ll be sad. But being the same? All the time? I didn’t want it to be forever for the kitten. Not even in heaven! I didn’t like that idea, the attempt to turn death into something it wasn’t. Death is simple, the end of one set of biological processes. Our bodies disappear and the cells that once we were made of decompose and feed new life. It seemed beautiful to me. So when I grew up, I followed my father not my mother. I didn’t want to be bound by superstition. I wanted to be a scientist too, so I could understand why nothing in the world stays the same forever.”
“What’re you saying, Liv?” Martin asks. “Do you still think things are as simple as that?”
“Life, death—we’ve always thought those were fixed concepts. But what if they aren’t? Biologically speaking perhaps they never were. Think of conception and childbirth. Energy transferred from thing to thing, the cellular material passed on from generation to generation, never truly dying. We privilege one form—our form—simply because we’re hardwired that way. But science is always showing us the world is richer, more fantastic than we believed possible.”
“They’re like monsters,” whispers the pug-nosed girl. She pushes herself upright, then stumbles to her knees. “I saw Clara Brewes. She died in College from a pulmonary embolism. I was the one who found her. She was shaking, just like that other boy.”
“We can’t be afraid all the time,” Liv insists. “The world is changing and we have to find a way to adjust. This is how nature works. Progression, change, destruction—or self-preservation. One thing changes and another responds, again and again and again.”
“Bullshit,” Bryan interrupts. “What about the ones who die? What about James and all the others? Astrid? She was, what? Just debris? It doesn’t matter that she died?”
A pained expression comes over Liv’s face. Her voice is tender. “I don’t know, Bryan. I wish I did. All I know is—”
But Bryan isn’t listening anymore. No one is. Because Caitlyn has begun to scream.
20
Confusion in the field. Drunken bodies stumble to their feet, or try to. Stay down, I want to tell them. Don’t you feel it?
Something very big is moving above us.
I raise my eyes. At first there’s only darkness. An open sky lit by the slackening glow of a half-moon. A walloping sound. Then one by one the stars seem to go out. Fear slaps breath back into my lungs. Somehow my fingers have found Bryan’s and his hand is clammy, cold as clay.
“Sophie,” he whispers. My eyes trace the edge of the blackness. There: a massive shape, thrashing wildly in the sky, a spiralling flurry of muscle and slick feathers. Then it shrieks, a knife-edge of noise that slices across my nerves. The sound is familiar—tormented, yes, or perhaps not that at all. Exhilarated. Rapturous. It’s so little like the soft burring noises that Kira now makes I wonder how my mind connects them. But it does.
I know you. The words hover on the edge of my lips.
The light seems to warp into rainbows around it, breaking apart the night, as its wings—wings!—unfurl like the sails of a ship, at least ten feet across. It glides above the peaked roof of the chapel, whipping up the air around it. A battering sensation drives thought from my brain.
All I can think is: It’s so beautiful.
“Bloody hell,” Bryan whispers.
My head whirs with strange images. Memories that don’t belong to me flicker in front of my eyes with the speed of a zoetrope, hovering over my vision. First darkness, then two strange faces. A woman with hair like bright copper coils. Soft hands touching my face, my fist wrapped around a fat finger. I am tiny and the world is vast and incomprehensible. I don’t understand my place. Only—I am alive, I am born. My skin as sensitive as if it had been scraped raw, every nerve new, and it’s terrifying. She is—mother. A feeling more than a word, a warm buoyancy like floating in the ocean. She cradles me in her arms. This moment is perfect.
And then it ends.
A distant pop. It could be the sound of a firework going off. I expect a flare of light zipping across the sky, but there’s nothing, only a vicious burst of pain in a body that isn’t mine. The nymph. The signals transmit along an invisible umbilicus, and my own ribs hurt.
Then the connection snaps, leaving me adrift, reeling. Some crucial piece of knowledge has been snatched away from me.
The faces around me—Bryan, Liv, Martin, Redmond—are wet with tears. It’s as if we’re all awaking from the same dream. As if we were all feeling it together.
Above us the creature loses control of its wings and it dips and tumbles. Its body slams against the peaked roof of the chapel, and there is a furious scratching. Slate tiles scatter off the edge of the roof.
I hear an anguished wail from nearby. I think it might be Liv. There is a second pop, and Bryan is the first of us to react. “Get down,” he cries out as he pushes me face first to the ground. The smell of the dry loam overwhelms me, chalky and sweet. I struggle to breathe, try to flip over onto my side, but Bryan’s weight keeps me pinned in place. Some part of me is still with the nymph. I can sense its panic, its horror, feel its chest convulse with pain. It swings its head from side to side. It sees so much more of the world than I can. The field shimmers with colours, awash in an almost electric glow I can’t process.
Now Bryan rolls off me. Drunkenness makes me slow to move. He’s so close to me that I think he might kiss me, but he doesn’t kiss me—instead he shakes me hard enough to rattle my teeth. “Sophie,” he says, “you have to go! You run, and you don’t look back.” His voice is grim and urgent. To the east of us, a squad car lights up the tree line with flashes of red and blue. “Get up!” My legs are leaden, entirely bloodless. Clumsy, clumsy. Bryan is yelling: “Go, go, run!”
The ground tilts underneath me, and after three steps violence explodes around me. “Get back you,” cries a police officer—where did he come from? There are howls of rage in response and the moonlight glints off lunatic faces, the same faces that were laughing a few minutes ago. I can feel it too—an electrifying jolt that goes beyond adrenalin. Something has wired us together, is urging us on.
A few feet away from me Martin is on the ground. He struggles to his feet but an elbow knocks him flying. His legs collapse at awkward angles. Without thinking, I take his hand in mine and yank him up. Strands of sweat-licked hair hang limply around his face—his glasses are nowhere to be seen, his pupils shrunk to pinpricks. He makes an animal noise deep in his throat and his fingernails sink into the skin of my wrist, tearing at the scar line and leaving deep gouges.
“Sorry,” he whispers hoarsely. But his fist convulses again.
I feel in him a raw anger that shocks me. It’s all I can do to make him let go, and a moment later he has vanished into the crowd.
More police in fluorescent vests are running at us, grabbing people, pinning them to the ground but there are not enough of them, not for us. I catch sight of Bryan rushing a cop, a young one with colossal shoulders.
“Why’d you have to shoot her down?” he screams. His parakeet green shirt is a map of sweat. I can almost feel the explosion of his breath as Bryan hurls himself toward the solid weight of the officer’s torso. The man spins in a tight corkscrew and now Bryan’s on the ground, and, oh god, I can see a boot coming down. Again. Again.
His hands are up over his face and I struggle to get to him, but I collide with someone with a meaty thwack. We both fall over. I have to get up. I’ll be trampled.
“Stop,” says a police officer. His voice is harsh, but his eyes are calm, sane.
He yanks me to my feet and twists me around. Bands of cool metal tighten around my wrists. Handcuffs, I realize. Then he hauls me up. My toes skim the grass and I struggle but he has me over his shoulder. There are wild noises around me, whoops and hollers, and blood pulses in my temples. I want to be out there with them, all of us—together. But at the same time I feel sick and heavy, and I stare at the ground as the cop carries me away from Bryan, from everyone.
Blood drips down the palm of my hand. Behind us, the field unspools into savagery.
21
The officer dumps me in the back of his squad car.
I twist in the seat, searching for Bryan out of the back window but I can’t see him. Other police cars arrive. Pulsing red light stains the field beyond the window.
I don’t know how much time passes before the officer opens the front door, settles into the driver’s seat. “Okay,” he says at last. “Okay, you don’t say anything for a while. Got it?” I can only see a slice of his forehead in the rear-view mirror, a mottled and sweaty brow. I drop my gaze away from his reflection.
It takes him several minutes to edge through the disorder. We pass two ambulances and a pair of fatigued paramedics who are shuffling a covered stretcher into the back of one of them. There weren’t that many of us out there, I think, but now maybe there are fewer. I cough up mucus into the sleeve. The gouge marks in my wrist leave a line of blood on my cheek. “Hey,” he calls from the front. “Are you hurt?”
I shake my head, fighting back tears.
“Fucking hell,” he mutters, turning and staring at me with big, hound dog eyes. And then: “You kids, just. Shite…”
The squad car crosses Magdalen Bridge and below us the river glimmers. I don’t know where he’s taking me. Am I under arrest for breaking curfew? Wouldn’t he have to tell me? Maybe he doesn’t.
I slump against the window, feeling relief, maybe. There are no choices to make here. That should scare me—but it doesn’t. I replay the scene in my mind: the creature tumbling against the roof of the chapel. It was a nymph—it had to be! I’d felt a connection with it. Then Martin grabbing my wrist. And Bryan, hurling himself at the officer. I know how he felt, that little flame burning inside like a pilot light, ready to explode.
We drive silently through the city centre, passing the spires of St. Mary the Virgin, then the massive iron gates of the examination halls. We turn down St. Aldate’s and head south. Is the station this way? As we cross the Thames, the squad car starts to slow. I don’t know this area, which is deserted and rundown. Paper flyers stick to the light posts and doorways, slicked down by spring rains and pulped into unreadability. No one has bothered to put up new ones.
The officer stops the car, gets out, and then opens the door to the back. “Prepared to behave?”
All the fight has gone out of me, replaced by a dull ache in my temples. “Yeah.”
“Good.” He closes the door again, locking it, and heads down the street. The cuffs on my wrists chafe. Nothing to do but wait, and wonder if Bryan is bleeding out on a stretcher somewhere. I think about him pressed against me in the dirt.
Please don’t let him be dead. A prayer whispered into the night. I can still see the image of the officer’s boot coming down on him again and again. Please let Bryan Taite be alive. Please don’t let him leave me. Please.
