the birdcage

Nothing happens the way you read in the history books. In war there aren’t two armies, there is only a field of men. There is no number of dead; but individual lives snuffed out. That is what the subject of history is, years shelved and decimalized. Birth and death, graphed to the simplicity of lines. Great wars a footnote to the next great war. The achievements of men and women plotted out against the bookmark of day, month and year.

And somewhere amongst this, my mother breathed. Somewhere danced in now long-closed nightclubs, laughed at jokes told by a younger version of my Father. And then the unpin-able moment she fell in love with him, after which she would have sworn there was no moment, that she’d always loved him.

I try to place things, to tell the story to myself, but you cannot know the story of a life; you can only tell a new story from theirs, as one cannot speak with another’s tongue.

Whilst other children would be given sweets, I would have to excavate them. Taught to choose plots on a map of the sandpit outside, my Father overseeing the dig from a deck-chair; playing ‘hotter/colder’ until I made a find.

We lived for History, my father and I. My bedtime stories were tales of Waterloo, The Somme, The Crusades. Though I had no nightmares because of it. There was always a happy ending, however bleak the tale. So that Napoleon grew closer to his family while in exile on the island of Saint Helena. That while a centimeter cost the lives of two allied fighters, The Somme gave knowledge enough to win the war – brave men have given their lives for less, my father said. And whilst The Crusades themselves cannot be reveled in, they did at least give Cecil B. DeMille another epic to direct. One that birthed the solid memory, that once my Mother, Father and I sat together; watching armor shine as bright as the actor’s smiles.

The ultimate theft is one letter from the act of giving. ‘Gave’, becomes ‘grave’ with a stroke; and that is how my mother left us. Blood drowning her memories, until her body held no more knowledge. Until there was no understanding of breath; and then, an unpin-able moment later, there was no recognition of spirit.

After my mother passed, we moved to a small flat in the centre of the city and so we no longer had the yard. Instead my father gave me centuries to play in. The new game became one of memorising dates to win sherbet lemons and sour apples.

At the time I was a child and at that age you cannot understand loss – perhaps you never do. It just becomes a fact of life. One that reers itself up at odd moments and doesn’t take the form of grief. How can you grieve for a face you remember as a dream, for to dream again is to replace them.

Instead I learnt by example. My father, with his sadness, taught me to horde buttons, as she had done. One jar half-filled, where she’d left off and then a row of others, as if she would return and marvel at our progress. Another thing her daughter and her would have in common. As if there would not already be enough to unite us. My Father and I proved that a loss shared is not halved, but doubled.

Inspiration seems to be resurrection; the common miracle, a person gathered beneath the someone else’s skin. The body is a tube carriage, our whole lives a long rush hour. Our own spirit sat alongside Nabokov, Camus and countless musicians. Death merely a change at the next station before we go on; in the body of a child, lover or fan-base.

So she became my muse and I began to do the same weekly crossword that she enjoyed. Filled in the words with red ink. I own her old records, with only a few extra crackles added to those she would have heard, dance to them with an empty coat as a partner. I’ve eaten cake with a teaspoon ever since I learnt that my mother did so. It was these, as well as countless other quirks, which men would fall in and out of love with me over. An inherence of small habits, the currency of a life without her.

I see myself as a moth, with no view of the sky. Blindly searching for a scrap of moonlight. She was the moon, that Mother above us and I searched tirelessly. Trying to hold on to the feeling of her, as she raised the tide of my blood, before she was lost again.

If she was there it was just around the next corner, a word on the next page. Like my Father said “Tomorrow never comes, its always today and then today again.” My Mother’s spirit felt like this; each corner, each page reached and she was already behind the next.

In the year I left for university my Father took a job as a researcher, rather than choosing to retire. He said it took his hours by the hand and led them away from him, but this was a blessing to him. I’d often picture him hunched over some dusty book, a slow motion fellow in a world of hushed hurrying as students darted in and out of shelves around him.

I often try to reason why he chose this; perhaps as a way to journey backward, past his own memories. Into the territory of other people’s victories and miseries. Where the future held only days without her, the past held the certainty of days already seen through to their end. Days already paid for, exempt from the debt of regret.

On February 6th he brought me a belated housewarming gift. He placed the bell-jar shaped gift on the table and instructed me to unwrap it.
A moment later and a sudden morning brought a yellow canary into song. A small life flitting back and forth out of fright, or expectation. He’d given me a bird, but I learnt it was the cage that was important. He told me it was to remember Hindenberg, so that is what I called the canary. Where other’s might have named a canary Banana, or Tweetie – I named mine after a tragedy.

He explained that the airship fell to earth like a meteor and with it died one dream of flight. From that moment the age of the airplane took-off. A huge balloon, a talisman of flight, burnt down to the ribs of a birdcage.
There was a long pause, as I looked at the cage and then at my Father, the man who never spoke of his grief, though it was at the core of every silence.

— And the bird? I asked.

— He’s to help you remember that dream of flight, that humans never let a tragedy stop them from moving on, or else we’d have called it a day after Icarus fell.

My father, the man who never took his own advice.