The Stars at Oktober Bend Read online

  I took that poem home with me, to the house of many windows. I pulled the bedcovers back and lay down, but only long enough to leave the shape of me there. Every night I did this for Louisa James to give her hope that I would one day learn to fit into her world. The moon transformed the floorboards into a shining sea and soon I fell asleep like an island in the middle of it.

  That night was the first I did not dream of my homeland, Sierra Leone – of the things I had seen there, of the people I had left behind. Instead I dreamt of finding a way to the house in the treetops and that girl on the roof. That girl I would later learn was Alice.

  11 ALICE

  lamentation – an utterance of grief

  i am the girl manny dreamed of. the silent voice that called him in his waking and his sleeping. i am the nightingale. i am alice and i have music as well as words.

  no one could tell me how the music came to be. and i could not remember how long it had been there. was it since the beginning – me listening while i floated like a star on a string in my mother’s warm dark sea? april, humming prettily to the mermaidenly being in her belly? maybe, maybe not. old charlie left his guitar and his mouth-organ under the bed. joey said they had to drag him away. our mother left joey and me in our beds, put her favourite child, her cello, in its velvet lined case in the aeroplane seat next to her. in my dreams i am velvet lined. and i am empty.

  when i woke up with fishbone stitches in my head, the music was there. it landed like fairy-wrens. tiny round bodies, long straight tails. lone birds and couples or flocks of three. perched on electricity wires, some with tails up, others with tails down. and upside-down birds, hanging like acrobats on a high trapeze. crotchets and quavers, semi-quavers and demi-semi-quavers. beautiful names for beautiful sounds. i knew from where the wrens perched which notes they’d sing. drew them, beak to tail on the grey underneaths of empty cereal packets. and later, in the book of flying. the words came after. from where i do not know. perhaps they were gifts from the wrens. sent to comfort me, to fill the silences others had left.

  songs: many-splendoured things made of words, music and mystery. the mystery was why the birds came to me. did they know me by name: alice the nightingale? bird-girl? had they seen me naked at the mirror, staring at my hills and valleys, the landscape of my body? did they know how i imagined my shoulder blades were wing buds? days i climbed onto the roof and dreamed of flying to canada, had the wrens watched me?

  the ravens came later. scratched the sky with sorrows. chased the wrens away. brought no joy, no song, no dreams of flying.

  there is a line on a map called the forty-ninth parallel. i have seen it for myself – in an atlas joey brought home from school. the forty-ninth parallel is where canada is. canada and our mother, april. i tore the page out and kept it. thought my mother might know what to do about my brokenness. about the mediocre pills. about why the birds came.

  april played cello with the royal philharmonic orchestra on the forty-ninth parallel and other faraway places. i knew this only because i heard gram tell hattie fox.

  hattie

  ran the post office

  wore a grey-lead

  pencil behind her ear and

  had ways

  of finding out

  could bore a hole

  into your soul with

  her ice-coloured eyes.

  gram never flinched. told hattie that april was young and talented. no one should stand in the way of her success, gram said sternly. hattie was first to look away. she gave gram her stamps, fiddled with the parcel string and talked about the weather until we left. at home gram did not speak of april. joey said that when i was in hospital, old charlie tried to bring me back from my long, strange sleep with promises of our mother’s return.

  ‘april will come,’ he’d whispered, ‘she always comes.’ april did not come. but old charlie’s words trickled down into the soft pink labyrinths of my unlistening ears. stayed there till i was fifteen, when the want to remember rose up like cool, green sap inside me. hard to know if what i remembered was dreams or truth, wishes or lies. i never dreamed about april. only the velvet lined case. dreamed there had been a child there. was i the child or was the child mine?

  i woke unafraid of falling. unafraid of stepping off the edge. the falling had been done. now there was only flying. joey wasn’t afraid either but he was too heavy to fly. twelveness sometimes made things seem simpler than they really were. complicated when they weren’t.

  i once believed anger was the only thing that heavied my brother and old charlie, kept them earthbound. i wrote a poem for them. an utterance of grief. a lamentation.

  flying

  is letting go

  fury

  is a ball and chain

  what poor birds are we

  he won’t fly and

  i can’t sing and

  no one listens

  when a caged nightingale cries

  freedom.

  poems mean whatever people want them to. that is why i like them.

  12 ALICE

  the comeuppance of jack faulkner

  joey pinched a magazine with shining pages and photographs of boats. he only took it to show me an advertisement for a company called faulkner flies. there were coloured pictures of lures – my lures with information about each one. the caption called them collector’s items. joey said that meant they’d never touch water. they’d be mounted and framed and hung on walls in the homes of rich people, or stored in purpose-made wooden boxes with brass hinges and clasps. lures to catch people instead of fish. flies to be envied and admired. i felt happy. no dead fish. no bleeding gills. then joey said faulkner sold my flies for ten times the money he paid us. he said it was time faulkner got his comeuppance.

  some words disappeared from me altogether. leaked out before the fishbone stitches mended me. comeuppance must have been one of them. i had no idea what joey meant. he pointed to the photographs of my lures.

  ‘look at the labels they’ve made for your flies. they’re pretty ordinary. you could do better. you could draw pictures too. why don’t you make some before faulkner comes up next time?’

  at day centre they showed us how to make things like paper, aprons and library bags. then they sold them to people who could have made anything they wanted, but didn’t because they went to school and university and got jobs and then there was no time left over for making anything. i didn’t go to day centre for very long because of my crazy electrics. but i took my paper home and kept it until joey said about making labels for faulkner.

  i made my labels like tiny books

  folded the paper

  tore it careful

  along the crease-marks

  sewed pages

  inside covers

  with a needle gram used

  to stitch roasting chickens after

  she filled their emptied stomachs

  with bread and thyme

  egg and sage and onion.

  inside each book i wrote

  the name of the fly

  its type

  wet or dry

  longtail matuka or parachute

  opposite i listed what

  feathers i used and where

  they were found

  whether the bindings were

  linen or silk and

  the weight and

  the size

  of the hook.

  last of all, on the covers of all my tiny books, i wrote a fancy ‘n’ for nightingale and decorated it with drawings. pictures were easier for me to make than words. seemed to come from a different place in me. i made them look like the ones i’d seen in a book the priest gave to gram. i was in hospital when he brought it to the house, but joey was there. saw and heard it all. gram told him she didn’t want his book.

  said

  she would rather

  her granddaughter undamaged

  her husband out of jail and

  hoped the people responsible

  would rot in
hell

  told the priest never

  to set foot

  in her house again

  joey said the priest laid the book down

  and when he was gone

  gram threw it

  after him

  my heart is weighed down to

  think of its twisted spine

  crushed pages

  words and pictures smothered

  by the cold

  hard floor.

  joey saved the book. smoothed its pages, looked inside the cover where the priest had written words that riled our gram. the curly script was mysterious as the foreign language printed on its pages to a boy who was ten. but he kept the book. put it under the house with the gun that our grandfather hid before the police came.

  later, much later, after i woke from my strange sleep. after they took me home and i learnt to trust bear, i followed her under the house where she kept bones, gumboots and tennis balls. there i found the unwanted gift wrapped in plastic, hanging from the ceiling in a string bag. it was called the book of kells. i thought it must be the most beautiful book in the world. the pictures inside were mostly of saints, animals and birds.

  i thought of gram while i looked at them.

  she, hollow as a roasting chicken

  heart and soul and giblets

  all torn out,

  wished

  i could persuade her to look

  at the pictures,

  thought

  their wonderfulness might help

  fill her

  silences and spaces.

  and when i finished making labels for my lures, i wished i could show them to gram. did not want to be the cause of her everlasting despair. wanted her to know that not all of me was damaged. on the cover of every label where i drew the ‘n’ for nightingale i disguised joey’s head amongst dragonflies and flowers, birds and feathers and fish. twined them all together, tangled as dreams. coloured them with inks i made from

  berries, beets and bracken

  onion skins and walnut shells

  but dared not show gram what i’d done for fear she’d guess we’d kept the book of kells.

  when the inks were dry, i pressed the labels flat between the dictionary’s leaves till the next time joey went to the country women’s rooms. he said i didn’t have to come. but i wanted to. was curious to see faulkner’s face when he looked at my labels. when he got his comeuppance. i stood with joey, opposite the man from the city.

  ‘ah, the flymaker of bridgewater,’ he said. his eyes crawled over me.

  i lifted my labels

  from between the wordy pages

  laid them flat on the table

  watched him fill his lungs with smoke

  and drop his stinking cigarette end

  on the clean mopped floor

  grind it

  under his hard city sole

  saw his arms spread wide

  on the aluminium rim

  of the pink laminex table

  head hung low

  between his shoulders

  close to my labels

  we stared

  me at him and he at

  my labels while

  earth moved

  tides turned

  and the universe grew a little older

  smoke leaked from

  faulkner’s nose spilled

  from the corners of his mouth

  curled upwards to

  the ceiling like

  the holy ghost and he

  crossed himself and whispered

  o sweet jesus

  joey looked at me and said nothing. i kept my eyes on faulkner till he could no longer ignore the loud silence between us. he straightened his spine. tore his eyes from the labels. looked at me like he was trying to read a book with pictures but no words. i did not look away.

  ‘holy shit, they’re genius,’ he hissed.

  ‘yeah, they’re genius all right, and they’ll cost you fifteen bucks each, on top of the lures,’ joey said.

  before we went home joey took me to the newsagency, peeled off a note from the roll faulkner had paid him and bought me a small, square bottle of gold ink.

  i never saw faulkner again. cannot remember

  the colour of his eyes

  the lines of his past

  the shape of his lips

  the pitch of his voice or

  the smell of his money

  but i cannot forget how both the sacred and the sinful slipped so easy from his tongue. light and dark together. fire and ice. i loved the way holy howled like a hymn up the back of his throat, how shit hissed and spat like hail on the fires of hell. perfect opposites. the one made the other deeper, richer, more terrible and true.

  later, much later

  when manny and i found

  one another when

  we met and touched

  skin and breath and soul

  the only way we could

  unpick the stitches

  that locked our secrets inside

  was to use words

  the way faulkner did

  13 ALICE

  dove amongst the pie-wrappers

  as though she knew that even wishes thought impossible sometimes come true. as though she knew about the boy on the bridge, bear woke me early. on the morning after manny james watched summer snow fall from my roof, she led me through the dewy garden, ducking apple-clustered branches. sunlight fingered scarlet runner beans, x-rayed peas in see-through pods. bear stopped at the fence behind the waiting rooms. sniffed the new sky, squeezed through a gap in the wire diamonds. and i followed.

  as though she knew exactly where that boy had been: on the bridge, across the steel spaghetti in the shunting yards and onto platform one, bear led me.

  the poster model gazed at me,

  the girl who put words in her mouth,

  i stared back

  looking at her empty hand

  looking for that missing thing i

  lifted the gardener’s notice

  shifted the theatre royal program

  checked the rubbish bin and between

  the slats on seats where people pushed

  brown paper pie bags

  sat and stared

  into the fairy-floss morning

  giddy-minded with the

  delicious mystery of who

  had taken my words

  i dipped into my bag. took a handful of papers on my lap. searched for something to fill a gap the size of the pansy-packet poem. took way too long. bear nudged me with her snout. i eyed the station clock, heard its ticking and its tocking. saw its narrow arm point to a dangerous black number. ten to departure time. bear trembled with faint sounds of faraway engines and wheels and footsteps of soon-to-come passengers. a distant runner jogged past the scout hall. i wanted to believe he was the night runner i’d seen on the bridge, small as a thumb in the moonlight. wanted to wait till he came close. to use saywords instead of written ones. to ask if he remembered a girl on a roof at oktober bend. wished for impossible things. that a few words of the poem i’d tossed into the night had found their way to the running boy. a fragment of me. a thought or two from my crazy brain.

  bear’s teeth tugged the hem of my skirt. i dared not let anyone see me with my bag of words. catch me in the act. anon, the girl with weird electrics. else my words might never be read. thoughts never shared. before the runner was close enough to see my face, bear and me vanished ourselves.

  i did not see the poem escape my bag. drift like a feather. nestle like a dove in the litter and the weeds. did not see the running boy, straight as a spear, scan the noticeboard, in the pocket of his pants a poem tied with purple thread. bear and me were long gone when he found my fallen paper. smoothed it with his hands. sat and read my words.

  i am

  a rooftop poet

  high on haiku

  silently shouting

  sonnets to the stars

  giving wings to

  words giving
wings to me

  together we fly

  my milky-way words

  and i

  i did not know the runner was manny james. did not know my poem persuaded him that the person who wrote it, dropped it then vanished away, was the same girl he’d seen on the roof of the house at oktober bend. i did not know that wishes thought impossible sometimes come true.

  14 ALICE

  ballerina on a bicycle

  bear and me knew all

  the detours

  short cuts

  hidey holes and how

  to disappear

  be safe

  in seconds we were racing along the damp dirt track beside the river. tiger-striped with sunlight and shadow. filled with fruity air. my wires did not meander. my electricity ran in straight black lines. no sparklers fizzed inside my head. no clouds of ravens hovered. my eyes streamed, but only with gladness. because someone had taken my words.

  joey sat

  unbuttoned

  in the garden

  crunching snow peas and

  wearing rosella feathers and

  fingers of light in his curls.

  striped tie stuffed

  in the pocket of his blue shirt ready

  for school.

  we flopped down beside him, bear and me.

  ‘where’ve you been?’ joey asked, and i opened my bag to show him.

  ‘one gone!’ i said. joey listened. heard excitement in my shapeless words. saw the salt marks on my cheeks. no one could protect me from tears. not all the time. not even joey. they happened mostly when my pills were in the cadbury’s roses tin. not in me. i had not taken them that morning. gram woke before me. watched while i swallowed. asked me afterwards to open my mouth. prove its emptiness. i hid them well and now the tears came. joey’s eyebrows worried themselves into a knot.

  ‘did something happen?’

  i shook my head.

  ‘happy,’ i said.

  ‘good. i gotta go now or i’ll be late again.’

  we walked under the bridge and i pointed up at his carving.

  ‘not forsaking?’ i teased.

  ‘nope. when i come back we’ll go dancing. go home now. home bear, home.’

  joey

  was a garden-grower

  day-dreamer

  stone-skimmer

  tree-climber