Wingspan of a Muse
Damage had been done, could not be reversed. The question of what to do steered Helen towards the odd white feathers of a crow’s wing. Perched on a crumbling wall at the edge of an old post hole, the crow was plunging his head into murky water to fish for slimy weed. After each success he shook his feathers then ate the pale catch.
If she stretched her arms wide, to measure her separation in the crow’s terms, Helen stood a wingspan away. At the foot of the terrace wall on which he lorded over his private pond, yellow wild flowers bloomed. In December. On her walk to the park Helen had seen June roses flowering again and the red petals of quince that couldn’t wait for March. Nature had slipped its seasons – anything might happen.
‘What’s wrong with your wing?’ Helen said to the crow. ‘Have you been colonised? Are parasites turning you white?’
That week she’d been reading about parasites in a book as chilling as it was sublime. Ten per cent of the earth’s species are parasitic insects. Lice eat the dry scales of moths and live in pelican pouches, which all sounded harmlessly symbiotic. Then there are the moths that suck blood, pus and tears from the eyes of domestic cattle. Some parasitic wasps have their own parasitic wasps, which have their own parasitic wasps, to the order of five, with each one laying its eggs inside the body of another, to be eaten from the inside by the growing larvae. Either this was the world in harmony or something had gone horribly wrong.
As the crow fished, Helen noticed white feathers folded into both of its wings. ‘Do you have lice in your hollow quills? What will you do when you can’t fly?’
Never had she been this near to a crow; she couldn’t leave without discovering what it meant. The day’s equilibrium depended on it. Earlier in the week she’d chanced upon a young fox. It had looked her in the eye and, instead of trotting away or shrinking back as the foxes usually did, it turned onto the pavement towards her. She’d winced when she saw the large oval patches of naked skin on both sides of its body. Must be mange. In the nature book, a fox lay dying, weakened by mange, entirely pink and bald. She hadn’t slept that night.
The young fox on the street had chosen her, she believed, and she would have given help gladly but it turned into the next garden and sat in the narrow gap between houses. She couldn’t bring herself to walk on. How long before the fox would die because of its parasites? But it was always going to die one way or another. Was there any use in succumbing to the temptation of pity? If she felt sympathy it should be because she genuinely felt it and not because she wanted to armour herself against her own vulnerability.
Wasn’t there a fable about a fox and a crow?
She decided to gamble with the crow in the park and claimed a foot from the distance between them.
The crow swivelled his head side to side, taking the measure of Helen. She reciprocated, making her own assessments about the rough patches at the top of his beak and the glossy black feathers that suggested a density with which she wanted to merge. What did she look like to the crow? Did he think she was a strange bird herself? All this time her thumbs had been tucked under the straps of her rucksack at the shoulder; it was how she’d been when she noticed him. Perhaps her folded arms in the black coat were wings to the crow. What about the large, red bobble on her hat? Did he believe it a sort of plume? A crest of feathers agitated in a display of aggression or the bird equivalent of passion.
She flapped her elbows, once, twice, and dared a third.
Then she stopped because she wanted to laugh and it would scare off the crow.
He wasn’t sure about the flapping, she thought – she might be an eagle, a giant, south London variety. Skipping off the pedestal of the green pool, he hopped along the wall, coming closer in response to Helen’s flapping her wings. He paused on the wall in front of her; she could have reached out to stroke him. He ruffled his head and chest feathers, puffed them up to mirror the loose pompom on her hat. Definitely saying something. The crow couldn’t tell if she was old or young, strong or weak but he was curious about her, as she was curious about him. Convergence, just for a moment.
Throughout the feather-ruffling he kept his eyes on her and she grinned, so thrilled and light in spite of everything. She was ready for the crow to speak or do something marvellous that said she was in the world, that she was something in herself and not just a parasite living off her boyfriend’s luck. He’d joked about it too many times, she’d realised that morning, for it to be anything other than what he really thought. The damage had been done, and a question rose from the crumbling structure of their relationship. How should she respond?
The crow stretched his head forwards into a sleek outline of himself and cawed three times. Helen jumped on the first. She didn’t know a birdcall could be this loud but she wasn’t scared away. Settling his feathers, he jumped further along the wall, turned his tail towards her, looked over each shoulder to check she was watching, and let out a dropping. She chased him off with a laugh.
As he flew away, the white feathers spread out across his underwings, alternating with the black ones in a beautiful variation. A flying piano, he stroked the air with his fingered wings, playing a tune she couldn’t hear. Yet she did hear something: Don’t tell your boyfriend about the crow. He’ll only quip about it when you’re in company. No need to get tetchy, he’ll say, because this is the creative use of naivety and flaws.
‘I’m making something new from found pieces,’ he’d said. ‘Which you’d understand, if you worked in the arts instead of the corporate world. Stand-up is the hardest thing. I need to know you’re on my side, no matter what.’
‘No matter the cost to me?’
‘But I’m not telling your family disasters straight. No one would believe me.’
‘Why tell them at all?’ she asked.
‘If you didn’t exist, I’d have to invent you.’
‘Isn’t that what they say about God,’ she replied.
He paused before saying, ‘Are you following me into comedy?’
It didn’t seem to matter to him that the pieces were still part of the living Helen and her brothers and cousins and aunties – not yet lost enough to be available for finding.
‘You’re only living your lives,’ he said. ‘If you don’t know how to use your hardships to make something bigger, then you’re not fully occupied. There’s nothing wrong with believing that things are as they appear, if you’re content to live at the surface. But when you move beyond, when you really see… That’s when everything, absurd, tragic, cruel, becomes something you can play with.’
She’d noticed he never plundered his own life. As her company plundered the earth, he reminded her with a smile. He never sucked his own blood, pus and tears. His life was too privileged to provide much material. Wasn’t that just his luck? Laughter. Applause.
There was a fable about a crow and a fox. She remembered it now. Using flattery, the fox tricked the crow into giving up its food. What about the nice things her boyfriend did say to her? She wasn’t being fair to ignore these. No one appreciates my talent like you do. I wouldn’t be where I am without you. You’re my trophy bird, aren’t you?
What else? Was there nothing independent of her relationship to him, of how he felt and wanted to present himself to the world? She tried to hear beyond his insistent voice to what he was actually saying: Helen, you’ve achieved so much in your corporate world, through my connections, you probably do need to pay your dues. Is this what he thought she was doing in supporting his creative use of her flaws and aspirations, making fun of how she slipped into management jargon when she’d had a drink? He never mentioned this. She should have paid closer attention to his omissions. There were lice in her hollow quills.
Or, she was the fox in disguise. These days, how sincere was her admiration for his creative endeavours that hadn’t yet paid a bill? What did she get from being the-girlfriend-of that she didn’t believe she deserved in her own right?
She’d found herself part of a two-thousand-year-old fable, abstracted from her own experience while still in the flow. She’d never thought of herself in the abstract. She was too solid, too subject to gravity and other invisible forces, which she knew existed because of how they made people and money behave.
The real crow alighted in a tree and cawed at a magpie, which flew off where Helen had stood her ground. The crow didn’t like Helen but he had recognised her as a presence in her own right. They were each a piece of the world, she realised with a tingle of her cells, and if you looked, if you really looked beyond your passing concerns, you would see that you – woman, fox, magpie, crow, with all your attendant parasites – were simply parts of the delicate shifting whole in communication with one another.
Now the crow took off and flew around the perimeter of the open space of the terraces, skimming the treetops so he could dive for safety if the eagle that was Helen pursued him. She turned on the spot to follow his tracing of the treeline. Then he passed the radio mast and steered to the northwest as the sun set and grey anvils surfaced above dendrites of trees – fractals that reveal the regular irregularity of nature, a way to glimpse infinity.
The crow vanished and left behind the outline of an idea – damage was simply variation in disguise. We’re all a bit pecked and bitten and chewed, Helen thought, and these curiosities lead us into the next encounter with ourselves.
Behind her, a magpie cackled and she circled back. The magpie stood at the edge of the crow’s pond, watching her. How odd to find she was almost mythical, that her wingspan reached back two thousand years before she was born, disturbing the stale air to mix the dust and breath of all the earth’s creatures, to find that in her cells she was every crow and every woman and couldn’t be confined as a muse.
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