Read by Paul Clarke
The boy in the bath is holding a razorblade in his right hand, the edge of which is pressed lightly against the skin of his left wrist. He is staring at the droplets of condensation forming on the white tiles of the wall. Vertigo sits on top of the closed lid of the toilet and writes in his notebook. Every now and then he taps the end of his pencil against the edge of the book but the boy in the bath does not seem to register the sound. The bathroom is not large, and with the boy and Vertigo and Dave the crow in there it feels full.
“Is this going to take all night?”
Vertigo looks up from his book and sighs. The boy in the bath just lies there, immobile and silent. Dave is perched on the rim of the sink, his wings spread, admiring himself in the mirror. He turns his head left and right and waggles his wings up and down in turn. Vertigo taps the edge of his notebook with his pencil and glances at the boy in the bath. Tears are running down the boy’s face. He turns back to Dave, who has folded his wings, who is now looking back at Vertigo with a tilted head.
“Seriously, Vertigo, this boy has been stewing for ages. Handsome as I am even I can’t stand here in front of a mirror all bloody night. Give him a nudge, eh?”
When Dave talks it is not like hearing a human voice. It is the sound of a crow calling out; caw, or quork, or kaaw as you prefer. The words are there, but beneath, a misshapen lump of sense under a carrion call. The beak opens and sound comes out but the words are separate. They are implied. Vertigo pushes his glasses up his nose, runs his hand through thinning hair, and taps his pencil on the edge of his notebook again. He looks at the boy in the bath and sighs and then leans forward to speak quietly into the boy’s ear.
“It’s just a little more, eh? Then it’s over.”
He has a voice like new paper entering an envelope.
The boy never looks at Vertigo, never looks at Dave (who has flapped and hopped his way onto the cistern and is now staring intently at a painting of a small boy in a sailboat on the bathroom wall). Vertigo looks away, his eyes lose focus. The boy closes his eyes and clenches his jaw, moves his hand quickly and swiftly, and the water in the bath turns to red. Vertigo sits back.
“Finally,” says Dave. In the bath the boy is eventually still. Vertigo does not look at him.
“I wrote a haiku,” says Vertigo. Dave opens and shuts his beak three times in quick succession; this is the crow equivalent of a wince. He opens his beak again and lets out another quork.
“I preferred the sonnets, to be honest. You were good at the sonnets.”
Vertigo winces.
“Well,” he says, “times change. People change. Even you might change, eventually. This boy was too young for a sonnet. Do you want to hear the haiku?”
Dave dips his head to signal affirmatively. The water in the bath is now a deep burgundy and darkening by the second.
“Here we go: Blue hills and blue skies
The red of blood in winter
Carries you onward”
Dave opens his beak and closes it three times, and hops to the edge of the bath.
“I prefer the sonnets. You were good at sonnets; that one about the old woman from Dalkeith, no lie I was close to tears.” Dave says, and then he pecks lightly at the crown of the dead boy’s head.
“Vertigo?”
Vertigo closes his notebook and puts it away in the pocket of his waistcoat, buttoned shut over a crumpled white shirt.
“Birds can’t cry,” he says, and Dave lets out three sharp exclamations. Over time, Vertigo has established this is Dave’s equivalent of a laugh. He rolls up the sleeves of his shirt to the elbow and takes off his watch and puts it safe into the pocket of his corduroy trousers. All of Vertigo’s clothes are a little too big for him; he has the look of someone recovering from a long illness. Dave flaps his wings but stays still. He pulls at his flight feathers with his beak. He is impatient. From the inside pocket of his waistcoat Vertigo retrieves two old silver coins, shillings with a dead King on them. They are the colour of pencil lead. Vertigo takes one in each hand and closes his fingers around them.
Dave the crow quorks with no words and no meaning, just to break the silence. Vertigo stands by the bath and looks out of the small bathroom window. He can see one tree, and it has no leaves left. He sighs and then bends at the waist and puts both of his hands into the water of the bath up to the wrists, the coins clenched tightly in his fists. Vertigo does it slowly, but still ripples spread out from where he has broken the surface. Vertigo is holding his breath. Dave is silent and still. After a few seconds, when the ripples have stopped, with a smooth motion he pulls his arms free of the red water. They are clean and dry. As he puts the two coins into his back pocket the sunlight through the window catches and glints on pure gold.
Later:
“Do you think it will hold?” Dave asks, and Vertigo shrugs. They are sitting at the top of the stairs in another house, at another time. Hanging from the banister on the landing is a red climbing rope bought months ago in preparation. Now it is tied firm, trailing only a few free feet before a simple slip knot. Beneath the knot there is maybe six feet of space before the floor at the bottom of the stairs. The boy is sat halfway down at eye level with the makeshift noose and he appears to be praying. His mouth moves unceasingly and his eyelids are almost closed.
Vertigo has his notebook on his lap, and is counting syllables on his fingers and putting stresses on them, “ba BAH ba BAH ba BAH ba BAH ba BAH,” he says, and Dave pecks at a stray thread from the carpet.
Vertigo sighs and fastens the elastic band around his pen and notebook cover, and puts both into his waistcoat pocket.
“I can’t do a sonnet,” he says, and Dave looks at him incredulously, head tilted to one side.
“Why not, what’s wrong?” Dave asks. The thread on the stair has come loose now, and with it a corner of the carpet and Dave is worrying at a nail that is protruding from the wood of the stair. On the stairs below them, the boy whose lips won’t stop moving has opened his eyes and is staring at the red rope. It is utterly still. He does not look at Vertigo, or at Dave.
“Well, honestly, I’m still in haiku mode. I’ve been looking in people’s rooms for books on Japan. I really think I might still get better.”
Dave opens and closes his beak three times in quick succession.
“Take this for example; he is going to hang himself, and there is this forest below Mt. Fuji, called Aokigahara. The translation is something like ‘Sea of Trees’. Every year hundreds of people hang themselves there. It is like an orchard for corpses. I was going to do this haiku with ripening apples. I think it really might have worked. There are legends that in times of famine people would abandon family members there to starve, so the Sea of Trees is full of hungry ghosts. Do you think that would work? Dave? Hungry ghosts and apples and hanged men. Maybe it’s too much for a haiku.”
Dave hops down from his stair and flaps his way upward to the top banister, where the red rope is hanging limply. He leans forward until his head is parallel to the rope.
“No way is this rope is going to hold him. He’s a chubby one,” Dave says. He raises his head again and gazes at the back of Vertigo’s head. “You aren’t a poet, Vertigo.”
Vertigo stares sullenly at the boy on the lower landing.
“I could be a poet.”
Dave quorks, and hops onto the top landing and makes his way back to the stairs. He sits next to Vertigo, and joins him in staring at the fat boy on the landing below.
“You know why you are called Vertigo?” Dave asks, and Vertigo looks at him, mouth open.
“Do you know the answer?” Vertigo says, “Don’t bring up things you don’t know the answer to. You know our agreement on that.”
Dave dips his head in acknowledgement.
“I still know some things. Get the fat boy to hurry up, and I’ll tell you.”
Instantly Vertigo gets to his feet and goes down the stairs, taking them two at a time. The fat boy does not look at him descending. When Vertigo is a foot away from the boy’s unwashed hair he bends at his waist and says ever-so-quietly, “Get a move on sonny. You’re only embarrassing yourself.”
By the time he has climbed the stairs to sit back down next to Dave the boy is already swinging from the red ligature, hands scrabbling for purchase on banisters, smooth walls and slick rope. But he has planned it well enough and there is no retreat. Vertigo stares at Dave and Dave dips his head, opens his beak, and gives out a meaningless quork.
“There is a quote, in a book, by a man, that essentially goes like this: Vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us; it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.”
Dave takes off again, and swoops down to land on the head of the boy, who is now still save for a gentle swaying. He pecks at the rope, but it stays strong. Dave quorks again, outraged.
“I can’t believe that bloody rope held, look at the kid, he’s huge!”
“Dave …”
Dave looks back at Vertigo, and opens and closes his beak three times in quick succession.
“Vertigo, you are the voice of the emptiness. You are not a poet. Your haikus are sub-par at best. Your sonnets, well, there could be something there, but you will always primarily be Vertigo. You are the voice in their heads when they are preparing dinner with their bright sharp knives and can’t stop looking at the pulse in their wrist, or when they grip the wheel of the car a little too tightly and picture themselves steering into traffic. You are all of these things, and you are very good at being them.”
Vertigo nods his head and walks down the stairs until he can reach the lazy pendulum of the boy. He takes the two silver coins from his pocket and puts one in each hand, reaches up to the boy. When they go back into his pocket they are a burning gold, too bright to look at directly. Vertigo proffers his right arm and Dave hops from the boy’s head onto the outstretched limb. Vertigo looks troubled.
“You really think there could be something in the sonnets?” Vertigo asks, and Dave quorks happily and dips his beak in the affirmative.
They leave the boy oscillating in a draught at the end of his tether, and high above them the rope creaks as it strains against the wood of the banister in time with the swinging corpse below, ever so slowly, ba BAH ba BAH ba BAH ba BAH ba BAH.
(c) Ian Green, 2013
Ian Green is 24 years old, originally from Aberdeen in Scotland and now living in East London and working in cancer research at Imperial College London. He’s previously had micro-fiction published by Open Pen and is seeking representation for his writing, primarily his first novel Slow Light.
Paul Clarke trained at the Central School and always got cast as a baddie or a monster. Or, for a bit of variety, a bad monster. Now a photographer, technologist and occasional performer, he finds the League's stories to be islands of relative sanity in his life.
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