Weaveworld

III

WHO MOVED THE GROUND?

1

he birds did not stop their spiralling over the city as Cal approached. For every one that flew off, another three or four joined the throng.

The phenomenon had not gone unnoticed. People stood on the pavement and on doorsteps, hands shading their eyes from the glare of the sky, and stared heavenwards. Opinions were everywhere ventured as to the reason for this congregation. Cal didn’t stop to offer his, but threaded his way through the maze of streets, on occasion having to double back and find a new route, but by degrees getting closer to the hub.

And now, as he approached, it became apparent that his first theory had been incorrect. The birds were not feeding. There was no swooping nor squabbling over a six-legged crumb, nor any sign in the lower air of the insect life that might have attracted these numbers. The birds were simply circling. Some of the smaller species, sparrows and finches, had tired of flying and now lined rooftops and fences, leaving their larger brethren – carrion-crows, magpies, gulls – to occupy the heights. There was no scarcity of pigeons here either; the wild variety banking and wheeling in flocks of fifty or more, their shadows rippling across the rooftops. There were some domesticated birds too, doubtless escapees like 33. Canaries and budgerigars: birds called from their millet and their bells by whatever force had summoned the others. For these birds being here was effectively suicide. Though their fellows were at present too excited by this ritual to take note of the pets in their midst, they would not be so indifferent when the circling spell no longer bound them. They would be cruel and quick. They’d fall on the canaries and the budgerigars and peck out their eyes, killing them for the crime of being tamed.

But for now, the parliament was at peace. It mounted the air, higher, ever higher, busying the sky.

The pursuit of this spectacle had led Cal to a part of the city he’d seldom explored. Here the plain square houses of the council estates gave way to a forlorn and eerie no-man’s-land, where streets of once-fine, three-storey terraced houses still stood, inexplicably preserved from the bulldozer, surrounded by areas levelled in expectation of a boom-time that had never come; islands in a dust sea.

It was one of these streets – Rue Street the sign read – that seemed the point over which the flocks were focused. There were more sizeable assemblies of exhausted birds here than in any of the adjacent streets; they twittered and preened themselves on the eaves and chimney tops and television aerials.

Cal scanned sky and roof alike, making his way along Rue Street as he did so. And there – a thousand to one chance – he caught sight of his bird. A solitary pigeon, dividing a cloud of sparrows. Years of watching the sky, waiting for pigeons to return from races, had given him an eagle eye; he could recognize a particular bird by a dozen idiosyncrasies in its flight pattern. He had found 33; no doubt of it. But even as he watched, the bird disappeared behind the roofs of Rue Street.

He gave chase afresh, finding a narrow alley which cut between the terraced houses half way along the road, and let on to the larger alley that ran behind the row. It had not been well kept. Piles of household refuse had been dumped along its length; orphan dustbins overturned, their contents scattered.

But twenty yards from where he stood there was work going on. Two removal men were manoeuvring an armchair out of the yard behind one of the houses, while a third stared up at the birds. Several hundred were assembled on the yard walls and window sills and railings. Cal wandered along the alley, scrutinizing this assembly for pigeons. He found a dozen or more amongst the multitude, but not the one he sought.

‘What d’you make of it?’

He had come within ten yards of the removal men, and one of them, the idler, was addressing the question to him.

‘I don’t know,’ he answered honestly.

‘Maybe they’re goin’ to migrate,’ said the younger of the two armchair carriers, letting drop his half of the burden and staring up at the sky.

‘Don’t be an idiot, Shane,’ said the other man, a West Indian. His name – Gideon – was emblazoned on the back of his overalls. Why’d they migrate in the middle of the fuckin’ summer?’

‘Too hot,’ was the idler’s reply. ‘That’s what it is. Too fuckin’ hot. It’s cookin’ their brains up there.’

Gideon had now put down his half of the armchair and was leaning against the back yard wall, applying a flame to the half-spent cigarette he’d fished from his top pocket.

‘Wouldn’t be bad, would it?’ he mused. ‘Being a bird. Gettin’ yer end away all spring, then fuckin’ off to the South of France as soon as yer get a chill on yer bollocks.’

‘They don’t live long,’ said Cal.

‘Do they not?’ said Gideon, drawing on his cigarette. He shrugged. ‘Short and sweet,’ he said. ‘That’d suit me.’

Shane plucked at the half-dozen blond hairs of his would-be moustache. ‘Yer know somethin’ about birds, do yer?’ he said to Cal.

‘Only pigeons.’

‘Race ‘em, do you?’

‘Once in a while –’

‘Me brother-in-law keeps whippets,’ said the third man, the idler. He looked at Cal as though this coincidence verged on the miraculous, and would now fuel hours of debate. But all Cal could think of to say was:

‘Dogs.’

That’s right,’ said the other man, delighted that they were of one accord on the issue. ‘He’s got five. Only one died.’

‘Pity,’ said Cal.

‘Not really. It was fuckin’ blind in one eye and couldn’t see in the other.’

The man guffawed at this observation, which promptly brought the exchange to a dead halt. Cal turned his attention back to the birds, and he grinned to see – there on the upper window-ledge of the house – his bird.

‘I see him,’ he said.

Gideon followed his gaze. ‘What’s that then?’

‘My pigeon. He escaped.’ Cal pointed. ‘There. In the middle of the sill. See him?’

All three now looked.

‘Worth something is he?’ said the idler.

‘Trust you, Bazo,’ Shane commented.

‘Just asking,’ Bazo replied.

‘He’s won prizes,’ said Cal, with some pride. He was keeping his eyes glued to 33, but the pigeon showed no sign of wanting to fly; just preened his wing feathers, and once in a while turned a beady eye up to the sky.

‘Stay there …’ Cal told the bird under his breath, ‘… don’t move.’ Then, to Gideon: ‘Is it all right if I go in? Try and catch him?’

‘Help yourself. The auld girl who had the house’s been carted off to hospital. We’re taking the furniture to pay her bills.’

Cal ducked through into the yard, negotiating the bric-a-brac the trio had dumped there, and went into the house.

It was a shambles inside. If the occupant had ever owned anything of substance it had long since been removed. The few pictures still hanging were worthless; the furniture was old, but not old enough to have come back into fashion; the rugs, cushions and curtains so aged they were fit only for the incinerator. The walls and ceilings were stained by many years’ accrual of smoke, its source the candles that sat on every shelf and sill, stalactites of yellowed wax depending from them.

He made his way through the warren of pokey, dark rooms, and into the hallway. The scene was just as dispiriting here. The brown linoleum rucked up and torn, and everywhere the pervasive smell of must and dust and creeping rot. She was well out of this squalid place, Cal thought, wherever she was; better off in hospital, where at least the sheets were dry.

He began to climb the stairs. It was a curious sensation, ascending into the murk of the upper storey, becoming blinder stair by stair, with the sound of birds scurrying across the slates above his skull, and beyond that the muted cries of gull and crow. Though it was no doubt self-deception, he seemed to hear their voices circling, as though this very place were the centre of their attentions. An image appeared in his head, of a photograph from National Geographical. A study of stars, taken with a slow release camera, the pin-point lights describing circles as they moved, or appeared to move, across the sky, with the Pole Star, the Nail of Heaven, steady in their midst.

The wheeling sound, and the picture it evoked, began to dizzy him. He suddenly felt weak, even afraid.

This was no time for such frailties, he chided himself. He had to claim the bird before it flew off again. He picked up his pace. At the top of the stairs he manœuvred past several items of bedroom furniture, and opened one of the several doors that he was presented with. The room he had chosen was adjacent to the one whose sill 33 occupied. Sun streamed through the curtainless window; the stale heat brought fresh sweat to his brow. The room had been emptied of furniture, the only souvenir of occupancy a calendar for the year 1961. On it, a photograph of a lion beneath a tree, its shaggy, monolithic head laid on vast paws, its gaze contemplative.

Cal went out on to the landing again, selected another door, and was this time delivered into the right room. There, beyond the grimy glass, was the pigeon.

Now it was all a question of tactics. He had to be careful not to startle the bird. He approached the window cautiously. On the sun-drenched sill 33 cocked its head, and blinked its eye, but made no move. Cal held his breath, and put his hands on the frame to haul the window up, but there was no budging it. A quick perusal showed why. The frame had been sealed up years ago, a dozen or more nails driven deep into the wood. A primitive form of crime prevention, but no doubt reassuring to an old woman living alone.

From the yard below, he heard Gideon’s voice. Peering down, he could just sec the trio dragging a large rolled-up carpet out of the house, Gideon giving orders in a ceaseless stream.

‘– to my left, Bazo. Left! Don’t you know which is your left?’

‘I’m going left.’

‘Not your left, yer idiot. My left.’

The bird on the sill was undisturbed by this commotion. It seemed quite happy on its perch.

Cal headed back downstairs, deciding as he went that the only option remaining was to climb up on to the yard wall and see if he couldn’t coax the bird down from there. He cursed himself for not having brought a pocketful of grain. Coos and sweet words would just have to do.

By the time he stepped out into the heat of the yard once more, the removal men had successfully manhandled the carpet out of the house, and were taking a rest after their exertions.

‘No luck?’ said Shane, seeing Cal emerge.

‘The window won’t budge. I’ll have to try from down here.’

He caught a deprecating look from Bazo. ‘You’ll never reach the bugger from here,’ the man said, scratching the expanse of beer-gut that gleamed between T-shirt and belt.

‘I’ll try from the wall,’ said Cal.

‘Watch yerself –’ Gideon said.

‘Thanks.’

‘– you could break yer back –’

Using pits in the crumbling mortar for footholds, Cal hauled himself up on to the eight-foot wall that divided this yard from its neighbour.

The sun was hot on his neck and the top of his head, and something of the giddiness he’d experienced climbing the stairs returned. He straddled the wall as though it were a horse, until he got used to the height. Though the perch was the width of a brick, and offered ample enough walking space. heights and he had never been happy companions.

‘Looks like it’s been a nice piece of handiwork,’ said Gideon, in the yard below. Cal glanced down to see that the West Indian was now on his haunches beside the carpet, which he’d rolled out far enough to expose an elaborately woven border.

Bazo wandered over to where Gideon crouched, and scrutinized the property. He was balding, Cal could see, his hair scrupulously pasted down with oil to conceal the spot.

‘Pity it’s not in better nick,’ said Shane.

‘Hold yer horses,’ said Bazo. ‘Let’s have a better look.’

Cal returned his attention to the problem of standing upright. At least the carpet would divert his audience for a few moments; long enough, he prayed, for him to get to his feet. There was no breath of wind here to alleviate the fury of the sun; he could feel sweat trickle down his torso and glue his underwear to his buttocks. Gingerly, he started to stand, bringing one leg up into a kneeling position – both hands clinging to the brick like grim death.

From below, there were murmurs of approval as more of the carpet was exposed to light.

‘Look at the work in that,’ said Gideon.

‘Are you thinkin’ what I’m thinkin’?’ said Bazo, his voice lowered.

‘I don’t know ‘til you tell me,’ came Gideon’s reply.

‘What say we take it down to Gilchrist’s. We might get a price for this.’

‘The Chief’ll know it’s gone,’ Shane protested.

‘Keep it down,’ said Bazo, quietly reminding his companions of Cal’s presence. In fact Cal was far too concerned with his inept tight-rope act to bother himself with their petty theft. He had finally got the soles of both feet up on to the top of the wall, and was about to try standing up.

In the yard, the conversation went on.

‘Take the far end, Shane, let’s have a look at the whole thing…’

‘D’you think it’s Persian?’

‘Haven’t a fuckin’ clue.’

Very slowly, Cal stood upright, his arms extended at ninety degrees from his body. Feeling as stable as he was ever going to feel, he chanced a quick look up at the window sill. The bird was still there.

From below he heard the sound of the carpet being unrolled further, the men’s grunts punctuated with words of admiration.

Ignoring their presence as best he could, he took his first faltering step along the wall.

‘Hey there …’ he murmured to the escapee ‘… remember me?’

33 took no notice. Cal advanced a second trembling step, and a third, his confidence growing. He was getting the trick of this balancing business now.

‘Come on down,’ he coaxed, a prosaic Romeo.

The bird finally seemed to recognize his owner’s voice, and cocked his head in Cal’s direction.

‘Here, boy …’ Cal said, tentatively raising his hand towards the window as he risked another step.

At that instant either his foot slipped or the brick gave way beneath his heel. He heard himself loose a yell of alarm, which panicked the birds lining the sill. They were up and off, their wing-beats ironic applause, as he flailed on the wall. His panicked gaze went first to his feet, then to the yard below.

No, not the yard; that had disappeared. It was the carpet he saw. It had been entirely unrolled, and it filled the yard from wall to wall.

What happened next occupied mere seconds, but either his mind was lightning fast, or the moments played truant, for it seemed he had all the time he needed –

Time to appreciate the startling intricacy of the design laid out beneath him; an awesome proliferation of exquisitely executed detail. Age had bled brightness from the colours of the weave, mellowing vermilion to rose, and cobalt to a chalky blue, and here and there the carpet had become thread-bare, but from where Cal teetered the effect was still overwhelming.

Every inch of the carpet was worked with motifs. Even the border brimmed with designs, all subtly different from their neighbours. The effect was not over-busy; every detail was clear to Cal’s feasting eyes. In one place a dozen motifs congregated as if banded together; in another, they stood apart like rival siblings. Some kept their station along the border; others spilled into the main field, as if eager to join the teeming throng there.

In the field itself ribbons of colour described arabesques across a background of sultry browns and greens, forms that were pure abstraction – bright jottings from some wild man’s diary – jostling with stylized flora and fauna. But this complexity paled beside the centre piece of the carpet: a huge medallion, its colours as various as a summer garden, into which a hundred subtle geometries had been cunningly woven, so that the eye could read each pattern as flower or theorem, order or turmoil, and find each choice echoed somewhere in the grand design.

He saw all of this in one prodigious glance. In his second the vision laid before him began to change.

From the corner of his eye he registered that the rest of the world – the yard, and the men who’d occupied it, the houses, the wall he’d been toppling from – all were winking out of existence. Suddenly he was hanging in the air, the carpet vaster by the moment beneath him, its glorious configurations filling his head.

The design was shifting, he saw. The knots were restless, trembling to slip themselves, and the colours seemed to be merging into each other, new forms springing from this marriage of dyes.

Implausible as it seemed, the carpet was coming to life.

A landscape – or rather a confusion of landscapes thrown together in fabulous disarray – was emerging from the warp and the weft. Was that not a mountain he could see below him, pressing its head up through a cloud of colour?; and was that not a river?; and could he not hear its roar as it fell in white water torrents into a shadowed gorge?

There was a world below him.

And he was suddenly a bird, a wingless bird hovering for a breathless instant on a balmy, sweet-scented wind, sole witness to the miracle sleeping below.

There was more to claim his eye with every thump of his heart.

A lake, with myriad islands dotting its placid waters like breaching whales. A dappled quilt of fields, their grasses and grains swept by the same tides of air that kept him aloft. Velvet woodland creeping up the sleek flank of a hill, on whose pinnacle a watchtower perched, sun and cloud-shadow drifting across its white walls.

There were other signs of habitation too, though nothing of the people themselves. A cluster of dwellings hugging a river bend; several houses beetling along the edge of a cliff, tempting gravity. And a town too, laid out in a city-planner’s nightmare, half its streets hopelessly serpentine, the other half cul-de-sacs.

The same casual indifference to organization was evident everywhere, he saw. Zones temperate and intemperate, fruitful and barren were thrown together in defiance of all laws geological or climatic, as if by a God whose taste was for contradiction.

How fine it would be to walk there, he thought, with so much variety pressed into so little space, not knowing whether turning the next corner would bring ice or fire. Such complexity was beyond the wit of a cartographer. To be there, in that world, would be to live a perpetual adventure.

And at the centre of this burgeoning province, perhaps the most awesome sight of all. A mass of slate-coloured cloud, the innards of which were in perpetual, spiralling motion. The sight reminded him of the birds wheeling above the house in Rue Street – an echo of this greater wheel.

At the thought of them, and the place he’d left behind, he heard their voices – and in that moment the wind that had swept up from the world below, keeping him aloft, faltered.

He felt the horror in his stomach first, and then his bowels: he was going to fall.

The tumult of the birds grew louder, crowing their delight at his descent. He, the usurper of their element; he, who had snatched a glimpse of a miracle, would now be dashed to death upon it.

He started to yell, but the speed of his fall stole the cry from his tongue. The air roared in his ears and tore at his hair. He tried to spread his arms to slow his descent but the attempt instead threw him head over heels, and over again, until he no longer knew earth from sky. There was some mercy in this, he dimly thought. At least he’d be blind to death’s proximity. Just tumbling and tumbling until –

– the world went out.

He fell through a darkness unrelieved by stars, the birds still loud in his ears, and hit the ground, hard.

It hurt, and went on hurting, which struck him as odd. Oblivion, he’d always assumed, would be a painless condition. And soundless too. But there were voices.

‘Say something …’ one of them demanded, ‘… if it’s only goodbye.’

There was laughter now.

He opened his eyes a hair’s breadth. The sun was blindingly bright, until Gideon’s bulk eclipsed it.

‘Have you broken anything?’ the man wanted to know.

Cal opened his eyes a fraction wider.

‘Say something, man.’

He raised his head a few inches, and looked about him. He was lying in the yard, on the carpet.

‘What happened?’

‘You fell off the wall,’ said Shane.

‘Must have missed your footing,’ Gideon suggested.

‘Fell,’ Cal said, pulling himself up into a sitting position. He felt nauseous.

‘Don’t think you’ve done much damage,’ said Gideon. ‘A few scrapes, that’s all.’

Cal looked down at himself, verifying the man’s remark. He’d taken skin off his right arm from wrist to elbow, and there was tenderness down his body where he’d hit the ground, but there were no sharp pains. The only real harm was to his dignity, and that was seldom fatal.

He got to his feet, wincing, eyes to the ground. The weave was playing dumb. There was no tell-tale tremor in the rows of knots, no sign that hidden heights and depths were about to make themselves known. Nor was there any sign from the others that they’d seen anything miraculous. To all intents and purposes the carpet beneath his feet was simply that: a carpet.

He hobbled towards the yard gate, offering a muttered thanks to Gideon. As he stepped out into the alley, Bazo said:

‘Yer bird flew off.’

Cal gave a small shrug and went on his way.

What had he just experienced? An hallucination, brought on by too much sun or too little breakfast? If so, it had been startlingly real. He looked up at the birds, still circling overhead. They sensed something untoward here too; that was why they’d gathered. Either that, or they and he were sharing the same delusion.

All, in sum, that he could be certain of was his bruising. That, and the fact that though he was standing no more than two miles from his father’s house, in the city in which he’d spent his entire life, he felt as homesick as a lost child.