The Buzzard
Memory - An untrustworthy fiction with a smidge of truth smuggled in
This week another extract from the book I’m currently working on.
Read the previous extract, The Horse, by clicking here.
This is a slice of a much longer story I’m working on, that travels through the mists of time, from the past to the present to the past and back along the rickety rope bridge of memory.
I hope you enjoy this extract, let me know what you think in the comments.
It was the summer of 1983.
I remember being a ghost back then, floating about haunting my life, my family, my town, my so-called country, invisible and irrelevant in the chaos of it all. Not only a ghost but sometimes a screaming banshee thrashing around trying to tear a hole in the world. In the end I ripped the world to shreds and then took a lifetime putting it all back together again.
I can’t remember exactly how old I was that summer, maybe 12, maybe 14, ridiculously young, barely alive and already half drowned in the storm of life. At the time I thought I was grown-up and sophisticated. I thought suffering gave me strength but I was really just a frazzled eye-witness stoked-up by the anxiety of living.
And sometimes I remember being a joyous beam of human sunshine binding the world together with love and vitality. Not a ghost but an energetic, curious, powerful and stubbornly defiant child, forgiving and endlessly romantic. A magnetic boy laden with kindness and gorgeously oblivious to my charm.
But we all know memory is an untrustworthy fiction with a smidge of truth smuggled in. No one would choose such an unreliable method, having to grapple along some rickety rope bridge though the mists of time. But it’s all we have.
I remember that summer, I was maybe 12, maybe 14, as a string of endless sunny days, the sun rolling through the heavens, the shimmering heat, everything baking for weeks on end. A summer of hazy super-eight memories, of flickering grainy people eating fish and chips on stony beaches and long car journeys with open windows and sticky seats and endless green hedgerows and the smell of gardenia and jasmine and cow shit and sun lotion and salt and vinegar and freshly kissed skin. Long days of laying beside rivers and endless walks through orchards and villages like an adventurer, huffed in boredom, lost in daydreams, lured through field after field. A summer of broken promises and unbroken lies told with certainty and ambition. A summer where everything changed, again, and nothing went back to how it was.
Reality and fiction seem to merge after all the retelling. Memories become stronger and weaker with every recollection. I remember that summer day when I saw a buzzard dropping from the thermal columns high above the Garden of England, I can see it in my mind’s eye, rolling and darting through an onslaught of crows. There were always crows. Crows everywhere. The buzzard dove through the crows like a missile locked on a roadkill, smeared outside our house in the no man’s land where our derelict little town bled into the surrounding farms and orchards.
Then it landed on the unravelled body of this hare, and I remember it gently folding away its wings like an angel and sinking its talons into the soft brown fur and the shiny red and white inside outsides.
I watched the bird standing so proudly in its dappled plumage under the blazing sun, taking its time, looking like a messenger from the heavens come to warn us, but there was no one but me, watching from the low wall beside our rundown red brick and ragstone house. And I remember saying out loud to my father, look, look at that bird, because I still spoke to him back then, and even though I hadn’t seen him for years I still felt him in my bones, his manner, his smell, his spirit. I remember I’d already started gathering and hoarding memories back then. Memories I still flick through, but can’t really trust, curated as they were by a broken ghost child over one hazy summer.
I was sat on the wall outside our house on one of those English streets where the houses are crammed together like pigs in a transport lorry, jammed up against each other, side by side, so no one could take a breath without pushing against the neighbour, all of whom were retreating into their own fragmented existences, no longer bound to some mythical community but instead newly bewitched by quick fixes, by having it all, by sharp elbows and pointed fingers and thoughtless tongues.
It was a tall, narrow building held up by the neighbouring houses like a old drunk that had seen better days. Years later it’d be called a fixer-upper with rustic charm and churned into flats to maximise asset value, but on that particular day, in the scorching summer of 1983, it was teetering between bohemian and dilapidated like a trap set to catch us, it suited us so perfectly.
On that scorching day when I saw the buzzard we’d lived there for a year maybe. Maybe longer. I remember the day we viewed the house. I hated the place but I knew immediately we’d end up living there. It was forlorn and abandoned and neglected and perfect. The garden backed onto a mud path that ran along a patchwork of allotments sloping downward toward a river with groves of ash and hawthorn and sycamore. I could see my mother was already planning her empire on that first visit. Eventually she would lay turf and a red brick patio and plant vegetables and flowering shrubs and punga trees and buy six white fantail doves from a man in the market and bring them home in a cardboard box and enclose them under plastic netting she’d draped over the garden shed. She was forever trying to recapture the wild land we’d left. Recreating a wilderness in the back garden of a house in a small English market town. She was building a miniature theme park dedicated to her perpetual yearning to be somewhere else, to escape wherever she was, to start afresh and surely this time to be happy. She too was lost, forever floating in the great ocean, forever on the lookout for swimming horses to deliver us from our fate.
When my mother removed the netting over the garden shed, after the eight week homing-in period, two of the doves were preyed upon by buzzards within hours.
“It’s natural,” she’d said picking up white feathers strewn across the garden, “it’s nature, buzzards need to eat too.”
“Those doves were invented by Victorians,” I’d said, “they could barely fly, if it were natural they’d have stood a chance.”
She, with a condescending gaze, laughed and said, “If it happens it’s natural.”
And I shook my head, “At least the jungle had a law,” I’d said, “this was just the wanton destruction of the weakest.”
I’d always been obliviously prophetic but little did I know then what a storm was coming.
The remaining doves survived through sheer chance which my mother saw as proof the universe was intervening on our behalf. She believed that some great power righted wrongs and balanced injustices. No matter what happened it happened for a reason. She was an atheist, but a religious, tarot card reading, crystal ball gazing atheist always looking for patterns where none existed. There was no intervening force keeping the world in check. We were living proof of that. In the end we’d need a more tangible guardian angel than just crossing our fingers.
I remember those buzzards, pulling at flesh with black and yellow beaks, ripping off strands and gulping down morsels with that perpetually serious expression they have and I began to get hungry myself. I need a coffee. I’m lying in bed now, in the present, watching the morning light seep through the window, watching your profile slowly sketch itself into existence, your head on the pillow, your breath the shallow rhythm of a deep sleeper, and I hear the dog on the sofa adjusting his position, momentarily awoken by a breeze of consciousness and the kitchen clock lightly ticking through the wall, even at this first blush of the day, when fairies and elves run freely and the world is yet to press itself upon us.
I’m lying here in our bed. Together with you, lost in my own memories, clambering along that rope bridge all alone, through the mists of time, transformed into that boy, me, back then, feeling the deep anxiety of those long past days welling up inside me.
Icy air is streaming through the window left ajar, harassing the houseplants on the sill, but we, you and I, are nestled together under our feathery quilts, lying snug and warm, breathing in the crisp wintry air, while you sleep and I reminisce. I think I should close the window so the room will be warmer when you wake but instead I fall back into wondering how to make sense of the past, how to present these stories in order, how to share with you all that is hidden inside me.
So I grasp the frayed ropes and continue along the rickety memory bridge back toward that day when my mother was dancing around the kitchen and I found myself standing in the doorway like an intruder caught in a flashlight beam, held in a frozen pose, watching her swing about to drive-time easy listening in her green jumpsuit and Jane Fonda headband, lifting saucepan lids and slicing and chopping and taking sneaky puffs on her cigarette, always pretending she didn’t really smoke, it was just a reward for her virtuosity, and there she was in my mind, pouring small glasses of white wine and downing each in one.
It was the same day I saw that buzzard ripping away at the outside-insides of a roadkill hare, that day, when I’d gone to tell about the buzzard and found myself standing there in the kitchen doorway, the sunlight in the garden silhouetting me in the frame, and I remember it was right there when I was first struck with the overwhelming insight that life is a charade, nothing more than a theatre forever running in our heads, where truth and meaning can be anything we want. Standing right there on that sunny day in the kitchen doorway it came to me in a flash, that we were all selfish, ego-maniacs, all of us, pretending, all of us, even Gandhi, even Mother Teresa, even, you name them, we’re all making it up as we go along, all of us playing some kind of role. It struck me like a lightning bolt, like a kick in the head, like a vacuum that sucked out everything.
And there I was, that day, struck down with this insight, at that moment, 12 or 14 years old, I don’t remember, standing in the kitchen doorway as my mother danced around to Led Zeppelin’s Going to California, watching her singing along to the radio, “Spent my days with a woman unkind, Smoked my stuff and drank all my wine,” watching her laughing as she took another swig from her glass and another eager puff, self aware, her voice off key, “Made up my mind to make a new start, Going to California with an aching in my heart,” slow-motion pirouetting, self-conscious awkwardness, playing a role, aware of the camera, checking her angles, both engrossed and disconnected, lost in her own world, light hearted and deadly serious, holding her glass of wine like a microphone for the crowd to sing along but there was no crowd, there was just me watching as she turned, me, standing there in the doorway, me, a crowd of one, bewitched by the scene, me, the problem child, the one fated to see through the facade and witness the agony, me, overwhelmed by the existential realisation that my mother was just as lost and helpless as I was, as the rest of them, as all of us.
“Oh, it’s you is it,” she’d said, coming toward me, face beaming, swamping me until I felt like a solider at the wrong homecoming, cold white wine splashing down my neck and still I was on high alert, a prey animal listening for the microscopic signals that reveal danger.
She gestured around the kitchen, “I’m making dinner,” pulling a face to show none of us can comprehend the mysteries of the Universe. But there was no mystery and even though I tried to hide it she saw I knew who was coming and she saw my disdain and right then she began shifting, her tight smile compressing, her hip momentarily extruding, her shoulders subtly warning of a volatile commotion bubbling below the surface.
We live in a stream of minuscule vibrations, the tiniest flickers carry such force, delicate subliminal signals and inconsequential nothings that change everything. The imperceptible narrowing of eyes, the off-beat hesitations, the inaudible sighs and the open faced lies, the wave of animosity in an eyebrow or a flourish of bitterness rolling along a jawline. This perpetual flow of ultra sensitive human vibrations swamped my senses as I navigated the volatility, forever searching through the tremors for paths to safer ground, always on high alert even as I slouched against the door frame listless in the heat.
If you’d like to help a struggling writer with a one off donation please click on the button below. Or, if you prefer you can click on the paid subscriber button at the end of this piece.
“Your brother’s out with Whatshisname,” she said, leaning one hand lightly on the sideboard, shifting onto the other leg, “your sister’s gone for dessert but she‘ll be back, she’d not get far on two quid now-a-days would she?” laughing, taking another swig of Liebfraumilch, “What you doing?” a barely disguised hint that there were other places I could be, as if I were an unknown and unwanted stranger knocking at the door.
“It’s just,” she said whirling around, “I could do with some privacy once in a while,” then earnestly, full-throated, singing along to the next verse, “Ride a white mare in the footsteps of dawn, Trying to find a woman who’s never, never, never been born,” pouring a tipple more and singing into the neck of the bottle, “Standing on a hill in my mountain of dreams, Telling myself it’s not as hard, hard, hard as it seems.”
I stood there staring, stayed put, immobilised in the realisation that all this, everything, my mother, me, these thoughts, were all a kind of spectacle, and we might, if we chose, change everything in the blink of an eye.
“Don’t,” she said, “just don’t, just for once, don’t ruin it,” her hand now holding the kitchen counter, her shoulders stiffening, my heart beating, annoyance rising in both of us, my cheeks blushing, lips tightening, my mind soaked with the thought, If it’s all a fucking charade why does it have to be this, what the fuck is wrong with us?
And as I burned with the stupidity of it all, she suddenly relaxed, and unexpectedly, uncharacteristically even, pulled together the semblance of a smile, “I’m not, it’s all ok, it’s only, I’m not even,” and she couldn’t quite get it out without conceding something so she stopped and just smiled at me, sensing my turmoil and for the time being feeling satisfied with that.
I should have shut up. I should have. But instead I heard myself saying, “Is Knobhead coming over then for something special is he?” and the darkness rose behind her eyes and my breathing shallowed and at the very moment when the world was blackening her attention was leashed by my sister squeezing past me, out of nowhere, suddenly back from the shops, dropping a handful of lollipops on the kitchen table and saying, “Ta daaa,” like a bored magician.
My mother looked at the scattered lollipops in confusion, then a horrified disappointment spread as my little sister opened the fridge and nonchalantly started drinking straight from a milk bottle, side-eyeing my mother to catch her reaction, and I wondered if she’d always known that life was theatre and you could improvise at any moment just to see what might happen.
“Get out the both of you,” came the voice like the air hissing from a dead body. And we do. We did. Back then. A million years ago, like ghosts we floated along the corridor, my sister and I, silently squeezing through the front door and hovering away into the relentless heat of the day, holding out breath, weightless, thoughtless, moving quick and quiet to avoid the landmines scattered throughout our lives.
“Where we going?” my sister said on that hot day that’s now wavering in and out of my recollection, that day when we hovered down our roasting street, under the blazing sun, past the blood stain on the road where a buzzard was carrying a roadkill hare back to the heavens, flapping past us, beyond the reach of all this madness on that peaceful summer’s afternoon.
I remember I said, “Lollipops?” and I remember my little sister snorted and raised her shoulders and repeated, “Lollipops,” and we were both smirking and I remember breaking into hilarious giggles and saying “lollipops,” over and over again, an priceless punchline that got funnier and funnier until finally I said “let’s go to the river,” but I didn’t have to because we both knew exactly where we were going.
And suddenly, I started running for the sheer hell of it, and as fast as lightning my sister was off the blocks right beside me, no question, even though it was a stupid place to be, she was there, even if I was digging myself down into a hole just to see how deep I can go, she was there climbing down beside me, all covered in darkness, and still shining like a full moon in October, even if I was screaming the worst things I could think of as loud I could, she’s was right beside me, running, running, running.
And I remember now as I’m lying here in this icy cold room under these warm blankets that we were running full pelt along our street toward the river bank, away from our harsh crumbling little town with its tatty pubs and union jack bunting and casual xenophobia. Away from our mean little town half stumbling and snarling like a ravenous drunk searching for a bottle, our counterfeit town of English class and tradition and new found greed and selfishness. Our derelict little town struggling to keep up appearances and so plainly heading for trouble that even I could feel it in my bones, me, an alien in that place, a stranger, one of the flotsam and jetsam. It wasn’t the place my mother imagined when we washed up onto the shores of the so-called Mother Country. It wasn’t the town her rose-tinted memories whispered about, like sirens drawing us onto this dangerous reef to wreck ourselves. Again. But there we were nonetheless, treading water, clinging on, sinking under and kicking and struggling to breath.
I remember we skittered off our street and ran down the baked mud path through the allotments toward the groves of ash and hawthorn and sycamore and the meadow grass and wild flowers growing along the riverbank. We ran past the overgrown gardens with their rickety fences, past the thistle and foxglove and tall sticky cow parsnip, through the long grasses on the banks of the slowly eddying river and finally we fell onto our backs and panted and sweated and stared up at swallows slicing through the heavens and the bees barrelling through the pink foxgloves that towered above us on that wonderful riverbank, a world free of the brutality and the tension and we lay there under the blazing sun, breathing in the damp river air and the green grass and the dry earth as we sank into a glorious peace in that warm summer breeze.
And then my sister pointed at a flower bell, the back of one hand shading her eye’s from the sun’s rays and said, “What’s that one again?”
“Foxglove, beautiful but deadly, remember?”
“Even bees, the little almsmen of spring bowers,” she said.
“know there is richest juice in poison-flowers,” I said.
“Beautiful but deadly, I love it,” she said.
“Ha, you would say that,” wafting my hand below my nose as if she’d farted and she told me to fuck off and we both lay there saying, fuck you, fuck you, until I suddenly jumped up and said in a TV news reader voice, “The sweet nectar of the riverside was blown away today by a powerful silent but violent, the perpetrator is well known to the authorities,” and she laughed and said “fuck you,” again so I keep going, “the perpetrator was accompanied by a boy genius who was overheard saying, Suffering is the soil in which great poets grow. This young man will no doubt continue his meteoric rise to great fame and take his revenge on the nation,” and now she looked blankly at me but I kept going, “They never understood how deeply he felt the world,” I held my hands over my heart, throwing my head from side to side, “They never realised the depth of his humanity,” then, looking down as if I was teetering on a cliff edge, “So he threw himself off the white cliffs off Dover in regret and rapture,” I threw myself to the ground, “And this boy genius became an angel,” and I rose up flapping my arms, and she laughed away at my pantomiming and said, “you idiot,” and I fell back to the ground and said in my own voice, “Except no one gives a fuck, so,” and my sister just looked at me for a moment and then we both silently watched the little brown sparrows that raced about in flocks between the trees by the riverbank and said not another word.
There comes a point in the well-adapted sensitive when the fear of breathing in all the stale air is finally undone by the joy of singing
Your writing—is going through a change, a new metamorphosis, combining the familiar with charting a new course through the unknown. You, my friend, are on fire. I was there, watching the buzzard spiral to earth to feast on his prey, the unsuspecting hare. I ran full speed—through wild flower fields near the river.
Hoarding memories; if I knew more of life back then, I would definitely have a hoarder library of memories, too vast for brain storage. You’re right, what do we actually remember, how much is wishful thinking. Fiction or fact, spiraling together in a double helix. Do we choose fiction over fact on purpose? I already know the answer. I love your contemplations of just how much to share, spiraling back, and forth to present day. I love how the wild horse swam through the story.
More please. ( I quickly went looking for a wild horse emoji to end my reply. The closest option for a wild horse, was a picture of a camel WTF, Substack! )