The naming of the birds, p.1
The Naming of the Birds, page 1
As arrows are in the hand of a warrior; so are children
—PSALM 127:4
Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity much rather: that which purifies us is trial.
—JOHN MILTON, AREOPAGITICA
Not one girl, I think, will ever look on the sunlight of another time who has such gifts as this one does.
—SAPPHO, FRAGMENT 56
(TRANS. ANNE CARSON)
THE NAMING OF
THE BIRDS
1
THE CHILDREN ARE taken far away, after the fire, and they are given new names. One morning they are led from their dormitories and made to line up in the passageway. Maybe it is the first morning or maybe it is later. Everything is strange here and they have no hold on the days yet.
The girls stand on one side and the boys on the other. The nurse tells them to stand up straight, even those swaying on crutches. Stand up straight for the master, she says, though the lean man in the dark robes is bent over a book and seems to take no notice. The light is hung with dust, and the children are hushed when they cough. Some cannot stop. Their breathing is still bad.
When the children have taken their places, the master opens his book. When he speaks, he is looking out above their heads. This is a great day, he says, a momentous day.
He carries on, using other words they do not know. The children take no special notice yet. They twitch and shiver in their thin gowns. Their hands wander from their sides to worry at bandages, to puzzle over skin that has turned raw and unfamiliar. The places where they hurt.
They are to have new names, the master says. They are to be called after birds. He has dropped his eyes to look at them now, and he says this as if it is ordinary. He says it as if such names would come to them easily. The Asylum stood near a great forest—the Asylum was the place from before, the place they were taken from—but they knew no more of that forest than they knew of the sky. Most could not tell a sparrow from a thrush.
When one of the girls lets out a throttled sob, the nurse seizes her hand and slaps it smartly. The child goes white and rigid. She blinks into the air as if she cannot tell where this new pain has come from.
The master begins with the boys. He stands before each of them in turn and reads aloud from his heavy book. The words are slow and strange, like vows or last blessings. The boys keep their heads bowed, not raising them until they think they are meant to answer. Some are too dazed for that, so the nurse must take hold of their chins and point to show them what is wanted.
Of all the children, only one is paying close attention. She stands near the end in the line of girls. She is not the tallest of them, or the sturdiest. Her wounds are not the worst or the least. Her left hand is bandaged, and those burns are still blistered and weeping. Some of her cuts are bad, too—the ones from the glass—but she has peeled the rest of the dressings off. She wants to see the marks.
She is paying attention because that is what she does. It is easily overlooked, her way of watching and listening. She hardly recognised it herself, before the fire, but now she knows how much it matters. She keeps still, but not too still, letting her eyes rest nowhere. When a thought comes to her, she keeps it from her face.
The thought that comes to her now is that something here is waiting to happen.
The master has reached the last boy but one, a moon-faced creature whose mouth hangs open like a hinge. This time the master pauses before he begins. He thumbs the corner of a page, then he looks up from it as if in distraction. He turns his head a little and makes a sound with his tongue tip. A slow tack, tack, tack, like the dripping of a cistern.
The girl sees and hears these things slantwise, keeping her eyes unfixed. Outside, the morning is changing, and the light from the high windows sharpens and pales. When she parts her lips, her breath shows and vanishes.
The master begins again. The words are the same as before, but now a quietness opens around them. When he comes to the end, it is a moment before the moon-faced boy looks up. His expression is all but empty.
“From this day,” the master says, “your name is Magpie.”
The boy’s mouth works, but he makes no answer. The nurse jabs him with a finger. “Now you. Say your new name.”
The boy flinches, and a twitching starts up in his cheek. Half his face is mottled with burns, and sheeny with some ointment that will do him no good. That skin will never mend right. At last he speaks, and as soon as he does the girl knows the moment is now. She feels its parts snicking together like the workings of a clock.
The boy saying, “But, sir.” The master closing the book, freeing a hand that curls behind a fold of black cloth.
The boy saying, “But, sir, my name is Dan.”
The master taking a backward step, the movement almost dainty, then loosing his arm. The fierce snap of his sleeve, scything the quiet, then the next sound. Like a lead pipe against tender meat.
The moon-faced boy bucks on his heels. He draws a quick, hitched breath, disbelieving. Then he slumps to the floor like a dropped flour sack.
For a moment the master seems not to notice. He smooths out the pages of his book. Then he speaks quietly, as if to himself. “I took a new name myself, when I came here.”
On the floor, the boy makes a thick snuffling sound. His hand is clamped to his face. The master’s backhanded slap was to the unburned side, but the girl doubts it was meant as a mercy. His right hand was free, for turning the pages. It was less effort.
“I was something else once,” the master says, “but now I am the Chaplain. The change was no great hardship.”
The Chaplain. It is another new word. The girl keeps her lips together. In secret, her tongue makes the ghost of its shape.
“Now,” the master says—the Chaplain says. “Up. Again.”
When he moves on to the girls, they try to be quicker with their answers. It doesn’t come easily. Some are hoarse still, from the smoke. Some are just senseless with fright. One of the smaller girls loses hold of her bladder, but she is made to keep her place. She stands in her own spreading water until the words come out right. Then the nurse hauls her away.
The watchful girl is next in line. Near her left foot, the bright seam of piss creeps between the boards, but she is careful not to stir. She keeps herself straight, lowering her eyes but not her head as the Chaplain’s black shape settles before her. The little girl’s water smells of nothing, but the air about this man is laced with scent. It is a fine and shimmering fragrance, of the kind that comes from crystal bottles, but beneath it there is old sweat, musted cloth, male flesh. That butchery tang.
He fusses with the pages, but she knows he is studying her. He is watchful too, she thinks, in a way that suits his purposes. He is seeking out some weakness, but he has not sighted it yet. He is curious, or impatient, or something she cannot name. After a time he gives an unsated grunt—like a man refusing thin broth—then he licks a fingertip and turns over a page.
The girl knows the words by heart now, though sometimes she must guess at their meaning. She lifts her eyes a moment before it is time, and at this he looks over her face, his lips gone tight. Either he finds no fault, or he finds one he means to store away.
He reads out her new name, and the sound of it is both strange and familiar. She has heard it before, surely, though she has never had cause to speak it aloud.
She says the word now, and her voice sounds new in her own ears. Sure and cold. Again the Chaplain gives her a look, and this time there is an edge of menace in it. She does not shrink from him. It is not that she feels no fear, only that the feeling does not seem her own. She is growing used to it, this gathering otherness in her nature.
On the night of the fire, while she was still trapped, her terror was like a living creature. Some writhing and eyeless thing that had squirmed from her gut to her throat, meaning to choke her from within.
But that was not what happened. That was not what the fierce creature did.
Her bandaged hand twitches. She masks the slip, stilling the movement in the folds of her smock. The Chaplain’s eyes flicker to her side, too late to catch it. When they return to her face, there is something in them that she cannot read. He thrusts out his chin and turns away.
The girl keeps steady in her place, but now she lets her gaze drift just a little. The view from the high windows is empty save for one corner pane, where she can see a stark lattice of bare branches. She cannot tell what kind of tree it is, but on the road here she heard talk of a thaw. Perhaps it will soon be in leaf.
And birds. It will be filled with birds, she supposes. When the children pass by this window—the boy who is now called Finch, or the girl who is now Starling—will they look out and wonder which is which?
She will not catch sight of hers, she thinks. It is an uncommon sort of name, and it must be for an uncommon sort of bird. It would make no difference anyway. It belongs to her now, this name, not to a handful of glimpsed colours in some faraway wood.
She repeats the word inwardly, to practise it. She finds she has taken to it, though she is not quick to bestow fondness. She likes how its three parts slip and clink together. The beads and slivers of it touching, bright against dark.
It is hers now, this name. The others cling to their shreds of remembrance, but when she reaches back there is nothing milky, nothing warm. Maybe there was once, but all of that is burned and blackened now. It is gone.
She was meeker before. She primped her coverlet and sang her hymns. She c
hirruped her prayers.
But then she crawled on her belly from a furnace. She drowned in black air, heaved up blood and cinders. She battered and bled herself free, on the night of the fire, and afterwards she fell into the deep and sharded dark. She took a secret with her, from the time before, but she took nothing else.
She needs nothing else because now she is something else. Now her name is Nightingale.
THE PLACE THEY have been brought to is called the Chapel, though they cannot tell why. It is not like any church they have seen. The masters dress in black, but Nightingale does not think they are clergymen.
There were clergymen who came to the Asylum, and they carried on as such men do. They talked of how the Lord looked kindly on children who accepted their lot, as if any child could do otherwise. The masters at the Chapel do not talk in that way, or if they do they make it sound like a secret joke. Like words that might mean something else.
Their rooms at the Chapel are high up, like the lodgings of servants in great houses, but they look out on almost nothing. From the dormitories, part of another wing can be seen. Its windows are blind with dust, its gutters slack and broken.
From the schoolroom, the view is of a blank yard surrounded by walls of streaked grey stone. It holds shuttered outbuildings and a mossy trough. Scattered around it are ancient tools and lengths of chain. A barrow with a broken knee is slumped in the weeds.
They see no one come or go outside the Chapel, and they hear no clatter of work, no carried scraps of ordinary talk.
Out past the walls a lane twists away between pitted and scrubby fields. Beyond a distant rise there is a huddle of rooftops, the stump of a mean church tower. None of the children know the look of this country, but how would they? The Asylum took in no children above the age of seven, and most were no more than babes in arms. Between them they hardly remember a lane with a name. Only an inn with a black sign or a flower market, a run of cracked steps.
Nightingale does not recognise this country either, but she knows what it means. It is no one’s remembered home, and it is grey and signless for a reason. They are nothing now, and they are nowhere.
NIGHTINGALE IS NOT the only one who takes note of such things. Most of the others are still sunk in themselves. They crouch whimpering on their cots, or shuffle empty-faced from room to room. But the boy called Finch is different. She sees him slip away from the rest when he can. She sees him linger by the windows when he thinks no one is watching.
He is careful, but he is not careful enough.
She finds him in the schoolroom one afternoon. It is often empty, since they are not made to go to lessons yet. None of the masters have come today, and the nurse is in the musty, doglegged room she calls the infirmary. She changes dressings there, and doles out bitter spoonfuls of tonic. She does it grudgingly, and she is content to be left alone.
Nightingale crosses the floor almost noiselessly—she goes about barefoot when she can—but at the last moment the boy turns and starts.
“Blast you for a sly little cat,” he says. His whisper is sharp but not spiteful. “I near shit my breeches.”
The girl hesitates. Until now, she has kept a wary silence amongst the others. Amongst the boys, especially. They were kept apart at the Asylum, except for the tests and the strange games. She is not yet sure of their ways. When she can think of nothing else, she says, “You’re not wearing breeches.”
The boy glances down at himself. Like her, he wears a coarse linen gown. No doubt his underclothes are the same too: a thin, discoloured vest, drawers of scratchy wool. He looks at her, a wry twist to his chin. “And you ain’t wearing your boots. They’ll clout you for that.”
The masters strike them all the time. Nightingale does not fear it especially—the fire left her scornful of lesser pains—but she will not say so. She will not show anything of herself without good cause. “They’d have to see me. And they didn’t say it was forbidden.”
His lips quirk. “You wouldn’t be sneaking about if it wasn’t. And I might tell.”
“You won’t,” she says. Her new voice has hard edges, and her hold on it is not yet sure. The boy, Finch, lifts one eyebrow. The other has been scorched away. His coppery hair is all patches and tufts.
“That right?” he says. He means, And what would you do about it?
She says nothing. She keeps her eyes level with his. Her altered nature is simple, in some ways. There is nothing she would not do.
“Well, you’re a ready one,” he says. He looks away again, out beyond the walls. “Dan reckons—Magpie, I mean to say. He reckons they’ve fetched us away to the Highlands. Ain’t never been up that way myself, but I don’t know. You’d think there’d be more in the way of hills.”
She sees the joke, but it stirs nothing in her. Maybe that’s gone too.
The boy lets it pass. “I didn’t say nothing,” he says. “About the Highlands, I mean. He ain’t come right yet, old Magpie. Or maybe he weren’t right before.”
This kind of talk comes easily to him. She wonders if she could learn the trick of it. She says, “Not far enough.”
“Eh?” He turns again, this time in puzzlement.
“When they put us on the carts,” she says. “After the—afterwards. We didn’t come far enough. Eight hours, maybe ten. There was talk and noise on the roads, for half the night. That means we went south, through town. Then it was quiet again.”
Finch looks her over again, his face doubting. “You was awake?” he says. “The whole time? Most of us was dead to the world.”
Her eyes slide away. “I couldn’t sleep. I was thinking of—” From the dark of her, the images screech and skitter.
A ring of black keys. A plump face leached pale with fright. Unlock it.
She waits, takes a careful breath. “I was just remembering.”
He draws back by a fraction, as if wary of what he might have touched. His nod is hesitant. “Aye, well. Eight or ten hours, then. That tells us something, don’t it? And across town, for all to see? Queerish, that. I’d have struck out through the woods, up Essex way.”
She shakes her head. “Walthamstow. Someone said to head for Walthamstow first. They followed a canal. Then I don’t know. Someone said, ‘Less of that free talk.’ Someone else said, ‘Yes, sir.’”
She sees him wondering all she has wondered. The same who, what, and why. Coming to the same nothing. “So where does that leave us?” Finch says. “You know your counties? No? Well, I suppose it don’t make much odds.”
No, it doesn’t. But like him, she cannot let it lie. She looks about the schoolroom, as it is now called. It was plainly put to some other use before. And until recently, she thinks. The air here remembers tobacco and boot polish. She has studied the scraps that cling to the paintwork, the remnants of maps, maybe, or duty rosters. Notices useful to men of the world.
Men who might say, Less of that free talk.
The picture of the queen was not taken down, or the five brass clocks fixed in a neat row. Their faces are shadowed with dust now, and their hands are stopped at odd hours. On their plaques are words she does not know. Names or places, maybe. They make her think of salt air and summerhouses, of inkstands and beeswax.
HUDSON, WINDWARD, GOLD, DELHI, CAPE.
Scraps, nothing more, and her untutored guesses. I was something else once. She understands so very little. She chafes at it, as she does now at all disadvantages, all hindrances. There are things she must do. Things she must know.
“You all right?” says Finch. “Got to be off somewhere?”
Something must have shown in her face. “They said there would be lessons soon,” she says. “That we would have to learn things. New things.”
“Aye, right. Can’t wait to get back to your times tables, is it?”
She stares at him. “You don’t understand. These masters, they’re not like the ones from before. The things they say, sometimes—we have to listen, when these lessons start.”
“Why?” he says. “You reckon they’ll say where we are?”
Nightingale presses her lips together. Perhaps it was a mistake, talking to this boy. “I need—” She checks herself. “We need to find things out, about this place, these people. And about—”
