Featherbones

Chapter Two

Chapter TwoOver the next few weeks, Felix feels drawn to the statue as he passes it by on his way into work and home again. In the mornings he has no time to stop and stare, but that does not prevent him from glancing her way as he walks through the shadow of East Park to London Road. Dawn illuminates her silhouette with its cold light, so that her slender arms appear severe, her skin sheer black and as devoid of warmth as the rest of the night-chilled city.

In the evenings she bathes in a different light, and seems the more content for it. Dusk draws a coppery green to the sculpted shallows of her face and robes, an oceanic tint dredged from the depths of the black bronze. It is during this time that she seems most radiant; an angel as he has always understood angels to be, and on more than one occasion he finds himself wondering why such statues are so often shaped like seraphim. It seems the nature of man to surround himself with Heaven, as though by doing so the world might seem more divine, or less hellish, or simply better. He sees only metal, forced into the shape of something that it is not.

When five o’clock on Friday finally arrives, the office empties. Felix remembers speaking to Michael, confirming their customary drinks, then walking home through the city. The high street stretches out before him; an endless parade of shop-fronts, multiplying in the gloom. It has stopped raining, although only recently. The ground glitters black with puddles.

At his flat, he finds leftover lasagne and a half-drunk bottle of red in the kitchen. The mince is grey, the cheese rubbery, but as the dish rotates in the microwave it slowly becomes more appetising, until the aroma of hot fat and melted béchamel makes his insides moan.

Taking himself to the balcony, he sits until the wine is gone, his stomach full, the sky a little softer at the edges. When the bottle is empty, he heads inside to get washed and changed, but not before undoing his tie and releasing it to the sky. The wind snatches the fabric, fluttering, from his hand, and does not give it back.

The walk to Ocean Village passes him by. One moment he is leaving his flat and crossing Queen’s Park towards the water. The next moment, he is standing outside a bar. There are a number of bars and restaurants by the marina, each as busy as the next. Laughter spills into the cold night, which has fallen without him realising.

He follows the murmur of conversation towards the nearest of the buildings. Orange light pours from its interior into the darkness outside. One side of the bar is mostly glass doors and these are open to the night air. He makes out the languid shape of smokers, reclining in the cold, and wonders whether Michael is among them. He will be on the smoking terrace or at the bar itself.

As he enters the building he is hit by a wave of warmth and sound. Voices buzz in his ears, and laughter, and the unmistakable clink of bottles against glass. He smells cologne and wine and the freshly-chopped fruit they are slicing at the bar to put in cocktails.

“What time do you call this?” says Michael, turning as Felix approaches. He is sitting at the counter opposite two towering drinks.

“More like what do you call those?” The drinks at the bar are fiercely red, served in a fat glass brimming with fruit and ice.

“Alcohol.” Grinning, Michael slides one of the drinks towards him. “Sea Breeze, I believe.”

He sits beside Michael and takes a sip through one of several straws. The taste is sharp, though not unpleasant. He relishes the sensation of the cold liquid and the warmth of the alcohol inside it.

“Sorry I’m late,” he says, withdrawing his mouth from the straw.

“Your excuse, Mr. White?”

Felix shrugs. “I was eating.”

“The world?”

“I was hungry,” he says, smiling.

“Aren’t we all,” mutters Michael, scouring the crowds behind Felix. His heady aftershave fills Felix’s nose. “And thirsty, from the looks of things.”

“What?”

“I’d know those wine lips anywhere. You are betrayed. One glass or two? Couldn’t wait to get started, I suppose?”

He realises that Michael is referring to the red wine he drank earlier that evening. “You’ve found me out,” he says, removing the straws from his drink and taking a large mouthful. Idly, he wonders how badly his lips are stained. He hears Michael laughing, sees his face creasing up over the rim of his glass, then the drink burns down his throat and he does not hear or see anything distinctly for the rest of the night.

Michael’s delight echoes across the bar. Felix hears genuine laughter, the kind that bubbles up from deep within before spilling like foam into the air. There is nothing stilted about the expressions on people’s faces. Their smiles are savage, eyes sparkling, faces freed from conscious thought and consequence. All across Southampton, people are flocking to clubs and pubs to lose themselves beneath the stresses of modern life.

“Outside.” Michael’s breath is heavy in Felix’s ear and down his neck. “Outside, I need a smoke.”

They move from the bar, where Michael has been speaking with a woman, and onto to the smoking terrace overlooking the marina. As they step outside, the cold is bracing. Shivers slip down Felix’s spine.

The calm takes his breath away. The blackness, too, stops him where he stands; a stretch of uninterrupted dark, which he knows to be the sea and the sky, though he cannot tell them apart. This is why they come here in the evenings, time and time again to the bar beside the sea: to drink and laugh and lose themselves in the clear breath of the ocean.

He half listens as Michael tells him about the woman at the bar. There is a name, an age, a rough score out of ten. It is a story he has heard a hundred times before. He is listening to other things: the wind, the sea, an irregular fluttering sound overhead, which he supposes is gulls, settling into the grooves of the building to roost for the remainder of the night. Gradually his eyesight grows familiar with the darkness and he makes out other details; gradients of grey spilling through the cloud-cover, tiny flashes of light like a sea of scales, where moonlight catches the waves, and small shapes in the distance, more gulls gliding silently in the night. They drink and smoke and laugh until they can do none of these things anymore and then they leave. Arm-in-arm, one silhouette against the night, they struggle into the back of a taxi.

The city streams past them, reduced to small lights, blurred lamps, an endless stretch of black that is the sky, beneath which buildings squat like old men with dour faces stationed by the sea. Felix sees his friend in flashes of illumination: strawberry stains down his white shirt, his eyes thin and wet with laughter, hair loose over his face where it has freed itself from the knot behind his head. In minutes, they are standing outside Felix’s block of flats. Michael pushes a crumpled note from his back-pocket into the driver’s hand. As the taxi pulls away, Felix and he stumble inside.

The brightness of the foyer burns their eyes. For what seems like forever they try to work the lift. Michael falls asleep in one corner, his face pressing against the tarnished metal walls, before Felix abandons the lift for broken. Dragging his friend to his feet, they make the long climb up the stairwell to the top floor.

When they reach his flat, Michael crawls from the corridor to the sofa and falls face down into the cushions. Felix waits until he can hear his friend snoring before taking himself to bed. He does not have to wait long. Stripping, he collapses into the coldness of the covers and closes his eyes.

His rest is fitful. More than once he wakes, entangled in his duvet, as though he has been thrashing inside it. When his bed becomes too hot, he wanders into the kitchen for a glass of water. The coolness of the rest of the flat is refreshing against his slick skin.

He fills a second glass, which he leaves for Michael, on the floor beside the sofa. His friend is facing away, cur-led into his knees, clutching a leather cushion like a swimming float to his chest. He has shed his shirt, and his shoulder-blades jut sharply from the whiteness of his back above the harsh track of his spine. The thought of his face, were he to wake suddenly and find Felix stand-ing nude over him, draws quiet laughter in the dark.

A strange sense of dissonance runs through Felix, as though the sky or the city under it is shifting. The laughter dies on his lips, leaving a hollow feeling in his chest. All of a sudden he feels ludicrous, standing here n***d in the moonlight beside the oblivious form of his friend. Turning, he hurries from the room.

Falling back into bed, he floats through the space between awareness and dreams. The sound of Michael’s deep breaths fill his ears, echoing those of the sea outside. Another noise accompanies it; soft, like a bird crooning, and he imagines the gulls again, settling into the gutters above Ocean Village. Something slightly rotten stings his nostrils.

He has had a pleasant evening. If he is sure of nothing else, he knows this. Friday nights are always satisfying, when for a few hours each week it is possible to forget the rest of the world, drink, laugh and be content. The feeling is quite cathartic. He remembers the New Forest coven he researched for a university project; women who professed to channel the spirit of the Devil, who lived and breathed his name, while they raced n***d through the trees. If it is the Devil who delights in dancing, who granted those women freedom from the strictures of their sorry lives, then he was there tonight, feet scratching out steps against the floor, tattered wings outstretched beneath his arms –

Rolling away from the wall, he turns his face to the cold side of the pillow and finds himself staring at a silhouette in the doorway.

For a few uncertain seconds he flaps like a newborn chick in his bed covers, before remembering that he is not alone in the flat. It is impossible to see Michael properly, but he makes out his friend’s thinness, his slender arms, the angular profile of his face in the darkness.

“Michael?” he says, but the man is already moving away down the hallway. Sinking back into the covers, his head heavy, he wonders whether he should go after him, and with the memory of the night fresh in his mind falls into the blackness of sleep.