Charlotte Newman Extract from The Magpie’s Daughter

Charlotte Newman

Extract from The Magpie’s Daughter One for Sorrow

Her wings carry her over the A-road, to the outskirts of the city. Over the trees she goes, hazel, mostly, and ivy dressed with the usual human detritus. A teething ring, a ring-pull. Here, winged with silver birches, is a nest of human making. Lovers have claimed its walls like moss, carved names in shaky hearts, as well as the question: what are you? It’s a good question. What is she? There are others who are like her but not really like her. Garden birds, common as muck – but there’s an ancient lesson in her blood. She can rasp and pierce and give time the slip as well as tell the difference between a real car and a toy. Nothing’s black and white except for her feathers and even some of them are blue and green. She’s in-between. And above a field now, which is yellow-bellied from summer. She swoops over to the houses on the edge. Oh, the human tangle. She looks! She listens. Lawnmowers, ambulances, drunks, articulated lorries, wood pigeons and windchimes from every suburb in London and she’s a-hover by Michael Smythe from Dorking’s rental, where he is ordering a curry, which he did the night Lexi said he was more like her brother than her lover (Michael Smythe would be willing to work past this, but Alexia Kouris, it turned out, would not). He thinks of her in the home they shared with their bird-of-a-feather boys. She likes the boys, especially their stories, especially the ones with birds.

Down the road she could fly, to the semi where the Wadlows have mated for life. They make time for sexing every second Thursday. They make no time for her. Or she could soar north, to the city, where she’d find Sunny Anand-Lloyd – that’s Sunny, not short for Sunil or Sonny Jim, whomsoever he might be! He wakes to a box of chicken bones. Whimpers. The bright day shows him no mercy-mercy. But she stays where she is. Something else has caught her beady little eye. She skips on over the rooftops for a closer look. All a-lonely it is, this house. All on its own. A broken gate separates the front garden from the field. There is a load of tat encrusted in white which she could add to, if she wanted to. This is where the Lamptons live. There’s Timothy Lampton, who had to take early retirement from Salterway College because of the economic crisis; his old students, among whom is a druid high priestess, have set up a Facebook page in his honour. He is packing a sports bag (though he never does sport); in it, he puts his toothbrush. In the bathroom his son, Patch, is tinkering with some negatives. He is eighteen and the camera was a gift. And there, in the kitchen, is Holly Lampton, the twentyone-year-old trying to combat loss by unloading and reloading the dishwasher. She does not wish to heal a mother’s absence with domestic labour. She just wants to keep busy. The magpie gives her feathers the once-over and considers sorrow. She’s been known to cause it. She’s been known to break into other birds’ eggs and eat the membrane within. One for sorrow, they say. One for sorrow, two for joy. She’s not a songbird – if she were, she’d sing, but nobody much likes her rattle. All she can do for now is watch the girl who watches the sun move across the kitchen. The girl who is wondering what her little life looks like to someone on the outside.

June. Holly wakes with recollections of childhood summers. If she could, she’d see this one out with her body pressed to her cool bedroom wall. She lies facing the skylight on the slanting roof opposite. From this angle she can’t see the trees or the field, or the row of terraced houses on the other side. She sees only pure blue. There are no clouds, and there’ll be no hibernation either (her shift starts at 12). An attic room, she thinks, rubbing her eyes, is a romance that cannot last the season. Temperatures are set to rise all week, with a 50% chance of rain on Friday. It really needs to break. Everyone keeps saying that. It needs to break, but it might not? Sweat clings to the back of her knees. She will feel better after a shower. She should get up now. She shouldn’t think about it. There are so many things she should do, fix that broken blind, for starters… She sits up. There, at the skylight, is a magpie. Its body is so smooth that she can’t make out individual feathers. There’s a streak of greenish-blue on the tail. It’s pretty. Maybe if they weren’t so predatory, the species would be a lot more popular. She reaches, slowly, for her phone. The magpie seems, and this is a daft bit of anthropomorphism, but it seems pretty unfazed, even arrogant, the way it’s staring her down like that. Don’t some birds indicate a dead loved one is near? Not magpies though. This one looks like it wants to break in. 10.45! Holly grabs her towel and peels her pyjamas off; all the while, the magpie watches. She narrows her eyes at it. “Perv.” She half-expects a response.

Patch is busy turning their bathroom into a dark room, a skill he learnt online. The gift of a Leica sparked this interest, or perhaps it would be

more accurate to say it enabled it. He takes photos of things like the daisy-covered bones of a field mouse and when Holly remarked that his photos had a brutal beauty, he tilted his head to one side and said that he didn’t think they showed brutality, only death. This is Patch all over. “Sorry, Sister.” He removes the sheet of plywood from the bath. “I thought you’d already left.” “I got distracted. There was this magpie–“ “Did you salute?” “Shit, no.” “Ah well.” He smiles, carrying his trays and brushes out to the landing. “Just try not to break any mirrors.” Holly pushes the door to and hangs her towel on the radiator, which hasn’t been on for months. “It would have made for a good photo, don’t you think? Magpie at skylight. Monochrome, just how you like it.” “Yeah,” her brother’s voice fades away as he disappears into his bedroom. “Make sure you call me next time.” It’s just been the two of them this week. Well, that’s fine; they might be motherless but they are not children. And there was a note, of course. Always is. Dear Children, I leave this cider in your care. Please drink responsibly or at least more responsibly than your mother, this was her fave (‘Fave’!). Money for takeaway in jeans back pocket (my desk) but eat some fruit too. Veggie loaf in fridge if you’re feeling brave. Happy Solstice! Back soon, Your Father, Timothy Lampton At the bottom, a self-portrait in biro. In it, he’d drawn himself wearing – for some reason – a cowboy hat. “Oh, before I forget,” Patch calls, “are you around tonight? I thought I’d make ratatouille.” Listen to him, sparrow-light, offering to cook like he’s not a teenager. Holly can remember when he lost his first tooth. It is her earliest memory and probably false. Probably, there’s a photo in a drawer somewhere. “Cheers, Brother,” she turns on the water. “But I’ll be back late.”