issue 5.0

The Painter

By Nick Sweeney

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The ground trembles with my anxiety. I am both imagining and experiencing it. A friend says she senses the city shrinking into itself. She walks its canyons to the end, finds the beginning, she says. I say, do you walk in circles? I will follow her one evening. I will wear my circular hat, and be hidden.

A bike trip led me to a bird sanctuary, where I met her. She was up in a tree disturbing the birds’ peace with bird calls from an old record. I said, you know it off by heart—you listen to it, what, every day? She said, I remember it from the record library, had it out the whole year I was twelve going on twenty. 

The birds’ calls never change, she said. But they do, I know they do, they change. 

A whim brings a move out of the trembling flatblock I shared for two years with local legends whose sheen had peeled: a celebrated ecologist reduced to poisoning the planet like the rest of us, a girl who sang on television, became famous, then deranged, and the man from what was a well-loved banks advert—which bank, I can’t remember. All doomed, and all passed through a phase of looking the same, and sounding it, their once-full coffers rattling and echoing. No goodbyes, I just go.

I live by the river in my aunt Amanita's abandoned bungalow with its clapped-out Citroen outside. Though it presumably had bright days, bringing laughter and frustration like any car, in my aunt’s care it was always a ruin, left out to fool burglars that people were home, stuck inside unable to use their broken-down car. I assume: inside, starving, unable to get to the bank to shake money out of its machines to buy food, inside, dead. Nobody home now, thankfully, neither dead nor alive, complaining. Just me, content. The towels are rancid and rusty from the airing cupboard pipe, the sheets rough and musty, the crockery cracked and crocked, but me? Content.

I charm a man I saw sometimes on visits to that very same aunt. Too old and bent now to run his ferries the short distance to the other bank, I promise him something vague and blag one of his boats, a small one. It has a bell, flares, lights, suspect-looking supplies too long damp.

Swans invade the land. They poke around, beaks to the ground, feel the trembling of the earth, retire to the water, puzzled, hungry. I will follow you one day, I promise. 

My casting-off technique needs testing, my firm grabbing of the painter, tossing it high, bringing it to me without covering myself in water. The sun will dry me in a minute, of course, but I can’t think of casting off without the clean catch of the painter.

Choosing a book for the journey is harder than you might think if you have only five books. I avert my eyes and choose one, She Beheld My Nightingale, a novel nobody ever read, surely, not in hardback nor paperback. Beneath that is Nissan Car Bend, about driving Japanese cars carelessly, or carefully. The next is called Words Requiring Symbols. Aren’t words symbols anyway? There is also Agnes, Saint of the Texas Oilfields and German Bite: A Short History of Voluntary Cannibalism. I am steadfast: one and one only, then cheat, and go back for all five. I find them mysterious now and unknowable, and vow to find what is in them that got them written, published, read, and discarded.

The tremors talk to me, up through the land, shake my bed. Ice falls from the sky, strikes the roof. It will be followed by fire, says the forecast. The tea leaves agree, and the Turkish coffee grounds. I sense the voice of my dark aunt Amanita in the next room, her square metre of white-streaked hair wet for hours from the shower after her hair dryer blew up. I can't remember the nature of that particular catastrophe, though she told me about it at great length. Now she foretells a time of tribulation long after she is dead. I ask her, is this now that time? No true answer, just incantation in her native Armenian. Time to leave. 

I wave to the swans. I walk among them. I couldn’t find a recipe for them. I may use one for roast goose and double the other ingredients. I will not be bringing the big goose plate my aunt bought for the hallowed occasions that prompted the killing and eating of enormous birds. Nor will I bring my uncle’s extensive Soviet stamp collection—no value now, if it ever had any—only his impressive goose-killing knife.

The birds look down with approval, glad of diversion. They swoop to the rail by the boathouse, wings singed, eyes missing or askew, beaks bent and bloodied. They note my hefting of the knife and its careful addition to the baggage. They chatter cautiously and regard the swans with pity. Beckoned by stale bread from under the sink and surrounding me to the waist, I cast my eye over the swans. The birds may have lost their songs, but fill the air with their expert mimicry of car horns and ringtones, and the calls of other birds to entrap them for food or catfish them for friendship. 

My uncle’s killing blade raised, avian eyes upon me, the ground trembling with my anxiety and with my dark aunt’s incantations loud from that room on the land, I seek the currents in the water. Out of the corner of my eye, I see my boat, adrift, its painter pecked to shreds by imperfect beaks. I tell the birds we will all stay together, and, arms raised, the knife like a conductor’s baton, lead them in a song.