I spent the day watching the waters below, strung out in leisure on my feathery hammock. As I say, people have become swans for all sorts of reasons. The Australians, in the arid outback, were terrified of flooding. They twisted themselves into the malevolent black swan, like those that haunt the underworld’s tepid rivers in Finnish mythology. The water determined their form as it does the gnarling of cliff edges, the gentle convexity of pebbles. Softly as an irreversible spell the tide creeps in and out under the moon’s stark guidance.
My stepmother, too, had set her spell in silence. We wondered why she haunted graveyards for nettles, pulped, mashed, spun and wove them into eleven fine green shirts. Then we discovered she was after revenge for my violation. It was for me that she presented my brothers with the shirts. Changed utterly, my brothers took flight.
I think they secretly knew I could be of no help to them. But they hoped, they hoped. I simply wanted to tell them, Make the best of it. Aren’t you happy as swans? Sufficient unto yourselves, your own closed circuit of desire, swooping by day over the multitudinous cross-currents that everywhere determine the form and shape of lives? At least you are now immutable, you swans. Violence is a reaction to the fear and apprehension one experiences in the face of mutability. You are freed of violence; set in your ways as you are, inviolable and muted, mute swans. Is that not enough?
But no. They wished to be ‘human’ again, they wanted my help still, and I was not to withhold it.
I never even had to try to exact justice. Odin, or whoever, saw to it for me. Gravity it was, I rather think, that exerted its influence, and declared that there would be no leniency for them.
As daylight waned, the sanctuary of their rock was nowhere in sight. The oldest brother, he who had first been transformed, reverted first to human form. He fell, and in shocked, panicked silence, the others beat on into the gathering night. Then another, and another. The remaining brothers shouldered their increasing responsibility for my mass and pushed desperately onwards, upwards, hoping for land. Another, another. They slipped out from under us with barely a scream. Those left were breathing ragged the length of their tortured, elegant necks. Flecks of blood and spittle appeared on their beaks. More, more of them fell.
Still I was not frightened.
The flight slowed down. We would never make it. We realised now.
Soon I was wrestling in mid-air with my youngest brother. He was the last one left and, as I discovered, utterly useless. One of his wings was still a human arm, just as, when human, one arm was a wing. His brothers had been buoying him up. His was the nettle shirt with the left arm incomplete.
‘I am the odd one out.’ He smiled ruefully, as he ruptured in flight and spread out bare-limbed. Human-formed, yet with one comically inept, immaculate bird’s wing, he dropped into the ocean below.
And I? I flew away.
I had my answer now, with which to confront Hilde. I had also discovered my vocation in life. And with that, I might do anything. Hilde was reduced to piddling about with archbishops and princes. Now that I had shed my feathery impedimenta, I pretty much had the world at my feet.
WILL YOU STAY IN OUR
LOVERS’ STORY?
She hated him first of all because he had silver hair. Her mother was stroking it the first time Mandy clapped eyes on him.
‘This is your new dad,’ her mother said, sitting next to him on the kitchen bench.
‘But he’s old,’ Mandy said and they laughed. When she remembered her first dad, he was young. He was up to his knees in the river, catching sticklebacks for her, and his face was prickled softly with beard.
Now Mam and this Les were laughing and getting married. His eyes creased up and closed in when he laughed. She hoped he would never come to pick her up from school.
The registry office smelled of disinfectant and new flowers. Outside the room where Mam and Les married each other, there was a large board full of names. Each name had a number beside it. Mandy, in her crinkled new green dress, read them all while they waited to go in. ‘They’re all old,’ she thought. Her head swam. Then Mam, shaking with nerves, ushered her in.
Two old women did the service. There wasn’t a vicar. Everything was silver and blue, even the flowers. The fat woman read the words out, Mam and Les repeated them. A thinner woman at a desk nearby was writing in a big yellow book. She blew on the page when she finished, as if the ink was hot.
‘Isn’t this a nice family group?’ the thinner woman sighed, taking their photo when it was all over. ‘I hope I don’t cut your heads off.’
She gave Mandy a special smile.
Les sprawled. He made a mess of their house, although Mam didn’t seem to mind. Mandy watched him make a pot of tea to watch telly with. He left tea bags steaming in the sink and clogging the plughole. The bench was sticky with wet sugar. He ate chocolate biscuits, humming through the crumbs as he poured out. Mam sat with the telly, not minding.
It was Les’s idea to cut down on fuel bills. He had read something in the Sunday paper, he said, about saving electricity.
‘Sounds like a good idea,’ said Mam and switched off the heating. All three curled up on the settee to watch the telly, a duvet over their knees, pulled up to their chins. Mandy had to sit between them all night. She couldn’t get out, even when she got bored. Les ate crisps. She listened to him mashing them to a slimy pulp.
When there was
