Richmond Park by Carolyn Stockdale

He was standing under the silver birch, looking at the swan.

‘Cygnus olor,’ said a voice at his ear. It was one of those annoying voices; a girl’s voice, of the sort that read poems out in assembly. He glanced up. Standing beside him was a girl, aged about ten like him, but bristling with confidence, her hair wound tight in a bun.

‘A member of the waterfowl family, Anatidae,’ she went on, clasping her hands behind her back, ‘within the genus Cygnus. A species native to most of Eurasia.’

He hunched his shoulders and turned away to shield himself from her gibberish.

‘Did you know,’ she said, ‘that the Australian black swan is entirely black?’

He scuffed the ground with his foot. All he had wanted was to stand in the quiet.

‘What’s the matter boy?’ she raised her voice. ‘Is it that you can’t hear?’

He concentrated on loosening a stone with his foot, digging into the earth until it was finally free. What it boiled down to was a matter of territory. As the stone rolled down the bank, he saw that she had moved closer to the edge of the water and was standing on one leg, arms outstretched like an aeroplane.

Every day since the start of the holidays, he had left the flat with his father and come to the pond. They had caught the tube together, crossing London in the early morning cool, not speaking much. At the crossroads on the edge of the park, his father had donned his hard hat and high-vis vest and set off for the road works.

It ought, he thought, to have been adventure; long weeks stretching out, unfettered by school. But the park was so large, so overwhelmingly vast, with great tilts of earth stretching out in every direction like an uneaten sandwich, that the very thought of it was simply exhausting.

The pond, a dark dimple of water, he had found by accident. Not many people thought it worth noticing. But when he saw the swan sailing over the bottle green, it reminded him of the park at home, where he once fed the ducks through the railings with his gran.

On Monday, she was back, standing in the middle of his favourite spot. He ignored her, and sat down under the shade of a tree, its trunk rising bonelike from the earth. Heat had sunk like sediment to the bottom of the country. The girl saw him and pirouetted over.

‘Hello,’ she said.

He hated girls. He hated their proficiency. But she needn’t think he was moving elsewhere. On its island, the swan raised its wing and began to peck the soft down underneath.

‘Why do you come here?’ she cocked her head to one side. ‘Is it the birds, or are you interested in deer?’

He scowled and picked up a stick. Early on, his dad had told him two truths about Londoners; that they liked you to have a purpose, and that the ones who spoke to you were usually mad. She pointed to the swan.

‘Did you know,’ she said, ‘that there used to be two?’

He did not.

Pleased, the girl lifted her left foot to her right knee, raising her arms in an arc above her head.

‘Oh yes,’ she said, ‘don’t you think he looks sad? When swans mate, they mate for life. Sometimes when one dies, the other dies too.’

He looked at the swan, not liking this alteration to his thoughts.

‘What happened?’ his northern vowels arrived conspicuous and flat.

‘Shot,’ she pursed her lips to enunciate the word. ‘I’m Alice by the way. I’m busy preparing for my audition.’

The swan flapped its wings and jumped into the water. Alice turned her head and jetéd forward, landing with a spin. Above them sheets of parakeets flitted through the trees.

‘Boy,’ she said, ‘are you alright?’

He threw a stick into the water. He had not wanted to think about home.

‘My gran used to say that a swan could break a man’s leg.’

She furrowed her brow. ‘Femur or Tibia?’

The sun pressed down, dirty and yellow. He swallowed hard, straining his ears for the comforting sound of his dad’s pneumatic drill.

For nearly two weeks, she didn’t come back. He was glad. But when the swan raised its wings, chasing an errant Jack Russell out of the water and up onto the far bank, he was sorry she had missed it. Many times, his thoughts returned to his old park, the park at home, with its hexagonal cafe and graffiti riddled toilets buried in the rhododendrons. Compared to here, it was small and grotty, yet every corner of it tingled with possibility. Here, by comparison, was as dull as standing in a stranger’s hallway.

On the tube, his father had had enough of the park. ‘Idiots,’ he proclaimed, ‘if you put a road through a park, then it’ll need to be mended. And when it gets mended, you are going to hear a pneumatic drill. I told them straight, there’s no such thing as the road work fairies, working their magic in the middle of the night.’

The heat grew old, slow and stale. He thought that maybe he should take a walk to the Isabella Plantation. Then one day she was back, her skin the colour of a well cooked biscuit.

‘Hello boy,’ she said, ‘have you ever been to the South of France?’

He did not reply, suspecting she could see, from his translucent skin, that before they moved here, he had never strayed further than the sea front at Blackpool. He listened to her talking about the South of France with the air of someone who’d visited the Queen. Yet what she described was a tedious place, with no children, just adults who bought crates of wine and cooked meals for each other. Perhaps it was like church: somewhere no one wanted to be, but where people went anyway, in the hope it might raise them to a higher status.

He gazed into the pond. It was impossible to see beneath the green of its surface. London was nothing but an endless toothache. He could hardly imagine his father heating up a pizza for Brian and Alf, then boasting about it the day after.

‘Your accent,’ she said, ‘where is it from?’

He thought carefully before giving an answer, the name of his town carrying too many smirks, and curbed remarks about pies and piers. Instead, he told her about his park; all about the toilets and graffiti and the wrought iron railings. There was a swan there too, he said, just like this one. His favourite thing had been the statue of an old man sitting in a chair, which for a long time he thought was his granddad.

‘The rain turned it turquoise,’ he explained, ‘but its foot is shiny, like gold, where people touch it for luck.’

‘Have you ever done that?’

‘Yes.’ He remembered being lifted up to reach it, although he had no idea now for what he had wished.

To his surprise, she stopped her ballet moves and sat down beside him. On her face was painted some sort of glitter. Up close her clothes were not all that clean. Her top was worn and frayed round the edges.

She frowned, then started to talk to him about bottles of gin. There were so many kinds, long or wide, round or square. Most were clear, some were green, but her favourite was blue. Blue was rare. She had got hold of an empty blue one and washed it out. At night, it refracted the street light, so that stars danced on her ceiling.

Her home, she described as a fairy tale house, where bottles sprang up in the strangest of places. You went to bed and ‘pouf,’ another would appear. The bottles had increased as it got closer to her audition.

Some days, they left the pond and climbed the hill, weaving slowly through the raggle-taggle tourists. Once or twice, he heard the chip shop sounds of familiar vowels and caught his breath, suddenly dizzy. On the water, the swan flared out its feathers, defending its territory against no one in particular. Then the weather turned and the drilling stopped. His father said that the road would soon be mended.

The sky was grey. She had not turned up and so he sat alone by the edge of the pond, counting down the days until school started back. The swan flinched and he turned to see a wild girl with long matted hair and a red puffy face, hurtling towards him. It took a moment for him to realise it was her.

She sat down beside him, clenching her fists. Then the swan sailed past and her body tensed.

‘Stupid,’ she yelled, ‘stupid, ignorant, bloody bird.’

Before he could stop her, she had scrambled to her feet and picked up a rock, throwing it at the swan with a feeble cry. The swan hissed, raising its wings as the rock plopped into the water by her feet.

Tears of frustration welled up. She wiped her face. ‘Here,’ she cried, picking up another, ‘you try.’

He stared at her. Without her ballet varnish she was crumpled and erratic; a feral creature writhing in the moss.

‘What, you want me to kill it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I am the only friend you’ve got and you will do as I say.’

He let his mouth drop. From far away came the thud of a football being booted; shouts of encouragement, then immediate dismay.

‘Do it,’ she hissed, ‘do it now.’

The swan folded its wings, watching them with an expert eye. In the curve of its neck it carried the frisson of every swan injustice, stretching back through the lineage of swans. It would, he knew, break his leg if it had to.

‘You’re bonkers,’ he said, throwing down the rock.

Alice digested his words. At first her knees began to tremble, then folded beneath her as she sank to the ground.

‘You really don’t get it,’ she shook her head, pawing at the dirt.

From somewhere back along the road, came a commotion. Thinking of his dad, he climbed up the bank to get a better look. There had been a crash. It had just happened, an old Volvo rammed into the back of a minibus. The driver of the minibus had got out and was swearing at the Volvo driver who now opened her door and squared up to him, shouting and waving her arms.

Meanwhile, a teachery looking sort of an adult discreetly escorted a group of girls out of the bus and onto the path. As soon as the Volvo driver saw them, she forgot about the bus driver and began to give chase.

Alice froze.

‘Mummy!’

They waited and watched, listening to the chatter of what they could see now were young ballerinas neatly turned out in matching outfits, mingled with the expletives of Alice’s mother. Alice screwed her eyes shut and flung herself on the earth.

‘No, no, no, I wish I was dead.’

Cool and collected, the swan glided over, its wings raised in a haughty arc. At the edge of the pond it carried on swimming, pushing forward towards Alice with its beak.

‘Get up,’ he said, pulling her to her feet. ‘Come with me.’

He had worked out where the girls were heading. If he could get her there first, maybe he could help. She followed him, clutching his hand without questioning, not really caring as they ran through the trees.

‘Hurry up,’ he said, stumbling over dry tufts of grass, getting too near to the deer. Out of breath, they came to a halt before what looked to him like a tall white palace. From an archway, at the top of the steps, ballet students swarmed like bees from a hive. Alice sniffed and wiped her face. He wasn’t sure what to do; Alice dirt streaked and red eyed, him with his ungainly, northern skin. Then he made his mind up.

‘Let’s go inside.’

She stared at the building and bit her lip.

‘Look, maybe there’s a reserve list. One of them’s bound to break something sooner or later.’ Yet he knew this was not true. He tugged at her sleeve, but she just stood, a brittle husk of a girl, her spirit left somewhere by the pond.

Then a noise from the path. They had got there sooner than he thought. The line of fledgling dancers advancing round the bend; Alice’s mother careering after them.

Alice gripped his hand, her face pale beneath her tan. He saw instantly how stupid he had been, how cruel to think that he could help. He saw too how these other dancers must have spent long hours rehearsing with expensive tutors, not pirouetting in the dirt by the side of a pond.

‘I’m so sorry,’ he said. But his words were whipped away by a furious sound descending from the sky; the powerful flapping of hundreds of wings. The sky darkened and he looked up to see an army of swans, circling frantically over their heads. They seemed to have a plan, targeting the line of dancers, beating their wings as they flew lower and lower. Screams broke out from amongst the girls who covered their faces, their hair pulled by furious beaks.

Only when all the dancers had fled and the path before him was completely empty, did the swans rise, circling the white building once, twice, before flying away. He looked around. He might very probably, he thought, have imagined it all, but the building’s white wedding cake walls were streaked and stained with stinking green splashes. He laughed out loud, imagining the troops of cleaners who would be called in to scrub it. He turned to Alice, but she was not there. He turned around, scanning the courtyard and the edge of the park. Alice had vanished.

It was raining outside the flat. He sat with his dad in the kitchen, eating a pie. It was an unspoken truth that the pastry in London was not as good as at home, yet they persevered.

‘Dad,’ he said, ‘do you know much about swans?’

‘Swans? It’s not been much of a summer for you, has it?’

‘But is there anything strange about them, anything weird?’

His dad wrinkled his nose. ‘Shouldn’t think so. Anyway, good news. We’ll be finished up at the park tomorrow dinner time. Didn’t your gran say as how a swan could break a man’s leg?’

Early morning, they caught the tube. He left his dad at the gate and took the trail to the pond. He knew she wasn’t there, yet he had a sensation that she was watching. For a while, he stood in the shadows, enjoying the silence. The water was dark, more black than green. A ripple shivered over its surface and from behind the island, the swan appeared. He stood very still, so struck by its presence, that at first he did not see the second, smaller bird, swimming quietly by the far bank.

The second swan moved slowly, as though trying out something new; as though it did not quite trust itself upon the water. It caught his eye and for a moment he thought he heard her voice. Then it bowed its head and arched its wings, striking out behind its mate.

Afterwards, all he could remember was an extraordinary grace, the sort of elegance often copied by ballerinas.

………………..

Carolyn Stockdale is a fiction writer and Creative Writing Masters student from Lancashire.  Her work is inspired by the landscape around her and is usually a little bit dark.  She has recently published stories with Riggwelter Press, Fairlight Shorts and Dark Lane Books.

Twitter: @CarolynStockda3