Bird Life: a novel by Anna Smaill

Author:Anna Smaill
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC019000, FIC025000, FIC113000, FIC071000, FIC061000
Publisher: Scribe Publications
Published: 2023-11-09T00:00:00+00:00

7

They were walking, Dinah and Yasuko. They had left the restaurant together. It had not been discussed; Chiaki and Machiko had simply peeled away to go to the station, while she and Yasuko had continued on. Dinah saw nothing to her right or left as they walked. She focused on a spot just ahead of her face and allowed her peripheral vision to fall away. In this fashion it was possible to believe that the pair of them were floating. A bubble suspended. The world even more beautiful than she had imagined.

Whatever-it-was had happened, Dinah thought. It had happened, but it was still happening.

They walked through Harajuku. Yasuko stopped. They were right in the middle of the pavement and there was a shout of irritation from behind. A group of schoolgirls who had been following pushed roughly past them. One narrowly avoiding hitting Dinah.

‘What is it?’ asked Dinah.

‘It is driving me crazy,’ said Yasuko. Her voice had changed. There was a new richness to it, an urgency.

‘What is?’

Yasuko swished her hands around her head as if a fly were buzzing there. She resumed walking. Dinah followed her, a little behind. They were nearing Yoyogi Park.

‘I have been trying to distract myself with work,’ said Yasuko. ‘And men. There are men out there who want to spend time with me. But I cannot do it anymore. Do you know, I used to have hours to read, to listen to music. But all the time has gone, just evaporated. There is none left. I don’t have time to do anything. And I am terrified. Terrified. When I sit down, I can hear my heart going.’

It was so exactly Dinah’s own experience, so exactly how she felt — the emptiness and panic at once — that through a door in her chest came a breathlessness, a weightlessness, a feeling as if someone had pushed air into the space there. She didn’t know if she could speak.

‘Why do you think you feel like this?’ She said it calmly, with utter familiarity. Any other tone would have been incorrect.

‘I think he took it all with him. Time. He took it. Is that foolish?’

Dinah looked at Yasuko’s face. It was remarkably the same. The agony was so much a part of the other balanced elements of her face. There was no surprise at all in this transition in their relationship, this move into a greater intimacy or revelation. She saw that they had been moving in this direction all along. It was part of a larger shape.

‘Who has gone, Yasuko?’

‘I have approached this in a back-to-front way,’ Yasuko said, and paused. They waited at the pedestrian crossing. ‘And I am so tired. Though that is probably just age.’

Dinah reached out and touched the yellow pole. A gentle feeling of blur around the periphery of her vision.

‘No. I feel that too. I think it is grief.’ Dinah looked back across the flow of foot traffic. ‘Grief is very tiring.’ The words left her, found their way to Yasuko.

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