Finding the words when the story is over
- dark mountain writing workshop 

Awakening 

My mother says she can hear the earth rising. “Soughing” she calls it. “Like trees in the wind?” “No, that is a different sound.”  “What does it sound like?”  “Difficult to describe”. We tell her it is the surge of her own blood, pumping in the thinning veins in her ears. She says no. There - can you hear that? A sort of swelling; the Earth.

This is not a metaphor. Her illness makes her sensory perception distorted, but particular.

On the roof, a magpie carefully prises out the rubber seal from between the joints of a metal parapet, and removes the strip of lead from beneath. An opening ceremony.

The traffic is constant but at 4 O’Clock the birds do hold this place. I am in a crucible, delineated by redundant chimneys, television aerials and scaffolding poles, broken only by the upturned bowls of a few remnant trees. A flat square of asphalt at upper window height for the Victorian terraces around, this platform is exposed; an arena, a stage for something.

From their separate vantage points in the scattered canopy, bird calls ripple out, building a cage of noise in the air. Darkness creates a synaesthesia where sound becomes space. A sonic architecture, tasted between the temples. The signals (from left and right) act more like sonar than call and response, not marking out the boundaries of territories, but probing from the centres of fragmented strongholds, bumping together where they encounter resistance.  

Overhead a solitary gull floats silently, paler than the sky. The only other living thing I see.

Walking in the half-light is a surprise - I find it hard to balance. My feet constantly recalibrate themselves as if on a tightrope. This twitching reminds me of the endless readjustment of my mother’s Parkinson’s legs. Her unruly knees. Her unsureness of the ground. 

Trying to stand planted, I imagine the chalk bowl of London beneath me, two floors down, through the joists and cavities of the building. This flat roof marks the footprint of a small converted garment factory, built in the 1970s. Before that, a Mews for working horses, dragging goods along the Hollow Way to the market at Nag’s Head. The back wall of our bedrooms on the ground floor are the only remnant of that stable. My neighbour swears she hears horses, restless in the night.

Water will seep laterally into crevices, blooming later in unaccountable places. Ants will drown in the air pockets between walls where they have built their vertical empire. 

What can you remember when you don’t even know what you have lost? If there is a pattern to this necrosis, it does not follow a logic that can be mapped. In these moments of pause, the question arises: is it enough to keep living in the fuzzy present, only half aware of the things that are missing? How would it be to embrace this dissolution more knowingly?

The river Thames was once thicketed by dense Yew forest up to its banks; the remains, silted stumps, can still be seen at Erith at low tide. 

Just as I am concentrating on locating the birdsong, the white gull returns. It circles over my head, wheeling and calling, a raking cry. It is joined by two more, and as the sky pales, I can see they are black-backed gulls, far from the sea. And they see me. There are seven, then eleven, then twelve.

I sit still, the songs of birds I do not know the names of drowned out by gulls and crows and pigeons.

The white shapes over my head continue to dip and circle, wanting something from me.

© Katherine Pogson 20 May 2021