H is for Hawk

The air in the car turns solid as glass. I take deep breaths and stare out of the window. It is a beautiful evening. This makes things worse.

I found the city wasn’t empty any more. It was a dark and fathomless warren of litter and glass, bankers and traders streaming through its sunken lanes. Sills, barricades, alleys. Tipping gutters, anti-pigeon spikes, pavements patterned with spots of trodden gum. And then, suddenly, St Bride’s Church,

THE EXPRESSION ON Christina’s face is unusual. It’s not a happy face, but it’s not unhappy either. Tense, certainly. It is fierce, ambivalent and brave. Today she’d come out to watch the hawk fly and in a burst of inspiration I decided to recruit her as my under-falconer.

deep repetition compulsion, the term Freud used to describe the need to re-enact painful experiences in order to master them.

The rabbit and I look at each other. It realizes this stare is an involvement in death, and disappears. Mabel doesn’t see it until the moment where the rabbit becomes air as it pops back down the hole, but she has to fly anyway, to the after-image, just in case;

Their existence gives the lie to the thought that the wild is always something untouched by human hearts and hands. The wild can be human work.

Here’s a word. Bereavement. Or, Bereaved. Bereft. It’s from the Old English bereafian, meaning ‘to deprive of, take away, seize, rob’. Robbed. Seized. It happens to everyone. But you feel it alone. Shocking loss isn’t to be shared, no matter how hard you try. ‘Imagine,’ I said, back then, to some friends, in an earnest attempt to explain, ‘imagine

The kitchen window threw a soft square of light into the garden.

At five in the morning I’d been staring at a square of streetlight on the ceiling, listening to a couple of late party-leavers chatting on the pavement outside. I felt odd: overtired, overwrought, unpleasantly like my brain had been removed and my skull stuffed with something like microwaved aluminium foil, dinted, charred and shorting with sparks.