Winter Timetable

I call them doves.

I

He draws them on the back of an envelope: the sparrow’s blunt tail, and the swallow’s forked into a whale’s fin. Fluke, he says, that’s what it looks like. Outside my bedroom the swallows swim through September.

II

I’m sat on the rocks in Exmouth, tasting mist and weed. Low tide. Gulls fight over half a packet of crisps; an old boy sighs, lights a cigarette and wanders on.

I turn my back to his smoke and read the winter timetable for the Starcross ferry. Rain pins down the sea.

Years later, gulls fight outside your attic room, fevered with the heatwave, over the rooftops, screaming. The window only opened four inches. We lay under it and you pressed frozen peas to my neck. (Iced. Faceless. I couldn’t tell where my skin ended.)

III

I had dreamed you in pieces; in the white room, where my body was marble. You’d sat behind me with a hairbrush in hand, working through the knots. When we met I kept checking you against the dream the way you check a bird against the photo in the book.

IV

Six of them, a scatter of white past the double-glazed front door. My dad says they’re white pigeons – that people call them doves when they need them to mean something. I call them doves anyway.

V

Sparrows come in through the hole at the back of the wardrobe. They loop the bedroom and we scream and duck until I wrap my grey jumper around one and feel the wild heart through wool.

VI

Every September they gather on the wires behind the houses, more of them each evening, and then one morning the wires are empty – four black lines ruled over the houses – and the sky above the estate is the colour of a scallop shell.

They rise and I do not.

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