Three extracts from The Granddaughter’s Song (2008)

Birds speak in myriad fragments and complex patterns beyond our awareness. The stories of their lives reach us in disconnected snatches. In an egg a bundle of cells is suspended in liquid. Time brings a bird with the message of its cells imprinted in its voice. It speaks of danger, fear, hunger, aggression, and desire; and we hear songs.

The detail is lost. Digitally recorded birdsong, slowed down but played at pitch, reveals sounds within sounds, like painted Easter eggs one inside another. We now know that birds sing too fast for human ears.

Analysts have linked the speed of birds’ communication to the relative shortness of their lifespan. Humans, who live longer, have more time. But what we have to tell can also be lost. Sometimes because it’s too hard to bear.

*

It was on the trains that Izeta became Elena. She’d got into a truck and there was a pile of sacks in a corner. She went over to the sacks and there was a man. Izeta tried to get away but he caught her. His eyes were red and he was very thin. He wanted to know who she was and she was afraid to tell him her name. Being Muslim hadn’t saved her brothers, so she told the man in the train that she was a Catholic. “My name is Elena Jovanovic. I am a Serbian Catholic.” Izeta wasn’t sure if the man had heard her, but he didn’t kill her. He put the sacks back over him. Izeta stayed at the other side of the truck and when the train stopped she jumped. The next train was going in the opposite direction. But it never mattered where the trains were going.

*

While Carl’s daughter talked, Elena ate cheesecake. Then they had coffee. It didn’t have cream on top but it was good coffee and Elena liked it. Carl’s daughter said composing music was like standing in a field. You stood in a field and all around you there were patterns of sound. If you listened to a horse grazing he made a pattern. You could hear him pull the grass. Then he’d snort. Then he’d start pulling the grass again. But other patterns would be happening too. A bird might be singing in the hedge. It would go chee, chi chee and you could listen to that, and then you could listen to the sound of the horse’s pattern under the other pattern, made by the bird. Then this time, when the horse snorted, he might take a step, and his shoe might strike a stone. Then he’d start pulling the grass again. And all the time the bird might be going chee, chi, chee. You’d listen to those sounds and they’d be at the front of your mind. Then you’d realise that, in the distance, someone was chopping wood. And that pattern of sound would be part of the other patterns, the horse’s patterns and the bird’s pattern, and you could turn your mind from one to the other, and you could made shapes. There would be patterns of sound and patterns of silence, and you could hear them together or separately, and shape them in your mind. And the patterns of sound would also be patterns of movement, the bird’s wings and the horse’s hoof and the man’s axe would all be objects displacing air, and they would be objects of different sizes, moving at different speeds. When Elena finished her cheesecake she asked a question. She hadn’t been going to ask questions, but she remembered Carl’s daughter’s name was Anna and she asked her about insects. If the birds in the field were singing, the day was fine, so wouldn’t you hear insects as well? Carl’s daughter said you would, and that they would make other patterns. Their legs and their wings might make sounds so small and so fast you might hardly be able hear them, or to distinguish one from another. But they would be part of what was there. No single sound or pattern would be more important than another. They would all just be there, and if you listened you would hear them.

*

As Anna watched, the tv screen suddenly went dead. She swung round in indignation. Grandmother stood behind her, holding the remote, having just hit the off button. Kneeling up on the sofa, Anna grabbed it and turned the news back on. It was bad enough having to provide residential care to a weirdo without having her hijack the remote. She scowled at grandmother, whose face was completely blank. Anna had a sudden memory of the pinch in the concert-hall, sharp and impersonal, and the black lizard eyes still watching the platform, as if it had never happened. Now, equally impassive, grandmother walked around the sofa and held out her hand. Anna stuck the remote behind a cushion. But that was just childish.
“Why are you looking at blood on the street?”
“It’s the news.” Anna heard herself sounding weirdly scared and defensive. “ I asked if you wanted to see it. You said you didn’t.”
Behind grandmother’s back, a reporter spoke into a microphone. You couldn’t exactly shove her out of the way, but Anna wanted to see. “ I was there this afternoon. It was a stabbing, only about a mile away.” Grandmother still had her back to the screen. About to hand over to the studio, the reporter gestured at the scene behind him where police still milled about. As the shot tightened over his shoulder Anna leant sideways to watch. Suddenly, her attention was caught by one policeman, whose head was bent, and whose shirt seemed patched with dark stains. Hovering on the edge of the crowd, he looked young and vulnerable, and intensely lonely. For a moment Anna felt nothing but fellow-feeling. Then she was stabbed by a shock of recognition. He was half turned away from the camera, but she knew him by his dodgy ears. It was Steve.