Chapter 8 Birdy
BIRDY
Six months earlier
I try to avoid talking to strangers, and never let outsiders into my home, so I ask the man on my doorstep to wait there while I put on some clothes, then suggest we talk in the pub on the corner of my street.
Some private conversations are best had in public; it’s safer that way.
He claims to be a solicitor, but the man looks like a saggy boob dressed in a suit, and I don’t trust him.
That said, I don’t trust anyone. I quietly explain what I do for a living, and promise that if this is some sort of trick, I will fucking end him.
He looks scared when I say that—people often are when they find out what I do—and he is quick to show me his ID and some paperwork.
A big part of my job is knowing when someone is lying, but despite everything I thought I knew, this strange little man is telling the truth.
Turns out I had a grandmother I didn’t know about, and she has left me a house in her will.
Sometimes what we don’t know can teach us more than what we do.
I get a nonalcoholic cocktail from the bar and make myself listen while the solicitor sips a ginger beer and tells a story about me that includes a few missing chapters.
Hope Falls used to be home a long time ago, I knew that already.
It’s where we lived when I was a little girl, it’s where my mother died when I was ten years old, and I have never been back since.
What I didn’t know is that I had a grandmother living in the same village.
And what I want to know now is why I was sent into care at the age of ten and forced to endure a series of foster “homes” when it turns out I still had family.
Finding this out now, when I have spent my whole life feeling so alone, is nothing less than devastating.
“Your grandmother and mother were estranged,” the solicitor says in a matter-of-fact tone.
He does not say why. I didn’t know my grandmother, but I knew Mum, and I can’t help thinking that she must have had a good reason for cutting her own mother out of her life.
Home isn’t always where the heart is; sometimes home is where the hurt lives.
When I think about my childhood before Mum died—and I make a conscious effort to rarely do so—I remember the sound of the sea outside my bedroom window in Hope Falls.
The watery lullaby was the soundtrack of my dreams, and my nightmares.
She used to say that we were both mermaids and that one day we would return to a secret world beneath the waves where nobody could hurt us.
Then she went there without me. The memory of the sea frequently wraps around me like a blanket of comfort all these years later, and strange as it sounds—even to me—it has often felt as though something about Hope Falls has always been calling me back.
Like an unfinished story you just have to know the ending to.
The last page torn out of the book of me. Lost. Missing. Incomplete.
I named my dog Sunday because that’s my favorite day and he is my favorite everything.
The following morning, back in my flat, he sits on the bed and watches me while I get dressed and I feel bad about leaving him again so soon.
He’s smart enough to know that the clothes I am wearing mean I am going out, and I can see him wondering if he is coming too.
My wardrobe contains ten white shirts, five identical pairs of jeans, three pairs of polished brogues, and a selection of very similar tweed jackets.
I am a creature of habit, as is my dog. I have always preferred dogs to people.
Dogs are loyal and can be trusted. Humans are the ouroboros of the world.
Going in circles, eating themselves, making the same mistakes over and over in history as well as in our own puny, pointless lives.
Humans may have evolved but humanity has not.
We do not learn. Instead, we self-destruct on repeat until oblivion, and we’re too stupid to see it.
My dog normally goes everywhere with me, but this is a journey I need to make on my own, so I leave Sunday downstairs in the bookshop.
I have never been good at trusting people—but the booksellers always take excellent care of my dog when I can’t.
Booksellers are almost always the best variety of humans.
I worry about the last-minute nature of it all—I am not a spontaneous person, I am someone who likes a plan—but I guess sometimes life takes us on unexpected detours that we simply cannot plan for.
I don’t do cars, and Hope Falls is too far away for the scooter, so I head to Paddington Station and take a train.
It isn’t until I am far away from London and my job and the life I have made for myself that I start to feel afraid.
Away from my little flat above the bookshop.
Away from my dog. Away from what the doctor told me yesterday.
Away from everything familiar. Heading toward the unknown and a house called Spyglass, which apparently now belongs to me.
The time passes surprisingly quickly; I’m lost in my own thoughts and regrets, and as the train hurtles through Blackmoor National Park things start to feel strangely familiar.
The park is huge. Over fifty square miles of open moorlands dotted with sheep, craggy granite hills, hidden valleys, and waterfalls.
Its beauty stretches far and wide in every direction, and I stare out of the train window, trying to take it all in.
Blackmoor is also home to a handful of small, fairly isolated villages, and none of them are more remote than Hope Falls.
The nearest train station is in another town, miles away.
There is only one road in and one road out of Hope Falls, so when I get off the train I take a taxi, and by the time I finally arrive it is getting late.
The harbor wall protects the village from the Atlantic Ocean on one side, and ancient moorland borders it on the other.
Blackmoor cannot be built on, so the village is protected in lots of ways.
People are harder to protect than places, I think, and then I wonder if that is true.
The view of the sun setting over Hope Falls is breathtaking, and I am hit by an unexpected wave of memories and a tsunami of emotions.
This was where my mother abandoned me.
I’ve been alone ever since.
Even when I wasn’t.
My mother’s voice used to narrate my life.
She lived on inside my head long after she stopped living.
It was only when I got older I found the off switch, and learned to dictate a life of my own.
My views of parenting have changed over the years.
These days I think part of a parent’s job is to figure out how to hurt you so that you can learn how to heal yourself.
The village still looks exactly as it did when I was a child and I can remember the house on the hill called Spyglass even though I have never set foot in it before.
It’s an iconic part of the skyline above Hope Falls, with its oversized eye-shaped windows and curved white walls, built into the cliffs it sits on.
I climb out of the taxi and stare up at the house I have just inherited from a grandmother I never knew.
She must have known I existed. She probably saw me.
From up here on the top of the hill, you can see everything and everyone down below.
The sun sets fast in this little corner of the country, and by the time I reach the front door it is almost dark.
I look up and glimpse the first stars shining down on me from light-years away.
A variety of time travel I find astonishing and comforting at the same time.
I have never visited any other place where you can see so much sky; it’s beautiful.
Spyglass is at the end of a lane with no name, high above and far from the other houses in the village.
The way it has been built into the cliff gives it a slightly unreal quality, and although it is still very striking, up close it looks a little tired and broken.
But then I have always felt there is much beauty to be found in imperfection.
Lavender bushes line the path that leads to a wooden front door with a shiny, brass bird-shaped knocker.
The sight of it stops me in my tracks, though I’m not sure why.
It’s beautiful. This place is so peaceful and still and quiet, the contrast to London is profound.
There are no neighbors. No traffic. No one and nothing at all.
Other than the calming sound of the sea in the distance, it’s completely silent.
I can’t quite get my head around the idea of owning this place.
I go to put the key the solicitor gave me in the lock but then stop.
For some reason it feels wrong, so I tentatively knock on the door, my fingers flinching at the touch of the cool brass bird, but nobody answers.
The solicitor did say it was empty and that it was mine, but life has taught me that when something seems too good to be true it almost always is.
I have a word with myself and use the key he gave me.
It fits and turns and the door opens.
I hover in the dark doorway, unsure what to expect.
Surprised because I feel scared and I don’t know why.
It is not a familiar feeling for me. My feet seem to be stuck to the spot, not ready to go in, as though my body knows something I don’t about this place.
But it’s too late to turn back. I’m here now.
So, for lack of a better idea, I reach for a light switch in the gloom, and am relieved when I find one.
The lights flicker to life and although I can now see, the first thing that really hits me when I step inside is the smell.