This is Felix Girard’s doing. It has been like this ever since Felix Girard excised the Whitby Beast from the face of the cliff called Black Cap. Whitby has become a destination. Wealth in a new form now mounts upward, from the seafront, into the town.
My father, though, is not particularly interested in this. His gaze is downward, his focus myopic, his stride, even on that rough ground, is purposeful, if slow. He is heading toward the Black Cap. Occasionally he pauses, stoops, reaches. He is gathering ammonites, their shells, just as he remembers from his boyhood, turned to brilliant amethyst, garnet, pyrite, smoky quartz. He thrusts them absently, almost automatically, into the pockets of his not-quite-shabby suit. It is almost like he is a child again, exercising the habits of his childhood: to stoop and to search, to gather, to collect. To hoard.
In this way he progresses slowly along the Scaur, pockets bulging with rocks. He in his rusty old suit, with his abstracted air.
He’s trying to distract himself. He doesn’t want to think about me. That’s difficult, of course. I am omnipresent, although I do not yet exist. I am paradoxical in this.
When he reaches the foot of the Black Cap he stops. And for the first time in many years, dares to look up.
• • •
The old wound is still there—the wound he could not bear to look at, when he was a boy—the gap where the cliff face came down. The wooden stage is still there, too, long abandoned now, where Felix Girard gave his first lectures on the Whitby Beast. The beast itself, of course, is gone: surgically excised, taken away to London. Leaving behind a massive scar on the face of the Black Cap. A scar within a wound. Sliced out of the slick, dark rock.
My father gazes upward, at the place where the tree roots still dangle, exposed, black, snaking arteries, the still-living trees green and precarious but still clinging to the cliff’s edge. That is the churchyard up there, St. Mary’s; the coffins that were also unearthed, and hung exposed like ragged rotting teeth, are gone now—rescued—replanted somewhere safer.
• • •
This is where my parents met. Not so very many years ago. But also a lifetime ago. She up on a scaffolding with her darling Papa, assisting in the excavation of the Whitby Beast; Leo down below, in the rocks, with his pencil and sketch pad, watching. Her golden hair. And her mocking cry. Papa! Who is that ridiculous bo-oy?
• • •
My father bends down, hefts a rock, despite the unhelpful constrictions of his suit throws it at the cliff face, watches, with silent satisfaction, the cascade of shale produced thereby. Then disgorges, from within his right front pocket, a small ammonite, the coil perfect, of fool’s gold. Turns it over in his palm. Admires this, the living tissue turned to stone. Stopped in time.
If only I could make them in glass.
Petrels fumbling moodily in the updraft.
• • •
Meanwhile I, who have been approaching for many pages, am about to arrive.
• • •
In an act of fateful serendipity, my mother is no longer lying on the sofa. She has gotten up; she has even, in my father’s absence, put on a frock; has even, for the first time in a month, hefted herself awkwardly down the stairs, this a major endeavor for her as she cannot, in fact, see past the vast planet of her belly even so far as her feet—so she feels for the stairs, first with her toes, then with the ball of the foot, then the heel, her palms braced against the walls for balance; edging me sideways past all those belongings of her father’s, past the rolled-up carpets and the specimen trays, the taxidermied alligators and the ocelot, those lifelike, no-longer-living things that occupy so much of the Birdcage’s limited space. She edges and inches until she reaches the fragrant nether realm of the abandoned kitchen, which she prefers not to see or to think about, and then maneuvers herself, with great effort, out, into the yard. Glancing surreptitiously at the shed, into the street. Upon the edge of which she stands, like a beacon, hugely.