The Aviary

Is there any sight finer than this?, I say of the Tyne Bridge as it skims the roofs of the buildings in the gorge. You could touch its green underside from the highest of the roofgardens. The streetlamps, painted the same green, jut upwards from the bridge sides, one hundred and fifty feet in the air. And the great arch of the bridge rises a hundred feet higher … 

'You need a project', says W. 'You need something with which you can be occupied'. W. has his scholarly tasks, of course. He's even deigned to collaborate with me. But I've never taken it seriously, our collaboration, not really. I've never risen to the heights he envisaged for me.

Hadn't W. always wanted us to soar together in thought? Hadn't he pictured it in his minds as two larks looping and darting in flight – two larks, wings outstretched, whose flight was interlaced, interwoven, separate and apart; or as two never-resting swifts, following parallel channels in the air … We were never to rest. We'd live on the wing, one exploring this, one that, but always reuniting, always coming together in flight, in the onrush of flight, calling out to one another across the darkness …

To think like a javelin launched into space. To think like two javelins, launched in the same direction, arching through the air. To think as a body would fall – as two bodies fall, tumbling through space. Thinking be inevitable as falling under gravity. Thought would be our law, our fate … But we'd fall upwards into the sky … upwards into the heights of thought …

And instead? There is no flight; not mine, not W.'s. I am his cage, W. says. I am his aviary. What he could have been, if he left me behind! What skies he could have explored! But he knows that this, too, is an illusion; that my significance for him is as an excuse. He can blame me for everything. It's his fault, he can say, even as he knows nothing would have happened if he were free of me.