​

​

viii. 

His feathers are bright flashes in front of the sun as he falls, eyes closed. He is meant to be here, at the pinnacle of the arc, frozen mid-movement: Icarus soaring, Icarus refusing to open his eyes, Icarus broken amongst the waves, little crowns of white lapping at his golden shoulders. Drowned, yes—but for just one moment, greater than the sun himself, and these waves will forever bear the name that echoes, broken, across the cerulean sea. 

 

vii.

Icarus’s wings fragment slowly; bright eagle and shallow dove and little sparrow leaving a trail of white across the sky. His wings are a masterpiece, and here is the artist, flying next to him.

Daedalus’s eyes are the ocean, and his thoughts are the little screws at the heart of his machines, and they just cannot keep turning. Icarus’s joy floods all senses, radiates like the too-bright sun that dooms him. Daedalus weaves through updrafts and currents, but his bones are brittle, and his joints have years trapped between their hinges. 

The sky is everything all at once. Daedalus knows the world, and he is afraid. 

 

vi. 

Close to the ocean, the air is cool. Sprays of saltwater touch Icarus’s lips as he glides across the waves. The wind is a song in his hair and the horizon is a riot of colour. There is promise in the way his prison drops away behind him, walls of cool stone that can hold him no longer. His father’s warnings are cobwebs, brushed away by the eastern wind. He who has only known stillness discovers that the world moves faster than a lightning bolt, that there is so much to discover, to see. His heart bursts as seagulls dive around him, as schools of fish glitter silver-bright against the sighing waves. 

Here, his life begins. 

He opens his mouth, and the wind rips the laughter from his teeth. 

 

v.

How can a creature born on land rise into the sky? Icarus stands on the edge of the cliff, rough grass against his bare heels, toes in the air. Daedalus stands by his side and speaks urgently about damp sea-spray, wing composition, the Apollo-touched radiance of the sun. He has spent months with his creation, and words of caution drip like honey from his lips. Too much is at risk, and he loves his work too fiercely for failure to be a consideration. 

Icarus does not listen: his chest feels too full to breathe. For the first time, he spreads his wings, and feels the updraft catch. His heart beats in time with the waves. With his father’s scream in his ears, a grin splits his face, and he leaps. 

 

iv.

When Daedalus presses the last feather into wax, a single tear rolls down his cheek. He straightens aching muscles and leans back his head. The air is heavy with the smell of lavender, night orchids, and the distant ocean. Around him, the labyrinth twists and turns, that marvellous creation of his mind. Deep within its darkness, a liquid-eyed monster raises its head and howls at the moon, and something in the walls of Daedalus’ heart shivers gently at the sound. Here, unbidden, his lips form a rare smile. Overhead, the universe spins and the moon is bright and this cruel and beautiful world might be his after all. 

 

iii. 

Golden-haired Icarus fades. He spends hours in the shade of the labyrinth, throwing stones at the salamanders that live between the heavy stones without ever hitting them. The skin under his eyes is deep purple, and his voice, when he speaks, is hushed and fragile. 

Daedalus sits at his son’s bedside for hours after he falls asleep, watching Icarus’s eyes flicker behind shadowed lids, slim fingers tapping against his throat. An idea takes flight in his mind, rising from the cool shade of their prison, into the sky that feels too crowded with stars. 

 

ii.

Icarus grows up surrounded by legends. In King Minos’s halls he spends hours looking at oil paintings of Gods and ancient heroes, humans that broke the world and died in fire. His wonder-bright eyes watch sandal-footed Theseus cross the sand in front of the palace, and the ball of red thread in Ariadne’s gentle hands. He is too young to understand the word betrayal, and when his life becomes stark lines of stone and sky and his father’s skin turns ashen with the months’ passing, he presses narrow palms against his prison walls and imagines a marble city chanting his name. 

 

i.

Listen! (We are very close now.) It starts with a boy. It starts with a question. It starts with a fire kindled, a single spark that, once fed, will consume the world it was created to warm. 

Icarus skips over stones, balanced on a Cretan wall, arms wide. The evening sun throws his shadow, small hands spread into wings, his hair a halo of flames. He turns to you, all chip-toothed grin and freckle-dusted cheeks and eyes as blue as the ocean, and slowly lowers his arms to his sides. His toes in the air, his heels on cracked sandstone, he closes his eyes and lets himself fall.

*

I’m turning nine the first year the solstice falls on a school day. As was tradition on the last day of term, Mrs McIntosh said there was a day of board games and crafts planned with a film after lunch. And something fun at home time, she said, and glanced at me. I blushed with anticipation. But when Mammy wakes me on my birthday, she tells me in her excited voice I can stay at home. We’ll spend the day together like we always do. I hold back my tears until Mammy is in the shower. Later, the ingredients for my cake are on the counter. I pour caster sugar over butter, which mounds like snow. Mammy, I say. Why don’t I have a Da like other kids? She turns on the whisk. When it stops, I think she’s going to answer my question, but instead she says, Eggs, Edith. I yank open the drawer, whack the first egg. The knife cuts straight through, the egg’s gooey insides oozing over the cutlery. Sorry, I say. It’s okay, she says. Accidents happen. Then she tips the entire contents of the cutlery drawer into the sink, the sharp clatter like ice breaking.  

*

The following solstice, Mammy has to work. She has a job in the school office doing boring stuff on computers. Sometimes I have to wait for her to finish, so I sit at her desk doing my homework. Isn’t she such a good girl? the head teacher says, slipping me a custard cream and a hot chocolate from the staffroom machine. Mammy beams. She’s the best. On the way home, to keep up with Mammy’s long strides, I slip-slide, the tread of my boots almost worn through. We can still make a cake, Mammy says. And I’ll tell you the story of your birth. I roll my eyes, but Mammy doesn’t see because she’s staring at the woman standing on our doorstep, a woman who looks exactly like Mammy, but with slush-grey hair. She’s wearing a burgundy coat with a snowflake brooch. Hello Edith, she says. Happy birthday. I’m your Nana. The air between them is hard and spiky and glacier-cold. It’s been ten years, Mammy says. Mammy’s Mammy nods. I know. A nana! I have a nana! We’re going to make a ca– But Mammy interrupts. Go inside, Edith. I don’t move. Now, she says. From the hallway I hear Mammy say, Remember what you said when I got pregnant? Mammy’s Mammy says, Let me make it up to you. Both of you. Ten minutes later the door slams. I take the third cup from the kitchen table, hurl it at the wall, and its shards fall like rain. 

*

More solstices and more birthdays follow. On my thirteenth, Mammy lets me get my ears pierced; on my seventeenth, she buys me ten driving lessons. We both know I don’t have the patience to teach you. I laugh, she does too, neither of us acknowledging the real reason: she’s an abysmal driver. I would kill myself if anything happened to you, she says. But if it was my fault, I’d carry on living with the sole purpose of pure punishment. The day after my eighteenth birthday, I throw a bag onto the passenger seat of a terracotta Ford Escort and drive away. I don’t tell her I’m going. In each place I settle, for a week or a month or a season, I send her a postcard, but only on the day I leave. By the time I’m twenty-eight, I’m married with a child of my own. A boy. Mammy, he asks one day, as I push him in the supermarket trolley. Do you have a Mammy? I abandon the shopping in aisle sixteen and strap him into his car seat. We drive and drive and drive until I say, There. There’s my Mammy. She waves from the front window. 

*

The solstice Mammy is dying, I tell her the story of my birth. We’re in what’s called the Easy Room, two armchairs pushed close around a low cornerless table. The icicles, I say, shake my head, and smile. I say the icicles that hung from the roof that year were so long and so thin, the low light seeped through and they dangled in front of the window like net curtains. Sixteen hours, I say. I tell her I have no idea how she birthed me alone with only ice chips against the pain. I had epidurals that numbed my body like sleet. I lay my hand on the table, palm facing up. She stares at me for a couple of moments. Perhaps there’s a last glimmer of recognition before it’s forever extinguished. Or, it’s pure reflex. But she puts her hand on mine and I say, Mammy. It’s you.