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‘Take regular steps,’ you said, without turning around, so I marched behind you, taking the steps, watching the shiny ripples of your red raincoat, drops of mist collecting in its crevices. ‘It’s the next ridge’ you said, ‘it’s the one after’. Your finger made a point of the x on the map, your mouth a mess of the Spanish hut’s name. And I made sure you felt listened to, though really I was focused on the water-cycle forming in your back.

Later it got warm, but you kept wearing your red coat, I think because you kept your map in its pocket. I had no map, but I did get good at the regular steps. So good that I kept their rhythm going in my knees while you stopped to check exactly where we were. That first warm day I saw, lying improbably on the path, a butterfly wing. I scooped mid-step to pick it up, then when we sat on rocks to eat our hardboiled eggs dipped in salt, I lay the wing on your coat sleeve, in the crook of your arm. It was a sort of greeting,  I think. We chewed and looked together at the creamy yellow on red, at the blooms of violet and terracotta, at the swoops of inky black. We traced the down on the piece of body that remained, it came off on our fingers. We dusted each other’s cheeks with it, bits of egg still between our teeth. ‘Heyyy eggy teeth’ you said, grinning, ‘looking gooood’, I said back, and we scrunched our butterfly-dusted noses. Then you knew, because you were you, that an egg tooth is a thing, it’s the sharp point on a chick’s beak that it uses to pierce its egg-shell. You described the hours of air a chick needs for hatching, that it gets through puncturing its egg membrane. Then suddenly you were ready to go, and I was delaying us, my layers still stripped off, my bits of lunch scattered. I tucked the wing into my book, then taped it that evening to a paper card, that I tucked into your pocket.

 

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Today I am crossing the zebra crossing when I am reminded of the wing, of our walk, of you. I think it is the stripes — their black and white regularity like the regular steps. The colours too —  the yellow on red, the red on grey, the starkness of it all, like black and white. As I cross I twist to put my hand up to the car in the sign that means stop and also thank you, and there is something in the twist of my body that makes me want to keep turning, to whirl over the road, like a dancer being a sycamore spinner. I want the stripes to whizz by and the drivers in cars to wait placidly. It isn’t a regular, even spin, no, I am imagining something awkward, weighted on one side, and I am still crossing the road when I realise it is the wing I am thinking of, its dismembered asymmetry, how it would fall in an off-kilter flutter, were I to drop it from that window there. 

The wing would fall and catch on the wind, covering ground, brushing the cheek of that passer-by there, then mine, then another’s, and surely as it brushed the slopes of our cheeks it would transmit messages between us, each swoop like a newspaper blowing up against a face, all the news transmitted into the person to whom that face belonged. I imagine thoughts hopping via wing this way. If that were a thing, I’d call you that way now, I think, my hands trailing in hedge.

Hello, you’d say, woken, why are you calling?

It’s the butterfly wing phone, I’d say, I’m allowed to call.

No you’re not, you’d say, it’s still a phone call, and anyway that wing turned grey, the tape fell off and it crumbled in dead-thing dust in Ana’s shoes. It was really annoying. 

Oh, I'd say, thinking of the dust sticking static to Ana’s tights. Fine, I’m breaking the rules. 

So why are you calling?

Well, —

What?

Remember fish hook man?

We’d come down from the mountains, and our taxi driver, driving over an old bridge, told us how he’d mended it, working stooped in the water beneath the arch, when a fisherman’s hook from up-stream had flown too far, had caught on his cheek, piercing right through. The driver stuck a finger to show in the rear-view mirror where he’d disentangled the errant hook from his own face.

Do you think it was true? 

What?

The story, the hook, the scar? 

I’d hear your breath on the wing phone, and I’d think how it would blow all that wing dust away, and I’d marvel at wing technology these days, for withstanding things like breath and longing.

Oh, maybe. 

It bothers me, the awfulness of it, a full man being caught, helpless like a fish. It’s awful, don’t you think? 

You’d sigh. It doesn’t bother you. 

What’s that poem? Where the caught trout becomes a glimmering girl, one thing becomes another, the fire, the trout, the brightening air. Pluck till time, you know?

You’d sigh, I’d hear your pill box rattling. 

Then conceding, reliable, the silver apples of the moon, the golden apples of the sun, you’d say, those fruits solid in your mouth, you have them, you hold them, the world firmer, more fixable in your mind and mouth.  

Whereas in mine it disappears into powdery, fact-less nothings.

Your breath again 

That’s all 

And what was the name of the mountain? 

You’d tell me in one.

Ah yes! Thanks. And the hut?

Stop calling, you’d say.

Silence. 

I just, I wanted — 

Go to sleep, you’d say, not knowing I was not in bed, but walking home,  jumping over pavement cracks, crackling curls of bark, my steps hardly regular at all.

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