The Dale Heron

Part 4 - The Attic Transformation

Something changed for my father, little-by-little, when he had taken custody of Ardea at last, locked as she was in an attic space above a flat he had taken in Holborn those past few months when his search began in earnest. Each morning he'd sit alongside her on the rough floorboards, thrilling with each glancing graze of feather on flesh, as he hand-fed her the frogs he bought at a nearby pet store and watched the terrible devouring of the creature, the carnal hunger still in his own eyes. The remainder of his day would be spent in a dazzled trance, the metronome breaths of the sleeping bird (for there was little room in the attic to do anything else) highlighting the unnatural colours of her feathers with each inhale and exhale, shimmering differently as the sun moved by the circular window that overlooked Lincoln's Inn Fields. Still, he could not bear himself to touch her; the ecstasy of it would be unbearably wicked, inwardly deeming himself too sullied to commune with the divine so directly. Thus, he acted the penitent reverend, shamed by his intentions but recognising all the same that he was the holy vessel chosen to hear the good word: Ardea.

Only Ardea's melancholy did not dissipate. Even after escaping her father's gilt and gelding gaol, even as her left primaries once again regrew, she remained as she was before, and, to my father, seemingly ungrateful for his reverential deed of exodus. Soon, her shrieks returned, and the neighbours were reporting banging noises coming from the flat next door as she threw herself against eaves, joists and floors. She refused to toilet in the same spot twice and her vent became woefully caked in excrement. She began to tear those precious metallic feathers from her back, creating raw patches of bare skin. The self-harm shook my father particularly. Offerings of cold-blooded batrachoidid sustenance and scrubbings of dirtied floors to a pulpy finish: weren't these acts of worship? And this – bloodied pinpricks of flesh, forsaken feathers and a criminal tarnishing of pure beauty – this was the thanks given to the loyal supplicant?

The disillusionment grew in the lived fulfilment of my father's dreams. His initially soft-spoken appeals to Ardea's self-preservation, her sanctity, morphed into sharper and more spiteful criticisms: "Look at the state of 'er," he'd say to the attic wood-boring beetles, "Letting 'erself go now, isn't she?" He started leaving her for hours at a time, returning (if he remembered) with some pathetic crushed cockroaches or grasshoppers, thinking himself "too good for thissun." The awe dissipated, he felt a new confidence to grope at her with his greedy fingers, unable yet to deny how beautiful she remained even emaciated, the satisfaction he still found in her possession, his lust still there.

At times, Ardea was too tired to resist as he stroked at the snowy feathers on her neck, his other hand reaching inside his trouser zipper, sweaty and panting. At others, she weaponised her beak, drawing bloody lacerations on my father's forearms and face. He'd punch at her then, bend back the feathers of one wing, even squeeze and shake the elegant neck he'd glorified moments before. Slamming the attic door shut behind him, he'd approach the nearest sex worker to purge his intimate depravity; kneeling before him, he'd tell them they were so beautiful, so unlike his wife, who was herself "such a selfish little cunt."

In one of his absences from the flat, my father found himself outside a forbiddingly neoclassical building across the park. Admiring the ionic columns that were giving him temporary porticoed shelter on that rainy day, he spotted the sign: "Hunterian Museum – Admission Free." Initially killing time, the place became a regular haunt of his, so bewitched was he by the history of the Royal College of Surgeons and the peculiar collector of who gave the place its name. The inners and outers of creatures unimaginable lined this library of anatomy. Bones and bone saws, implements of 18th century surgery and ivoried mannequins vied for space alongside jarred baby hearts and pickled appendixes displayed like a butcher's counter; shelves of endless pewter, glass and preserving ether. Taking notes and photographs, committing information placards to memory, a sick notion leeched into his brain, one that also fired his belly with excited power.

What was the possessor of a god if not a greater god himself, he thought, as he compressed a chloroformed cloth about Ardea's beak. He'd planned it for months: revisiting his notes every hour; learning to sew by hand from an old woman in Elephant and Castle; attending a weekly pottery class off the Northern Line; listening in solemn absorption to a circled survivors group for war amputees off the District Line; acquiring instruments and ingredients for a torturous art, sprinkling subtle deceptions in every London borough so as not to raise suspicion; and pencilling drawing after drawing of his Pygmalion fantasy.

While Ardea lay motionless save a shallow breath on the floor of the attic, my father plucked at her feathers, one-by-one stripping her completely naked and filling two bin bags. He bent back her wings through resistant cartilage until he heard a meaningful crack, and he then thread a surgical needle and roughly stitched the wingpits against her body so that they would heal in a straight-armed fashion. He squished and shaped ruddy clays into exquisite forms, firmly pressing them against Ardea's angry flesh, a wetted finger blending them at the edges. Removing the plastic protective coatings, he glued the replacement fingers intended for IED-maimed soldiers upon the tips of Ardea's wings, the silicone finish soft with a familiar human tackiness to aid their function. He did the same with the ankle sock-like coverings that he squeezed over her clawed feet after ripping out the clawed nails, the new toes just redundant accessories that could be crushed like a grape between your fingers.

The vulgar carcass now laid into humanoid shape, my father applied the top coat after another smothering of chloroform. Hardening to bone the clay with the hours-long running of a hair dryer, he painted her a stark white. Using a rope similar to an over-thick fishing line, he criss-crossed her back and chest hundreds of times into an X that, when tied at a knot just below her vents, straightened her back into a tall line and created two sensuous lumps on her upright chest. The coup de grace to the Ardea of before was a ashy blonde wig that he sewed into her scalp through bits of leather-hard clay, sealing it in place as before with the hairdryer and white paint, accentuating the seductive neckline she retained while undressed.

If you asked him, my father would have said that the next seven years were blissful, such was the pride that he enjoyed in displaying the silent and mysterious doll that he now went about London with, relishing every second glance at a wine bar and over-the-shoulder turn on the street and ear-whispered "You're one lucky man" or "Let me buy you a drink." Though Ardea struggled to acclimate herself initially to her reincarnation – pain in her rope-corseted and unbent spine, frightening tears at the seams when she tried to extend her wing-arms, tripping steps on feet that didn't belong to her, overburdened legs bearing the weight of a dozen unnecessary kilograms of clay – she soon (quite literally) found her feet. Even she experienced moments of joy in those years: seeing the outside, smelling comparatively fresh air and having company beyond that of one person. She met so many new people, her striking appearance opening doors to the couple (Ardea and my father) previously closed, such that she was soon a staple of public life, photographed in newspapers, gossiped about on chat shows and subreddits, ever-seen but – in a perfect symmetry to competency – never required to speak.

The problem was that, though they attended society galas together, my father was a third-wheel, an afterthought, a means to an end. What they really wanted was Ardea, and men and women alike would devise means of isolating her at every chance. They would ask her, "Where did you find that boor?" and "That accent – dragged him from the provinces, eh?" of the man they called her husband, and "Wouldn't you like to play hide the sausage roll with me?" and "Tallyho, I'll wager there's some patrician in you. No? There could be yet you play your cards right" to her alone. They would touch her fake hair, stare into her too-golden-to-be-real eyes, run their finger down her neck that had been re-plucked and oiled to a near-human semblance and ascribe every secret wish in their hearts to her.

And my father began to hate her for it in the private of the Holborn flat. Business cards placed without her noticing into the clothes he'd picked out for her were ripped up and thrown in her face. Invitations addressed to her to attend such-and-such's opening nights were politely declined (to them), a backhanded slap and a shout of "whore" (to her). She was forbidden to walk with the group of women she befriended – stood by, really, who found that they wanted her to stand by them too - in Russell Square, for fear of a tryst-bound rouse. She was only to go out with him in tow, only to wear the tightest fitting clothes when doing so, or otherwise remain locked inside the attic. The freedom that Ardea had enjoyed up to then became less and less free, the blossoming confidence (perhaps even happiness) withering, the depression returning deeper and deeper with each blow from my father.