The Dale Heron

Part 5 - Escape

My mother never hid from me who my father was – the man with the blue-black hair who called her beautiful and told her she was better than his "bitch wife." I'm sure this could have described any number of the gentleman callers of Lady BonBon (as she was known, a delicious packaging for her last name Bonner), but it was a point of pride for her that she could remember the face of every John she'd come upon in her line of work – or rather, it must be said, vice versa. "Aha!," she said to herself one day while leafing through the magazines at her local off licence, "That's him. I knew he was someone." It was an otherwise meaningless snap of a man and his wife on the red carpet, but to her it held great import, such that she bought the tabloid that day, something she usually left with licked fingerprints on the shelf while chatting with the shop assistant. To her, she now owned proof-positive, full colour evidence that she was the loveliest woman in London. Hadn't he said so at the time? And didn't this photograph show how beautiful his own wife was, meaning that she was even more beautiful than this goddess? Hence, deeming him perhaps the most insightful and connected of her clients, she ascribed me to this man that I came to call (in my head, for I had not met him) my father. The fact that I was already ten by the time of their first sexual encounter seemed to matter very little; at least our hair colour was similar. And I had no reason to take anything other than a passive interest in this absent male role model.

Until, at least, I met the man who had grown up in Cowslip Cottage the summer before Year 13. I, as usual, was instructed to busy myself outside the flat my mother and I shared for an hour so while she attended to her regular Wednesday four o'clock gentleman – not that I would have preferred to be in my own room anyway then, as this gentleman had a habit of putting on a vicar's outfit (I pray it wasn't his own) and asked to be punished in a naughty baby voice. The Cowslip Cottage man was homeless by this time, ejected from the ornithologist's home after the "brutal bashing" as the papers put it, and he camped in a disused entrance to a long-closed BHS. He sat upon a torn sleeping bag, streaks of white in his hair making him look ancient by my teenage standards. What intrigued me was that he was not begging passersby for money or food. Instead, he was holding a cardboard sign with a photograph of what I guessed to be a younger version of himself and an indescribably unique looking heron, saying to them, "Have you seen this bird?".

For years, I had scanned my mother's prized magazine in search of a family resemblance with the man who was allegedly my father, if for no other reason than to see what I may come to look like in the future or hope to aspire to with 50% of his DNA. Ardea's presence in the photograph too was seared into my mind, and I couldn't miss the eerie similarity shared by the homeless man's bird and my father's wife. So I spoke to him, in fact spending over five hours beside him on the pavement. His speech was desperate and pressured, at times with the volume at full blast, arms flicking out occasionally to make a point, other times speaking in hush – to himself or to me, I don't know. Gaunt-faced and coughing up yellowy mucus though he may have been, there was still something noble there, an inner vitality that drove him on. He rocked while he spoke about his life in Bridbydale and the shock discovery of the egg. He lovingly described his daughter, Ardea: how beautiful she was, how he tried to protect her, how he should've done things differently. He explained how he had come to live on the streets, railing that it was only for the love of his lost daughter as he had a home he could go to up north. His father had recently died, he said, leaving his mother (unwell herself) alone in Cowslip Cottage, missing a son who had disappeared years before and chastising herself for her part in that disappearance. When I left him, he was continuing to survey the streets, the skies even, as if Ardea would suddenly appear to him, all while voicelessly moving his lips in imploration or prayer as the sun was setting behind a row of vacant shops.

I revisited him a few times over the several months after that, though never in the same spot twice. His peripatetic life meant that he was sometimes filling a stolen trolley to move into a new nook or uncomfortably reclined over a park bench with arm rests set like spikes to prevent rough sleeping. He filled my mind with thoughts of Ardea, which I was connecting into thoughts of my father. I once snuck my mother's magazine out of the flat and showed him the photograph that amounted to a family album in our household. His mouth formed a little-shaped O, his eyes wide though blinking often. "WHERE IS SHE?," he started to shout at me before gazing back at the page, stroking it, and crying a little, "Oh, what have they done to you?" I promised him (and myself) that we would find her.

It all happened rather quickly then and, sadly, without much of a plan. My mother told me that she met the man with the blue-black hair when she still had her "city flat" – a co-working space of a kind, a bedsit shared amongst six sex workers who had allocated times for their affluent investment banker-type clients who couldn't or wouldn't travel out to our flat in Bethnal Green. She'd seen the man exiting a building at Lincoln's Inn Field, she said, and she happened to be the first thing that he saw "and that was that, and then you came along," winking. Though she couldn't be sure he still lived there or ever did, it was my best lead, and I encouraged the man from Bridbydale to decamp to Holborn where our best hopes lay.

Days went by with no sightings of Ardea or my father, the police quickly cottoning on to this new street-sleeping arrival and menacing him at every opportunity. I sensed that my friend was getting wearier as temperatures hugged winter longer than anyone expected that year, and his lurgy turned dangerously pneumonic. I'd sit with him then and bring him lukewarm Bovril and packs of tissues and Fisherman's Friends, not searching any longer for Ardea or my father but trying to care for him. But he'd hoarsely tell me off for giving up.

I thought our failed pattern was likely terminal, a pointless exercise that threatened more than it could achieve, a friendship that I would likely lose in the pursuit of a shared fever dream. But on the thirteenth day of patient waiting, I watched the man's face glow amidst the gloom of March days. His laboured wheezes meant he often laid on his side then, and his sightline, even with a black fading of his vision at the outer edges, happened to form a miraculous hypotenuse from the earth to the top of some row of buildings. And there she was, the woman from the photograph, the woman that we believed was somehow a bird made human, beautiful still, staring out a circular window at the top of a building overlooking the park.

A mad energy seized him. The man whose death I was readying myself for threw off the sleeping bag covering him, climbed unsteadily to his feet, marched over grasses and through puddles through the park, heedlessly trampling uncollected dog poo and knocking over bins standing in his path. He slid ever so slightly on the rank-smelling fallen leaves on the pavement skirting the park, forcing his body to jolt awkwardly forward on legs that hadn't moved much in the last few days into the road, where a BMW driver couldn't slam his foot on the brake in time, telling a police officer later "I didn't see him, mate" and "Did he scratch the paint?" after my friend was pronounced dead.

The sound of the impact brought out every resident of the street onto their stoops – some wishing to be helpful, some just plain nosey – including my father in a long bathrobe with mussed blue-black hair and a mug of coffee in hand that read "Tell me if my biceps get in your way." Eyeing the scene over minutes, savouring his comical coffee, he spotted an attractive paramedic attending and decided it didn't harm to linger nearby her once it was clear there was nothing to be done for the man from Cowslip Cottage; didn't he know the right things to say to her to show how sympathetic he was, which camp she'd want him to fall into regarding the homeless (those poor people/those blights on the city), how to make her laugh even in these circumstances? Well, if not, he thought he did and tried regardless.

I didn't stand still in the shock of my friend's death or in the face of my would-be father. Instead, I snuck across the street and into the open door of the block of flats. I ran up the steps to the uppermost flat, pushed open the door and scanned the three rooms for the circular window. I thought I'd made a mistake when I heard a thumping from the ceiling over my head, from the attic where I found her in that foul-smelling space. Beautiful, immensely so, but crumpled on the floor, extremities agitating every direction the stitching would permit, a glassy hopelessness in her eyes with no recognition of me entering that space.

The large wheeled suitcase was there still, dust embedded with loose tendrils of a spider's web. You may perhaps guess the rest. Me: packaging her up as though she was a winter coat laid aside for a season or two once the temperatures reach a steady 15 degrees. We: exiting that flat, a surreptitious fleetness of foot on my part as I jogged my parcel away from Lincoln's Inn Fields, faster then out of Holborn and finally leaving London altogether. I mentioned that my homeless friend told me about his mother's home up north. I wagered that she may welcome us to Bridbydale with open arms, carrying as I was her long-missing granddaughter and news of her son.