Imago Bird by Nicholas Mosley Page B

the courtyard below. He was saying something like—“Now hold on with your left hand till you’ve got a better hold with your right”—or—“Try to get that knee an inch or two closer than that to the drainpipe.” That old know-all. Walking in the garden. Treating it as if it were a purely mechanical predicament. Which it was, partly. A way of getting out of it. To put it in a different context How did he know? When he got out of that garden? My mother and sister and Aunt Mavis had come out into the courtyard and were saying things like—“Call the fire brigade!”—and my father was saying—“No, he’s doing all right.” And me stuck up on my tightrope and just about dying. And he was telling the others to go back into the house. Then I got one hand and one foot on to the drainpipe. It was not all that difficult. With someone else below me, and watching and talking. With language doing what it is good at: exorcising: and then something magical takes over. One’s being able to fly, suddenly, like an arrow. Straight to the target. After one has done all the talking. Then I was climbing down the drainpipe. Or perhaps it was not anything like twenty feet to the railings below. My father was saying—“It’s good to know that one can get down from the top floor if there’s a fire.” You see, this is the point of the story: to have got the whole thing out onto somethingdifferent; where we could see ourselves; from another framework. And so not be trapped. And I was looking down at my knee that was slightly bleeding. You see, this was how I knew what to do about Sheila when she was behind her bathroom door. One does pass on, in some way, acquired learning. And then we were going into the house, my father and I. And my father was saying—“The problem now of course is how ever again to get back into the lavatory.” I said “You can push a piece of paper under the door and then work the key through so that it falls on the paper.” My father said “That’s brilliant” We were going up the stairs to the first floor. My father said “Do you think there’s a big enough gap beneath the door?” I said “Yes, they tried to push through a sandwich.” My father said “A large sandwich?” I said “No, a small sandwich.” We were by this time outside the sitting room on the first floor. My mother and my sister and Aunt Mavis were watching. They were like actors on the edge of a stage trying to look like the Eumenides. My father said “One of the odd things is, that people are absolutely brilliant at doing things like climbing down drainpipes and getting keys from the wrong sides of doors, but are absolutely hopeless at things like knowing what to do about their feelings.” I said “Why is this?” My father said “There’s some theory about the human brain being superimposed on a much older brain, of some mammal or even reptile or something, but I don’t think that’s very well authenticated.” We were going on up the stairs to the bathroom. I said “Do you think things will get better?” He said “Oh I think so, don’t you?” Then—“But I think it will depend on two things, one, the way the wind changes; and two, on a person’s being in some sort of readiness to move in any of several ways when it does.”’
    Then, to Dr Anders, I said—‘Oh I know I’m quite like my parents, I like them, why shouldn’t I? I’m even like my mother; who came in to see me that night and sat on the end of my bed as if she were a statue on the banks of the Nile; and onto whose shoulder I put my head and cried: and if she did not hold me quite as tightly as I would have liked then isn’t this because she wants to respect people, so that it will be the wind and not herself that will carry them when it