17

HUMMINGBIRD

Trochilidae

It was raining, thin lines of wet running down the train window as they sped through the Italian countryside.

The rain was a completely inconsequential observation, it was always raining somewhere on the planet, but Emily realized the weather was something she used to pay attention to. It used to set the mood, the plan for the day, determined when to go for a walk, or if they would visit a garden center, plant some seedlings, bring the washing in before the storm arrived. It would make her decide if it should be meatballs or barbeque for dinner, and whether she needed to take a jumper when she cycled into town.

Still dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, Emily felt the chill on her bare limbs as she rummaged through her bag for another layer. As she shrugged on a thin black cardigan, she thought about how unstructured, how spontaneous, her life had become, which seemed ridiculous, given she was being sent in a very clear direction.

When was the last time I had a bath? she wondered. When had she last lazed underneath warm bubbles and lost herself in a book? She stared out of the window, rain smudging the view, and tried to think of the last moment she had spent at rest, at peace.

Tyler had turned everything upside down. The feeling of being alone, of being separated from the world, had only intensified since Rome. She could still remember the sensation of being carried in his arms, feel the vibration of his heart, beating against her own.

Her sketchbook lay open, revealing a few pictures earlier made of the starlings, all the shapes that she had seen. But they wouldn’t quite come together in the way that she wanted, and all she had so far was just a tangled mess of lines that vaguely resembled a tornado.

Phoebe and Tyler sat close to each other in the seats opposite. Her legs were tangled up in his lap, and she stroked his hair while they had a halfhearted argument about Romeo and Juliet. Emily had tuned them out, tried instead to focus on the pitch and timbre of voices from the other passengers, not caring that she had no idea what was being said.

There was a woman on the phone, having a heated discussion with someone on the other end. Her words were like staccato drums, every so often rising into a shout that seemed to explode, like the blast from a trumpet, and make the elderly man seated next to her jump.

An orchestra of words. Emily swapped seats, peered behind her down the aisle as she mentally put each person in the carriage into a different section of the orchestra. The children would be the strings, all fighting one another for attention; the group of women hunched close together could be flutes, their whispers and laughter skipping over the surface of all the other instruments. Then the man at the far end, trussed up in a three-piece suit and frowning at his computer screen, a bass drum, perhaps, or even cymbals that he would clash together theatrically when he found the answer to whatever was causing that line between his eyes.