Surprise

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  I looked at him. In? Deal? It took me a moment to absorb and understand what he was saying. He didn’t merely want to buy a dozen Tigers for his team, he wanted to become—my partner? Had God spoken from the whirlwind and asked to be my partner, I wouldn’t have been more surprised. I stammered, and stuttered, and said yes. I put out my hand. But then I pulled it back. “What kind of partnership did you have in mind?” I asked. I was daring to negotiate with God. I couldn’t believe my nerve. Nor could Bowerman. He looked bemused. “Fifty-fifty,” he said. “Well, you’ll have to put up half the money.” “Of course.” “I figure the first order will be for a thousand dollars. Your half will be five hundred.” “I’m good for that.” When the waitress dropped off the check for the two hamburgers, we split that, too. Fifty-fifty. I REMEMBER IT as the next day, or maybe sometime in the next few days or weeks, and yet all the documents contradict my memory. Letters, diaries, appointment books—they all definitively show it taking place much later. But I remember what I remember, and there must be a reason why I remember it the way I do. As we left the restaurant that day, I can see Bowerman putting on his ball cap, I can see him straightening his string tie, I can hear him saying: “I’ll need you to meet my lawyer, John Jaqua. He can help us get this in writing.” Either way. Days later, weeks later, years later, the meeting happened like this. I pulled up to Bowerman’s stone fortress and marveled, as I always did, at the setting. Remote. Not many folks made it out there. Along Coburg Road to Mackenzie Drive until you found a winding dirt lane that went a couple miles up the hills into the woods. Eventually you came to a clearing with rosebushes, solitary trees, and a pleasant house, small but solid, with a stone face. Bowerman had built it with his bare hands. As I slipped my Valiant into park, I wondered how on earth he’d managed all that backbreaking labor by himself. The man who moves a mountain begins by carrying away small stones. Wrapped around the house was a wide wooden porch, with several camp chairs—he’d built that by himself, too. It afforded sweeping views of the McKenzie River, and it wouldn’t have taken much convincing to have me believing Bowerman had laid the river between its banks as well. Now I saw Bowerman standing on the porch. He squinted and strode down the steps toward my car. I don’t remember a lot of small talk as he got in. I just slammed it into drive and set a course for his lawyer’s house.

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  moments of my life. No matter how it turned out, I didn’t want to let it pass without embracing it, acknowledging it. So I stared at the columns. I admired the sunlight bouncing off the marble. I stood there for the longest time... “You coming?” Werschkul said. It was a blazing summer day. My hand, the one gripping my briefcase, was drenched with sweat. My suit was soaked through. I looked as if I’d walked through a rainstorm. How was I going to meet a U.S. senator in this condition? How was I going to shake his hand? How was I going to think straight? We entered Hatfield’s outer office, and one of his aides led us into a waiting room. A bullpen. I thought of the births of my two sons. I thought of Penny. I thought of my parents. I thought of Bowerman. I thought of Grelle. I thought of Pre. I thought of Kitami. I thought of James the Just. “The senator will see you now,” the aide said. She led us into a large, refreshingly cool office. Hatfield came out from behind his desk. He welcomed us collegially, as fellow Oregonians, and led us to a sitting area by his window. We all sat. Hatfield smiled, Werschkul smiled. I mentioned to Hatfield that we were distantly related. My mother, I believed, was his third cousin. We talked a bit about Roseburg. Then we all cleared our throats and the air conditioner soughed. “Ah, well, Senator,” I said, “the reason we’ve come to see you today—” He held up his hand. “I know all about your situation. My staff has read Werschkul on American Selling Price, and briefed me on it. What can I do to help?” I stopped, stunned. I turned to Werschkul, whose face was the color of his pink bow tie. We’d spent so much time rehearsing this negotiation, preparing to convince Hatfield of the rightness of our cause, we weren’t ready for the possibility of... success. We leaned into each other. In half whispers we talked about different ways Hatfield might help. Werschkul thought he should write a letter to the president of the United States, or maybe the head of customs. I wanted him to pick up the phone. We couldn’t agree. We started to argue. The air conditioner seemed to be laughing at us. Finally, I shushed Werschkul, shushed the air conditioner, turned to Hatfield. “Senator,” I said, “we were not prepared for you to be so obliging today. The truth is, we don’t know what we want. We’ll have to get back to you.” I walked out, not looking back to see if Werschkul was coming. I FLEW HOME in time to preside over two milestones. In downtown Portland we opened a thirty-five-hundred-square-foot retail palace, which was instantly mobbed. The lines at the cash registers were endless. People were clamoring to try on... everything. I had to jump in and help.

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  She led us into a large, refreshingly cool office. Hatfield came out from behind his desk. He welcomed us collegially, as fellow Oregonians, and led us to a sitting area by his window. We all sat. Hatfield smiled, Werschkul smiled. I mentioned to Hatfield that we were distantly related. My mother, I believed, was his third cousin. We talked a bit about Roseburg. Then we all cleared our throats and the air conditioner soughed. “Ah, well, Senator,” I said, “the reason we’ve come to see you today—” He held up his hand. “I know all about your situation. My staff has read Werschkul on American Selling Price, and briefed me on it. What can I do to help?” I stopped, stunned. I turned to Werschkul, whose face was the color of his pink bow tie. We’d spent so much time rehearsing this negotiation, preparing to convince Hatfield of the rightness of our cause, we weren’t ready for the possibility of… success. We leaned into each other. In half whispers we talked about different ways Hatfield might help. Werschkul thought he should write a letter to the president of the United States, or maybe the head of customs. I wanted him to pick up the phone. We couldn’t agree. We started to argue. The air conditioner seemed to be laughing at us. Finally, I shushed Werschkul, shushed the air conditioner, turned to Hatfield. “Senator,” I said, “we were not prepared for you to be so obliging today. The truth is, we don’t know what we want. We’ll have to get back to you.” I walked out, not looking back to see if Werschkul was coming. I FLEW HOME in time to preside over two milestones. In downtown Portland we opened a thirty-five-hundred-square-foot retail palace, which was instantly mobbed. The lines at the cash registers were endless. People were clamoring to try on… everything. I had to jump in and help. For a moment I was back in my parents’ living room, measuring feet, fitting runners with the right shoes. It was a ball, a blast, and a timely reminder of why we were in this. Then we moved offices again. We needed still more space, and we found it in a forty-six-thousand-square-foot building with all the amenities—steam room, library, gym, and more conference rooms than I could count. Signing the lease, I remembered those nights, driving around with Woodell. I shook my head. But I had no sense of victory. “It can all disappear tomorrow,” I whispered. We were big, there was no denying it. To make sure we weren’t too big for our britches, as Mom Hatfield would have said, we moved the way we’d always moved. All three hundred employees came in on the weekend and packed up their belongings into their own cars. We provided pizza and beer, and some of the warehouse guys loaded the heavier stuff into vans, and then we all slowly caravanned down the road.

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  1977 His name was M. Frank Rudy, he was a former aerospace engineer, and he was a true original. One look at him told you he was a nutty professor, though it wasn’t until years later that I learned the full extent of his nuttiness. (He kept a meticulous diary of his sex life and bowel movements.) He had a business partner, Bob Bogert, another brainiac, and they had a Crazy Idea, and together they were going to pitch us—that’s the sum total of what I knew that morning in March 1977 as we settled around the conference table. I wasn’t even sure how these guys reached us, or how they’d arranged this meeting. “Okay, fellas,” I said, “what’ve you got?” It was a beautiful day, I remember. The light outside the room was a buttery pale yellow, and the sky was blue for the first time in months, so I was distracted, a little spring feverish, as Rudy leaned his weight on the edge of the conference table and smiled. “Mr. Knight, we’ve come up with a way to inject... air... into a running shoe.” I frowned and dropped my pencil. “Why?” I said. “For greater cushioning,” he said. “For greater support. For the ride of a lifetime.” I stared. “You’re kidding me, right?” I’d heard a lot of silliness from a lot of different people in the shoe business, but this. Oh. Brother. Rudy handed me a pair of soles that looked as if they’d been teleported from the twenty-second century. Big, clunky, they were clear thick plastic and inside were —bubbles? I turned them over. “Bubbles?” I said. “Pressurized air bags,” he said. I set down the soles and gave Rudy a closer look, a full head-to-toe. Six-three, lanky, with unruly dark hair, bottle-bottom glasses, a lopsided grin, and a severe vitamin D deficiency, I thought. Not enough sunshine. Or else a long-lost member of the Addams Family. He saw me appraising him, saw my skepticism, and wasn’t the least fazed. He walked to the blackboard, picked up a piece of chalk, and began writing numbers, symbols, equations. He explained at some length why an air shoe would work, why it would never go flat, why it was the Next Big Thing. When he finished I stared at the blackboard. As a trained accountant I’d spent a good part of my life looking at blackboards, but this Rudy fella’s scribbles were something else. Indecipherable. Humans have been wearing shoes since the Ice Age, I said, and the underlying design hasn’t changed all that much in forty thousand years. There hadn’t really been a breakthrough since the late 1800s, when cobblers started lasting left and right shoes differently, and rubber companies started making soles. It didn’t seem all too likely that, at this late date in history, something so new, so revolutionary, was going to be dreamed up. “Air shoes” sounded to me like jet packs and moving sidewalks. Comic book stuff. Rudy still wasn’t discouraged.

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  We’d spent so much time rehearsing this negotiation, preparing to convince Hatfield of the rightness of our cause, we weren’t ready for the possibility of… success. We leaned into each other. In half whispers we talked about different ways Hatfield might help. Werschkul thought he should write a letter to the president of the United States, or maybe the head of customs. I wanted him to pick up the phone. We couldn’t agree. We started to argue. The air conditioner seemed to be laughing at us. Finally, I shushed Werschkul, shushed the air conditioner, turned to Hatfield. “Senator,” I said, “we were not prepared for you to be so obliging today. The truth is, we don’t know what we want. We’ll have to get back to you.” I walked out, not looking back to see if Werschkul was coming. I FLEW HOME in time to preside over two milestones. In downtown Portland we opened a thirty-five-hundred-square-foot retail palace, which was instantly mobbed. The lines at the cash registers were endless. People were clamoring to try on… everything. I had to jump in and help. For a moment I was back in my parents’ living room, measuring feet, fitting runners with the right shoes. It was a ball, a blast, and a timely reminder of why we were in this. Then we moved offices again. We needed still more space, and we found it in a forty-six-thousand-square-foot building with all the amenities—steam room, library, gym, and more conference rooms than I could count. Signing the lease, I remembered those nights, driving around with Woodell. I shook my head. But I had no sense of victory. “It can all disappear tomorrow,” I whispered. We were big, there was no denying it. To make sure we weren’t too big for our britches, as Mom Hatfield would have said, we moved the way we’d always moved. All three hundred employees came in on the weekend and packed up their belongings into their own cars. We provided pizza and beer, and some of the warehouse guys loaded the heavier stuff into vans, and then we all slowly caravanned down the road. I told the warehouse guys to leave the baseball-mitt chair behind. IN THE FALL of 1979 I flew to Washington for a second meeting with the bureau-kraken. This time he wasn’t so feisty. Hatfield had been in touch. As had Oregon’s other senator, Bob Packwood, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, which had review authority on Treasury. “I’m sick… and tired ,” said the bureau-kraken, pointing one of his tentacles at me, “of hearing from your high-placed friends .” “Oh, sorry,” I said. “That mustn’t be any fun. But you’ll be hearing from them until this situation is resolved.” “Do you realize,” he hissed, “that I don’t need this job? Do you know that my wife… has… money ! I don’t need to work, you know.” “Good for you. And her.” The sooner you retire, I thought, the better.

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  I don’t know why I was surprised to see him. He needed to sign the papers, cut the check. He reached out his hand. A bigger surprise. I shook it. We all took seats around the table. Before each of us stood a stack of twenty documents, and each document had dozens of dotted lines. We signed until our fingers tingled. It took at least an hour. The mood was tense, the silence profound, except for one moment. I recall that Strasser let forth with a huge sneeze. Like an elephant. And I also recall that he was begrudgingly wearing a brand-new navy-blue suit, which he’d had tailored by his mother-in-law, who put all the extra material into the breast pocket. Strasser, affirming his status as the world’s foremost antisartorialist, now reached into his pocket and pulled out a long string of extra gabardine and used it to blow his nose. At last a clerk collected all the documents, and we all capped our pens, and Hilliard instructed Kitami to hand over the check. Kitami looked up, dazed. “I have no check.” What did I see in his face at that moment? Was it spite? Was it defeat? I don’t know. I looked away, scanned the faces around the conference table. They were easier to read. The lawyers were in total shock. A man comes to a settlement conference without a check? No one spoke. Now Kitami looked ashamed; he knew he’d erred. “I will mail check when I return to Japan,” he said. Hilliard was gruff. “See that it’s mailed as soon as possible,” he told his client. I picked up my briefcase and followed Cousin Houser and Strasser out of the conference room. Behind me came Kitami and the other lawyers. We all stood and waited for the elevator. When the doors opened we all crowded on, shoulder to shoulder, Strasser himself taking up half the car. No one spoke as we dropped to the street. No one breathed. Awkward doesn’t begin to describe it. Surely, I thought, Washington and Cornwallis weren’t forced to ride the same horse away from Yorktown. STRASSER CAME TO the office some days after the verdict, to wind things down, to say good-bye. We steered him into the conference room and everyone gathered around and gave him a thunderous ovation. His eyes were teary as he raised a hand and acknowledged our cheers and thanks. “Speech!” someone yelled. “I’ve made so many close friends here,” he said, choking up. “I’m going to miss you all. And I’m going to miss working on this case. Working on the side of right.” Applause. “I’m going to miss defending this wonderful company.” Woodell and Hayes and I looked at each other. One of us said: “So why don’t you come work here?” Strasser turned red and laughed. That laugh—I was struck again by the incongruous falsetto. He waved his hand, pshaw, as if we were kidding.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  Two days before the service something very strange happened on the hill. We’d been walking up a hedgerow running down the edge of a field of undersown stubble. There was a pheasant in the hedge; I’d heard it cluck and run, rat-wise, along the damp and nettly ditch, and Mabel had heard it too. She’d crashed over the hedge and perched out of sight at the top, facing away from me. Her blood was up and mine too. I shouldered my way into the hedge, knowing that any second now the pheasant would rocket out in front of me in a burnished clatter of feathers. I pushed my head through the hedge. Heard a whoosh of air and felt a staggering blow. I reeled. Coshed by a goshawk! First only blackness, then a field of stars. Then a weird proprioceptive sense that I was wearing a crown of thorns; a complicated halo of pain around my head. She’d bounced off me, left eight talon incisions behind, and was back at the top of the tree, craning to see the pheasant, which had done what all pheasants do best: escape. I shook my head dully. She thought I was the pheasant. She didn’t know it was me. A strange buzzing in my ears, and then a muffled calm as the endorphins kicked in. I held my hand out and whistled her down to my fist, then mechanically started working the rest of the hedge-line. We were walking into the sun at this point, and I started taking a warm, distinct pleasure in the fuzzy gold aura that bathed us. Light-headed, slightly unsure of my footing, I finally wondered, Why is my vision strange, and why do my eyes sting? Then, Why is the goshawk bating at my face? It took me a while to work out why both. I rubbed my eyes and my hand came away soaked, dramatically and Shakespearianly, in blood. I pulled off my glasses. They were covered in it. Blood was running in streams down my forehead, into my left eye, and was now attracting the attention of a hungry goshawk. Christ, I thought, this is a bit Edgar Allan Poe. I used my sleeve and some wet grass to get the worst off. Luckily this was sufficient to make the goshawk uninterested in eating me. I felt for the talon incision: a half-inch long, deep slash right between my eyes. Ah, yes, the sixth chakra, the seat of concealed wisdom, now rouged with an austringer’s bindi. I pressed the place hard with my fingers until it stopped bleeding.

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  Had God spoken from the whirlwind and asked to be my partner, I wouldn’t have been more surprised. I stammered, and stuttered, and said yes. I put out my hand. But then I pulled it back. “What kind of partnership did you have in mind?” I asked. I was daring to negotiate with God. I couldn’t believe my nerve. Nor could Bowerman. He looked bemused. “Fifty-fifty,” he said. “Well, you’ll have to put up half the money.” “Of course.” “I figure the first order will be for a thousand dollars. Your half will be five hundred.” “I’m good for that.” When the waitress dropped off the check for the two hamburgers, we split that, too. Fifty-fifty. I REMEMBER IT as the next day, or maybe sometime in the next few days or weeks, and yet all the documents contradict my memory. Letters, diaries, appointment books—they all definitively show it taking place much later. But I remember what I remember, and there must be a reason why I remember it the way I do. As we left the restaurant that day, I can see Bowerman putting on his ball cap, I can see him straightening his string tie, I can hear him saying: “I’ll need you to meet my lawyer, John Jaqua. He can help us get this in writing.” Either way. Days later, weeks later, years later, the meeting happened like this. I pulled up to Bowerman’s stone fortress and marveled, as I always did, at the setting. Remote. Not many folks made it out there. Along Coburg Road to Mackenzie Drive until you found a winding dirt lane that went a couple miles up the hills into the woods. Eventually you came to a clearing with rosebushes, solitary trees, and a pleasant house, small but solid, with a stone face. Bowerman had built it with his bare hands. As I slipped my Valiant into park, I wondered how on earth he’d managed all that backbreaking labor by himself. The man who moves a mountain begins by carrying away small stones. Wrapped around the house was a wide wooden porch, with several camp chairs—he’d built that by himself, too. It afforded sweeping views of the McKenzie River, and it wouldn’t have taken much convincing to have me believing Bowerman had laid the river between its banks as well. Now I saw Bowerman standing on the porch. He squinted and strode down the steps toward my car. I don’t remember a lot of small talk as he got in. I just slammed it into drive and set a course for his lawyer’s house. Besides being Bowerman’s lawyer and best friend, Jaqua was his next-door neighbor. He owned fifteen hundred acres at the base of Bowerman’s mountain, prime bottomland right on the McKenzie. Driving there, I couldn’t imagine how this was going to be good for me. I got along fine with Bowerman, sure, and we had ourselves a deal, but lawyers always messed things up. Lawyers specialized in messing things up.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  I return exhausted from our latest attempt: a hellish, traumatic afternoon, fractious, gusty and sour. I’d met Stuart and Mandy out on the hill. ‘I’ll run the dogs for you,’ he said. ‘See if we can get a point for her.’ But Mabel wasn’t having any of it. She bated and twittered and glared. She hated the dogs, she hated it all. I hated it too. I fed her up and drove us home. Then I started pulling clothes from a wardrobe, attempting to transform myself into a cheerful, civilised person who does things like go to art galleries. I brush the burrs from my hair, wash my face, shrug on a skirt, push the sleeves of a cashmere jumper back to my elbows, paint a black line over each eyelid. Foundation. Mascara. A smear of lipsalve to seal my wind-dried mouth, a pair of shiny boots with heels that make me worry that I can’t run in them – for running seems essential these days – and I check the result in a mirror. It is a good disguise. I’m pleased with how convincing it seems. But it’s getting late, and I’m running against the clock. I have twenty minutes to get to a gallery for the opening of an art exhibition. I’m supposed to give a talk about it in a few weeks’ time and I have to see the bloody thing first. I battle with sleep as I drive, and by the time I reach the gallery doors my knees are ready to give way. I expect a room of paintings and sculpture. But when I open the doors there’s something so unexpected inside my brain turns cartwheels. It is a full-sized bird hide built of rough-hewn pine, and it is – I read the sign – an exact copy of a real structure in California. Seeing it in the gallery is as disconcerting as opening a fridge door and finding a house within. The hide is dark inside and packed with people peering through a window in one wall. I look out of it too. Oh! I see the trick. It is a neat one. The artist has filmed the view from the real hide, and is projecting it onto a screen beyond the window. It shows a soaring California condor, a huge, dusty-black carrion-eating vulture rendered nearly extinct by persecution, habitat destruction and poisoning from lead-contaminated carcasses. By the late 1980s only twenty-seven birds remained, and in a last-ditch effort to save the species they were trapped and taken into captivity so that their domestic-bred young could be used to repopulate the wild. Some people tried to stop this happening. They believed honestly and sincerely that once all the birds were captive, condors would cease to exist. These birds are made of wildness, they argued. A captive condor is a condor no more.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  As I put my parcels down upon the kitchen floor I heard voices in the parlour - Florence‘s, and Annie’s. The doors between were all ajar, and I could hear them perfectly: ‘She works at a printer‘s,’ Annie was saying. ‘The handsomest woman you ever saw in your life.’ ‘Oh Annie, you always say that.’ ‘No, really. She was sitting at a desk at a page of text, and the sun was on her and making her shine. When she raised her eyes to me I held my hand out to her. I said, “Are you Sue Bridehead? My name’s Jude ... ”’ Florence laughed: they had all just been reading the latest chapter of that novel, in a magazine; I daresay Annie would not have made the joke, had she known how the story would turn out. Now Florence said: ‘And what did she say to that? That she wasn’t sure, but thought Sue Bridehead might work at the other office... ?’ ‘Not at all. What she said was: Allelujah! Then she took my hand and - oh, then I knew I was in love, for sure!’ Flo laughed again - but in a thoughtful kind of way. After a second she murmured something that I did not catch, but which made her friend laugh. Then Annie said, still with a smile to her voice: ‘And how is that handsome uncle of yours?’ Uncle? I thought, moving to warm my hands against the stove. What uncle is that? I didn’t feel like an eavesdropper. I heard Florence give a tut. ‘She’s not my uncle,’ she said - she said it very clearly. ‘She’s not my uncle, as you well know.’ ‘Not your uncle?’ cried Annie then. ‘A girl like that - with hair like that - growling about in your parlour in a pair of chamois trousers like a regular little bricksetter ...’ At that, I didn’t care if I were eavesdropping or not: I took a swift silent step into the passageway, and listened rather harder. Florence laughed again. ‘I promise you,’ she said, ‘she’s not my uncle.’ ‘Why not? Why ever not? Florrie, I despair of you. It’s unnatural, what you’re doing. It’s like - like having a roast in the pantry, and eating nothing but bits of crusts and cups of water. What I say is, if you’re not going to make an uncle of her, then, really, consider your friends, and pass her on to somebody who will.’ ‘You ain’t having her!’ ‘I don’t want anyone, now I’ve found Sue Bridehead. But there, you see, you do care for her!’ ‘Of course I care for her,’ said Florence quietly. Now I was listening so hard I felt I could hear her blinking, pursing her lips. ‘Well then! Bring her to the boy tomorrow night’ - I was sure that’s what she said. ‘Bring her to the boy.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Beyond it was a girl - a rather handsome girl, with dark hair showing beneath a velvet tam-o‘-shanter. When she saw me she said, ‘Oh! Is Florrie not at home, then?’ and looked quickly at my arms, my dress, my eye, and then my hair. I said, ‘Miss Banner isn’t here, no. I’m on my own.’ I sniffed, and thought I caught the smell of burning onions. ‘Look here,’ I went on, ‘I’m doing a bit of frying. Do you mind... ?’ I ran back to the kitchen to rescue my dish. To my surprise I heard the thud of the front door, and found that the girl had followed me. When I looked round she was unbuttoning her coat, and gazing about her in wonder. ‘My God,’ she said - her voice had a bit of breeding to it, but she was not at all proud. ‘I called because I saw the step, and thought Florrie must have had some sort of fit. Now I see she’s either lost her head entirely, or had the fairies in.’ I said, ‘I was me that did it all ...’ She laughed, showing her teeth. ‘Then you, I suppose, must be the fairy king himself. Or is it, the fairy queen? I cannot tell if your hair is at odds with your costume, or the other way around. If that’ - she laughed again - ‘means anything.’ I didn’t know what it might mean. I said only, rather primly, that I was waiting for my hair to grow; and she answered, ‘Ah’, and her smile grew a little smaller. Then she said, in a puzzled sort of way: ‘And you’re staying with Florrie and Ralph, are you?’ ‘They let me sleep last night in the parlour, as a favour; but today I have to move on. In fact - what time have you?’ She showed me her watch: a quarter to five, and much later than I had expected. ‘I really must go very soon.’ I took the pan off the stove - the onions had burned a little browner than I wanted - and began to look about me for a bowl. ‘Oh,’ she said, waving her hand at my haste, ‘have a cup of tea with me, at least.’ She put some water on to boil, and I began jabbing at the potatoes with a fork. The dish, as I assembled it, did not look quite like the meal that Mrs Milne had used to make; and when I tasted it, it was not so savoury. I set it on the side, and frowned at it. The girl handed me a cup. Then she leaned against a cupboard, quite at her ease, and sipped at her own tea, and then yawned. ‘What a day I have had!’ she said. ‘Do I stink like a rat? I’ve been all afternoon down a drain-pipe.’ ‘Down a drain-pipe?’ ‘Down a drain-pipe.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  Later, when I picked her up again, the mood in the room had changed. She had done this before; was no longer entirely certain I was a monster. She bated, once, towards the floor, but it was a bate to the floor, not away from me in blind terror. I lifted her back onto the glove. We sat some more. Then, instead of fixing her gaze on me in horror, she began to examine her surroundings. New things. Shelves, walls, floor: she inspected them all carefully with small, sideways movements of her head. Hawk parallax, judging perfect distances. She observed the ceiling as far as it would go, the lines of the bookshelves beneath it, cocked her head to consider the strip of messy tassels along the edge of the rug. Then came a decisive moment. It was not the one I was hoping for, but it was thrilling all the same. Regarding the room with simple curiosity, she turned her head and saw me. And jumped. Jumped exactly like a human in surprise. I felt the scratch of her talons and her shock, too, cold and electric. That was the moment. Until a minute ago I was so terrifying I was all that existed. But then she had forgotten me. Only for a fraction of a second, but it was enough. The forgetting was delightful because it was a sign that the hawk was starting to accept me. But there was a deeper, darker thrill. It was that I had been forgotten. 11 Leaving home Keys in pocket, hawk on fist, and off we go. Leaving the house that evening is frightening. Somewhere in my mind ropes uncoil and fall. It feels like an unmooring, as if I were an airship ascending on its maiden flight into darkness. Stepping over the low railings into the park I head for the thick black avenue of limes and the lamplit leaves beneath. Everything seems hot and clean and dangerous and my senses are screwed to their utmost, as if someone had told me the park was full of hungry lions. Night air moves in the spaces between the trees. Moths make dusty circles about the lamps. I look down and see each pale blade of grass casts two separate shadows from the two nearest lamps, and so do I, and in the distance comes the collapsing echo of a moving train and somewhere closer a dog barks twice and there’s broken glass by the path and next to it a feather from the breast of a woodpigeon judging by its size and curl. It lies upon the grass as if held just above it, gleaming softly in the darkness. ‘Bloody hell, Mabel,’ I whisper. ‘Who spiked my tea with acid?’ Night has never looked like this before. I walk deeper into this lamplit world, wondering at my heightened perception and reassured by how unconcerned the hawk is. She does not look up.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  Two days before the service something very strange happened on the hill. We’d been walking up a hedgerow running down the edge of a field of undersown stubble. There was a pheasant in the hedge; I’d heard it cluck and run, rat-wise, along the damp and nettly ditch, and Mabel had heard it too. She’d crashed over the hedge and perched out of sight at the top, facing away from me. Her blood was up and mine too. I shouldered my way into the hedge, knowing that any second now the pheasant would rocket out in front of me in a burnished clatter of feathers. I pushed my head through the hedge. Heard a whoosh of air and felt a staggering blow. I reeled. Coshed by a goshawk! First only blackness, then a field of stars. Then a weird proprioceptive sense that I was wearing a crown of thorns; a complicated halo of pain around my head. She’d bounced off me, left eight talon incisions behind, and was back at the top of the tree, craning to see the pheasant, which had done what all pheasants do best: escape. I shook my head dully. She thought I was the pheasant. She didn’t know it was me. A strange buzzing in my ears, and then a muffled calm as the endorphins kicked in. I held my hand out and whistled her down to my fist, then mechanically started working the rest of the hedge-line. We were walking into the sun at this point, and I started taking a warm, distinct pleasure in the fuzzy gold aura that bathed us. Light-headed, slightly unsure of my footing, I finally wondered, Why is my vision strange, and why do my eyes sting? Then, Why is the goshawk bating at my face? It took me a while to work out why both. I rubbed my eyes and my hand came away soaked, dramatically and Shakespearianly, in blood. I pulled off my glasses. They were covered in it. Blood was running in streams down my forehead, into my left eye, and was now attracting the attention of a hungry goshawk. Christ, I thought, this is a bit Edgar Allan Poe. I used my sleeve and some wet grass to get the worst off. Luckily this was sufficient to make the goshawk uninterested in eating me. I felt for the talon incision: a half-inch long, deep slash right between my eyes. Ah, yes, the sixth chakra, the seat of concealed wisdom, now rouged with an austringer’s bindi. I pressed the place hard with my fingers until it stopped bleeding.

• From Educated (2018)

  “People take drugs for pain,” he said. “It’s normal .” I must have winced at the word “normal,” because he went quiet. He filled a glass of water and set it in front of me, then gently pushed the pills forward until they touched my arm. I picked one up. I’d never seen a pill up close before. It was smaller than I’d expected. I swallowed it, then the other. For as long as I could remember, whenever I was in pain, whether from a cut or a toothache, Mother would make a tincture of lobelia and skullcap. It had never lessened the pain, not one degree. Because of this, I had come to respect pain, even revere it, as necessary and untouchable. Twenty minutes after I swallowed the red pills, the earache was gone. I couldn’t comprehend its absence. I spent the afternoon swinging my head from left to right, trying to jog the pain loose again. I thought if I could shout loudly enough, or move quickly enough, perhaps the earache would return and I would know the medicine had been a sham after all. Charles watched in silence but he must have found my behavior absurd, especially when I began to pull on my ear, which still ached dully, so I could test the limits of this strange witchcraft. —MOTHER WAS SUPPOSED TO drive me to BYU the next morning, but during the night, she was called to deliver a baby. There was a car sitting in the driveway—a Kia Sephia Dad had bought from Tony a few weeks before. The keys were in the ignition. I loaded my stuff into it and drove it to Utah, figuring the car would just about make up for the money Dad owed me. I guess he figured that, too, because he never said a word about it. I moved into an apartment half a mile from the university. I had new roommates. Robin was tall and athletic, and the first time I saw her she was wearing running shorts that were much too short, but I didn’t gape at her. When I met Jenni she was drinking a Diet Coke. I didn’t stare at that, either, because I’d seen Charles drink dozens of them. Robin was the oldest, and for some reason she was sympathetic to me. Somehow she understood that my missteps came from ignorance, not intention, and she corrected me gently but frankly. She told me exactly what I would need to do, or not do, to get along with the other girls in the apartment. No keeping rotten food in the cupboards or leaving rancid dishes in the sink. Robin explained this at an apartment meeting. When she’d finished another roommate, Megan, cleared her throat. “I’d like to remind everyone to wash their hands after they use the bathroom,” she said. “And not just with water, but with soap.” Robin rolled her eyes.

• From Educated (2018)

  near his face but he wasn’t looking at it. He was looking at us. I opened the picture book I’d purchased for the class so I could take a closer look. Something was written under the image in italics but I couldn’t understand it. It had one of those black-hole words, right in the middle, devouring the rest. I’d seen other students ask questions, so I raised my hand. The professor called on me, and I read the sentence aloud. When I came to the word, I paused. “I don’t know this word,” I said. “What does it mean?” There was silence. Not a hush, not a muting of the noise, but utter, almost violent silence. No papers shuffled, no pencils scratched. The professor’s lips tightened. “Thanks for that,” he said, then returned to his notes. I scarcely moved for the rest of the lecture. I stared at my shoes, wondering what had happened, and why, whenever I looked up, there was always someone staring at me as if I was a freak. Of course I was a freak, and I knew it, but I didn’t understand how they knew it. When the bell rang, Vanessa shoved her notebook into her pack. Then she paused and said, “You shouldn’t make fun of that. It’s not a joke.” She walked away before I could reply. I stayed in my seat until everyone had gone, pretending the zipper on my coat was stuck so I could avoid looking anyone in the eye. Then I went straight to the computer lab to look up the word “Holocaust.” I don’t know how long I sat there reading about it, but at some point I’d read enough. I leaned back and stared at the ceiling. I suppose I was in shock, but whether it was the shock of learning about something horrific, or the shock of learning about my own ignorance, I’m not sure. I do remember imagining for a moment, not the camps, not the pits or chambers of gas, but my mother’s face. A wave of emotion took me, a feeling so intense, so unfamiliar, I wasn’t sure what it was. It made me want to shout at her, at my own mother, and that frightened me. I searched my memories. In some ways the word “Holocaust” wasn’t wholly unfamiliar. Perhaps Mother had taught me about it, when we were picking rosehips or tincturing hawthorn. I did seem to have a vague knowledge that Jews had been killed somewhere, long ago. But I’d thought it was a small conflict, like the Boston Massacre, which Dad

• From Educated (2018)

  accurate. I heard Mother tell a room of devoted faces that sixty-five percent of Dad’s upper body had been burned to the third degree. That was not what I remembered. In my memory the bulk of the damage had been skin-deep—his arms, back and shoulders had hardly been burned at all. It was only his lower face and hands that had been third-degree. But I kept this to myself. For the first time, my parents seemed to be of one mind. Mother no longer moderated Dad’s statements after he left the room, no longer quietly gave her own opinion. She had been transformed by the miracle— transformed into him. I remembered her as a young midwife, so cautious, so meek about the lives over which she had such power. There was little of that meekness in her now. The Lord Himself guided her hands, and no misfortune would occur except by the will of God. — A FEW WEEKS AFTER CHRISTMAS, the University of Cambridge wrote to Dr. Kerry, rejecting my application. “The competition was very steep,” Dr. Kerry told me when I visited his office. I thanked him and stood to go. “One moment,” he said. “Cambridge instructed me to write if I felt there were any gross injustices.” I didn’t understand, so he repeated himself. “I could only help one student,” he said. “They have offered you a place, if you want it.” It seemed impossible that I would really be allowed to go. Then I realized that I would need a passport, and that without a real birth certificate, I was unlikely to get one. Someone like me did not belong at Cambridge. It was as if the universe understood this and was trying to prevent the blasphemy of my going. I applied in person. The clerk laughed out loud at my Delayed Certificate of Birth. “Nine years!” she said. “Nine years is not a delay. Do you have any other documentation?” “Yes,” I said. “But they have different birth dates. Also, one has a different name.” She was still smiling. “Different date and different name? No, that’s not gonna work. There’s no way you’re gonna get a passport.”

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  Birds that can neither fly well nor run fast, they are such easy prey for goshawks that falconers avoid flying them out of a sense of sporting fair play. Mabel had never seen them before, but she looked upon them now as if they had been designed by a kindly deity for her personal delectation. I wasn’t surprised; I’d already discovered that all sorts of predatory taxonomies are buried in a baby goshawk’s brain. A few days earlier I’d seen her looking at a small drawing of partridges in a book I’d left open on the floor. Intrigued, I picked up the book and held it in front of her. She kept her eyes fixed on the picture, even when I moved the book about in the air. No way! I thought. The drawing was in ink; it was stylised and sparse: it caught the feel and form of partridges, but there was no colour or detail to it. I flipped through the book, showed her other drawings: finches, seabirds, thrushes. She ignored them all. Then I showed her a drawing of a pheasant. Her black pupils dilated; she leaned forward and stared down her beak at it, as fascinated as she had been with the partridges. I was amazed. Amazed that she could understand two-dimensional images, and even more amazed that something deep in her brain saw these sparse inked curves as fitting the category gamebirds and had pronounced them worthy of interest. Right on cue I hear a soft clucking noise, and a thin peeping, and Mabel’s head swings round, and mine too, and we see – just there, just ten feet away – a hen pheasant and a line of cheeping, half-feathered poults squeezing themselves under a railing on their way towards the grass. The pheasant sees Mabel and stops dead. She has never seen a goshawk before, but instantly perceives the danger she is in. She crouches to fly, realises this would leave her chicks behind, then considers sitting down and pretending to be a rock, and when she realises the futility of this manouevre – her lacy beige back does not match the sunlit grass, and the hawk has already seen her – all hell breaks loose. She stretches her neck high, puffs out her cheek feathers, beak open in panic, and runs pell-mell out across the pitch. Her chicks follow her desperately, six ungainly clockwork dinosaurs. I am bewildered – there is no safety out there, nowhere to hide, unless the pheasant thinks that putting her chicks amongst the distant moorhens would give them a faint, statistical chance of escape. Mabel. Oh God, Mabel. Mabel is bating at them, bating so hard, wings beating so furiously, that she hangs horizontally in the air. The breeze is cold in my face, my fist pulled towards the fleeing pheasants. She bounces back onto my hand, beak open with exertion, fixes me with a white-hot, angry eye, then bates towards them again. Not here, not now!

• From Educated (2018)

  looking at Mother. Looking helpless. “Do you think—should I call an ambulance?” I think I heard him say that. And if he did, which surely he must have, Mother must have whispered a reply, or maybe she wasn’t able to whisper anything, I don’t know. I’ve always imagined that she asked to be taken home. I was told later that the farmer whose tractor we’d hit rushed from his house. He’d called the police, which we knew would bring trouble because the car wasn’t insured, and none of us had been wearing seatbelts. It took perhaps twenty minutes after the farmer informed Utah Power of the accident for them to switch off the deadly current pulsing through the lines. Then Dad lifted Mother from the station wagon and I saw her face— her eyes, hidden under dark circles the size of plums, and the swelling distorting her soft features, stretching some, compressing others. I don’t know how we got home, or when, but I remember that the mountain face glowed orange in the morning light. Once inside, I watched Tyler spit streams of crimson down the bathroom sink. His front teeth had smashed into the steering wheel and been displaced, so that they jutted backward toward the roof of his mouth. Mother was laid on the sofa. She mumbled that the light hurt her eyes. We closed the blinds. She wanted to be in the basement, where there were no windows, so Dad carried her downstairs and I didn’t see her for several hours, not until that evening, when I used a dull flashlight to bring her dinner. When I saw her, I didn’t know her. Both eyes were a deep purple, so deep they looked black, and so swollen I couldn’t tell whether they were open or closed. She called me Audrey, even after I corrected her twice. “Thank you, Audrey, but just dark and quiet, that’s fine. Dark. Quiet. Thank you. Come check on me again, Audrey, in a little while.” Mother didn’t come out of the basement for a week. Every day the swelling worsened, the black bruises turned blacker. Every night I was sure her face was as marked and deformed as it was possible for a face to be, but every morning it was somehow darker, more tumid. After a week, when the sun went down, we turned off the lights and Mother came upstairs. She looked as if she had two objects strapped to her forehead, large as apples, black as olives.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  But I have been just about busting to know it, ever since I first got a proper look at you.’ She took a breath. ‘You used to work the halls, didn’t you? You used to work the halls, alonger Kitty Butler, and calling yourself plain Nan King. What a turn it give me, when I saw you here first! I never maided for no one famous before.’ I studied the tip of my cigarette, and did not answer her. Her words had given me a kind of jolt: they were not what I had been anticipating at all. Then I said, with a show of laughter: ‘Well, you know, I am hardly famous now. They were all rather long ago, those days.’ ‘Not so long,’ she said. ‘I remember seeing you at Camden Town, and another time at the Peckham Palace. That was with Agnes - how we laughed!’ Her voice sank a little. ‘It was just after that, that my troubles started ...’ I remembered the Peckham Palace very well, for Kitty and I had only played there once. It had been in the December before we opened at the Brit, so rather near to the start of my own troubles. I said, ‘To think of you sitting there, with Agnes beside you; and me upon the stage, with Kitty Butler ...’ She must have caught something in my tone, for she raised her eyes to mine and said: ‘And you don’t see Miss Butler at all, these days ... ?’ And when I shook my head, she looked knowing. ‘Well,’ she said then, ‘it’s something, ain’t it, to have been a star upon the stage!’ I sighed. ‘I suppose it is. But -’ I had thought of something else. ‘You oughtn’t to let Mrs Lethaby hear you say it. She, well, she don’t quite care for the music hall.’ She nodded. ‘I dare say.’ Then the clock upon the mantel struck the hour and, hearing it, she rose, and stubbed her fag out, and flapped her hand before her mouth to wave away the flavour of the smoke. ‘Lord, look at me!’ she cried. ‘I shall have Mrs Hooper after me.’ She reached for my empty coffee-cup, then picked up her tray and went to her scuttle of coal. Then she turned, and grew pink again. She said: ‘Will there be anything else, miss?’ We gazed at one another for the space of a couple of heart-beats. She still had the smudge of coal-dust at her brow. I shifted beneath the sheets, and felt again that slippery spot between my thighs - only now, it was slipperier than ever. I had been fucking Diana every night, almost, for a year and a half.

• From Educated (2018)

  of a corpse and I heard Dr. Kimball say, “They pulled his body from the river.” There was a date beneath the image: 1955. I realized that Mother had been four years old in 1955, and with that realization, the distance between me and Emmett Till collapsed. My proximity to this murdered boy could be measured in the lives of people I knew. The calculation was not made with reference to vast historical or geological shifts—the fall of civilizations, the erosion of mountains. It was measured in the wrinkling of human flesh. In the lines on my mother’s face. The next name was Martin Luther King Jr. I had never seen his face before, or heard his name, and it was several minutes before I understood that Dr. Kimball didn’t mean Martin Luther, who I had heard of. It took several more minutes for me to connect the name with the image on the screen—of a dark-skinned man standing in front of a white marble temple and surrounded by a vast crowd. I had only just understood who he was and why he was speaking when I was told he had been murdered. I was still ignorant enough to be surprised. — “OUR NIGGER’S BACK!” I don’t know what Shawn saw on my face—whether it was shock, anger or a vacant expression. Whatever it was, he was delighted by it. He’d found a vulnerability, a tender spot. It was too late to feign indifference. “Don’t call me that,” I said. “You don’t know what it means.” “Sure I do,” he said. “You’ve got black all over your face, like a n—r!” For the rest of the afternoon—for the rest of the summer—that was what he called me. I’d answered to it a thousand times before with indifference. Now, I was alive to it. I couldn’t articulate how the name made me feel. Shawn had meant it to humiliate me, to lock me in time, into an old idea of myself. But far from fixing me in place that word transported me. Every time he said it— “Hey N—r, raise the boom” or “Fetch me a level, N—r”—I returned to the university, to that auditorium, where I had watched human history unfold and wondered at my place in it. The stories of Emmett Till, Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King were called to my mind every time Shawn