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The Thrown Voice Romany ‘The story starts with who you are. I strode at night across the heath to hear a nightjar. It was night which throws her voice inside a bird. I would stand below his song and become cast into creature, into his purled world. The bird could never be seen. It seemed a soft scar of sound as if a lone tree’s bark sang the night’s wound from a lone tree’s bough, and yet heath and bird were grown two in the dark. Those wound, wounded voices were thrown into me, as if bird and tree were hornbooks I could finger and trace and sing aloud. I spoke through night, or night through me and all the creatures of the night sang free. My Gypsies gave tongue to campfire stories but my spell drew speech from the circling heath. I was a magician to them, the magic man to my people. I lost it. I lost my magic when I lost those voices. I cried my eyes out. I have cried my eyes into myself. How can you know what it is like to lose your magic?’ The magician drains his hipflask of whiskey. I catch him under his thin arms and catch myself in surprise, for he weighs no more than a bird, as though the bones were air-blown, his body a wingspan, not a man. I cradle him to earth. ‘What’s gone can be gained again’, he whispers, ‘Take the path across the purling heath; 4
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night-long, overhear the notes of nightfall, nocturne of nightjars turning with the world from county to county in slown song: a slur of notes played without departure or border. There’s the thrown voice you seek: to be thrown into pure bird, poured song, hear the soft scar of the night’s wound. Let me rest’. A young Gypsy winks at me: ‘Take no notice of the sly old soak. It’s the DTs blathering through him now. He can’t get his act together by which we mean his Act. That shaman blether is stabbing him in the liver. This broken bottle. That smashed bottle there. The spirit’s spirited away his spirit’. The Gypsies laugh. ‘He made mad magic before the booze,’ another smiles. ‘The man could pirouette playing cards on his palm, flip the whole pack up to burst like doves, flapped down as one bird into the dovecote of his fist. One bird! At our winter fairs he’d dance the crowd on the marionette strings of his voice. No prop or pose. Not even a song. Now he’s the maddened ghost of his act…’. ‘Uncle!’ a teenage Gypsy jeers, ‘are you sleeping or waking? – or still fast in the fumes of the whiskey-world between dream and dram? Look at those dregs in his cup. He can’t read a word or world from them not for love nor money. Maybe he might, brothers – for another swig!’ The Gypsy spits: ‘He capers in the majesty 5

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The Thrown Voice

Romany

‘The story starts with who you are. I strode at night across the heath to hear a nightjar. It was night which throws her voice inside a bird. I would stand below his song and become cast into creature, into his purled world. The bird could never be seen. It seemed a soft scar of sound as if a lone tree’s bark sang the night’s wound from a lone tree’s bough, and yet heath and bird were grown two in the dark. Those wound, wounded voices were thrown into me, as if bird and tree were hornbooks I could finger and trace and sing aloud. I spoke through night, or night through me and all the creatures of the night sang free. My Gypsies gave tongue to campfire stories but my spell drew speech from the circling heath. I was a magician to them, the magic man to my people. I lost it. I lost my magic when I lost those voices. I cried my eyes out. I have cried my eyes into myself. How can you know what it is like to lose your magic?’ The magician drains his hipflask of whiskey. I catch him under his thin arms and catch myself in surprise, for he weighs no more than a bird, as though the bones were air-blown, his body a wingspan, not a man. I cradle him to earth. ‘What’s gone can be gained again’, he whispers, ‘Take the path across the purling heath;

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