Hemispheres

by Stephen Baker

  We scan with bins, and Yan sets the scope up between us. I like to watch waders feeding. Tiny white sanderling skittering over the mud like clockwork mice in perpetual motion. A couple of piebald oystercatchers winkling shellfish from the ground with those garish plastic orange bills, using the prehensile tips to unlock the shells. Pale dunlin everywhere, nagging insistently at the mud. Groups of redshank moving through the shallows with their high-stepping walk and orange legs.

  Greenshank, over there, says Yan. See the three refraction columns on the horizon? Follow the middle one down until you get to a group of knot. Count in three from the left and you’re there.

  Got him. There’s a whimbrel in there as well.

  Yeah?

  You’ve got the twitcher gene, I say.

  Meaning?

  You’re always looking for the odd one out. If it was just dunlin you’d be off home.

  He grunts.

  Aye, he says. Always been one of them birders. You can keep the common stuff.

  Been there, done that, I say.

  There’s something about a rare bird, he says. It’s a survivor. Come over them uncharted seas from fuck knows where.

  We’re opposites, me and you. I could look at the common stuff all day.

  He snorts, goes back to the scope.

  What have you got anyway?

  Couple of little stint over there, in among the dunlin. Couple of bar-tailed godwit out there. Elegant buggers, dipping their beaks right in to the hilt.

  Yeah, got them.

  And let’s have a blast through these redshank, see if we can get us a spotted.

  He starts to scan through the mixed flock, and I focus in on them too.

  Got it. Spotted redshank. Left-hand end of the flock. Paler than the rest, stripe through the eye.

  I can’t see a stripe at this distance man. But yeah, there is a paler one. See how it’s feeding different to the rest? Sweeping its bill through the water, like. Side to side.

  Like your missus doing the vacuuming, he laughs.

  Careful now, she’ll have your guts. Mind, she doesn’t do much of that these days.

  What, the vacuuming or having your guts?

  Either. Both.

  I bet this fertility business has hit her hard Dan.

  Aye. It’s like we circle round each other but never really meet. She goes out with her mates, comes back mashed.

  Nowt wrong with a bender now and then, he says, calmly.

  I know. But sometimes she doesn’t come back till the morning. Says she slept over at a mate’s house. That’s why you never woke her up this morning.

  She wasn’t there.

  Right. Look, I shouldn’t be telling you this. You’ve got enough on your plate.

  What you mean is I never earned your confidence. You feel disloyal, spilling your guts to me.

  Yeah, that’s what I mean.

  You’ve got to talk to someone.

  Did you ever regret blowing it with Kate? You could have come back from the Falklands and made a go of it. You could have been a stay-at-home husband and dad.

  Pipe and slippers, he says.

  Garden centre on a weekend.

  Nah, he says. Life’s too short for regrets. You can’t look back.

  I look at him but he’s got the bins up to his eyes.

  Me and Kelly, I say. It used to feel like we were a unit. We’d do stuff together. Nowt special, like – the pub, the flicks, club on a weekend. We had a sex life. But none of it’s happening any more. We haven’t got anything in common except childlessness. It’s like we remind each other of the problem.

  Sounds like you need to ship out, he says. It’s making you unhappy.

  It’s not that simple.

  It is from where I’m standing.

  He coughs, softly.

  The sun rises beyond the flats, beginning as a small red disk nudging at the horizon. The flat surfaces of mud and water become gilded, subtly at first but then flaring into life like fields of molten copper, like the surface of the sun. And a collective dread begins to pass through the waders. They shrug and shuffle their feathers, looking around more often, concentrating less on feeding. I can’t see any possible cause for this. No bird of prey visible, no other birders around, no dogwalkers. Sometimes it just happens. Fear gusts unbridled through the flock like a virus.

  And there’s only ever one outcome. Thousands of waders rise into the air, the vast flock turning and wheeling as one, a huge double helix twisting itself inside out. The spotted redshank disappears among the others, among the telegraphy of white rumps and wing edges. They raise their voices now and the empty air fills with the urgent message carried from ten thousand feathered throats.

  We used to roll back to the Cape around nine o’clock and fry up bacon and eggs for breakfast, scorching and salty. You felt glad that you’d sat in that wooden icebox, that you’d been outside in the cold for hours when everyone else was only just swimming into consciousness. And there wasn’t any time or space beyond this, at all.

  *

  The door to the hide clatters behind us and I look at Yan and appreciate for the first time how much weight he’s lost. He’s a skeleton, with the donkey jacket dwarfing him, flapping up around his scrawny neck. And he’s struggling to keep up. I can see his chest working, red spots flaring in his cheeks. I slow down appreciably, and he fires me a hard glance, keeps striding ahead.

  That fucking eyepatch of Barlow’s, he barks. I never knew about that. He always played it by the book, did Geordie. Regulations man, all the way. And it turns out he’s got a screw loose all along.

  Aye, well. It must have been pretty traumatic. That young lad shot through the eye.

  It was a war, he says. We were professional soldiers.

  He coughs deep, expectorates noisily, and voids an oyster of phlegm onto the ground. Keeps walking hard, pushing himself, and now I’m struggling to keep pace with him.

  The lighter, he says. It’s still in your pocket.

  I grope for it and test its weight in my hand. It’s turned fiercely cold in the minutes since he handed it to me. I toss it to him and he fields it in both hands.

  So, he says. The girl. Molly, was it?

  Polly.

  You missed your chance there, didn’t you?

  I suppose you’d have got stuck in.

  Nah. I never needed to rely on booze or rohypnol son. Never had to beg for it or play tricks.

  We carry on walking. Huntsman Tioxide and the Seal Sands refineries are shooting giant and knotty middle fingers into the sky and our conversation fades out behind the hum of the estuary, the deep respiration of the place, long and slow like the tidal breathing of a sleeper.

  11. Long-Tailed Tit

  (Aegithalos caudatus)

  Paul was fast asleep, breath coming slow and the headphones still buzzing away at his ears. The train rattled through North London, sunless cuttings and sidings frothing with buddleia and spray can graffiti, the backs of industrial units. Paul licked his lips, swallowed, snuffled. His eyelids twitched, pupils in motion beneath. Asleep, he looked like a little boy.

  When you think about birdsong you probably call to mind the spectacular ones. A nightingale trickling into a summer night like a girl’s breath on your neck. Or the black treacle drizzling from a blackbird’s throat, infused with the essence of dusk. Fiercely alive and at the same time weary of life, a blackbird can make your heart swell to busting without ever knowing why.

  But most bird calls are mundane stuff. Little fragments, little ticks and chinks of sound. Contact calls, like social glue, keeping the flock together. Like sonar. You fire out a pulse of sound. I’m here, it says. What about you?

  And it’s reassuring to hear the answer come back. Yes, I’m here.

  He was standing where he said he’d be, top of the escalators at King’s Cross, and I was absurdly glad to see him. Bruising on one side of his face and a split lip.

  Did Franco catch up with you?

  Nah, just the foo
tie – a few boots in the napper like. I’ve had worse from me dad. Lucky me brains are in me dick, eh?

  How did we get on?

  We were shite.

  He stood there like a rock, brown skin and the facets of his shaved head. Commuters streamed either side and some of them ignored him and some of them glanced at him shyly, with fear and disgust and desire, because he was ugly and beautiful and contemptuous and unapologetic.

  Paul glanced down at the holdall in my hand. A commuter barrelled against his shoulder as he did so and Paul swivelled aggressively, giving the evil eye to the man’s broad back as he beetled away up the stairs, daring him to turn round.

  You did it, eh? he said.

  Aye.

  He erupted into hoarse laughter and his eyes flared sea-green and brilliant.

  Danny Thomas, he said. Tealeaf and absconder. London Rent Boy of the Year, nineteen eighty-five.

  Fuck off.

  Tell us, he said. Go on.

  So I told him about Barlow. People frothed around us, the world turned.

  What a fruitcake, said Paul. Wearing a patch when you got both eyes. Two or three short of a six-pack and no mistake. Where you headed now like?

  Somewhere near Peterborough. It’s a junkyard.

  I’ll pal you up there.

  What about your job?

  I’m on an extended sabbatical Danny.

  He turned and started yomping down towards the platforms and I followed him.

  How do you mean, sabbatical?

  Me boss, he said. Jimmy Kelly. Thinks he’s the king of shit. He says no you can’t have Saturday off to travel for the match. In the wonderful world of landfill, Saturday is the big day. People been doing the garden, clearing out the shed, and down they come in their little cars itching to throw it all in a big hole in the ground. You listen to it on the radio like every other cunt, says Jimmy.

  But he changed his mind in the end, eh?

  Nah. Stuck the nut on him and walked off the job. That’ll learn him. He’ll have to cover the shift hisself instead of wanking in the office.

  The train from King’s Cross was crowded. By the doors the space was crammed with backpackers, sitting or lying on humongous rucksacks. Paul pushed through and stormed down the corridors, dispensing the evil eye to all sides, barely waiting for the sliding doors between carriages to open. I streamed behind in his wake. All the seats were full, passengers already crouching behind newspapers, paperbacks, personal stereos, guarding their hard-won territories. We came to the smoking carriage, a thick topiary of smoke already blooming. There were no seats. Paul scowled, then lighted on two pairs of seats facing each other, occupied by four kids not much younger than ourselves. Paul stood in front of them.

  ’Scuse me lads and lasses. I can’t help noticing that you’re not smoking. And I believe I’m right in thinking this is a smoking carriage.

  A silence while the kids looked at Paul and wondered what was coming. They were two couples, the boys in jeans and pinstriped shirts, one blue and white, one pink and white.

  Well, Paul continued affably. Me and my mate here are both smokers, and we’d like to enjoy the facilities British Rail has placed at our disposal. So I’ll have to ask you to vacate these seats immediately.

  The kids exchanged nervous glances. Judging by their bags they had been on a shopping trip to London and were now on the way home.

  You can’t make us move, said one of the girls, the one sitting next to Blue-and-White.

  She was blonde, horsey, a string of pearls quivering with indignation at her throat.

  We were here first, weren’t we Harry, she added, looking to her boyfriend for support. Harry was bricking it.

  Look mate, he said. We don’t want any trouble. But you can’t just take our seats. Possession is nine tenths of the law, isn’t it? Why don’t you just try further down the train?

  I stood behind Paul, saw other passengers notice what was going on. They shrank away, embarrassed. Nobody was going to help the four kids. Paul breathed a deep sigh of frustration and fixed his glare on Harry. Pink-and-White was looking out of the window, willing himself elsewhere. The lights of suburban London blinked past in the drab twilight.

  Now listen here, Paul said. Old chap.

  A meaty hand shot out and grabbed Harry by the throat, blurred blue spots at the knuckles. The other kids were frozen, petrified. He dragged the younger boy up off the seat to eye level. He had floppy hair, combed back into a wet-look with gel. With his other hand Paul retrieved a lighter from the pocket of his combat jacket, and brought it up close to Harry’s face.

  These seats are ours, said Paul, amiably. If you want to argue about it, I’m going to burn your fucking face off.

  He flipped the lighter and a blue flame roared at least a foot into the air.

  I hear hair gel burns a treat, he added.

  Come on, said the other girl, the one with Pink-and-White. Let’s just go.

  She hustled out of her seat and down the carriage, boyfriend scurrying after her. Paul threw Harry after them. He stumbled and sprawled in the aisle. Passengers glanced at him in annoyance.

  You can stay if you want, gorgeous, Paul said to the blonde horsey one. She pushed past him, shaking with disgust. The carriage settled down to normality, people burrowing back into the comfort of magazines and paperbacks. Paul beamed and settled back, contentedly planted his boots on the seat opposite. He lit a cigarette and began exhaling smoke rings that billowed into the air and burst against the cool surface of the window.

  Possession is nine tenths of the law, he said. I like that.

  Ten minutes later he’d rummaged through my holdall and found my Walkman and now he was screwing the earpieces in and twiddling with the volume.

  Do you want one or what? he said, waving a packet of chews towards me. I fumbled for a couple of the squashy green lumps, compressed them into my mouth. Paul put both feet up on the seat opposite, lit up ostentatiously and cracked a can of Tennants Super. He sipped on it, eyes closed, and I looked at the home-made tattoos on his knuckles. A blue point on each one, faded into an amorphous blob. His hair was beginning to grow out. It was an inch long now, just enough to hint at parting and curling and lying flat like catfur. Blue veins at his temples.

  Dan. Paul jogged my elbow so that I suddenly spilled forward, waking in confusion. I shook my head, hard.

  Sleeping like a baby, he said. We’re nearly there pal.

  He balled up the Walkman with its speakers and tossed it back to me and I fielded it. The train was beginning to slow towards the station.

  What do you think you’re going to find, anyway? he said.

  People don’t just disappear, I said.

  Aye they do. My dad did one when I was six, and I never seen the bastard since.

  Maybe they’re two peas in a pod, your old man and mine.

  Maybe.

  He tucked both hands behind his head and yawned. Stubbed his cigarette down onto the seat cushion. I watched it scorch a hole through the tartan cover and into the foam rubber.

  So, he said. Did your dad ever beat fuck out of you with a belt buckle when he was mashed up?

  Nah.

  Did he ever like stub fags out on the backs of yer legs?

  He wasn’t like that. You should know.

  Did he ever knee you in the bollocks and then laugh his cods off because he loved that little squeak you made when he knocked all the air out of you?

  No. He didn’t.

  Right, he said. Just checking.

  We got as far as Whittlesey before we ran out of trains and decided to bed down on the platform for the night. Paul was talking to some lasses and I watched how they leaned against the fence and arched their backs like cats and laughed too hard at his jokes.

  I went for a walk.

  Down the road I found a farm track and cut down among fields with the sinking sun clenched hard like a lump in the throat, still warm on my back and the top of my head. Climbed a hedge bank and vaulted the fence and w
alked along a hawthorn hedge where luxuriant growth had exploded from the trimmed-back bones of last winter in wild and sprawling locks of thorn. And the hedges were bubbling with white blossom, etched across the green contours like crisp snowbanks.

  A flock of feeding tits came gusting along the hedgerow, one of those loose alliances of small birds swirling like smoke through the early summer fields. They were all around me, blue, great and long-tailed, pinging small contact calls like neurons firing in the forest of the brain.

  I’m here. Are you there?

  I came to a halt where grassland rolled downhill towards a stream, bristling with introvert trees like a furred artery in the base of the shallow valley. The sun strengthened and the light was flooding through stained glass, the bitter deep blue of the southern sea and the tart nose-wrinkling green of an early apple. I listened to the wind moving through foliage, the quiet rippling of grasses, the shuffling of hawthorn leaves like a soft insistent rain, the polite applause of mature trees. The flock had raced on across the landscape, just a solitary long-tailed tit still coasting the hedge above me, pricking the foliage with little thorns of sound. But now there were no answering calls. I imagined a sink emptying, water spiralling down a plughole. Emptying the world, emptying my body. There was only a hillside, impossible blue and green. The wind moved in the hedges and high up a tiny bird was ticking.

  Dark when I got back to the station, a wind whipping through from the Fens. There wasn’t much shelter on the open platforms so we hunched down in the lee of a gaggle of baggage trolleys and waited for dawn, when we could get our connection. A full moon blazing, and while the orange glow of Peterborough eroded the western fringe of the sky, the centre was deep and unruffled. I thumbed a paperback I’d bought at King’s Cross. Crime and Punishment. It was one of my set books.

  Don’t know how you can read all that stuff, said Paul. I never got into it at school. Too busy driving teachers over the edge. Remember that Mr Hunter we had for physics? I think I give him a nervous breakdown. He used to run out the classroom and stand outside in the yard smoking a fag with his hand shaking. We’d all be sitting there waiting for him to come back.