The Hummingbird and the Bear

by Nicholas Hogg

  Embarrassed, I apologized, and ingratiatingly thanked him for inviting me to spend Christmas Day in such warm company.

  ‘Don’t be silly. It’s a treat to have you here. All I can say is that Jenni seems to have inherited her mother’s fine taste in men.’

  ‘Philip!’ Freya scolded. ‘Get on with carving the turkey.’

  We sat, Jenni and I holding hands beneath the table. She was in love. I was in love. I have no doubt about that, however you want to define love. I was in love with it all, the decorations, the fireplace, the pine trees in the garden dusted with frost, Philip’s cricket bat signed by Ian Botham, Jenni. I wanted every last part of it.

  When I pulled a cracker with her uncle, and a plastic ring fell into my lap, I slipped it away into my pocket. Later, once the rest of the family had boozily bid us goodnight, I led Jenni into the top bedroom.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ she whispered, pulling me back. ‘We’re not shagging in my mum and dad’s house.’ She was giggly, a little drunk. ‘What are you up to, Sam?’

  I led her into the centre of the room and turned out the light. I opened the curtains to the starry sky, got down on my knees and proposed.

  FOR MONTHS I TALKED Jenni out of trips back to Nottingham, not wanting her to see the warren I’d played down as a boy, the rusting pit heads of the barren coalfields, the bush I’d slept in as the homeless teen. That was no longer me. Now I had a life in a suit and tie, marching to work with a million others along the medieval streets of the Square Mile. Entranced by the city, the chance to be born again in a metropolis that had risen from plague, fire and blitz to become the powerhouse of the financial world, I revelled in my reinvention. Give me the gleaming towers of banking, Lloyds and the Gherkin, the steel-tipped peak of Canary Wharf. I stood beneath the painted beams of Leadenhall and had my shoes shined, walked a circuit of the Roman amphitheatre that Guildhall was built upon and watched as the Lord Mayor in all his finery paraded the ancient courtyard. I thought I was part of it all. That we were part of it all, Jenni and I, the young lovers, the City flyers from a renowned business school making strides in blue chip companies, buying flats on bonuses and cracking open bottles of champagne in buzzing wine bars.

  But if I sat and thought for a moment, perhaps on a lunch break in a park, or the bombed-out church near Cheapside with its roof bared to the sky and garden filled with flowers, I thought about my mother, and wished she’d lived long enough to see her son transformed into the man.

  After the night I was kicked from home, I didn’t speak to her for years. Nearly five, I realize now, too late. I refused to see her. Letters to my flat went unopened into the bin. Why did I need a mother who’d chosen a drunken thug over her son, the boy who loved her?

  Our peace treaty had been my graduation from university. The invite, then an awkward coffee in a supermarket cafe. We hugged, that day in the rainy car park, and a week later at my graduation ceremony. In the photo you can see that what I thought was age was her illness. The rogue cells that were wrecking her organs.

  It all happened so quickly. One weekend we were reminiscing about our old estate, friends and neighbours, games of tennis over the garden fence, the street party for Charles and Di’s wedding. The next I was at a funeral with my sister, standing directly across from him, the man who’d kicked me from her world. We listened to a dolorous priest offer a final prayer, and watched the woman who’d fed, dressed and loved us lowered into that rectangular hole. I walked away from the shovels of soil, the bouquets of flowers that would wither on her grave.

  This is what Jenni wanted to know about, what I kept in my locked heart. I dodged and parried her attempts at finding out who I was, leaving an enigma she loved even more.

  YOU COULD HIKE MANHATTAN every day for the rest of your life and never take the same route twice. When I wasn’t standing before flip charts or rooms full of men and women wondering if my strategies for merging their banks would slash their jobs, I locked myself in this grid, walking the graphed and numbered blocks, containing myself, my thoughts, to simple decisions of what turn to make, whether to cross at a certain intersection or not.

  On a walk through Midtown, stepping away from the pulse of the crowd to bend and tie a lace come undone, I’d watched a scrap of paper pick itself up from the gutter and lift to the breeze, past the hats and coats, the signs and wires, aiming at the height of clouds but giving up where King Kong carried on, falling back to the multitudes flowing along the streets, the tourists, tramps and cops, the rich and poor, a frail old couple in Times Square wavering in the brute force of a city.

  I walked to erase my conscience. I walked to avoid thinking about what I’d left. Who I’d left. But it wasn’t easy. For the first three days not a cloud appeared on the blue, as if the cirrus and cumulus had massed on the US border awaiting a customs entry stamp. And this clear sky was a blank screen on which to project my thoughts. My guilt. Only by watching the frenetic streets, listening to the bark and song of New Yorkers hurrying about their day, the vendors singing out their wares, the peanut sellers and hawkers of fake brand handbags, and contemplating the dollar stalls selling hats and gloves within feet of men and women trading companies, could I forget myself.

  But when I stopped it was all me. Beating heart and memories.

  THE GEESE EXPLODED INTO flight, panicked wings flapping on the windscreen. I saw bright orange beaks, abandoned feathers and webbed feet, fishing line tangled about a leg.

  But I didn’t see them early enough to stop.

  I hit the brake and missed the geese. The back wheels locked and slid. The rear end snaked out and I heard my expletive as if on a time delay, grabbing the wheel and over-steering so as not to spin or flip.

  Instead we carved up the verge and bounced over a culvert before clattering into a junction sign.

  Kay screamed. We bounced off the airbags, yanked back by our belts and thrown to a sudden halt.

  We both swore, staring at the balloons which had burst from the dashboard. I asked if she was okay, and was checking she wasn’t hurt when something under the bonnet thrashed and clunked.

  ‘The engine,’ she shouted. ‘Turn off the engine.’

  Pistons squealed then stopped when I yanked the keys from the ignition. Through gritted teeth I swore again, before apologizing half a dozen times.

  ‘We’re all right,’ she said. ‘You okay?’

  It was very quiet after the crash, after the honking geese and screeching tyres, the racing engine and crumpling metal and the shocking pop of the airbags. Then, and I can’t recall who was first, we both erupted into laughter. Maybe it was fear, the spike of adrenalin. Maybe other people would have cried. We laughed.

  ‘Geese,’ exclaimed Kay. I watched her laugh, saw how her cheeks dimpled.

  We climbed out to inspect the damage as a car rounded the bend I’d just slewed from.

  ‘The cavalry’s here,’ said Kay.

  ‘A tow truck would be handy.’

  It would have been, but instead a primly dressed woman in her fifties put down the window. Before asking either of us if we were okay, she said through pursed lips, ‘You’re not the first to come a cropper zooming these lanes.’

  ‘I was hardly speeding,’ I said, defending myself, and told her about the geese.

  ‘Geese?’ she repeated, a scowl of disbelief on her pinched face.

  I had my hand on her car roof, and leant in closer to the open window, explaining how I swerved to avoid the birds. When I smelled her lavender air freshener I realized she could probably smell the whisky and the rum.

  ‘Well,’ she remarked sharply, drawing back from the window. ‘You might find your reaction time a little sharper when you’re sober.’ And with that she scornfully looked Kay up and down, no doubt wondering what kind of woman would get into a car with such a man, before driving away.

  ‘Bollocks,’ I said, watching her turn the bend. ‘We’d better get a move on. You’ve got a plane to catch, and I don’t want to be breathalyzed.’
As I said this I realized it was an admission of guilt, and started apologizing again.

  ‘Hey, hey,’ Kay cut in. ‘I knew you’d been partying.’

  With Jenni carless, Segur was the obvious man to ring. ‘You better give Chris the bad news and call him.’

  She deflated with this thought, shrunk with a sigh. ‘He’ll be mad,’ she said, biting her lip. ‘But not at you.’ She stood with her phone to her ear, eyes on the empty road, but glazed, perhaps focused on where Segur was picking up his mobile.

  At the time I missed this subtle hint, the anger her husband was capable of. Or perhaps I was aware, but knew there was nothing I could do about it, then. She was a woman married to another man, and I was a man about to marry another woman.

  I pulled my phone from my pocket, ready to call Jenni. ‘Have you got a signal?’ I asked, noting the flat bars on my screen.

  ‘Nothing,’ she confirmed.

  ‘I’m a great chauffeur.’

  She shook her head and smiled. She should be angry, worried about missing a flight, but instead she beamed. ‘And where the hell are we?’

  ‘Somewhere between here and there.’

  On the right of the road more cornfields sloped towards a shallow valley. Through the haze I could make out a church steeple, house roofs. To the left a cow field rose up to a small copse of trees. The cows lazily chewed grass and eyed us, standing by a wrecked car, surveying the yellow crops and a distant village hovering on the mist.

  ‘Well,’ said Kay, ‘we couldn’t be stranded in a more beautiful place. It’s like I’m stuck in a postcard.’

  ‘It’s not as if hungry wolves are circling the fire.’ In fact things were pretty calm considering I’d just written off my car and Kay was in danger of missing her flight. ‘We might have to hitch.’

  ‘I could lift my skirt,’ she laughed, raising her knee and tugging up her hem to reveal a bronzed thigh.

  ‘You’ll cause a ten-car pile-up doing that.’

  ‘Ten cars?’ She smiled. ‘That’s optimistic.’

  She was right. It was as if the road had been closed. I stood on the verge to look over the hedgerows and across the cornfields towards the village. I could make out the car of the woman who’d just stopped and tutted at our misfortune. I pictured her chatting with a bored local bobby, gladly informing him of drunk drivers joyriding their peaceful lanes, running down flocks of geese. I thought I was joking to myself with this scene, but my stomach tumbled when I imagined blowing a lungful of rum into a breathalyzer.

  ‘Shit.’ I panicked. ‘We’ve got to get out of here.’

  ‘I kinda guessed that.’

  ‘I mean soon, now.’ I looked past her to the wood on the hill. ‘I’ll pay for another flight if you miss this one.’

  Perplexed, she asked what I was talking about. ‘Won’t the first car that drives by see us stuck and take us to the next village?’

  ‘If that good Samaritan is a policeman I’ll lose my licence.’

  ‘They’ll charge you with a DUI?’

  I was definitely ‘under the influence’. Physiologically the alcohol, and certainly my treacherous hormones, but I’d venture that far more profound forces were dictating my actions. Even fate, though not the kind found in newspaper horoscopes. Rather a destination in the future we were always travelling towards, yet would only recognize once we arrived there.

  ‘If that old bat calls the police, and they drive up here and make me blow in a bag, I’m fucked. But if we sit it out for an hour or so, I should be okay.’

  ‘I don’t see a pub.’

  ‘How about the trees?’

  She looked to the copse, leaves turning in the light breeze. ‘It’d be a picnic if we had a basket.’

  Her acceptance of our situation was in stark contrast to how Jenni would have reacted, believing that her adroit PA skills of organization should have a godly control of events beyond the boardroom. Increasingly of late, in proportion to the amount of power she was garnering from the execs, any inefficiency, from London transport to our own arrangements, including weekend breaks and shopping trips that were planned with military precision, would be tutted at and noted for improvement. But the annoyance that came with the suggestions seemed to run deeper than logistics and common sense. Now I know the train delays and hotel complaints were proxy targets for her frustrations about us.

  The chat between Kay and me, my cock-eyed plan of hiding on the hill accepted, told me that if we met such minor calamities with humour we were … well, how dare I put it? Connected? But did I really think that then? No. Perhaps my hormones did, but my conscience was still present. Just.

  ‘I’d better get your case out of the boot.’

  ‘So the police don’t find the evidence of my abduction?’

  I apologized again, but she waved it off as a bad joke. ‘As long as I don’t have to tip you for carrying it up the hill.’

  Over the gate, and then between the startled cows, we hiked to the wood like trudging holidaymakers willing the hotel to be round the corner. Or people fleeing a crime, a country, immigrants on the threshold of a new world.

  Yet if my previous life did exist – because on that morning it seemed more fiction than fact – I’d have to find another. Kay had seen the blueprints of my future with Jenni and set them on fire, sent that cosy home in Marlow, the church and a wedding dress up in flames.

  And I was pouring on the petrol.

  THE WEATHER CHANGED OVERNIGHT, as if someone had turned down the Manhattan thermostat. ‘Uh-oh,’ the Fox News forecaster warned. ‘Looks like a drop into the forties for New York City.’ Not that I’ve ever been able to work out what exactly Fahrenheit figures mean. I can do the calculations, of course, but the sense of actual temperature is somehow missing from the numbers.

  Perhaps in the same way my sense of life had been missing from my sums of system analysis, the bank mergers and right-sizing, turning two jobs into one and not thinking of the individual at the temp agency, the unemployment office.

  And from the calculations worked on my own affairs, Jenni, a marriage.

  Yes, I’d made plans for the big day, booked the cars with my best man, written out the guest list with my mother-in-law. But I felt like a stand-in for my own body, organizing someone else’s future, not mine. Though I analyse this at some remove from that day in Manhattan. And how very wise the fortune-teller looking into the past.

  All I knew that morning as I stepped from my apartment was the cold wind slicing through my jacket and chilling my bones before I’d even walked a block. I quickly noticed that New Yorkers had forgone style, turning up collars and pulling on hats, picking up the pace.

  As I was about to do myself.

  First I bought one of those hats with the furry ear flaps that dangle down, then a thick woolly scarf and a pair of sunglasses. Warm, protected from the sun dazzle bouncing off the storeys of mirrored skyscrapers.

  And disguised.

  Only four days in a city thousands of miles from Jenni, and, without her physically there to keep my thoughts in check, I was again inhabited by another woman.

  It was time to find out where Kay lived. I hardly felt as if I actually made this decision to find her, rather that I was drawn to the pursuit in the same way men are compelled to scale deadly peaks.

  All I had was the business card passed by Segur at the reception. If I couldn’t get hold of her, that was surely the end of my infatuation. Wasn’t it? Back in London, by the time October had come round, I was thinking of Jenni far more than I was of Kay. Even when my thoughts did turn to that hillside, the geese and the crashed car, it seemed a work of fantasy.

  However, a month into the rugby season, mid-game and feeling the effects of a heavy night out after a bankruptcy party at one of the first restaurants to feel the squeeze, I was catching my breath as the fly half lined up a kick when Kay flashed into my head. Usually, once I was on that rectangle of muddy field nothing existed but an oval ball. A thought beyond a tackle or a pass was a fi
rst in my career, and I was glad when the league started, the lower divisions filled with thugs whose fists and studs needed keeping an eye on if you were to survive a game intact. Again, I could lose myself in the match, the skill and the violence. For eighty minutes a week I could forget the wooded hillside, a haunting woman.

  Then a combination of the credit crunch and the Statue of Liberty brought her back into my life.

  I was requesting overtime to make sure I wasn’t one of the culled, one of the screwed-up faces of anguish from the Square Mile accompanying an apocalyptic headline. Number punching and schmoozing. If the consultancy stayed in one piece, then so would I. My job as an analyst was to streamline, improve efficiency and save money. I was needed. My focus on Jenni and work was once again honed.

  Then broken. All by a postcard of the lady in the harbour. Signed very simply with the letter K and a kiss.

  She must have found the business card I gave to Segur. No return address. I quickly slipped it into my desk drawer. The last thing I needed was one of the ‘boys’ in my department to start winding me up about mysterious mail from New York. But it burned beneath the files I’d hidden it between.

  At lunch I grabbed a wrap from the Pret on Cannon Street, briefly wondering if the line at Tesco’s for cheaper sandwiches was growing each day the economy shrank, then came back to my desk and looked at the postcard again. A buzz. Goosebumps from tracing the outline of that one letter.

  ‘Quick word, Sam.’ I still had it in my hand when Charlie Fanshaw, the co-director, called across the wall of computer screens, inviting me into his office to ask if I wanted a two-week transfer.

  ‘Frankfurt again?’

  He shook his head. ‘Bail out the Yanks.’

  ‘New York?’ I asked, hearing a slight shake to my voice.

  ‘That’s where the action is. A change management project for you. Bank merger. Big fish eats the little one, and you have to throw out the bones. Well, give them a price for what it’s going to cost to fire half their staff and kick out the contractors.’