The Hummingbird and the Bear

by Nicholas Hogg

‘You impressed?’

  She told me she would kiss me if I got us there safely. Enough incentive to focus on the road, navigating the sprawl of parkways before finding the I-87 to arrow us all the way into the mountains.

  Kay switched on the stereo, skipping past ads and the empty harangue of DJs afraid of silence. When the opening piano section from ‘Court and Spark’ tinkled into the car I reached over and turned up the volume. We listened to Joni Mitchell sing about love coming to her door, a man dancing up a river.

  ‘That’s such a beautiful line,’ said Kay.

  My body thrummed with the music. We waited for the next song, Van Morrison singing about rain and water.

  After Van finished crooning, Kay searched for the next station to miss the inevitable ads, letting out a little whoop when she heard the scrambled guitar and thumping bass of Sonic Youth.

  ‘Gotta pay homage to my guys from Seattle,’ she said, turning the volume first up, then down, guessing it didn’t catch me in the same way Van Morrison and Joni Mitchell had.

  ‘I just don’t know the song,’ I answered. ‘That’s all.’

  Kay turned the volume up again, sat back, thought for a second before sitting forward and turning it down again. ‘You know, I’m glad you don’t love the song. I’d be freaked out if it all worked.’

  She was right, and the trip would perhaps uncover what was real and what we’d projected about each other. Talk of the first food stop gave away some more of her life.

  ‘Anywhere but McDonald’s,’ she insisted as we shot past a rest area presided over by the giant golden arches, the red and white clown in his oversized shoes.

  I laughed. ‘That would be a turn-off.’ The fibreglass giant smiled his stupid smile. ‘If you couldn’t go past a McDonald’s without needing a thick shake.’

  ‘You’re not kidding.’ She sat up a little, put her hand on my thigh. ‘Can we do the ugly truth thing again? I got a good Happy Meal story.’

  The weight of her palm was wonderfully heavy on my leg. I said I wanted to know everything, and she started telling me how things had gotten bad for her in Seattle. Picked up by the police a couple of times, possession charges, shoplifting.

  ‘Miss a few court dates and soon enough it’s an arrest warrant.’

  I looked away from the road, at Kay. I wanted to see her face telling this story, this biography. But she was turned to the rushing scenery passing by the window, trees and billboards, perhaps picturing the Californian landscape she saw from the freight train she jumped to cross state lines and avoid the warrants.

  ‘And I was starving, crazy hungry. All we had to eat in the boxcars were pumpkins. Hacking them up with keys.’ She shook her head. ‘I was so screwed up. All I was doing was hustling for a fix. Simple as that. Get money, get high. Whatever it took.’

  I shuddered on the word whatever. I thought of my brief but fierce battle with cocaine, the hollowed-out nights and petty theft. And a friend I’d played rugby with, a hulk of a kid who went from upending fly halfs to injecting, and then turning over off-licences. He was finally caught when a policeman pulled over to buy a pack of cigarettes as he had a rounders bat cocked above the cashier’s head.

  What saved Kay was getting arrested with a dealer. A background check and the warrant in Oregon.

  ‘They extradited me. Two days in a downtown jail before three days on the road in a van.’

  She’d taken her hand off my leg now, so I reached mine out and put it on hers, a reassurance.

  ‘That was what changed a lot of things, not the rehab, but that van trip. I was shackled, hands and feet. Can you believe it? And I was the only woman. Me and four guys chained to the seats. Of course we couldn’t get out at the gas stations, so when the driver stopped one of the guards picked up some food.’

  ‘Happy Meals.’

  ‘Burger, fries and Coke. Morning, noon and night. Three days of Happy Meals, shaking for a fix. Hell. Pure hell. I asked the guard if he could at least get Diet Coke and he laughed. That was it. There and then I vowed I’d get clean.’

  ‘Well, I’m guessing you did, because you’re here right now.’

  Cat’s eyes zipped down the windshield. A straight road hemmed by trees.

  ‘I had no choice. Because I’d jumped rehab before the judge banged that hammer and gave me a month in jail.’

  She told me about crawling up the walls of a prison cell, that a barred room was a better way to quit smack than being in a group session with some namby-pamby counsellor.

  I reached out for her hand. I told her I thought more of her, not less.

  ‘Why?’

  I was looking back and forth between the road and Kay. ‘I know something about hitting rock bottom,’ I said. ‘I had my own drug problems, once. After my mother, a bad break-up, I couldn’t leave the house without doing a line.’

  ‘You see yourself inside out,’ she said. ‘You know you. The best and worst. The extremes.’

  I nodded, agreed. ‘Only then can you know someone else.’ And I added this with some confidence. Because I knew the core of myself. Or at least believed I did, sitting behind the wheel of a car fired like a missile at the future.

  THE NIGHT WOMBLE WALKED into the Grove with an empty sports bag I was single and broke, once again hanging around with the local gangsters I’d gone to university to avoid. Siobhan and Marissa were an item, and I’d returned to selling double glazing after the foreman at the plumbing supplies warehouse caught me napping in a bathtub.

  It was also the night before I moved from Nottingham back to London, when I realized I was falling down a hole I soon wouldn’t be able to climb out of.

  Within minutes of finishing my beer I was helping Womble strip lead from a factory roof. A few years older than me, Womble worked on the bins. When he wasn’t stealing. He knew I needed money for a free-wheeling coke habit, walked into the bar looking for a willing partner in crime, and saw me sitting in a corner.

  Like a pair of shadows above the terraced homes of sleeping families, we scrabbled across gables and eaves, trod and hoped for a beam beneath our feet. When the moon crested the clouds, the lead gleamed in our hands.

  ‘Bastard’s gettin’ heavy now,’ said Womble, dragging the bag across the rooftop like a corpse he had to get rid of before morning.

  He shared a flat with his brother, Maz. Before Maz was raided he bought a Reliant Robin because drug dealers don’t drive plastic pigs, and he guessed that a fibreglass three-wheeler wasn’t the kind of car that aroused much interest in the police.

  The evening Womble saw squad cars outside the flat, a carnival of blue lights and sirens, he screeched a U-turn and stamped on the accelerator. A bottle of vodka later, a roundabout was a tricky island to navigate.

  But maybe it was the only shore for a marooned man, a man driving with no destination.

  The Pig finished its tumble on the other side of the barrier. Splashed with blood, Womble lay slumped over the steering wheel. Cars passed, headlights flashed on the shattered windscreen. He crouched behind the dashboard until the road was clear, then put his shoulder to the Pig and pushed.

  No wreck. No crash. No one looking for the driver. In one growling effort, he shunted the Pig down the hill until it smashed through the undergrowth. Knackered and drunk, Womble crawled inside and folded back the passenger seat.

  The next morning he woke to a blue sky beyond the treetops, the constant hum of traffic. ‘Not that different from the sea,’ he tried to tell me, insisting it was better than turning up for work or going home with the police after him.

  Looking around the clearing, a cover of branches and bushes, he found a drain that ran through a short tunnel into a paddock of cows. This would be the front door. The train tracks into town were across the road, and it was just a stroll to the Grove when he felt like a game of pool or had some junk to sell.

  At night he walked into the industrial estate and pulled tarpaulin off skips. He transformed his refuge into a princely den of leather sofas and glass-topp
ed coffee tables, wiring a TV to the car battery, nailing his dartboard to a tree trunk.

  I sat with him on the broken sofa and listened to the whirl of traffic beyond the trees. On that island I had no thoughts of my own life, how a degree had done nothing but put me into debt. That my mother was gone. Once I was down there with Jeff, taking mouthfuls of poteen from a Lucozade bottle. As we watched jets streak across the sky, Womble scratched The eye of the storm on the bonnet.

  Until he turned up outside the Grove towing a brass bedstead on wheels, those who heard that Womble lived on a traffic island said it was rubbish. And then the same doubters slowed driving the roundabout on their way home, trying to see over the crash barrier, past the covering of leaves, circling as Womble sat watching TV and doing word-searches from tattered quiz books, grilling burgers on the bonnet of a Cortina, fixing bikes and selling kettles.

  Though I was hardly doing much better. Two months’ rent due on a dump of a house, a daily tour of abuse selling windows to people who already had them. And a dumb paralysis of grief because my mother had left without a goodbye.

  So when Womble had asked if I wanted to earn some ‘easy money’, I’d downed my beer and walked out, no one looking at us, no one wanting to know what two men were doing with an empty sports bag just before last orders.

  We worked our way up and down the eaves, breaking slates, prising up nails and peeling off strips of shining lead. Now all we had to do was haul the bag to the corner of the building where we first climbed up. I remember looking down, thinking the fall would kill me. I imagined the shape I’d take as a dead man. The passers-by and drunks walking home, stopping to see my final pose in life.

  ‘Straight across the gables,’ instructed Womble. ‘Bastard’s too heavy to drag across the slates.’

  I didn’t have a better idea. I wish I had. Fragments of slate broke beneath our feet and skittered off the roof into the car park. They made a tinkling sound like breaking glass when they hit the ground.

  Then, very slowly, my handle began tearing from the bag. Then tore from the bag. The weight yanked Womble round to face me, nearly pulling his arm off because he wouldn’t let go. He just had time to say ‘Fuck’ before the slates opened up and swallowed him whole.

  Lights came on in the car park. Womble had gone, vanished from the night. I crawled over the hole and looked down, past the broken slates and dangling plaster, the cartoon outline of his fall through the ceiling.

  He was on his back and smiling, circled by a crowd of shift workers who stood at the sort of respectable distance usually reserved for holy men or deities.

  ‘HE WASN’T DEAD, WAS he?’ asked Kay, about Womble. ‘He was fine,’ I answered, no memory of the stretch of highway I’d just driven while telling the story. ‘Until the police came.’

  ‘Were you arrested?’

  ‘I was running across those rooftops like Spiderman.’

  ‘You got away?’

  ‘Jumped down on to someone’s shed. The whole thing collapsed. I leapt over their back fence and didn’t stop running till I got to my place.’

  ‘What happened to Womble?’

  ‘Locked up. Not for long. They thought it was better for him than living in that wreck on the traffic island.’

  ‘You still know him?’

  ‘Well, of him. He’s all right, sort of. He’s got a council flat, last I heard.’

  ‘Good for him. And you.’ Kay laughed, playfully pushed my knee. ‘The city boy stealing lead from a roof.’

  ‘A quality crime.’

  ‘Aren’t churches good for that kind of thing?’

  I shook my head. ‘That was it. Seeing Womble fall through that roof, the thought of me ending up like that.’

  ‘I think Jenni comes into the story soon.’

  I looked across at Kay. ‘You’re pretty sharp.’ She gave me a sad smile.

  And I drove on, flying past more exits for fast food, speeding towards those green mountains. But reversing through memories. I told Kay about packing my bags and catching the train to London the morning after the Womble escapade, ringing the universities and practically begging for a place on a Master’s.

  ‘I’m guessing you got on one.’

  ‘Business,’ I answered, gripping the steering wheel tighter. ‘I walked into that first lecture and sat down next to her.’

  ‘Jenni.’

  ‘I should talk about something else.’ I hoped Kay would agree, because I had a strange sensation in my arms, like pins and needles.

  ‘You okay?’ she asked.

  I shrugged my shoulders, rolled my neck.

  ‘I can drive if you want?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ I lied, my skin prickling.

  ‘JENNI,’ SHE WHISPERED, HOLDING out a hand to be shaken. ‘Sam,’ I whispered back, the lecturer darting an angry look at two students daring to not pay attention in the first class of a London Business School MBA. Between taking notes on ‘Ethics and Corporate Social Responsibility’, I flicked glances at her slim fingers round her pen, the neat handwriting. When the class finished I asked if she wanted a coffee, and we sat in the campus bar and did the usual intros of why we were taking the course.

  ‘Putting off the real world,’ she joked. Her small and perfect lips. ‘And you?’

  ‘Keeping me from a life of crime.’ Thinking that sitting in halls overlooking manicured lawns was better than stealing lead off a factory roof.

  ‘After that lecture,’ she said, ‘I think the best businesses are the most ruthless. The ones with criminal bosses.’ She laughed at the thought of what she was about to say. ‘I can learn from you, then.’

  She let me borrow her notes when I missed a class, which I often did, working part-time shifts with a temp agency to pay my rent. My friends from university had mostly left London, flown off to teach in Japan, taken jobs in France and Italy. In a class of nearly seventy students I thanked my lucky stars that I’d sat next to her. Between mind-numbing placements in various offices, each stint too brief to make any real friends, she was one of the few people in a city of seven million that I could actually talk to. Nottingham was just over an hour away on the train, but that was suddenly a past life I wanted to distance myself from.

  After a month of eating picnics in Regent’s Park, feeding crusts to the pigeons and walking off lunch along the Grand Union Canal, I asked her on a date.

  ‘To Hampton Court,’ she pondered, pausing in the middle of a sandwich. ‘I was supposed to be heading back to Marlow on Saturday.’

  I suggested we could go earlier if she wanted. ‘But I won’t be able to buy you a meal if we do.’

  ‘See,’ she said, that sharp, knowing smile. ‘The MBA is already working. Cutting costs on a lady.’

  But I did buy her dinner, sitting in the bay window of a pub overlooking the Thames. When the waiter lit the candle and the soft flame glowed on her pale skin, I thought she was stunning. And although she was obviously beautiful, the belle of the class with her striking, Germanic looks, and that high and bright laugh, I hadn’t found her attractive until that moment.

  Or is this another lie to myself? Perhaps I always wanted her, from when I first saw her in the sunlit lecture hall, but knew she was a woman who’d demand a better man.

  After a day walking the grounds of a palace home for kings and queens, a lavish room for each of Henry VIII’s six wives, I was enchanted. Not just with the fallow deer running free in the park, the peacocks and the architecture, but now with Jenni.

  And brave enough to tell her, to kiss her.

  I remember going back to my flat that night, the sum of my life in a rented room, the taste of her in my mouth. This is something, I thought. Someone.

  Within months we had a place together, shared a bed.

  ‘My bad boy,’ she’d say, lying naked, running her hands through my hair. ‘You know I could blackmail you with all those confessions.’

  We had all the abandon of new lovers, the vigour and heat, youth. And then after sex, after the
shudder and cry, came the murmured calm, talking. Steadily I’d told her stories, selling the rental car and reporting it as stolen, burgling a snooker club. Womble and the factory roof.

  ‘And now look at you. Star student on an MBA, and in bed with a girl who’s never even stolen a penny chew.’

  At the beginning of our relationship, pulling her into my world, my heart, I used these tales as bait. I realized she got a buzz from my history. But after a year together, finishing third in that class of seventy students, I stopped talking about where I’d been and what I’d done, and planned my career with all the measured guile of the young business exec I was training to be.

  What I got from her was something better than myself. What she got from me was the feeling that she was someone I’d changed for. A woman with enough presence in the world to alter mine.

  ‘You need to give me more about your family,’ she’d say, probing beyond the anecdotes. ‘You must be angry, sad. Something. Your mother. How do you feel about her? That doesn’t just go away.’

  But that was done, wasn’t it? Or so I thought, and hoped, once I found Jenni and believed she was the one, the only.

  AFTER I TURNED OFF the highway we followed a glittering lake, driving beneath blue sky and trees, the autumn leaves brushed a million different hues of red. I didn’t say anything because I knew I was being ridiculous, but when a silver Lexus took the same exit I almost believed we were being trailed, checking in the rear view mirror until it took a side road just before Phoenicia. We went through the small town with Kay reading out the directions.

  ‘Should be up a way on the left.’

  We took a bridge over a shallow, fast-flowing river. Two hundred yards on was an ensemble of timber cottages set below a stand of pine trees. I took one more paranoid look to see we hadn’t been followed, worried that Segur himself had shadowed us there, then took the turn into the lodgings.

  ‘Here’s home for the night,’ said Kay, peering through the windshield.

  I drove along the gravel drive and pulled up by the reception. Then apologized to Kay.