‘English rain,’ I said, and Zannah’s face nodded in the window.
‘I know what you mean,’ she said.
We’d arrived at school in England for the first term in what I thought was the middle of winter. I could not believe that any sky could rain for so long without ever running out of water, that the cold could go on and on, that it could get colder and darker with every day that passed. That every single day could dawn with the same low hanging sky as the last, so low that even the sun barely rose in it.
And then, when the winter really started in earnest, I found myself a retreat of sorts high up in the cloakroom in a niche above the hot-water tank, where I could pretend the warmth that seeped up from the tank was the sun-warmed blast of heat sent up from the African soil. I set myself up a little refuge there, and tried to dream of home. Shielded by the ranks of coats and scarves, I could curl up with the pages of my Field Guide to East African Mammals, tracing the familiar pictures with my finger. Each animal in profile, both males and females where they were different, the distinguishing marks labelled with neat lines. I closed my eyes and tried to conjure up the sounds of home.
But it was only a temporary refuge. They always tracked me down in the end, looking for someone to torment, something to pass the time. Their faces were hard and pale and cold, as pinched and grey as the sky. I can still see the ringleader now, a smallish girl, sharp featured, with thick and bloodless skin.
‘I heard your mum’s a loony,’ she said once when they’d cornered me in the playground with no teacher around to intervene. ‘Heard they put her in the bin, the loony bin.’ The others looked shocked and nervous, and even she seemed frightened at her own daring. Other people’s parents were off limits even in the dog-eat-dog world of the school. She stood her ground, but the rest had backed off a little, the playground falling silent, all eyes on the confrontation. She had crossed the line, and she knew it. They waited for my response.
They were expecting words. Girls didn’t fight here in England, not like the boys did. They sat in their groups and used words as their weapons, taunting and teasing, leaving no trace. So she didn’t sense danger when I unshouldered my satchel, laden with books, and doubled the strap in my hand. She was smiling in triumph when she thought I’d given in, was turning away, not contesting her jibe. The bag swung through the air, heavy and low, winding her, leaving her speechless. I watched her face flatten with shock. Maybe my father was right, I had been allowed to run wild. They left me in peace after that, to count off the slow days until the holidays came and I could return to Africa.
With only a week of term to run, my father showed up at the school boarding house, my mother drifting palely behind him.
‘We’re having Christmas in England, this year,’ he announced. My mother smiled benevolently, at both of us. I hated her.
We weren’t to return to Africa for years, it turned out. Holidays became a succession of rented flats, or awkward stays with distant relatives, aware we were wearing out our welcome, not sure where else we would be expected to go. Sometimes my mother stayed with us, drifting through the days or making a brittle approximation of normality. Sometimes my father shuttled between us and the latest clinic or hospital or home that seemed to be offering some hope. There always seemed to be a reason why we couldn’t go back as each term ended, some complication, a last-minute change of plan.
Finally, we wore him down, Zannah and I, and made it back for the summer holidays the year I turned fifteen. My mother was in a clinic in the UK that year and we flew out on our own. As soon as we got off the plane we were hit by a wall of humidity and the glare of the unrelenting sunlight. I felt myself expanding in the warmth, memories flooding back to me like a forgotten childhood language. When we got there, the house at first seemed barely changed: smaller, shabbier, but full of the bright light I’d remembered, and the deep contrasting pools of shade. We sat on the seats of the veranda still dazed from the long flight, our ears assaulted by the alien familiarity of the calls of the insects and birds, and the weeks stretched out in front of us like a promise. But when we awoke the next morning, it was to an empty house, a note on the breakfast table from my father saying he would try and be back early. Zannah was on the phone straight away, summoning up friends, but I had no one I cared to get in touch with and ended up drifting alone around the house, touching the old familiar surfaces, trying to bring back the sense of home. Mattie followed me round as I went, treating me with polite indifference, until with a sigh he tired of my wanderings and lay down stiffly on the old worn hide of the rug and slept, twitching in his dreams. My school books breathed the grey damp air of England and I couldn’t settle to them. Juma was no help, busy in the kitchen, slamming a knife through a joint of meat as though it had offended him.
‘Bwana will be back soon?’ I asked, but he only shrugged.
‘College is finished,’ he said, and he stared at me, some challenge on his face. I was in no mood for riddles and left him to his work, drifting once more out onto the veranda and curling up on my father’s chair, nothing to do but wait. I watched as the shadows shortened with the swinging sun, shrinking under the trees, then lengthened back across the grass the other way. At four, the sun began to work its way up my feet and legs, burning my England-pale skin. At six it dropped decisively behind the trees. My father returned as the brief twilight finally faded.
‘You’ll get bitten to death out here,’ he said. He lit a mosquito coil and in the brief flare of the match his face appeared and disappeared, unreadable in the shifting light of the flame. Wordlessly he sat beside me, and we watched the steady glow of the burning coil unwind its spiral. The chemical smell of the smoke threw me back more surely than anything else had done, into the past, into my childhood. Then without a word he rose again, placed his hand for a second on my shoulder, and was gone, leaving nothing but the quiet click of his study door behind him.
And so the weeks passed. My father barely inhabited the house, coming back at odd and unpredictable hours, sometimes seeming startled to find us at the breakfast table, sometimes not appearing at all. I didn’t mind the loneliness, the empty passing hours. But I could see he had his own life here, a life we were no part of, and that we, to him, were somehow less present, only dimly perceived, like ghosts or memories in comparison.
We found out eventually, of course. We were bound to. The affair had been an open scandal for years by then, my father and Mrs Iqbal. Some kind soul could stand it no longer, and let it slip to Zannah, avid for her reaction. Zannah didn’t disappoint. She went and raged at him, white with fury, accusing him of betrayal, wishing him dead. He stood in his study doorway and took it all, making no excuses, letting her blow out her anger until she subsided in spent tears. I didn’t blame him for the affair, I never did. But I had seen the way he stood and watched us and saw how he wished us gone, and that felt like the keenest betrayal of all.
Walking out of the cafe, with the parakeets swirling overhead, Zannah asked, ‘What was that bird we used to call the rain bird? With the sad call?’
‘The rain bird? Probably a Burchell’s coucal.’
‘But what was its call supposed to be saying? In Swahili?’
I could remember the legend that Juma told me of the bird who, orphaned, sings in the forest its song of loss and loneliness. The Swahili words came back unbidden just as I’d heard them from Juma. I could hear his voice in the dark syllables and the long dying fall at the end that we had likened to a pouring bottle. And as I recited them Zannah joined in too, nodding with the memory.
‘Sina mama, sina baba,
Nakaa peke yangu tu, tu, tu tu . . .’
Then Zannah repeated the words in English, almost to herself. ‘I have no mother, I have no father. I live all alone in the forest on my own, own, own
‘What made you think of that?’ I asked.
‘Oh, I used to sing it to myself at school after lights out, to try to get to sleep at night.’
‘Did it help?’
/> ‘Beat the hell out of crying myself to sleep.’
‘I always thought you were happy there.’
She just shrugged, and smiled, her eyes unreadable, the shades of the little girl I remembered almost vanished from her face. Then she turned and walked on, leaving me hurrying in her wake.
GREAT CRESTED GREBES
Podiceps cristatus, family ‘Podicipedidae’
‘What do you mean, "Feeding party of long-tailed tits (heard only)"?’
‘Just what it says. I heard them feeding in a beech hedge, but before I could track them down, they were gone. Oh come on, Tom, I think I know longies when I hear them.’
Tom looked up and fixed me with his green eyes, clear as glass. I sat back, enjoying the monthly ritual of jousting over what I could and could not keep in my list. At some point, back in the past, Tom had taken it upon himself to keep us all honest. And as he and I were the first ones in the pub, as usual, I was bearing the brunt of it.
‘Could have been any mixed tit flock. Or something else imitating them, like a starling.’
‘You’re obsessed with starling imitations.’ He tightened his mouth at this, disallowed my long-tailed tits and moved on.
‘I heard there was a nice cattle egret at Selsey. How did you manage to miss that?’
‘Ah yes, the egret. Look, Tom, I think that was my fault. I made it up.’
‘You made it up?’ He looked up again, frowning this time. Lying about birds was almost as bad as lazily ticking them when you hadn’t properly seen them. Worse, in fact.
‘I was joking. Well, sort of. Someone was hanging around irritating me, and telling him there was an egret on the other side of the harbour seemed like the best way to get rid of him.’
‘Who?’
‘I don’t know. This guy. David somebody. Anyway, he came back later having actually seen the wretched thing so it turned out I wasn’t lying after all.’ I stopped, having run out of words, beginning to squirm under Tom’s steady gaze. He had a way of just watching as you spoke, not interrupting, letting you dig yourself deeper into the mire.
‘Some people just see what they want to see,’ he said. Finished with Thursday, Tom turned over to Friday, and my outing with Zannah. ‘Ring-necked parakeets? Not a native bird.’
‘They’re on the breeding list.’
‘Could have been escapes.’
‘They were in and out of tree holes. They were looking for nesting sites.’ I sat back and folded my arms, feeling I’d won that round, waiting for the verdict. He looked at me sideways and smiled his rare smile, there and gone in an instant, transforming his features.
‘Seeing as I’m feeling generous . . .’ He moved down my list to Saturday. ‘Ah, your great crested grebe pair, nice. Bit early for them to be dancing now, I suppose?’
‘Yes. And besides, it’s a long-established couple. They hardly bother any more. Just a card on Valentine’s Day and a bunch of flowers from the garage if she’s lucky.’
Tom looked at me and decided I was joking but that it didn’t merit more than a blank stare. He turned the last page over, looking for more, not finding it.
‘Nothing on Sunday? You didn’t go out?’
Sunday had been grey and damp, cold, miserable, a day for sitting at home feeling sorry for yourself. I had meant to go out anyway, drive out and find some clear skies, some thin winter sunshine and lose myself in the busy world of the birds, but I had let my own busyness be my excuse and the short day had faded into darkness before I could leave the house.
‘You should have come up to Great Missenden with me, to see the red kites. It was beautiful up there. Four of them, quartering the fields and the road. Two of them definitely juveniles, play fighting, sparring in mid air. Amazing.’ He had forgotten my list, forgotten everything but the birds, and he conjured them up with his words so I could see them too, dancing around each other, bright in the winter sky.
‘You should have asked.’
He glanced at me uncertainly, as though unsure of how to take my response. He turned back to my list in his hand, frowning.
‘And what about today? There’s nothing here at all for Monday.’
‘Tom, I work in an underground, windowless office in the university. What am I going to see?’
‘You need to get out, Manda, get out more, do more, not sit around indoors
‘Feeling sorry for myself?’ I finished his sentence for him. He shook his head slowly, not really denying it, looking at me oddly, a frown drawn between his brows, as though we were talking about more than birds for a moment. But this was Tom, I remembered, Tom the obsessive, Tom who ate, drank and slept birds, who thought of nothing else. Of course we were talking about birds. I reclaimed my list from him and looked around for any sign of the others.
I could see Will’s round face heading towards us through the after-work crowd. He grinned through the packet of peanuts clenched in his teeth and put three brimming glasses down on the table.
‘Alan’s on his way,’ he said indistinctly, then dropped the peanuts like a well-trained Labrador. ‘Ah, year lists,’ he added, pulling a scrawled piece of paper out of his back pocket. ‘I suppose Tom’s is in taxonomic order again.’
I looked at Tom’s list, which I held in my hand with my own. Not only was it in taxonomic order, but it was admirably detailed and precise. He listed only birds he had seen and positively identified. He had noted the sex, approximate age, behaviour and location of each bird. I gave it back to Tom.
‘I don’t see the point of not doing it properly.’ He shrugged, picking up Will’s list and putting it down again without comment. I picked it up and peered sideways at it, trying to decipher Will’s handwriting.
‘Coffee, sugar, cornflakes, bread, bog roll,’ I read. ‘Blimey, Will, some of these are firsts for the county, I think.’
Ah yes, here we see the rare shy, retiring cornflake, its habitat destroyed by modern farming practices and an influx of muesli from the continent, creeping through the undergrowth . . .’ Will grinned and substituted his shopping list for another, equally scrawled and scrappy piece of paper. ‘No wonder I couldn’t find what I wanted in the supermarket this afternoon. Spent four hours trawling the aisles for a packet of bitterns – no, don’t panic, Tom, I haven’t really got a bittern on that list.’ And then, because he was Will, and because he couldn’t stop himself, ‘Once bittern, twice shy.’
Birding with Will was a non-stop succession of weak puns, from ‘leave no tern unstoned’ to ‘look at the pair of tits on that’, some of which had over the years wormed themselves so deeply into my brain that I found myself thinking them whether Will was there or not. Gareth’s nickname for him was Mostly – short for mostly harmless – but over the last few years I’d noticed Gareth seemed to seek him out more and more in preference to Tom, his childhood best friend. It was Gareth and Will who went on trips together, they, and to a lesser extent Alan, who egged each other on to worse and worse puns in the pub while Tom and I faded into the background, there merely to listen, to be entertained. Tom now favoured Will with a look of blank indifference that cut off whatever remark he was going to make next, and dropped back into brooding silence, looking no further at Will’s list.
Alan joined us, slightly breathless, his face as red as his coppery hair. ‘Sorry I’m late. Kids playing up. Jenny couldn’t make it.’ His wife, Jenny, never could make it, and every month we got the same hurried apology. Jenny was a birder too, as keen as Alan in her youth or keener, but the children had clipped her wings the way they hadn’t seemed to clip Alan’s. He was older than the others, a graduate student when we had been undergraduates, but he didn’t seem to have aged at all over the years, as though letting the rest of us catch up. In Alan’s world, Jenny was always going to come to the pub, if not this time, then next time, if the kids weren’t playing up, of course.
‘What’s that you got there, Manda? CD-Rom and half the phone book?’ Will asked.
‘Gareth’s list. I split it off the da
tabase. I was going to give it to him tonight.’
Alan paused in the act of sitting down, exchanged a quick glance at Will, then settled himself. Ah, Manda,’ he said. Will shifted uncomfortably, concentrated on opening the packet of peanuts. Tom wasn’t listening, distracted by the list, unable to resist the opportunity of going through Gareth’s entire life.
‘Manda, Gareth rang, about half an hour ago,’ Alan continued. Will finally wrenched the peanuts open, spraying half of them across the table. Tom looked up briefly from the printout, caught my eye and looked away again quickly.
‘He said he was thinking of bringing, er, Ruth tonight.’
‘What? Essex Girl?’
‘Well, she’s getting a bit into birding, now, starting a list of her own.’
‘She’s not a birder, she’s a bird,’ I said. Will snorted, but shut up at a look from Alan.
‘It’s that kind of thing he wants to avoid. Look, Manda, we’ve known you a long time . . .’ He didn’t finish the sentence, and he didn’t need to. But we’ve known Gareth longer.
‘You can still be in the main group, use the website.’
‘Will, I maintain the fucking website.’
Alan looked uncomfortable. I knew I was making his point for him. I put my hands up, tried a smile. ‘I’ll be civil, I promise.’
‘It’s just, these evenings, it’s always been about the four of us, since uni, since before then, even.’
Instinctively, I looked to Tom for support, but he avoided my eye. I wondered with a sharp pang if this was even news to him or if he had known, if the four of them had discussed it already, and he had let me sit there this last half hour in my fool’s paradise, my happy ignorance, thinking we were friends. And if this, then what else had they all concealed from me, loyal to Gareth as they were? What else had they known and kept hidden behind their blandly friendly faces? How often had they sat and watched me, here in the pub, out in the field, laughing along with me and thinking, poor Manda, if only she knew?
Out of a Clear Sky Page 4