I wasn’t about to beg. ‘I can finish my drink, I suppose?’ Will nodded, but only after checking with Alan, who glanced discreetly at his watch and then started playing with the catch. I felt the three of them watching me as I forced the beer down as quickly as I could.
‘Peanut?’ Will offered. I shook my head and finished my Guinness in a silence broken only by the clicking of Alan’s watch strap: open and closed, open and closed, as though he were trying to break it.
‘Give Gareth the list,’ I said as I got up to go. ‘Tell him everything is on the disk.’ They nodded again. As I made my way away from the table I could hear the conversation start up again slowly, something about a ringing day coming up, a big twitch Will had been on in December. I turned to look. They had closed their chairs up round the table, erasing the place where I had sat.
Outside in the car park the cars and the tarmac gleamed damply, reflecting the bright spill of light from the pub. My own car was sitting right by the entrance, but I postponed the moment of getting into it, of admitting defeat. When I’d arrived the place had been almost empty, just Tom’s work Land Rover parked by the skip, towering over everything else. Now the car park was filling up and as I stood irresolutely in the doorway trying to summon the will to leave, I saw Gareth and Ruth threading through the parked cars, their faces lit orange by the street lights.
Without thinking, not wanting to be seen, I slipped back into the shadows behind the sheltering bulk of the Land Rover. There was a sour stink of stale beer and wine from the skip full of empty bottles behind me, but I was safe here, hidden from their approach, watching through the windows of the car. I could hear the harsh grate of her voice and see her, distorted by the glass, clinging to his arm, tottering on too-high heels. It used to be my arm that slipped so familiarly into the crook of his elbow like that, my hair that he kissed as we paused at the door into somewhere, gathering ourselves for an entrance. He said something and she laughed, a whinnying high laugh, and then they were gone, swallowed into the pub, shutting the door so the car park was left to the darkness.
‘Annoying, isn’t she?’ said a voice behind me.
I whirled round, startled, heart hammering with shock. David was standing right behind me. It was too dark to see his face clearly but the high beaked nose caught what there was of the light and his eyes seemed to glitter as he leaned forward.
‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to creep up on you, but you seemed somewhat absorbed.’
‘What, are you following me?’
‘No, not exactly. I had just seen you and was on the point of warning you that Gareth was on his way when I realized you had anticipated me. I’m sorry I gave you a fright.’
‘It’s OK,’ I said, and I hoped I had kept myself under control as I watched Gareth and Ruth together, that my face had not betrayed my feelings. ‘And thanks. For coming to warn me.’
‘Not at all,’ he said. ‘It was my pleasure. Can I do anything else for you, though? Buy you a drink? A meal? Give you a lift home?’
I shook my head, fumbling for my car keys, wanting now only to be left alone. ‘I’m fine. Thanks.’
‘Not even a quick cup of coffee?’ He followed me across the car park, impossible to shake off. My car bipped in greeting as I pressed the button on the key chain and he leapt to pull open the door for me, waving me in with a flourish. Then, when I’d climbed in, he wouldn’t let go of the door, but hung on to it, leaning down, still talking.
‘He’s not worth it, you know, Manda. You’re worth ten of him. Twenty. Thirty.’
I wanted to wrest the car door from his grasp but I knew that would play into his hands, make a joke of it, a game. ‘Please,’ I said, starting the engine. ‘I just need to go home.’ And he finally let go, opening his hands in surrender.
‘You’re a cruel woman, Manda Brooks.’ I shook my head. ‘And yet you’re worth a million of her.’
I brushed off his remark at the time. It was only as I started off through the emptying streets that I started to wonder how he had come to learn my full name, and how he had come to be there, so conveniently, waiting outside the pub.
I drove back slowly to the house, which was now lopsidedly furnished after Gareth’s predations over New Year. As we had arranged, he’d come over to pick up ‘his’ stuff while I was staying with Zannah. An interesting concept, after almost ten years of living together. I wandered through the empty rooms and noted once more the gaps, the lines in the dust, where a book, the stereo, a picture, had been. New absences kept jumping out at me, ones I hadn’t noticed when I first returned on Saturday. Only that morning, opening the wardrobe to dress for work, I had heard the chatter of the empty hangers; seen how much space had been taken up over the years by the substantial mass of Gareth’s dark suits. Now only my work clothes remained, hanging forlornly at one end. I spread them out along the rail, but that only made it look worse and I shoved them all back and slammed the door, triggering the faint echo of the hangers again, wire against wire.
We had agreed I would keep the car; we still had to decide what to do with the house. In the gaps where familiar objects had stood I could feel her presence, standing beside him, egging him on. The rug we bought in Morocco, together, had become a square of unfaded carpet on the sitting-room floor. The maps, one for each trip, birds and dates marked in Gareth’s scrawl. They had filled a whole shelf and now they were all gone – even the ones we hadn’t used yet, the trips we’d once planned, with the maps spread out on the rug before us as we sprawled beside the fire. The windows blazed black and empty in the sitting room, the new curtain rail still propped up beside them, curtains draped over the back of the nearest chair. It had been almost our last act as a couple, that purchase; a parody of marriage – the trawl round the DIY store, still exhausted from the recriminations, still moving forward as though on auto-pilot, because we couldn’t stop. Three weeks before Christmas, the shop almost unbearable with crowds and cheerful music, but I was clinging to the normality of it. It had seemed to me as though as long as the rail remained there, leaning expectantly against the wall, he would stay. He had promised, after all, that he would put it up. He had owed me that much.
On that last morning I had woken with the grey drugged tiredness of a bad night’s sleep. I had spent that night, as I had spent so many nights, picking over the details of his betrayal, the few hard facts I had. I could tell even as I lay there that he was awake beside me, locked in his own cycle of thoughts. There was no point in talking, not any more, not to each other. He had found someone else, and that was the end of it and nothing I could say would change anything. In the early hours he had got up and I had fallen finally into an uneasy sleep. When I dragged myself out of bed to prepare for work, he was already dressed and packed to go. He fiddled with his keys and sat opposite me as I ate my breakfast. I stared at him, exhausted.
‘I’m leaving,’ he said.
‘What about the curtains?’ It was all I could think of in reply.
He shook his head and looked at me again. ‘I’m leaving, Manda. Ruth is coming to pick me up in an hour. It’s over.’
‘But you promised,’ I said, and heard the childish whine in my voice.
‘Manda, I’m leaving. My bags are packed. This is it. It’s not about the curtains.’
I suppose some part of me still didn’t really believe it was the end. Even after he left, after we’d had our businesslike telephone conversation about picking things up and dropping off keys, I had clung on to that one promise of his. He’d come in over the weekend and he’d put up the rail, as he said he would, and then he’d step back to admire his handiwork and see the life we’d made together still spread out around him, and he’d realize his mistake. It was only when I’d opened up our front door, stepped over his set of keys, sprawled on the mat with their familiar brown leather key ring, put down my weekend bag and walked into the sitting room to see that rail still leaning there against the wall that I realized he’d really gone.
While Tom was out wa
tching the red kites soar, I had spent the weekend unpicking the last of the knots that tied Gareth and myself together. Other couples might have to divide their record collections. Birders have to split their lists. We had almost ten years of listing together, all of them painstakingly databased by me on a system I’d built clandestinely as a student on the university network. I’d taught myself enough Oracle to do it and when the system administrator finally caught up with me he was impressed enough to offer me a job when I graduated. I was still working in the same job; and I was still using the same design for the database, although the software it was written in had moved on. Night after night I had sat in the computer labs and entered every sighting from Gareth’s notebooks; spelling his whole life out, bird by bird. His past became mine, in a way, as I worked my way through his lists. Birds I’d never seen, places I’d never gone to becoming as much a part of my memories as of his. I grew used to the quiet hum of the almost empty rooms, the glare from the strip lights in the corridors, the intent and silent stares of the other night owls, their faces lit with the green glow from the screens. It took me three weeks of long nights to work my way through the stack of Gareth’s notebooks and then I started with our own, our joint birds.
Appropriately enough, I began with an owl, a barn owl. The first one ever for me, just one of many for Gareth. It was the year that Gareth had bought an ancient motorbike, the proceeds of his first job, and with it the freedom of the country. At last we had the mobility to chase birds as they were reported, not waiting for a train, or a lift, or the weekend. That Friday we had headed off to Suffolk, looking for an Icelandic gull that had been reported hanging around Aldeburgh. It proved frustratingly elusive, that wraith-like bird, always just flown wherever we went. By the Saturday afternoon, tired and cold from the knife-like wind that scoured the shingle beach, I was ready to give up and retired to the seafront to thaw my hands on a cup of tea while Gareth watched on, promising to run and get me the moment he saw anything.
He didn’t, so I lingered over my tea, enjoying the tingle of blood returning to my fingers and face, then pushed myself back into the wind. Gareth’s face was aglow.
‘It came just after you left. You should have seen it, Manda, swooping down over the beach. It was fantastic.’
I was furious. ‘You said you were going to come and get me.’
‘Yeah, but it was only here a second.’ He was looking away, turning to watch a herring gull that was picking over a fish head a few yards away, only meeting my eyes for a brief moment.
‘You did see it, didn’t you?’
‘Manda!’
I narrowed my eyes. They had happened before, these mysteriously appearing birds of Gareth’s. ‘couldn’t it have just been a light herring gull?’
‘No way. The wings were too pale, the bill too short. Come on, let’s get some tea, I’m perishing.’
I was torn. I wanted to stay and look for the gull. But I felt that standing there would imply I didn’t believe him, that I was doubting his word, his honesty, his identification. Tom berated Gareth all the time about his habit of conjuring up birds from thin air. But Tom could do that. Tom had known Gareth forever.
Gareth had taught me everything I knew about birds. I was still learning, then, still looking in the wrong direction half the time, fumbling with my binoculars, hastily paging through my field guide. It had been half the basis of our relationship, me learning, him showing, sharing his knowledge with me. I followed him up the thick shingle, my feet slipping, turning my head as we left the beach for one last look.
By the Sunday the consensus was that the bird had gone. Gareth’s was the last sighting by a long way and I could see the exchanged glances of the other birders when he mentioned it in the pub and the way the conversation was quickly turned to other birds, other sightings. We packed up that afternoon and the short winter day was already over by the time we set off. Later I would learn how to sleep on the back of the motorbike on those long night rides, slumped against the comforting warmth of Gareth, trusting him to keep me safe. But that night I was prickly and cross, sitting upright with my arms braced behind me. Over and over I revolved the little scene on the beach in my head. Why didn’t he get me, if it was the bird? If it wasn’t the bird, why did he say it was? Either way I was disturbed beyond the simple irritation at dipping on a bird we’d come miles to see; it was the dishonesty, the readiness to boast, those exchanged glances of disbelief from the others. The pitying looks had included me, by association. I found myself for the first time edging away from him, no longer willing to be encompassed in his glow.
I was roused from this futile cycle of thought by the sudden shock of silence and stillness as the engine was switched off. I asked Gareth what the problem was, but he shushed me, motioned me to look over his shoulder. In the circle cast by the bike’s headlight I saw what I took to be a cat sat bolt upright in the road. But as we both watched with held breath it rose, ghostlike, on white silent wings, and flew steadily away, held briefly in the beam until it jinked and vanished into the woods.
‘Barn owl,’ Gareth said, ‘guarding its kill.’ A rodent lay dead on the roadside before us. I knew that hundreds of young owls died each year, guarding their prey from the roaring metal monsters on the roads. Gareth got off the bike and gently moved the dead mouse to the side of the road where a bird could safely take it. He stood for a moment just waiting, watching the spot where the owl had vanished, the edge of his face caught in the glow from the headlight. I sat quietly, my eyes on his face as he reluctantly turned and came back to the bike. Just before he restarted the ignition we heard a long haunting screech from the trees. Gareth raised one hand as though in salute and I wrapped my arms back around his solid warmth, grateful once more for his presence.
The owl was still there, the memory crystallized in the bald facts – place, time, name – of the sighting. Merely viewing the record on screen, as I checked what I’d been doing, was enough to bring it to life and send it once more rising up silently before us and vanishing into the dark woods.
I was pleased that my original design for the system had held good. With a single query it was possible to unzip Gareth’s birds from my own, retaining on both sides the ones that we had shared. I ended up with a single file combining all his sightings; twenty years of history. I was going to give him a copy of the database too, but the thought of him and Essex Girl sitting in front of it putting in their birds stopped me. It had always been one of our Sunday night rituals, filling in the weekends birds – Gareth sitting in the corner, calling out the names and dates and places from his notes, me typing as fast as I could to keep up. Let him write his own database. Let her write him one. If she could.
I finished the weekend’s work by putting in my own birds for the last two days – a thin crop, Tom was right. The best were the grebes, a regular pair from our local birding patch, a flooded gravel pit a few hundred yards from the house. When the pit had been exhausted the quarrying firm had done a bit of half-hearted landscaping and planted some trees. Not a great site, in truth, but it was ours, walking distance from our house. Over the years its raw edges had softened as the trees grew up and nature began to reclaim it. The cars roar by on the M4 on the other side of a strip of trees, unaware that yards to their left there are ducks and lapwing and grebes, and one small, solitary birder walking her way around the lake, looking for peace of mind.
When we had bought the house the pit was even rawer, only fully flooded a year or two before. But it was one of the things which had attracted us to this suburban pocket on the outskirts of Maidenhead. Even its rawness had seemed like an advantage to me. It was a chance for us to start something together, to watch as it grew up from nothing. Over the years we had recorded, visit by visit, the colonization of the site, and with it I began to understand the quiet attraction of this country, a place that had up until now felt only alien and cold to me, repellently drab and grey. In Africa this would have been a riot of vegetation within weeks, loud with insects and
birds, rampant with new life. Here, the process was more insidious, a gradual softening of the hard edges, almost imperceptible until one spring it just blossomed, a froth of white flowers appearing against the green, and I saw how the whole rough unpromising spot had quietly transformed itself in its subtle beauty.
The birds were subtler, too, not giving up their secrets to the casual eye. Cormorants had quickly colonized the edges of the water and sat in lines along the abandoned machinery, hanging their wings out to dry like ragged laundry, guano streaking everywhere they perched. The two grebes that followed shortly afterwards must have been young to adopt such an unpromising nest site. When they arrived the first year we visited they were slim and pale, silvery grey unspectacular birds that swam low in the water, making barely a ripple. They can dive deep, grebes, flattening their feathers to expel any pockets of air, driving themselves down to the bottom with powerful feet, placed well to the back of their bodies for maximum efficiency. On the surface they seemed a little awkward, bobbing under the water as quickly as they could, as though getting away from an alien world.
And then, early one spring morning when we had returned from a trip away, we found them transformed, the winter moult over, and their bright breeding plumes forming great ruffs, framing their heads. As we watched, the male brought the female weed, and little fish plucked from the depth of this brand-new lake, and they turned and faced each other to dance. In turn they bobbed and tucked their heads, mirroring each other. We sat and watched as they danced across the surface of the water side by side, their bodies held upright out of the water, propelled along by their lobed feet. Awkward, almost comical, to human eyes, but there was a tenderness to it, especially in that mirroring of each other, that almost made me believe the birds dressed up their mating rituals in fine emotions as well as fine feathers. And then, the courtship done and the pair bond formed, the dancing stopped, and they got on with the serious business of rearing a family.
Out of a Clear Sky Page 5