This Saturday the grebes were still in their winter plumage, slim and pale again, the courtship forgotten. They hunted separately on the water, within sight of each other but rarely seeming to acknowledge each other’s presence. I stood on the shore and watched them, holding my breath for each dive, unable to match the staying capacity of their lungs. Each time I would be forced to take another breath well before the bird I had been tracking bobbed buoyantly up to the surface again. It would float for a moment on the water, gleaming white against its reflection, and then, with a little jumping dive, it would be gone again, back into the depths. I watched them for an hour as they busied themselves with their lives, as they passed and re-passed each other in companionable silence. Then I thrust my cold hands into the depths of my pockets and trudged back to the empty waiting house.
Ever since university, the first Monday of every month had always been spent in the pub with the rest of the gang. Now as I wandered round the house, room after room, trying to summon the will to cook myself another solitary supper, I didn’t know what to do with myself. I thought I had made a life here, settled like the grebes for this place, for this cold and unpromising country, and made the best of it. Zannah talked about home, these days, and meant Africa. I stared out of the blank and empty sitting-room window and wondered where home was now for me. Only my face stared back, telling me nothing.
As I waited for my supper to heat up, I stepped out for a moment into the cold of the garden and looked up. The night had cleared and the chill was growing, a hard frost threatening, sucking the last life out of the winter foliage. The wrong stars looked back at me: weak, few, struggling against the street lights. My father had once tried to teach me how to navigate by the night sky, how to find my bearings and set a course, but had grown frustrated and given up because the constellations he remembered weren’t there in the glittering southern skies. Only Orion, whose belt hung above me now, was familiar to us both. These stars, so distant and faint, were the ones he had been seeking, but I knew no names for them, and he was dead now, and couldn’t tell me.
I looked in through the window at the brightly lit kitchen, the dark emptiness of the house beyond. I wondered what would happen if I simply walked away, where I would end up, what would become of me. I must have stood there wondering for a long time, with no sense of time passing, lost to the world.
I hadn’t even had a chance to look properly at the others’ year lists, how mine compared. I thought about them all sitting in the warm fug of the pub, Alan with his furtive cigarettes, Will joking, Tom silently musing. Gareth would be the bright centre, as usual, the sociable one. She would probably be bored. I wondered if he’d even looked at his own life list yet, seen what I’d done. Tom would have noticed, though. He had looked up from the list for a moment just as I was leaving and our eyes met, and I thought I saw him nod, just once, as though in approval.
I smiled to myself a little as I ate my lonely meal. I’d been reminded, as I went through his list, just how many birds Gareth had that would cause rolled eyes and exchanged glances in the pub. Like the Aldeburgh Icelandic gull, and the capercaillie that had appeared – briefly, beating through the Scots pines – while I was behind a bush having a pee. And the golden eagle that everyone else thought was probably a buzzard. We all see, some of the time, what we want to see. It’s just that Gareth was better at that than anybody else. So it was for his own good, really, that I’d carefully removed them all – every last dubious one of them – from his life list before I handed it over.
DUNNOCK
Prunella modularis, family ‘Prunellidae’
A couple of weeks later I was startled by the phone ringing on a Friday evening. Zannah’s day to ring was Thursdays; after shed watched EastEnders and before she sat down to eat. I could set my watch by it. She would fill me in with her boss’s latest atrocity, and I would dredge up some incident from my week that would demonstrate that I was still getting up and going to work on a daily basis and not, say, lying in a warm bath with both wrists slashed. On Fridays Zannah went out. On Fridays I ate my solitary meal in front of the television in the still-uncurtained sitting room and planned my weekend. It was somewhere between the end of the gardening shows and the beginning of the American comedy imports that the phone rang. If not Zannah, then who? I picked up the phone.
‘Gareth?’ It was Tom.
‘Tom, he left me. Six weeks ago. Remember?’
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Shit. Sorry, Manda. I was going to update my phone.’
The silence lengthened between us. I wasn’t about to help him out. I was still bitter about his betrayal that night in the pub, the way he’d failed to stick up for me, the fact that neither he nor any one of them, not even Jenny, had contacted me since. Still, something prevented me from simply hanging up on him, and as the silence extended between us, I relented.
‘Do you need his number?’
‘No, no, I have it.’ More silence. I imagined Tom squirming a little on the other end of the line and I found I was enjoying the moment.
‘Was it something I can help with?’
‘Oh, well, I was wondering what hour Gareth was going to do for the garden birdwatch weekend.’
When I first met Gareth, garden birdwatching, and bird feeding generally, was considered pretty lame, the sort of thing your parents would do. Luring birds to the artificial habitat of the back garden seemed somehow cheating compared with going out and finding them in the wild. But once the RSPB garden survey got to be big, and they discovered they could submit a list, the lads’ interest was piqued and the whole thing got a bit competitive. Our flat fenced square of builders’ rubble thinly disguised as a lawn suddenly sprouted plants: berries for the birds, flowers for the insects the birds ate, teasels for the finches, a pine tree for the goldcrests and coal tits. Pointing out that the whole event was supposed to be a scientific survey, not a territorial pissing competition, fell on deaf ears. The problem was that while the count could take place at any time during the allotted survey weekend, it had to be completed within an hour.
‘I don’t know, Tom, you’ll have to ask him.’
I twisted the phone cord as I listened. Tom seemed to have forgotten his embarrassment now, had forgotten even that he was talking to the wrong person, and was warming to the theme.
‘Only, if I pick, say, seven a.m., I’m likely to get the woodpecker in on the fat ball. But I won’t see the coal tits. If I wait till later, I might even get the sparrowhawk, or a buzzard.’
‘Jenny told me last year that Alan spent pretty much the entire weekend watching out of their kitchen window. Then he worked out which sixty-minute time span gave him the best number and used that.’
There was a long pause while Tom digested this. ‘Don’t tell Tom,’ Jenny had added as she told me, giggling. ‘You know what he’s like about lists.’
‘Well, at least he still sticks to the hour,’ Tom said finally.
‘You’re tempted, though, aren’t you?’ I asked. ‘Go on, admit it.’
‘What do you think Gareth will do?’ Tom asked.
‘Gareth will do what he did last year, write down every bird he’s ever seen in the garden and a few that he wishes he had.’ I felt a small twinge of disloyalty at this, quickly suppressed. The evening stretched out endlessly in front of me, and I was enjoying the brief moment of human contact.
‘And you?’
Ah yes, and me. My fleeting cheerfulness vanished. I’d been avoiding looking out of my kitchen window for the last few weeks since returning from Zannah’s. It wasn’t just the maps Gareth had taken, and the bird books, and the rug. All of the feeders had gone, and their bare hooks, and the empty nail where the bird box had hung, depressed me every time I caught sight of them. The life had gone out of the garden, leaving behind only a vague feeling of guilt at not feeding the birds; one more thing I ought to be doing and wasn’t. I made a vague and non-committal answer, but Tom wasn’t really listening any more. He had returned to Alan’s idea and was
chewing it over, squaring it up with his conscience, more tempted than he wanted to admit.
‘The thing is, I’m working on Sunday. I can’t cover the whole weekend.’
I sighed and shifted the phone from one ear to the other, peering out into the dark of the window and seeing only my own face glaring palely back at me. ‘Why don’t I spell you in on Sunday? If you trust me to get the birds right, that is.’
After I’d put the phone down, having made arrangements to meet, I didn’t return immediately to the TV but sat on for a moment, staring out at the invisible garden while canned laughter blared out behind me. I didn’t need its dulling stupor. Tom’s call had reminded me I had things to do, and more than that, that I had a whole life out there, a world I belonged to, with its rules and its in-jokes, and it was time for me to rejoin it.
I snapped off the TV and headed upstairs to the computer, logging into the club’s website. Birding, Berks – named by Will, naturally, and usually losing that vital comma – had grown out of the regular Monday night sessions in the pub but was now bigger than the original group. It sat on a semi-official corner of the university web server, a minor perk of the job. As long as I didn’t work on it during office hours and kept it free of anything defamatory, my boss turned a blind eye. It had started as a place where we could keep our lists and our photos and had evolved from there. Now anyone in the local area could set up an account, keep a list, alert others to unusual sightings, fill in trip reports, plan itineraries, ask advice. Half the accounts belonged to people I recognized, the rest were strangers, some using nicknames to maintain their anonymity. Somehow over the past couple of years this site had become a community of sorts, filled with semi-strangers whose on-line lives were more vivid to me than some of the people I knew in real life. I spent an hour or so setting up a new page for the big Garden Birdwatch, to allow people to submit their lists to us as well as to the RSPB. And then I spent the rest of the evening wandering invisibly around my domain, eavesdropping on conversations, looking at lists, the benevolent keeper of my own little world.
Two new accounts had been created since I last checked. One had a university address, stillhunter, with New Year’s Day sightings for Selsey and Pagham Harbour. ‘Cattle egret!!!’ it had as its first bird, black-tailed godwit the second, and I smiled to myself, imagining Tom’s response if he encountered it. Ruthie_d was the second, and the email address was instantly familiar, causing a sick lurch to my stomach. I was surprised she hadn’t used a different one, surprised Gareth had even suggested she join, knowing as he must know that I would see it there. My hand hovered over the delete key, poised to wipe her account out of existence, but I resisted. Just knowing I could remove her whenever I chose was power enough.
I woke up the next morning determined to go out and replace the bird feeders Gareth had taken from the garden. One good thing about living in suburbia: you didn’t have to go too far to find a garden centre. There was one right on the corner of our road. I stopped in but the selection of feeders wasn’t very inspiring. I looked at the price stickers in despair. A letter had arrived from Gareth’s solicitors – he had solicitors now. Or maybe they were hers. A decision had been reached about the house in my absence. I was to buy him out. Generously, I had been given until April to arrange this. Less generously, it would be at the current market price. Essex Girl’s voice on her answering machine had asked me to leave a message. Halfway through my carefully worded suggestions of where they could stick their letter, and their solicitors after it, Gareth picked up the phone.
‘Manda, you’re scaring Ruth. And you’re not doing yourself any favours.’
I put the phone down. Added to my list. Find lawyer. Get house valued. Find an enormous sum of money I didn’t have.
The cheapest bird feeder was plastic and acrylic. It didn’t even pretend to be squirrel proof. Lightweight and gaudy and cheap. I put it back, picked up a more robust version.
‘That’s a very good bird feeder,’ said an unctuously familiar voice behind me. I turned, almost dropping it. David.
‘What are you doing here?’
‘I work here,’ he said, acting hurt. ‘Saturday job. I’m at the university.’ He wasn’t wearing the turquoise jacket now and his manner was a little more subdued; he’d lost some of the bumptiousness I remembered. I hadn’t had him down as a student; there was something in his face that didn’t fit, a wariness behind the clowning manner that the students didn’t share. He had approached behind me so quietly that I had been completely unaware of his presence, but now he was suddenly too big, too close, to be ignored. I felt that if I stepped away from him he would follow, that I could find myself cornered. Looking around I realized that there was nobody else in the shop; the other few customers lingered outside, poking through the shrubs and pots.
‘Bit old to be a student, aren’t you?’
He shrugged. ‘Did some other stuff first.’ He didn’t elaborate and I didn’t ask. ‘I’d have thought you’d have a feeder by now.’
I spoke without thinking, my mind on other things. ‘I did, several. Or rather Gareth did.’
‘Wow, he took the feeders.’ He did a silent whistle, shaking his head, but with a half-smile of amusement playing about his lips, and I could have cursed myself for giving him the opening. ‘Harsh. That’s harsh.’
I walked slowly down the aisle, trying to concentrate on the job in hand with David trailing behind me, still shaking his head and talking. None of them seemed right – the solid ones were too expensive, the rest were just toys, flimsy things that wouldn’t last a winter. Finally I gave up, and picked up a packet of bird seed, thinking I’d buy a feeder in town.
I felt it taken out of my hand. ‘I’ll get this,’ he said.
‘I’m sorry?’ I said.
‘My treat. My gift. To you. To make it up to you. To show you that some men know how to behave.’ He leaned forward, looking around, dropping his voice in a parody of discretion. ‘And I finish my shift in a minute. I can even help you carry it home.’
‘Please,’ I said. ‘Don’t.’ I didn’t have it in me to play along with his joke. He was smiling, head on one side, a ridiculous expression on his face that I supposed was meant to be appealing. ‘Please, David, I’m in no mood. I wish you’d just leave me alone.’ The smile vanished and before he could put on a puppyish expression of disappointment I thought I saw a flash of anger, lightning in a summer sky.
‘Your loss,’ he said simply, handing the seed back, and I dragged up from somewhere a few words of thanks. I hurried over to the till, feeling his eyes on me long after I’d woven through the high maze of shelving and found the counter where I could pay. Once I’d got outside the door, my mind on the next set of errands, something – that uneasy feeling of being watched – made me turn round again. There was no one in sight, just the shrubs and the bedding plants, the racks full of pots and containers, square bags of compost and mulch stacked high on pallets, blocking my view. I waited for a moment, listening to the quality of the quiet that surrounded me. Sometimes the best way to see a shy bird is to walk on past it, looking behind you to see it emerge when it thinks that the danger is past. I set off again, two brisk steps, stopping and turning abruptly, sure I’d caught a peripheral flicker of movement out of the corner of my eye, a tall figure ducking down behind a half-assembled shed. I set off again, sauntering this time, easing my pace, pulling out my mobile as I went and then stopping to sit on a low wall by the car park. David had no choice but to walk past me, and keep on walking as I mimed a wave, lost in my conversation, uninterruptable, safe from his approach.
I sat on for a good while, ignoring the cold, making sure I had shaken him off completely. In front of me was a small tree, planted in a tiny circle of brick paving. It was staked to a post, the ties already digging into the bark, caged in by an iron railing. Despite all this protection, one of its branches had been broken off and was trailing on the ground, last year’s dead leaves still clinging to it. At the very tip of the tree sa
t a blackbird, loudly advertising his territory, working his way through his repertoire of whistles and calls.
Threaded through his song I heard a distinctly familiar combination of notes. A passing man unconsciously patted his pocket, checking his phone. The Nokia ring tone. Gareth’s phone had the same one – hardly surprising, it was the default setting. The blackbird must have heard these notes a hundred times. Even on this cold and quiet Saturday morning I could see three or four people clutching phones to their ears. Husbands calling wives, checking their purchases. Men taking advantage of the brief moment of solitude to call their lovers. The blackbird had casually picked up the cheery little tune, not unlike one of its own, and was using it to impress its drab brown mate. She would be crouched somewhere less conspicuous, listening. So too would any young male blackbirds without a territory of their own, alert for any hint of weakness in the voice, ready to muscle in. And there might be other females too, still looking for a mate, uncaring whether he already had one, whether he had a brood of his own. The blackbird sang on lustily, his eye ring and beak bright orange, advertising his health, his excellent diet, apparently uncaring, just full of the joys of the coming spring.
I got up, abandoning my pretence, flipping shut my own mobile and sending the blackbird fleeing in alarm. I had forgotten to recharge my phone three days ago, but that didn’t matter. It sat mute in my pocket anyway, charged up or not. No one was singing for me.
Tom’s house – more of a cottage really – sat in the nearest thing to a wild wood Berkshire could offer. Straight out of his master’s course in ecological science, Tom had landed a job as a forester at a private estate that had somehow survived among the motorways and suburbs of the county. A nature reserve but without the pesky addition of any visitors, he lived among hundreds of acres of trees which were technically accessible only to those people living in the few houses scattered around the estate. The pay was terrible but the duties few and ill defined. As long as the bridle paths remained open and no rotting tree branches landed on anyone’s head he and his boss were free to manage the estate as they felt fit. When I arrived on Sunday morning he was preparing to go out and clear the rhododendron that spread through the forest like a cancer. He threw his chainsaw and helmet into the back of his truck.
Out of a Clear Sky Page 6