‘Make yourself at home. List is on the kitchen table. I’ll be back round four.’
I pushed open the door. I had never been inside Tom’s house in the five or six years he’d lived there. It was surprisingly tidy, the kitchen spartan. A single mug, plate and knife on the dish rack, a scrupulously clean tea-towel hanging from the cooker door. Books – not just field guides and forestry manuals, but a whole library of bird books and ecological studies – were neatly marshalled along shelves on the dresser. More books filled a case in the hall. Pushing open another door I found a sparsely furnished sitting room. Two easy chairs faced an empty grate but a third was pushed up against the window, and an ancient pair of binoculars hung by their strap from the window catch. A third door led to a bathroom, also furnished with a pair of binoculars. Tom obviously made sure he didn’t miss a thing. Looking up, I could see a telescope set up on the half-landing. Tom had told me once he’d felled three trees to make sure he could see the tree where he suspected a pair of hobbies were nesting. Peering down the eyepiece, I could make out an old bundle of sticks in the crook of a distant branch but saw no movement.
Back in the kitchen I could see that Tom had been up since dawn. Each bird was entered in neat block capitals with the time seen to the minute. I settled down by the window with a cup of tea and my binoculars to hand for a long quiet day of observation. The first birds I saw, gleaning the scattered seed, were a pair of dunnocks. Two little brown birds, subtly streaked with grey, they appeared unremarkable and demure as they peaceably pecked and hopped side by side. There had been a time – back in the early days – when Gareth’s nickname for me was Dunnock. When I finally broke down and asked him why, he laughed and ruffled my hair and said, ‘Because you’re little and brown and unobtrusive.’
‘Oh, thanks,’ I’d said, not very pleased, trying to flatten my hair back down against the onslaught of the wind. We were sitting on the beach at Selsey at the time. Alan had driven us all down to look for a group of red-necked divers that had been reported a week earlier. Tom had immediately disappeared off to Selsey Bill to watch for passing seabirds. Gareth and I were technically sea-watching too but somehow we had found ourselves just sitting on the shingle watching the endless cycling of the waves and huddling together against the biting April breeze. When I turned my head away from the sea to try and get the short strands of hair out of my face for a minute, I could see Alan and Jenny doing much the same a few yards down the beach. I focused my binoculars on them for a second, catching Jenny in mid laugh as she comfortably settled herself against Alan’s back.
‘Completely misleading, of course,’ he said, as though it were a change of subject. ‘They are famous for their adultery.’
‘Who, Alan and Jenny?’
‘No, silly, dunnocks.’ I kicked him, and he kicked me back and tried to wrestle me down, but I was intrigued and persisted.
‘So why me? Why call me a dunnock, then?’
He looked away for a moment, then back at me and his eyes were slaty blue, opaque as washed pebbles, unreadable as the sea.
‘I was reading about it. They are supposed to be monogamous but sometimes the male takes another female – which is nothing unusual, I suppose – but what’s more unusual is that the female will sometimes mate with another male, the minute her own mate’s back is turned.’
‘Seems fair enough to me.’
‘Yeah, but then he comes back, catches them at it, chases the other male off, the beta male, and mates her again, just to make sure. All season they’re at it, shag and counter-shag until she starts laying eggs. Then both of them – both males – help feed the chicks.’
‘And that reminds you of me, does it?’
‘I’ve seen the way you look at men.’ And then I knew he was joking, for I had eyes only for him, and he knew it. ‘Tom, Alan, Will, the guy in the newspaper shop . . .’ We gave up all pretence of interest in the birds and rolled like children on the shingle, tasting the salt spray on each other’s mouths. And when we stopped, breathless with laughter, there they all were waiting: Alan and Jenny and Will, and Tom, stood apart from the others, up on the road, arms folded, fixing us both with a level gaze.
Now here I was, alone, watching dunnocks in Tom’s kitchen, and I saw another way of interpreting Gareth’s words, one I had missed up to now. For it isn’t just the female dunnock that plays fast and loose with the pair bond.
Whatever his meaning, Gareth had taken to winding Tom up – or maybe it was me – pretending he thought Tom fancied me. It had started around a year after I had left university. Tom was at Bangor, doing his masters, down visiting us for a weekend. Gareth had just bought our first car, we were renting a two-bedroom flat, and Tom, for once, was the one to do the teasing.
‘Ooh, washing machine! Microwave! All the mod cons,’ he exclaimed sarcastically as I showed off our little kitchen, the spare bedroom which I had hurriedly prepared the night before.
‘It’s only Tom, Manda,’ Gareth had said, as I hunted the cupboards for a clean towel and matching sheets, but he was our first real guest and I was measuring myself against some forgotten or imagined standard of domesticity, dredged up from who knows where. That night I cooked supper while they talked, throwing a remark or two of my own into their point and counterpoint of reminiscence. Some of their stories I knew so well from long repetition I could almost join in in their telling. We ate with our plates on our knees on the sofa because the table was crowded with maps and notebooks, our plans for our first birding trip abroad together. Tom stood and surveyed them, threw in a few suggestions and then, finally, a curt nod of approval.
‘Should be good,’ he said. ‘Wish I was going myself.’
‘Sorry, mate,’ Gareth said, giving me an affectionate squeeze. ‘Couples only, know what I mean?’ I leaned against him, at home in the warm enclosure of his arms. Afterwards Tom and Gareth went to wash up in the kitchen and I remained curled up on the sofa listening to the rumble of male voices through the doorway, no longer paying any attention to the words. It had become simply a background noise, the soundtrack of my contentment, and I remember thinking then that this was it, that I was happy.
We spent the whole weekend driving round all of Tom’s old favourite birding spots, ending in Burnham Beeches on the Sunday afternoon. He was due to get the train back to Wales that evening, but we just had time for one final wander through the spring woods looking for birds together. We headed down, away from the crowds of dog walkers and family groups on constitutionals, past the ponds and into the scrubbier woods where beeches gave way to oak and holly and everything was tangled with old man’s beard. We had stopped to watch a party of long-tailed tits as they flitted through the bushes, calling constantly to keep in contact. They were feeding near a dense stand of holly, which hollowed out into a little covered clearing, and Tom leaned down, watching the tits but also beyond them, into the bushes, always alert to the chance of something else, something interesting.
The tits flew off and Gareth, bored, wandered after them along the path of a small leaf-choked stream. Tom paused me for a moment with an imperious gesture of the hand just as I was about to follow.
‘Watch this,’ he said, and I leaned down to look through the branches towards the ground where a small brown bird foraged busily among last year’s dried leaves.
‘It’s a dunnock,’ I said, curious as to why Tom would be directing his attention to such a commonplace little bird.
‘Yes, I know, a female,’ he said. ‘Watch.’
I watched. The little bird foraged on, oblivious. Tom squatted down, getting comfortable against the trunk of a tree, and I sank down slowly too, resting my elbows on my knees. Gareth’s footsteps faded away and soon I could only hear the dry rustles of the bird’s movements, Tom’s breathing, and my own.
‘What are we watching for?’ I said at last, in an undertone. Tom didn’t respond for a few moments, and I thought he hadn’t heard until he put his finger up to his lips and then pointed beyond the little
female to a branch a few feet above her, where another, apparently identical, bird was perched.
‘Wait,’ he said, and as we waited we saw her crouch down and twirl her tail in invitation at this skulking male. Behind and above us I heard a fractured song, and as I turned to look, Tom breathed in my ear, ‘That’s him, behind us.’
‘Who?’ I said, confused, and almost missed the brief second’s frantic mating as the first male flew down from his concealed perch and barely hovered behind the crouching, waiting female.
‘The other male,’ Tom said, and as he spoke there was a feathery whirr as a third brown bird flew into the little clearing, seeing off his rival. ‘The mate. The alpha male.’
His rival may have gone but the female remained, still crouching and submissive as her mate pecked brutally at her cloaca, then mounted her himself, just as briefly.
‘Ouch,’ I said, but Tom just laughed.
‘That’s evolution,’ he said, and we started to scramble back out of the concealing bush. I stood up too quickly and I felt as much as saw the rising tide of blackness as the blood rushed downwards – the world fading out into nothing – and my hand reached out instinctively for support. It met scratchy wool and warmth and I steadied myself briefly before sound and vision returned and I saw Gareth’s bright face before us, darkening briefly to a frown as he approached.
‘What have you two been up to?’ he said, reaching for jokiness in his voice.
‘Watching dunnocks,’ said Tom, and I took my hand off his shoulder and put it through Gareth’s arm, sneaking it down into his jacket pocket and insinuating my fingers into the warmth of his palm.
‘So that’s what they call it these days, is it?’ he said, picking a dead leaf out of my hair with his free hand, but this time the laugh was unforced. ‘Watching dunnocks? Hands off my bird, Tom.’ We started back towards the car, Gareth and I together, Tom off to one side.
‘Ménage a trois,’ Tom said, ignoring Gareth’s last remark, and I could feel Gareth’s stride hitch for a second before he continued walking easily on. ‘The dunnocks, I mean. The female was having a sneaky little shag with her lover in the bushes.’
‘You saw that?’ Gareth said. ‘Wow. So you won’t be impressed with my tree creeper then.’
‘Ah, bastard, I haven’t had that yet this year. Wait up, will you?’
As Tom headed back to get the tree creeper, Gareth wound his hands behind my back and pulled me close. ‘No sneaky shags with my rival, right?’ he breathed, and it was my turn to laugh.
‘Tom? Give me a break.’
‘I know, I know, credit the girl with some taste, eh?’ His mouth was on my face, my ears, my neck, nuzzling through the wool of my jumper, his hands pushing up against the skin of my back, down into the waistband of my jeans. But he didn’t forget – wouldn’t forget – the incident; and for a while afterwards he went back to calling me Dunnock on occasion, catching my eye across a table or a room, especially when Tom was around. It wasn’t a private thing now, but a public one, done with a heavy-lidded stare at me as he said it, as though challenging the assembled company to ask him why he called me that. He knew I’d flush and look away as he threw it into the conversation and then as often as not moved on, leaving me confused and stumbling for the next word. Those would often be the nights that he’d grab me even before we reached the car, pulling me into doorways, kissing me roughly as I half protested, half acquiesced, even after he’d spent a whole evening alternating between baiting and ignoring me.
But he did it less often as things cooled between us, when whole weeks might pass without us so much as touching, when I went to bed, pleading exhaustion, at nine and feigned sleep, back turned, when he stumbled up after midnight. Our nights out together became fewer, anyway, as he found work colleagues to drink with, other places to go without me. I began to hate the nickname and everything it stood for; it reminded me too much of a time when we had been happy, especially when others picked it up and used it unknowingly, long after Gareth had stopped bothering to tease me any more, had stopped bothering about anything at all.
I shook my head at the memory and banished it. The birds had flown, anyway, replaced by a flock of squabbling sparrows which looked crude and scruffy after the dunnocks’ muted elegance. Gareth had bored of the joke in the end. He still liked to taunt Tom about things – his solitary life, his seriousness – but Tom, like me, put up with the teasing. It was the price we paid, with Gareth, for his attention.
I made a note of the sparrows and watched on. Tits – blue tits, coal tits, great tits – busied themselves at the peanut feeder. A pair of collared doves sat bowing in a tree. I sat and watched and noted, my tea cooling beside me. Only the constant checking of the clock as a new bird flew in gave me any sense of the passing of time. It was long past four before Tom showed up, and the last birds were leaving for their roosts. Only a blackbird sang on in the dusk.
I didn’t mention the dunnocks to Tom, in the end. It seemed like it would open a whole conversation I didn’t feel like having. Instead, I told him about the ring tone call of the blackbird in the car park. ‘Normal or polyphonic?’ he asked.
‘Normal, I think.’
‘I remember when I was a boy, they all started doing the trim-phone ring. Remember those phones?’ I shook my head. Something else I’d missed. ‘And then it was car alarms. They’ll be doing polyphonic by next year, I bet you any money. The new young ones coming through. Those trim-phone blackbirds are all dead now.’
He sat down to pull his boots off, then leaned back and closed his eyes. His face was marked slightly by soot from the bonfire I could smell on his clothes, and his throat stood out white against the dark wool of his jumper. Without the usual penetrating gaze his face was softened, blurred by tiredness. It only lasted for a second and then he was back, instantly alert.
‘Where’s that list?’
Later, over bacon and eggs, I finally broached the subject that had been bothering me for a fortnight.
‘What was she like then?’
‘Who?’
‘Essex Girl. You know.’ I didn’t want to dignify her with a name. ‘Gareth’s new . . .’
‘Ruth? All right.’ He shrugged. ‘Haven’t you met her?’
‘Barely. When Gareth was sleeping with her behind my back he spent quite a lot of energy keeping us apart. And after I found out, I wasn’t too keen to socialize.’ I regretted the words the minute they came out of my mouth. The light tone I’d aimed for hadn’t quite made it past the bitterness in my throat. Tom looked uncomfortable, started clearing up the plates, and I found I was dreading the end of the evening, the return home. ‘All I know is, if her text messages are anything to go by, she can’t spell.’ He laughed, sat down again.
‘Well, OK, she didn’t strike me as the sharpest tool in the box. I don’t think she’ll be back in the Bird in Hand either.’ He paused, cleared his throat, and the next sentence came out of his mouth almost sideways. ‘In my opinion, Gareth has made a big mistake.’
I looked at Tom but he had turned his back, taking the plates to the sink and scraping them busily. For a moment I thought he meant there was a possibility that Gareth and I could go back, right back to the way we had been, as though he hadn’t done what he had done, as though I hadn’t done what I’d done, as though nothing had happened. I could suddenly see the five of us sitting round the pub table as we had done for years. We would be laughing. Laughing at one of Gareth’s witticisms, or Will’s terrible jokes, it didn’t matter. Listening to one of Alan’s long drawn-out stories about a birding trip involving uncomprehending foreigners. Arguing about whose turn it was to get the next round in. Drawing up our top-ten list of all-time great birds. We could sit in the warm circle of our own making and exclude the rest of the pub, the rest of the world. And this time maybe I wouldn’t pick up that gleaming little Nokia with its cheery ring and idly page through the messages received box. Wouldn’t ask, when Gareth came back from the Gents, who ‘R’ was. Wouldn’t feel t
hat cold sinking in the pit of my stomach, the pounding heart, and the shaking hands, as his eyes shifted away, and he cleared his throat, and the rest of the table gradually fell silent.
‘You reckon? Do you think he might come back?’
Tom paused in the act of turning from the sink, a plate in one hand. His face was unreadable, but I thought I saw pity there, pity and pain. He didn’t say anything, but turned back to the sink, scraping the plate with what seemed like unnecessary vigour, blasting it with the tap so it drowned out my words.
‘Ah, no, stupid question,’ I said to his back. ‘Forget I asked it.’
For five days, as January crept over into February, I rose and left for work in the dark, and returned in the dark. On the Friday evening I finally got around to updating my own list from the weekend’s birdwatch. Tom’s was in already, and Alan and Jenny’s. I was half expecting a panicky phone call from Will wanting to know what his password was. A few others had submitted too. I pulled my list up off the database and logged in myself.
Twenty minutes later I was still cursing at the computer. Every time I tried to transfer my list up, it complained that the file was already there. Five days of sorting out other people’s computer problems had left me dull-witted and slow, and it was another ten minutes of trying various combinations of key strokes and muttered swear words before I had the wit to check the entry under my own name.
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