I turned and followed his gaze. Out towards the setting sun, over the sea, hundreds of birds were circling in perfect unison. They flew in a dense formation, turning as one; the flock darkening when they tipped their wings, thickening then thinning as they flashed against the beaten gold of the sky. Even as I watched, a smaller group came in and shot towards the cloud and was absorbed into it. Another group and then another flew in, each merging imperceptibly with the mass, which circled on without missing a beat. Hundreds became thousands became uncountable. The flock circled in and flew inland and I heard and could almost feel the rush of their wings against the air as they swooped and turned and beat out again over the sea, pouring over our heads.
‘Starlings,’ Eddie said, ‘gathering to roost.’
I didn’t want to know what they were, or what they were doing. It was enough that I was watching. The cloud of birds seemed to me to be a thing in itself, a living entity, forming shapes; a rolling river of birds snaking over the water low and fast transformed into a blunted mass, high and slow. It rose and fell, started to drift off slowly along the shore, all the time pulling in the smaller groups that flew towards it as though drawn by a magnet.
I was expecting the usual ribbing on the ride home. Generally, my tactic was to keep myself well out of the orbit of those three, hoping to go unnoticed. I made my way to my solitary seat, and watched as the coach pulled past the warm steamed-up windows of the cafe. Becky, Rachel and Holly plumped themselves down around me, Holly in the seat in front, Rachel across the aisle, Becky behind, her blonde head poking through the seats. I was surrounded.
‘What?’ I said, without turning my head from the window.
‘Well, go on then, did you snog him?’
I turned my head slowly to look at them. There was only avid curiosity in their faces. ‘Did you?’
I just smiled, folded my arms, closed my eyes as though to sleep. I knew not knowing would drive them mad and I relished the thought. As the coach rocked on through the twisting Dorset lanes I let their voices merge with the harsh remembered calls of the birds I’d seen and saw again against the darkness of my closed lids the swirling specks of starlings, gathering to roost.
‘Penny for them?’ David had his by now familiar foolish grin on. I looked at him, trying to see past the smile to what I knew lay underneath.
‘What are you doing here?’ I no longer had the energy to be polite. People turned to look at me again, disapproval in every line.
‘You know, I could point out that I am a birder’ – the word sounded all wrong somehow in his mouth – ‘and that this is a bird, and I’m perfectly entitled to be here watching it. But actually, as you know, I’m here mainly because I thought I might see you.’
I wanted to put my face in my hands, to rub the whole situation away. ‘Please leave me alone.’
‘Manda,’ he said, and he caught my elbow. ‘Don’t you see? I just want to make you happy.’
It was too much. I jerked out my arm from his grasp. I hated to be held like that, detained, arrested. Too many memories there. I pulled out my arm too hard, too fast, uncaring in my panic, the violence of the movement spooking the bird. A great sigh went up from the crowd as the hoopoe lifted up and flew, beating west, vanishing over the trees. Then every eye seemed to turn from the space where it had been, and lighted on us, on me, accusingly.
I turned round to David, still rubbing my elbow, feeling the ghost of his grip like a print on my skin. But there was no one behind me; he had gone, slipped out through the crowd and vanished as swiftly as the bird.
Jenny caught up with me at the bottom of the hill.
‘What was that about?’ she asked.
I shrugged.
‘I guess he’s just not your type,’ she said, smiling a little, raising her eyebrows, trying to lighten the mood.
I didn’t answer but I slowed my pace, letting her keep up beside me without breaking into a jog. My heart rate was returning to normal. I realized I was still rubbing the spot on my elbow where his hand had been and I stopped that, putting my hands into my pockets instead.
‘Sorry,’ I said finally. It was something I seemed to be saying a lot these days.
‘Cup of tea?’ she said. ‘You look like you need one.’ We stood by her car for a moment and I got the impression she was waiting for something, an explanation, an answer, something I couldn’t give. All I could offer her was a weak joke, pretending normality.
‘At least we saw the bird, before I scared it off,’ I said. ‘And you know what? I don’t think Gareth’s seen it yet.’ And we laughed and the moment was past.
Jenny’s house was empty, for once.
Alan and the kids still out, looks like,’ she said, pushing open the door into the hallway. ‘Will said he might drop round later, pick up an old scope of Alan’s for his trip.’ I’d never seen their house so quiet or still. We settled in the kitchen among a slew of half-finished school projects and abandoned toys. Jenny made tea, chattering through the sound of the kettle boiling and then the dishwasher rumbling into life. I could barely hear what she was saying, but it didn’t matter. She was talking as she always did, just filling the silence, hopping from subject to subject. I watched her as she moved around the kitchen, beginning to clear up the mess, happy to be still, half listening, half not, drifting along with my thoughts.
Gareth had sometimes pressed me with questions, seeking some version of my past that might make some sense of my behaviour. Why I could not stand hospitals and clinics, police stations, waiting rooms of any kind. Why my own father was dead to me, my mother not spoken of, my sister seeming to need to keep me close, tracking me down, checking I was OK. His childhood seemed like some sunny dream to me, out birdwatching with Tom in the woods and heaths of Surrey, something from a book. I found it hard to frame my own in a way that would make sense to him, or to me for that matter. The few bits and snippets that I’d inadvertently dropped seemed to shock him, and I backed off, not wanting to drive him away. His parents were alive, well, stolid in their neat brick house, and talked of dogs and roses and the prospects for the weather. Sitting in their cheerful sitting room, surrounded by pictures of Gareth as a baby, Gareth as a boy, with Tom, with his dog, with his parents, even with me, my own memories seemed somehow improbable, unmentionable in this cosy world. I gave them the bowdlerized version, stories from my early childhood, when I thought we had been happy. I told them what they wanted to hear, about safari trips and coral beaches, taking a dhow to Zanzibar and watching my parents wander hand-in-hand through its crowded ancient streets while Zannah and I trailed behind, hand-in-hand too, worried we might have been forgotten.
The rest I left unspoken, and his parents didn’t ask. Only Gareth persisted, coming upon me late at night when sleep had proved elusive, sitting in their dark conservatory, warding off the rush of memories my half-stories to them had triggered. He’d tuck my chilled feet into the warm space between his arm and his chest and try to talk about my past, about the things I wouldn’t tell him. And I’d sit mute and unyielding, wishing I could tell him everything, but not knowing how to begin. We would sit like that as the minutes passed, and the silence stretched out between us, my feet icy against his skin, never seeming to grow any warmer. Then he would sigh and disentangle himself, pull me up and lead me back up the stairs to bed. One night, one visit, he stopped coming down. I sat on through the small hours anyway, not sure if I was waiting for him to find me or not, not certain if I even cared.
With the tea made, Jenny sat down at last, handing me my mug, taking her own and clasping it, head on one side.
‘Are you OK?’ she asked finally, when a long minute had passed on the kitchen clock and I had not spoken. I revolved some answers in my head, but it didn’t matter, she filled up the silence with her own answers. ‘Gareth’s leaving must have hit you harder than I thought. Tough after so many years.’ She paused to let me answer, then when I didn’t, continued on without me. ‘But, you know, there’s other fish in the sea,
Manda. Gareth and you, well, maybe it wasn’t meant to be.’
She stood up again – Jenny was never one to sit for long – hunting for something in a cupboard, then, distracted, starting to fold a pile of laundry that stood in a basket on the counter.
‘I should be going,’ I said. It was growing dark while we were sitting there, and I still had to walk home.
‘Don’t go,’ she said, but then the phone rang and she went to answer it, chatting to Will as easily as she had chatted to me, switching her tone from concern to animation without skipping a beat. I looked around and saw I didn’t belong here, wouldn’t be missed. This was Gareth’s world. I put down my untouched tea, relinquished its warmth, and slipped out quietly through the front door while she was still on the phone. Jenny meant well but I hadn’t the energy any more to pretend, to keep up the front that I was OK.
I had forgotten all about semi-palmated sandpipers, and Eddie, until I got to university. After the death of my mother, and the eight years of misery I had endured at school, I arrived determined to make this a fresh start. But by the first week I already felt my nerve failing, my resolve slipping. The student bar had been intimidating, and the girls in the corridor of my hall of residence seemed no different from the ones who had tormented me at school. So far we’d exchanged only names, subjects, polite smiles, but I worried that whatever it was that clung to me, whatever air of defeat or desperation or madness, would soon be sniffed out and I would spend another three years as an outcast.
Determined to forge some life for myself beyond lectures, I stepped into the echoing hall where the freshers’ fair was held. The student societies had laid out their wares and were displaying in front of them. Every stall was a bustle of hope and enticement. I saw a block of girls I recognized – three friends already – tilting their heads and flicking their hair at two older boys who were trying to interest them in rugby. Drama students postured, musical ones sang, there was an inflatable boat swaying precariously above the scuba diving club. The cacophony almost drove me back, but the throng had pushed in behind me and the only way out was forward, through the hall, and out the other side. Sidling past rowers and debaters and Christians, I found a gap in front of a quieter stall and paused, bracing myself for my next move. I didn’t even see what club it was, saw only a familiar typeface, leaping out from a row of books laid out for sale on the table. The Field Guide to East African Mammals. Unable to resist, I picked it up.
‘Bit old, that one,’ said a male voice. ‘Bought it for my year off, couple of years back. It was out of date even then.’
‘The mammals don’t change, though, do they?’ I said as I flicked through the pages, all of my old friends springing to life. I looked up properly, saw a tall, handsome blond boy smiling at me with blue eyes, and noticed their sign. ‘Funny thing for a birdwatching club to sell, though.’
‘We’re raising funds to build a hide.’
I handed over my fifty pence and turned and looked at the crowd despairingly, trying to see a route out.
‘Gareth, you’re supposed to ask her to join us.’ I noticed beside the blond boy another stockier lad with the anxious brown eyes of a teased dog. He had had a T-shirt printed, I noticed. ‘Birds – the feathered kind!’ was written on the front. The feathered kind. Something in the phrase tugged at my memory.
‘She’s not interested, Will.’ But the blond boy, the one called Gareth, smiled even as he dismissed me. ‘Are you now?’
‘I might be,’ I said, suddenly unwilling to be brushed off so easily. ‘What makes you think I’m not interested in birdwatching?’ There was something in that smile, those blue eyes and the warmth they gave off that kept me standing there, the book’s familiar weight in my hand.
‘It’s not just about bloody robins,’ said a third voice from behind the pair of them. I hadn’t seen the figure who sat, his chair tipped backwards nonchalantly against the wall, a half-dismantled tripod in his hands. Through the gap formed by Gareth and Will I could make out only dark cropped hair, a cold gaze. ‘Name one interesting bird you’ve seen, then.’
‘Semi-palmated sandpiper.’ The words came out unbidden. ‘Dorset, 1991.’
The chair legs came down to the floor with a crash. ‘Fuck,’ he said.
By the time they worked out I was bluffing I was well ensconced in the pub with them. Tom, the tripod dismantler, was seated in the corner, silent for the most part, except when appealed to on some point of identification or birding etiquette. Every so often I’d turn and catch him watching me, his gaze cold, assessing, and I’d look away. I wasn’t interested in him. Gareth was seated to my right, with his warm thigh pressed against mine, under the table. Will was regaling Alan, an older postgraduate student, with the sandpiper story for about the third time. The banter flowed over my head and I sipped at my beer and felt like I’d come home. The girls I knew came past, bored of the rugby players, and greeted me warmly, eyes wandering over to where Gareth sat, barely according the others a flicker of a glance. I nodded at them and turned my attention back to the group: to Will, to Tom’s brief intervention, to Alan’s shout of appreciative laughter. But above all to Gareth, as he turned his gaze towards me more and more until we seemed almost alone together, lost in each other’s presence, our fingers now entwined under the table, both of us smiling and gradually falling silent.
I didn’t really know how it had come about, what unspoken words had made this happen. We stepped out of the pub together while it was still almost light, leaving the others behind, and both looked up into the warm October evening. Above our heads the starlings were gathering to roost, to sleep together for warmth and safety in numbers. The air was full of their metallic cries as he turned my face towards his. I could have fallen in love with him then, from that one gesture, as he cupped my face with his warm hands and told me I was beautiful. But it was too late. I was in love with him anyway: had been since I’d sat in the pub with them all, in the circle of faces, included.
I stepped out into the calm of the late-winter suburban dusk. There was no one around on the street. The doors of the houses were tightly shut, but their curtains were open so that each window presented a display, a tableau of happy family life. I wondered when Jenny would notice I was gone, and what she would do. Phone Gareth, I thought bitterly, or Will, or tell Alan, spreading the news. Manda, poor Manda, she’s gone a bit strange, always thought she was odd, she’s losing it now, the poor dear. And then they’d forget, move on to the next thing, the next bird, the next story, and I would be left in peace.
I looked up at the sky where the last light lingered over the rooftops. The starlings were doing their gathering flight. Just a few tens or dozens, swooping high and then low, seeking the comfort of each other before settling down to their roost. They might find safety in numbers, but not me. I turned up my collar against the raw wind and set off for the long walk home.
FIRECREST
Regulus ignicapillus, family ‘Sylviidae’
I sat on a bench near my office, flicking crumbs from my sandwich towards the scrambling sparrows, and tried not to think about the long stretch of the afternoon ahead of me. March, which had roared in on a raw east wind, had now relented and offered its first painful day of spring. A blue sky gleamed behind thin clouds and the sun touched my face with warmth as well as light. Somebody, somewhere, had mown the grass and released the sharp green smell of summer. Everywhere there was a loosening: of jackets, scarves, coats; and of the faces I passed in the streets, no longer pinched against the cold. The birds were feeling it too, had been for longer, their own internal rhythms telling them now was the time to fly, to fight, to breed. Even in this scrap of green space the air was loud with birds. A male chaffinch, with blush-pink chest puffed out, was doing his brisk arpeggio, and above the softer sweeter coloratura of the robin I could hear for the first time this year the repetitions of the chiffchaff’s call that signalled its return from Africa. The south-westerly gales had blown in more than the warmth, they had brought the f
irst wave of migrants. It was a time, in short, to be out birding.
Just as I was crumpling up the wrapper from my lunch my phone rang with its own electronic warble. Tom. I had shaken everybody else off, it seemed, but not him.
‘Firecrest in Deal.’
‘I know.’ I’d seen the email in my inbox already. It had flashed up just as I was leaving for lunch. Tom knew I’d been looking for a firecrest for years; it had become a standing joke among the group. It’s not as though it was a particularly rare bird, nor even a particularly elusive one, unless you happen to be me. But every birder’s got one bird like that: the one that they haven’t seen, that they should have seen, that everyone else has seen. The one that’s just flown the minute you get in, the one that was showing beautifully yesterday, the one that was all over the shop, last year, you should have seen it. Probably even Tom.
Deal was both tantalizingly close and impossibly far away. By the weekend the bird would be gone, and it was impossible for me to take time off from work. Our office was piled with boxes of unassembled kit. We were walled in with them, trapped by the constantly ringing phone and the hovering presence of university staff members who had taken to haunting our doorway. Deal was impossible.
‘You’re going, right? Come down with me.’
‘Tom, I can’t.’ The sun was dimming as the soft breeze blew in clouds. The sparrows fled the shadows they made. Tom didn’t respond. ‘My car needs servicing.’ More silence. ‘It’s mental at work just now.’ He waited. I’d been looking for a firecrest for ten years. I ran out of excuses. Tom let his silence do the talking. I sighed.
‘Ah, Tom. Don’t you start giving me a hard time.’
I walked back to the office with dragging feet. The sun was still warm on my face but the joy had gone out of the day. Tom was right, of course, he always was. It was spring already and I was falling behind. Janet, who operated our help desk, handed me three slips as I walked in. Three more jobs to add to the stack. Setting them aside, I checked my email first. Tom again. The firecrest had moved, according to the latest bulletin, and was now in a supermarket car park on the outskirts of Dover. He’d be going down there anyway whether I joined him or not. I sighed. A supermarket car park was excellent for viewing but a sign that the bird was restless, hunting for territory. It wouldn’t stick around in a car park for long. By the weekend, when I was finally free to seek it out, it would be gone. The phone rang, and I picked it up, half concentrating, half thinking about the bird, pulling up a map of its new location on my screen as I answered.
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