‘IT support.’
David’s voice broke into my abstraction, startling me. ‘I have a problem with my computer.’
I glanced over to where Janet was sitting and watching me closely. She had taken to doing that these past few days as the work piled up around me and I fell further behind. I said through clenched teeth, ‘What sort of problem?’
‘My emails keep bouncing. My emails to you.’ They had filled up my inbox before I could filter them out, arriving faster than I could delete them. ‘I’m worried that you may not have received my invitation to dinner this evening.’
I closed my eyes, ignoring Janet, breathing in and counting slowly down as I exhaled. Then I put the phone down, softly and gently, settling it down in its cradle as though that might keep it quiet for the rest of the afternoon. My hands, I noticed with some detachment, were trembling slightly. I returned to my computer, looking down at the slips scattered around my desk, picking up the first one, and trying to concentrate on it, wishing I hadn’t been so rattled by the call. My phone rang again and I jumped at the sound, barely able to muster a coherent response to a query from Finance, my eyes fixed on my monitor, functioning on autopilot, taking very little in. Up until now, David had provoked mainly irritation in me, irritation and an underlying current of unease. But he was turning up too often, in too many places. Once or twice I thought I saw his car, just at the bottom of my street, always pulling away when I went to investigate. Other times he was just there, shopping where I shopped, walking where I walked, always around. Each time he kept up his act of baffled friendliness, as though this were some chance encounter, no more than coincidence. But something had shifted in my mind, like a wall giving way under steady strain; a slow and unnoticeable creep suddenly and catastrophically transformed. I could no longer ignore it. I was becoming afraid.
I got rid of the caller from Finance and tried to return to my job. It all seemed so remote. On the screen I could see pictures of the firecrest posted by people who’d been down to see it already. It was hunkered in among the bright orange berries of the trees that seemed only to grow in supermarket car parks, its feathers fluffed defensively into a ball. It looked startled and hunted, ready to flee, unsettled by all the attention. I know how you feel, I thought. The sight of it triggered a hunger. I wanted that bird on my list.
My phone was ringing again. I stared at it but didn’t pick it up. Six rings, seven, eight, nine and it went to voice-mail. In the respite of silence I tried to focus. I knew I ought to be working but I granted myself one more indulgence before buckling down. With an action that had become too habitual these days, I went in to check the others’ lists. Gareth’s hadn’t changed yet – not since I last checked, an hour ago. Tom had updated his list over lunchtime, as he usually did, using the computer in the forestry office as he didn’t have one at home. Owls, he’d added. He must have been out spotlighting for them in the evening. Alan and Jenny were in Norfolk with the kids – their joint list full of avocets and marsh harriers and thousands and thousands of waders still overwintering in the marshes. ‘Bittern booming?’ Jenny had added at the end. ‘Alan claims he saw it. . .’ I could imagine her writing it, him leaning over her protesting, laughing, but in the end allowing the disbelief to stand.
The phone rang, stopped ringing, paused as though for breath, then rang again. I stared at the screen. The site had been hacked, I knew that. Ever since my list had been tampered with I’d had a sense of someone else in there, someone besides me, leaving a trail of small changes. There was a pattern among them, too subtle to notice unless you were looking for it. Most were merely random, but others recurred. Ruth’s list, for instance, lost a few birds overnight whenever she updated it. Someone kept changing Will’s password, convincing him he’d forgotten it again, forcing him to ring me up. Wildly improbable birds – albatrosses and condors – showed up on Gareth’s list, but only fleetingly, enough to provoke a flurry of interest before they were gone. Only Tom’s account seemed immune, Tom’s and mine.
When I had first stopped trusting Gareth, I hacked into his email account. It hadn’t been hard. Gareth was not a good conspirator; he used the same password for everything. His life was laid out in front of me, open to view, everything he had tried to keep hidden. I read all his emails to Ruth and all hers to him for six weeks before I could make myself stop. The first time I opened one, I felt sick. My hands trembled and I could feel the clammy chill of sweat, my stomach turn over and sink as I clicked on the icon and waited for the text to come up. I should have stopped there, should have walked away, never bridged that hard gap between suspecting and knowing the truth. But once I had started, I couldn’t stop. For six weeks, I watched Gareth and knew, knew that I knew and he didn’t, enjoying the sense of power I had, little as it was, something snatched out of the wreckage.
Now, staring at the site, looking vainly for clues, I felt that the tables were turned. My world had been invaded, and I didn’t know how. Someone was watching what I did, I felt sure, knowing what I had done, adjusting their strategy to stay one step ahead. Somebody had me in their power.
I looked once more through the log files on the server, confirming what I already knew, what I had seen before a hundred times. The latest changes had been made through my account. And they had been made by someone logging in from my PC. I shook my head hard, trying to shake off the thought that I was simply going mad. The only person who could possibly have made those changes was me.
The phone was ringing again, the noise drilling into my thoughts. I picked it up and heard with a sort of dull lack of surprise that it was David.
‘Are you avoiding me?’ I tried to square the subtle mind behind the hacking with this foolish voice, this open pursuit, apparently so benign. He was still talking, almost pleading, a whining note of entreaty in his voice. ‘You’re too cruel.’
Sighing, I told him I had nothing to say. I put down the phone and went out for a breather, surprised by the sunlight when I emerged, the warmth of the sunshine still there on my face. I had forgotten about the spring. Soon the clocks would be going forward; a quarter of the year over already and nothing achieved except the dull round of survival. Apart from the hoopoe, and a few migrants that had showed up at the gravel pit over the weekend, I was getting nowhere. During the week I spent the daylight hours buried at work, and the weekends I now spent endlessly walking round the familiar bounds of the gravel pit, unable to tear myself away. I found myself spending hour after hour there, watching the grebes as they danced in their courtship dance, sitting on the raw bare banks at the edge of the water, huddled in an old coat of Gareth’s. Each time I put it on I knew I was making a mistake, but I couldn’t let go. It was still filled with his presence, still holding his shape, his smell, triggering memories, dragging me back to the past. I seemed to see him everywhere – his walk, his back, the turn of his head, only to look again and see a stranger, or no one at all. Sometimes I wondered if he left his coat with me deliberately, marking his territory, keeping me hanging on. As if he knew that I would wear it, would not be able to resist, and that as long as I did I would never quite be free of the past.
I was filled suddenly with the restless ache of spring, from the thawing of memories I tried to keep frozen. And back in the office, plodding through the next hour, I found I had shaken off all the distractions but one. I forgot about David, about the site, even about Gareth and what he might be doing without me. It was the thought of the year turning, of the precious spring coming and going without me, that preyed on my mind.
At four o’clock I stood up and logged out, reminding Janet I had to leave early. I had another rendezvous, one I couldn’t avoid. It was just a short drive from work, something that never failed to surprise me. The events of those days seemed now so remote, so separate from the life I’d managed to forge for myself, that it seemed impossible they could have happened just half-an-hour’s drive from my home. Zannah was waiting for me there, and as I pulled up and parked I was struck for a mom
ent by how alike we had grown, somehow, over the years. She had worn black, as she did every year, and her face stood out white against her collar. She seemed drowned by her coat, her hands barely creeping through the cuffs. Only her blue eyes, catching the last of the afternoon sun, seemed to have any colour. She had my walk too, I realized, as we fell into step, the same gait, the same way of raising her shoulders and hunching her neck in the cold.
‘You remembered the date,’ she said, not quite making it a question.
‘I remembered the date.’
Eleven years to the day of my mother’s death. It was just such a spring day, too, the kind of day that fills a person with painful hope, too much to bear. And it was hope, in a way, that killed her. My father’s hope, taking her out of the nursing home thinking that spring might somehow have changed something. My own hope. And hers, that one of us might have been able to save her. I live with that every day; there’s no danger I’d ever forget it. It’s Zannah who seems to need to mark the date, make this annual ritual, and I go along. With Zannah, that’s usually the easiest route.
We stepped through the graveyard gate into the shade of the yews. Spring had not yet reached here, away from the warmth of the sun, and I envied Zannah her coat. We walked side by side in silence. At the approach to the grave site, I stopped. That was as far as I ever came. That was the compromise we had worked out, Zannah and I, over the years. She walked on without me and I sat down on a nearby bench, not needing to watch, looking away, feeling the chill enter my bones, thinking my own thoughts. I knew she would lay down her flowers, arranging them neatly in the stone vase, clearing the grave. I knew she would lay down flowers for me too, although I have never asked her to, stubborn in her delusion, sticking to her notion of what ought to be done. And I knew she would then stand there in silence, her eyes closed, keeping her thoughts to herself.
As I sat and waited for her, there was a movement in the yew tree nearest me, soft and fast, the quick burr of feathered wings in motion, the thin tseeping call of a familiar bird. The goldcrest is even smaller than its cousin the firecrest; a Fabergé bird wrought in flesh and feathers, with a clockwork presence like a magical toy. Only a few small crucial details tell them apart. This one turned its large dark eyes upon me and seemed to observe me for a second. It betrayed no fear, went on with its business of gleaning infinitely small insects from the yew’s branches, its head in constant motion as it cocked it back and forth. Its movements were so fast and sudden that it seemed almost to materialize in each new position, working its way so close to me that it no longer mattered that I had no binoculars with me. I was able to see each individual feather unaided. Its crest, flush with the head, was bright gold against the mossy green, its chest was a pale shade of buff. I waited, unbreathing, watching for it to take off and flee, but it seemed undaunted by my presence. Finally, it came to a rest at the top of the tree, opened its beak and sang a few repeated phrases before flitting off silently into the dusk. It was a perfect sighting.
‘What was it?’ asked Zannah, behind me. She had come up so silently, stood there so still that it was only her words that alerted me.
‘The wrong bird,’ I said, turning. She didn’t ask me what I meant, and I didn’t try to explain. She had a raw peeled look to her face and I realized she had been crying and I remembered that this too surprised me every year, this grief of hers. I put out a hand to console her, not knowing what else to do, but she had turned before I reached her and if she saw my gesture she gave no sign.
We walked back to our cars without speaking. It struck me that we might look a companionable pair, side by side, keeping our distance, silent in the comfortable way of old friends who know without words what the other is thinking. But I knew that our silence was different. Zannah had long since given up asking me what had happened that day, had given up trying to piece it together to get at the truth, but I knew and she knew her questions remained and the unspoken words seemed to drive out all others. And so we walked without speaking together, until the gate released us to go our separate ways.
An open verdict was returned at the inquest, that convenient fiction. The funeral was sparsely attended, apart from a knot of ghouls at the back who’d come to stare at the closed coffin and speculate about what was in it. We all sat together at the front of the church: myself, Zannah, my father, putting up a united front as the vicar described a woman I didn’t recognize, one that he’d never known. It was the last time we would ever all be in one place. As we filed out towards the graveyard my father turned to me, detaining me with a hand on my arm. I saw again the dulled and faded gold of his hair, drifting upwards as the breeze took it. I could see the blue sky reflected in his eyes and the loosening of the skin, softened by the disappearance of the strained worry lines that my mother had given him. He tried to give me a compassionate look, but underneath I saw the questions in his eyes, the nagging undercurrent of doubt.
‘Manda, I’m sorry.’
I shook him off and trailed down the steps after him, looking neither to right nor left. However many times he apologized, the words that he’d said couldn’t be unsaid, nor could his thoughts be unthought. The congregation formed a phalanx of black coats around the grave. As the vicar intoned the last prayers and my father and Zannah stepped forward to throw the first clods of earth down into the grave, I remained outside the circle. The final hymn rose thinly into the air and I could see the pair of them, father and daughter together, comforting each other. I turned my back and walked on through the gate, into the spring sunlight, and away.
When I got home, I sat in the dark for an hour, turning things over in my head, wondering what was left that mattered any more. The goldcrest came to my mind in all its perfection; the wrong bird. And I realized that the desire for the right one was still there, that that hadn’t gone.
And something else too, maybe, if I was honest. Tom had asked me to come and see it, me and not anyone else. And that meant something to me too. It was spring. It was time to move forward, not live in thrall to the past.
The phone number came unbidden to my fingers. He answered at the first ring, as though he had been waiting for my call.
‘Manda,’ Tom said.
‘Tom,’ I said.
‘Pick you up at six?’
‘You’re on.’
SKYLARK
Alauda arvensis, family ‘Alaudidae’
Tom, never late, arrived well before dawn the next day. His work Land Rover chugged noisily in the street outside the house and I hurried out before he could sound the horn. As we drove through the sleeping suburban streets I felt lifted by an excitement I hadn’t felt for months, maybe years. This was the hour of birding trips, of holiday departures to bizarre locations on bargain flights. On a work day it had an illicit feel. Tom seemed to have caught it too, the fizzing mood of a successful getaway. We roared down an empty motorway, the Land Rover suspension adding a new harmony of squeaks and groans over the bass note of the engine as the needle crept past seventy. I looked at my watch. It was so early, barely time to be thinking about getting up, making the first coffee of the morning, contemplating the grind into work. Instead, I was escaping. I wanted to laugh out loud.
With the outskirts of London safely negotiated, and the rush hour beginning to bite, we switched to the smaller roads and at around seven-thirty Tom pulled over into a lay-by so I could call in sick without having to shout over the noise of the engine. I left a message on the help desk line while Tom climbed out, switched off the mobile and buried it deep in my bag. I got out too and joined Tom, stretching my back.
"What did you tell them?’
‘Food poisoning.’
Tom jerked his head at the old caravan that squatted under a faded and frayed St George’s cross. ‘Fancy making it an odds-on proposition?’
The morning sun was filtering through the trees by now, and, sheltered from the breeze by the boxy side of the Land Rover, it was almost warm enough to sit in comfort while we ate.
�
�Now I know I’m on holiday,’ I said through a mouthful of salty pig fat and white bread and margarine. I was still huddled in my jacket but Tom seemed comfortable just in his jumper, tipping the white plastic chair perilously backwards. I felt conscious suddenly of my unwashed hair prickling under my woollen hat. If the weather warmed up much more I’d have to take it off. I was aware of other things, too: of Tom’s square hands wrapped around the fragile cup, of his nearness, of the dark freckles – like moles – that spread across his nose and cheeks. The holiday fizz I was experiencing had an edge to it. I busied myself with maps and routes. For so long Tom had always just simply been there, an adjunct to Gareth, a disapproving look, someone to appeal to. I’d never really taken in his physical presence before, the way he swung back on chairs, the easy way he turned the heavy steering of the Land Rover. He saw me looking and met my gaze briefly until I looked down at the map again.
‘Where’s the bird now? Still at that big Sainsbury’s outside Dover?’ I asked.
‘Last I heard.’
‘Fantastic. Still, at least we won’t be incurring some farmer’s wrath. Did you go and see the hoopoe?’
Tom shook his head. ‘Not my scene.’
It was true. Tom’s list these days was full of the real rarities, the British ones, not the bewildered vagrants blown in on the spring winds.
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