I remembered we had found one once, Gareth and I, grounded in the long grass, its wings useless to it on the alien surface, its feet and legs too small to launch it back into the air where it belonged.
Gareth was reluctant to interfere. ‘It’s probably injured or weak, or it wouldn’t have fallen,’ he said as I hovered over it.
‘Fine,’ I said. ‘You wring its neck and put it out of its misery then.’
But I knew he wouldn’t have the heart to do that, not to a swift. The bird lay quiet while we discussed its fate, its feathers gleaming a dull charcoal. He picked it up and held it firmly while he looked at it, checking it was OK. It struggled strongly in his hands, no longer calm, both wings working equally. It was fully fledged, an adult, with long powerful wings reaching far back beyond its tail. It made no sound beyond the light scratching of its feet against Gareth’s skin. Extending his hands in front of him, he held the bird aloft and loosened his grip so it sat for a moment poised on his palms, just lightly cupped there, suddenly still. Then he swung his arms up further and opened his hands as he dropped them away, launching the swift in a scramble of wings. At first I thought it would fall, drop like a stone to the ground, but it didn’t. The great wings unfolded and it began to glide, skimming the grass until the wings beat out a rapid rhythm that lifted it up and away. I tried to follow its path, our one swift among the multitude, but with one twisting manoeuvre it had gone, merged with the flock, indistinguishable from the rest.
The next morning, at breakfast, I told Tom the sale was going through.
‘I’m going in to the lawyers today. And then that’s it. There’s nothing to keep me here.’ The airiness in my voice sounded false even to me.
‘Nothing?’ he asked.
‘Tom, I can’t stay here forever.’
‘Manda, can’t you see?’
‘See what?’ We sat among the breakfast dishes, each with our matching mug and plate, the meal finished. Tom put his tea down and reached for my hand. Blindly I put my own mug down and let our fingers touch.
‘I love you, Manda. Can’t you see that? I want you to stay forever.’
I couldn’t speak. The words sat there between us, like our clumsily joined hands. I looked down at my plate, avoiding his eyes.
‘I’ve always loved you.’
‘Have you?’ I tried a jokey smile. It didn’t work. My hand felt dead, numb, slightly clammy. I fought the urge to pull it away.
‘Ever since I first saw you. Only Gareth got there first.’
‘Tom . . .’ I didn’t know what to say. He disentangled his fingers, patted my unresponsive hand. It still felt numb to me.
‘It’s all right. I know you don’t feel the same way. But as long as you’re here I thought I’d have some hope. I thought you might, I don’t know, feel safe with me. Come around to it. Stay.’
He waited. I couldn’t answer. So easy to stay here, I thought. So easy just to sink down and stay, a traveller falling asleep in the snow. I almost opened my mouth to say that I’d wait, for a little while, just a few weeks. The words rang in my head. But something stopped me from saying them. My hand now looked like someone else’s, dead on the kitchen table. I brought it back into my lap. He shrugged.
‘Oh well,’ he said.
He looked so sad as he stood up and cleared away the dishes. I could feel the remembered touch of his hand as a phantom on my own. His words ought to have touched me, I knew, ought to have triggered something, some answering emotion of my own. I didn’t know why I could feel nothing. I didn’t know what I should feel. And so I sat on, unmoved and unmoving, while Tom finished tidying and left, and I was alone again. I fingered the phone, hoping for a call from someone, a message from Gareth, something to distract me, to break this strange blank mood I had fallen into, but it remained mute and I knew there were no answers there.
I went outside and looked at the silent van while the swifts screamed indifferently above my head. I sat in the back on the narrow bunk and touched all the polished surfaces, examining it minutely. It was ready, and it was perfect. The door of my cage was open on its hinges. I knew then that I had to go. Tom would trap me here, if I let him. It was time to get away.
I took the van into town, trying it on for size, getting used to the way it handled. For once it was the forest that felt oppressive and close, no longer a place of safety. The trees crowded in on the track and as I burst out of the gloom into the ordinary daylight of the road I felt a weight lift, my senses ease. Swifts, swallows and martins zipped around me, soaring high for invisible insects, stooping low for water and mud for their nests. Even in the town centre they I could see them, high in the gaps between the buildings. The sharp twittering chatter of the swallows filled the air. At the solicitor’s desk I set my signature down in the spaces indicated, page after page, my name next to Gareth’s, joined together for the last time. The house was gone, shed from me like a load. I was free.
I dropped off the last set of house keys at the agent’s and walked back to where I’d parked, jingling the van keys as I went. On impulse, I popped into a stationers and chose a stack of hardbound notebooks. They weren’t the proper field notebooks I’d been using before, but they would do, and the blank ruled pages filled me with a little rush of anticipation. I could start from scratch. Each bird in it would be fresh and new and mine. I saw how it could, after all, be made to work. Settling in the van’s front seat felt like coming home and even with its awkward steering and sluggish engine, I felt more in control than I had done for weeks. My heart rose with the swifts and I lost all sense of foreboding among the spring-green woods.
The cottage looked neat and trim and cheerful, welcoming now that I’d resolved myself to leave it. I whistled as I gathered up my stack of books and papers and a bag of provisions for the van. I didn’t notice the crow until I went to push open the gate and its heavy bulk flapped and banged against it, head swinging down in a familiar slack gape. It was suspended by its feet, wings hanging down, flies already gathering about its eyes, long dead. Its feathers had lost their sheen and hung black and stark, rusty with blood. For a moment I must have stood there, lips still foolishly pursed, arrested in mid whistle, unable to move. My hands uncurled of their own accord, dropping my bag. Then I backed away, unable to turn my eyes from the sight of the bird which moved still, softly, as the gate settled. If I turned I knew I would run and not stop running. Instead I retreated, fumbling for the safety of the van, and sat there staring at the hanging crow in silence.
I don’t know how much time passed while I sat there. It might only have been minutes. I sat in an almost trancelike state, watching the crow swing and settle, until my phone dug me out of it. Gareth. A message.
‘Lawyer called. House gone. Now what?’
I clutched the handset to me as I got out of the van and braved the gate, inching past the dead bird, gritting my teeth to force myself past it without flinching. Once in the house I stuffed my few clothes into my pack along with my binoculars and scope, rolled up my sleeping bag and tied it shut. Our breakfast dishes still sat where I’d left them by the sink. I thought about leaving a note, but I could think of nothing to say. I squeezed myself back out through the gate and into the van, backing and turning to get myself onto the track again. My heart was hammering with the effort. Only once I had reached the gate did I feel I could thumb in a response, once I was sure it was true.
‘I’m on the road.’
That night I slept with only the thin roof of the van between me and the turning stars. Hour after hour through the night I opened my eyes to the unfamiliar darkness of the van and realized where I was, then settled back into my dreams. Every time I shut my eyes I saw spiralling flecks rising endlessly upwards, not swifts, this time, but ash. I saw my father’s letters burning one by one and for the first time I wondered what he’d written in them, month after month, year after year until he died. The only words I’d glimpsed of them had been the salutation, letter after letter, endlessly repeated. My dear Manda
, My dearest Manda, My dearest daughter. Too late to read them now. I was freed of them now, free from the reach of their reproach. I never had to know now what he had felt, what he had meant, whether I bore the burden of his forgiveness.
The next morning, when I had returned, from the hide and prepared my solitary breakfast, I felt the pleasure of being alone and undisturbed, beholden to nobody, my whereabouts unknown. My phone sat on the front seat, glowing with a recent message, burring to remind me of a missed call. Gareth and Tom and Zannah, each of them in their own way demanding to know where I was. Let them wait, all of them. I needed none of them. I packed away my things carefully, strapping everything down, making them ready for the road. Then before I could set off I did two more things. I opened the virgin pages of the first notebook and listed the birds, meticulously, in the order I had seen them, ending with the swifts. And then I switched off the phone and buried it, deep in the bottom of the bag.
I settled in the driver’s seat, my birding gear beside me loose and ready to hand. The engine started with a slight shudder and I could hear faintly the domesticated rattle of the dishes behind me. I glanced at the map and turned the nose of the van north. I was on my way.
PART FOUR
RED KITE
Milvus milvus, family ‘Accipitridae’
I sat on the rock with my back to the rough stone wall and looked out towards the sea. Theoretically I was checking out the raft of eiders that floated just beyond the crashing breakers. But really I was just taking in the endless restless energy of the North Sea as it worked against the ragged edges of the shore, unpicking Britain’s fraying coast. The day was fine, with only a light breeze, but some unspent fury from a still-remembered storm drove the sea onwards against the rocks. The eiders bobbed, buoyant as toys, rising and falling with each wave. In among them there could be other birds, something new perhaps, ducking through the surf. In a minute I would look for them, spend the time, make the effort to identify them. In a minute. For now I was content with the company of the sea.
The day before I had crossed the invisible border and I was in Scotland. That felt like an achievement, although nothing really had changed. Something like the same remembered restlessness that drove the sea had propelled me up this far, but now it was beginning to ebb. I was beginning to feel I had nowhere left to run.
That first fine springing morning, escaping with the swifts, I thought I had got away. For a week I pottered east, stopping off at every reserve and forest I could find, following up every pager alert for rarities, making up for lost time. The days began to merge together as the birds mounted up, each day distinguished only by the new list in my notebook, dozens of memories tucked away behind the scrawled names. A nuthatch, slaty-blue against the rough bark of a tall pine. The slow and careful moments distinguishing, definitively, between a marsh and a willow tit. A long frustrating day spent chasing hawfinches that always seemed to have just flown until I tracked them down in the bushes around the car park, their feathers bright against the fading light of the day. The further I got from the familiar roads and closed-in views of my home, the freer I felt, the stifling memory of the last few weeks dropping away with the miles. Day after day the skies opened out around me until finally I found myself cresting a low rise and turning along a banked road that dominated the flat drained landscape of East Anglia with the rising sun above me and the fenlands spread out below, black and rich and flat, stretching to merge imperceptibly with the water.
It was another beautiful calm morning with the early mist still burning off, colours brightening with every minute. I pulled over and stopped, got out, stretching my back, and listened. There was no sound save the birds. No other cars, no planes, no trains rattling busily along, just a cacophony of birdsong reasserting itself now that the alien note of my engine had gone. I leaned against the cooling bonnet of the van, absorbing its warmth, and closed my eyes to bring the sound closer. Larks and wrens and chaffinches, robins and thrushes, the scratchy repetitions of the warblers, all competing yet distinct. I drank them in. And then I felt, despite myself, a sharp bubble of regret, physically present as though lodged in my chest, that I had no one to share it with, this moment of pure joy. It caught me unawares, ambushing me, and I opened my eyes to the lonely road, still empty to the horizon, and climbed back in, searching for my phone, long abandoned at the bottom of my bag. It peeped into reluctant life and I turned it off again and put it on to charge, postponing the moment of actually using it, getting back onto the road.
Once in a campsite, another day’s birding under my belt, and my phone now fully charged and waiting, I switched it on. My thumb paused over the keypad, waiting for a decision. Not Tom, too complicated, too many difficult explanations to make. Not Gareth, either, although I hovered for a moment, allowing myself to dream. Only family remained. I pulled up Zannah’s number and reluctantly reconnected myself to the thread of the world. I didn’t know it then but I was to have just two more days of freedom before the persecution returned, dropping out of nowhere like a sparrowhawk tipping its wing to spill the air and power down on its prey.
It happened in Norfolk on a late afternoon when the flat lands and raised banks of the fens had lured me into walking too far, too long. It was a grey afternoon, the sky hanging heavy above me, with nothing but a narrow layer of clear air between the earth and the cloud. I was looking for the upraised vee of a harrier’s wings soaring over the dark flat soil of the land. Distances were hard to judge but it seemed as though I could see for miles and miles in all directions. As I followed the curve of the bank, landmarks – the windmill which marked the entrance to the campsite, the low rise of a road bridge over a drain, a bank of poplars – rearranged themselves relative to each other, never seeming to be any nearer or any further away, but always shifting in a slow and stately dance of perspective.
With the grey weather, the evening had come on imperceptibly and it was now dusk. Only the water and the sky held any real light. The land was dark, the bushes and trees darker, pools of blackness. The last time I had seen another person was more than half an hour before, a canoeist who had paused in the still water for a brief moment and watched me as I scanned the river, then paddled away. His passage was marked by the calls and splashing runs of scattering water birds, and as the fuss died away I began to notice the silence and how alone I was in the landscape.
I walked more quickly, keen to get back to the warmth and light of my little van, suddenly eager for the sights and sounds of humanity in the sprawling shanty town of the caravan park. But there was no quick route back. I could still just make out the tall silhouette of the windmill across the reed beds but the way was barred by ditches and marshes and long gleaming cuts of water that glinted in the dark. I had taken a wrong turn somewhere, I realized, stopping and trying to make sense of the map in the half light, and I had a long walk ahead of me. As I resumed I heard behind me a scurry of activity, birds propelling themselves out of the reeds with raucous alarm calls. I turned and looked back but saw nothing; when I resumed, so too did the trail of disturbances. I was too high on the bank to be causing them – these were the tell-tales of a predator down below. A fox, I thought to myself. A fox or a stoat, on the prowl for chicks or eggs. A partridge whirred up with heart-stopping suddenness and I turned and glimpsed or thought I glimpsed a figure slipping behind a tree, felt rather than seen in the thickening gloom. Not a fox, then, or a stoat. A human predator.
Panic took me. I didn’t stop to think. I ran, guided by the last shimmer of light from the sky in the water beside me. I didn’t stop running until I reached a road with a farmhouse sheltering behind a thick hedge. I drew myself into its black shadows and waited, making myself invisible. I could hear nothing any more, no running feet, no birds, no calls. My legs trembled with the effort, my heart finally thudding back to a steadier pace. I waited some more. Whoever it had been was gone, or else very patient. The run had made me sweat and as the moisture dried I began to feel chilled, unable to stand there muc
h longer. I was forced onwards, back out into the open, reasoning with myself, jumpy with fear. The walk seemed endless. The campsite glowed on the horizon, drawing me towards it. The van was parked on its very edge, a humped and humble shape beside the bigger caravans and mobile homes. I could see it long before I got there, outlined by the halo of the lights, looking somehow wrong. It was odd, cockeyed, slightly slumped. As I approached it I could see why: three flat tyres, the fourth still hissing.
‘Call the police, I would,’ said a voice out of the darkness, husky with cigarettes. ‘Sorry, love, give you a fright?’ I turned and saw a woman lit up suddenly by the warm flare of a match, her face there and gone, replaced by a small orange glow. She was sitting on her own caravan steps and as my eyes adjusted I could make her out better: cropped blonde hair, short skirt and vest top, flip-flops.
‘Kids,’ I said, and it sounded unconvincing to my own ears, but she shrugged and said nothing more. I watched her smoke and considered her advice, knowing I wouldn’t take it. I had had enough of the police after the death of my mother, after my father’s wild accusation. I had had enough of their questions, their professional scepticism, soft questions and hard eyes, probing, always probing, taking nothing at face value. My father had withdrawn his words almost immediately, but I had been led away, a firm hand gripping my elbow. The key had turned in the lock in the cell with a click that seemed final, a sound I still heard in my dreams. They went over my story, time after time, and all the time they were watching, my eyes, my face, my hands. I wondered what they saw. Perhaps through my story, my half-truths, my partial tale. Perhaps right into my guilty heart.
It was only a few hours before I was freed, but enough to know the way their minds worked. Enough to know I would never call on them for help, not if I could avoid it. My name would lie in their files somewhere, their suspicions still there, I knew it. Calling the police was not an option for me.
Out of a Clear Sky Page 19