2008 - The Bearded Tit (14 page)

Turkey was clearly the Christmas-dinner choice in Dickens’ time. Who can forget that charming scene from
A Christmas Carol
when Scrooge, a new man after his ghostly visitors, wakes up bursting with good humour on Christmas morning, opens his bedroom window and shouts down to an urchin in the street, What’s today, my fine fellow?’

‘Why it’s Christmas Day, Mr Scrooge!’ replies the startled boy.

‘I shall give you some money for you to purchase a prize turkey.’

And the chirpy cockney sparrow of a lad replies, Where the fuck am I going to get a prize turkey on Christmas Day, you senile old git?’

Or something like that. It’s a long time since I read it.

And the actual word ‘turkey’ has clearly not had great semantic PR over the years. Turkey:

1) An unsuccessful theatrical production, a flop, an embarrassment.

2) A person or thing of little appeal, a dud, a loser.

3) A large ugly, unattractive woman.

4) A naive, stupid or inept person.

5) Cold turkey; the sickness, nausea and mania of drug withdrawal.

Definitions 2) and 4) just about covered me and how I had felt this morning. The more I thought about it, the worse I felt. Surveying the mounds of limp turkey, greyish sausages, whiffy sprouts, frazzled bacon, charred roast potatoes, sloppy carrots and turnips, mould-speckled cranberry sauce, rubbery trifle, senile mince pies and flaccid whipped cream, I decided that I wasn’t that hungry after all. I turned to Kramer.

‘Why don’t we just nip across the road to the Maypole and have a cheese sandwich?’

‘Good idea,’ he said.

‘Oh, er, hang on…not the Maypole.’

T
he sombre cubicles of the basement bar of the Turk’s Head reminded me too much of the church confessional. I never liked confession. Penance was my least favourite of the seven sacraments.

The seven sacraments: Baptism, Penance, Holy Eucharist, Confirmation, Matrimony, Ordination and Extreme Unction.

Baptism was easy because, as a babe in arms, you didn’t have to do much except scream the church down as the priest poured water over you.

Eucharist was great fun. It was your first Holy Communion and in our church you got a huge cooked breakfast afterwards.

Confirmation meant pledging yourself to be a soldier of Christ. This didn’t seem too scary even to a thirteen-year-old. The odds, one guessed, of being called up to fight for Christ against the battalions of Satan must have been pretty long. And a perk of confirmation was that you got an extra name. My confirmation name is Peter. (The famous biblical pun on the Greek
petros
, meaning ‘rock’: ‘Thou art Peter and upon this rock I shall build my church.’ Of course I didn’t know that at the time.)

Then comes the sacrament of Matrimony. Ah, yes, the joys of marriage. Right, moving quickly on, ordination. This is the sacrament of taking Holy Orders: becoming a priest. I didn’t think this one would ever be relevant in my particular life, though there have been many times when I thought entering the priesthood looked like a cushy option.

Extreme Unction is the last sacrament: the anointing of the sick. The most interesting thing about this one is that when, as a Catholic schoolchild, you learn your catechism off by heart, you never really know what any of it means and you’re seldom completely sure what the actual words are that you’re parroting. The seven sacraments would go: ‘baptism, penance, holy eucharist, confirmation, ordination and extree munction.’ For years I didn’t know what extree munction was. I didn’t know if there were any other sorts of ‘munction’ other than the ‘extree’ one.

But Penance. You have sinned. You must confess your sins. You must be punished for your sins. When you were very young you had to ask your parents what sins you had committed before you went for your weekly visit to confession. Lying, being rude to your parents and horrible to your brothers and sisters were their usual suggestions. So you’d happily confess to those sins, whether you’d committed them or not. As you got older you could work out the sins for yourself, perhaps throwing in ‘using bad language and thinking rude thoughts’. I remember confessing to having rude thoughts long before I knew what a rude thought was. As you get even older, things that you thought were sins before don’t seem like sins any more, but part and parcel of being a human being: lying is surely too everyday still to be counted as something worth confessing. Using bad language is almost compulsory nowadays, and having rude thoughts is surely the only way to stay remotely sane in the modern world.

The punishment was invariably having to say a number of prayers. Our local parish priest would listen to your sins and after some deliberation tell you to say three ‘Hail Marys’.

It was perfectly clear that he didn’t really pay that much attention to what you said your sins were, and I once flirted with the idea of confessing to having stabbed the Pope to death just to see if I still got three ‘Hail Marys’ as my penance.

It was the day after the apparition of Brigid in my bedroom. JJ had fled without a word. This was the first opportunity I had had to speak to her since. We sat down next to each other in the solemnity of our booth and I prepared to make my confession. Up till then the conversation had been curt and functional.

‘Hello, how are you?’

‘Fine. You?’

‘Fine. White wine?’

‘Please.’

At the table we slowly and silently sipped our drinks. Before the pregnant pause gave birth to something unsightly, I produced a carrier bag and offered its contents to JJ.

‘This is for you. I meant to give it to you a couple of days ago,’ I began nervously, ‘but I—’

‘—left it at Rex the Chaplain’s drinks party,’ she helped out.

‘It’s a reed bunting.’

I gave her the fluffy toy bird and she smiled sweetly and squeezed it and it made a noise like a bird. If not a reed bunting.

‘Oh, it’s lovely. Thank you so much! I like reed buntings. You don’t see them very often.’

‘I don’t see them at all; I’m reed bunting blind!’

She smiled weakly and I abandoned that line of evasive humour and tried a half-truth instead. Or was it a half-lie?

‘I wanted to get you a long-tailed tit coz I know that’s your favourite but the shop had sold out.’

‘Ah never mind. This is lovely.’

The reed bunting (
Emberiza schoeniclus
) is a striking bird, easy to see and identify, especially in summer. The male sings openly from low perches in wetlands and water’s edges. Streaky brown back separated from the black head by a white neck ring. It looks like a sort of elite sparrow. The repeated jangly song is unmistakable; it sounds identical to the thirteenth bar of the intro to ‘Martha My Dear’ by the Beatles. You know: ‘doo doo doodoo doo’. There, I hope that’s cleared that up.

She squeezed it again and its tinny unconvincing chirrup was a welcome distraction. And again. And again. The amusing novelty value of this did not last long.

JJ took my hand and clasped it between both of hers. She fixed me with her eyes and spoke softly. ‘I’ve got something to say—’

I didn’t let her get any further. ‘That girl used to work in the canteen, as a waitress, she’s mad! South African, in fact. We had a sort of thing in my first year and I hadn’t seen her for ages but I bumped into her on the way to see you and I couldn’t shake her off and I thought I’d go for a drink with her because I didn’t want to turn up to meet you with her and I lost track of the time and we got drunk and she must have spent the night with me but I know nothing happened even though she had no clothes on and I couldn’t get in touch with you and I’m sorry but there’s only you and I’m sorry I lied to you and didn’t give you a long-tailed tit.’

JJ was looking at me with a look so warm it was melting me. I wonder if I’d get away with something as light as three ‘Hail Marys’.

She put one arm round my neck and pulled my face to hers. She kissed me deeply and roughly and desperately. It was the loveliest kiss in the world ever. I know. I was there. When we separated we were both panting. My heart was pounding on my ribcage, screaming to be let out.

‘Is that all you’ve got to say?’ I asked in between breaths.

‘Yes, I’ve got to go back to work!’

She kissed me again. A peck on the cheek. A microscopic version of the previous kiss. She shuffled along the bench seat and sat on something and we heard the unconvincing made-in-Taiwan squeak of a reed bunting.

‘I
won’t be catching the bus home straight after work tonight. I’m going to the theatre and my dad’s going to pick me up later.’ JJ seemed very excited by the prospect of a theatre visit. She seemed nervous, agitated even, but at the same time bright-eyed and eager. I was annoyed; it was close to the end of term and I didn’t know how long it would be before I saw her again. I thought it surely must be ‘special occasion’ time.

‘What’s on?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘I mean what are you going to see at the theatre? What play?’

‘I’m not really going to the theatre. That’s just what I’ve told everyone. And I finish work at five o’clock and then I’m completely yours.’ Adding coyly, ‘So to speak.’

I was disappointed; mainly because I had not been listening. She seemed so happy but I didn’t seem to feature in her excitement.

‘I thought you’d be pleased!’

‘I just thought that perhaps you and I could spend some time together before the end of term, that’s all.’

‘That’s what I mean, you idiot!’

Then it dawned on me. This was it. She was offering me herself. Our relationship was going to move on in one ecstatic leap. ‘One day things will be very different.’ She’d said it so many times. ‘One day.’

‘One day soon.’

‘It will happen.’

‘We can’t stop it happening’. All these things I thought were turning into an empty promise. Now today was going to be the ‘one day’. I smiled.

My whole body smiled.

The future was about to begin.

‘I’ll meet you at five, then!’

‘You bet!’

‘And we’ll go straight back to my room!’

JJ laughed a deep, rich, beautiful laugh full of tenderness. ‘You’re so gallant. We could go straight back to your room or we could have a nice romantic meal, or a bottle of wine; we could see a film; or, hey, we could go to the theatre!’

‘No, I hate the theatre. No close-ups in theatre. Everyone overacts and you can never tell who’s talking.’

‘Oh right, that’s ‘theatre’ dismissed in a few short, sharp sentences.’

I began to retract. ‘Oh, sorry, are you a theatre fan?’

‘No, I hate it. In fact, I don’t know why we’ve arranged to go to the theatre tonight.’

I put my arm around her. ‘Well, let’s not go then.’

‘Good idea,’ she agreed.

‘What shall we do then?’

‘I know,’ she smiled knowingly. ‘We could go straight back to your room.’

‘Excellent.’

We laughed and kissed and she went off to work leaving me eight painful hours to fill.

What was I going to do?

I sat in my room at my desk.

I looked at the clock. 09.25.

I got up and paced up and down.

I sat down again and looked at the clock. 09.27.

I got up and paced up and down again. A bit longer this time.

I sat down and looked at the clock. 09.31.

Mmm. I picked up the clock and examined it. There was clearly something wrong with it. How could six minutes take as long as six minutes to go by?

I shook it. 09.32.

Right; I’ll pace up and down for a bit. I paced up and down the length of the room for as long as I could. Must have been at least quarter of an hour.

I looked at the clock. 09.32.

Shit, I’ve broken it. This is ridiculous, what could I possibly do to take my mind off tonight, to calm down, to relax?

I could do some work. I could start the essay on ‘distinctive features in phonology’. It had to be in a month ago, so the sooner I started it the better. I opened the relevant book. My eyes darted around the page, alighting on random words: ‘allophonic’, ‘syntagmatic combination’, ‘archiphoneme’ and ‘Grimm’s Law’. I slammed the book shut. That’s enough phonology for a Friday. I looked at the clock. 09.32.

Aha, of course. 09.32. Time to get a new dock! I’ll go into town and do a bit of shopping. I picked my jacket up off the bed. I looked back at the bed fondly. That was to be my portal to heaven a little later on. Just an ordinary, inconsequential bed. Oh no! My bed! Christ, look at it! It’s disgusting. I pulled back the bedclothes. Jees! I can’t take her to this bed. I looked round the room. I can’t bring her back to this shithole. An urgent list of unpleasant jobs appeared in my head from nowhere. Eight hours may not be long enough.

‘How much did you want to spend?’ said the florist.

‘I didn’t want to spend anything,’ I replied.

‘Is it for a special occasion?’ she went on patiently.

‘Yes, a very special occasion. A very, very, very special occasion!’ I smiled knowingly, hoping in some vain way I might communicate to the florist just what I’d be doing later.

‘Twenty-five pounds?’ she suggested.

‘Not
that
special,’ I said quickly.

‘Well, a single red rose can be as special as a huge and pricey bouquet,’ she offered, sensing that flowers were not a regular budget item for a student with a tiny overdraft facility and a massive overdraft.

‘You took the words out of my mouth,’ I said, settling for the simple romantic minimalism of the single red rose. She picked one out to show me.

‘Perfect!’

‘Right you are,’ she said. ‘That’ll be nine pounds ninety-nine, please.’

Tuck me!’

‘Ah, that’s sweet. A single red rose. That’s a lovely touch.’ JJ was looking exactly as she had at nine o’clock that morning and yet lovelier than I had ever seen her.

She was looking around the room. ‘Blimey, it’s very dean and tidy. Undergraduate rooms are usually pigsties.’

Please God, don’t let her look under the bed. Amen.

‘So how many undergraduate rooms have you been in?’

She smiled. ‘This is my first.’

Then she kissed me so passionately it was bordering on the obscene.