2008 - The Bearded Tit (2 page)

But tonight was different. I looked down the long and lonely highway that stretched out ahead of me and could see nothing but green lights. What if I couldn’t do it? I knew in theory
what
to do, but in practice, I’d had no practice. And this girl was clearly well practised. Did I actually
want
to do it with her? Or did I feel I
should
do it with her? Was there an invisible peer pressure forcing me on? A bloke needs to lose his virginity as soon as possible with whomever and carry on having as much sex as possible for the rest of his life. That’s the received adolescent male wisdom, isn’t it? Was it
expected
of me to do this thing, whether I wanted to or not? Was it expected of me by
me!
Brigid was a fit, healthy, immensely physical girl and as I imagined the bio-mechanics involved in making love to her, they seemed suddenly daunting. This is no time to get cold genitals, I thought. It’s got to happen sooner or later, so let’s get it over with. I returned her next kiss with as much passion as I could manage.

‘Hey, let me get a bit more comfortable,’ she said detaching her tongue from the inside of my cranium. She kicked off her boots and stretched out alluringly on the bed. She giggled in the South African version of coquettish and then decided it was time for another cigarette. (This one she lit herself, having worked out that this was the least time-consuming procedure for the task.)

‘Tell me something about yourself,’ she said. My body was beginning to respond as I steeled myself for the job ahead, and now she wanted to talk. This just brought home to me the fact that she was very much in control. Yes, we would have a sleepless night of hot sex, but clearly on her terms, in her time. The conversation that then unfolded consisted mainly of me rambling as endearingly as I could about a huge range of subjects like sport, food, cinema, books, family, history, sunbathing, Tchaikovsky and
Sooty and Sweep
. She listened intently, stopping me occasionally when I was getting ‘Really boring, man!’

Eventually she was driven to interject.

‘What about big things? You know, death!’ An abrupt change of subject, it has to be said, as I was talking about fish fingers at the time. ‘I mean, listen. What happens when you die? And what about God? Do you believe in God?’ she asked earnestly.

Now, I don’t know why I said what I said next. Perhaps I needed to know a bit more about her upbringing or background. She evidently had issues on this subject whereof I knew not and perhaps I should have trodden more carefully, but I replied dramatically, ‘Of course I believe in God. How could I not? Because if God doesn’t exist, then I don’t exist.’ I turned off the overhead lights, leaving the room in the gloom of a single reading lamp, looked her in the eyes, grabbed her hand and said, ‘For the truth is, my child, I am THE DEVIL!’

Her scream was deafening. She grabbed her coat and boots and slammed the door as she fled into the night.

She left her cigarettes. I kept them for a while in case she came back for them.

She didn’t.

I guess she bought a new packet.

‘She was a hell of a feisty girl,’ Mack was saying. ‘Reg the Hedge said he heard her screams from his room.’

I smiled a dismissive smile as if to say, ‘Oh, it was nothing!’ And I knew that it
was
nothing, but I was building on the lie. I did not say that I had fabulous sex with Brigid, but I was not denying it either. A reputation was being born. A reputation based on a pack of feeble lies.

‘Well, what about that girl from the posh school in Shelford? She was a bit special!’

‘Oh her. Charlotte.’ I recalled another bleak encounter.

Charlotte was a very well brought-up, ‘nice’ girl, with rich parents and lots of blonde friends called things like Pongo, Baggers and Smell. Things had progressed well with Charley and I found myself at the end of our third evening out back in my room, nervously unbuttoning her shirt.

‘You seem nervous,’ she said. ‘Your hands are all shaky.’

‘Nervous? No! Excited. Eager!’ More lies. I had decided that if I just ignored my nerves and misgivings I might end up having the bawdy one·night stand students were supposed to be having all the time; in fact, the sort of night I presumed every student in the world, except me, had already had. Again it was the girl who saved me from the brutal interior fight I was having.

Charlotte had a boyfriend. He was called Dusty. Just as I was faking lusty impatience and undoing her belt buckle, she put her hand on mine to stop me, saying, ‘I don’t know if I can do this. What would Dusty say?’

‘Sorry?’

‘What would Dusty say?’

‘What would Dusty say?’ was not one of the questions I was expecting to be asked that night, nor indeed at any time during my university career, so I was at a loss to know how to answer it. Dusty was her ‘sort-of’ boyfriend but they hadn’t been getting on well lately and she was beginning to think there was ‘no future’ in it, especially as he was about to go off to agricultural college.

I saw Charley on three further occasions. On each occasion we got back to my room and I managed to remove one more piece of clothing before the business was halted by the ‘what would Dusty say?’ moment. It had a feel of pass the parcel to it, though increasingly I felt that when the music finally stopped, I would not be the one holding the prize.

The fourth occasion did involve total nakedness. And we spent the whole night cuddling and snuggling together. The total nakedness was mine only and the night was as chaste as you’d expect in bed with a girl wearing T·shirt, jumper, jeans, boots and an Afghan coat.

But the truth is I enjoyed the closeness. I actually enjoyed the lack of sexual pressure, and because the constraints were entirely hers, I could continue with the flimsy myth of me as philandering alpha male pestering her for sex.

Incidentally, about a week after that fourth night I found out exactly what Dusty
would
say. It was: ‘This is for sleeping with my girlfriend, you silly arse!’ followed by a serious punch in the jaw. He had evidently turned up at the college bar one night and asked who was Rory McGrath and been directed to the one with the ludicrous hair.

To be honest, I still feel a bit sorry, and guilty, for Furry Frank Evans’s fat lip. He didn’t even look
that
much like me.

‘She was lovely,’ Mack reminded me. ‘You lucky thing!’

I smiled non-committally once more. ‘Yeah, she was sexy. Never quite hit it off with her, though. Our backgrounds were too different I suppose.’ So The Lie limped on, and Mack reminded me of another non-conquest from the previous year.

‘Cathy from Newnham. She was a corker. I remember the night she came to the bar. She couldn’t wait to whip you back to Newnham!’ Mack chuckled. ‘And ‘whip’ was probably the right word!’

Enter, from very wide left, Cathy Daniels. Newnham was an all-girl college, with a reputation for being fairly straight and academic. I too remembered the night distinctly. There was something a little unsettling about Cathy Daniels right from the beginning. After an encouraging start, her small talk, I recall, strayed towards famous serial killers. Witchcraft got a mention or two. As did the arrow-poison frogs of the Amazon jungle.

She was certainly original. I didn’t even mind her chalk-white make·up; and teardrops drawn with purple eyeliner. Her room in college looked like it could be the torture annexe in the Museum of Satanism. She offered me a shot-glass rilled with a volatile, viscous green liquid that I took to be methylated washing-up liquid.

‘Cheers,’ I said, gulping down the flames.

I sensed a hot night could be in prospect and decided I’d better use the toilet.

‘Oh, I’m afraid there aren’t many gents’ loos in college. The nearest one is down two flights of stairs and right at the end of the corridor on the left through the third set of swing doors.’

‘Cheers.’ She’d clearly given those directions out a few times. The gents was surprisingly clean and well maintained but, then, I suppose, in a place like this it didn’t get much use. As I relieved myself, I read the one bit of graffiti that had made it on to the walls. It was a depiction of a skull and cross-bones, in scarlet broad-line marker, under which was written, ‘CD bad news. Leave now, while you still have that in your hand!’

It was enough. Ungallantly, I left through a firedoor in the side of the building and disappeared. I ran all the way back to college, half expecting to be greeted at my door by a severed goat’s head and a note saying, ‘No escape!’

Eleven failed encounters in my first year. I had left a college room in the morning with eleven different girls over the nine months and had not had a sniff of sex. Friends would wink knowingly as they saw me with a new girl. ‘Good ol’ Ror!’ It was a sham. A half-drunken, fumbling, grappling sham. A sham that was only adding to the pressure.

Eleven failed one·night stands. But had they failed? Or had I failed? Did I want them to fail? I still had not grasped that what I wanted was not to found in the bleakness of casual encounters, it was to be found somewhere else. Somewhere, at that precise moment, that was very, very close.

‘I’ll tell you what, Macko. Let’s go and find us both a girlfriend. Today! Let’s be brave. Let’s wander about town a bit. Go into a few shops, cafes and pubs and chat to some girls. Not just anyone. Nice ones. Ones we like the look of. No pressure. Let’s not look too eager. Too desperate. Let’s try to be cool and laid-back. Let’s just go with the flow.’

‘OK. Where shall we start?’

‘We’ll start…’

A divine vision walked past our table. Good God. She is incredible.

‘…with her!’

I don’t know if I thought at that moment, my life will never be the same again, but if I didn’t, I should have done.

T
he jackdaw has a blue eye. A pale blue eye. Amazing. How come I’ve never noticed that before? That’s one I’ve drawn dozens of times. Just outside the classroom window a jackdaw is pecking around in the grass. There’s loads of them round the school buildings. Perhaps they nest here. They’re really noisy too when they get together; like all crows. Jackdaws don’t ‘caw’ in a crow-like way; they make a strange, sharp, ‘chack’ noise. It is almost a dog-like yelp. That is supposedly how they get their name. But I didn’t actually know this when I was a schoolboy staring out of the window, letting Dismal Desmond’s physics lesson wash over me. Back then, I didn’t know that the scientific name was
Corvus monedula
, which is Latin for ‘jackdaw crow’. I didn’t then know that the Romans had another word for jackdaw, which was
graculus
. The Romans did many great things, they gave so much to arts, to science, to language, to civilization, but I can’t for the life of me work out why they’d need two words for ‘jackdaw’.
Monedula
and
graculus
. Most people don’t know one word for a type of bird in their own language. I had heard of Graculus, the wise and sardonic bird in the children’s cartoon series
Noggin the Nog
, though. But
that
Graculus was ‘a great green bird’ and was probably, therefore, a cormorant…or maybe even a shag.

I knew that the bird distracting me from the lesson was a jackdaw. I knew it was in the crow family. A nice crow, though. Not big and ragged with an alarming bill like a rook or a raven. Handsome. Greyish neck and breast, black face, glossy blue-black everywhere else. And a pale blue eye. Or is it white? Maybe it’s white and the glossy blue-black plumage makes it appear blue. I’m calling it blue, anyway. Yes, the jackdaw has blue eyes.

‘Gravity, McGrath!’

The voice of Dismal Desmond.

‘Sorry, sir?’

‘We’re talking about gravity, McGrath, and you appear to be looking out of the window.’

Sniggering 4B’s eyes were all on me.

‘Sorry, sir.’

‘So tell us, Mr McGrath, what do you understand by ‘gravity’?’

I had been so involved in not listening to the teacher that I was struggling to remember what lesson I was in.

‘Er…seriousness, sir.’

More sniggers.

‘Seriousness? What are you on about?’

More sniggers.

‘Er…gravity…seriousness…the gravity of the situation, sir.’

‘So, McGrath, you’re telling me that in 1665, Sir Isaac Newton discovered ‘seriousness’?

Mocking laughter now.

‘Yes, sir. Er…up till then everything had been quite amusing.’

Some laughter on my side now.

‘Your mouth is going to get you into a lot of trouble one day, McGrath. I hope I can be there. As well as your homework, McGrath, you can write one hundred times, ‘All particles attract each other with a force whose magnitude is directly proportional to the product of their masses divided by the square of their distance from each other.’’

Ironic applause from my classmates.

That seemed a very long line to write one hundred times. And thinking about it now, it was probably far too advanced a definition of’gravity’ for the level of physics we were studying. I’m sure we were still at the ‘gravity is what makes apples fall out of trees’ level. And supposing it hadn’t been an apple tree that Sir Isaac Newton was sitting under when he was pondering the forces of the universe. Supposing it had been a coconut tree! That would have delayed the advance of physics considerably. Einstein’s ideas might not have existed if Newton hadn’t given us a mechanical model of the universe. After all, more people are killed worldwide by falling coconuts than by sharks. But I didn’t know that then.

‘Could you repeat that, sir, while I write it down?’

Dismal repeats it. I write it down.

‘Could you repeat it ninety-nine more times, sir, while I write it down?’

There is a loud bang as Dismal thumps his desk.

The jackdaw outside the window takes off. An effortless jump and flap and the bird is in flight. And what a flight. High, fast and straight, then tumbling acrobatically to join others on the roof of the language lab. Is that why it’s so easy to watch birds? They fly. We aspire to that; we want it; we envy it. Anyone, birdwatcher or not, must admit that deep down it’s more fun watching a bird flying than a flightless bird. Penguins are fascinating and the ostrich is quite remarkable in its way, but surely we all want to watch an eagle soaring, a hawk diving or a swift racing over the rooftops at over 100
mph
. So much for gravity. The jackdaw’s flight was an open defiance of Dismal Desmond and his dull lesson, of gravity, of weightiness, of heaviness and of seriousness. All the stuff that keeps our feet on the ground, ties us down, attaches us to the daily grind of the planet. Like all birds, the jackdaw can do without gravity when he feels like it. It can leave planet Earth, humans and all their filth; birds can rise above it.