2008 - The Bearded Tit (9 page)

‘Wow, well done!’

Kramer glossed over the details of the whole conversation but somehow he manoeuvred it to this conclusion:

‘And Branfield told me you always wanted to be in that position in the scrum because you liked his arse.’

Lobby was dumbstruck with rage. Kramer rubbed salt into the cliche. ‘And apparently you sometimes stroked his bottom and once tried to insert your finger! Well, this is just what Branfield says; I don’t believe it for a moment, Lobby, I know you. A man like that doesn’t get the record highest score on the college pinball machine!’

Lobby shook with rage and stormed off to convene an emergency committee meeting of the Ponding Club.

‘Oh no, it’s raining,’ said JJ.

‘Good weather for ducks, as they say,’ I said, adding casually, ‘Hey, why don’t we wait in my room; it’s only just up there. Till the rain stops.’

She looked into my eyes, thoughtfully for a moment, then smiled.

‘Not today.’ She looked sad. I looked sad and she added, ‘One day though. Soon.’

And with that we started walking back to the bookshop via a café, leaving the huge raindrops to bounce off the indifferent backs of the college ducks.

Duck.

The first proper word I ever spoke.

After ‘Dada’, of course.

Interesting that most babies can articulate ‘Dada’ as a word earlier than ‘Mama’. Clearly, despite the tenderness of maternal love, babies are keener to talk about avant-garde art movements of the early twentieth century.

But for me after ‘Dada’ came ‘duck’.

I don’t remember it but my parents still talk fondly about an early visit to a park near Newquay, where we fed the ducks in a pond by the playing fields.

I apparently turned to my father and pointed saying, ‘Duck, Dada!’ And they all laughed. ‘Duck, Dada!’ I said again and they all clapped. ‘Dada, duck!’ I said again. Too late, as my father was hit on the back of the head by a cricket ball.

‘D
amn,’ said JJ, ‘I’m going to get soaked.’ She only had a T·shirt on.

‘Here,’ I said handing her my jacket and putting it round her shoulders. ‘Oh, and what about your hair?’ I took off my shirt and put it over her head.

‘You’re mad! Ooh, it’s nice and warm.’ It was a cold autumn afternoon and my toplessness drew some baffled and disapproving looks from passers-by. We laughed. I thought I was being well gallant and I didn’t mind the rain even though it was colder than I’d anticipated. Looking back, of course, I realize that this larking about was really some sort of courtship behaviour. It was the extravagant male, singing, dancing and flashing for the female.

We arrived at the café and the waitress said, ‘Please sit anywhere you like.’

‘Great,’ I said. ‘We’ll sit at Roxy’s cocktail bar on Bondi beach, thanks.’ JJ giggled even though I’d said this in various forms on quite a few of our dates. But there you are, you see: amusing the female can be such a useful, if obvious, way of attracting a human mate.

‘If you can make a girl laugh, you’re in,’ a girl once told me.

‘That’s easy, I’ll drop my trousers,’ I’d said. She’d laughed a lot.

‘You see, you’re putting yourself down, but it’s still funny!’ She laughed again and, you know what, within days she was going out with my best friend.

Birds have a comparatively simple time. The male frigate bird, after twenty hard minutes of gulping air, can transform his saggy, wrinkled throat pouch into a huge, bright red balloon that attracts females from miles around. And apparendy the size of the balloon is important. The Bulwer’s pheasant can pull a mate just by expanding and waggling its spectacular wattles. I couldn’t compete with that, not with the size of my red throat balloon and the length of my wattles; I was going to have to stick to small talk, and hope that the size of my small talk didn’t matter.

I put my wet shirt back on as the waitress guided us to a table in the window. We sat down and watched the busy street trickle in a blur down the glass. I like rain. I do. I really love it. It cheers me up. I love waking up in the morning and hearing rain on the windows. I love returning from a hot, sunny, foreign holiday to a rainy Heathrow, to the comforting blandness of drizzle and grey. There is probably some deep psychological reason for this hidden away in the murkiness of my childhood. I’ve no idea but I do know that sunshine makes me feel uncomfortable. Bright light means no hiding place. It means exposure and vulnerability. Perhaps diere’s a shadow of my Catholic guilt being cast over my life by the sun. Is it God’s searchlight poking into holes, under rocks and into corners looking for me? The sun makes me feel like I’m under a microscope being examined, assessed and evaluated. What shall we do with this specimen, then? Throw it away; it’s useless. Rain is my friend: stroking my forehead, caressing my troubled brow and rhythmically rocking me to sleep.

‘Isn’t this weather awful,’ said JJ, peering out of the café window into the torrential gloom of a November afternoon.

‘Dreadful,’ I concurred.

In fact, I thought the weather was being rather kind to us. Our time together was so limited that the rain meant we couldn’t wander down by the river or over the meadows, looking at birds. We had to sit together in cafes or pubs; we had to sit close together in dark, cosy corners. It also meant that I stood a better chance of being seen by fellow students who would undoubtedly be stopped dead in their tracks at seeing me ‘canoodling’ with such a gorgeous girl. Not that we were quite on ‘canoodling’ terms just yet.

‘You’ve got a bit of coffee froth on the side of your mouth,’ I told JJ.

I leant over and wiped it off as gently as I could. An electric moment. Tingle, sparkle, crackle and pop.

More animal behaviour. Classic courtship. Mutual grooming and preening. Even the mighty albatross with its huge, deadly bill can delicately caress his female, stroking the feathers and removing the odd bit of dirt or a parasite or, quite possibly, coffee froth.

‘It’s nice to be all snuggled up inside on a day like this,’ I suggested.

‘Yes, it would be nice to be in bed, wouldn’t it?’ she said.

‘Extremely.’

We looked at each other and there was an unspoken struggle to change the subject but leave the subject the same.

We laughed. She squeezed my hand. Things were getting more intense. Something would happen soon. It was clear to both of us that we felt the same way and that things would inevitably develop in their own time. These thoughts and feelings were, of course, unspoken. Most of our relationship was unspoken. We spoke of birds and made jokes about friends, colleagues, strangers in bars but the real stuff was never mentioned. Except in eye contact. We’d hardly touched each other literally, but our eye contact must have been X-rated. JJ and I were one of those couples who now get on my nerves. Young lovers staring wordlessly into each other’s faces and sighing occasionally over an undrunk beer or a now stone-cold cup of coffee.

‘The lapwing,’ she said, and suddenly we were back in the bustle of the steamy café.

‘The lapwing?’

‘Yes, I’ve just remembered,’ she explained. ‘The lapwing is sometimes called the rain bird.’

Now the lapwing is an amazing suitor to the ladies. The courtship flight is quite a piece of work; lapwings go for it and just don’t care. They climb, they dive, they swoop, they flutter, they zigzag, they swerve, they change speed recklessly. They are that bloke on the disco floor who is on his own but who knows he is the best mover in the place and goes through his entire box of dancing tricks and doesn’t give a damn who sees him or what they think.

‘I thought the lapwing had enough names already: lapwing, green plover, peewit. So why rain bird?’

‘No idea. It’s a plover. And ‘plover’ must come from
pluvium
, the Latin for rain.’

‘Does it portend rain, then? Does it like the rain? Does it breed in the rain? Does it eat rain? Do lapwings fall from the sky in little drops? I mean, why ‘rain bird’?’

I was only joking but it came out quite angry-sounding. She smiled at me. I was probably annoyed that the spell had been broken and I think she knew. She lifted my hand to her mouth and kissed it. This was the first uninvited and positively physical thing she’d done to me and it was wonderful. The broken spell was mended and we resumed staring vacantly into each other’s eyes.

‘Well, look who it is!’ said Kramer with unwelcome
bonhomie
. The spell was broken again. Any more breakages and we’d end up having to get a new spell altogether.

‘Miserable day,’ he went on.

‘It is now,’ I said.

‘Oh, am I disturbing you?’

‘Of course not,’ said JJ, just getting in ahead of my ‘yes, can you go away’. JJ seemed to like Kramer and they got on very well. But she got on well with everybody. She was attractive.

‘Do sit down, Mr K,’ I said, offering him the seat that was closest to me and furthest from JJ. Ah yes, the male starts behaving differently in the presence of a rival. Kramer wasn’t a rival as such but as any male bird will tell you, another male in your territory, however innocent, must be dealt with instantly and aggressively. The capercaillie, a ferocious black grouse from Scotland, will fight to the death to protect what is his. I found myself frowning in Kramer’s direction.

‘What’s wrong with you?’ he asked.

‘I was thinking about a ferocious black cock.’

‘Blimey, I
have
come at the wrong moment. I’ll get my buttered teacake and go.’

The lovebird. From the genus Agapornis
. Aha, from the Greek for ‘love’ and the Greek for ‘bird’. Brilliant bit of scientific naming, there.

A small stocky parrot with a short, blunt tail. Their beak is rather large for their overall size
. That’ll be from all that snogging, I suppose.

They mate for life and are observed to be very affectionate to each other. In German, they’re called
‘Die Unzertrennlichen’,
which means ‘the inseparable ones’, and in French they’re known as
‘Les Inseparables’.

Typical of the French not to have their own word for ‘inseparable’.

The lovebird’s general over-all colour is green. The Fischer’s, the black-cheeked and the collared lovebirds have a white ring round the eye
.

They eat mainly fruit, vegetables, grasses and seeds. Mack-winged lovebirds enjoy the occasional fig. There are nine separate species, eight come from mainland Africa and one, the Madagascar lovebird, doesn’t come from mainland Africa
.

What am I doing?

I’m reading about birds from Africa and Madagascar! These aren’t British birds. I’m getting obsessed. I AM obsessed. I’m obsessed with birds. No, I’m obsessed with JJ. And she’s obsessed with birds. No, she’s not. She’s not at all obsessed with birds. She’s not obsessed with anything. Not even me. She just knows a bit about most British birds. We talk about birds all the time though. No, we don’t. We hardly ever talk about birds any more. We see them occasionally, we look out for them and name them if we spot them, but that’s it. We talk about everything else.

Everything.

Everything except the future.

This is how it is. I’m either with JJ or I’m reading about birds. Learning about birds is a substitute for being with her. That’s what it is. At weekends when I don’t see her, I go out for walks in the country and look at birds. I was even getting to like the countryside around Cambridge.

Coming from Cornwall, the countryside here was a shock to me. Cornwall is high moors with spectacular granite outcrops, rolling wooded valleys and steep heather-topped cliffs butting up against Atlantic breakers. Cambridgeshire seems crushed under the weight of the sky. Huge, flat, peaty landscape, intersected with long, dead-straight strips of water, like ribbons of glass against the black soil.

There is no horizon.

Or maybe there is
only
horizon.

But the sun actually rises here. And it sets. It doesn’t just prematurely disappear behind a hill. This is a good place for sunrises and sunsets.

And different birds in the drowning fields. One weekend I saw lapwings, curlews and snipe. A snipe in a field. That’s not very Cornish. I couldn’t wait to tell JJ. Well, I couldn’t wait to get back to my room and try to find out what this mottled brown bird with an extremely long bill was, and then learn its Latin name (Gallinago gallinago), and then tell JJ.

Kramer swept into my room without knocking.

‘How are the lovebirds today?’

I hate that. What a stupid question. Patronizing and euphemistic, with perhaps a hint of envy. It’s a demeaning question, equating the people asked with rather feeble-minded, gormless-looking parrots. Or was I reading too much into it?

‘Can’t you knock?’

‘Yes, I can knock, but not today; it’s Geknoches, a Jewish festival when it’s forbidden to bang on wood with your hands. You weren’t doing anything embarrassing, were you?’

‘I was reading about parrots.’

‘Oh, you were doing something embarrassing, then? So how
are
the lovebirds?’

I ignored him.

‘Oh, I see. You don’t want to talk about it. I was wondering if you and JJ had got married, had children and emigrated to New Zealand yet?’

‘Yes, we have.’

‘Or even finally got round to holding hands?’

‘Things are progressing nicely.’

‘So you haven’t touched her yet then?’

I ignored this question.

‘Is it love?’

‘What is love?’ I asked him in return.

‘Why are you answering questions with questions?’

‘Who wants to know?’

‘There’s nothing shameful about being in love, you know.’

‘I don’t think I know the meaning of the word ‘love’.’

‘It means nothing.’

‘What?’

‘In tennis, ‘love’ means ‘zero’.’ Kramer was the sort of tippy student who gave students a bad name. Clever and smirking. And eminently punchable.

‘That ‘love’ has nothing to do with ‘love’. It’s a corruption of the French
oeuf
or ‘egg’.’

Kramer tutted. ‘You’re the sort of tippy student who gives students a bad name.’

‘I haven’t seen JJ today. It’s her day off.’