2008 - The Bearded Tit (10 page)

‘Why don’t you see her on her day off?’

‘She lives about twenty-five miles away!’

‘So?’

‘And she lives with her parents; it’d all be a bit difficult.’

‘Why doesn’t she come and spend the day here in Cambridge with you? It might move things on a bit.’

That was a very good question and one I had asked JJ, only to be told it was awkward; she had arrangements already, family things.

‘She’s doing family things.’

‘Isn’t that roughly what you want to do with her?’ He smirked and I ignored him.

‘I’m in no rush,’ I tied to Kramer.

‘I’ve got a bad feeling,’ Kramer said, walking over to the window and looking out at the gloomy remains of the November afternoon.

‘You always have a bad feeling! You are gloomy. You are pessimistic. You are lugubrious. We’ve been through this: you’re a miserable cunt!’

He seemed pleased by this description of himself. ‘Mmm, maybe.’

‘It’s the time of year.’ I joined him at the window and looked out into the college gardens.

He turned balefully to me. ‘Look, a magpie.’

‘So it is!’

The unmistakably handsome crow. A beautiful bird. Stridently black and white, but with bright blue iridescence and a long glossy greeny-purple tail. It gets a bad press. It steals other birds’ eggs and eats other birds’ chicks. But, hey, who doesn’t? And if you feel like learning the scientific names for all British birds, why not start with the magpie?

Pica pica
.

Kramer looked at the bird and looked back at me shaking his head. ‘One for sorrow.’

‘Oh dear, there you go again. I don’t believe you have a superstitious bone in your body.’

‘Well, you never know. My uncle Harry walked under a ladder once and was dead within forty-eight years.’

I tutted.

‘Take care, my friend!’ was Kramer’s portentous exit. I watched the magpie for a while. Mmm, I too was beginning to get a bad feeling. I cast an anxious glance across the lawns in the hope of seeing another magpie.

A
fter seeing one magpie, is there a time limit before you see the next one? If I see one at nine in the morning and the next one at five in the afternoon, is that two sorrows or one joy?

As soon as Kramer had gone, I left my room and went for a walk in search of
Pica pica secunda
. It was gone five now and my chances for getting any joy were fading with the light. Not that I was superstitious or anything, or that Kramer had infected me with his pessimism, but I felt perhaps I should assess the JJ situation.

Where were we up to?

I was in love with JJ. I sensed she felt the same way but there was something holding her back from full expression of her desire. Maybe, at some level, she wasn’t ready for the intensity of relationship I seemed to be offering. Maybe she had just come out of a difficult and painful relationship and was nervous about getting involved in something ‘serious’.

JJ and I had never discussed her previous relationships on the grounds that I didn’t really want to hear about them.

Perhaps she just wanted to ‘play around’ for a few years before getting involved in the ‘relationship of a lifetime’. If this were the case, perhaps I should make it clear that if she wanted to play the field I could easily do a convincing impression of a field. Perhaps she was just being nice to me and really thought I was a bit of a twat; pleasant enough company to liven up her boring days in the bookshop, but not worth getting too involved with.

No, come on, Rory, you’re letting your self-loathing get in the way here. There is definitely a tingle when you’re together.

And a sparkle.

How many tingles to the sparkle, I wondered.

And there had been moments of electricity. There were times when our faces had come so close together we could feel each other’s breath, eyes fixed on eyes and words pointless; moments when there had been a crackle and the smell of something smouldering. Yes, several moments of crackle.

How many sparkles to the crackle?

Right, let’s go over what we’ve done so far: first of all there was the time we were sitting next to each other and my knee touched hers. This was a pure accident but it sent a glorious shudder through me even though she moved her knee away quite quickly. I mused for a while on the possibility that this wasn’t an accident; that she’d deliberately brushed her knee against mine to take, as it were, the temperature of the situation. We had crossed a busy street and I’d taken her by the hand and led her across to the other side and I’d tried to hold on to it a bit longer than was necessary. She let go of my hand quite soon after, overtly to point out a collared dove flying by.

Apparently these birds were almost unknown in Britain and now were on a huge increase. I didn’t really care. Since then the number of casual hand-holdings and inadvertent knee-rubbings had increased to the point where I was no longer keeping count. But if you must know, I stopped at twenty-seven casual hand-holdings and nineteen inadvertent knee-rubbings.

Then there were the ‘goodbyes’ at the bus stop when she went home to her parents each night. I didn’t know what status to give the goodbye pecks on the cheek. It was physical contact but there was too much that was everyday about it. Even people who just met for the first time seemed to depart with a peck on the cheek. Or one on each cheek. That was becoming quite widespread, more often than not provoking a shriek of, ‘Oooh, going continental, are we?’

Obviously, with JJ, I went continental to double the contact and the time spent kissing her. I was also trying to move mouth-wards with the cheek-pecks.

At first JJ compensated for this by turning her head to the right if I was kissing her left cheek and vice versa, meaning that her mouth was well out of my reach. But as the weeks passed, I noticed that our cheek-pecks were becoming very nearly lip-pecks as JJ did less head-turning to avoid my mouth.

After about a month, the arm round the shoulder had been accepted. As always this starts with a yawn and a stretch of both arms and the one behind the shoulders of the girl you’re with stays there, eventually flopping innocently on her shoulder.

The ‘arms round JJ’s waist’ were also accepted as being normal and non-threatening. Clearly the issue now was how firmly I squeezed her. Pressure was being subtly increased on every occasion until one day in a lunchtime pub I squeezed a bit too hard while she was drinking a Coke, which she had to spit out along with some partially digested cheese sandwich.

‘Oh, I’m so sorry!’

‘It’s alright; you just took me a bit by surprise.’

‘I just felt like squeezing you.’

‘Ah, that’s nice. I wasn’t expecting it. No harm done,’ she said kindly, as she wiped the lump of regurgitate off her blouse.

The resting-of-hand-on-knee had pleasingly moved on as far as squeezing-inner-thigh. I’d worked my way up from resting-hand-on-knee to resting-hand-on-just-above-knee to resting-hand-on-top-of-thigh to dangling-hand-on-inner-thigh and one day, in the basement gloom of the Henecky Tavern, I made my move and put my hand on her upper inner thigh and squeezed it.

‘I’ll get another round in,’ I said straight away and got up and went to the bar; part of my plan was not to hang around for an embarrassing rebuttal or awkward silence. This seemed to work; when I got back with the drinks she did the same to me and I was in heaven.

Our physical intimacy lurched suddenly forward one pre-bus-stop evening drink when we were talking about physical peculiarities.

You know the sort of thing: the sinister implications of being left-handed; curly hair versus straight hair and the shape of follicles; does the size of the gap between your two front teeth mean anything; does not being able to whistle mean you’re homosexual; does not being able to whistle while holding up a chair by one leg mean you’re homosexual; is it possible to touch your left elbow with your left hand; is the length of your forearm between wrist and elbow exactly the same as your shoe size?

I suddenly had an idea.

‘What about tongue length, then?’ I asked her.

‘What about tongue length?’

‘Can you touch the end of your nose with your tongue?’

‘Let’s see,’ she said, and closing her eyes tight she stuck her tongue out as far as it would go and curled it back and upwards towards her nose. She couldn’t touch the end of her nose with her tongue but it was the sexiest thing I’d ever seen.

‘Oh shame; very close, though.’

She pulled a joke sad face. ‘Can you do it?’

‘Easily,’ I said, and leant over and touched the end of her nose with my tongue.

She laughed a lot.

And I did.

My day was made.

But the silver lining had a black cloud around it in the shape of Carl Kramer.

‘You’re in a ludicrously good mood for someone in a doomed love affair,’ he grumbled later over a pint.

‘Yes, I touched the end of JJ’s nose with my tongue today!’

‘Jesus Christ,’ Kramer said, shaking his head in despair. ‘Are you taking part in the foreplay marathon or something?’

‘A little often, my friend.’

Yet, despite Kramer, it had been a good day. They all had been. Why had a note of doubt crept into my mind? I was walking back to my room down the path by the duck pond and something flew over, a dark, silent shadow flapping slowly.

Amazing.

A tawny owl.

Always a delight to see.

Or was it another magpie, I thought to myself. Yes, you know what: I think that was a magpie.

‘H
ello. Is JJ around?’

‘Oh dear.’

It was not the answer I expected. The grey-haired man with thick-lensed glasses precariously close to the end of his pointy nose smiled with a mixture of kindness and pity. ‘It’s her day off.’

I knew it was her day off. She told me that the last time I saw her. Then why was I here in the natural history department of Blackwaters? Was I turning up to see her in some sort of subconscious reflex action? JJ’s immediate boss, Mr Critchley, tilted his head back to line up his eyes with his glasses and looked at me appraisingly.

‘You seem like a nice boy,’ he said and shook his head. World-weariness weighed down on him like a block of concrete but he gave off no bitterness. Perhaps the blocks of concrete had squeezed it out of him. Bitterness uses up more energy than kindness; perhaps he was too tired to be anything other than benign. ‘She’s a nice girl.’

‘She is,’ I agreed enthusiastically.

‘You would have made a lovely couple.’ He shook his head again. ‘Another lifetime, maybe.’

I was unsure what to make of this and was wondering if I should go through the motions of pretending to buy a book when Critchley suddenly became business-like and said, ‘Are you going to buy a book or did you only come in to see JJ? Please don’t say you want to buy a book because you know you’re over your limit on your account card. Don’t make me have to refuse you.’ The likeable old man seemed genuinely distraught and I started to assure him that I was only there to browse: books and shop-girls.

‘Well, obviously I did want to see JJ, but as I’m here—’

I was interrupted by the arrival of a handsome young man in a suit. He was self-assured and immaculate. A lady-killer. A screen idol. Drop-dead gorgeous, if the phrase had been invented in 1975.

‘Mr Critchley!’ He nodded in Critchley’s direction.

‘Oh hi, Neil!’ said Critchley, and turned to me to introduce the suave devil. ‘This is Neil Curtis from social science. He helps me and JJ out from time to time.’ He pointed in my general direction and said, ‘And, Neil, this is…er…a customer. I’m sorry, I can’t remember your name.’

‘Rory.’

‘Oh yes, of course. Rory’s another one who’s in love with JJ!’

Neil frowned in my direction. ‘Oh, another one I’ve got to fight off?’ He winked at me and patted Critchley on the arm. ‘I’ll see you later. Call me if you need me!’

The cool Mr Curtis glided effortlessly away, leaving behind a pleasant hint of expensive aftershave and an unpleasant feeling in the pit of my stomach. I felt distinctly uncomfortable about such an obviously good-looking charmer ‘helping out’ JJ from time to time. My discomfort was increased by his cheeky ‘another one I’ve got to fight off comment and its attendant wink. Whatever that meant, I did not like it.

I took a quick look through my faces to see if there was a brave one I could put on, and said, ‘He seems like a nice bloke.’

Critchley slumped back into his chair, swivelled 360 degrees and grabbed the desk to halt himself abruptly.

‘Listen, there’s something I should tell you—’

I was distracted from Critchley’s revelation by the sound of a familiar boisterous cackling coming from somewhere around organic chemistry. I peeped round the corner and saw Degsy and Lobby, the ponding kings, coming up the stairs towards me. I wasn’t in the mood for any interaction with these two. I felt my absence was urgently required.

‘Er, listen, I’ve got to go.’ I left Critchley and headed down the back stairs to the basement, to modern languages, where I belonged. I picked up the biggest book I could find, opened it in front of my face and scrutinized it. As the maps showing the migration of Latin began to blur, I sensed that the danger had passed. I put the book back on the shelf and I became aware of the smell of gentleman’s cologne. The tap on my shoulder made me jump.

‘You get around, don’t you? Modern languages now!’ Neil winked again and left with a cocky, ‘I’ll give JJ your love.’

K
ramer burst anxiously into the bar. He paced up and down, glancing around nervously.

He looked troubled. Twitchy and uncertain. Nothing out of the ordinary there, then, I thought. He came up to me at the pinball machine and interrupted a classic studenty discussion about rock music.

Adrian ‘Headbanger’ Brown was putting forward the theory that the Moody Blues song ‘Nights in White Satin’ was, in fact, ‘Knights in White Satin’, on the flimsy argument that ‘Nights in white satin never reaching an end’ didn’t mean anything.

‘What sort of knights would wear white satin, then?’ I asked. ‘I mean, you couldn’t go into battle wearing white satin, could you?’