2008 - The Bearded Tit (11 page)

There was a murmur of agreement from my fellow drinkers.

‘I mean, what would the king say if you turned up to fight for him in a bloody war against the Saxons wearing white satin?’

A few sniggering nods.

‘
Sire, here I am, Sir Nigel de Lingerie, come to give myself for your cause, o my liege
.’

‘
No suit of armour then, Sir Nigel?
’

‘
I find it makes me perspire so, your highness, and restricts my use of the sword and lance. Besides, chain-mail is just so passe!
’

‘It’s metaphorical, you twat.’ Headbanger was unshaken in his opinion.

Kramer tapped me on the shoulder.

‘Bad news,’ he said.

‘Yes, you are,’ I replied.

He took a swig of my lager.

‘I need to talk to you urgently in my room.’

‘Can it wait?’

‘No, and I need some chicken soup. Urgently.’

Kramer sounded serious and I quite fancied some chicken soup.

‘So what’s the bad news?’ I asked as Kramer passed me a bowl of soup and a lump of bread that was well past its incinerate-by date.

‘Eat your soup, I’ll tell you.’

It was midnight by now, and eating late-night chicken soup in Kramer’s room had become quite a common occurrence. His aunt Sadie was visiting at the end of term and all four gallons had to be finished.

‘Just throw it away,’ I had recommended. ‘Chuck it down the toilet.’

‘She’d have a heart attack. You don’t know my aunt Sadie.’

‘She’d never guess.’

‘You’re kidding; as I said, you
don’t
know my aunt Sadie.’

‘Answer me this,’ I asked. ‘Which is the commonest bird in the world?’

‘Do I get a mark for ‘don’t give a shit’?’

‘No’.

‘It must be a pigeon.’

‘No, closer to home.’

‘A homing pigeon?’

‘No. A chicken. The domesticated hen. There are about twenty-four billion of them worldwide.’

Kramer shook his head. ‘There wouldn’t be if my aunt Sadie had anything to do with it.’

‘They’re descended from the red-jungle fowl,
Callus gallus
, ’ I said, proud of some new titbits of bird information; chicken nuggets, we’d probably call them now.

‘I can’t believe the domesticated hen is of any interest to ornithologists.’

‘Well, in fact, ornithology was originally the study of chickens.’

‘Now you
are
talking cock,’ said Kramer. ‘The trouble with chickens,’ he went on portentously, ‘is you never know what they’re thinking. Whenever I’ve looked a chicken in the eye I’ve always thought: what the hell is that bird thinking? It never looks at you back, for a start. Especially if you’re about to wring its neck till it dies.’

‘Oh yeah, and you’ve done that a lot, I suppose,’ I sneered.

‘I spent three months on a kibbutz killing chickens. I know what I’m talking about. That’s when I realized you never know what a chicken is thinking.’

‘They were probably thinking: ‘Watch it, chaps, here comes that bastard Kramer and look, he’s got that neck-wringing glint in his eye!’’

Kramer ignored this. ‘You can’t trust a bird called a ‘chicken’ that isn’t troubled by chicken pox. When have you heard of a chicken getting chicken pox? Never. Mind you, they used to be very valuable. Roosters particularly. In fact, when Socrates was dying of hemlock poisoning, his last words were, ‘I owe Asclepius a cock.’’

‘I didn’t even know Socrates was dead. Interestingly, Brazil never won the World Cup when he was captain, you know!’

I thought this fatuous comment would bring Kramer back to his apparently urgent ‘bad news’.

‘Bad news,’ he said.

‘What’s wrong? Are you dying of cancer?’

Kramer laughed. ‘Ha, no, I’m not. Well, I probably am, actually; one day certainly, a long lingering death knowing my luck, but that’s not what I wanted to tell you.’ He took a deep breath. ‘JJ has a boyfriend.’

I said nothing. ‘Well, I
think
JJ has a boyfriend.’

But JJ is the love of my life and I think I’m the love of hers. What was Kramer on about?

I finally said, ‘My JJ?’

‘Well, how many JJ’s do you know?’

‘What do you mean, she’s got a boyfriend?’ I was really struggling to take in the meaning of this statement. A statement of unfortunately simple, unambiguous plain English.

‘I saw her leaving the bookshop today. Arm in arm with a bloke. They seemed quite giggly and together.’

I misgulped some soup and coughed painfully.

Kramer shrugged helplessly. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘What did he look like? It’s probably one of her friends from the shop that I know and have met before and there’s nothing in it really,’ I said, trying to convince myself, rather unconvincingly.

Kramer closed his eyes and thought. ‘Tall, blond, athletic, well dressed, very good-looking. Not a bit like you.’

It was Neil Curtis.

‘When did you see them?’

‘As the shop was shutting.’

Normally the time I would be meeting her before she caught her bus home but tonight I hadn’t. She’d said she’d got a prior engagement she couldn’t get out of.

‘What sort of prior engagement?’ I had asked.

‘Oh, a really dull one I’d do anything to get out of!’ she said, pulling an upside-down smiley face.

‘Why don’t you just not turn up?’

‘I wish it were that easy,’ she said, and I loved her more for using the subjunctive. Then I said something which surprised us both.

‘Are you seeing your other boyfriend?’ How dangerous! How daring! Suppose she’d said ‘yes’! ‘Yes’ would mean she had another boyfriend but that, implicitly, I was her boyfriend as well. If she said ‘no’ that could mean she did have another boyfriend but she wasn’t seeing him tonight. But that I was still therefore the other boyfriend! Or worse: ‘yes’
or
‘no’ could still mean she had two boyfriends, neither of which were me. She answered neither ‘yes’ nor ‘no’. She just spluttered out a giggle and said, ‘You are⁄wwwy!’ then she leaned over and gave me a small but perfectly formed kiss on the cheek.

And now later I hear from Kramer that there is another boyfriend. If not the only one.

‘Neil,’ I said.

‘Are we going to pray?’

‘That’s his name. He works with JJ. I’ve met him. Critchley introduced me to him.’

A deeply unpleasant feeling unconnected to Aunt Sadie stabbed me in the guts. ‘Critchley was about to tell me something. Something serious, but I didn’t stay to find out what it was. I had to go because Degsy and Lobby were hanging around.’

Kramer sounded sympathetic. ‘I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news. It may be nothing.’

I was feeling suddenly empty and alone. Kramer walked over and put his hand on my shoulder.

‘You know what you need, my friend. Some soup.’

I
put down my pint on the corner table of the empty pub. I sat down. I stood up again and started pacing up and down. It was hard to relax. I was thinking about Neil and JJ. I was trying not to think about Neil and JJ. That was why I couldn’t sit down. I sat down. I sipped the lager and shuddered. It was ten to twelve and it didn’t seem to be lager time but I’d asked JJ if we could meet early as I had something important to tell her. Ask her. I bit my nails for a few moments then I stood up and started pacing again.

‘You alright, mate?’ asked the barman. ‘You’re like a caged animal.’

I sat down again.

‘Hello, Charlie!’ said a piercing voice from the other side of the room.

I looked up. A caged animal. A mynah bird, in fact.

‘Hello, Charlie!’ it said again. And again. The accuracy of the diction was amazing, but I soon gathered that I had heard the full extent of its conversation. I did not like caged birds, but I was glad of the distraction and I walked over to it.

‘Hello, Charlie,’ I said. Mynah birds can only repeat what they hear, so I assumed this one had heard the phrase ‘Hello, Charlie’ more than any other and therefore it was called Charlie.

‘Hello, Charlie!’ it said back to me.

‘Sorry to butt in, chaps!’ It was JJ. She looked more stunning than I remembered her. I sensed that part of me wanted her to look less than perfect now. Now that she was going out with Neil. Possibly.

‘You look great,’ I said.

‘Ah, thanks. Hey, amazing speech that bird’s got.’

It was a beautiful bird: glossy black, with stunning yellow flashes on its wings. It hopped neurotically from perch to perch in its cage.

‘Fantastic to teach a bird to speak so accurately.’

I disagreed. ‘I think it’s terrible. And anyway it’s not speaking, it’s imitating. The mynah bird is in the starling family and they’re all good mimics; but it’s not speaking.’

‘It sounds like pretty good English to me.’

‘It has no capacity for language like humans have. You can teach a bird to say ‘cat eats bird’ or ‘bird eats worm’ but it will never be able to say, like a human could, ‘bird eats cat’ or ‘cat eats worm’. It can’t produce language. It can’t make up things that it’s never heard before. That’s why it only says ‘Hello, Charlie’. Eventually someone called Charlie is going to walk in and that bird is going to make his day. Otherwise it’s pretty dull. It hasn’t got language pre-wired in its brain like we have.’

‘Blimey,’ said JJ. ‘You did go to a lecture once!’

I realized that I was sounding heavy and stressed. I needed to get this over with quickly. I needed to get out of this cage.

‘What would you like to drink?’

‘Just an orange juice, thanks.’ She was radiant this morning; her brilliance made me feel increasingly like a shadow.

‘My parents always had a budgerigar when we were young,’ she was saying.

That reminded me. It’s true. When we were young and we would visit neighbours or friends of my parents, I was always intrigued by the number of houses that had a pet budgie. What was it about the budgie? They are brightly coloured. They sing. It seemed quite innocent then. But birds sing to attract a mate. They sing for love; for sex. And then they sing to defend everything that goes with that: the mate, the nest, the eggs, the chicks, the territory; the future of their genes. They do not sing for fun. They do not sing for our enjoyment. And they fly. They fly long distances. They cross continents, they cross oceans. They are creatures of the sky. They are not creatures of the cage. I find it hard to think of anything that symbolizes ‘wrong’ as neatly as a caged bird. A small, brightly coloured creature flitting helplessly back and forth on an endless two-foot-long journey. A creature that could fly thousands of miles.

The energy of a bird, its colour, its sound and its movement confined behind metals bars is such a potent image of repression it’s not hard to see why art and literature have used it so much. Flight is escape; flight is liberty. How often when I’ve felt imprisoned have I looked upwards, scanning the sky for a bird, a symbol of freedom? Invariably, of course, it’s a pigeon. In towns, a feral pigeon; anywhere else, a wood pigeon. Boring for the birdwatcher: it’s the bird you can’t fail to see, the bird that is so common you can hardly count it as a wild animal. And yet so many times I have felt miserable and confined but been suddenly heartened to see a pigeon flying over with its strong, fast, direct flight, exuberant with a sense of freedom and space. A symbol of hope.

Robert Franklin Stroud was not a nice man. Disruptive, apparently, and divisive. And very violent. How else would you end up in solitary confinement in the island prison of Alcatraz?

Tantalizingly close to San Francisco, the ‘Rock’ is cut off by fierce sea currents of freezing water. Stroud is immortalized in film as the
Birdman of Alcatraz
. A sanitized and sentimentalized story of his life tells of how he kept insanity at bay by looking after birds, curing injured and sick ones and selling them to fellow inmates or letting them fly off to freedom. The idea of a caged man freeing birds is compelling, and despite its distance from the truth the film became very popular. Stroud himself was never allowed to see it.

There is a strange irony that the ‘Birdman’ should be the most famous inmate of this hellish prison.
Alcatraz
is the Spanish for pelican. The island is named after the enormous flocks of the bird that early explorers observed there. And it is no longer a prison. It’s actually, listen to
this
, a bird sanctuary; home to many rare species.

The aborigines of Australia are closer to nature than we are. For thousands of years they have lived off whatever has been provided by the land. Or the sky. A brightly coloured parrot, small but super-abundant, is a protein-rich meal. Undeniably ‘good food’; or, in their own language:
betckyerrigyar
. They would be surprised to see the
betchyerrigyar
(or ‘budgerigar’) pointlessly caged in so many urban locations. Do the keepers of caged birds perhaps think this is a link to the wilderness, a little piece of wild nature in the city?

Does it make them feel less caged in their human habitation? Surely, a bird flying wild and free is more uplifting? A caged bird in the city to me is a symbol of misery.

‘You look miserable,’ said JJ, putting her hand on mine. ‘Is something the matter?’

Here we go.

‘Yes…er, I wanted to ask you something.’ My insides were knotting up nicely. ‘Well, the thing is—’

She cut me off instantly. ‘Ooh, hang on. I must tell you something first. Sorry to butt in but this is really exciting.’

‘Oh, yeah?’

‘It’s about Neil who works with me. You’ve met him, haven’t you?’

I was beginning to feel sick.

‘Er…I think so. Good-looking bloke?’

‘Yeah, really dishy,’ she said, a bit too enthusiastically.

I took a deep breath. ‘What about him?’

‘Well, I went out with him the other night.’

‘Really?’

‘To the theatre. It was brilliant. He is amazing.’

I took a swig of lager and swallowed hard.

‘In what way is he amazing?’

‘Well, him and his boyfriend do this brilliant stand-up act. In drag, of course, and camp as you like! But it is funny. You should see it!’

I was dumbstruck.

‘Are you alright?’

‘Yes.’ I was beginning to chuckle. ‘Yes, I was just thinking that I should see it. It sounds fantastic. I haven’t been to the theatre for ages.’