2008 - The Bearded Tit (15 page)

‘Glass of wine?’ I said politely when we stopped.

She fell back on to the bed and pulled me on top her.

‘We haven’t got time for wine!’

There then followed a few minutes of excitingly hurried unbuttoning.

‘Clean sheets, look!’ I said.

She grinned earthily. ‘Not for long!’

D
ecaffeinated coffee. Ha ha ha! How that would have made us laugh back in the seventies. So you get some coffee and take out of it the thing that most makes it coffee. That’s mad enough, but then you drink it.

Half-fat butter. But butter is all fat, isn’t it? So half-fat butter must just be half as much butter, surely?

Low-alcohol lager. Now you
are
messing with things that are no business of us lowly mortals. Tampering with lager. That is surely a job for God and God alone. What’s the point of drinking low-alcohol lager? Most lager doesn’t taste that good any way, so why take away its spirit, its one
raison d’être
?

What next? Salt-free salt? Unleaded pencils?

But what about this one: flightless bird.

Flightless bird?

Is there not in the word ‘bird’ a semantic entailment which has to include ‘flight’?

This has always troubled me. As a little boy, I was constantly drawing birds. Perching, gliding, hovering, soaring and occasionally swimming. But I don’t recall ever drawing a flightless bird.

Yes, penguins are birds, I suppose. Well, there’s no ‘suppose’ about it, I suppose. Penguins are birds. Yes, flightless birds, but not just birds that don’t fly; birds that don’t even look like birds.

Kiwis are flightless birds but they do look as if they could, if shot at with an air-rifle, suddenly flap briefly into the sky and then disappear into the undergrowth. I mean, a kiwi looks like a bird. It looks like a game bird and we know that they will do anything to avoid flying, and when they do fly it’s not that convincing. I presume that’s why man shoots game birds and not house martins.

Penguins are odd. But then they’re very good in water. Water is a fluid, you might argue, as is air, therefore penguins ‘fly’ underwater. I’m not convinced. An ostrich is built for speed. But for land speed. Huge, long, tautly muscled legs for high-speed escape. As a birdwatcher I would not be overexcited by seeing a penguin, an ostrich or a kiwi. Well, perhaps in North Norfolk there might be a little excitement in spotting those three. And obviously, if you did see them, you’d have to tick them off the list and add them to your new sightings of the year, but I’d rather see a rufous bush robin.

For me, a bird should be built not for the ground or the sea, but for the sky, and there is perhaps just one such bird. This bird belongs to the sky. Or perhaps the sky belongs to this bird. I’m sure that God, having gone to all that trouble creating the sky, realized he needed at least one of his creatures to be at home there. Or perhaps, after creating this bird, God realized that he would have to create the sky specially for it. A bird that comes to earth so rarely that it finds it nearly impossible to take off from the land, a bird whose scientific name means ‘no foot’.

The swift.

‘Swift’: what a great name for the world’s fastest-flying bird too. Superb to watch in sociable groups on a summer’s evening, whistling and screaming over the rooftops in death-defying acrobatics: black sickles of lightning.

They eat on the wing, they drink on the wing and they sleep on the wing. But there is more.

They make love on the wing. They mate in flight. Can you think of anything in the natural world that we could envy more?

They fly as high as they can into the air and then they drop down in their lovemaking with a dizzy, exhilarating, spiralling fairground ride, tearing themselves away from gravity at the last minute and back up again to repeat the breath-taking plunge of ecstasy.

Can we compete with that? Does anything come near that liberation from the pull of planet and humanity as an infinite downward carefree tumble locked in the embrace of pleasure?

I thought we came close that night. My first time, my first time with JJ, our first time together. My small, sweaty bedroom flickered with candle gloom. The elderly creaking bed was a pathetic stage for this act. It was no match for the vastness of the swifts’ heaven. But our two desires rubbed against each other frictionlessly and were single-mindedly united in a determined struggle, a desperate dance, a blazing arrow’s flight towards one urgent goal. Our love and hunger for each other had obligingly unplugged our brains from our bodies, so all fear, tension, guilt and anxiety disappeared and we functioned as base organisms: cleanly, effortlessly and perfectly. We were lost for a brief, panting eternity during which we were up there with the swifts in endless space and limitless pleasure.

In the next hour or so only two words were spoken. ‘No words,’ JJ had whispered to me. So we lay there clasped moistly in each other arms, savouring the heavy aftertaste of joy, waiting with wide-open eyes for our one body to smash into the ground and burst like a firework into a billion tiny sparks. For once, though, the spell felt unbreakable.

We were motionless. The silence was ruined by the vast thumping of lovers’ hearts.

‘Fancy a beer?’ Kramer was banging on my door. ‘Are you in there?’

We heard the door handle being turned. It was locked. How did we remember to do that in the frenzy of our arrival?

‘If you’re not in there just say so,’ Kramer said kramerishly, hoping, no doubt, to tempt me into saying, ‘I’m not in here!’

I resisted.

We listened and waited for the neurotic pacing up and down to stop and Kramer’s clumsy footsteps to fade in the direction of the bar.

Then, once again, two swifts took off and headed for the stars.

And they landed again; as much as these two swifts could ever have landed.

And flew again.

‘This is so lovely,’ she said and I felt compelled to agree. ‘It feels as if time has stood still.’

I looked at the clock. 09.32.

But then, unfortunately, it stopped standing still.

Time was up.

We dressed hurriedly in breathless silence, and then dashed through the sodden city streets so JJ could meet up with her lift home from the theatre.

The shady doorway of David’s second-hand bookshop next to the graveyard of St Edward’s church did no justice to our goodbye.

Why was she crying so much?

‘Why are you crying so much?’ she asked me.

‘I’m happy,’ I said weakly.

‘Things will be different now,’ she said. ‘I love you.’

‘I know. And I love you.’

After more tears she ran off and the night took her little hand, put its arms around her and swept her away.

I
hurried back to the college bar, walking on air. Was Svalking on air’ already a lazy cliche by the mid-seventies? I can’t remember but ‘walking on air’ was definitely what I was doing after JJ went home that night. That’s what it felt like, and those are the only words I can come up with to describe it, so we can safely say that, for all its faults, the phrase is well worthy of its cliche status.

I wouldn’t be seeing JJ till Monday morning so this promised to be a very long weekend. But it was my first weekend in my ‘new home’. I was a different person now. Notwithstanding the fact that I wasn’t the only person in the world ever to have made love, I felt, that night, that I was the newest member of a select club. I was a cut above ordinary humans now. I had touched the hem of God’s robe. I was a conquering hero. I had returned from a gruelling and bloody nineteen-year-long war and was now back triumphant among the people of my village. I could see it in people’s eyes, the way they glanced at me, the way they stopped and stepped back a pace to look me up and down admiringly. Did I notice a subtle deference that wasn’t there before? A slight tilt of the head as they spoke to me, perhaps, the hint of a genuflection? I was a different person. I had grown in stature; metaphorically, perhaps, but others would surely see it physically. I felt so different that I wondered briefly if my friends would recognize me at all. Who is this noble stranger swaggering down the steps towards us? He looks familiar but there is something kingly about him, something majestic and magical, something that is special, beyond the reach of us poor humans. I opened the doors to the college bar and went in. I can’t recall my entrance exactly but I feel sure the packed room fell silent, that there were fireworks, brass fanfares and resounding cannonades.

‘Eh, McGrath, your flies are undone!’ sneered Headbanger.

‘You’re all red-faced and sweaty,’ said one of the pair known as the Twat-twins. ‘You look as if you’re having a heart attack.’

I brushed away these lesser mortals and found Kramer at the bar.

‘Where have you been?’ he asked, handing me a pint. ‘I came to your room.’

‘I was out,’ I said failing to keep the beaming from my face.

‘Sure you weren’t pretending to be out? I thought I heard heavy breathing coming from your room. And I smelled candles.’

I winked at him and said, ‘Poltergeist!’

‘Bless you!’

‘I was in a special place,’ I said, trying to sound mystical.

‘A special place? The clinic? Have you caught something?’ Very down to earth, Kramer, and never missing an opportunity to talk ‘medically’ if he could.

‘I’ve been in the sky actually.’

‘Cloud cuckoo land?’

‘Flying.’

Kramer shook his head. I felt a wave of pessimism approaching. ‘Trouble with flying is crash landing. Have you noticed how only planes that are flying crash? Planes don’t crash when they are on the ground.’

‘Haven’t you ever heard the expression: ‘Look on the bright side’?’

Kramer raised his eyebrows dismissively. ‘OK, find me the bright side and I’ll look on it.’

‘I’ve had the best night of my life tonight.’

‘Do I infer from that that you and JJ have finally gone beyond the ‘holding hands, swapping scientific bird names and giggling in the corner of pubs’ stage?’

‘I think it’s safe to say that things will be different now.’

I was feeling almost delirious and it was wonderful to be immune at last to Kramer’s unremitting defeatism.

‘You mean things can only go downhill from here,’ he grumbled.

I laughed, put my arms around him and kissed him.

He recoiled. ‘I’ll put that down to alcohol,’ he said. ‘You dearly haven’t had enough.’

I didn’t sleep that night. When I wasn’t hovering a few feet above the mattress, I was sniffing the pillowcase and sheets for any trace of JJ’s perfume, any trace of her body, any trace of two hours ago. I tried to relive every moment. I worked backwards from the hurried and tearful goodbye. I thought about every moment of our love-making. Strenuous but effortless. Fragile but indestructible. Momentary and eternal. Our early nerves and self-consciousness had been quickly overwhelmed and vaporized by the flames.

‘It’s my first time,’ I had whispered to her.

‘Try to make it your first time every time,’ she’d replied, and I was free.

I couldn’t wait for the next day, and the next, but mainly the next. The following daybreak was exceptional. Saturday morning must have been up all night preparing such a resplendent treat for me: a huge spread of tangerine sun and icy blue sky.

I was up so early I even bumped into a sanctimonious clutch of Christians on their way to breakfast in Hall.

‘Morning, chaps!’ I chirped at them. ‘Great to be alive!’

They rounded on me as a unit and stared defensively as if waiting for the booby trap to go off. I wonder if they had an inkling that my ponding had been averted and that Degsy and Lobby had
them
in the cross-hairs.

‘Praise the Lord who has given us this beautiful day!’ I added, as the chapel doors shut behind them with a hollow echo.

I realized the rest of the day was going to be a struggle. I urgently needed to do something to take my mind off JJ and love and sex. Of course! Why didn’t I think of this earlier? I could do some work. I could read the relevant books and write one of the essays I was supposed to write. It had worked briefly on Friday morning. Work, the last resort. If you cannot do something that is useful, constructive or fun, you might as well work. If anything was going to neutralize my newly awakened libido it would be some transformational generative grammar.

I returned to my room, took the appropriate books from my shelf, found an unstarted exercise book and began making notes. Without any hesitation, I waded into the semantic quagmire of deep structure, presuppositions, factuality and sentences like ‘the horse miaowed’.

This was just the therapy I needed. The time seemed to flash by. Just as my brain was beginning to rebel, I looked up at the clock. 09.32.

‘OK, who are you?’ Kramer was standing in the doorway. ‘Tell me now or I’ll call the police!’ Kramer reached over and picked up an empty wine bottle and waved it threateningly in my direction. ‘Reading Chomsky? Making notes for an essay? What the hell is going on? Just tell me who you are and what you’ve done with Rory!’

‘Do you want a coffee?’

‘This is outrageous! Is this what love does to you? Thanks for the warning!’

I got up to fill the kettle. ‘I thought I’d do something constructive to take my mind off JJ.’

‘Have you no consideration for your Director of Studies? How’s he going to feel, what’s he going to think if he finds out that not only have you done an essay but you’ve handed it in on time?’ Kramer picked up my notebook. ‘So that’s the sum total of your morning’s work?’

‘Mind your own business.’

‘Is this part of your essay then? ‘I love JJ’.’

‘Piss off.’

‘How long did that take you?’

Then I remembered I was Kramer-proof.

‘About twenty minutes. But I did several drafts.’

‘It’s a highly commendable piece of work.’

‘Ah, I know what you’re thinking: you’re thinking it’s just a formal sentence along the basic lines of subject-verb-object, but that’s just the surface, Carl, old friend. I’m looking for something deeper. I want to know what is pre-wired deep in our grey cells that allows both of us to understand that apparently simple utterance, ‘I love JJ’.’