2008 - The Bearded Tit (33 page)

I was watching one as I drove on the outskirts of Milton Keynes one spring evening: so pleasing to the eye; such a dashing reminder of the energy and vigour of life.

‘It would be a shame to lose you again,’ I said to the bird. I don’t know why but my thoughts turned to Danny.

A
beautiful summer’s day. The sun overhead in a spotless sky meant there were no dark corners for the shadows to hide in.

‘What a terrible day,’ I said to Tori as we looked over the golden reeds to the dark blue band of sea beyond. ‘Doesn’t it ever rain in this country?’

‘It’s lovely. I know it doesn’t feel right but I think we should be glad.’

I had promised Danny that when he got back from his travels we would have a nostalgic trip to Norfolk: a little bit of birdwatching and a huge helping of eating, drinking and merriment at the Hoste Arms in Burnham Market. Tori was with us this time so it would not be a ‘boys’ night out’ but this
was
a rather special occasion.

‘Where’s Danny?’

‘He’s still in the car. I’ll go and get him.’ She turned to go.

‘He’s missing the birds. And they’re his favourites. Dicky birds. Get him out here quick!’

High summer is not a great time for serious birdwatching. The partners have been found, the nests have been built, the mating has been done, eggs laid and hatched, the hyperactive feeding of voracious chicks is over, the fledglings have left and the parents have nothing much to do now except to moult the finery of their breeding plumage and survive till the circus of life rolls back into their town. Above the reed heads the momentary flitting of nameless warblers was obvious. An occasional swallow, swift or martin would twitter by in a dark flash, and the distant white specks of some reliably ubiquitous seagulls were visible with the accompaniment of shrieking laughter and bad-tempered wailing.

Danny would have once thought a day like this spent in the countryside looking at nature was a waste. A day like this was for iced drinks and scantily clad girls followed by a warm twilight of music, laughter and mischief. But we all change.

Danny had changed a lot since I last saw him three months ago as he left for the Gambia, struggling into Heathrow under the weight of suitcases, camera gear and his worsening hacking cough.

‘Here we are,’ Tori announced sadly.

The ashes were in a small ornate urn. Tori’s hands were shaking as she handed it to me. Ashes. How painfully apt.

A small brown bird flew up from the reeds in front of us and immediately disappeared.

‘Hey, what was that?’ Tori asked, her excitement not disguising the tears in her voice.

‘A dicky bird,’ as Danny would say.

The sun went behind a cloud. I shivered. I looked up. There were no clouds. It was just my thoughts getting dark.

‘Alright then, here goes,’ I said, and took the lid off the urn and flung its contents as hard and high as I could. As the ashes emptied out, the soft, westerly summer breeze picked up the blue-grey cloud of dust and floated it gently off towards nothingness and Brancaster.

S
tormcock. What a great word! The old name for the mistle thrush. A larger, greyer and tougher version of the song thrush, but with a similar talent for singing. This hardy bird had often been observed perched high in the wind and rain, pouring its tuneful heart out into the teeth of a gale. It gets its common name from its predilection for mistletoe. Its fondness for this particular plant makes me think its popular name should be something like ‘kissing bird’ or ‘kiss-cock’. Neither of these suggestions has yet been taken up by the birding community.

‘Hey, Jon,’ I said enthusiastically, ‘what about
Stormcock?
You know, Roy Harper? Play something from that. You must have heard of it. It’s a classic. Only four tracks and one of them lasts thirteen minutes.’

Jon was nowhere to be seen. He was sitting on the sofa a few feet away but he was nowhere to be seen. He was deep in his electronic fortress. The Xbox controls at his feet snaked towards the television, which every few seconds blared out the same request to ‘choose a weapon’. I turned it down. Jon didn’t notice, he was sitting with the electric guitar on his lap, legs crossed and feet resting on the amp. He was wearing headphones and, for extra isolation, his woolly hat was pulled right down over the rims of his sunglasses.

‘You’re just so fucking annoying, Jon,’ his loving sister chimed in.

‘What about ‘Fly Like An Eagle’ by the Steve Miller band?’ I suggested. Jon nodded, but I think that was a coincidence.

‘‘Bird On A Wire’ by Leonard Cohen?’

Louise looked imploringly to heaven. ‘Come on, Dad, we’ll never regain contact if you want him to play Leonard Cohen. Anyway, there are songs not to do with birds, you know.’

‘Name one.’

She came straight back with, ‘‘Dirty’, Christina Aguilera?’

‘OK, that’s not about birds, but it’s sung by a bit of ruff.’

A big tut. ‘That’s just lame, Daddy!’

‘Hey, Jon, do you know ‘The Chicken Song’?’

A loud twangy minor chord rang out; it throbbed with reverb, chorus, sustain and ‘why don’t you two just get out and leave me alone?’

‘OK, Jon,’ I said picking up my coat. ‘Me and Lou are going shopping. We’ll be an hour or so. See you later. Are you warm enough, by the way? You’ve only got three sweatshirts and a hoodie on.’

Another dismissive twang rattled the amp and we left.

The deal was that I’d take Louise shopping provided we could walk into town the long way round: the scenic route; the pretty way.

‘You mean the birdwatching way?’ she had correctly surmised, and we ambled round the meadowy outskirts of the city and were rewarded with a skylark singing high up in the clouds.

‘Beautiful. Hear that!’

Louise looked around, back and front, up and down. ‘What is it?’

‘It’s called the invisible bird.’

‘I can’t see it.’

‘Well, there you are, you see.’

She was intrigued to pin it down but this one was invisible in the whiteness. I told her this bird was special but made the mistake of telling her it was also rather dull and streaky brown, and while the shops were open she wasn’t going to wait to see one drop back to earth.

‘In Victorian times, they used to eat them, you know.’

‘Ugh, that’s gross! Anyway there can’t be much meat on them.’

‘No, there isn’t. You’d need about twenty for your pie. And then you’d have to bung in loads of stuff like bacon, beef and onions.’

‘Mmm, sounds lovely; apart from the skylark. Would you eat one?’

Children have an uncanny knack of putting you on the spot.

‘Er…good question, Lou!’

‘You’re always going on about how wondrous skylarks are, how they’re endangered and all that, but would you eat one? You eat other birds: chickens, pheasant and loads of creepy stuff. What about a skylark?’

‘Ah, I know,’ I said, pretending I’d suddenly had a flash of inspiration, ‘a merlin!’

‘What do you mean, ‘a merlin’?’

Good, she hadn’t noticed I was evading the question.

‘The merlin is a small bird of prey; looks like a little pigeon. They’re really neat. In the day when the aristocracy hunted, the men had peregrines and the women had merlins. In royal circles, the merlin was the lady’s falcon. Anyway,
they
eat skylarks. Their favourite prey, and I’ll tell you something interesting…’

‘Can’t wait!’

‘…if the lark stops singing and drops down for cover, the merlin nearly always gets it, but sometimes the lark carries on singing, even louder, and rising as the merlin approaches it, as if to say, ‘Don’t mess with me, pal!’, and then the merlin leaves it alone.’

‘Cool,’ said Lou, ‘So, answer me, would you eat a skylark?’

‘Oh hell, I suppose so; if there was no other food and I was starving and desperate. God knows how I’d catch one, though.’

‘You could borrow the Queen’s merlin!’ She smiled and I held her hand. We hurried up a bit and scared a pair of chaffinches off the path in front of us, and Louise listened indulgently as I told her about how chaffinches were hunted and captured for singing contests. The male has a loud song, which it repeats over and over again all day long. In the late nineteenth century, men would catch them and cage them in dingy pubs, place bets on which would sing the longest or repeat its song the most times. The contests produced a lot of money and no little crime. Good singers changed hands for substantial sums. ‘It was quite cruel, I should imagine, and it’s against the law now to trap birds like chaffinches.’

Louise betrayed the tiniest hint of interest. ‘Where do you get all this weird shit from?’

‘Oh, you know; I read it in books, mainly.’

‘So people actually write books about all this birdy stuff? And some people read it?’

‘Apparently…Hey, Lou, stop! Keep still.’

We were crossing a small square of park lined with large old trees. The grass had just been mown. This is the ideal setting for a green woodpecker. I have seen them here before and out of habit I always look. And there was one. Just a greenish lump in the distance, unless you knew what you were looking for. Despite their name, the green woodpecker spends most of its time on the ground looking for ants, which it scoops up with a long, sticky tongue.

‘You wait here,’ I said to Louise, leaving her on the path as I tiptoed in long, slow strides towards the bird. The nearer I got, the slower and more precise my movements got. I was near enough to see every detail of the marvellously coloured creature. One tiny move at a time now, I edged closer and closer. I was playing statues as I came within a couple of yards of it as it busily stabbed the neat lawn. One step too many and it yaffled away to the trees, showing off its fine yellow rump.

‘Wonderful!’ I turned back to my daughter. Two or three passers-by had stopped to watch my curious, slo-mo dance, and next to them my gorgeous sixteen-year-old Loulou was twisting and squirming with excruciating embarrassment.

A tour of clothes shops seemed to help her over the trauma of seeing her father behaving like a headcase in the busy broad daylight of a city Saturday.

We got back from town to find that Jon, too, had returned from the planet he was on earlier. He seemed very keen and lively.

‘Hey, Dad, listen to this!’ He picked up the guitar and announced, ‘Some birdsong for you.’

His nimble fingers glided effortlessly up and down the fret-board as he played an almost note-perfect version of the Beatles’

‘Blackbird’.

‘That’s amazing, Jon! All it needs is a foot-tap and a real blackbird singing in the background.’

I was impressed but a little miffed. I taught him to play that. And
I
can’t play it.

T
ori was beginning to look intently into the reeds. ‘That was something a bit special. Something I’ve never seen before.’

‘It was an LBJ. A little brown jobbie. Or a ‘lousy blow job’ in Danny’s words.’

‘We should have brought the binoculars.’

The dull bird I had just dismissed suddenly appeared again and perched for a tantalizing instant on a reed stalk.

‘That wasn’t a warbler.’ She seemed quite insistent. ‘I can’t believe we didn’t bring our binoculars.’

‘Well, we haven’t got our bins because we didn’t come here to birdwatch, did we? We came here for Danny.’

She looked away.

‘I know, I know. That bird was different, though.’

‘Was it an Indian harpy eagle?’

She aimed a reproachful schoolteacher’s face in my direction.

‘No!’

‘A Madagascar firefmch?’

‘I’m not playing this game.’

‘A construction site crane?’

She put her hands to her ears and shut her eyes tightly.

‘A fireside chat? A bit of a lark? A three-point tern?’

‘You need Danny here to laugh at your drivel.’

I sighed. ‘Oh, what’s the point?’

‘Well there’s not much around. It’s summer and the birds aren’t up to much, are they?’

‘No, I mean what’s the point of birdwatching? Death makes you think tilings like that, doesn’t it?’

A sudden breeze stroked the reed heads, causing a ripple of light and shade to glide over the marsh.

‘There’s exactly the same point to birdwatching now as ever. Death has never changed the point of something!’

‘So, what is the point of birdwatching?’

Tori sighed. ‘What’s the point of anything?’

‘True; go on, tell me.’

She tutted, but not too unkindly. ‘Why don’t you ask your kids? Didn’t you say that either everything has a point or nothing has a point? And even if everything is pointless, it doesn’t mean to say you don’t have to do it, or you can’t enjoy doing it.’

I looked out across the reed beds to the sea and sky. Yes, I probably had said those things. ‘Death is bound to stop you in your tracks and make you think oh, what’s the point, we’re all going to die.’

‘That fact that we’re all going to die surely means there’s even more of a point to doing anything.’ Tori’s magical words derailed my train of thought.

‘Actually, talking of death, what are we going to do about Danny?’

‘What do you mean, what is there to do?’

‘Well, we’ve done our duty, haven’t we?’

Tori looked puzzled. ‘Explain.’

‘Well,’ I said, Ve’ve got rid of his cat, as requested, scattering the ashes in a long, touching and sacred ceremony—which, incidentally, he was too wussy to attend.’

‘Well, he was upset.’

‘I don’t know why. He resented that cat and every penny he spent on its banana sandwiches.’

‘No, the thing is this: deep down, he didn’t want to lose his last reminder of Diana, the one and only love of his life. He couldn’t bear to say goodbye.’

‘I think you and me deserve some just you and me time together.’

Tori shook her head. ‘We can’t just abandon him in Norfolk. Anyway, we’re supposed to be having a memorial lunch in the Hoste together. Strictly non-vegetarian.’

‘True.’

We headed back to the car park.

‘At least the car’s not going to reek of fags,’ she said.

‘True. He hasn’t smoked since he left for the Gambia. He’s done well.’