2008 - The Bearded Tit (4 page)

It had been an ordeal for me to come up with the acceptable wording for the invitation, nothing too timid or clumsy, but I’d ended up settling on something like, ‘If you want to we could go out together, I mean…er, not go out with each other but go out at the same time as each other…er, be together just in your lunch hour, if you wanted to, but if you’re doing something else, we don’t have to or you may not want to anyway and…er, a sandwich down by the river. Or another day, perhaps?’ An irresistible offer and she had amazingly accepted. We sat next to each other, but not very next to each other, on a bench overlooking the river. I was mesmerized by her eyes, smile, brain, voice and even the tomato seed on her shoe. What is it about tomato seeds? Whenever you eat anything with a tomato in it, however careful you are, somewhere on your clothes or body there will be a tomato seed. Even in the middle of the back of your shirt.

‘I mean, did you study natural history?’

I was trying to be neutral and cool in that embarrassingly uncool way young men have when they’re trying to be neutral and cool.

‘No, my degree is philosophy.’

‘Well, what do you know! And how do you know that you know it? And what is knowledge anyway?’

She laughed pleasantly.

Phew.

Tou’ve got a tomato seed on your shoe.’

She lifted her foot up and scraped it off, showing amazing flexibility in her well-toned leg. My mesmerization needle was trembling by the red area of the dial.

‘What is it about tomato seeds?’ she said. ‘Whenever you eat anything with a tomato in it, however careful you are, you always get a seed on you!’

I laughed. ‘Yeah, worse than that, your sandwich didn’t have any tomato in it!’

‘It must be from last night,’ she said pulling a silly but mesmerizing face. ‘I was in a tomato-crushing competition.’

I liked this girl. Quirky, bright, gorgeous. And she seemed to like me. What was wrong with her? What was her dark secret?

‘Do you like birds, then?’ she asked me.

‘Very much so.’

‘The feathered sort, I meant.’

‘Ha ha ha. Well, I like both sorts actually.’

‘What’s that over there?’ She was pointing at a small, brightly marked bird flitting among the weeping willows.

‘That’s a blue tit.’

‘Very good,’ she said, giving me a cheeky thumbs-up in a mesmerizing way.

‘That’s easy.’

‘Are you a tit man, then?’ she winked.

This girl is just amazing. She was moving the conversation down paths I was frightened to go down.

‘I do like tits,’ I said, laughing enough to acknowledge the ambiguity.

‘Have you ever seen any penduline tits?’ she asked with too much mischief. I was struggling to keep up.

‘Er…don’t think so. Blue, obviously, coal, long-tailed…’I left great tits off the list. I was not ready for the conversational direction their mention might entail.

‘I love long-tailed tits. They’re my favourite. Probably my favourite of all birds.’

‘Really? Aren’t they a bit sweet and girly?’

‘Yes!’ she said rather sharply and left me floundering.

‘It’s one of those words though, isn’t it?’ I said, hoping to regain my unconvincing coolness. ‘Tits, you know, easy gag!’

‘Well, there’re a few bird names like that. Shag. What about a shag?’ She laughed and mockingly put her hand over her mouth. ‘So to speak!’

‘Yeah, it’s like a cormorant, isn’t it? Greener though.’ I was lost but struggled on. ‘But I’ve never seen one in colour. Only black and white.’

She looked puzzled but went on, ‘Chough is another one.’

‘Oh yes,’ I said. ‘It’s not spelled c-h-u-f-f, though, is it?’

‘Have you ever seen a chough?’

‘No.’

‘I could show you one.’

I’d now lost track of the conversation, I was too busy being besotted. My mesmerizedness was full so I’d moved on to being besotted. Besotted with this spiky, feisty, cheeky, bright and beautiful thing who knew about all things bright and beautiful.

‘You could show me a chough?’

‘Not now though. We’d have to go to a clifftop in Wales.’

‘You should ask for a longer lunch break. Oh and there’s ruff.’

‘Oh yes,’ she said and then added in a silly cockney accent with which I was, needless to say, besotted, ‘Yer, like a nice bit of ruff.’

‘Yes, a few rude birds around, aren’t there? Tits, chough, ruff, shag, and what about the purple-headed ox-pecker!?’

She laughed out loud at this. I would have been in big trouble if she hadn’t. She looked at me kindly. ‘You like that humour, don’t you? You do it a lot.’

‘What?’

‘Going one step further. Going slightly too far with an innuendo. Turning the innuendo on its head.’

‘If you say so.’

‘Oooh look,’ she said, pointing at a robin that was boldly hopping by our feet pecking at the billions of tomato seeds we’d dropped, ‘
Erithacus rubecula
.’

‘Oh, so you know the scientific names as well?’

‘A few. You just pick them up.’

‘Are you into birdwatching then?’

‘No, I’m into walking in the countryside and looking at things and wanting to know what they are.’

‘Here’s one for you,’ I said, desperately trying to think of a Latin bird name. ‘
Passer domesticus?

‘House sparrow. That’s just about the easiest one. What about
Puffinus puffinus
?’

Well, that’s dead easy too. Puffin, of course.’

‘No, Rory,’ she said, like a disappointed schoolteacher. ‘Manx shearwater, I’m afraid. Easy mistake to make.’

This irritated me. And besotted me. She hadn’t finished exposing my ignorance.

‘What about
Emberiza citrinella
?’

‘Er…
citrinella…
sounds a bit fruity.’

‘Well, you’re on the right lines.’

‘Something lemony?’

‘Keep going.’

‘Er…is it lemon meringue pie?’

‘It’s a bird, stupid!’

‘Oh, lemon meringue mag-pie.’

‘Ha ha.’ She mocked. ‘No. Yellowhammer.’

Of course, yellowhammer. The bird of my childhood. A small bird with a lemon-coloured breast. I loved talking to this girl. I loved being with her. I was hooked. There was no escape. She was in my bloodstream. A tiny creature had sneaked into my veins and was about to multiply and take over my whole body, my whole life. And we hadn’t even touched each other.

All too soon the hour was over and we were walking back up the high street towards the shop.

‘See you again, then?’ I said as neutrally as I could.

Teah, be nice,’ she said back, neutrally. But I felt that her ‘neutral’ was really ‘neutral’. My ‘neutral’ was ‘pretend neutral’.

‘Next time I need a bird book I’ll call in the shop and see you.’

‘When will that be?’

‘In about half an hour.’

She laughed. ‘See you!’ She turned her back on me and went into the shop.

Occasionally in your life you think: something big has happened. You don’t always realize it, though. This time I had. If only skipping gleefully hadn’t been so uncool in the seventies, I would have skipped gleefully back to college. Instead I slouched back with a moody frown…but in a gleeful skipping kind of way.

And I’d made a decision. I was going to go straight back to my room and learn the scientific names for all British birds.

Puffinus puffinus
: Manx shearwater, indeed.

Y
ellow was different back then. Back then was before the intensive planting of oilseed rape. Now the countryside is chequered with unearthly slabs of sulphur, the landscape glows with a radioactive yellow mist and a sweat-scented cloud of allergy creeps across the fields. The yellow of my Cornish childhood summers was the yellow of dandelions, buttercups, celandines, cowslips, broom and, of course, gorse. Ah yes, gorse. Every clifftop hedge was topped with this dark spiky shrub, its small yellow pea-like flowers stunning against the impossible blue background of sea and sky. And on every other gorse bush was a bird. A lemon-yellow bird. A yellowhammer. A small bird, streaked brown on the back and wings and with a bright yellow head and breast. The thin, tinkling song, with its unmistakable drawn-out final note, falling and rising, carried for miles through the strawy heat-haze of Cornish farmland.

This bird, which, I was later to learn, is
Emberiza citrinella
, became part of my life one particular summer. I was fifteen and I’d made a discovery. A big discovery. Like most children that age I’d discovered what was wrong with the world. People.
That
was what was wrong with the world. More specifically, other people. Yes, they were the problem. Actually, even more specifically, the other people in your family. Yes, they were the root of the world’s problems. If it weren’t for them, the world would be perfect.

There were six in my family. Myself plus two brothers, one sister and two parents. And, in the comforting simplicity of those days, we were the children of the same two parents. One of whom was our mother and one of whom was our father. It was neat. As we all grew up I realized that the house was not really big enough for six people. Whichever room you went into, there’d be somebody else there already or arriving just after you. That was so annoying. But at that age everything was annoying. Everyone was annoying. And if people chanced not to be annoying briefly, you’d be annoyed anyway. Sometimes a parent would liken our house to ‘Piccadilly Circus in the rush hour’. This expression baffled us Cornish youngsters, who had no concept of a ‘rush hour’ or of Piccadilly Circus, which we presumed was a travelling show.

It was apparently a substantial misfortune to be an only child. Like Eric down the road.

‘Poor Eric. So lonely. And spoilt. Well, only child, you see!’

It was hard for me to grasp what was so unfortunate about Eric or what was so sad about being spoilt. ‘Spoilt’ seemed to mean you got what you wanted. You never had to have the ‘which TV channel’, ‘which music’, ‘how much food’ and ‘how long are you going to be in the bathroom and don’t leave a smell’ discussions and their attendant punch-ups.

Birds, of course, do things differently. Overcrowded or not, brothers and sisters have reason to be afraid. The brown pelican, for example, has a chick. It is happy and well fed and grows strong for a while. Then, what’s this? Another egg appears. And it hatches and, lo and behold, there is another chick. A competitor for food and attention. But a small, weak competitor for food; one that can quite easily be forced out of the nest into the river of waiting crocodiles. The same for the next chick and the next. What a ruthlessly black-and-white world they live in. A frightening and seductive simplicity. Not something I was about to propose as a solution to overcrowding in my nest. Not as a weedy second-born, anyway.

As the summer of that year approached, I took to leaving the house and going for long walks on my own. Particularly on Sundays when tempers were always a bit frayed from having been forced to go to church and when the weekly blockbuster roast lunch had put people into a tetchy stupor. St Agnes was about seven miles from our house. A small town with a pretty beach. A great walk on a spring day along the coast road lined with gorse bushes, every few yards a male yellowhammer singing. And most important, I was on my own. And going nowhere in particular. After a few weeks, people began to ask questions, of course. Why would you choose to walk fourteen miles for no particular reason? ‘I want to be alone’ is always going to sound ludicrous and melodramatic whoever says it, an ageing filmstar or a fifteen-year-old schoolboy.

Eventually I told them I was visiting a girl. That was the easiest excuse, and it meant I had a part of my life that was just my own and nobody else’s. And the girl herself was perfect. Quiet when necessary; chatty when necessary. She was funny and serious, energetic and peaceful. She was tall, small, thin, plump, blue-eyed, brown-eyed and, best of all, non-existent. I have had some fine relationships with girls in my life, and I have few complaints, but I learnt early there’s something very special about a non-existent girl. They are who you want them to be, they do what you want them to do and you don’t have to explain the rules of Rugby Union to them.

I did this long and, mercifully, lonely walk about a dozen times, and other than the ecstatic moments spent with my non-existent girl, whom I had christened Nema, from the Latin for a female nobody, my most vivid memory of those times was the yellowham-mer and his song. This is a series of fast and high repeated notes followed by two longer notes at the end, rising and falling, ‘Ti ti ti ti ti ti ti ti ti tyeeeuuuw.’ The traditional country rendition of this is ‘a little bit of bread and no cheese’. I have repeated ‘a little bit of bread and no cheese’ to myself a hundred times and have yet to make it sound anything like the tinkling song of the yellowhammer. I would love to meet, and have some severe words with, the slightly deaf man who decided that the yellowhammer was singing ‘a little bit of bread and no cheese’. But this energetic bird starts its song in early spring and goes on daily into late autumn. It may not be a great song but it was always there in the warm fields, meadows and clifftops of my growing up. So many Cornish summers of my teens can be shrunk down into the faint, metallic, fragile and persistent song of a yellowhammer, perching on a branch of gorse, starkly bright, lemon-yellow against the infinite blue.

‘W
hat the fuck are you doing in here?’ Kramer was lying on my bed, reading one of my bird books. ‘Give that to me!’

Kramer shook his head and tutted. He was playing the part of the village elder about to impart a nugget of wisdom to an impetuous youngster.

‘You’re up to something. I don’t know what it is. You disappear at strange but regular times each day and you have a load of bird books in your room. It’ll end in tears, my child,’ he intoned rabbinically. ‘No good will come of it, whatever it is.’

‘You’re turning into a parody of a lugubrious Jew!’ I said, trying to hide my irritation.

‘Turning into? How dare you! I was born a parody of a lugubrious Jew. My parents are parodies of lugubrious Jews, my—’