2008 - The Bearded Tit (3 page)

It was as if the jackdaw was saying, ‘Gravity? What the hell is gravity!’

Well, I’ll tell you: it’s the attraction that particles mutually exert with a force whose magnitude is directly proportional to the product of their masses divided by the square of their distance from each other.

‘H
i,’ I said, as neutrally as I could, hoping that nothing in my words gave away the fact that I wanted to make love to her, run away with her, have her children, look after her sheep on a remote Hebridean island and die with her in a magical suicide pact and then roam the earth forever holding hands with her in spiritual ecstasy.

‘Hi,’ she said neutrally back. I think I’d got away with it. She was stunning. All life and sunshine was compressed into her petite frame, her bewitching smile and her infinitely twinkling eyes.

Mack and I had tracked her down to Blackwaters bookshop. This could be very handy. Students spend a lot of time in bookshops. Buying books, of course. These may often end up getting read. Though that was of secondary importance. You couldn’t read a book you didn’t have, therefore having them was an important first step.

She was working in the natural history section and I noted that, from my lurking position in the Mammalian recess, she seemed to be rearranging the bird books. This was good. As a boy, I used to draw birds. Back home I had about a dozen bird books. This was familiar territory. We were three floors away from the Modern Languages section where I should be buying most of my study books, but no matter, it’s always good to broaden one’s horizons.

‘Can I help you?’ she said stunningly.

I jumped but, thank God, she didn’t notice.

‘Sorry to make you jump!’

‘No, it’s OK…er, actually, I was looking for a book.’

‘Well, you’re in a bookshop, that’s not a bad start. You Cambridge students really are bright!’

‘Ha, yes…very good!’ I said, as un-feeling-like-a-twatly as possible. I went on treading carefully.

‘A bird book.’

She nodded stunningly.

‘A book about birds,’ I went on.

‘Yes, I know what a bird book is. What sort? We have a few.’

‘Well, it just needs to have pictures in it really.’

‘Can’t you read then?’ she said cheekily but still stunningly. But not quite as stunningly. The cheekiness had used up some of the stunningness.

‘Well, I just need a reference really. I draw birds, you see.’

‘Oh wow. You’re an artist?’

‘Well, yes and no!’

‘Meaning?’

‘Well,
no…
I’m not strictly speaking an artist but;
yes
, I am…’

‘You are what?’

‘Yes, I am not strictly speaking an artist!’

She laughed charmingly, which at least indicated that she did not think I had mental health problems.

‘Oh, I know just the book. It’s up there on the top shelf. Hang on, I’ll get the stool.’ She proceeded to get the stool, stand on it and stretch up to get the book. I whistled to myself, indifferent to her short skirt riding up, her T·shirt riding up, the firm curve of her calf muscles, the dainty, balletic, inward arching of her back.

‘Here.’

‘It’s just what I want.’

‘You haven’t looked at it yet.’

‘It’s fine. I’ll take it.’

‘Lovely colour photo on the front. I suppose you know what bird that is?’

I looked casually. It was a jackdaw. If I was editing a bird book full of glossy photos I might put something more exciting than a jackdaw on the front, I thought.

‘It’s a jackdaw.’

‘Yeah, aren’t they lovely-looking birds?’ she asked. ‘There’s something cheeky about them. Look at that bright eye.’

Of course, I agreed. ‘Yes, lovely. Some people think they’re boring. Good choice for a front cover!’

‘Well, they’re ignorant then!’

‘Well, exactly,’ I said, taking out my account card. ‘I’ll pay with this.’

‘Right,’ she said, walking over to the cash desk and sitting down. ‘Blimey, it’s pricey—£24.99.’

I flinched and dropped my account card. This was not going 100 per cent according to plan. I was now rummaging around on the floor for the card, on my knees under her desk, face to face with the chair she was sitting on. Oh dear. Don’t look. Get out of there. I had to get up quickly but not bang my head on the underside of the desk. Hear that, NOT bang my head on the desk; she clearly thought I was a big enough imbecile already. I got up and banged my head on the desk. She laughed. I stood up red-faced and breathless, hating myself for dropping the card. If only Isaac Newton had been hit by a coconut, this probably would never have happened.

‘Sorry about that. Here’s the card.’

She looked up my account details.

‘So this is the first book you’ve bought this term!’

‘Yes, I always buy my first book of the term…er, first. Er…before I buy any others.’

‘I bet you buy your second book of the term next!’

I laughed. I think she was probably taking the piss out of me but was doing it in a friendly enough way to help me out.

‘No, I’ll buy my third book next. I’ve already read the second book.’

‘Hey,’ she said looking my ‘purchase history’. ‘Last year all the books you bought were on Spanish, French and linguistics!’

‘Yes, I’m a language student but I’m thinking of changing my degree.’

‘I didn’t know they did a BA in bird-drawing,’ she said, completing the administrative bits of buying the book, which she put in a bag and handed to me. My heart was beating abnormally fast and I think I probably held the bag fractionally too long, enjoying the moment. We were, but for a plastic bag and a ludicrously overpriced book, touching each other.

‘Are you OK?’ she asked.

‘Er…yes, I’m just recovering from the shock of paying nearly £25 for a book!’ This was in fact true. It was the most expensive object I had ever bought. More expensive than my superb, secondhand guitar, which I had spent nearly a year saving a colossal £20 for. I could not afford this book and was already working out whom I could sell it to or which other bookshop I could return it to, saying it was bought for me by mistake.

‘Yes, it is a hell of a lot of money.’ She looked me straight in the eye sympathetically. It was a wonderful feeling. I started trembling.

‘Especially for a book with a jackdaw on the front!’

‘Aaah,’ she said, biting her bottom lip and touching my arm. ‘I forgot to give you your discount: twenty-five per cent off! Give me your card back.’ This I did, and the book suddenly cost £18.74.

‘Er…what was the discount for?’

She smiled the best smile available in the world that day and said, ‘The changing-your-degree-to-bird-drawing discount.’

‘But…’I started to say something and she stopped me with a wink. She winked at me! Suddenly we were connected. We had a secret. It was the rest of the world and us. Me and the girl whose name…er, I didn’t know.

‘A
n artist’ would be an exaggeration, but then so would ‘not an artist’. When I was about seven, I was good at drawing. No, I was good at drawing birds.

Well, I was good at drawing
some
birds. The passerines. Though I’d never heard the word when I was a five-year-old drawing robins, blue tits and blackbirds. Passerine is a perching bird. From the Latin
passer
, meaning ‘sparrow’. You’ll all, no doubt, remember this from the famous poem by Catullus. Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about. The one that goes:

Passer, deliciae meae pullae
,

Quicum ludere, quern in sinu tenere…

The poet is jealous of his girlfriend’s pet sparrow. We’ve all been there. She’s playing with her sparrow in her lap and he wishes she was playing with
him
.

Because I was good at drawing birds like sparrows, people assumed I was ‘interested in birds’. They would buy me bird books, on my birthday and at Christmas, and I would painstakingly copy the pictures, unwittingly learning to recognize and name most British birds. My first and favourite was the
Observer’s Book of Birds
. Small and handy and one bird per page. The trouble with the
OBB
was that colour pictures alternated with black-and-white. So pages one and two would be beautiful sharp colour plates and then pages three and four would be dull monochrome. And so on throughout the book. Now, even at the time, I thought this was not a great scheme for learning how to identify birds. Not quite so bad for those of us who just wanted to draw them. Since most of the fun of my schoolboy ‘bird art’ was the colouring-in, I ended up only drawing the coloured ones. These I knew off by heart, and by the age of ten I could identify each and every one of half the birds in Britain. Years later when I became a more ‘serious’ birder, I realized this meant a legacy of embarrassing ignorance. I’d heard of, and could easily identify, the moorhen and the coot, but not the oystercatcher and the avocet. (The gorgeous avocet should definitely be in colour. It is the only way you can appreciate how beautifully black and white it is.) I could recognize the swallow and the swift but not the house martin and the sand martin. ‘Yes!’ to cormorant and shag; ‘No!’ to gannet and bittern. A buzzard but not a goshawk. A mallard but not a wigeon. A dunlin but not a sanderling. I mean, take it from me, these are serious omissions, heinous gaps in general bird knowledge. For this I thank the
Observer’s Book of Birds
.

So, a bird artist, of a crude kind, yes; but a birdwatcher? Never. What is the point of that? Birds are part of the outside world and young people only live in an inside world. I would see birds occasionally. Obviously. And, more than my friends, I’d know what they were. But the birdwatching gene was definitely not twitching. The simple fact was I could draw birds.

Though, actually that’s not true either. I wasn’t so good at drawing that I could decide in advance what bird it was going to be. If you said to me, ‘OK, draw a jay,’ I could certainly start drawing a jay. In fact, the first two or three pencil strokes would be a hundred per cent jay, but as the bird neared completion it may have morphed into an eagle or a spoonbill.

I remember one rainy holiday in particular, when I drew one of my best ever lapwings. For Christmas I’d got a new set of pencil crayons. One of my childhood joys—still a delight, in fact, as well as a happy memory—was opening a new set of pencil crayons. The clean smell of wood and crayon-lead. The smart arrangement of similar colours: blacks, greys and blues segueing nicely into greens which paled neatly into yellows which darkened richly into oranges, reds, purples and browns. Then there was always a white one, which you would use once or twice and realize it was never quite as white as the paper you were drawing on. Anyway, it eventually got smudged with other colours and rather than pure white it would just leave browny streaks on what you were colouring. And I loved the pristine needle-like points. I savoured a long look at the points and even jabbed myself with a few to enjoy the pointiness of them. I knew that before long the ends would be rounded, blunt, broken off or stuck annoyingly for ever in the deep bit of a pencil sharpener.

‘I bet you’re going to draw a bird,’ sneered one of my family.

‘Well, as it’s a new box of pencils, I thought I’d do an easy one. A chaffinch.’

Before starting the black outline, I took out the crayons I’d probably use: pink, pale blue, olive green, brick orange, and a couple of light browns. As the outline proceeded I realized this was going to end up as un-chaffinchy a chaffinch as was possible. Well, I supposed it looked more like a chaffinch than if I’d been attempting a Mexican red-kneed tarantula, but for ‘someone who was good at drawing birds’, it was not good enough.

‘How’s the chaffinch coming along,’ asked my younger brother, who was turning shapeless blobs of plasticine into shapeless blobs of plasticine.

‘It’s a lapwing,’ I said, hastily adding a long black crest to the back of its head. ‘I decided that chaffinches are too boring!’

And so that was it. I would start drawing the bird and I would eventually name it after the bird it most closely resembled. It could start off a blackbird but if the beak was too hooked or the wings too broad then it would become a buzzard. Or a black kite. I found it was useful not to colour the bird in too early. That would have been a give-away. One day in class I was drawing a robin. It was a disaster. Neck too long. Legs too long. Eyes too big. But I had stupidly already coloured it in like a robin. The finished article did not look too bad. The teacher said it was the best picture in class and I got a bar of chocolate even though she had never heard of a ‘red-breasted ostrich’.

I had begun learning early how much of life depends on fraud, pretence and falsehood. Or was it just
my
life?

‘C
all me JJ,’ she said. Of course, I thought. JJ. What else? I should have known. It was perfect. It was her. But I suppose I would have thought that whatever she’d said.

‘Susan.’ Ah, yes, of course. So simple, so English, THE girl’s name, almost.

‘Sophie.’ Yes, from the Greek for wisdom but a sweet diminutive.

‘Jasmine.’ Ah yes, exotic fragrant flower. Perfect. It was her.

‘Brenda.’ Ah yes, a little bit Celtic; boldly old·fashioned but so individual in 1975.

‘Ron.’ Yes, of course. Energetic, powerful, manly abbreviation of the twee and flowery Veronica, and amusingly monosyllabic.

This was a game I was to play many times later in life. A sort of party game, an ice-breaker. You have to find a reason why someone’s name is the most appropriate name for that person. It was a game I became very skilful at over the years. Though I was once stumped by a girl called Fanny.

It was nice to know she was called JJ. I was beginning to learn the importance of knowing the names of people and things.

‘So, JJ, do you have to be interested in natural history to work in the natural history department of a bookshop?’

I was scratching around for small talk as we sat on the banks of the Cam on a mild September day. After a week of bumbling, mumbling, red-faced, desultory chit-chat in the bookshop, I had eventually asked her if she wanted to spend her lunchtime with me down by the river.