Out of a Clear Sky Read online

  ‘Who’s there?’

  I was answered only by the ringing alarm call of a fleeing blackbird. My heart rate settled back to normal and I returned to the path, and headed to the bay.

  With the cool grey of a January dawn, details emerged slowly out of the murk. I was crouched on the shingle bank watching a group of waders follow the ebbing tide, probing with their beaks through the mud for invertebrates. Among the smaller waders a bigger bird, a godwit, was working its way through the mud channels. I had just set up the scope and was trying to get the bird in it to check the colour of the tail and the streaking on the back. Most of the birds were oblivious to my presence, moving busily back and forth on the important business of feeding, but the godwit seemed to be aware it was being watched, and every time I had it nicely in the centre of my lens it would duck behind a hummock of seaweed or into a deeper channel, where it would disappear for a few seconds and then reappear at the worst possible angle. Finally, it hopped up onto a clump and stood showing nicely as I fumbled with stiffened fingers to get it into focus. The slanting sun broke through the cloud and for a few seconds each feather was sharply picked out in its light. The bird was preening and I could see the busy movements of its beak through the plumage, the inward-turned concentration of its eye. We were joined together, just for a moment, in the curious one-sided intimacy of the telescope. But then something spooked the whole flock of them, and first the godwit and then every other bird in the harbour rose with a cacophony of alarm calls. Most of them circled once, calling, and settled, but the godwit was gone.

  I turned to look at the source of the disturbance, hoping it was someone just passing through, a dog walker, someone I could ignore. But this was another birder, grinning as though he knew me, dressed in a bright turquoise anorak and a fleece bobble hat that seemed to have been designed to be seen from a helicopter in a blizzard. He was armed with a set of new-looking binoculars, Leicas, 8 x 42s, and had a Swarovski scope slung over his shoulder. My heart sank. I was in no mood to be sociable.

  ‘Anything interesting?’ he asked.

  ‘There might have been.’ I tried to keep the irritation out of my voice.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Godwit.’

  ‘Bar-tailed,’ he said confidently.

  ‘No, black. I could see the tail as you flushed it up.’

  He ignored my sarcasm. ‘The hide book’s got an entry for a bar-tailed.’

  I suppressed the urge to point out that hide books weren’t infallible, and besides, birds had a tendency to move around. Instead I looked blankly at him and hoped he would go away. No such luck.

  ‘Where is it?’ He raised his binoculars, started scanning the horizon.

  ‘It flew away.’

  This time I hadn’t quite managed to keep the edge out of my voice. He looked at me, feigning hurt.

  ‘Ooh er. Bit hung-over, are we?’

  I didn’t respond immediately. There was something familiar about him that had been nagging at me throughout our exchange, and now I had managed to place him. He’d shown up on a guided visit the bird group had taken to a sewage works the summer before. He can’t have had the scope then because he’d kept borrowing mine, but I remembered the way he’d shown off the brand-new Leicas, hovering anxiously behind them as they were passed from hand to hand. ‘Eight hundred quid,’ he had said, when they had been returned, and he hefted them in one hand as he spoke, as though their quality was something that could be weighed. I remembered too the smirks behind his back because everything he did and said betrayed his ignorance, and the expensive binoculars didn’t prevent him from looking half the time at the wrong bird, misidentifying everything, and finally almost losing his footing and having to be hauled back from the brink of a settling pond. He’d latched on to me in the end, when the teasing from the others became too audible to be ignored, and I had tolerated him then, encouraged him even. Irritating as he was, his chatter masked the fact that Gareth and I weren’t really speaking, and hadn’t been for weeks. It only served to deepen Gareth’s mood, but I didn’t care. Someone – anyone – to talk to, someone to pay me a bit of attention, was better than the lengthening silence between us. And maybe I’d thought it might pique Gareth’s interest a bit. So I had taken the time to show this guy where to look for the rarer gulls, how to tell them apart, let him use my scope. But Gareth ignored me anyway, walked on without speaking, shutting me out.

  I softened. He was probably right, I was hung-over. Any other year, I would have been tucked up in bed early on a New Year’s Eve, ready for an early start. Our big celebration for New Year was the day itself and the chance to kick off the year list together with as many birds as we could, making every bird suddenly fresh and new, something exciting. But that was then, when there was an ‘us’. Now Gareth would be birding somewhere else, with someone else – if he could drag Essex Girl out with him. And my sister, guilty at abandoning me over Christmas, had insisted I spend the night with her friends. I had worn a social mask all evening, uncomfortable with the effort. Zannah had treated me with the careful handling you’d give to recently mended china. Her friends had been polite, friendly, ultimately remote. I had left as soon as I decently could, walking through the damp alien London streets, but the late night had taken its toll on my mood. I had had my fill of semi-strangers.

  Still, there was no need to be rude. I had been a new birder once, and probably just as annoying. I mustered the closest I could manage to a smile. ‘Maybe a bit hung-over, yes,’ I offered, and he grinned.

  While we had been talking a few more waders had flown in and the rest were feeding again as though they had never been disturbed. Out of the corner of my eye I could see the constant bustle of the birds as they probed for food side-by-side in companionable silence, like so many little sewing machines stitching through the mud. I was itching to get back to watching them. In peace and on my own.

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Cattle egret over on the big shingle bank,’ I lied.

  ‘Cool!’ He trotted off, and I was alone at last.

  By eight-thirty, a couple more birders had set up on the shingle and every ten minutes or so another would arrive. There were nods of recognition at half-remembered faces, rueful acknowledgements of one too many the night before, a sense of a community building up on the barren shore. Seeking a more solitary pursuit, I packed up and drove down to Selsey Bill to do a bit of quiet sea watching. Red-throated divers would have been nice, even a common scoter or two, but actually what I really wanted was just an hour or two of quiet concentrated watching.

  I found a sheltered spot and hunched down and let my eyes scan the sea for birds. I was looking for some little anomaly in the movement of the water, something bobbing, or flying, or diving. Crouching down further, I caught it: almost nothing, just a disturbance in the pattern of the wind-blown waves. This was what I had come for: the moment when I get the binoculars onto something and a shape resolves itself – what is no more than a speck against a sparkling sea instantly categorized into duck or gull or diver. The moment when there was nothing in the world but me and the bird. My mind filled with the particulars – the diagnostics that make that one bird uniquely itself and nothing else, my whole concentration focused through the narrow circle of the lens. I was as still as a hunter, projecting my gaze towards the tiny distant speck. And then, nailed, the bird was named, labelled, pinned down. Just a cormorant this time, floating low in the water as though holed and sinking. I watched it for a minute or two until it slipped back down under the waves, and then I began scanning again, for the next flash of movement, the next prize.

  It was absorbing stuff. When I checked my watch it was gone eleven; I had been watching for about two hours. My left leg was completely dead, and my fingers were blue. I’d spent the last few minutes just watching a young lesser black-backed gull as it tried to smash shells by dropping them onto the shingle below. It would fly up and drop the shell, spend a few minutes hunting around for it on the beach, retrieve t
he unbroken shell, fly up and drop it again. Eventually, it had a bright idea and flew round to drop it instead on the road that ran along the seafront. It was immediately robbed of its prize by a couple of black-headed gulls half its size, who then got into a huge fight over it and flew off, still squabbling. The lesser gave up and sat on a groyne instead, ruffling its feathers. It was hard not to imagine it was sulking.

  As I stood on the seafront, still stamping the blood back into my leg, I realized that not once in the past two hours had I thought of Gareth. The black mood of the morning had gone, and I no longer had that wretched loop of memory playing in my head of the last time I had seen him, driven off in Essex Girl’s car, his notebooks clutched in his lap, and that last triumphant wave of hers as her car had dwindled down the road and vanished round the bend. The hours had simply disappeared. And the birds I’d seen in them were purely mine. I straightened and stretched the kinks out of my neck and spine and even my scalp seemed to lift and lighten. For the first time in four weeks I began to feel that I had been somehow liberated.

  Selsey that morning had the shut-up air of all seaside towns in winter. There was only one open cafe, a tiny place with a window that was so steamed up I couldn’t see in, but I didn’t care. I just wanted a hot breakfast and somewhere to make some notes, list what I’d seen. A whole morning’s worth of birds clamoured and jostled in my head; diagnostics and calls and primary feathers and bill lengths confused together until they were funnelled down into neat rows on the paper. Gareth’s best friend, Tom, always used to scold him about his obsession with keeping score. ‘It’s not about the numbers,’ Tom would always say, and he was right. Well, half right. It’s not just about the numbers. But when your boyfriend – partner, live-in lover – of ten years leaves you three weeks before Christmas, and when he’s always been the one who has seen the most birds, and when he’s going to be in the pub in a few days’ time with the rest of them to see who got off to the best start for the year, then, you know, it is about the numbers. I added up my total for the morning and allowed myself to feel just a little bit pleased.

  I went on to make some more detailed notes; some reminders on the godwit colouring so I could check it later. I’d been a little more confident with Neon Bobble Hat Boy than I’d really felt, and I wasn’t about to get my field guide out of my pocket in public. I made a note about the gull and its abortive attempts to open shells and was just putting the notebook into my pocket when someone sat down heavily opposite me.

  My fragile good mood ebbed away. I didn’t need to look up. My peripheral vision had clocked the bright turquoise jacket as soon as he entered the cafe. He had, at least, taken off the hat.

  ‘Thanks for that cattle egret,’ he said. ‘Superb. My first for the UK.’

  Slowly, reluctantly, I moved my belongings to make space for him. The cafe was crowded now, and there were no free tables. I was trapped.

  ‘There’s been a fair few sightings round here these days,’ I said, masking the irritation as best I could. I was annoyed though. Even he couldn’t mistake an egret, so there must have been one after all. That would have got me off to a good start.

  ‘You’re Manda, aren’t you? Gareth’s girlfriend? Where’s Gazza then?’

  No putting a brave face on that one. ‘His girlfriend no longer.’

  ‘Oh God,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry.’ I shrugged, trying to convey that it didn’t matter, that I didn’t care. I was grateful for the distraction of the waitress, the bustle of taking his order. The tea I was drinking had gone cold and nasty, but I buried my face in my cup anyway. By the time the waitress had gone, I had managed to regain my composure.

  ‘I’m David, by the way,’ he said. ‘We met a few months ago, that trip to the sewage works. So sorry about you and Gareth. But I’m glad I bumped into you here, I’ve been hoping to meet you again. You do remember, don’t you, that time we met last summer?’ His eyes sought mine anxiously and I nodded again.

  ‘Of course,’ I said. He grinned again, a strange too-eager grin. I looked away, embarrassed by his eagerness, wishing I were elsewhere, wishing I’d thought to get the bill when I had the chance so I could get away.

  ‘You were a real inspiration to me, you know, that day. I just remember how kind you were, putting up with me, my bumbling, my stupidity.’

  His face, thawing in the heat of the cafe, was as bright now as his coat. He had blue eyes that seemed to bore into me as he spoke, still trying to hold my gaze. His skin was pulled taut and thin over the cheekbones. I’d thought him good looking in the summer, in a flashy way, though not my type. Now I wasn’t so sure. I began to look around rather more desperately, seeking a means of escape. The waitress seemed determined not to meet my eye.

  ‘I’ve remembered everything you told me, you know. About the birds, about finding them, identifying them, watching them.’

  ‘It was nothing.’

  ‘Not to me,’ he said. ‘Not to me. I was inspired. I rushed out and bought a scope that same day, the same one you had, the same tripod and everything.’ He laughed self-deprecatingly, but his manner was flushed and hectic, overheated.

  ‘They’ve good optics, Swarovskis,’ I said, as neutrally as possible.

  The waitress passed almost within touching distance, her face still resolutely averted. Finally, my despairing wave attracted her attention. I gestured for the bill and started gathering my belongings.

  ‘Do you have to go? Are you in a hurry? Can’t you stay and chat? I saw that godwit again and you were right. Of course. How could I have doubted you? I’m sorry, I’m talking too much again. I’m driving you away. I do that, sometimes.’

  ‘Look, I’ll see you around,’ I said as the bill came at last and I could escape. It was something to say, meaningless, a commonplace pleasantry to blunt the brusqueness of my departure. But he smiled again as if I’d said it as though I had meant it, as though it were a gift I’d given him, a promise I’d made. I left the cafe with relief.

  The cold air hit me as I turned up the street towards my car. All that was waiting for me in London was an afternoon spent rattling round the confines of my sister’s flat until I could decently leave and go back to the unwelcome prospect of the empty house. Delaying the moment, I stopped off at the Pagham reserve, checked out the Ferry Pool hide for some of the freshwater ducks and then strolled along the banks of the silted-up harbour. Sitting on a sheltered bench was an old couple who must have been in their seventies. Both had ancient binoculars around their necks and they were dickering gently away about who had misidentified what bird some time back in 1957. They both smiled vaguely at me as I passed, and the man, seeing my binoculars, suddenly said, ‘Nice kingfisher up by the cut. Probably still there; fishing, it was,’ before he turned and resumed their running argument. I could believe that it was one that had been running, on and off, for the last forty-odd years. There had been a time when I had thought Gareth and I would end up like that, still birding for as long as we could totter.

  Leaning over the parapet of the bridge I looked up the cut and lingered there, half hopeful, half just waiting to see if the kingfisher would appear. The river banks were a tangle of dead stems; the only movement came from the weed that flowed in the water, waving in the current. As I waited and watched I became one more still thing in a world of dull greens and greys and browns and the birds which had fled at my approach began to re-emerge. It was a drear winter’s day, really, raw and drizzling, but to the birds, acutely tuned to the lengthening of the light, the year had already turned and spring was on its way. I could hear a great tit calling, then a chaffinch, then the persistent territorial chucking of a wren. The only human sound was that of the couple’s voices carried to me on the wind in bursts, nothing I could make out – just a tone of voice, equal parts affection and exasperation.

  I had almost given up on the kingfisher when a flash passed under the bridge and shot straight to the vegetation on the river side. I saw nothing but a glint of blue and it took another minute of clo
se searching with the binoculars before I found the bird again. It was perched swaying on a dead stick, staring down into the murk of the water. Even in the dull light it glistened, blue and turquoise and coral, incongruous among the drab fretwork of the bare bushes.

  A kingfisher was the first bird I can really remember seeing, shown to me by my father. Not the common kingfisher, the one we see in England, but one of the African ones. The English avifauna are pretty impoverished. Apart from ducks and waders, and some of the forest birds like tits and warblers, we tend to have just one of each kind: kingfisher, bittern, heron, each instantly identifiable, whereas in Africa each bird comes qualified with a host of similar relatives. I have never been able to work out exactly which species of kingfisher it was that my father and I watched through the Land Rover window – probably a pygmy or a malachite. I don’t recall much else about the day or why we were out driving alone together, with me sitting in the prized front seat. Maybe my mother was ill that day, maybe she was off doing something with Zannah, maybe it was some special treat I’d earned. I would have been about eight, my head filled with animals, not birds. I remember only my father stopping the car abruptly and backing up the dirt road, the engine whining with the effort, until we were level with a small tangled stream, choked with debris.

  ‘Look, Manda, there, on the reed.’

  I looked, willing to do anything my father asked of me. Held my breath in silence at his hushed tone, even though the Land Rover’s diesel engine ticked and grumbled louder than ever in neutral. When I saw it, everything else faded away. The bird sat, impervious, jewelled in turquoise and blue feathers. It was stilled and attentive, its whole being focused down towards some point in the muddy water beneath it. What fish could be small enough to be caught by this tiny toy? For a minute it hung motionless from the reed, then took off and seemed to hover over that spot in the water before plunging downwards. It returned briefly with a minnow squirming in its beak and then was gone, as though the whole scene had been something my father had conjured up for me and then dispelled. I turned to ask him what we’d seen but he was still staring at the space where the bird had been, as though patient watching could call it back. I let the words die and the spell held us both in silence until we regained home.