Common Ground (23 page)

The room had grown dark. Tiredness was finally dragging down my somersaulting mind. My head sank back, further into the pillow, descending into the quiet, loamy blackness of sleep. Then it registered something, an alteration occurring in the atmosphere. The rain was stopping. I looked up at the ceiling and imagined the roof peeling away, the clouds dissipating and seeing swifts up there somewhere, swimming broad-shouldered among the stars.

My arm had gone to sleep. I slid it from under Rosie's shoulder. ‘You OK?' she whispered, stirring. ‘What are you thinking about?'

‘Migration.'

She smiled and turned over. ‘Please don't,' she said, guiding my hand to her belly and holding it there. ‘Stay here with us.'

I laughed and then it dawned on me.
That
was it! That was what I wanted to say to the swifts, what I should have said when our paths crossed at the sewage works.
Stay here with us.
And it was those words I was thinking of the next morning when, opening the curtains, I glanced up and finally saw a scattered band of them flying high in blue sky, east to west, like stray eyelashes blown across coloured paper. I pressed my face against the glass and then wanted to tell Rosie, but she had rushed out an hour earlier to a midwife appointment almost forgotten in the mad monsoons of the last month. Oh, well. A nice surprise for later. Then – what timing – she called. I was on the edge of relaying the news when my brain registered the formality of her tone, the forced calm, the words:
I'm on my way to the hospital. There is … there might be … something wrong
.

Hope is such a useless emotion, but it's the default setting in all of us. You can't help resorting to it. And I
hoped
against hope that this was just normal pregnancy gremlins, a regular nothing, some common mix-up. After all, she'd corrected herself; she'd said
might
, hadn't she? With the phone still clasped to my ear, brain whirring, I realised I'd been staring at the silicon seal that wraps around our double-glazing for I don't know how long, noticing for the first time how it had a few little black specks of mould spreading from the corner. I noticed other things too. The heat and brightness of the morning. The softness of the carpet between my toes.
The carpet –
we'd deliberated in the shop and then plumped for the softest and most stain-resistant one, even though it cost more, as we both envisaged little hands and feet crawling over it. All the time, in my mind, cogs were turning, processing. To speed things up, Rosie was driving herself straight from the doctors' surgery and was already near the hospital when she'd called.
Don't come
, she'd said.
Honestly. By the time you get here they will have finished the scan.
The scan? How long does that take?
They put me on a machine for twenty minutes. I'll call as soon as I can. Promise. Don't come.

The machine is actually a belt consisting of two sensors which is strapped over the womb to monitor the baby's heartbeat. As I washed quickly, dressed and tightened the belt of my jeans, I thought of the same thing happening a few miles down the road and felt sick. I sat down. Over and over a question:
How can I fix this?
I got up again. Making coffee I knew I wasn't going to touch, I replayed internally what Rosie had told me, looking for solutions: the midwife had been going through the routines as normal, asking the questions, all cheery, motherly, brassy, comforting. ‘So, what about this rain we've been having?' Her eyes had taken on a glazed, middle-distance look as she ‘had a feel' around Rosie's bump and took her blood pressure – quite high. ‘Have you been overdoing it? You should be taking it easy at this stage.' Then she drew closer, leaning forward with the stethoscope. The cold disc caught a high, tripping heartbeat first, going far too fast for itself. Odd. So she reset and tried again. And again. Now it was even more unusual, a yawning silence. An absence. It was then she called the Antenatal Clinic.

Every room in our house suddenly seemed devoid of air. I went outside and – wouldn't you just know it? – the day was spectacular. The month had got over its tantrum. Light poured down the street. The mottled stone chimney stacks reached up into a tropical ocean sky, casting long shadows over the slates. You could smell the heat building. Cars gleamed. In front of our door, before the low stone wall and the pavement, weeds had run riot with recent over-watering and colonised a small strip of pebbles completely: pink-flowered herb Robert, willowherb, dandelion, alkanet, the rough leaves of a flowering currant dug up long before our time, yet still clinging on. A laurel bush I'd cut back a few weeks earlier had started re-growing clumps of soft, waxy leaves from its cut branches. I noticed all this: the way nature was defying the obstacles, using them even, the way the laurel had tangled with the fence to gain better traction and strength, the way the currant had forested the pebbles with young shoots. I noticed it all. And hoped.
Could these be signs?
I thought about running to the edge-land, running to the hospital. Then, suddenly woozy, I crouched down with my back against the house. An orb spider's web was knitted perfectly between the laurel's leaves. I fought the urge to project everything onto that spider, but my brain wasn't behaving –
If it moves left everything will be OK. Move left. Please.
I checked my phone's screen, bewildered by how slowly the minutes were passing. The spider sat still. The stone in my stomach grew heavier. And over and over, those four words in my head:
Stay here with us
.

The sound was distant at first, like that note you hear sometimes when still half-asleep with your head buried in a pillow and you breathe out through your nose. A soft, airy whistle. Then it swelled quickly until it was a loud banshee scream –
seeeeee-seeeee, seeeeee-seeeeee
– zipping fast and low over the terraces and the back-to-backs. Swifts tipped into the streets in riots of joy and noise, like a carnival hitting town. Their scream wasn't menacing or melancholy, more playful than anything; the peak of a laughing fit, a toddler being tickled.
Seeeeee-seeeee, seeeeee-seeeeee
, they implored in their glee. And I tried, but before I could even turn my head they were off again, arrowing over another roof.

‘Did you see the sparrows? They've gone mad!' said the little girl from next door. I hadn't noticed her coming up the pavement but she stood on the other side of our fence now, foot on her scooter, all red dress and big smiles. She's a kind, confident girl, Libby. Could be a kid's cartoon heroine – a wonderfully bolshie tomboy, bright as sun on snow and the first person who spoke to me on our road after we moved in. Shielding her eyes with a hand on her thick-rimmed glasses, she craned her neck and scanned the empty sky.

‘They're swifts, Libby,' I said, ‘not sparrows.'

She looked at me, frowned, and repeated the word to herself under her breath.
Swifts.
‘And where do
swifts
come from?'

‘Africa.'

Africa
, she mouthed it silently again. ‘Why are they here then?'

The words were there somewhere, but they suddenly refused to form in my mouth. I coughed and checked my phone. Only a minute had passed. Ridiculous. Then from somewhere beyond the end of the road, from the direction of the edge-land, that swelling sound again:
Seeeeee-seeeee, seeeeee-seeeeee
.

‘Here, look. They're coming back,' I said, pointing up at the long blue corridor above, formed by the rows of terraces. That's the trick to watching them, to look at the sky rather than try to follow the bird. And that time we did
see-see
. Immediately three screamed into view and split formation, the two outer birds peeling left and right over roofs; the central swift plunging down into the canyon of houses, banking and brushing up against the side of number 28. It was a quick movement, a deliberate crash: the swift touching the point where wall met the carved wooden roof trim, before turning and bursting off again. It passed so close to us I could see the sun through its tail and hear the wing whistle. Libby put her hands up to her head and whooped. ‘It went through my hair!' Not quite, but that's how it feels when they explode past you – as though their seesaw wings are brushing your face, coating it with sky dust and cloud wool.

It's one of the things I love most about swifts – that they manage to pull off part elemental wonder and part town-bird with such aplomb; they are creatures with a truly panoptic world view, possessed of a higher consciousness tuned in to the great governing forces of our globe, and yet, for a short time, birds of the common people too. When they return to our realm it's not to pristine reserves or protected wetlands, it's
here
, to the sewage treatment plants, factories and back streets. The sprawl is as much part of the swift's world as the stratosphere. They're like little, wild, black boomerangs hurled down from the heavens, sent to us to bestow a kind of day-to-day benevolence. One minute you're fumbling with the keys, emptying bins or waiting desperately for a phone call, the next they're with you, above you, around you, a dose of the sublime where you least expect it; when you most need it.

More came, spinning and thwacking into the eaves or bouncing off over our heads. Gangs of them casing out the joint – numbers 25, 20, 13, 12, all the houses soon had visitors. We ticked them off together each time the birds appeared in their scattering, lunatic, overlapping shrieks. I had no idea our street would be such prime real estate, but it made sense – a row of Victorian terraces that, for all its modern UPVC double-glazing and brightly painted front doors, is still decidedly higgledy-piggledy in places. Swifts have a nose for lapsed DIY duties: the fallen-away mortar between sandstone, the inviting vistas between slipped roof slates, the gaps where gable ends and eaves have warped a bit over the years. This is because, over time, swifts have warped a bit too. At some point along the evolutionary high wire they threw their lot in with us, largely abandoning the nesting habitats they evolved with, like tree holes and cliff fissures, for the nooks and crannies of towns. Some have suggested it may have coincided with when those master stonemasons, the Romans, were spreading through Europe. And that would have been a clever move. Beautifully opportunistic. Why wouldn't you ally with an ever-expanding, building-obsessed species with a tendency to leave holes in its many roofs and towers? But what may have been a successful strategy for two thousand years has been unravelling in more recent decades. Swift numbers have been hit hard by post-war building methods and materials; the sealing up of structures in the name of energy efficiency, and a general squeamishness at sharing our homes with the natural world. They don't give up easily, though. Being dependent on the man-made these days, swifts keep looking for the gaps, forgiving our cooling affections and indifference, blessing us with their presence. I love that about them too.

That's what all the wall-bouncing was about. It is known as ‘knocking' or ‘banging' and it's what swifts do to scope out their nest sites or challenge for occupied spaces. The urgency was understandable. With mating delayed by the weather they were wasting no time with formalities, but slamming about, ringing doorbells one after another to see if anyone was home. Breeding swifts are traditionalists and will keep the same partner and nesting site year on year, provided man and nature are complicit. When arriving at their nest sites separately, the first bird in a mating pair will reclaim the spot by screaming their presence, folding in those broad wings and vanishing into the eaves. Should a rival already be inside they will fight in violent, close-quarter duels, like handcuffed wrestlers, hissing, grappling and scratching sometimes for hours at a time before one is ejected and the victor roosts to guard it and wait for their mate. Reunited, both male and female birds take shifts to gather nesting materials from the air – feathers, thistledown, leaves, grass, seed cases, even the cotton centre of cigarette filters – all taken on the wing and formed into loving, soft, cup-shaped bowls bound together by saliva. Spit-welded, you might say. The younger, non-breeding swifts – those birds under two or three years – also play the knocking game, usually receiving short shrift from a shrieking breeding occupant. Unperturbed, though, they pair up and range out to the edges of a colony, looking for space. In some instances they'll even build dummy nests, practising for when their own time comes. Given their speed it's hard to know for certain, but I'm pretty sure both breeding and non-breeding swifts were working their way down our road. It made me wonder if perhaps our street formed the outer limit of an established swift territory, if our house might not be a swift edge-land.

My thoughts tumbled like this as we watched them, Libby and me. She was a little human blessing amid the avian ones. I was thankful she was there, forcing me to keep my eyes skywards, calming my trip-hammer heart, distracting me with her never-ending list of questions: ‘So how far
is
three million miles?'

‘Well … it's like flying to the moon and back. Six times.'

Her silent mouthing again.
The moon and back.
‘And they can fly
that
far?'

‘Over a lifetime, yes.'

‘That's impossible.'

But nothing's impossible.
That's what I was secretly telling myself. Swifts prove as much: the migrations, the heights, the distances, the speeds, the ability to navigate from African jungle to the same tiny crack beneath the same fascia board in Harrogate. Miracles happen in nature every day, we just don't pay attention. Things disappear and things return. Cloudy mornings bring in sunny days. The world sometimes rights itself. Sensors pick up missing heartbeats.

And a few miles away, the half-hour of surveillance came to an end. The nurse shook her head with bemusement and began removing the belt. ‘Nope, there's nothing to worry about,' she said. ‘The baby's heart rate is perfectly normal. Strong and regular with just the usual variability. Spot on for twenty-eight weeks.' She even showed Rosie the data printout – a perfect pattern of peaks and troughs. A mountainous, panoramic heartscape. Understandably, Rosie quizzed her:
then why had it been fast? Why had it failed to register? Why these irregularities?