Keys of Babylon (16 page)

Hey presto
, the man said. All right, it's not a world tour. But there's a day of local talent at this place I know. Just up the coast in Santa Barbara. You're part of it.

That's a long way, said Fabien. What about the Venice Theatre?

Believe in me, said the man. Look, who introduced Jim Morrison to Ray Manzarek? Who told Jim about the Doors of Perception?

Yeah, said Phil, red in his goblet. And who gave Morrison his first leather pants?

You want it, it's yours, said the man. Okay?

I'm thinking about it, said Fabien, holding his glass as Phil poured.

There were two thousand graves on the beach at Santa Barbara. ‘Veterans for Peace' had erected this ‘Arlington West' for Veterans' Day, a national holiday.

Happy Veterans' Day, someone said to Fabien. He didn't know how to respond. A sign said the two thousand crosses represented the American dead in Iraq.

A crowd with go-cups had gathered to listen to the veterans' speeches. Fabien tried to peel a persimmon. The demo did not simply involve an antiwar group of those with first-hand experience. Veterans for Peace linked ‘the Iraq resource war' with ‘the twilight of worldwide petroleum reserves and climate stability'. You gotta connect terror and oil and all these hurricanes, bellowed a man with a megaphone.

The persimmon was the sweetest fruit Fabien had tasted in California. It was sweeter than the Rees's chocolate and peanut butter blocks which he bought in the Korean store next to the Palm. People in the crowd cheered, a few cursed under their breaths, and the vets played rock music and read poems. Some had a barbecue going and were offering wings and ribs.

The yellow fruit dissolved in Fabien's mouth. His lips went numb as he knew they would. Then his tongue. But beach volleyball had restarted and the sea ached blue. Five miles out, the oil rigs were almost invisible in the haze. Fabien tried to order a beer but couldn't speak. A man put a
Sierra Nevada
into his hand and waived the charge.

An hour later he was sitting in the Lobero Theatre, waiting his turn. The sound check for the rock groups had been endless and Fabien was bored. Pony tail kept dropping by, asking how he felt. They had driven up together that morning, the older man playing
Ventura Highway
on the CD.

This is it, kid, he kept saying of the road. America was a great band and that's their finest song. And we're right on top of it all. Yeah, this is Ventura. Feel its fabled curves.

In his theatre seat, Fabien shrugged and waited for the pill to kick in. There was no space for him in the dressing rooms, full as they were of men and guitars.

By the time he played, the show was running an hour late. The crowd kept coming in and out and there was a racket back stage. He'd spoken to the boy at the mixing desk who was doing his best, but through the open theatre doors he could see the sky turning white over the boulevard and hear the sirens, the constant sirens, worse than Olimpio these days, he caught himself thinking, distracted and mid song.

You did good, said Pony Tail in the bar afterwards. But the Lobero's not your scene. It's like a fucking opera house in there. As to Santa Barbara, maybe I was wrong. Money's killed it. Those vets on the beach are getting a hard time. Look, here's some cash. Take the Surf Rider back to LA, it's a great trip.

Get me a glass of wine, said Fabien, slumped.
Cabernet
.

Whatever the pill was doing, it wasn't what the pill should do. Fabien was starting to feel far away. So far away.

It's white bread from the shop in Fort William. No seeds in it, only a yellow crust. And soft as snow. Just how I like it. But the meat is dark, dark red sausage meat marbled with fat. Cheap, nasty meat, Alice would have said. Alice would also have said it's mechanically recovered spare parts from the slaughter house floor. Well too bad. I'm starving. I cut a slice with my penknife and make a sandwich. John has a sachet of mustard and I squeeze that in. Then I sit and sigh with my back against the pine tree. It's not comfortable but the food puts things into perspective. As food will.

After another sandwich, concentrating on tearing bread, slicing meat, drinking this isotronic orange cola whatsit stuff from a plastic bottle, I'm able to relax and look around.

We are on a forested hillside and the way leads north and up. Or so John says, John the map reader and expedition leader. But, as he keeps reminding me, we might be there already. The Mecca, he says. The ultimate. So keep your eyes peeled.

As if I need telling. That's John's trouble. Stating the obvious. Am I stupid or something? I might be boring but I'm not stupid. You bet my eyes are open. Because I'm looking. I'm listening. There had been a treecreeper on one of the pines back there and I'd watched it for a while. But John paid no attention. We're after something else, aren't we? Something more important. At least for John.

I watch him peel his apple. Bloody John and his fruit. His five, his eight a day. We'd bought the apples with the other food. The last three in the box, bruised and yellow grannies, going soft. But why peel them? Surely if there was any goodness left, it was in the skin. John has a bigger knife than mine and it's much sharper. Good blade. How quickly the peel lies in one piece, its curls in the pine dust. But who the hell peels apples now?

And, wait for it, I think to myself. Now comes the other blade for the next operation. The coring. One twist, and there it is. Little pale embryo, black seeds intact.

Meticulously neat, that's John. But not as mad as you might think. Some of the others are extremists. Utter obsessives. There's this chap, Tim. Dotty about dotterels. That's all he looks for. Maybe a kentish plover. But, fair play,
John has another life. In fact, I've always thought he has his hands full.

There's his mother, to begin with. And John's job. John's a mail sorter at the Mount Pleasant depot. Working nights, he has plenty of time for his other profession. That's what he calls it. Now some of those types, the bachelors still at home, you never get to see where they live. The kind of time warp they inhabit. The sad squalor. But John is relaxed about me coming to his flat. It's upstairs in a street over in Archway. Near the Drum and Monkey, a pub he's never been in. It's a bit Irish round there and for historical and employment reasons John doesn't like the Irish. He's lived in that flat all his life.

John's mum's a queer old stick, I suppose. But not bedridden or anything like that. Her legs are thick and inflamed, but she hasn't suffocated him, as I might have expected. The flat's her palace.

Ooh, he'll be out in a jiff, she'll say to me. He's just doing his books. Have a cup of tea, love.

Whenever I come round, John is doing his books. But then he'll emerge from his bedroom and she'll waddle off into the kitchen, which isn't a kitchen, just part of the front room. Tight fit that nest. Two big eggs. After she serves the tea, in china cups, lump sugar with a tongs, she'll retreat to her bedroom and the telly will start. A quiz or something. She does crosswords too. And read? John is proud of his mum's reading. Biographies of the stars. You know, the newsreader type stars. Glamorous weathergirls. Breakfast show bints.

I remember once recently, I called round and John was working on his Gambia sightings. Ledger XLV1, to give it the full title. Some people use photographic records but not John. It's not the look of birds that pleases him. It's not the colours. Some people even record songs, but you have to draw the line somewhere. No, it's the very act of seeing that's important. Important to John, that is. The observation itself. Not the appearance of whatever's observed. And then the logging, the listing in the ledger. The listing's as important as the sighting.

It's a special kind of imagination that works like that. But John is his own man. He doesn't need photographs to prove to anyone else what he's seen. He hates those types who put everything on a website. Because if the Gambia ledger states that John has seen some sunbird or a sulphur-breasted bushshrike, then that's enough. He trusts his own eyes and what those eyes see is added to the ledger's columns. The ledgers are his chronicles. His Domesday Book.

He's commandeered those ledgers during his turns at the dead-letter office in Mount Pleasant. Apparently that is a trusted role. The Post Office doesn't let just any common or garden sorter loose in there. You see, John by now is a senior sorter. They give him the difficult stuff to decipher. No, not Santa Claus letters, but the mysterious parcels and envelopes. The indecipherables. The inexplicables. Sometimes they have to be opened and that again is a responsibility. Everything's tiered in the Post Office, see. And John's up there. Well, that's what he implies.

John also tells me he gives advice on anything suspicious. That's all he says. But suspicious is a serious word. You might think that he means nutters. Blokes with a grievance against any one of our glorious bureaucracies. Which probably means all of us. You know, the oddball who might send a letter bomb to the taxman or the speed camera people. But, really, it could also be terrorists. Anything suspicious, John says. So follow the logic. I asked him once. He just tapped his nose. Experience, see. He's out on his own is John.

Anyway, John has transferred all his earlier birding records to the ledgers. Even his schoolboy stuff, because he started this lark when he was ten. Names in Latin and English, locations, dates, times. All done with fountain pen and Indian ink. The sunbird and the bushshrike, by the way, were recorded in John's hotel grounds in The Gambia. Sixty big ones, he told me.

If John was impressed, then it was, shall we say, significant. A big one is his term for a completely new species. A first. They were in the bloody gardens, he hissed. Sixty! He even said the bloke with him never left the hotel. Didn't need to. A week in The Gambia and the chap was in his element. UK Gold on telly, English grub, and sulphur-breasted bushshrikes on the pitch-and-putt. For a lot of the men I've met in this game, that's a version of paradise. Couple of bottles of Julbrew beer – the Export comes in at 5.7 alcohol according to John – and you've got yourself sorted. Then three hours of
The Sweeney
while you're writing it up. Birder's heaven. Though not John's cup of tea of course. He did the jungle trip, the river trip. Got another bundle of big ones. Including, nice one this, the western banded snake eagle, which is always hard to spot. Or so everyone says.

It's not bad under this tree. John says it's a Scots pine. The food's finished and I'm looking round. There's a shaft of light on the pine needles and the pine cones and the orange flakes of bark around us. Everything is sparkling. But the forest gets darker in all directions.

No, it's not bad. But not great. I've never been in a forest before. A real forest, that is. Where you can't see the edges. Must be three in the afternoon now. But don't they say it stays lighter in Scotland? Closer to the North Pole? You know, the northern lights. Maybe that's only in summer, but I'm not going to bring it up and show my ignorance. Not worth it with John. After all, he's the traveller, I'm not. Though after this trip, that may change. Alice wanted to go on the Eurostar to Paris but I didn't fancy it. Too pricey.

But travelling's hard work. It's Sunday and we're supposed to be driving back tonight, which is crazy. It's six hundred miles and the van has to be on the forecourt tomorrow at nine. I work at a car hire place see, New Jersey Road Wheels. We do all the Fiat models and it can be busy. People like Fiats. Nippy and cheap. Spare on the juice too, which means everything these days. The boss said I could borrow a Punto. Seeing I've been there twenty years, that's the kind of perk I expect.

But it was tough driving. The M40 was a giant car park. I don't know how much longer we can go on like this, forty tonners going past from Romania, Slovakia. That's where they make the cars now, John said. Slovakia. They say it's booming.

That's interesting, I said. But, fair play to yours truly, this has been my longest drive. Ever. A New Jersey customer had left Abba
Gold
in the CD player, so I kept putting it on. Got it all by heart now, from track one, ‘Dancing Queen', to track nineteen, Waterloo. Can you hear the drums Fernando? became our catch phrase. Going north was hard work. John decided we had to be driving north west of London. But past Brum then Manc, it was ‘Fernando' all the way.

After the umpteenth play, John put it off. It's rubbish, he said. Those horrible rhythms are rotting my brain. That's the trouble with Abba, he said. No soul. No personality. Not real is it? Typical Swedish flatpack crap. It's Ikea music.

We kept going and soon I was further up than I'd ever been. The smell was different. There were all these old mills that had become apartment blocks. Cottages with stone roofs. Fields full of black sheep. By the way, I've always liked that song, ‘Life in a Northern Town'. Pity we didn't bring it. After a while we stopped for food at the Rheged Centre near Penrith. John said there's a Penrith Road in N15 and a Penrith Street, with your associated closes and suchlike, in SW16. The guy's a genius.

We had extra coffee to keep us going, then a quick tour of the exhibitions. Rheged was all wars. Warriors with dirty great swords. God, isn't England great? I said. Why do people fly abroad when they could be exploring their own country? But John had his mouth full of Cumberland sausage and soon we were bombing on.