Keys of Babylon (18 page)

Thanks, he said. Very sarky, like.

What's up? I asked.

You see a little brown bird up here? he asked. Not a sparrow, mind. Grey on it.

Um, I said. No. Why?

The others had gone but this bloke stopped. He was holding a book, not a camera.

It's rare, he said. A red lister. And you've scared it away.

Hey, sorry mate, I said. I'm just on the public path.

Well, he said, it's supposed to be here. We've been tipped off.

What is it? I asked.

You won't have heard of it.

Try me, I said. I had the feeling here was somebody else who thought I was boring. That he picked up an aura of boredom around me. That I radiated boredom.

But, speaking personally, I wasn't bored, was I? Well, not much. Alice said that I bored her. Which, for a husband, fair play, is not good. But hardly inexcusable. Not grounds for bleeding divorce. She had looked at me in my sleep. Well everyone is boring when they're asleep. Aren't they? Now here was this bloody birdwatcher implying it.

Wryneck, he said. In England we're down to a single breeding pair. But this is a September migrant. Hard to spot but not exactly an LBJ.

Oh, I said. What's that?

Little brown job.

Look, I said. I'm interested in birds. Course I am.

Well come and spot this one for us, he said.

Yeah, I said, looking round. Seems like I owe you one.

We never found the wryneck. Maybe it was there or maybe it was a false alarm. They're so elusive, the guy with the woolly hat told me later in a caff. That guy was John.

I learned quickly that birders have this incredible network of communication. Soon there had been other groups tramping over the hill. I was amazed. Could have been a hundred twitchers. Some chaps had walkie-talkies. Bloody laptops too.

There's this pub where they meet up in Norfolk, John explained. Used to be the Red Lion. But so many birders called it the Parliament of Fowls that the pub changed its name.

He looked at me then as if he wanted a reaction.

That's nice, I said.

So when I rang Alice I thought birding was the solution. Here was something we could do together. Saturdays in Osterley Park. We could walk down the Grand Union and watch the ducks. Take sarnies. I'd already bought
The Observer's Book of British Birds
and started scanning the RSPB website. It was an
enthusiasm
. That was her word. She always said I lacked enthusiasms. But birds for Alice were out from the start. A real no-no. So in a way it was the wryneck that put the mockers on my marriage. And not many people can say that. Bastard LBJ.

But I've come up here, haven't I? The Caledonian Forest, smack bang in the wilds of Scotland. John has a map spread out on the pine dust and is looking at it with a magnifying glass. John doesn't wear specs or contacts. Seems he's made it a point of principle. Which surprises me. How does he read all those addresses, then? I've looked at the map and it's difficult. All these names of hills and streams, like they've been misspelled. Just lines of Scrabble. There's houses up here literally miles from the road. You wonder what goes on there. Spooky.

Yes, he says, finally. Keep your eyes peeled. Let's keep looking and listening. They'll be coming in to roost about now.

The van must be two miles from here, parked on a gravel track. But I'm not sure of my bearings any more. And I'm hungry again. John's map is bloody empty. Just a mass of tree symbols and those Scottish words with the letters jumbled up. To tell the truth, neither of us could understand a word in the Bay Horse either. There's even different money in Glasgow, which was news to me.

It was funny too in the shop in Fort William, buying our provisions. Nice-looking kid behind the till but I had my suspicions before I spoke to her. She's not a local, I thought. Can you hear the drums Fernando? I said to her. She just kept chewing her gum.

There was this poster for a Shinty game. What the hell is Shinty? The shop had different foods too. I didn't know if they were Scottish or not. Black bread on offer, with all these seeds in it. And that meat I bought. It didn't look normal but I thought I'd try it. Perhaps it's haggis. Pretty cheap for right up here in the sticks, where there are more bloody crows than people. In fact, there are no people. Just hills and moors going on for miles. It's spooky all right.

And now it's three o' clock and dark in the forest. John's out of sight, gone up the hill. There's not even a path, just a stream bed with flat stones and a trickle of water. That's all I hear, the stream flowing. But I think if I crouch down, if I'm really unobtrusive, and if John has our bearings right, then I'll see one. Or at least I'll hear one. Which will be fantastic. Because I've my own ledger now. John took it from the sorting office. Says there's a stash of them going to waste. Beautiful books, superseded by technology. I can imagine myself tomorrow night, or more likely Tuesday, ledger on the kitchen table, writing it all down. Even bought my own fountain pen, a Parker Vector, first since school.

Loxia Scotica
, I'll be writing. The Scottish crossbill. September 11, 3.10 p.m.

And, although you're not supposed to do this, I'll do it anyway. I'll add:

The Scottish crossbill is the only bird indigenous to the British Isles. This means it is found nowhere else in the world. Thus it is unique. The breeding population is static and its habitat has not changed since the last ice age. The Scottish crossbill is highly endangered.

But this is where the problem comes in. My book doesn't mention the Scottish crossbill. Must be too rare. And even John says that there is only one way to determine it from the two other crossbills that come to Britain. Now
determine
is a typical birder's word. It feels scientific to me. Authoritative. But with all three crossbills, the male is red and the missus is green.

Apparently those others can irrupt anywhere in the country. Another birder's world that.
Irrupt
. Sounds sudden and dangerous. Like they are Vikings or something, come here to pillage.These foreign crossbills fly over from the continent when there's a shortage of food. They fancy our pine cones and nick them off the natives.

So, there is only one way to determine our unique bird. That is the song of the crossbill. Not size, not plumage. Officially, the Scottish crossbill has a Scottish accent.

John says he'll be able to tell
Loxica Scotica
immediately. Well, he wasn't so good in the pub last night.
Pint of heavy
? he had to ask. Heavy? Excuse me, what's that?

The young barman looked at him and said something that could have been in Icelandic. Whatever it was, this woman sitting at the counter nearly choked. Charming. But I watched John in the mirror. He looked old and small in his woolly hat, peering over that polished mahogany. Almost uncertain of himself. There were posters on the wall where we were sitting. One was the band, Texas, with that Charleen Spitieri. Now there's a looker for you. Sorry Alice. The other showed Mel Gibson in
Braveheart
. He was painted blue and looking well pissed off.

Take it easy, I said to John. You'd be grumpy too if your head was about to be separated from your body.

Fucking Picts, John said. But under his breath. He drank more than I've ever seen him last night. Snored like a badger.

But anyway, I better wait here. It's roosting time. There ought to be a chattering, a chittering all over. Before he disappeared into the trees, John talked about
territories of song
. Listen out, he told me, for a kind of guttural warbling.

Och aye, I said. John says the Scottish crossbill may be observed individually or in small flocks. Well, I'm bloody looking. I'm bloody listening. But there's nothing. John says the name of this place is Glen Affric, and that all that's happened here in the last ten thousand years is that real British animals like the lynx and the bear have died out. But landowners want to bring them back for tourists.

It's crazy, John says. They'd have to find the skeleton of a British lynx. Then somehow extract its DNA. That's the only way to bring back a proper British lynx. You can't just whip them over from Norway.

Hear hear. But I'm thinking about something else. You see, apart from John's mum, no one knows we're here. Up in Scotland, John told her. Brilliant. Gives a search party a lot to go on.

It's darker now and still there's absolute silence. When you work on the Jersey Road, this sort of silence is weird. Everything's hollow. It's ringing in my ears. But the stream bed's my reference point and I'll stay here till John comes back. Tell you the truth, I might be going off this ornithology business. But you know what? I think Alice would be proud of me.

Even for that season it was hot. I went west along the coast and found myself in Nerja, everything shivering like cellophane in the haze.

I saw they had built a palace where the dunes had been. Once the dune pools held egrets. They had reminded me of home. Creeping close I could glimpse the birds' reflections in the water. Now there were fountains, but the fountains were turned off, and the swimming pools empty. After the first palace was a castle. After that castle another castle. Or palace. Each castle was fifty apartments piled on top of one another. Towers and minarets, but all empty. No cars in the parking places and the dune grass like wire breaking through the tar. And everywhere the signs; some
Se Vende
, some
For Sale
. But the English have stopped coming. Suddenly there are no English.

At last I saw a man and I asked him about a job. A watchman's job. A caretaker.

I'm going to Madrid, he said. My cousin has a tapas bar. The polytunnels are for the Africans.

I was in Madrid once and saw the living statues in Plaza Mayor. It crossed my mind. Who would I be? I thought of Picasso. They named the airport in Malaga after him. Then I thought of Lorca. I saw a plaque for him in Benal Madena. I looked up from the street and there it was. But how does a poet dress?

Then I thought of Clint Eastwood, the man with no name, the thin cigarillo between thin lips. Who would dare refuse him money? A fistful of dollars? But I would have to stand on a box. No men are tall where I come from. Even in this place, they call me
Lazarillo
. The little Lazarus.

I turned a corner and war had been declared. There were the Rangers supporters and there were the police. Grown men were vomiting in the street. There were police horses with white eyes, men with helmets and shields. The warriors are called The Gers, a Glasweigian tribe half naked and painted blue, singing outside GMex and The Thistle. I trod the broken glass around the Briton's Protection Hotel. A gallon of Grunt, an eight pack of indigo SuperT. Bellies brimming with gold. I thought of the desert I had once crossed – all that ash as if the world had burned. Goat herders in their cinder-coloured rags.

I used to sell the
Big Issue
near Woolworths. I used to tell the people who I was and that I had come here for a better life. Across the road outside Streets night club, a woman older than my mother would play the accordion, its white teeth brown as nicotine. She knew only one tune. Then Woolworths closed. Then the night club closed. Some boys took her accordion and stepped on it. How it groaned in terror. I heard its protest and went to help. The boys were gone and I was glad. Those boys in their hoods, their trackwear, glancing at their screens.

Today I have been cutting cloth. When he gave me the job, the man didn't ask my name. The bale of silk was cold as river water in my hands and upon my chest. We might have been anywhere. But there was a newspaper, the
Manchester Evening News
, and packets of teabags. After a few days I knew where I was. We were working in a warehouse on an estate off the Salford Road. There were two English women who smoked when the bosses weren't looking. One burned a hole in the fabric and they had to hide it.

There are no windows in our building, and the strip light hums. Our toilet is at the end of the corridor. How the women sigh when they see it. They bring their own soap, their own paper, and there is a bootmark on the door.

Have a break, the man said yesterday. We were all surprised, but we couldn't go anywhere. There is a yard with puddles and piebald ice, and the german shepherd on a chain keeps the people out, keeps the people in.

When I woke this morning it was dark, darker even than the Euphrates where I once rolled at night in its velvet bed.

I found the costume outside the Piccadilly hotel. Somebody had been sick on it but I sponged it down with hot water and Lenor in the laundry room.

This evening I walked into the Woodlands lounge. There were a good group of the residents there. Two or three saw me at once, then all turned their heads. The men cheered. Then everyone clapped. It was December 28 and I was Santa Claus, a green Santa Claus in a green Santa costume, a green Santa hat. Only the boots were missing. I have a pair of trainers from the sale they have at St Michael's every Saturday. My other shoes have come to pieces.