Rook (9 page)

‘Birds learn the layout of the stars,’ Harry announces. ‘All of them, the first summer of their lives.’ Tucked into the back pocket of his jeans is a paperback he quotes from constantly, a book written by a woman who has lived for years with a pet rook called Chicken, his favourite of the armfuls of books he’s brought to Creek House from the library since they found the bird.

Perhaps, Nora thinks, birds sense the presence and position of stars with something other than sight, a kind of vibration or magnetic pull, such as the moon exerts on the tides.

‘They use some sort of infrasound.’ Harry seems to have read her mind.

The path they have been following ends in the graveyard of an abandoned church, out in the middle of farmland, the building surrounded by overgrown hedges. The long grass is brittle and yellow as hay, but the high arching brambles loaded with thorns are vigorous, their stems, thick and muscular, stretching over and between the gravestones. Harry stops walking and pulls the book from his back pocket. He turns the pages. Feeling the weight and heat of the air in this enclosed, secret place, Nora moves to stand in the shade of an oak. At her feet, roots lift the ground at the base of a gravestone which leans so far it looks about to topple. No one visits these graves, or tends them, words engraved on stone no longer legible.

‘Here it is,’ Harry says. ‘What she reckons birds can hear:
hushed sighs and whispers of hurricanes in far continents, cracks and moans of tremors beneath the earth, the ripping of the fabric of the universe
.’ His finger moves along the words, cuticle lined with mud. She has slept with her windows flung wide during the heat wave of the last few days, and the blade of his turf cutter slicing into earth has woken her in the cool of early mornings. Harry has lifted an area of grass, peeling back a large rectangle of the lower lawn, the turf stacked in rolls in the shade. She must ask Ada again what plans she has for the garden.

‘The sounds of sea and wind, of oceans and volcanoes, the explosion of meteors.’
Harry closes the book. ‘Man, that’s some poetry!’ As he gazes towards the trees in the distance, Nora notices flecks of brown in his grey-green irises. Laughter lines spray at the corners of his eyes. He shakes his head. ‘Like they can hear the future coming.’

‘Will our bird learn the stars?’

The baby rook spends his nights in the kitchen by the ancient Aga, sleeping in his basket covered with the black towel. Not a glimpse of the stars.

‘Who knows? We don’t even know if he’ll be able to fly, he’s too unfeathered right now. And,’ Harry looks at her, ‘we have a problem if he becomes too tame, if he gets imprinted and thinks of you as his mother, no chance then of returning him to the wild.’

They leave the churchyard to cross a field of late-sown maize where rooks fly low, the movement of their wings slow and deep as they lift and settle again to walk the planted rows with their stiff-hipped swagger.

‘Eating the bugs,’ Harry says, tapping the book in his pocket.

From a distant barn or outhouse comes the sudden echoing bark of enclosed dogs. Nora pushes the hair from her forehead, her skin claggy in the heat. She has a headache coming and wonders whether it’s because the hot, dry spell is about to break, if there will be thunder. When Harry described the place where rooks come in their hundreds at dusk to roost – a stand of trees on a slope of land in a remote spot on the Downs – Nora asked him to show her, with Rook. Now she regrets her suggestion. Judging by the barbed fence through which they have just clambered, this is private land. Farmers almost always own guns.        

Harry has disappeared through a gap in the hedge skirting the maize field. Nora follows. Standing with her back pressed close to the hedge, she watches him jog, crouched low out of sight, across an open strip of grass towards a ditch which separates them from the wood. The ditch is too wide to step over and filled with stagnant water. She wants to go back.        

‘C’mon,’ Harry says, in an undertone, beckoning her over. ‘Cross here.’

They are a long way from Harry’s van; she mustn’t lose track of time. She has a lesson later and they left the kitchen table at Creek House littered with various chopped foodstuffs and droppers containing milk and water. Harry wouldn’t let her stop to clear up the mess before they left, because Rook goes without food only for a short time, before waking, frantic with hunger, his head wavering on a scrawny neck barely able to hold up the weight of his gaping beak. At first it was impossible to get the bird to swallow even a morsel of food. ‘It’s going to die,’ Nora said. ‘We’re going to kill it.’ In the end, Harry balanced chopped egg on the end of his finger and pushed deep into the red throat. Nora held her breath. The bird seemed to choke, swallowing several times with a sound like a strangulated gargle, but then its beak flipped open again, ready for more.

A plank, split and rotten, bridges the ditch. Harry takes swift strides over to the other side. ‘It’s fine,’ he says.

In the wood, the ground is sodden. Some trees are leafless. They lean at an angle, propped on others, half-dying, bark smothered with lichen and trailing moss. Low-slung branches catch at Nora’s hair and water seeps through the stitching in her boots. Nora glances again over her shoulder towards the distant farm buildings, squat on the horizon, but the snarls and barking have stopped.

‘I don’t like this place, Harry.’

‘Humans don’t come here. That’s why the birds like it, in winter. Now, they’re at the rookeries. See this?’

At their feet, and close to the fissured trunk of the tree, the ground is covered with bird excrement. Nora looks up. All she can see are fragments of blue sky beyond leaves backlit by the sun. No birds. The oppressive sense of absence, she realises, comes from the lack of birdsong.

‘So,’ Harry scratches his chin, ‘from what I can make out, they leave here in spring and return in autumn.’

Nora’s socks are wet. She doesn’t like the dying atmosphere of this place but she doesn’t want to be left behind, alone, so when Harry strolls further into the wood, hands deep in his pockets, she follows. His voice rolls on in that way he has, a low mumble as if he’s talking to himself. ‘Best to come now . . . occupied elsewhere with their nests . . . not to disturb them at night.’

Nora imagines the branches of these trees in winter crowded with rooks, the wood filled with the dry rustle of feathers as the birds shuffle for position. During the day, she carries Rook around with her wherever she can, in the willow basket, but at night he is alone in the kitchen, only the click of cooling pipes for company.

‘Can we come back here, in winter?’ she says. ‘And watch?’

Harry nods. He places a hand on her shoulder, his thumb resting on the nub of her collar-bone, and seems about to say more but when he stands in silence, looking up at the canopy of leaves, Nora’s awkwardness rises like a barrier. She bends to brush something imaginary from her ankle and Harry’s hand drops to his side.

‘We must allow the bird to be wild,’ he says. ‘Help him return to life among his own kind.’

Nora nods, although a part of her resists the idea. Harry makes it sound as though it’s just a matter of giving permission. What if, after the plummet from a high nest and the suffocating rush of air, Rook can’t be wild? His beak flips open readily enough for food but so far he has not let out any sound louder than a wheeze or putter. Perhaps the baby bird fell from his nest and squawked or cried or peeped for his parents until the muscles of his parched tongue and the throb of his scarlet throat were strained beyond the ability to produce any more sound. A silent rook would not survive.

They make their way back and are crossing the maize field towards the abandoned church when over by the farm outbuildings a Land Rover fires up and rumbles towards them, accelerating fast, the driver’s door swinging open. The farmer is half-in, half-out. Heat rushes to Nora’s head. They shouldn’t be here. She takes longer strides, to cover the gap between hedge and churchyard as quickly as she can, staring down at her feet and trying for nonchalance by pretending to be unaware of the Land Rover which continues to head straight for them. Harry dawdles as usual, still some way behind her, hands in his pockets. He’s whistling something she half-recognises from one of her mother’s old Frank Sinatra LPs.

Nora is a few yards from the churchyard boundary and the gap in the hedge, when the Land Rover skids to a halt beside her, raising a cloud of dust. The farmer leaps out of the cab. He is wiry, whipped taut with fury.

‘This land is private, very private.’

‘I’m so sorry. I didn’t—’

‘If you’ve come here for the rooks, you’ll only disturb them.’

‘No, I didn’t know. I’m sorry . . .’ Nora’s words drain away under the white heat of his glare.

The farmer spits in the dust.

‘Wrong time of year, though.’ Harry’s deep voice is close behind her. He snaps a grass stem, twiddles and pops it into his mouth. The weight of his hand rests again, companionably on Nora’s shoulder. ‘Got lost, didn’t we, mate? Too many beers, lunchtime, sunny day: know what I’m saying?’ With a roll of his tongue, he passes the stem of grass from one side of his mouth to the other and winks at the farmer.

Beside Harry’s slow calm, the viciousness of the farmer’s pent-up fury dwindles. He swings up on to the Land Rover’s mounting step to stand high above them in the open doorway. A gun lies across the passenger seat. Harry slips a hand around Nora’s waist and with an almost imperceptible nudge, encourages her to start walking away.

By the time they have reached the evergreen seclusion of the ramshackle churchyard, the Land Rover has disappeared.

‘He was so angry.’

Harry removes the grass stem from between his lips. ‘Jealous,’ he says. He peels the broad green leaf from the stem. ‘Probably thought we’d been shagging.’ Harry chucks the grass stem high into the air. ‘Like we’d want to roll around in all that bird shit.’

They look at each other and start laughing.

Through Nora’s open bedroom window, sometime in the night, comes a metallic scrape from the flagstones below, and a faint humming: a favourite dance tune of her mother’s. Nora dips her head under the sash. In the moonlight Ada is posed like a fifties film star on the garden bench below, slender legs crossed at the ankle and tucked to one side, her right arm raised from the elbow, hand poised in the air holding something balanced there, between her fingers, the way she’d hold a cigarette.

Tonight there’s a sheen about her, hair falling silvery over the crimson-and-black silk of her kimono. Ada lifts her hand to her mouth and a cigarette holder catches the light from the moon. She hasn’t smoked for years yet Nora watches her shoulders rise as she inhales, holds the breath and savours it, before tapping the holder on the arm of the bench. The smoke is acrid. The cigarettes will be French, skinny and brown, the ones she smoked when Nora was a child. Flick use to steal them to play at dressing-up, posing in front of Ada’s full-length mirror, wearing her shoes and hats.

Outside, Nora lifts the lapels of her towelling dressing gown close round her neck and face against the cool air. ‘Mum, your coat.’ Holding the coat by the shoulders, she offers it, with a shake of the heavy fabric, inviting Ada to slip her arms into the sleeves, but with a second brisk tap of the cigarette holder against the bench, Ada looks away, turning the fine swoop of her jawbone towards her daughter.

Nora says nothing. No point starting another argument in the middle of the night. No point mentioning the cigarette. She swings the coat invitingly. ‘Come on, Mum.’

How often Ada must have held coats out like this when she and Flick were small; it’s something mothers do, a gesture of waiting. She has seen Flick’s impatience with her two daughters, flapping their coats at them, their little bodies jerking as she tugs coat edges to button them, or yanks zips up to their chins. Now Nora waits for her mother.        

The shrubs cast moon shadows across the grass and at the bottom of the garden by the water’s edge the trees stir in the dark. A smell of algae and mud wafts up from the creek.

Isaac held her coat out for her that first night, after her Wigmore debut. He kissed the back of her neck, just below the ear and she swung around in shock. Afterwards, he told her he’d thought she was going to slap him across the cheek.

She is not going to think about Isaac, she is far from that other life.

Ada raises her arms backwards a fraction to indicate her readiness to be helped into the coat sleeves. Hair falls either side of her face on to her collar as she watches Nora button up her coat.

‘Why not, I thought.’ Her voice is barely audible. ‘Why not treat myself? Make some changes?’        

‘Come inside now.’ Nora takes her mother’s hand, aware of the lightness of bone.        

Ada sighs and straightens her shoulders. ‘After all, no one else is going to.’ She looks away towards the sloping lawn where dew is caught on the tips of the grass blades. ‘The garden has grown so wild.’

‘It’s always been wild, Mum.’

Ada draws in a wavering breath. ‘Well, we have plans, Harry and I, big plans. So I’ve told him he can park his caravan here, at Creek House, down near the water.’

On the lawn, footprints in the dew blur across the grass towards the old orchard. Nora wants everything to stay as it is, as it was in her childhood, with the seclusion created by overgrown laurels, hebes and tamarisks which shield the garden from the view of passing boats, or walkers on the creek path. She likes Harry well enough, but is not keen on the idea of his constant presence around Creek House. She knows better than to make a fuss. Besides, it’s likely Ada’s ‘plans’ will come to nothing. By next week she will have cooked up some other impulsive scheme and they’ll be buying grass seed to reseed the bare patch of lawn.