The Bower Bird (6 page)

I’ll be able to do that here. There are rock pools on several of the beaches – Porthmeor, by the Island; Porthgwidden; the little beach by the museum – I don’t know what it’s called. And on Porthminster Beach and Carbis Bay there are lots.

Where we were at Peregrine Point there were caves and pools but the climb was steep so I wasn’t up to exploring much. We used to gather mussels though, and Mum cooked them with chopped onion and white wine. You have to clean them thoroughly in clean running water for a while, or stick them somewhere cold in clean water until you need them.

They look disgusting – like the insides of a squashed hedgehog – but close your eyes and they taste like the smell of the sea.

Mrs Thomas is in her attic room too. She is opening the window and putting out bread for the gulls. Perhaps she thinks the male is the spirit of her dead husband. She waves when she sees me. If Mum is right and all seamen come back as seagulls there must be dozens of widows and bereaved mothers all over St Ives, Mousehole and Newlyn and other seaside towns looking after their own personal family gulls.

It must be difficult to carry on living when everyone you love is dead.

IF I HAD
been born a hundred years ago I wouldn’t have survived a week, even. Without antibiotics, and digitalis – a heart drug that comes from the foxglove – I would have died in babyhood. Without transplantation expertise and organ donation I wouldn’t have any hope of living much longer. I’m lucky to have been born in the twentieth century.

We are picnicking on my favourite beach, Porthmeor, sitting up against the granite wall below the artists’ studios, facing the big rollers dashing in and the low sun. It’s still warm enough to wear a T-shirt. There are quite a few holidaymakers here, tanned from a week of sunshine. We are sitting close to a ladder that goes from the sand up to the door of a beach house. A group of people sit drinking white wine and beer and passing a big bag of crisps between them. There are some wrinklies and two babies and three toddlers and several older children too, who are running around giving the little ones towel rides on the sand.

Most people on this beach are hiding behind windbreaks but not this crowd.

‘Gussie, don’t stare. It’s rude.’

‘I’m not.’

‘You are.’

I am. I do that. It’s a bad habit. But I am genuinely interested in other people. It’s like being an anthropologist studying the behaviour of a lost tribe. I can’t help it. Better than being totally uninterested in life around me.

At Peregrine Cottage there was only Nature to observe. Here, there’s loads of people. There’s a rather lovely woman, tall and slender, dark, who is holding a tiny baby, not hers. She has a sweet face, not exactly pretty, but more than pretty, glowing and kind – concerned. Her husband is much older and wrinkly and very tanned. He is obviously well known, like a Godfather figure. People keep making a detour to come to him as they are walking along the beach. They don’t kiss his ring or his hand though. They sit for a while and are offered a glass of wine or a little bottle of beer.

‘He must know everybody. I wonder if he knows Daddy’s family?’

‘Gussie, stop it!’

‘What?’

‘You know what. Don’t Do it!’

‘Oh look Mum!’ The weird, big-eared cat is standing at the top of the ladder looking down at his family on the beach. One of the girls climbs the ladder and carries the cat down. She places it on a rug and strokes it.

I yearn to go and say hello, but I am suddenly shy. Why? In the past I would be perfectly able to meet new people. Am I too grown up to be naturally gregarious and sociable? I make myself stand and walk slowly to where the cat is. I crouch to look at him.

‘Hello, may I stroke him?’

The child, who is like a little fairy, with fine blonde hair and white skin, nods at me, and I reach out to touch the strange creature. His back is barely covered with a fine curly down, hardly fur, more like velvet or felt, and he has no eyebrows or fur on his face. His pink belly is loose and swings from his ribs when he moves.

‘He feels strange,’ I say. ‘What is he called?

‘Wobert, he’s a Sphinx, a throwback,’ says the little girl, ‘but he’s very clever. He carries his blanket around.’

Poor little cat. His eyes bulge, his ears are huge, he looks and feels so weird, sweaty skinned, warm and clammy, I bet he doesn’t get stroked or cuddled much.

‘I have to take him in now, or he’ll get sunburned.’ She lifts him carefully and takes him up the ladder.

There are too many Stevenses in this town. I looked them up in the local telephone directory: two fish merchants, a plumber and a builder, a funeral director, a swimming pool engineer, a wine merchant, an interior decorator, an estate agent, an hotelier, a publican and a builder. And all the regular Stevenses who don’t have a commercial title.

I suppose I could go through the entire directory, phoning them all and asking about their family history – see if any of them know Daddy. Perhaps not, it would be a huge telephone bill. Next time he phones I’ll ask him to give me a lead. Mum says Daddy is not strong on family.

I’d noticed.

Maybe because he was the black sheep of his family, he said, thrown out of the nest. No, that’s a mixed metaphor. Sheep don’t have nests. He hotfooted it out of town as soon as he could – (another foot metaphor).

Is it fate that Mum brought me here? She could have taken me to any one of a dozen different Cornish towns – Newlyn, Mousehole, Mylor, Penzance, Falmouth. But we came here, to where there are at least a hundred other people called Stevens.

I think I am here to find my lost family, my Daddy’s family. He didn’t want to be Cornish. He was probably too big for his boots (foot metaphor again).

All I know about them is that Grandad Stevens was a car dealer, and always drove around in smart new cars. Rovers, I think he sold. And Grandma Stevens wore stiff corsets and had pink hair or blue hair and drank her tea with her little finger in the air.

Mum never met them. She says they wouldn’t have approved of their son’s choice of a much older wife.

She doesn’t look her age, Mum, except when she tries to look younger.

Something or someone emptied our dustbin today. Mess everywhere. Mummy was Not Happy. At Peregrine Cottage we would blame a fox, but here in the heart of the town, who knows?

In Essex, where Grandpop and Grandma lived, there was a fox who used to come into their garden each night looking for titbits, (that might be tidbits as titbits sounds rude). I often saw him by the orange street lamp, sauntering across the road and going under their car briefly before doing his usual snacking in their back garden. Grandpop made a habit of leaving food for him. But Grandpop’s favourite was the robin. It would follow him around while he was gardening, practically landing on his hoe or spade or whatever. Grandma did most of the gardening but Grandpop was allowed to do the heavy stuff, like digging.

I had a disgusting job to do in her garden – collect caterpillars from the cabbages and drown them in a bucket of water. It didn’t occur to me to complain about being hired to torture and murder living creatures.

I wonder how mentally developed a creature has to be before it has a personality. Obviously dogs and cats have personalities, each one a separate identity, like bossy Flo and wimpy Rambo, but what about robins and rats, guinea pigs and toads? If we thought that sheep were interesting characters and have real relationships with each other, would we still kill them for food?

I heard on Radio Four an organic dairy farmer saying that her cows all knew each other and had lasting family relationships. She had witnessed young heifers joyfully greeting their mothers after being separated from them for a year. A joyful cow? What does she do? Jump for joy?

What makes a creature more than just alive? What gives it purpose and contentment, affection for its family?

I do know that certain birds, including swans and geese and herring gulls, mate for life. But what about insects? If I knew a mosquito had thoughts and feelings and a mother who loved it, would I still want to swat it? What about crabs and prawns? Do they form attachments? Oh dear, I don’t want to survive on lentils and bean sprouts and soya beans.

Oh no, I should never have thought about insects dying. Into my cold soup, gazpacho it’s called and it’s made from chopped tomatoes, has landed a black-fly. He looks like a miniature angel spread-eagled on the red sticky surface – an angel fallen into Hell.

‘He’ll have tomatoes up his nose,’ I say. I can’t bear the thought of him drowning slowly so I scoop him out and squash him properly and thoroughly.

‘He’s got more problems than tomatoes up his nose now,’ said Mum, rather callously in my opinion.

When we get home, black-fly and greenfly are everywhere in the garden, all over practically every leaf, and I have frenzy of killing. I don’t understand. Why did I feel compassion for one drowning black-fly in my soup and now I am a mad killer with no remorse? I went from being a Buddhist to a maniac mass murderer in less than two hours.

Death: I know, or think I know that death will only be nothingness, but I don’t want oblivion yet. I want to smell honeysuckle in the dark, I want to hear my cat greet me with her special purring mew. I want to smell old books. I want everything, clouds, sunshine, I want to see a whale – I’ve never seen a whale. I even want to hear the terrifying sound of the sea in a storm. I want a boy to kiss me one day. I want to run along a beach again. I want to go to America and Australia. There are so many books I want to read. I want to live.

WE’VE BEEN WATCHING
our video of
Casablanca
again. It never fails to make me cry. Mum too.

Goodbyes: I hate them. At airports, railway stations, docks – even other people’s goodbyes. Even their hellos make me want to cry: emotion as catching as a virus. When a child runs and jumps into the open arms of a grandfather; strangers’ tears; other people’s happiness, other people’s grief – it gets to me. All those people at the barrier when you go through customs, you can see the anticipation written in their eyes, searching for the face of their loved one, the familiar shape of family. I am moved by their strong feelings. It’s as if it’s me they have lost and found again, or I’m a hero come home from a war. I am affected especially by men’s affection, men hugging their wives or mothers, their children or each other. That moment when a man hugs another man, perhaps knowing they won’t see each other for a long time, maybe imagining it’s for the last time. Men being affectionate, men crying. That is so… so… it’s wonderful and terrible.

I remember Daddy after Grandpop and Grandma died. He had been so brave for days, Mum said, phoning friends to tell them the terrible news. He came to see me in hospital and suddenly started weeping – silent tears at first. But then he held my hand tight (he wasn’t allowed to hug me as I was wired up to machines and had tubes coming out of every orifice) and he gave way to his sadness and really sobbed for a moment before pulling himself together, controlling his shaking shoulders and blowing his nose loudly. And they weren’t even his parents. They were Mum’s. It was awful to see him cry. His face didn’t dissolve like Mum’s does – her nose goes red and big and spreads all over her cheeks, and her eyes are puffy for at least twenty-four hours. He looked untouched by his emotion, normal, but with brimming eyes, like a film star who has had glycerine drops to make his eyes glisten. He told me that that’s what they do in films. He knows all the tricks of cinematography. That’s the art of filming.

I think he should have been a film star instead of a filmmaker. He has that soulful, clapped out look, like Gerard Depardieu or Johnny Halliday or Bruce Willis. I love French films, not only because he does. He once met Jeanne Moreau – his greatest moment, he says.

His favourite movie is
Léon
, directed by Luc Besson. We watched it together in a private cinema in Paris. It was brilliant – lean-back seats as comfortable as armchairs, and there was champagne, well, not for me, obviously, but for Daddy, and he gave me a sip. Even the smell of the place was expensive, as if someone had dropped an entire bottle of lavender oil into the foyer. And the girl – Natalie Portman – when the film was made she was only a little bit older than I am now. Twelve. She’s beautiful. And I love her hair, though I think it’s rather an expensive looking cut for a girl her age, but maybe all French girls have access to good hairdressers. It’s an ace film. Complicated, but with an English soundtrack. Daddy knows all sorts of film people, being in the business.

It’s a shame he’s lost
TLE
: The Lovely Eloise. She’s very pretty. I wonder why she left. I expect she got bored with being asked if he was her father. Or maybe her career as a model/actress got in the way of a lasting relationship with a man who isn’t really going to help her on her way to fame. But that’s being sarcastic or…? Oh, I’ve forgotten the word. Cynical.

I was once accused of being sophisticated by my teacher. I can’t remember what I said to her to make her say that. I thought sophisticated was a good thing to be, but no, she said, no, it wasn’t. It was very very bad. She made me look it up in the dictionary. I did.

Sophisticated: adulterated; falsified; wordly-wise; devoid or deprived of natural simplicity; complex; very refined or subtle; with qualities produced by special knowledge or skill; (of a person) accustomed to an elegant, cultured way of life; with the most up to date devices.