The Travellers and Other Stories (11 page)

I couldn't sleep that night, nor for several nights after that. I felt so crushed after what had happened in the corridor. The night before I was due to move into the store cupboard I lay awake until four, when I finally got up and wrote Peter Tracey a note.

I used a sheet of my best writing paper—laid, cream, A5—and wrote the message neatly in ink, folded it into quarters and wrote his initals, PJT, on the front.

Vae, da mihi veniam vitae
, I wrote. Well, pardon me for living.

And felt a little better.

When I arrived at school, I popped it into his pigeon hole before beginning the task of moving my things from my old room into my little cubby in the artblock.

My next note, the following day, took a slightly more assertive tone.

Potes currere, sed te occulere non potes
.

I liked this one much more than the first: You can run, but you can't hide. I liked its symmetry, its edgy concision.

That afternoon Jenny had her last ever lesson with me before the start of her exams. I felt thoroughly miserable. When she'd gone, I spent an hour or so reading and then I collected my things—my cardigan, my mug and my briefcase—and turned off the storeroom light. It was long past the end of the day, and already the school appeared to be virtually deserted.

I crossed over into the main building to return my mug to the staffroom, and as I walked out through the darkening corridor on the ground floor, I saw a light on in the library. I paused, and saw Peter Tracey emerging from behind the bookcase where the dictionaries are kept. He sat down with the small Cassell's
Latin-English English-Latin
with the purple cover. I saw him take out my two pieces of paper, watched as he scrunched his handsome face into a frown of concentration, as he licked the tips of his fingers and began to leaf through the pages of the Cassell's.

He sat for about an hour, alternately staring at the notes and hunting through the purple dictionary. Then he slammed the Cassell's shut, snatched my notes from the table and began striding towards the doors.

I scuttled away.

Over the past two weeks, I have increased the frequency of the notes to two a day. The first I leave in the morning, after assembly, the second just before lunch. I've also begun to vary the messages, both in tone and in length. A few have been quite long, as apart from my packing, there has really been nothing left for me to do, but on the whole I have preferred to keep them quite brief, no more than a single line.

Every day, after school, long after the cleaners have gone and left behind their sweet refreshing perfumes of polish and ammonia, Peter Tracey has been staying on in the library, poring over my notes, of which there are (as of yesterday) thirty-two.

From time to time during the day, I leave my storeroom to go and look at him through the door of my old teaching room. He looks tired and wan. The other morning I saw him snap at one of the girls, which is most unlike him.

Now, I am packing. Tomorrow, I will have been the Latin teacher.

The only objects left in here are my briefcase, my cardigan, my mug, two flat empty boxes (which have turned out to be surplus to requirements), a half-used roll of brown tape, a pair of yellow-handled scissors.

There is also my five volume set of Manilius, which I can't quite bring myself to pick up off the shelf, it seems to me that when I pack away my Manilius, it will be the end of everything, I will have lost.

I left this morning's note in Peter Tracey's pigeon hole about an hour ago. I kept it short and to the point.

Homines tui similes pro ientaculo mihi appositi sunt.
I eat people like you for breakfast.

Peter Tracey doesn't knock. He pushes open the door and for a moment he just stands there.

His appearance is dishevelled, there is a bright sheen on his upper lip, a twitch tugging at the skin over his right temple. As he comes towards me, he seems to fill my little room completely.

His narrow, good-looking face is very close to mine now, I can see the veins in his handsome brown eyes. He grips my shoulders, my silence seems to produce in him an almost animal rage. He is shouting now,—
screaming
, I would say—I can feel his furious breath on my tightly sealed lips.

‘Fucking tell me!' he bellows, ‘Tell me what they fucking say!'

METAMORPHOSIS

TELLING ME THE
news about Alice last week in the library, Arthur was rude to me for the first time ever.

Arthur who is never rude, who never has an unkind word to say to anyone. Arthur who in all the years we worked together was never anything but the most perfectly courteous old-fashioned gentleman.

He told me that Alice is pregnant, due in April, and then he said I should stop all this nonsense with the bird books, the videos. That everyone at the library knows it is just a pretext so I can come in and try to speak to Alice or say something abusive to Meakin. He said I am making Alice's life a misery and if I really cared about her I would stay away.

‘But I am interested in birds, Arthur,' I said.

I wanted to explain to him that my bird research is a good thing. It is an occupation. I enjoy it and it takes my mind off Alice and Meakin for quite long periods during the day. It gives me a sense of purpose and usefulness.

But when I began to speak Arthur put his finger to his lips and said, ‘Quiet now, Howard. This is a library,' as if he thought I might be about to start shouting.

He date-stamped my video and my book, looking with distaste at the photograph beneath its protective plastic cover: an African crowned eagle ripping open the stomach of a large vervet monkey.

I caught a brief glimpse of Alice, talking to Gail over by the hessian-covered screens which divide the children's section from the rest of the library. I didn't think then that she looked particularly pregnant. She looked the same as always: tall, pale-ish skin, dark hair tied back in a pony-tail with a plain elastic band. It is worse though, her being pregnant. The thought makes me nauseous, ill. I'm really not sure I will be able to cope with Alice having Meakin's baby.

She flushed when she saw me and whispered something to Gail. Then she walked briskly away between the reading tables where the newspapers and periodicals are laid out, stepped into the storeroom and closed the door. She always does that when I come into the library. She hides in the storeroom until I have gone. Meakin I hardly ever seem to see. I think he hides from me too.

Philip Meakin is a strong, stocky man in his early thirties with short brown hair, no grey in it yet. How I hate him.

The best thing that has happened over the last few weeks has been my coming across the video,
The Flight of Eagles.
So far I have watched it twenty-three times. Useful as the books are, the video represents, I think, something of a breakthrough.

I used to work at the library, with Arthur and Gail and Alice and Philip Meakin, but when Alice and Meakin got married I found I couldn't stay.

My interest in birds—my
need
of them, if you like—began when I left.

I didn't resign in any formal way because until the moment I walked out I hadn't planned to go. I was standing at the front desk with Arthur. I must have been crying because Arthur looked so appalled. His small pale eyes were wide with sympathy but, being Arthur, he was shocked I suppose by my complete collapse, my total loss of control.

‘I think I'm going to have to leave, Arthur,' I said and picked up my things—my green corduroy jacket draped over the back of the chair there, my newspaper and my bag.

The bird book was in my bag. I had put it there because the spine was badly broken and I had planned to mend it slowly at home, a few pages every evening.

It was the middle of the morning, a strange time to be at home in my kitchen. I opened the battered little book and began reading. The reading calmed me, and it was interesting. All of it. It was new to me and I found it quite absorbing. I had lived for forty-eight years and could only identify perhaps half a dozen common birds—magpie, pigeon, crow, robin, a few more maybe. I would not have been able to identify with any certainty a thrush or a swift or a lark or a nightingale, let alone anything more unusual, a buzzard, say, or a cormorant.

I discovered some interesting things:

That the wandering albatross possesses a special locking device which fixes its giant wings in position, allowing it to float above the ocean for weeks and months on end without touching land. That a flamingo will lose its pink colour if it doesn't eat enough brine shrimp and algae. That when a male bower bird (a small, plain brown thing) is ready to mate, it constructs a palatial hide-away beneath a canopy of orchid twigs, decorating the ground with pink blossoms and bright leaves, bits of broken glass and plastic and the shiny black carapaces of dead beetles.

Over the course of the following week I carefully repaired the book, pausing frequently to read anything that caught my attention.

The nictating membrane is a useful third eye-lid which protects against dust and light and water. In man, this membrane exists as a vestigial presence in the form of the tear duct.

The rich oil with which most birds anoint their feathers is secreted near the tail in the
preen gland
. Hence, preening.

A diving peregrine moves at a speed of 200 mph, the fastest creature on earth.

I returned to the library after an absence of about a week, having finished the book. I took out a few more, Gail saying as she checked them out that she hoped I was doing all right, that everything was okay.

I said, yes, I was okay really, not too bad.

On the whole though I have not done very well since being at home without working, without Alice. I have let things go rather, I sleep too much and eat poorly. I have begun to wake in the mornings with shooting pains in my face from clenching my teeth all night. I have stopped doing any laundry or going to the dry cleaners as there is no real reason for me to look smart. Now that nearly all my clothes are used up, I have hauled down the old ones bagged up on top of the wardrobe and have begun wearing them instead: T-shirts with writing on them, a thick cotton track-suit, the brown three-piece suit I wore at my graduation, an old parka.

These days I go to the library from time to time for more bird books; most days, I suppose. Alice is there of course. Alice is always there when I go in for the bird books. I always see her for a few moments before she spots me and goes off in the storeroom because she thinks I am going to accost her. And Meakin—though I rarely see him—he's there somewhere in the library as well.

Most days Alice wears a cream dress with short sleeves and a round neck-line, a pair of fawn court shoes. She has taken his name but I still think of her as Alice Nolan.

The bird books are all together on the third wildlife shelf.

Somehow within the last week, in the seven days since Arthur told me the news, Alice has begun to look noticeably pregnant. She has started wearing loose dark trousers and various smock-like blouses. Her face is fuller, not so pale, her dark hair thick and glossy.

It is interesting that every single bird in existence, without exception, gives birth by laying eggs.

I had never really considered the reason for this, though it seems obvious to me now. It has to do with weight. Everything about a bird has to do with weight and buoyancy—its hollow bones, the extra air sacs in its body. If a female bird tried to fly around with her gestating young inside her body, she would drop out of the sky.

I usually wait a few moments before going into the library. In that short period of time before she sees me, while I stand outside and look in from the street through the glass of the main doors, Alice looks very happy.

When you come to be interested in something, it seems all of a sudden to be everywhere. I have found, for example, that there is almost always a story about birds in the newspaper these days.

A flamingo at the Chicago Zoo has been fitted with a wooden leg.

A storm-driven Little Auk has been found marooned on Blackpool Pleasure Beach. The bewildered creature is being kept in a cage in which a mirror has been installed, so that the poor thing will not think itself alone.

I even came across the following on the Letters Page of a free magazine I found lying around in the stairwell of my building:

Hope is the thing with feathers

That perches in the soul.

I have cut that out, and stuck it onto my shaving mirror.

The library's collection of bird books is patchy, slightly eccentric. There are forty-eight books all told, including a good dozen privately published pamphlets by local enthusiasts, and various field guides. My favourite books are those with the best photography—close-ups of a pink-skinned cuckoo hatchling sending the pale speckled egg of a reed warbler smashing to the ground. The communal nest of a group of sociable weavers, draped over a tree in the Kalahari like a vast shaggy rug.

There is a book I like called
The Language of Birds
which turns out to be a curious little miscellany of bird-related vocabulary. The Hebrew for two-tone owl is
o-ah.
The following is a list of collective nouns: A parliament of owls. An exaltation of larks. A murmuration of starlings.

In my other reading I have learned that a male wild turkey with small neck wattles is unlikely to attack a male wild turkey with large neck wattles.

I have learned that collisions between birds and aircraft are surprisingly common and potentially catastrophic.

There are just three bird videos on the shelves at the library:
Wildfowl, The Behaviour of Penguins
and
The Flight of Eagles.
Finding
The Flight of Eagles
is the most exciting thing that has happened to me in the course of these miserable weeks. It is what gave me my idea.

I have been reading about eagles for some time now and I cannot imagine there is a living creature anywhere that would not be frightened if confronted by one. Bald, crowned, golden, harpy, short-toed—they are all different but they all have the same beady eyes and sloping beaks, they all possess, more or less, the same mean face, the same grand ambitions when it comes to the kill. The South American harpy will swoop into trees and pick off sloths the size of sheep dogs. The European short-toed eagle will attack a viper whole. And then there is—or rather was—Harpagornis, the largest eagle the world has ever seen. Now extinct, it preyed on the large flightless, ostrich-like moas of New Zealand. It had a nine-foot wingspan, talons as big as a tiger's claws. I imagine its spread shadow across the sun, the creak of its enormous wings, its terrifying speed. The hysterical moa, thundering through the forest. Harpagornis skewered to its soft back.