Gathering

There are more magpies in Dublin than anywhere else in the world. Belfast must be second on the list. I could see them lined up on the giant arm of Goliath, the biggest crane in the western world; they flew in flocks over Napoleon’s nose, a craggy lump of nasal rock sprouting from a mountain worn to resemble the great man’s face glowering over the city. It was January. I stepped onto a concrete harbour surrounded by a khaki sea, magpies arrowing across the sky, stepped onto foreign soil and felt as if I were home.

I’d come to stay in Ballynanane, a small village on the east coast of Northern Ireland. It was little more than a single street called Main Street, as were most of the major roads in these tiny towns. It had a harbour, a municipal park, a pub – the Sandpiper with mustard-coloured plaster walls and windows as thick as the bottoms of beer glasses – a Spar shop and an insurance broker’s called John Lloyd’s that had a toy scene in the window with miniature cows and plastic trains. There was a café called the Pink Geranium which I was to discover had a tiny cinema screen in a back room, and a church in solid grey granite. The house I had rented was at the far end of the village. It was an end terrace house, two up, two down, with a handkerchief of a garden front and back and a date palm tree by the gate that had seen better days. The house looked out onto the sea and the wind howled round the gable end and frayed the palm leaves into thongs.

I’d bought a bicycle in a junk shop before I left, and the first thing I did when I arrived that January day was ride through the village. At the far end was a wood bisected by a mud road potholed with puddles. The grey stone walls surrounding it were high, a good couple of metres, and topped with battlements. Blocking the entrance was a rusty iron gate with great spikes set between two stone turrets. The gates were chained together but the padlock had a flower of pure, shiny silver round the keyhole.

I cycled past the entrance to the wood, and at the point where the road curved away to the south and left the wood behind someone had painted ‘For the love of the blue skies of Ireland we will not surrender to the Republic’ in ragged white letters on the walls. There was little hope of that. The sky was dark grey, it was drizzling and the skeletal trees were black with rain. Tattered remnants of leaves clung like sodden garments to some of the branches, and great cables of ivy wound round their limbs, burying finger-thin suckers knuckle-deep in the bark. I could just make out part of a large house deep within the wood. It was painted pale olive green; the reflections of black storm clouds swam viscously in the lifeless windows. And then they came. I heard the beat of their wings first for they were utterly silent. The base of my spine started to tingle, and I felt a chill draught creep along my scalp. There must have been about two hundred of them, shoaling through the sky, black and cruciform, blocking out what little light was left. It took at least a minute for them all to pass over my head and slide as one sinuous body over the wall, and through the wood. They alighted on some oaks and clustered in dense groups along the branches as if the trees were growing ill-formed and shifting galls. From the heart of the wood came the strangled cry of a crow, and now for the first time they called, a rattling clamour that issued from their hoarse throats.

Cabaire breac in Gaelic, maggot pie from the French, my first sight of a communal roost of Irish magpies. I stood in the rain and watched them as they stirred and seethed along the damp limbs of the trees. It looked like an optical illusion, the dark trees crowned with black and white birds – it was difficult to see where one bird ended and another began. My eyes watered, and the noise hurt my ears, but somehow it seemed right that I should be welcomed in this way.

I stopped at the Sandpiper on my way home. I stood in the entrance and dripped gently as my eyes adjusted to the gloom. No-one spoke. I walked a little unsteadily towards the bar and ordered a Guinness. When in Rome . . . The burr of talk began to build back up. The place was full of a dense fug of smoke, the floor and the bar were made of dark wood, and the seats were upholstered in mulberry imitation leather. I liked the timing of the drink, the no-rush attitude while the barman propped his chin in his hands and waited for the froth to settle. A few youths were playing pool in one corner, and in the other a couple of old men were huddled over their pints by a hissing gas fire. There were no women. Someone once told me you could get all the nourishment you needed if you existed on a diet of Guinness and peanuts. I sipped my drink, and watched the pool with one eye and the motor racing on Eurosport with the other. The sound had been turned down and the cars veered, swerved and collided in perfect silence.

‘Will you not join us?’

I looked over. One of the old men was leaning on his stick with one hand and gesturing towards me with the other.

‘C’mon over,’ he said. His face was lined and his hair was wild and white. Even in the yellow light filtered through the beer-glass windows I could see his eyes were bright blue. ‘New to town are you?’ he asked as I sat down.

‘I arrived today,’ I said.

‘And where were you saying you’re from?’

‘You’re not Irish be any chance?’ said the other. ‘Every bloody Englishman thinks he’s Irish. There’s more Irish over the water than there are here.’ He was small and round with a pink face and sunken, bleary eyes. His hair was reduced to sandy wisps and he only had one front tooth.

‘Definitely English,’ I said, ‘I live in Cambridge and my parents have a house in Kew.’

‘You’re the student then, the one in the O’Malleys’ house,’ said the blue-eyed one.

‘Kind of,’ I replied.

‘Kind of staying in the O’Malleys’ house or a kind of student? Och, aren’t all students kind of studying?’ He chuckled and held out his hand. ‘George,’ he said. His grip was surprisingly strong, his knuckles large and misshapen. ‘And this is Cyril.’ He nodded at his plump companion. ‘Runs the cinema across the road, so he does. Not that you would be interested, you young folk, all you want is to be Terminated or Robotcop or some other nonsense. Cyril here shows old films. Black and whites.’

I shook Cyril’s soft white hand. ‘My favourite kind,’ I said and his eyes lit up.

‘And what will you be studying?’ asked George.

‘Magpies.’

He stiffened and fixed me with his piercing gaze. ‘Magpies is it? That’s a queer thing to be learning. Mark my words,’ he leant forward and gripped my hand, ‘they’re the devil’s bird and they’ve a drop of his own good blood under their tongue.’

I recoiled from his beer-laden breath.

He suddenly laughed, a wheezing sound emanating from the depths of his chest, and I was no longer sure whether he had been teasing me or not.

‘Magpies indeed. Well good luck to you.’

The two old men clinked their glasses together and Cyril gave a gap-toothed grin.

I nodded at them and stood up to go. As I was putting on my still damp coat George called out to me, ‘What did you say your name was, son?’

‘It’s Niall,’ I said. ‘My name’s Niall.’

In 1909 the Reverend W. Darwin Fox wrote about the Great Magpie Marriage. He was describing ceremonial gatherings which aren’t marriages, but more like teenagers dating, flirting and fighting, although, as he says, ‘The whole affair was evidently considered by the birds as of the highest importance.’ I saw a ceremonial gathering the following morning. Maybe it was just luck; I certainly took it as a good omen.

I spent the morning cycling round the winding roads that led out of Ballynanane trying to familiarize myself with the landscape. The sky was white and the visibility low, fog obscuring the tips of the trees. I stopped at a sheep-bitten piece of scrubland by the edge of the sea. Where the grass ended and the cliff began there was a drop into nothingness; the caw of seagulls, wheeling in as if from nowhere, was muted. The chill air was sharp with the scent of gorse, and there were tatters of wool beaded with dew on the scraggy hawthorn bushes. I left my bike propped up against a wall and walked across the grass. About a hundred metres away from the cliff edge the gorse and the hawthorn grew denser and taller. I pushed my way through and in the centre was a natural clearing. A stream ran round the edge, its banks overflowing muddily onto the sodden earth. A couple of magpies were crouched in the puddles, shaking water through their feathers. As soon as they saw me they flew through the trees. I crouched down behind a gorse bush amongst khaki-coloured needles and waited.

It wasn’t long before the pair returned and started to poke about in the short grass for worms and beetles. I was so engrossed watching them that I didn’t notice the others arrive. There must have been about ten of them, sitting almost motionless in a small hawthorn above the foraging pair. Against the overcast sky, their white plumage did not show up and they seemed to be irregular birds, painted with a Picasso touch. Suddenly one of the males hopped down onto the grass and bounded towards the female. The resident male stopped in his tracks and bounced in an exaggerated fashion over to the female too. She continued pecking and prodding the ground as if deliberately ignoring them. The males started to circle her, hopping faster and faster after each other, uttering shrill cries. The first male flew directly at the interloper and the three of them headed for the hawthorn. The other magpies burst in a cloud from its branches, chattering harshly. Like disturbed butterflies, they drifted back down, but almost immediately, one aimed a peck at another. The fight escalated until the whole tree shook with the beat of their wings, and the heavy air reverberated with their caws. As the noise increased, the birds broke into two groups and began to chase each other round the small bushes in the clearing. Other young birds, drawn by the spectacle, started to fly in, in pairs and threesomes, swooping low over the branches and seeding themselves like strange fruit in the stunted trees. The overspill landed back in the centre of the clearing. They appeared to be pecking for grubs, watched by the new arrivals, but I saw a pair of birds flirting on the outskirts. The male had fluffed his white feathers up, and angled his tail towards the female, a sure sign of his amorous intentions. She was pretending to feed, but was, in fact, edging closer and closer to him in small hops. The male that had prior claims on the female darted in and the usurper chattered excitedly and flew at him. And then the whole clearing seemed to erupt in screaming, fighting, flapping magpies. It felt as if there were about fifty of them now, a pack of juveniles without homes or mates, testosterone-fuelled and high on the thin, fine air. They flew above my head flashing their piebald wings and my ears rang with the noise. They tangled in the bushes and fought in the clearing, and then crested the tips of the trees and disappeared into the mist-thick field.

I burst from the gorse bush, snagging my coat on the thorns and scattering needles. My legs ached with cramp, and my steps were jagged. I slipped on the slick grass, righted myself and tore through the hawthorns in the direction of the young birds. But they were nowhere to be seen. They had vanished as quickly and as silently as they had come. The clearing was probably prime territory belonging to a resident pair, and they had been challenged by the youngsters. The others had watched and joined in the skirmish as a way of probing the limits of the resident pair’s endurance, and in the hope of quick sex. Too young, I thought. They had yet to learn that this sort of thing was best conducted in privacy lest you lose your woman.

I wandered around for a while, my trainers and trousers getting increasingly wet and muddy, then cycled a little way on. There was not a magpie to be seen. It was now mid-afternoon and a bad time to try to find them anyway. I rode back into town and stopped at the Sandpiper. I bought a couple of Guinnesses and carried them, froth peeling away in the wind, to the Pink Geranium. The thickly plastered walls were a livid shade of fuchsia, and the roof was thatched, a thin stream of peat-laden smoke guttering from the chimney. A door from the café led into the cinema. Cyril was perched on a high chair next to the projector at the back of the room, a film flickering on the opposite wall. I handed him a pint.

‘Well, bless you, bless you, lad, an’ you haven’t spilt a drop,’ he said, and his face cracked open in a gummy grin. ‘I’ll wind the film back to the start. We can’t have you missing any of it.’

As I was the only customer, there were no objections. I slumped into one of the dusty, dried-blood-red chairs, put my feet on the back of the one in front of me and spent the rest of the afternoon drinking and watching Passport to Pimlico in glorious, scratchy monochrome.

‘Next week,’ said Cyril in a stage whisper as the credits rolled, ‘we’ll be showing Sunset Boulevard.’

On my way back through the village I stopped at Spar. It was run by Mrs O’Malley whom I rented the house from. The shop played a game of musical lights – there didn’t seem to be enough electricity to go round so only one light was ever on at a time. Shrivelled carrots and limp cabbage wilted in the darkness. Mother was right, there was almost no fruit. Mrs O’Malley swapped the lights round so I could find the tin can section. A young man stepped out of the shadows and peered over my shoulder as I was trying to decide whether to go for Custard Creams or Jaffa Cakes.

‘Oh, don’t mind William,’ called out Mrs O’Malley. ‘Come away from there,’ she said, to William, I presumed, as if he were a dog that had been poking its nose in something unsavoury. ‘William’s harmless,’ she added, steering him into the corner of the shop and pushing him into a chair. ‘He’s just a wee bit soft in the head.’

It was difficult to tell, but I thought he must have been in his early twenties. His black hair was unkempt and slightly greasy and he curled his arms around himself as he sat hunched over in the hard-backed chair. He watched me surreptitiously from large vacant eyes and dribbled a little. I bought several tins of sardines and baked beans, a loaf of Mother’s Pride, a jar of Marmite, a packet of Jammy Dodgers and some Cheese Triangles.

‘’Tis a shame about the weather but,’ said Mrs O’Malley as she reached me down a six-pack. She had one of those perms where the curl doesn’t quite meet the scalp.

I looked outside. It was still raining. ‘I imagine I’ll get used to it,’ I said, as much to myself as her.

The sofa at home was green and lumpy with the springs poking out uncomfortably. There was a threadbare mat on the floor and a cast-iron fireplace. I turned the sofa to face the window and sat looking at the sea eating sardines on toast. Between the coal grey of the water and the darkening of the sky was a thin line of light. I watched it narrow as the wind whined round the house and whistled through the chimney.

After a week of baked beans and sardines, the odd bag of chips from the Sandpiper, and sticky cakes from the Pink Geranium, I thought I should have a proper meal. David had bought me a copy of The Rough Guide to Ireland – I think it was his idea of a joke – but it said there was a restaurant out past the lough. It was vegetarian, but you can’t have everything.

It was already dark when I left for the Greenaun and the wind felt like a force field that I had to fight my way through. In the heart of the wood a couple of lights were shining. I cycled past and out of the village into the darkness beyond. The wind was particularly vicious as it knifed over the tops of the low stone walls. In the distance I could hear cows lowing. It took me a good half-hour to get to the restaurant though the lough was only about a couple of miles as the crow flies from Ballynanane. The light from the occasional car froze the waves approaching the shore in a snapshot of movement. At the most northerly end was a large reed-bed alive with roosting sparrows. As the reeds hissed and seethed in the wind, small clumps of birds fell from the stalks and fluttered into the dark beyond the beam of my bike light. I thought that I was disturbing them so I turned off my light. Above the whispering of the reeds, I could hear the cheep of the birds and the trembling of tiny wings. Then there was a single shrill cry and the flock winged away en masse to another part of the marsh. I wondered what could be hunting them. I put my light back on. A few metres away, a couple of magpies flew up from the road giving alarm calls and disappeared over the nearest wall. I stopped the bike and bent down to look. The mutilated body of a sparrow was lying on the road, its neck broken and its chest skewered open. I immediately decided to come back when it was lighter. Magpies killing sparrows – I’d never heard of such a thing before. Did they hunt the sparrows in groups? Was this an example of a magpie ‘tradition’ found only on the east coast of Ireland? Or was it an isolated incident born of necessity because the winter was so bleak? I left them to their meal and rode on.

The restaurant was upstairs in a Georgian-style house overlooking the lough. The tables and chairs were of solid pine and heavy folds of calico hung at the windows. Walls, the colour of baked pumpkin, had been covered in pale yellow stencils and spider plants hung from the ceiling. It was pretty full. I took a small table in the corner. Below me I could see part of the reed-bed and a floodlit pier extending into the lake.

I ordered half a carafe of house white which came with a glass tumbler like the ones you have at school and a beetroot and sour cream risotto with chargrilled courgettes. It certainly wasn’t green – the courgettes had brilliant yellow skin – but probably contained a few more vitamins than my normal fodder.

There was a slight commotion on the table in front of me – one of the party was demanding to see the manager. Apparently there’d been some mix-up with the order. The waitress was beginning to look uncomfortable.

‘Our manager never comes in, so he doesn’t,’ she said.

‘Well, who runs the place then?’ asked the elderly man who’d been making the complaint.

‘I suppose it’s Eddie really, our head chef.’

‘Well then, send him up. I’d like a wee word with him.’

I turned away at that point – I thought I saw an owl sliding past the oil-black water. When I looked back at the party, they seemed to be smiling up at the chef, soothed no doubt by the newly uncorked bottle of wine he’d brought up for them. He had his back to me, but even so he was like no chef I’d ever seen. He was about my height and thin, and was wearing a tight black T-shirt, purple suede trainers and navy Levi’s. His hair was short and black, and round his waist hung a set of kitchen knives hooked together on a thin chain.

He started to walk away from the table, but the elderly gentleman called him back. ‘Since you’ve been so kind as to give us the wine, we’ll be so kind as to pay for it,’ he said, but I scarcely paid him any attention. As the chef turned to face the man, his belt of knives swung out, scattering beams of metal light across the walls and ceiling. Even more noticeable, the chef was a woman, no, a young girl, of about nineteen.

A little later, on my way back from the gents, I passed her leaning out of the landing window, smoking.

‘I’d complain about the food too if it wasn’t so good,’ I said ruefully.

She turned to me and blew out a plume of smoke. ‘Then what would you want to be doing that for?’ she asked sharply.

‘Well, just trying to work out how to get a free bottle of wine,’ I said and cringed inwardly at how lame my attempt at humour had been.

‘I’ll see what I can do,’ she said, turning away from me.

I slunk back to my table. Half an hour later she slid into the chair opposite me. She had brought a tumbler with her, and immediately poured herself a glass of wine and refilled my glass, emptying the carafe.

‘Fetch us another, would you, Siobhan,’ she called to the waitress and turned back to me. ‘Eddie,’ she said, extending her hand.

‘Niall,’ I replied.

She began to roll a cigarette, a very thin one made of liquorice-coloured paper, and I noticed that her big, strong hands were laced with tiny white scars. Her eyes were large and blue, and although she was good-looking her nose was too big and her lips too thin for her ever to be called beautiful. She said nothing until she had finished rolling her cigarette, lit it, and taken a drag and a gulp of wine. By this stage I’d recovered from the fact that he was a she, but there was something terribly familiar about her face – though for the life of me I couldn’t think where I might have seen her before.

‘So what,’ she said, ‘brings you here?’

‘Magpies,’ I said.

She nodded. ‘I was having a smoke outside and I saw you on the road. Was it a sparrow you found? They’re allus killing them in winter.’

I noticed that she had extraordinarily clear skin, almost translucent. I remembered I was supposed to respond at this point but I couldn’t stop staring at her. I said ‘You look too young to be a head chef.’

She shrugged. ‘Everyone allus says that. I’m twenty-one. When you’re young you’ve more ideas, you’re not so set in your ways as they are round here. So you liked your risotto then?’ She looked down at my plate which I’d scraped clean, leaving only thin lines of pink beetroot juice. It had reminded me of a savoury version of the rice pudding they served in the college at Cambridge, but that was fine by me.

‘Yes, it was great. I didn’t even know you could get yellow courgettes.’

‘In the back of beyond. Surprising what you can find. Anyway,’ she stubbed her cigarette out resolutely, ‘I must get back. Come again.’ She got up, clinking slightly. She had such a long neck. I thought of how it would feel if I cupped it in the palm of my hand. Eddie strode across the room and disappeared down the stairs to the kitchens.

*    *    *

I settled into a regular pattern. I spent the afternoons in the cinema or in the Sandpiper, and once a week I cycled over to the Greenaun for a meal that was bizarrely gourmet for the north of Ireland. Eddie was usually weird but spot on; occasionally she missed. Peanut butter, cottage cheese and mandarin pizza followed by tomato ice cream was definitely wide of the mark for me, and as far as I know she never repeated it.

I set up an office in the house in the back bedroom which was little more than a boxroom. Mrs O’Malley lent me a rickety table that I had to prop up with chips of wood. I made myself a filing cabinet out of a cardboard box for my papers on magpies, and customized my Psion so that I could collect data from it in the field and download it to the laptop at night. It took me two days to match the spreadsheets from the Psion with those of the computer. The frustrating thing was that there was no phone line so I couldn’t even have e-mail. Ironically the lab in Cambridge did have a satellite phone that hooked up to the computer, but I’d never even considered that I might need it.

I spent three weeks mist-netting entire tracts of the coastline and the outskirts of the wood in a vain attempt at catching magpies. Hanging a net in one place ensured that you could never return to trap them there again; they were far too cunning. For those three weeks I was up by six in the morning, staggering through the dark and crashing about in the undergrowth, becoming entangled in my own nets, growing sodden and cold. I thought of my father in tweeds (though even he, surely, would have worn something sensible in khaki) wandering through the Peruvian jungles inspecting traps for small mammals, and his brief excitement when he found them full. At that time he would have killed them and stuffed the specimens. The place had probably been crawling with four-inch cockroaches and jungle rats, but it seemed a far more sedate occupation than waiting in the freezing cold for a wily white and black bird which, if caught, would attempt to lacerate your hands with its beak and scratch your eyes out with its claws, not to mention having to release the quivering songbirds that I also inadvertently trapped. But eventually I managed to catch and ring a sufficient number of the birds and felt I could now begin to start collecting data.

The day I began my research properly two magpies (unringed) alighted on the harbour wall as I was wheeling my bike out of the house. A lucky twosome, and, indeed, I was fortunate that day. Dawn was just breaking, the village was bathed in a steel-grey glow and there was no-one around. I’d chosen a section of land past the wood as my study site. A field of long grass led to a coppice of pine trees bordered by a high stone wall which was festooned with ivy. Beyond that was a scrub wood of hawthorn and elderberry with dense tracts of bramble and dead bracken that gave way to short, rabbit-cropped grass. The grass bordered a bay that was a good two miles long. At one end the wood by the village swept right down to the shore; the other side of the bay grew increasingly stony rising to a dark black cliff with a disused lighthouse. About half a mile out to sea was a rocky outcrop, barren save for nesting seabirds. It was called Skull Island.

My site seemed to be ideal magpie habitat because there was short grass for them to feed on, and a choice of tall trees as well as the denser hawthorns to nest in. What I hadn’t realized was that I’d walked onto a battlefield. As I crossed the first field with its lush grass, dark shapes fell out of the pines and flew agitatedly amongst the trees, cawing bitterly. In the half-light as they swooped about me and their calls tore the air I could just make out the grey cape on their shoulders: hooded crows, after people the magpies’ most hated enemies.

I walked along the seafront as the day broke, scanning the land for birds with my binoculars. The tide was on its way out and had left a flotsam of cuttlefish cases and kelp, the stalks as bleak as bones, the holdfast shrivelled hands whose fingers had been ripped from rocks. The sea was calm today, the colour of pewter. And then I saw a male magpie. He was tree-topping, standing on the tip of an elder whose branches were glazed green with algae, bobbing and lifting his tail in the air, the proud gestures of a bird asserting his territorial rights. I focused the binoculars on the tree. The female was there too, crouched in the thicket of branches, her brash black and white plumage almost perfect camouflage as it broke up the outline of her body and melded into the shadows. To my intense relief, I had already ringed both of them.

Pacing up and down my study site, I discovered that there were four territories each with a pair of magpies along the scrub by the beach; I decided that they would be the main focus of my study, although I needed to survey other birds in the rest of the area which, if the winter roosts were anything to go by, was densely populated. It wasn’t long before I came across an old tumbledown cottage at one end of the site – the roof had been thatched but was mostly caved in, and behind it was a small greenhouse; miraculously some of the panes of glass were still intact. It was only marginally warmer inside than out; a chill wind seeped through the shattered glass. I stood on the stone lintel and thought of my father. One of the first things he’d done when we moved to our house in Kew was to build a greenhouse in the garden. He was home from work by six and spent the rest of the evening and all his weekends assembling it. Meanwhile cuttings and tubers accumulated bit by bit along every window sill in the house. I carried bits of wood and passed him nails, screws, putty, orchids. I thought I was indispensable, but I’m sure I just got in the way. I was only eight at the time, but I remember seeing my mother standing at the back door with her hands on her hips watching him, an apron wrapped around her middle. She’d been going to tell him that his tea was on the table, but the words were stillborn, and even at that age I could feel her despair though then I found it incomprehensible.

‘It’s not your usual day,’ said Eddie, sliding my plate in front of me.

‘And that’s not your usual job,’ I said.

She sat down opposite me, chin in her hand, and said, ‘It’s not so busy. I can take a few minutes off.’

She reached across to an empty table for a glass and poured herself a small measure of my wine before she started to roll one of her thin cigarettes.

‘Well, d’you like it?’

I’d only taken a couple of mouthfuls, but I’d learnt that the response had to be immediate if I didn’t want to offend her. She was sitting hunched forward, her eyes screwed up against the smoke, her whole body tense. For once she was wearing her chef’s trousers, but with a CK T-shirt and Nike trainers she still managed to make them look like a fashion accessory.

I nodded with my mouth full, but realized I wasn’t going to be let off that lightly. She’d baked flat-cap mushrooms, their lids lined with basil leaves, soaked in white wine and garlic. There were also roast potatoes and parsnips coated in apple jelly. It was delicious. I told her so, and felt as if I were back home again. It wasn’t so bad when my mother cooked – she felt it was expected of her and we were rarely obliged to comment, but whenever my father made anything, his burnt, hard, or largely inedible food was the main topic of conversation. He, like me, could quite happily live on baked beans on toast and bread and jam but for my mother’s sake he occasionally tried to cook. Once when my mother was away for the day we baked a cake together and took it out of the oven too early – on purpose. The bottom was a glorious blend of molten strawberry jam and runny golden cake mixture. We ate it straight out of the tin. The only thing that spoilt it was my mother coming home and finding every surface in the kitchen smothered in flour and smeared with margarine, dishes scattered from the sink to the table. She’d dropped her Liberty bags on the floor and burst into tears.

Eddie didn’t smile, but her eyes glowed briefly when I praised her cooking. She finished her wine and got up to go.

‘Do you ever get any time off?’ I asked. I’d been practising all day. It was meant to sound nonchalant, and had by the fifteenth time down on the seashore as I waved the mug of my thermos flask in the air. Now it came out as a hoarse croak, my voice regressing to a pre-pubescent squeak at the end.

‘Sure I do. I’ll come over to Ballynanane some time.’

I watched her walk away from me, weaving past the potted plants, her knives clattering by her sides, and I thought of her hands with their smooth almond-shaped nails and the myriad scars. That was too easy, I thought. There had to be a catch.

*    *    *

The following day was a complete disaster in terms of my fieldwork, but that, I suppose, is the pattern of these things. As usual it was dark when I got up and there was a dense fog that clung to my clothes. It was so thick I could barely see more than a metre in front of me; like the drapes of a curtain being shaken, the shifting mass of cloud released the sharp smell of salt, fish and oil. On the beach I could hear the water breaking gently as if from afar, and when the dawn broke, it was with a thin blue light that seeped through the mist.

I wandered up and down the beach, but the visibility was so poor I could see nothing. It was slightly frustrating, but comforting in a way – for some reason it reminded me of my childhood. Just after seven in the morning, the mist started to clear and I was aware of the brooding mass of the sea. I was holding a shell at the time – I must have picked it up in an idle moment. It was a top hat – a sleek cone, pale grey-blue wound with opal and purple like an ornate turban – and when I turned to look down the beach in the direction of the wood I saw a horse and rider emerging from the mist. The horse was galloping but its hooves made no sound on the sand; its legs rose and fell as regularly as pistons, the muscles bunching and sliding under its skin with smooth, oiled precision. The animal appeared to be moving in slow motion: for one long moment neither horse nor rider seemed to draw any nearer to me. The rider on the dark bay was clothed in red from head to foot. And then the two were upon me and for one brief moment I looked up at the great sweating animal and saw that its rider, clad in what I now perceived to be a cloak, was sitting side-saddle, the brilliant scarlet material billowing out behind her. They passed me and were once more engulfed by the fog, and I was left only with the stark image of them indelibly impressed on my mind.

I did not see a single magpie that day.

When I was at Cambridge I studied dunnocks. Sometimes they’re called hedge sparrows because they’re small and brown, scurry wren-like in hedges and look like fatter versions of their namesakes. Dunnocks have a rather strange social life: one female mates with two, sometimes three, males and they all help to rear her chicks. Like everything in life there’s no equality; it’s not a caring, sharing household. One male is dominant, and he gets to mate with the female most of the time. But the female actively solicits sex with her other ‘husbands’ and will sneak into the bushes with them when she thinks the top male isn’t looking. The reasons for this are twofold (they, of course, have nothing to do with love). The female gets a good mix of genes from different males – it’s the old adage of not putting all your eggs in one basket. Mating with one male would mean all her chicks inherited his deficiencies, but at least some out of a bunch of nestlings with different fathers will survive – the ones with the best genes. And the other reason is that it’s not exactly in the males’ interest to look after chicks that don’t belong to them. The problem is that they can’t tell which fledglings are theirs so they’ve compromised: all the males feed all the fledglings, but they only feed them in proportion to the amount of sex they’ve had. If the female copulates with all the males, they all think they’ve produced lots of chicks, and will fetch numerous caterpillars. It seems like a reasonable strategy, but personally I thought the males didn’t need to work quite so hard: they couldn’t yet understand that the number of times one has sex doesn’t necessarily correlate with the number of offspring one produces.

I worked in the high-walled botanical garden which was quiet and sheltered and trapped the sun in odd corners. It was by chance that I discovered the scientific proof for multiple parenthood of the dunnock chicks. I was watching a female hiding in a flower bed with one of the subordinate males, and as she was about to mate with him she ejected a little white pellet. After the birds had done their business, I collected this pellet and took it back to the lab. It proved to be full of sperm – from different males. The males were not just competing against each other on a day to day level, playing a game of subterfuge as they hid amongst the winter jasmine, they were also filling the female full of as much sperm as they could, and their sperm were continuing the battle inside her – may the best sperm win, and all that. But the female had defeated them all and was chucking the stuff out every time she wanted to mate. I concentrated on collecting and analysing these sperm samples but, unsurprisingly, I didn’t find many. One morning a female I was watching expelled a sperm parcel which landed on a leaf. I waited until she had flown away, and went to collect it, slide at the ready. But as I got to the bush, the pellet slid off the leaf. I started crawling round in the undergrowth looking for the tiny white blob. I was lying face down in a flower bed covered in mud and twigs when I saw a pair of shiny black sensible shoes. I looked up and there was a nun standing in front of me. She bent down and peered at me through her glasses.

‘Young man,’ she said, ‘what on earth are you doing?’

‘Ugh! And you told her you were looking for bird sperm?’

Eddie, I thought, had no sense of irony. We were at my house and I’d just finished telling her about my dunnock research. It was about a week since I’d last seen her and I’d got back from the Pink Geranium in that warm and befuddled state that comes from drinking pints in the dark whilst watching an old B-movie and finding, on your entrance back into the real world, that although you have squandered your afternoon, remnants of the day still remain. She was sitting in her car outside my house, hanging her cigarette out of the window. I didn’t ask how she knew where I lived; in Ireland everyone knows everything about everybody. She was looking in the wing mirror and as soon as she saw me approaching she stubbed the cigarette out on the side of the car, and started bustling me and all her provisions into the house. She’d bought boxes of food, crockery and cooking pots plus all her knives.

‘I didn’t think you’d have anything decent to cook in,’ she said, giving me a cast-iron wok to carry. She was right, but she was disgusted at how right she was. ‘Is this all you have?’ she asked incredulously, opening one of the cupboard doors. ‘How d’you manage?’

I looked inside the cupboard which contained an ill assortment of chipped china and old Pyrex. ‘You only need a plate and a knife for sardines on toast. Maybe a spoon as well.’ I changed my mind. ‘In fact, the beauty of this dish is that you don’t need a thing – not even a tin opener.’

Eddie curled her lip at me.

She inspected my fridge too, and was about to close the door, her face screwed up at its lack of anything edible save for two loaves of Mother’s Pride and some half-used margarine, when she pounced on a silver-foil-wrapped parcel.

‘What have you here?’ she asked, pulling it out.

‘My sandwiches.’

‘You’ve a brave few in here. Are you on some kind of weight-gain diet?’ She balanced the sandwiches in one hand.

‘No, they’re for the week.’

She looked at me quizzically.

‘It saves time. You do them all at the start of the week, and I can just grab them as I’m going out the door. I have to get up early, you know,’ I protested.

She shook her head at me and giggled. ‘You kill me, so you do.’

She’d been wearing a knee-length camel-coloured fake fur coat that looked as if it had been made out of a bathroom mat; underneath she had on a black T-shirt with a green plastic alien sealed into a clear pocket on the front.

‘What on earth is that?’ I asked, trying to put on a deeply plummy accent, peering as closely as I could at her chest.

‘Get away with you,’ she said, shoving me hard.

She was incredible: she’d brought two sorts of wine, an ice bucket and some ice. I didn’t even know you could buy ice – it reminded me of the days when men cut slabs from fjords in Norway and shipped them back to London, the clippers racing each other and the melting ice wrapped in sackcloth. Back on the Thames they unloaded the ice onto the dock and it glittered cold and blue and alien as traders haggled for slices of frozen Norwegian rain. This stuff was in a plastic bag shaped into cubes with hollow centres. The wine we were supposed to start with as an aperitif was pink and from somewhere called Blossom Hill. I thought it was a bit of a girlie drink, but it was surprisingly nice and not sweet at all.

I watched as Eddie chopped up the food, slicing her blade down as if it were a guillotine. Seconds later an onion would still look like an onion, but when she swept it into a pan it fragmented into myriad minute cubes. She mistook my close scrutiny and said, ‘It’s not what you think, you know. I started playing about with knives when I was wee. I used to watch the chefs on telly and try to chop things as fast as them. I practised on old turnips and bits of stick, anything that was around, and the knife slipped a bit sometimes.’

I realized she was talking about the scars on her hands. She started telling me why she was vegetarian. I stopped listening after a while and just looked at her instead. As she bent over the chopping board, the light caught the line of each fragile bone in her neck. I imagined running my fingers down her vertebrae and with difficulty prevented myself from mentally peeling off her alien T-shirt.

Eddie rolled out pastry and cut it to fit the shape of a deep tin, two circles for the top and bottom, a rectangle for the side. She worked deftly, the blade of her knife flashing, and with almost no measuring at all she created a perfectly lined tin with none of those bits of awkward pastry that normally dangle over the side, or the edges that won’t quite meet so you have to do a cut and paste job. The only time I ever made pastry was at school in home economics lessons and my flan case looked like a patchwork quilt embroidered to imitate the dark side of the moon. Eddie rubbed her eyes and left a smear of flour on her temple. Once everything was in the oven, she washed her hands, rolled a cigarette and flung open the kitchen door.

‘C’mon, it’ll be a wee while before it’s ready.’

We walked across the road and leant on the railings overlooking the sea. They were ice cold and burnt my stomach. Below us the sea heaved. Street lights catching the dark water chiselled it into fine-cut waves; occasionally spray arced towards us. Far out at sea came the deep boom of a foghorn. I thought how amazing it was that the sea could be the same and yet different, the waves rolling in following a pattern programmed by the tide, and then, for some indefinable reason, a rogue wave would smash against the concrete shore and shower us with sub-zero sea water.

Eddie had baked sweet potatoes in their skins and mashed them with yoghurt, ginger and green peppercorns; the pastry turned out to be for a deep mushroom pie which she cut into perfect slices, and there were roasted pink onions, split open like flowers, tender and caramelized in balsamic vinegar. She poured us red wine that tasted of cinnamon and earth. We took the kitchen table into the sitting room and sat in the dark with one candle between us and the night, the palm tree flailing at the window and the sea moaning barely metres away.

She was slightly flushed from the wine and from cooking and I noticed that she ate very little, but made many small movements, darting at her plate with her knife and fork. She told me that she had grown up in the next village along the coast and had lived there all her life. She couldn’t wait to leave ‘this poky wee island’. She said she was Catholic, third in a family of five: there were two older brothers, a baby boy, and her sister was five. She talked about how difficult it was with the baby at home, always crying, and her sister who pinched the child when she thought no-one was looking, how her brothers came home drunk from time to time and her father was away at sea for months at a stretch. She glossed over the religious differences between her family and the rest of the village, saying only that she never went to church. When I asked, she said her name was an old Irish one, Eithne, and in the way that abbreviations become diminutives, she was Et, and then Ed, before her brothers began to call her Eddie.

We washed all her pots and packed up the leftover food and then she drove home. I stood in the sitting room which smelt of wine and thought how stupid I was. Stupid to allow her to drive away half drunk along these dark and winding roads. Stupid because I didn’t kiss her. When she stood at the doorway and looked at me, I suddenly realized with a lurch why she seemed so familiar. She was standing in the shadows, and although she was slouching she was almost as tall as me. I stared at her deep blue eyes and short dark hair as if seeing her face for the first time. It was like looking at an old friend. I knew then that she was what I would look like were I a woman and the thought made me mildly uncomfortable. But that isn’t why: I didn’t kiss her because I could have done. I thought if I could, then so could other men; probably other men did. The fact that she had come and cooked this meal for me and me alone I dismissed because, after all, that was her job, cooking was what she did.

She had hesitated, then brushed her lips against my cheek and left. She waved once without looking back.