Hatching

One morning at the beginning of April I arrived on the beach to find sand blowing low along the shore like dry ice. Bleached white, it shifted and seethed in ectoplasmic coils, settled between the ribs of a seagull’s skeleton, grazed a glass bottle washed up from Mexico, folded between the toes of a jelly-bean-blue plastic sandal. It rustled and hissed round my ankles, and danced in will o’ the wisps across the tidemark. How, I wondered, would one calibrate such a thing – the waves on the shore, the sands of the sea? Some days every seventh wave was larger than the rest, thin as a diamond, bright as a gem, its cutting edge splintering into spume. Some days the sea was flat as a sheet of black obsidian; when the sun came out clear pools of aquamarine blossomed like the unfolding of Japanese lilies. What laws of science could determine how water molecules, the pull of the moon, a melting iceberg, flowering algae, and the song of a whale would interact? They say that Chaos Theory can predict these things – collect enough data, use a big enough computer – and from turbulence a pattern will emerge: order from anarchy. I couldn’t picture myself as a mariner sampling the seas for the resolution of complexity. Where everything and nothing has an effect, how would one know where to stop? How could one tell whether the slow drift of a sea horse caught in the current, or the sudden snap of an angel shark’s jaws, would contribute to change, causing a shift of volcanic sand on the shores of Reykjavik, a bigger bloom of krill in the Antarctic? How could a computer tell you that on an insignificant beach on the north-east of the island of Ireland a tide of moon jellyfish would blow in and leave the imprint of their internal organs stamped into the damp sand as perfectly as the print from a mushroom when the spores fall out in the pattern of gills? I liked my science as precise as the counting of orchid leaves. I liked to know that the animals I was watching were programmed by their genes, their lives unfolding as clearly as if I could decipher the code inscribed in the protein of their cells.

That morning the magpie pair in the pine trees fought. I guess it was inevitable, I suppose you could have seen it coming. The crows mobbed them. The grass below the trees was thick and lush – fine for the crows, but too long for the pies. There wasn’t enough food and the female was constantly harassed. At five to nine she left and never returned. I walked in the general direction she took but didn’t find her until eleven fifteen. She was with a stranger, an unringed male on a prime territory way down the beach where the grass was shorn by herds of rabbits and there were low-growing thorny trees. She was preening the unknown male, quivering her wings and begging for food with an intensity unrivalled by any courtship displays I’d seen before. The technical term for this is divorce. By remarrying, female magpies move up in status, zeroing in on middle-class territories, pulling themselves up from the lower classes by their bootstraps. I wondered what had happened to the new male’s ex-partner, whether she too had moved up in the world or had been injured. Perhaps she was still on the scene and he was embarking on a bigamous relationship.

When I returned to the stand of pine trees the abandoned male was hunched in an elderberry bush. The nest was empty and the ground was littered with bloody fragments of eggshell. That night I had a dream. I dreamt I was eight years old again and I was walking through the dry heat of the desert greenhouse at Kew. The quail were silent and it was dark – the cacti’s curved fangs were silhouetted against the milk-white panes of glass. I slid open the door to the Orchid House and entered the moist tropical heat of the jungle. I was surrounded by fleshy leaves. A single spray of moon orchids glittered as pale as moths in the twilight. I walked over to the blackbirds’ nest but there was no sound, no tell-tale rustle of wings, or flighty stirrings in the throat of the female. I climbed up onto the wooden bench, pushing pots of orchids to one side. I thought the nest must be empty but as I knelt in front of it and smelt the metal tang from the copper water pipes, I caught sight of the female. She appeared to be wrapped in spider silk as if she had been completely mummified. I reached out and picked her up. She weighed almost nothing. Cushioned in the moss-lined nest three eggs gleamed like sweets, and a tiny fledgling reared its head and opened its mouth to gape silently at me, its stumps of wings raw, its eyes dark as blackberries and sealed with skin. In my hand I felt the still bird’s heart beat once, twice and then stop. It was like the tolling of a bell echoing in the curve of my palm.

After that first time with Nadia I returned to the stables again and again, driven by some incomprehensible addiction. I didn’t see her for nearly two weeks and I suspected that her job at the riding school was little more than a passing fancy to be entertained when she pleased. When I finally saw her she was curt, and although I was left with tinder-dry fantasies it was little more than I expected. The time after that I was walking along the beach. She came riding towards me, bareback astride her horse, her red cape flickering in the wind. I imagined her wearing nothing but the cloak. At the same time, I wondered at her vanity. I looked up, thinking she might nod to me as she passed, or that at the very least I would catch sight of her face beneath the mane of thick hair, so black it was nearly blue. She slowed the horse to a walk.

‘Do you want a ride?’

I looked dumbly up at her, unsure whether she meant I could test drive Gabriel as if he were a new motor, or whether there was some hidden meaning in her question.

‘Well do you or don’t you? You can get up behind me.’

She wound her cloak tightly around herself and I tried to jump on the horse. I managed on my second attempt, but it was more like a bad scramble than the neat, athletic vault I’d hoped for. The horse steamed gently between my thighs. I put my arms around Nadia’s waist, and as we walked towards the wood I unwound the cape, and eased my hands against her hot skin. She flinched at first, my hands were cold, but as I moved them upwards to cradle her breasts she arched her hips and leant back against me, swaying slightly. There was a glimmer of a smile, a glimpse of real feeling when I asked her to put her cloak back on after she had undressed in the stables.

After that, I slept with Nadia occasionally, though the infrequency was not for lack of trying on my part. I was under no illusions. I didn’t want a relationship with this woman, and I was certain she felt little for me. She was beautiful, but in an impossibly icy yet exotic way. If I’d met her in other circumstances, I doubt I’d have had the courage to speak to her. I think it was her boredom that attracted me; if I created enough opportunities, she might fuck me as the mood took her. I liked to think she found me attractive, but I also knew if I had not presented myself other men would, other men surely had: I was nothing special. When she kept her eyes open during sex, she might as well have had them shut, so cut off was I from what she was feeling, or whom she might be fantasizing she was with, and though this damaged my pride, in a strange and slightly perverse way, it turned me on. There were none of the complicating emotions that are normally implicated in an act that ought to be pure pleasure. I pretended to myself I might get to know her mind if I had sex with her. I was intrigued to find out how she operated, and what might move her; yet I remained completely content to keep our relationship, such as it was, solely physical; knowing deep down that I really didn’t care what she thought.

In the meantime things got worse for the magpies. The following day a sparrow hawk attacked the first pair. The domed roof of the nest must have been badly made for the hawk pulled the messy bunch of twigs apart with its hooked claws and seized the female. The male tried to dive-bomb the hawk, but it was too late: the raptor broke her neck and carried her clean away.

For the rest of the day the male flew between the beach and the scrubland, through the wood and across the fields, calling for his mate. I returned at dusk and there was no sign of the male, but I could hear the pitiful cries of the chicks. They were three days old and I didn’t think they’d last the night. As an objective scientist, the proper thing to do would be to leave them to their fate; the hawk attack was a natural event, after all. I dithered for a couple of minutes and then pushed my way into the heart of the hawthorn. It took me half an hour just to get a couple of metres off the ground. I had to break some of the branches, and by the time I reached the nest my clothes were torn and my hands and face were scratched. The chicks were cold but still alive. As I put my hand through the opening of the nest, they made a heroic effort to open their mouths and cheep. I took them out one by one and put them in the inside pocket of my jacket. There were five of them and they moved feebly against my chest.

I struggled out of the tree, falling the last few feet, and ripped my coat again. I walked back across the fields in the dark, stumbling into the bitter cold of the stream and bruising my shin on a tree stump. When I got home I put them in a box with a hot-water bottle wrapped in a towel underneath them. I heated up some milk until it was the temperature of blood and added an egg. By hammering the edge of a teaspoon I was able to make it into a narrow scoop with which I attempted to feed the five baby magpies. Most of the milk missed and dribbled over them, but when I was sure I’d managed to get at least a little nourishment into them, I covered them with my pillowcase and left them in a box by the fire.

‘Eddie feeding you too many vegetables?’ asked Mrs O’Malley as I paid for five cans of dog food. William watched me from a dark corner of the shop, only his hands, pressed together in his lap, illuminated by a still pool of light. The corner store smelled of dried peas and rotten apples.

As soon as I got back home, the babies started to crane out of the box, their tiny overweighted heads lolling on their thin necks like flowers that haven’t been given enough water. I mixed up the dog food with more egg and a few oats, and ground in some of Eddie’s vitamin tablets. She had innumerable different varieties – she was always complaining that her skin was too dry or something. I told her that if she actually ate anything her skin would be fine – not that I could see anything wrong with her complexion anyway. This time I managed to get a bit more food into them, but even right after I’d fed them, they opened their mouths and begged for more. I was still up when Eddie came home. It was only then that I realized what an intensive and time-consuming job it was for the parents – the babies needed to be fed every fifteen minutes. The noise level increased dramatically every time I went near the box, and, for such small, vulnerable creatures, they were certainly vocal.

Eddie stood in the middle of the floor with her hand on her hip, a cigarette dangling from the other, whilst I tried to explain what I was doing.

‘Didn’t think you’d be up for my benefit,’ was all she said, finally remembering to take a drag.

She went into the kitchen and reappeared a few minutes later with some leftover food from the restaurant. She put the plate on the floor. There were pink onions roasted in sherry and stuffed with almonds and wine-coloured sage leaves, a hot avocado pie that tasted of chicken, red cabbage cooked with cranberries and apple, and chargrilled purple sprouting broccoli. She ticked the items off on her fingers as she enumerated them to me.

‘And I recommend a white Zinfandel from California – which is pink,’ she added when she perceived I hadn’t quite grasped the colour scheme.

I said it all looked rather pretty, but I was too tired to eat much. Eddie sat down on the sagging sofa and got out her knives. She started to sharpen them as fluidly as if she were filing her fingernails and I tried not to look.

*    *    *

The next couple of weeks were a complete nightmare. The magpie chicks ate voraciously and it soon became apparent that there was no way I could go out to the field with them at this loud, hungry and needy stage. I tried to enter some of my data into the laptop, but my attention wandered as soon as they started cheeping again. By the time I’d downloaded the same data three times and lost a day’s work, I gave up and concentrated on sleeping and watching daytime TV. The only time I ever used my brain was when I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation which I thought would amuse Eddie: an angel, if one really existed, would have to have a wing span of six metres to carry the average male body – plus an extra four stone of chest muscle to power them. And to support this extra weight, he’d need a breastbone like a turkey’s but half a metre long. No wonder angels were always saying ‘Do not be afraid’ every time they cruised in at 60mph heading smack bang for virgins and unsuspecting shepherds.

I realized what a pattern Eddie and I had fallen into. Eddie wouldn’t get in until about two in the morning. Twice a week she stayed up until four, sometimes with a friend, sometimes in my house, drinking wine and coffee and smoking dope, before leaving for the vegetable market in Belfast. The rest of the time she would climb into bed and wake me up. I’d doze fitfully and get up at five, whilst she would sleep in until eleven, take a long bath, and dash frantically to work to supervise lunch and prepare the following week’s menu. I used to find it exciting being woken by her insistent tongue and hands and making love in a half-dream; now I just felt tired and annoyed. It wasn’t that I didn’t like giving her pleasure, but I was a little bored of lying beneath her, holding back until she was ready.

For someone who had a very natural look, a large number of bottles containing lotions, creams, unguents and powders had appeared. I’d no idea what they were for, but their smells and contents leaked, spilt, dusted and pervaded the bathroom and bedroom. The kitchen was always scrupulously clean and meticulously laid out, the taps so shiny you could see your reflection in them, the spices and tins in regimental rows in the cupboards, pots of leftovers neatly labelled and sealed with cling film in the fridge – but the rest of the house was a mess. The place reeked of incense, and the bedroom had become a grotto full of wax stalagmites and stalactites. The angels had multiplied too. The wallpaper was all but covered with divine posters and there were gold cherub candles in the bathroom. Eddie liked to bathe in style. I’ve never been a particularly tidy person myself, but I don’t mind my mess. Sometimes she even put flowers in the sitting room. Flowers are for greenhouses.

I moved the magpies into the boxroom and put my files and computer downstairs in the living room.

‘Are you planning on working down here?’ Eddie asked suspiciously.

‘Well, I can’t work upstairs with the magpies, can I? Their bloody cheeping would do my head in.’

‘It does your head in? You’re the one that brought them home. It’s so cramped – I’ve got nowhere to sit, or put any of my stuff. The whole house is full of magpies and magpie bloody papers.’

‘And the bedroom is full of fucking angels. What do you mean you’ve got nowhere to put anything? Your stuff is lying around everywhere. Anyway, you must be used to being cramped, you’re a fucking Catholic for God’s sake.’

I immediately regretted what I’d said.

‘Why d’you think I moved here?’ Eddie yelled in frustration. ‘To get some peace and bloody quiet.’

Even I, no great reader of female behaviour, realized she was on the verge of tears as she ran out of the house and slammed the door. I ran after her and caught her by the palm tree.

‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that. Look, you wouldn’t have wanted them to die, would you?’ I asked.

She shook her head slightly.

‘And it’s only for a little while. As soon as they’re big enough, they’ll fly off and we’ll get the sitting room back to normal. I’ll put all my things in the boxroom and you can have all the space and peace and quiet you want.’

I led her back into the house and kissed her. As I slid my hands beneath her T-shirt, she said in a small voice, ‘I’m late for work, so I am.’

‘Eddie,’ I said, ‘you’re always late for work. Today you’re just going to be a little later.’

I peeled her T-shirt off and made love to her very slowly and gently. Soundlessly. I thought I could make things better without words.

One day Eddie decided to sort out her life and went to Belfast. She came home with four almost identical outfits. She was going to be organized, she explained. Two were for when it was cold, two for when it was warm; the difference between them was the thickness of the material and the colour. She hung her complete outfits up, each one on a separate hanger. They were for when she fell out of bed at midday and sleepwalked into the bathroom. She wouldn’t have to think about what to wear, she said. Within a week they were lying in mixed-up piles on the bedroom floor, and now that I was home I was privy to her loud and panic-stricken demands to locate a certain T-shirt – the one with the black star on green, not the green star on black – her desperate attempts to find something clean, and her constant queries about what I thought she ought to wear. She would snarl at my attempts to locate items of clothing – how could I possibly think that that shirt would go with those trousers? She would smear stuff on her face, rub gel in her hair, toss my clothes round the room, and emerge looking fresh and perfect save for the slightly agonized expression over how late she was.

Since I was cooped up at home with my magpies, I didn’t get the chance to wander along the beach towards the Ismails’ wood under the pretext of research, and so I was unable to see Nadia. I missed her exotic perfume, her air of crisp detachment, the way her eyes would suddenly glow with life in the dark of the stables. I missed her striking, almost glacial beauty, so cold I could barely look at her. I missed being able to take her, wide awake and forcefully, holding my hand over her mouth to stop her crying out loud, feeling her teeth sink into the palm of my hand like a horse at the bit, the way she slid and moved beneath me with no jagged edges or stone-sharp bones.

I called David.

‘Hey,’ I said.

‘All right, mate. How’s it going?’

‘OK. You?’

‘Fine. Did another E1 this weekend. I’ll have to mail you a spare set of keys.’

‘Good?’

‘Yeah, great. The wrens are laying. One male had five nests on his territory.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Should have seen them, they were so perfectly formed. He used bright green moss. I think there’s a correlation, you know, number of nests and territory quality.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Bound to be. We’ll have to run some experimental trials next year. You’d better be there to give me a hand.’

‘Whatever you say, boss.’

‘You bet. All right, you old bastard, see you around.’

I didn’t feel any better. I stood in the phone booth and rested my head against the glass for a minute. It was cold. Outside a gale was blowing.

I phoned my mother and immediately felt guilty at the pleasure in her voice.

‘Niall! I’m so glad you called. We were worried about you. Is everything all right?’

‘Yeah, yeah, fine. How’s Dad?’

‘Same as ever, Niall. I hardly see him. He’s always in a greenhouse, whether it’s the one at home or at Kew.’ She tried to laugh. ‘He’s well. He’s going to a conference soon, in Germany I believe. On orchids, but I don’t know exactly what it’s all about. And he’s given several talks in London recently. I think one was at the RGS. How’s your work? Have you heard from David?’

‘He’s busy counting wren nests.’

‘What about you?’

‘Well, things have kind of ground to a halt here. I’m looking after some baby magpies, not getting much done.’

‘I’m sure you’ll catch up. Whose magpies are they?’

I told her a little bit about the fledglings and then surprised myself by telling her about Eddie. Christ, I thought, I must be in a bad way, talking to my mother like this.

‘What’s she like?’

I thought for a minute. ‘Well, she’s like me, but she’s not. Like me that is. She’s a chef, she doesn’t eat meat, she likes clothes . . .’

I ran out of things to say. How can you sum a person up, I wondered. When I thought of Eddie the images I held in my mind were physical – not sex necessarily, but the way she moved, how she held herself, wielded a knife, walked round the house, strode across the restaurant, bent over laughing, lit a cigarette. Those were the things, I thought, that would remain, long after I’d forgotten what I’d said to her, what she might or might not have said to me, where we’d gone and whom we’d seen.

My mother was still talking. ‘I always remember it being cold and damp, but the sea was incredible, the light, always changing.’

‘Sorry?’ I said. ‘Where was the light incredible?’

‘Ireland,’ she said patiently.

‘Oh. I hadn’t realized you’d been.’

There was a long pause.

‘No, no, I guess not,’ she said at the same time as I said, ‘Look, I’ve got to go. The magpies, you know.’

‘Thanks for calling, love. Don’t leave it so long next time, will you?’

I went back and fed the magpies, then wrapped them up in the pillowcase and headed for the Pink Geranium. Cyril was playing Breakfast at Tiffany’s. I remember smirking in sympathy at the scene where Holly Golightly is trying to get Paul, her new next-door neighbour, to find her black alligator shoes; he discovers one under the bed, she eventually spots the other in the fruit basket. The last thing I can recollect is Audrey Hepburn declaring she is ‘top banana in the shock department.’ I woke up with an erection, and a cloud of beer breath in my face. Cyril was shaking me violently.

‘They’re complaining so they are.’

‘I guess they’re hungry,’ I said, yawning, looking down at the fledglings squirming beneath the pillowcase.

‘Not them, you great lump, them,’ he hissed and indicated the audience with a flamboyant sweep of his arm.

The theatre was filled with old women all of whom were muttering and shaking their heads at me.

‘Church outing, so it is,’ said Cyril. ‘Cakes served in the café afterwards followed by flower arranging.’

I groaned. ‘All right, all right, I get the message.’

‘You’ve not missed much anyway,’ said Cyril sarcastically, ‘I’ve only had to rewind to the beginning twice.’

I picked up my box and made my way slowly along the aisle, tripping over several artfully placed umbrellas. I took the magpies back home to feed them, then carried them with me to the pub.

‘What in God’s name are those?’ asked George, bending his head over his stick to look in the box. The magpies craned their scrawny necks back at him and gaped so widely I thought they might choke. Their feathers were just starting to poke through their wrinkled pink old-man skin. ‘They’re queer and ugly.’

I couldn’t help but agree.

‘The devil’s spawn,’ he added, somewhat unnecessarily I felt. He prodded one with a gnarled finger, the nail thick and yellow. ‘And do you know how the magpie came by his black and white colours?’

I shook my head. I had a feeling I was going to be told whether I liked it or not.

‘’Twas at the time of the crucifixion. The magpie was the only bird that refused to go into mourning, and so he wore black and white to offend our dear Lord. And the Lord made the magpie wear his two-tone cloth for ever after. Malicious little blighter.’

He took a sip from his beer. Just in case I got the idea he might have been referring to the good Lord, he continued, ‘The only animal, the only one that refused to go into the ark was the magpie. The pair o’ them, the male and the female, perched on the rafters of the boat and jabbered at the drowning world. Didn’t stop them hitching a ride but. Och, they’re evil wee beasties indeed.’

He looked sharply at me, his blue eyes as keen as ice picks. ‘An’ I’m tellin’ you, son, you should have left these where they were. No good will come of it, not at all, at all.’

‘George,’ I said, ‘if you don’t stop being so bloody melodramatic I’ll have to go and join the women’s flower arranging.’

‘It’s no laughing matter, sonny Jim.’

‘Definitely not. There’s a limit to the amount of things you can do with daffodils.’

The magpies liked to be bathed every day. I used the washing-up basin, to Eddie’s utter disgust. She shouted at me for a full minute and I thought I was simultaneously going to be ditched for John and end up with a face full of pecan pie. They were at a stage where they would struggle, splash and gape as if they couldn’t make up their minds whether to love it or loathe it, and their brains were still in feed-me overdrive. The way I saw it was that they were full of conflicting subroutines for eating, sleeping and playing; they didn’t have an overall programme that would act as a long-term guide to co-ordinate their behaviour and allow these subroutines to run concurrently.

At five weeks old they were still incredibly ugly: they looked as if some avian voodoo spirit had stuck them full of quills, and they were as prickly as baby hedgehogs. But at least I could now leave them for longer periods of time. I decided to go back to my study site to see how things had been shaping up in my absence. I gave them a larger feed than normal, laced it with brandy and turned the gas fire in their room up a little higher than usual. That, I figured, should send them into a sleepy stupor for a good couple of hours.

The sky was white, clouds massing on the horizon in heavy brooding grey, the sea a sulky black, savage and sand-laden where the waves hit the shore. Small flocks of dunlin zig-zagged along the water’s margins; the odd raindrop fell across my face and my lips were raw with salt. There was something on the beach that looked like a large white worm. As I got nearer I saw that it was trussed up with wool and strands of weed. Poking from one end were four small hooves, and from the other a muzzle, the lips pulled back to reveal a set of tiny teeth. It was a lamb bound tight as a cocoon. It must have drowned; this was the sea’s strange way of presenting gift-wrapped offerings. It reminded me of the bagworm, a kind of moth whose larvae hatch live inside the female and eat their mother from the inside out before attaching silken ropes to her remains and casting away on the wind.

I had to lean into the wind as I walked. It caught a handful of magpies in its grip; they shattered against the sky, wings and tail feathers outstretched, and were swept into the wood. To my surprise I discovered that the male whose mate had been killed by a hawk had not taken another partner but was still hanging round the scrubland. Every so often he would fly aimlessly over the fields calling before returning to his perch. Against the odds, the male who had been abandoned by his unfaithful partner had managed to mate again with a new female who was much younger than him. They were now rearing a second brood of chicks. The third pair and the adulterous female who had married up the social hierarchy also had chicks and were attempting to feed them. All of them were thinner.

I was timing the male of my third pair to see how frequently he returned with food when I noticed something white on the trunk of the tree. I focused my binoculars on it. It was a cross crudely scratched into the bark directly below the nest. I went back to the other nests, even the one desecrated by the crows. They were all marked with a cross.

I figured I had another half an hour or so before I needed to be back home so I cut across the beach and into Nadia Ismail’s wood. I wanted to see if the flock of adolescent birds were still around. As I suspected, the stables were empty save for Toby, the white Shetland pony. I followed the path away from the house deeper into the woods. There were wild primroses, and crocuses growing along the verges, and further into the wood lime-green stands of sorrel, the finely veined flowers just beginning to unfold. The wind sliced through the trees and the branches creaked and groaned. The path itself was probably only ever used by Nadia: it was pockmarked with hoof prints and I imagined her riding towards me, her sheet of black hair and her red cloak sweeping around her. I hadn’t seen a single solitary magpie and I was thinking of turning back when I saw the gleam of water ahead. I quickened my pace. It was in the wrong direction and far too still to be the sea.

The trees fell back and there in front of me was a small lake complete with several different kinds of ducks. A couple of moorhens stepped gingerly towards the far bank. There were a few water lily leaves in the centre, rolled into tight scrolls by the wind, and a small wooden boat. The path continued on past the lake and crossed a shallow ford laced with the deep butter-yellow of marshcups. I walked round the edge of the lake, sending the ducks and moorhens into squawking flurries and the variegated ducklings scrambling for cover amongst the bulrushes. The sky was nearly pitch black by now and from out at sea an ominous peal of thunder rolled in. I could hardly hear the ducks above the howling of the wind, but one thing I did hear with great clarity was a sharp click and a locking sound as I entered the wood again. I was about to swing round to see what it was, when an arm tightened round my throat and I was hauled backwards. I had a dizzying impression of vast oak trees arching above my head and then I was pushed to the ground.

I looked up at my assailant. He was well over six feet tall, broad-shouldered and stout-thighed. He had a thick head of ginger hair and a beard. Clenched in his left fist was a shotgun with the safety catch off.

‘You’re trespassing, son. You’re lucky I didn’t shoot you as soon as see you.’

I stood up. He still towered over me. ‘I was just looking for magpies. I study them, you know.’

‘Aye, I know all right, you daft bugger.’ He spat and turned back to me. ‘The only good magpie’s a dead ’un. You can get out that way. Don’t let me catch you here again.’

I hastily clambered back to the path, tripping over a tree root, and headed away from the lake. I could feel his eyes boring into my back as I stumbled over small stones, but when I finally plucked up enough courage to look behind me, he had gone. The path curved round at the edge of the wood, winding back up to meet the potholed drive and the huge rusty iron gates with their forbidding battlements on either side. They were padlocked together and I had to climb over the wall, half falling into the field below. Just as I reached the road to the village, the sky seemed to crack, there was another roll of thunder and rain poured down in icy torrents. Sheets of water swept in from the sea, obliterating the horizon and turning the road into a shallow river.

The thunder frightened the magpies. They cowered in their box and hardly cheeped when I entered the room. I peeled my wet things off as soon as I got in and fed the magpies wearing only my boxer shorts. I’d almost finished when there was a frantic pounding on the front door. I ran downstairs and opened the door a fraction. I was nearly flattened against the wall by the force with which the door was flung open. Nadia Ismail pushed her way into the hall and stood in front of me dripping with water. Her hair was slick against her skull and drops of rain hung on her thick eyelashes above those impossibly blue eyes.

‘You have to feed me,’ she said, tearing off her cloak. She tossed the sodden thing over the banisters and strode into the kitchen, flicking her hair over her shoulder. A streak of water hit me across the chest. She left a trail of wet footprints and the longed-for mixture of sandalwood perfume and the sweet smell of hay and horse behind her.

‘Come on, Niall, what is there to eat?’

She didn’t wait for me to reply but opened the fridge and started emptying it of silver-foil-wrapped dishes. I watched in amazement as she squeezed whole slices of aubergines baked in pesto into her mouth. A dribble of green oil ran over her chin. Nadia bit into a courgette fritter and wiped her glassy lips across the back of her hand.

‘It’s Ramadan,’ she said. ‘I’m not supposed to eat between sunrise and sunset. I can’t even buy food from Spar without me da finding out. And it’s such a long time over here, so many hours of daylight.’

She tore the foil from another bowl and scooped out red wine and mushroom pâté with her fingers. Eddie, I thought, would be amazed that for once I’d managed to eat all the leftovers she brought back. I’d have to tell her I went for a run, or something. Nadia finished the pâté, washed her hands and pushed her hair back from her face.

‘Now what have you that’s sweet? I need sugar. C’mon Niall, I feel so faint.’

Nadia didn’t look as if she were going to faint to me; she was positively glowing beneath the thin sheen of water that coated her skin. I cut her a piece of rum and chocolate cake and steered her in the direction of the sitting room.

‘Well don’t just watch me,’ she said through a mouthful of chocolate, ‘put the fire on. It’s bloody freezing so it is.’

I went back into the kitchen and started to hunt through the freezer for something I thought she would like. Riffling through bags of ice, I remembered the first time Eddie had come round to the house with enough food and equipment to feed a small army, and I felt myself break out in a cold sweat. What if she came home? She might feel ill, or have forgotten something vital for tonight’s dinner. It was highly unlikely, I told myself. I allowed my mind to cloud with images of Nadia glowing like hellebore when the first frosts melt. I went back into the sitting room. Nadia had licked the plate clean and looked as smug as a cat that’s just drunk a quart of cream. There was a faint rim of chocolate icing round her mouth.

‘Ice cream,’ I said, holding out the tub. ‘It’s home-made.’

For one second she almost smiled. She was about to take it from me, but I kept it out of reach.

‘I’ve a better idea,’ I said as I peeled the lid off.

I took a spoonful of ice cream and held it out to her. I watched as she took the spoon between her lips and sipped the ice cream from it. For one heart-stopping moment she looked up at me. I took another spoonful and put it in my mouth. I leant forward and kissed her and the ice cream burnt and thawed on our tongues. Scooping some up in my fingers, I trailed it across her lips before kissing her. I took her clothes off and smeared ice cream across her soft, brown skin, licking it away as it melted while outside the rain hammered on the windows and the sea tore at the shore.

Towards the end of the month I received a parcel from my mother. It was Eddie’s day off, and for once she was out of bed before eleven.

‘What’s in it?’ she asked sleepily. She was curled up on the sofa, bleary-eyed and yawning.

‘Don’t go to sleep on me. We’re going out, remember?’

She nodded and yawned again.

There was a card, which my father had signed. I wondered if he’d even read it, but that was probably a little unfair of me, and a photo.

‘Actually,’ I said in surprise, ‘it’s for you.’

I handed her the parcel which was wrapped in gold and blue paper. She tore it open at once. It was full of clothes. They looked as if they were from my mother’s charity shop and had been in vogue about twenty years ago – old Adidas tops and parkas, a stripy jumper and a snake belt, the kind I remember wearing to hold my grey flannel shorts up at first school, and a pair of Farrah trousers. I groaned inwardly.

‘You can stick them in the bin, I won’t be offended,’ I said, not sure whether to be annoyed or amused.

‘Oh no, they’re great, so they are. Your mother has brilliant taste.’ She pulled off her T-shirt and immediately started trying the clothes on. ‘They’re just so cool. How come you didn’t inherit her clothes sense?’

‘Must’ve been on the other X chromosome.’

‘I’m going to write her a thank you letter. Give me a bit of that paper.’

‘Do it when we get back, she’s not going anywhere. Are you going to get dressed at all, or is this the start of your new career as a fashion victim?’

She screwed the wrapping paper into a ball and threw it at me. While she was getting dressed, I looked at the photo. It was black and white, slightly creased and was of my mother and father, looking younger and happier. My father’s beard was thicker and glossier than I remembered it, and my mother’s face was rounder, firmer. My father had his arm around my mother, and also another woman. She was slight and very young – she couldn’t have been more than twenty. It looked as if she were trying to smile, but was finding it harder than she’d expected. There was something familiar about her. I couldn’t work out quite what it was at first. The twist of her mouth? She had my father’s eyes. Perhaps she was a relative? There was a church in the background. I turned the photo over, but the only thing written on it was the date: 1972.

I put the photo in my coat pocket and shouted up at Eddie.

‘Hold your horses, I’m coming, so I am.’

She clattered down the stairs, grabbed her car keys, kissed me and raced out of the house. I followed and locked up. We had planned to drive to Tollymore Forest Park. The park was on the slopes of the Mourne Mountains, the highest mountain range in Northern Ireland, which sweeps directly down to the sea. For once the visibility was good and we could see the tips of the mountains, shiny as shale with snow trapped in pockets. Driving towards them I had an eerie sensation. I felt a tingling at the back of my neck and a tenseness across my shoulder blades. I could imagine what the mountains were like in winter covered with snow and stunted trees, the last haws wizened on their branches, tiny lanterns of red hope for starving birds; in summer in the full flush of heather, the purple slopes, unfolded into the sea like a falling cloak. Most days the mountains would announce themselves by their absence, a brooding presence shrouded by mist and fog. They must, I thought, control the weather. From somewhere I remembered a saying, ‘If you can see the Mourne Mountains, it’s about to rain; if you can’t see them, it’s already raining.’

We parked the car and walked through the ornamental gardens to get to the start of the forest trail. The sensation grew stronger. I started to feel slightly sick right at the point where we walked along a path bordered by camellia bushes, their glossy leaves so dark they seemed to swallow the light. The waxy buds were still wrapped in membranes like the inner eyelid of some kind of reptile. I pulled Eddie towards me and put my arms around her.

‘What are you being so soppy for, you great eejit?’ she said, pushing me away.

She was wearing one of my jackets – her wardrobe contained a conspicuous lack of anything warm to wear out walking and it had been a struggle to persuade her to take it instead of her fluffy bathmat and a tiny T-shirt that exposed her midriff. I figured our walk was going to be fairly short.

The forest stretched above us streaked with the new leaves of larches.

‘You know,’ I said, ‘I feel as if I’ve been here before. Just round the bend there’s going to be a bridge.’

There was.

‘I thought you said you’d never been to Ireland.’

‘I haven’t.’

‘Well there’s bridges all the way along this path. We’d have seen one sooner or later.’

‘Yes, but I knew it was going to be like this – a rustic sort of feel, and a hiding place carved into the rock next to it.’

‘Och, well, you can’t expect me to believe you now.’

‘Sure I can. It’s that déjà vu feeling all over again.’

I hung over the bridge and stared into the water. It was a deep green sinking into darkness. The other side above a waterfall was shallower, stones poked through the surface crowned with moss and grass; below the level of the water they appeared armour-plated, covered with beaten pewter moulded to fit their form. Forests of weeds trailed sinuously across molten-copper-coloured pebbles. I had an image of myself playing with the stones, tripping and falling into the water, so icy cold I stopped breathing, felt the current catch me in its grip, felt the weed slide across my palms as perilous as mermaids’ hair. I heard people shouting as I picked up speed and hurtled towards the waterfall, pebbles trickling from my fingers. Someone pulled me out choking and gasping, puking water, and there were adult voices, angry with love. I shook my head. Nothing like that had ever happened to me. I must have seen it in a film or something.

Eddie had used my musing as an opportunity to have a rest. She was inside the cave which was above the river, the entrance screened by a wooden blind. I couldn’t see her, but a thin stream of smoke wafted through the opening. I joined her. She was sitting on a bench, hunched up awkwardly.

‘I’m cold,’ she said.

I sat down next to her and put my arms round her. She felt frail and bony.0 I wondered what we would look like in the semi-darkness with our twin white faces, black hair and blue eyes. You were supposed to be attracted to people who looked like you. There’d been studies on it: you picked people who were neither more nor less good-looking. The people that you pick match you – not just looks but height, weight, build, even down to the ratio of the length of your middle finger compared to the rest of your body, or the size of your ear lobes. Eddie’s were small and shaped like teardrops; they melded with the skin of her jaw. She had an outie tummy button and I had an innie; she had a birthmark like a misshapen daisy in the hollow of her thigh just below her hip bone. I had one on my right shoulder blade. My twin, my other half who looked so similar and was so different. And Nadia? Was it an attraction of opposites between me and her? Nadia was small, she barely came up to the middle of my chest; her hair and skin were practically black and the soft curve of her stomach, her full hips and warm flesh were quintessentially feminine. But her eyes were as blue as my own.

‘Come on,’ I said, taking one of Eddie’s scarred hands in mine. ‘Let’s keep walking.’

We headed back along the other side of the river and Eddie said, ‘I came here once with me mammy. It was years ago and we climbed really high, it felt like we were walking for hours. We went right up into the mountains, so we did. She said she had to show me something and she’d brought along lots of sweets to keep me going. I thought it was so strange, just me and her – she left my brothers at home, and the babies weren’t born then. It was exciting at first, but then I got bored. I sat down and cried because I was cold and I didn’t want to keep walking but she didn’t get angry with me like she normally did. She looked worried and sad so I got up. And then we got to this grassy place with no heather. It was almost level, the mountain dropped away steeply below us, and above us it was starting to get rocky. She stood there at the edge of this place and I couldn’t understand why – it was just grass and a few stones in the middle of bloody nowhere.

‘I said, “Mammy, why’ve you stopped?” but she just ignored me, and then I got frightened and started to cry, and she took me in her arms and she said, “This is a cillín – these are the graves of the unbaptized babies and you must never forget they are here.” The Catholic church wouldn’t allow bastard children, or babies who died before they were baptized, to be buried in consecrated ground so they brought them up to this place on one of the mountains and buried them in shallow graves, no names or nothing, just a stone. And if no-one told you, you could walk right across the graves of those babies and you wouldn’t be any the wiser.’

She didn’t say another word for the rest of the walk and seemed very quiet and withdrawn. I didn’t want to intrude upon her thoughts so I said nothing until we got back to the car.

‘Shall we go and get something to eat in the café?’ I asked.

She nodded and we went in. I was going to take advantage of her unusual quietness and get a bacon and sausage sandwich, but she snapped out of her mood, and ordered us both veggie burgers and salad, with French dressing, no mayonnaise, no onions, and extra ketchup, and mineral water with ice and lemon, but not the kind from Ballywalter. I smiled. She was back to form, and I sat back and waited for the onslaught for the café was a design nightmare – red plastic seats that were stapled to the floor, tacky prints of forest scenes, fake flowers, and everything from sugar to mustard in plastic sachets. The food was the standard junk you get in most restaurants round Northern Ireland – chips, eggs, sausages, and sticky buns. Eddie looked round in distaste, shrugged off my jacket and started rolling a cigarette. She snorted in disbelief at the dressing the chef had attempted to concoct, but didn’t launch into a diatribe against the place as I had expected.

Instead she simply said, ‘I can’t wait to get to London,’ and I got that edgy feeling, as if I didn’t want to be there, or perhaps more accurately, I didn’t want her to be there. ‘When are you going back?’

I shrugged. ‘Dunno. I don’t have any plans to go for a while.’ I looked out of the window, suddenly becoming intensely interested in the ornamental gardens below us.

‘What d’you mean, you don’t know? Aren’t you going to see your mammy and daddy?’

‘Got to finish my work here. I’m not supposed to be taking a break from data collection. If it wasn’t for those damn magpies I’d wouldn’t have had to stop at all.’

‘I’d love to go.’

‘I know,’ I said, and I could hear the tension in my voice. And then Eddie surprised me as she usually did by ploughing ahead without me and I didn’t know whether to be pleased because there were no strings attached to our relationship as far as she was concerned, or whether to be annoyed that she didn’t want to depend on me.

‘I’m going over there later this year. I’ll stay with a friend of John’s to begin with. Just you wait, I’ll have a restaurant of my own in London town, so I will.’

‘I’ll be your first customer.’

‘Here,’ she said, ‘I don’t want it.’

She put half of her burger on my plate. Eddie, I thought, was so self-absorbed, though not in a narcissistic kind of way – she’d give you the shirt off her back if you said you were cold.

We drove back along the inland road where the mountains turned into rolling hills and the walls were made of loose granite covered with plates of yellow lichen.

‘Just stop here a second,’ I asked Eddie.

‘What d’you want to look at that for?’

‘I just do.’

‘I’ve seen enough churches in my time,’ she said, and stayed in the car.

It was small with a circular nave. There was a statue of Mary in a blue and white cape by the roadside. It was dark inside save for white light filtering through the half-open door and a dull glow from the thickened glass in the stained glass windows. A single candle flickered by the altar. The place smelt of cold stone and rotting daffodils.

I found what I was looking for by the font – leather-bound and gold-embossed books of all the births and deaths in the parish – and I took out the one for the year I was born. I didn’t know why, or what I was looking for, but about halfway through a name leapt off the page: Jacob Charles Eamonn Edwards, born 2 February 1967 to Sarah Ann Edwards. A coincidence, that was all, that we shared the same surname and were born a few days apart. And the names of my father and my grandfather? The human mind isn’t very good at probabilities, I thought as I slid the book back onto the shelf. We search for patterns and meaning, hunt for answers, believe false prophets and cling to old faiths. The probability of being killed by a shark is one in 300 million, yet you only have to spend six hours in a car to have a one in a million chance of dying in a crash, and which do we fear the most? Biologically speaking, that’s fair enough: sharks have been on the planet for 38 million years, cars are a new thing on this earth. Maybe in a few more million years we’ll evolve car phobia – if we last that long, that is.

On a whim I took out the old black and white picture my mother had sent me. I looked back at the church just as I got to the car. It was almost identical to the one in the photograph. Another of those coincidences the human mind is always being fooled by. I tucked it back in my coat.

That trip to Tollymore was the first time I’d left the magpie chicks alone for any length of time. The problem I now faced was what to feed them. They were old enough to eat solid food but I wasn’t about to start collecting grubs and insects twenty-four hours a day. The phone boxes here were still quaint enough to have copies of the Yellow Pages in them, and I looked up ‘chicken farmers’. There was an intensive farm not far from the Greenaun, so one afternoon I cycled over.

It took me a while to find it. The farm itself was at the end of a long lane bordered by a dense hawthorn hedge that was just beginning to bloom. The last of the dog violets were withering at its feet, and wild carrots opened their carousels of flowers like floral lobster pots trawling for insects. The road was potholed and stony and I was convinced I would get a puncture. As I reached the crest of the hill, a black mongrel dog came flying towards me, barking with rage. I skidded to a halt, and half fell off my bike. The dog leapt and choked on its collar, spinning on the end of a chain. Its bark became high-pitched and winded, saliva flecked its cheeks, and from my position of relative safety, I noticed that one of its eyes was brown, the other clouded and blue. A whole chorus of dogs joined in, their wounded barks sawing the air. I walked gingerly up to the dog until I was sure of the reach of its chain and then freewheeled my bike past it and into a rutted courtyard made of levelled concrete awash with fetid pools of slurry and cow-pats. Two whippet-thin ginger and white dogs whined and growled from a kennel next to the black dog, which now turned in frenzied circles howling at me, its kennel inching along the concrete as it desperately attempted to seize a piece of my calf. The stench of chicken shit was overpowering.

‘Is it lost you are?’

An elderly man hobbled towards me, his legs bowed, his trousers held up by a length of twine. His nose was hooked, his lips were lined as a drawstring and his ears sprouted grizzled tufts of black and white hair.

‘No, I think this is where I want to be. Calder’s Farm?’

‘Aye, that’s right. And what will you be wanting?’

‘Chicks,’ I said. ‘Day-old chicks.’

‘You’d best be coming in. Speak to me son, Jim.’

I followed him into the farmhouse, a dark, granite brick building, and leant my bike against the wall.

‘Sit here, I’ll be looking for Jim.’ He gestured with a swollen red and crooked finger to a heavy bench attached to a long wooden table. The kitchen was cold, the fire out, and the pots on the range were black with use and caked in congealed fat. I waited, feeling the cold from the stone flags seep into the soles of my feet.

‘I hear you want some chicks.’

I looked up at what I presumed was Jim, a man in his late forties, early fifties, broad-shouldered and stocky, his face ruddy, his hair black. In contrast to his weather-worn complexion his lips were thin and white. He was wearing a waxed jacket and his boots were covered in chicken droppings.

‘Yeah. My name is Niall,’ I said, standing up and holding out my hand to shake his.

His grip slid from mine as if the touch of another hand repulsed him. I explained why I wanted day-old chicks.

‘We’re not in the business of selling frozen chicks. We use them for bone meal, you see, grind them up. Would that do you?’

‘Not really. They need to be solid, something for the magpies to chew on.’

I didn’t know which was more ridiculous, the idea of my fledglings with beaks full of teeth, snapping for food like pterodactyls, or of Jim tipping balls of yellow fluff into a concrete mixer.

‘Well now, it’d be no trouble to freeze you some specially. How many would you be wanting?’

‘I dunno. A couple of bags to be going on with. This sort of size.’ I gestured with my hands.

‘Martha,’ Jim shouted suddenly. ‘Do you take Calder’s eggs?’

‘I’m not sure,’ I said apologetically. ‘I don’t take much notice of the labels on the boxes.’

‘Well you shall have some,’ said Jim as if there were to be no more discussion on the subject. ‘Martha,’ he shouted again.

A woman a little younger than him appeared at the door. She was wearing a nylon wraparound pinny; the waxed jacket she wore over the top didn’t disguise the rolls of fat around her midriff or her large, pendulous breasts.

‘Fry him an egg,’ said Jim, nodding at me.

‘Oh no, I’m not hungry. Really, please don’t go to any trouble.’

The pair acted as if I hadn’t spoken. Martha kept her jacket on as she lit the stove and clattered one of the greasy frying pans on top of the flame. Jim sat down heavily opposite me. The table creaked with his weight. He slapped an order book down, carefully placed a piece of carbon paper between two sheets in the book, and laboriously wrote down ‘Frozen day-old chicks’ and the price, in blue biro. He dated the invoice and tore it out.

‘So now, see me da tomorrow morning and he’ll give you what you need.’ He got up and left without saying goodbye.

Martha cracked two eggs and dropped them into the spitting pan. She ladled oil over them as they cooked.

‘Have you been running this farm for long?’ I asked, desperate to break the silence.

She didn’t answer and I retreated in embarrassment, unable to discern whether she hadn’t heard me or was ignoring me. A few moments later she slapped a plate down in front of me with a couple of buttered slices of Mother’s Pride and the two fried eggs. She left the kitchen without a word.

I found some knives and forks in the third drawer I opened. The other two were full of cables and syringes, string and linseed oil. I sliced my first egg in half, right down the middle, and as the yolk burst it was marbled with blood. I watched as the two fluids melded and flowed over the bread and trickled viscously onto the plate. I checked that no-one was about to come into the kitchen before tipping the whole lot into the bin.

Old Mr Calder watched me leave, nodding his head slowly at me as I cycled past the three psychotic dogs, and on the way down the hill, freewheeling over the bumps and stones, I breathed in deeply, trying to fill my lungs full of fresh air and the scent of hawthorn blossom. But try as I might, I couldn’t rid myself of the smell of Calder’s Farm, nor of the image of a plastic bag full of peeping day-old, day-glo chicks, gradually winding down like wind-up toys, the inside of the bag growing opaque with condensation from their tiny breaths, their fluffy feathers wilting and clinging to flesh that changed from pink to blue-grey as their soft and pliable bodies became hard and solid to the touch. I wondered if there was a word to describe this kind of death, this kind of meat; I thought of my magpies and how I was forcing them to cannibalize their own feathered kind.

I’d already been back to the farm and was chopping up the chicks when Eddie came downstairs the following morning. When she saw what I was doing she left for work without a word and didn’t come home that night. She went straight to work from wherever she stayed but the next night she came home and made love to me with a passion she hadn’t had for a while. Neither of us mentioned it, and the chicks stayed in a bin bag in the freezer. I did wrap the ones I had to defrost in tinfoil, though, so she wouldn’t have to look at them.

It didn’t stop me borrowing Eddie’s kitchen scales. I took them and Ruth’s stepladder to my study site – I was going to weigh all the wild magpie chicks. I started with the most difficult ones – the male and his new young partner who had a nest in the pine trees. The stepladder only went a third of the way up the tree. I put the scales in my rucksack and climbed the rest of the way. The crows fell like leaves from the trees cawing hoarsely and the magpies uttered rattling alarm calls. One of the branches I grabbed hold of was short and tinder dry. It snapped off in my hand and I nearly fell. The tree swayed slightly from side to side in the wind and I could feel the dull throb of a splinter in the ball of my thumb. Nearer the crown the branches grew thick and sturdy, but I didn’t want to trust the ones lower down any more. I gripped the trunk between my feet and knees, wrapped my arms round as far as they would go and inched up the tree. By the time I managed to grab one of the larger branches at the top I was out of breath. I hauled myself up and sat with my legs dangling into space on either side to get my wind back. From up here I could see the sea, the roof of Nadia Ismail’s house, the disused lighthouse on top of the cliffs at the other end of the beach and, behind me, the lough to the far side of the fields. The tree creaked and groaned and the crows’ cries filled the air. They were lined up in rows on the other pine trees. The two magpies had given up and flown away. I took my rucksack off carefully so I didn’t overbalance and hung it from the branch. I wedged the scales in between the dense, resinous foliage and mat of finer twigs and reached into the nest to remove the chicks. They were much smaller than the others since they’d been born later, and a good deal thinner than my fat blighters had been at their age.

As I held their struggling, scrawny, flesh-pink bodies, I remembered something John had told me. I’d gone round to watch the FA Cup at his house and we’d drunk more than was good for us and eaten wheaten bread with rhubarb and ginger jam and toasted potato cakes in front of the fire because he said Eddie would never give me traditional Irish fare in a month of Sundays. Towards the end of the afternoon I’d asked him about the crosses on the trees. He said it was an old folk custom to get magpies to abandon their nests. I wondered whether Brendan had scraped away the bark on those trees with his penknife, and if so, was it to frighten me or the magpies? I told John about getting the day-old chicks and he told me the strange case of the chicken child. A few years back a boy was found in one of the nearby villages. He was the bastard child of one of the young daughters in the family and they’d put the infant in the chicken coop. He wasn’t discovered until he was seven years old. The boy was malnourished – he’d lived on chicken feed his whole life – and he was seriously deformed: most of the time he’d perched on a shelf, arms wrapped round his knees. He couldn’t speak a word: he clucked like a hen and looked at his food with one eye, his head to one side. I suppose any living creature will take on some of the characteristics of those with whom it is raised and I was determined to make sure my magpies knew what they were.

I climbed back down the tree slowly and it was only when I reached the ground that I realized I was shaking. I walked along the beach towards the scrubland. A thick fog was rolling in and seagulls flew out of it as if they were spirits made flesh. I couldn’t rid myself of the image of the child, crouched in the dark and filth of the chicken coop, his head tilted, soft clucks swelling from his throat. What must it be like to be locked inside the cage of your own mind for seven long years, unable to speak or communicate? How would you view the world when you couldn’t name it? How would you feel when you were released into the blinding light of day where nothing smelt of the familiar musty air of poultry and all about you spoke in an alien tongue?

The other two pairs of magpies had made their nests in low-growing hawthorns which weren’t too difficult to get at now that I had a ladder and didn’t have to climb through the middle of the thorns. I still tore my hands, though, but the parents didn’t dive-bomb me. To my surprise they sat quietly in a nearby bush and watched. I put my hand into the nest but I could only feel one chick. I thought for a minute I’d got the wrong nest completely. The chick, when I pulled it out, was huge. It overflowed the scales and gaped at me with its enormous beak. Perhaps the others had died for some reason, and this chick had got to eat all the food that should have been shared between its siblings. The other odd thing about it was that it already had most of its feathers. Maybe its accelerated growth had made it sprout feathers prematurely. But as I put the chick back into its nest, I realized that its feathers were grey. I climbed back down the tree and peered on the ground around the roots. The grass was littered with splinters of thin white bones. I folded up the stepladder and tucked it under my arm, then stopped dead. The monstrous chick wasn’t the magpies’, it was a cuckoo and it must have pushed the other fledglings out of the nest. But I still couldn’t understand: magpies were almost never parasitized by cuckoos in this country. Songbirds like reed warblers and meadow pipits were duped into caring for cuckoo chicks because the cuckoos’ eggs so closely mimicked their own – but not the magpies: they were too smart to be conned by pale imitations of their own eggs.

I had the answer sooner than I thought. When I reached my final pair of magpies, they were both perched on top of their nest, jabbing fiercely through the roof. I crouched down behind a bush and got out my binoculars. The magpies were tearing their nest apart, and as I watched, the male seized a chick in his beak. He could barely lift it, it was so large. I was too far away to tell whether it was another cuckoo chick, but if the size was anything to go by it couldn’t possibly be a magpie fledgling. But before the male managed to pull the imposter clear of the nest, out of the fog came five grey birds which began to dive-bomb the magpies. The male dropped the chick and turned to ward off the attack. The grey birds circled round the pair, darting in and raking at them with outstretched feet and slashing at them with their beaks. The magpies cawed and rattled in response, and shortly their attackers flew away – but not far. They alighted in a neighbouring hawthorn and sat in a row on one of the branches. It was only then that I was able to get a good look at them. To my amazement, they appeared to be large cuckoos. The five regarded the magpie pair with dull yellow eyes, and eventually the male started to forage half-heartedly around the base of the hawthorns, and the female began to repair the nest.

The cuckoos remained watching the magpies until the pair resumed feeding the fledgling before flying off together. I was astonished. Was this some new breed of parasitic bird, a kind of cuckoo mafia that terrorized the magpies into raising their young? If so, they no longer concentrated on subtle tactics – camouflaged eggs and baby birds born to look like their hosts – but used sheer brute force and bully boy tactics to frighten the magpies into submission. I walked home thinking about all this, and worrying about the implications for my own research now that my little population of magpies was sadly diminished.

‘I need to go to the library,’ I said. ‘I wondered whether you fancied a trip into Belfast.’

‘So I can drive you in, you mean?’

‘Something like that. But we could go out while we’re there, go to the cinema. I hear they have colour films.’

‘OK,’ said Eddie. ‘Sounds good.’

‘I don’t know what you want to do while I’m in the library. Go shopping?’

Eddie looked at me with disdain. ‘I’ll be in the library too, so I will.’

‘What, helping me look up papers on cuckoos?’

‘I’ve more interesting things to do,’ she said haughtily.

She didn’t stay cross with me for long but I thought I shouldn’t be so condescending to her, even as a joke. Eddie chatted about the customers in the Greenaun on the way into town. The ones she liked the best were her obstreperous clients, dragged in by their friends, who demanded to know where the meat was, and whom she tamed, less through charm than through fine cooking; the ones who left feeling full and content even though they’d come in demanding to go to McDonald’s on the way home.

When we got to Queen’s University library, I searched for papers on the arms race between cuckoos and their hosts, a war of attrition which the cuckoo generally won. Libraries have a soporific effect on me, and as usual I found myself daydreaming – this time about all the papers I would write on the cuckoo mafia I’d witnessed. David would be my co-author, of course, and I imagined he’d want to see the cuckoos in action for himself. I tried to picture David over here and, with a mixture of pride and dismay, I thought that he’d probably fit in well – he and John would get on, and David could charm the pants off everyone I knew, even George and Eddie.

I looked at Eddie. She was hunched over a book, furiously reading and taking notes. Suddenly she got up and strode down the aisle alongside the rows of reading desks and marched past the book stands before disappearing between the stacks. A minute or two later she emerged, a book in one hand, and swung back into her seat. I was at the far end of the library and was aware of the way she attracted people’s gaze. Students in libraries always look up at the slightest distraction, but they stared for longer than normal, and I grinned like an idiot, knowing that this woman was with me, smiled at the furrow in her brow, the look of sheer concentration on her face, her complete obliviousness of the attention she was receiving, and because I knew that in another five to ten minutes she’d be bored, and would want to leave.

A quarter of an hour later she photocopied a few pages from one of the books, tapping her foot in impatience at the queue, and the Jurassic slowness of the machine.

‘I’m ready to go,’ she announced, a little too loudly.

‘Meet you outside,’ I mouthed back.

She was hunched on the front step smoking one of her roll-ups and clutching a plastic cup of coffee to her chest when I came out. The air was dense with the red scent of mulberry flowers.

‘Beginning of May and it’s still fockin’ cold,’ she muttered.

‘Well, if you insist on wearing . . .’

‘Oh, give over, you sound like me mother. She’s allus saying my clothes are so thin you could spit through them. Anyway, this is from your mother.’

‘Is it?’ I said in surprise. ‘It looks like all your other things.’

She rolled her eyes at me, then interlaced her fingers in mine.

‘So will we go to the greenhouse then?’

I gave her a puzzled look and she added, ‘You know, the Palm House. I thought you might want to go.’ She tailed off as if she’d had a good idea and was suddenly no longer sure about it.

‘Oh, that one. It was built by the same architect who designed the Palm House at Kew,’ I said excitedly. ‘Yeah, that’d be great. Is it near?’

She smiled triumphantly at me. ‘Sure it’s just across the road.’

I squeezed her hand, touched that she’d thought of it, and pleased she wanted to go with me. I didn’t for a moment think that visiting a greenhouse in the city centre was the way Eddie would normally consider spending her day off.

The Palm House was a smaller version of the one at Kew, with the same characteristic dome built from more small panes of glass than the output of your average Venetian glass-blowing factory. The reflection of ornamental cherries and small shoals of clouds fragmented like a Cubist Monet over its curvilinear surface.

‘Designed by iron-founder Richard Turner, his inspiration was iron “deck beams” used in ship-building,’ Eddie read from a brochure. ‘It’s supposed to look like the hull of a boat, so it is. Originally all the glass was green to shade the plants,’ she added. ‘Sure what they did was practise on us first and then build a proper one at Kew. Isn’t that typical of the English?’

Inside it was dank and humid with none of the soaring space between banana trees and strangler figs that was characteristic of the Palm House at Kew. The smell of dense foliage and dank soil reminded me of plants I’d seen in the jungles of Venezuela: Swiss cheese plants with leaves like torn boats snarling twenty metres into the forest canopy, flowers whose plastic petals were shaped like lips and which hung in mid-air as if to ensnare the unwary traveller, the sickly sweet smell of perfume and decay that rose moth-like at night and, of course, the orchids. My father always preferred the tiny ones, their flowers so minute that no-one but he might stop to see, whereas my taste had always run to the big and brash: monstrous orchids as Wilde once said.

‘What are you thinking about?’ asked Eddie, tugging my hand.

‘Orchids,’ I said, and realized that was the wrong answer. She gave one of her half-sneers that was supposed to be condescending to me and my one-track mind, but in reality was little more than the twist of a broken smile.

We visited the other greenhouse which had a subterranean basement full of frangipani and cotton trees, and on the ground-floor level red brick ponds bright green with duckweed and giant water lilies.

‘How many angels could dance on a lily leaf?’ I asked, pulling Eddie towards me and kissing her on the nose.

‘Look what I found out today,’ she said, pulling out the sheaf of photocopied papers from her back pocket and waving them excitedly in front of me. ‘I found another angel of war – Camael. According to some sources he was one of the seven angels of the Lord, along with Michael, Gabriel and Raphael. He had the skin of a leopard, he ruled Mars, and he was in charge of a legion of twelve thousand angels of destruction.’

‘Right up your street.’

‘I was also reading about the nature of evil,’ she said importantly. ‘Apparently evil is all part of God’s design. When St Paul was alive he visited the third heaven, and he said,’ she riffled through her notes, ‘it was full of “angels of evil, terrible and without pity, carrying savage weapons”. In the Psalms it said that heaven and hell were only a hand-breadth apart. It was only later that they became separate places. What happened,’ she continued as we left the greenhouse, ‘was that when angels were born they had free will and they were allowed to choose one thing – good or evil. Once they’d chosen whose side they were on, they had to relinquish their free will and stick with that choice for ever.’

‘What about us?’

‘Oh, we’ve got free will all right. That’s why the angels do the “final reckoning” to balance how much good we’ve done against how much evil before deciding whether we should be in heaven or hell.’

That we were creatures of good and evil I had no doubt: it was part of our genetic make-up. Free will was a whole other issue, but I didn’t want to get into an argument about it with Eddie.

‘Let’s go and eat, and then go to the cinema,’ she said, abruptly changing the subject.

We went to a small African restaurant tucked behind one of the university buildings which had Nigerian prints on the walls and played music from Senegal. We never made it to the cinema and I spent most of the meal on my own, gradually getting drunk on the complimentary bottle of wine that had no label, only a sticker of a zebra pasted on the front. Eddie, after a couple of mouthfuls of the peanut stew and fried plaintain she’d ordered, disappeared into the kitchen to chat to the chef and didn’t emerge for some time. When she did, she was brimming with ideas for incorporating peanut butter, okra and cassava into some of the dishes she served at the Greenaun.

As we were driving home, Eddie suddenly pulled a piece of paper out of her jacket pocket and handed it to me.

‘Could you just explain to me what this is?’

I recognized it as my handwriting. ‘Oh, just doodling, you know.’

‘Doodling?’ She snatched it back and, balancing it on top of the steering wheel, started reading aloud. ‘Flesh, carrion, fowl, sausage, salami, beef, kangaroo, ostrich,’ she swerved back onto the left side of the road, ‘wurst, jerky, pepperoni, crocodile, brawn, lobster, breast . . . breast?’

‘The art of driving is keeping your eyes on the road,’ I said dryly, trying not to let any of my terror show.

She tossed the piece of paper back at me. ‘What on earth is it, Niall?’

‘It’s a list of meat. I was trying to come up with all the words we use to describe meat and see if I could separate them from the words we use for animals we eat.’

‘Crocodile?’

‘Some people eat crocodiles.’

‘Well some people will eat almost anything. You don’t have locusts or caterpillars.’

‘Good point.’

She gave an exasperated sigh. ‘But why, Niall?’

‘Just doodling, like I said,’ I answered irritably, then added, ‘I was thinking of meat, eating it, I suppose, since we never do, I mean I don’t because I’m with you, and that got me thinking about words and how they define us. There was that myth that Inuit people used twenty-eight different words for snow, and now it turns out it’s not such a myth, they do use lots of words for snow and ice. But then, so do we, everything from flurry, to sleet, slush, powder snow ...’ I started running out of examples. ‘Anyway, the point is I started wondering about words for meat – I mean, most societies eat meat, it’s an integral part of human culture, so it ought to figure highly in our thoughts and that should be reflected in the language we use. The more words there are for meat, the more important it should be for that particular culture – that was my hypothesis, anyway. Language, you see, defines how we think.

‘But I haven’t quite worked it out. I mean, I don’t know anything about the words other languages use for meat, and in English, well, beef only applies to cow, but we don’t say let’s eat some cow, whereas we would ask for kangaroo meat by name. Then there’s words like steak which normally means beef if you don’t specify which animal it came from, although you would say kangaroo and ostrich steak, but not chicken steak. I just didn’t know how to categorize anything on the list, that’s why it’s such a jumble.’

‘What was the point?’

‘I don’t suppose there was one,’ I said lamely, ‘it was just something I did and I’ve been thinking about.’

‘The point is you don’t like being vegetarian, so you don’t – you don’t like having to eat the same food as me when we go out. You’d much rather be eating lobster and steak.’

‘No, that’s not true,’ I said a little too loudly.

She was holding the steering wheel so tightly the scars across the back of her hands were a livid white.

‘The point is,’ she started again, then stopped herself. ‘Niall, did anyone ever tell you you were a queer soul?’ She ruffled my hair. ‘What about toad-in-the-hole and haggis? Where do they fit into your grand scheme of things?’

The next day I saw something even stranger than the cuckoo mafia. As I was looking for my birds, a movement on the short grass of the beach attracted my attention. It was a white bird, leaping. At first I thought it was a gull but when I looked at it through my binoculars I realized I was mistaken. I had to put the binoculars down and stare at the wall of mist billowing in before I could look back at the bird and believe what I was seeing.

It was an albino magpie and it appeared to be having an epileptic fit. It was hopping and jumping in a circle, first one way and then another, its wings partly outstretched. Occasionally I saw its thick pink tongue flash from its beak as it uttered a single harsh cry. Then it gave one final leap and struck at the ground with its beak. It had caught a mouse and as I watched, it tore it to pieces bit by bit and ate it, and as it did so, drops of blood beaded its pure white feathers.