The Bearded Tit Part 8

'Do sit down, Mr K,' I said, offering him the seat that was closest to me and furthest from JJ. Ah yes, the male starts behaving differently in the presence of a rival. Kramer wasn't a rival as such but as any male bird will tell you, another male in your territory, however innocent, must be dealt with instantly and aggressively. The capercaillie, a ferocious black grouse from Scotland, will fight to the death to protect what is his. I found myself frowning in Kramer's direction.

'What's wrong with you?' he asked.

'I was thinking about a ferocious black c.o.c.k.'

'Blimey, I have have come at the wrong moment. I'll get my b.u.t.tered teacake and go.' come at the wrong moment. I'll get my b.u.t.tered teacake and go.'

LOVEBIRDS AND SORROW.

The lovebird. From the genus Agap.o.r.nis. Aha, from the Greek for 'love' and the Greek for 'bird'. Brilliant bit of scientific naming, there.

A small stocky parrot with a short, blunt tail. Their beak is rather large for their overall size. That'll be from all that snogging, I suppose.

They mate for life and are observed to be very affectionate to each other. In German, they're called 'Die Unzertrennlichen', 'Die Unzertrennlichen', which means 'the inseparable ones', and in French they're known as which means 'the inseparable ones', and in French they're known as 'Les Inseparables'. 'Les Inseparables'.

Typical of the French not to have their own word for 'inseparable'.

The lovebird's general over-all colour is green. The Fischer's, the black-cheeked and the collared lovebirds have a white ring round the eye.

They eat mainly fruit, vegetables, gra.s.ses and seeds. Mack-winged lovebirds enjoy the occasional fig. There are nine separate species, eight come from mainland Africa and one, the Madagascar lovebird, doesn't come from mainland Africa.

What am I doing?

I'm reading about birds from Africa and Madagascar! These aren't British birds. I'm getting obsessed. I AM obsessed. I'm obsessed with birds. No, I'm obsessed with JJ. And she's obsessed with birds. No, she's not. She's not at all obsessed with birds. She's not obsessed with anything. Not even me. She just knows a bit about most British birds. We talk about birds all the time though. No, we don't. We hardly ever talk about birds any more. We see them occasionally, we look out for them and name them if we spot them, but that's it. We talk about everything else.

Everything.

Everything except the future.

This is how it is. I'm either with JJ or I'm reading about birds. Learning about birds is a subst.i.tute for being with her. That's what it is. At weekends when I don't see her, I go out for walks in the country and look at birds. I was even getting to like the countryside around Cambridge.

Coming from Cornwall, the countryside here was a shock to me. Cornwall is high moors with spectacular granite outcrops, rolling wooded valleys and steep heather-topped cliffs b.u.t.ting up against Atlantic breakers. Cambridgeshire seems crushed under the weight of the sky. Huge, flat, peaty landscape, intersected with long, dead-straight strips of water, like ribbons of gla.s.s against the black soil.

There is no horizon.

Or maybe there is only only horizon. horizon.

But the sun actually rises here. And it sets. It doesn't just prematurely disappear behind a hill. This is a good place for sunrises and sunsets.

And different birds in the drowning fields. One weekend I saw lapwings, curlews and snipe. A snipe in a field. That's not very Cornish. I couldn't wait to tell JJ. Well, I couldn't wait to get back to my room and try to find out what this mottled brown bird with an extremely long bill was, and then learn its Latin name (Gallinago gallinago), and then tell JJ.

Kramer swept into my room without knocking.

'How are the lovebirds today?'

I hate that. What a stupid question. Patronizing and euphemistic, with perhaps a hint of envy. It's a demeaning question, equating the people asked with rather feeble-minded, gormless-looking parrots. Or was I reading too much into it?

'Can't you knock?'

'Yes, I can knock, but not today; it's Geknoches, a Jewish festival when it's forbidden to bang on wood with your hands. You weren't doing anything embarra.s.sing, were you?'

'I was reading about parrots.'

'Oh, you were doing something embarra.s.sing, then? So how are are the lovebirds?' the lovebirds?'

I ignored him.

'Oh, I see. You don't want to talk about it. I was wondering if you and JJ had got married, had children and emigrated to New Zealand yet?'

'Yes, we have.'

'Or even finally got round to holding hands?'

'Things are progressing nicely.'

'So you haven't touched her yet then?'

I ignored this question.

'Is it love?'

'What is love?' I asked him in return.

'Why are you answering questions with questions?'

'Who wants to know?'

'There's nothing shameful about being in love, you know.'

'I don't think I know the meaning of the word 'love'.'

'It means nothing.'

'What?'

'In tennis, 'love' means 'zero'.' Kramer was the sort of tippy student who gave students a bad name. Clever and smirking. And eminently punchable.

'That 'love' has nothing to do with 'love'. It's a corruption of the French oeuf oeuf or 'egg'.' or 'egg'.'

Kramer tutted. 'You're the sort of tippy student who gives students a bad name.'

'I haven't seen JJ today. It's her day off.'

'Why don't you see her on her day off?'

'She lives about twenty-five miles away!'

'So?'

'And she lives with her parents; it'd all be a bit difficult.'

'Why doesn't she come and spend the day here in Cambridge with you? It might move things on a bit.'

That was a very good question and one I had asked JJ, only to be told it was awkward; she had arrangements already, family things.

'She's doing family things.'

'Isn't that roughly what you want to do with her?' He smirked and I ignored him.

'I'm in no rush,' I tied to Kramer.

'I've got a bad feeling,' Kramer said, walking over to the window and looking out at the gloomy remains of the November afternoon.

'You always have a bad feeling! You are gloomy. You are pessimistic. You are lugubrious. We've been through this: you're a miserable c.u.n.t!'

He seemed pleased by this description of himself. 'Mmm, maybe.'

'It's the time of year.' I joined him at the window and looked out into the college gardens.

He turned balefully to me. 'Look, a magpie.'

'So it is!'

The unmistakably handsome crow. A beautiful bird. Stridently black and white, but with bright blue iridescence and a long glossy greeny-purple tail. It gets a bad press. It steals other birds' eggs and eats other birds' chicks. But, hey, who doesn't? And if you feel like learning the scientific names for all British birds, why not start with the magpie?

Pica pica.

Kramer looked at the bird and looked back at me shaking his head. 'One for sorrow.'

'Oh dear, there you go again. I don't believe you have a superst.i.tious bone in your body.'

'Well, you never know. My uncle Harry walked under a ladder once and was dead within forty-eight years.'

I tutted.

'Take care, my friend!' was Kramer's portentous exit. I watched the magpie for a while. Mmm, I too was beginning to get a bad feeling. I cast an anxious glance across the lawns in the hope of seeing another magpie.

JJ SO FAR.

After seeing one magpie, is there a time limit before you see the next one? If I see one at nine in the morning and the next one at five in the afternoon, is that two sorrows or one joy?

As soon as Kramer had gone, I left my room and went for a walk in search of Pica pica secunda Pica pica secunda. It was gone five now and my chances for getting any joy were fading with the light. Not that I was superst.i.tious or anything, or that Kramer had infected me with his pessimism, but I felt perhaps I should a.s.sess the JJ situation.

Where were we up to?

I was in love with JJ. I sensed she felt the same way but there was something holding her back from full expression of her desire. Maybe, at some level, she wasn't ready for the intensity of relationship I seemed to be offering. Maybe she had just come out of a difficult and painful relationship and was nervous about getting involved in something 'serious'.

JJ and I had never discussed her previous relationships on the grounds that I didn't really want to hear about them.

Perhaps she just wanted to 'play around' for a few years before getting involved in the 'relationship of a lifetime'. If this were the case, perhaps I should make it clear that if she wanted to play the field I could easily do a convincing impression of a field. Perhaps she was just being nice to me and really thought I was a bit of a t.w.a.t; pleasant enough company to liven up her boring days in the bookshop, but not worth getting too involved with.

No, come on, Rory, you're letting your self-loathing get in the way here. There is definitely a tingle when you're together.

And a sparkle.

How many tingles to the sparkle, I wondered.

And there had been moments of electricity. There were times when our faces had come so close together we could feel each other's breath, eyes fixed on eyes and words pointless; moments when there had been a crackle and the smell of something smouldering. Yes, several moments of crackle.

How many sparkles to the crackle?

Right, let's go over what we've done so far: first of all there was the time we were sitting next to each other and my knee touched hers. This was a pure accident but it sent a glorious shudder through me even though she moved her knee away quite quickly. I mused for a while on the possibility that this wasn't an accident; that she'd deliberately brushed her knee against mine to take, as it were, the temperature of the situation. We had crossed a busy street and I'd taken her by the hand and led her across to the other side and I'd tried to hold on to it a bit longer than was necessary. She let go of my hand quite soon after, overtly to point out a collared dove flying by.

Apparently these birds were almost unknown in Britain and now were on a huge increase. I didn't really care. Since then the number of casual hand-holdings and inadvertent knee-rubbings had increased to the point where I was no longer keeping count. But if you must know, I stopped at twenty-seven casual hand-holdings and nineteen inadvertent knee-rubbings.

Then there were the 'goodbyes' at the bus stop when she went home to her parents each night. I didn't know what status to give the goodbye pecks on the cheek. It was physical contact but there was too much that was everyday about it. Even people who just met for the first time seemed to depart with a peck on the cheek. Or one on each cheek. That was becoming quite widespread, more often than not provoking a shriek of, 'Oooh, going continental, are we?'

Obviously, with JJ, I went continental to double the contact and the time spent kissing her. I was also trying to move mouth-wards with the cheek-pecks.

At first JJ compensated for this by turning her head to the right if I was kissing her left cheek and vice versa, meaning that her mouth was well out of my reach. But as the weeks pa.s.sed, I noticed that our cheek-pecks were becoming very nearly lip-pecks as JJ did less head-turning to avoid my mouth.

After about a month, the arm round the shoulder had been accepted. As always this starts with a yawn and a stretch of both arms and the one behind the shoulders of the girl you're with stays there, eventually flopping innocently on her shoulder.

The 'arms round JJ's waist' were also accepted as being normal and non-threatening. Clearly the issue now was how firmly I squeezed her. Pressure was being subtly increased on every occasion until one day in a lunchtime pub I squeezed a bit too hard while she was drinking a c.o.ke, which she had to spit out along with some partially digested cheese sandwich.

'Oh, I'm so sorry!'

'It's alright; you just took me a bit by surprise.'

'I just felt like squeezing you.'

'Ah, that's nice. I wasn't expecting it. No harm done,' she said kindly, as she wiped the lump of regurgitate off her blouse.

The resting-of-hand-on-knee had pleasingly moved on as far as squeezing-inner-thigh. I'd worked my way up from resting-hand-on-knee to resting-hand-on-just-above-knee to resting-hand-on-top-of-thigh to dangling-hand-on-inner-thigh and one day, in the bas.e.m.e.nt gloom of the Henecky Tavern, I made my move and put my hand on her upper inner thigh and squeezed it.

'I'll get another round in,' I said straight away and got up and went to the bar; part of my plan was not to hang around for an embarra.s.sing reb.u.t.tal or awkward silence. This seemed to work; when I got back with the drinks she did the same to me and I was in heaven.

Our physical intimacy lurched suddenly forward one pre-bus-stop evening drink when we were talking about physical peculiarities.

You know the sort of thing: the sinister implications of being left-handed; curly hair versus straight hair and the shape of follicles; does the size of the gap between your two front teeth mean anything; does not being able to whistle mean you're h.o.m.os.e.xual; does not being able to whistle while holding up a chair by one leg mean you're h.o.m.os.e.xual; is it possible to touch your left elbow with your left hand; is the length of your forearm between wrist and elbow exactly the same as your shoe size?

I suddenly had an idea.

'What about tongue length, then?' I asked her.