Blackbird

Not your typical British blackbird either

2015

  A few times a year, a wild bird is blown thousands of miles from its native land. Nobody can really say how this might happen – it might have been caught in a storm, it might even hitched a ride on a passing ship – but what Gaia was absolutely certain about was that every time this happened, a previously invisible group of British birders would leap out of the undergrowth, grab their extremely expensive gear and cycle/drive/charter a plane down to try and catch a glimpse of the vagrant in question.

  “Come on Thushie, please?”

  We were in bed on a Saturday morning. Her parents thought we were having an innocent sleepover (which in fairness we were, for an hour) after a hard week at Uni; even as we tossed and turned and threw off the duvet, we made sure to be quiet enough not arouse any form of suspicion. We’d had quite the night, but as a life of sex and study had taught me, I was not an early riser. I was the type of girl who was prone to making the most of my excuse to lie in, at least until the sharp light of midday forced me out from beneath the covers. You won’t be surprised then that I did not appreciate Gaia rousing me so early.

  “You’ve woken me up at 7am because someone saw a blackbird?”

  “The first ever red-winged blackbird to make it to England? Hell yes I have. Move your ass, we’re going.”

*

Gaia and I were both 19, and we’d known each other for 6 years before that. At first, she was the other Brown girl, a Canadian with hair for days. Turned out she was trained so well in Tamilian Bharathanatyam that when she took to our high school stage, she became the literal reincarnation of a Goddess. Sure, it helped that we were both brown. When you’re alone in a foreign land, your first instinct is to stick with what you know, but with us it went further. As a Sinhalese Kandyan dancer myself, we soon bonded over our shared love of movement, the fact that our ancestral Sri Lanka could ever have been blessed with two such beautiful forms. I lost count of the hours we spent together teaching and learning with each other, figuring out the different steps, how to position our hands and squat without pain, the meanings behind every expression. In this, and in our lovemaking, she shared everything with me, but when it came to other things, what she missed about Canada, she clammed up tight.

  “Have you done this before?” I asked, having had our breakfast and packed some snacks for the road. “Like, bird-chasing?”

  I didn’t notice the books in her bedroom till she showed me a few months back. At first glance the place was normal enough. Bedstead with monotone covers, dressing table with makeup sets, a wardrobe full of sexy dresses. What was not immediately on show were the sketches laminated in a hidden folder, the faded colours of books on Bizarre Beasts, the world-spanning encyclopaedias with each page worn at the edge. I suppose it made sense. It’s not exactly an it-girl’s prerogative to admit she loves animals beyond a horse, cat or puppy; even now, she had held her tongue on this most clandestine of passions for fear of boring me. Perhaps that’s why I was as surprised as I was by her smiling reply to my question. Wide like a child’s, her cheeks trembling with unashamed honesty.

  “It’s going to be so different with you there,” she said. “I can’t wait, you’re gonna love it.”

I had never seen her like this. Inasmuch as I’d resigned myself to enjoying the day for her sake, my curiosity was well and truly piqued.

The bird – a male, according to the Twitter account chirping away on Gaia’s phone - had apparently landed about an hour or so away from us, somewhere near Croyde Beach. It’s the true definition of a West Country refuge, a small Devon village hidden amidst sleepy side roads and ancient thatched cottages. Granted, it’s busier in summer, when city-slickers coming to cool down in the Blue-Flag surf, but in early May, on a slightly cloudy day, you can normally enjoy a walk along the sand dunes in peace, with nothing but the rustle of the tussock grass and the waves against the shore to accompany you. This was not one of those serene days.

   “Gaia, since when were you a 55-year old white man?”

  By the time we reached the car park we’d chosen as our base, it was rammed. Chortling groups of gentlemen in rain hats and thick coats were all around, patting each other on the back as they lugged their cameras from their cases.

  “Oh look, there’s Terry!”

   Gaia is about average height for a brown girl, about 5’3”, slim but toned with a face as well-drawn as a Disney Princess. Watching her make a beeline for and shake hands with random wrinklies about twice her width was, to me, like placing a well-cooked cutlet amidst a sea of boiled potatoes.

  “You came all the way down from Sheffield for this?” she said, beckoning me over. “That’s great!”

  “Wouldn’t miss it for the world,” said Terry, a cheerfully red-lipped man with a round forehead, before turning to me. “Catbirds, alder flycatchers…you can never get enough of the chase, especially when it comes to these American birds. I’m glad Gaia here’s brought you along, she’s been at this for years. She’ll really show you a good time.”

  That, as it turned out, wasn’t the real surprise.

  “Chase?” I asked.  Gaia nodded.

  “It’s a bird, dummy. You didn’t expect it to stay in one place, did you?”

  Why hadn’t I thought of this before bringing along my brand-new trainers? Just why.

  We started our trek in the village, following the markers along the high-street, knocking on doors to gain access to gardens, especially if they came with a view. Apparently this was a well-known part of bird-chasing – or twitching as Gaia was at pains to have me call it. Once a bird is spotted, the person who finds it tends to notify the neighbours and prepare them for an influx of new trackers. One lady was even kind enough to offer us a piece of toffee cake and tea. (I was honestly surprised she had enough for 15 (plus 1) keen birders.)

  “If you see anything that looks like this,” Terry said to me, showing us all the photo, binoculars in his free hand, “give us a tap. Don’t shout, even if you’re indoors.”

  From the edge of gardens to wilder fields as we walked the rocky route of the headland, I was shocked by how many birds I’d previously failed to notice. Most of them were little ones, black-and-white blobs with tails called long-tailed tits (I giggled, sorry), chubby yellowhammers with brown bodies and stripy faces, even a red and blue Dartford Warbler which was apparently locally rare. Sure, hearing all their names was a little disorienting and weird at first, but once I could put a beak to the name, it was genuinely so cool noticing so many fluffballs for the first time. It got to the point where, more than once, at the sight of something vaguely blackbird-like, I pointed like a baby asking for food, but each time, nope, stern looks, fail, next.

  “Am I embarrassing you?” I asked Gaia, after at least the fourth or fifth attempt. It was 3pm, and we’d walked to the top of Baggy Point, our views spreading across golden beaches to the right and left, the Atlantic blue below. I’ll admit, I was slightly wheezy from the effort, even though grandparents would routinely climb these cliffs.

  Gaia patted my shoulder and tried a joke.

  “You’re like my mom in Toronto Zoo, oh no I can’t walk up another hill. I know it’s a big zoo but still, she’s old. She has an excuse.”

  It didn’t quite land. Turns out she’d lived in a district not too far from the zoo itself, a place where many fellow Tamils had fled in the 80s and 90s as the civil war burned into life. I’d heard bits and pieces from Aunty and Uncle about their lives as refugees, the fraught finances, the upheaval, the rising political passions that followed them across the sea, but I’d heard nothing from Gaia. She was selective enough about what she would tell me to begin with; it felt too intrusive to ask her directly.

  “Honestly,” she said, signs of a slump growing in her step, a little hint of tiredness, even frustration, growing in her voice. “I used to sit in the yard and count all the random things that popped by. We used to get all sorts, even bunnies and deer sometimes. It’s a cold place in Winter sure, but there’s so much more you can see there if you really look. I can’t imagine how crazy Sri Lanka must be with all its endemics.”

  This was the first I’d ever heard her talk more than a few words about her old home, and I wondered for a moment where she would rather have been. She was theoretically in her element with these twitchers. She’d seen so many things that even the oldies had trouble picking out, but for some reason failing to hunt this one bird was really getting to her. The thing with twitching is that you never really know what will happen. You could literally belch gas down motorways left right and centre and still not see the elusive bird you’re after. I’d resigned myself to muddy trainers (with a grimace, as you do), but then at least I could clean them. What if your birdie got eaten by a cat, or decided to try and go home? I was learning you could never predict these things, that Terry and the rest of the old boys enjoyed the occasional beer they stopped off for along the way just as much, but then shouldn’t Gaia have already known all this?

  As the day went on, we weren’t getting any closer. We had traversed literally the entire region, every reasonable habitat and path where a bird that ostensibly lived in cities might have found refuge. Every hour, we were losing someone, the arthritis getting too much, commitments with the wife, so on and so forth. Gaia, wide-eyed, kept moving forward as she always did, refusing to give up, suggesting a nook we’d missed, a cranny to go back over that matched up with the previous records. Just as we’d headed out onto the beach, we lost Terry too.

  “Don’t worry, we’ll get ‘im,” he told us, with honest good cheer. “Might not be easy, but there’s always a next time. Pleasure meeting you both.”

  Even as we said goodbye to him, his weathered old Jeep pattering off into the distance, I don’t think his consoling words made Gaia feel any better.

  I followed her as she slumped onto the sand, cross-legged, silent as the evening’s surfers threw themselves into the waves. Her eyes were moving from side to side, computing every possible angle, but her body no longer carried that same energy.

  “Hey,” I said, wracking my brains for something nice, yet empty, enough to say as I sat down beside her, “you were right. Today was great, we should do it again sometime.”

  Still nothing. I closed my eyes and breathed.

   “Come on, bubs, it’s just a bird.”

  Then came release.

* 

 “You know how close I am with my cousins. When I was younger and we were all in Scarborough together, they still hugged and kissed me every time they saw me, like I was still a baby. God, I used to get so worried about them. In ’09 right, a bit after Amma and Appa got shook down by those thugs asking for ‘donations’, they kept telling me they were going out on protests. “Fuck the government and their genocide.” Thing is, even though we had tickets to leave, we wanted to be there with them. No matter the individual mistakes, the cause was the cause, right?”

“They would hide their LTTE flags and placards up in the attic so nobody would ever get suspicious. They’d been a terrorist group for years, but they were the only ones fighting for Eelam, so what else would we use? Soon as the coast was clear, out they came. They were so proud, talking about the Leader like he was a God – even the Aunties would tell you off if you put his face on the grass, it’s that deep. And they could stay out for ages you know? The local restaurants gave you dosai for days. I remember staying up all night wondering if the police would get them for inciting hate or something, if they would come and watch the birds with me one last time before we left like it was the only thing in the world that mattered.

God, the birds.

The thing with blackbirds right, they move in flocks. I think they’re the most common bird in North America, so when I say you can see millions of them, I mean it. I just remember looking out of the window in the early hours waiting for my cousins and just...my Lord Thushie. I’ve read about birds blotting out the sky, but I never thought it would be real. So many of them, like God had sent down a storm or a blessing, I couldn’t stop watching.

My cousins…they were fine. They cried with us when the fighting stopped a few days later, but we had to leave before the memorials could start…”

 She tailed off, turning to me.

  “Ever since I came here, you were always the only person who’s given me the peace I felt when I heard they were coming home. God, this is dumb. When I saw that bird was here, I felt like I did when they came through the door. I just wanted you to see it and realise…forget it. It’s dumb. It’s so dumb.”

  I wiped my eyes. She didn’t need to finish her sentence.

  “It’s not. It never was.”

*

We sat there in silence for a while, having sips of the lukewarm tea we’d kept after heading out, the last few vadai Aunty had made yesterday. The clouds had long since departed, leaving a Sun that had started to sag and sink beyond the horizon. I breathed the sea air, then looked down at the disappointed girl resting in my lap. Eventually, she nodded off, sinking into my arm. She was a deep sleeper. I ran a finger through her hair and held her close for nearly an hour.

Then, right on inappropriate cue, the blackbird decided to join us on the beach. 

At first, I barely registered him. After all, when you see a sunset like those you get along Negombo Beach near Colombo, you know where you’re going to divert most of your attention. Still, after a day spent seeing common things be common, such sleek, crow-like blackness on such a small bird stood out like a fresh coat of paint. He was about the size of my hand, his wings bearing epaulettes of orange and red, his head jerking in an almost-complete circle as he surveyed his alien surroundings. He looked nothing like a British blackbird. Instead of thin and jaunty, he was stiff and angular, his bill as dark as his feathers, designed not to pull out worms but to cut seeds into manageable chunks.

Huh, I thought to myself, Gaia’s skills were rubbing off on me…and rubbing off on me fast asleep!

My eyes jarred, but then common sense told me, okay, you’re in the wild, no sudden moves. The bird was literally three feet away, closer than any bird had been that day. I tapped Gaia’s nose. No response. Tapped again, even her forehead, her left breast. She merely settled further into her sleep. I couldn’t disturb her. She’d just make too much noise and frighten the bird away. This was too risky.

I decided on a compromise. I had no choice. This meant too much to Gaia for me to mess this up and ruin things now. Slowly, inching my hands into my pocket and then out, I took out my phone, selecting the best zoom I could manage. 

Stay still, bird.

I took one photo, but I’d forgotten to turn the phone to silent. The click echoed in the coastal air, and for an eternal second, I watched as the bird turned to look me in the eyes and stare.

Still there.

I don’t think I’d ever felt myself shake so much as I flicked the little side switch. Even them, try as I might, the photos weren’t great. The bird was moving, hopping around, grabbing something from in the tussock, then weaving back out. So much blur, honestly. Not everything works out the way we hope, but as I took a reel of at least 10, I could at least console myself with the idea that I had tried.

It felt like hours, but the whole episode was over in a few minutes. A breeze ruffling his feathers, the blackbird spread his wings and flew out beyond the dunes into the evening sky. I followed him with my eyes until he disappeared from my sight, a black blur joining others as darkness slowly fell over North Devon.

  “Hey…”

  Gaia was more awake now, her voice a little croaky and her eyes a little blurred in the dying light.

  “Did I nod off? Anything happen?”

  I breathed. Kissing her forehead, I was unable to control the smile that was steadily growing my cheeks, no matter how heavy it felt to wear.

  “I’ll show you in a bit, okay?”