Fingers in the Sparkle Jar Read online

  Portswood Pets and Aquaria had the usual fare: puppies, kittens, the rabbits and rodents, goldfish, budgies, hundreds of terrapins and tortoises, but they had real animals too. Pirate the blue and gold macaw was ‘not for sale’ but sulphur crested cockatoos were, mynah birds were, and so were flights full of amazing exotics which I would try to identify by matching their biro-scrawled name to the skittish explosions of feathers that would nervously erupt when I peeped into their cramped cages. Their wings whirred like shuffled cards, their beady eyes flashed brilliant fear, the perches crowded with fluxing flocks of Gouldian finches, Java sparrows and pin-tailed whydahs left me awestruck.

  But even better than the birds were the tropical fish at the back. These ‘ridiculously expensive’ things, as my dad called them, made my colouring sets look wholly inadequate; in their verdant pools of waving weed they sparked parts of the spectra I’d never seen, they zipped out of the shadows and flashed brand new colours. They were entrancing and standing in the muggy, damp, bubbling room was tantalising, it was a portal into another world where all the life swam and couldn’t be touched, juggled or jostled by my all too eager hands.

  Hung like earrings on ribbons of swaying green, coiled and curled, there were once living seahorses and I nearly burst! These peculiar fish ranked alongside bats, otters and snakes, they were ultra special. But they only had them on one occasion and I wondered if they had died because at the front of the shop, by the till, they sold dried starfish and seahorses. And these fragile and easily lost curios were my must-haves or there’d be serious repercussions at home. Just like the plastic bats, desiccated marine life was a necessary zoological sedative to keep those long hours between Saturdays bearable for my parents, so my father always gave me half a crown for a new seahorse.

  But even the kaleidoscopic splendour of the tropical fish couldn’t match the magnetic draw that pulled me to my knees to gaze into the rows of grubby glass tanks that contained … reptiles! Fat and wrinkled pythons, the peeling tails of boa constrictors and, amongst a fluctuating show of lizards, geckos and skinks, fabulous green iguanas – and unbelievably they had real chameleons too! I’d stand entranced as these jungle gems wobbled through their foliage, eyes going everywhere, just dying to see them change colour or spit out their famously long tongues. They did neither but it was here that my craving became insatiable because the penultimately most desirable pet in the shop was the crocodile.

  Yes, in a long thin tank near the counter they had a caiman just like my stuffed one. It lay there, quite motionless in a thick green soup, staring with its glistening, exquisitely veined eyes, its little white teeth so close on the other side of the misty glass. It was beautiful, a pocket dinosaur beyond my non-existent pocket money and my parents’ purse. I begged and begged for that creature but not nearly as much as I pleaded to own the greatest animal they ever had for sale in this repository of natural wonders.

  Over the years Portswood Pets had bushbabies, chinchillas, chipmunks and even small monkeys – and allegedly once upon a time, lions. None of these came close, because on one fateful and unforgettable rainy afternoon, with my sister in the pushchair and my mum moaning about having to wait outside, I stepped in and there, in a parrot cage, hanging, twisting, twitching, licking with sherbet-pink tongues were two fruit bats. Ahhh! How my father’s heart must have sunk when he saw them; I’m surprised he didn’t break down and weep because in that instant he would have known that for the foreseeable future his life would become about as unbearable as it’s feasibly possible for a mono-minded compulsive child to make it. His son didn’t want the grand wooden boxed set of Meccano, the Action Man deep-sea diving outfit, the complete array of Thunderbirds toys, Scalextric or a brand new bike … he wanted a bat. And he wanted that bat very, very badly.

  The Bird

  Sunday 1 June 1975

  UNFALLING, THE BIRD stands chopping air, fluttering and then rolling down smooth, slipping and then sliding away to ring a curve across the storm until it pitches at its apex and begins to dance with the wind, its plumes constantly shaken, folding and flicking to steer it still and … balance broken it tumbles and steadies with a twist of grey – cloud-licked and clean, now measuring the weight of the sky again. Then a drop, deckling wings furling – waiting, rich brown back and freckled front – watching, and then the ground quickly surges up and swallows it into the scrolling grass, sucks it down in a greedy rush. And it’s stopped, nothing happens now.

  Wind licks little furies on the meadow and tousles the willows’ petticoats, which flounce into a fit of wild fretting. The evening is set to argue, it’s begging for thunder as it cleaves the sun through the groaning barricade of carcassed elms and the drenched field in which the boy lies sours around his torn plastic shoes. But he is unshivering, he needs to see what happens next or all his sodden trudging will have been a waste of Wednesday … the bird still in hiding. For him there is no time here, nothing measured, nothing that passes, for him nothing is felt except his indestructible focus. His world is small and shrinking fast and this leaves him alone in the fields of fourteen, tiny in a giant space, safer in himself than in anything of theirs.

  And it’s up, just there, low, burdened and loping away through the cloak of drizzle. He jumps and runs, runs stumbling and smashes through the spiny hedge, always with his eyes on the bird, it goes up, it’s black now, not so pretty, then it twists to a sliver and folds, flaps past the trees where the cows are puddling mud and then higher, it circles tight and once and through the hassle of his panting and the wash of rain he hears a faint whinnying before it vanishes.

  It’s prematurely dark by the time he slips the elastic bands over his feet and folds his trousers neatly back, jerks his bike around, his jacket loaded with wet and the stale smell of him and the soft scent of earth. He pauses to pull some thorns and licks watery blood from a scratch that is still bleeding when he kicks open the garage door, crashes his racer into the blackness and smells his dead dinner beneath the grill. Friday, he thinks, Friday… his hand on the door, his mum shouting up the stairs, his sister ignoring her, his dad reading about the referendum, ignoring both of them.

  The Farmer

  June 1975

  THE FARMER AT West Horton lopes out watching the mugs slopping tea, scalding his muddy palm, dodging between the dazzling sunlit sheets that his mother stands pegging to a droop of lines. Unhitching a rose-snagged corner, he dirties it and frowns. The tidy old woman takes the tea and crouches to place it by the basket; she smiles, draws curtains of grey hair behind her ears and continues to hang up the washing. He glances out over the valley and sees a tiny figure moving across the jigsaw of meadows by the railway. From the edge of the garden he peers, slurps his bitter brew and nods. It’s the boy who comes looking for birds. He’d been at the door before eight this morning but he’d ignored it; he’d given him permission to go down there but whenever he came, which was several times a week now, he always knocked on the big front door anyway. He’d answer it sometimes, nod and say, ‘Fine. That’s fine, yes, go, you’re welcome.’

  Occasionally after this reiterated exchange the boy would suddenly start to tell him about some bird or other. He’d talk absurdly fast, obliviously tripping through his words, always looking down at the step, he’d tell the mat about something that totally switched him on, he’d lurch from timid and backward to a barely contained mania, rambling too quickly, excitedly crashing through a dialogue that gave no room for conversation and then, inevitably, punctuate this cascade of unsolicited enthusiasm with a question. He’d finally glance at him to ask if he’d seen a ‘whatever-it-was’. Which he hadn’t because he knew nothing at all about birds.

  A clod of shit fell from his crusted boot, so he dragged his instep over the rocky edge of the rose garden, drained his cup, flicked away the sludge and then crouched to push the dung around the wizened stems of the flowers. His mother’s shadow eclipsed the soil and he knew exactly what was coming.

  ‘Lavington,’ she wheezed, ‘I won
’t be able to do this forever.’

  The washing. She meant the washing. The housework, the cleaning, the wife’s work, the non-existent wife’s work. The farmer’s wife who wasn’t there. He stood up. The kid had stopped by the three big trees on the edge of his herd of curious Friesian heifers, which were crowded round the gate in the bluish wash of mid-morning shade. He stropped his hands over his checked shirt, folded back his tattered cuffs and clipped his thumbs onto his hips. A radio dribbled the Osmonds over the lawn and the distant cattle bucked and jostled, encircling the figure until he disappeared. He wasn’t going all the way down there. He screwed up his eyes; it was a long way off. Thankfully the boy reappeared, silently clapping his hands at the playful crowd, and then flipped over the gate and out of sight behind a plait of hedgerows, still foaming with suds of browning blossom. He shook his head, turned and limped off to the yard. Kestrel, that was it, the bird he was always on about. Kestrels.

  The Bird

  Friday 6 June 1975

  ‘I FOUND IT!’

  Blue biro. I’d tried so hard to inscribe it in my very best curly handwriting but the quality of my calligraphy decayed rapidly and after seven short careful lines impatient delirium had annotated the remainder of the entry and I’d produced a page of inappropriate scrawl. I sat up and breathed and, mildly calmed, gave the second whole page over to a neatly drawn map of a tiny patch of Hampshire. It showed individual trees and there was a scale and a legend that illustrated the symbols for fencing, a bog and a wet ditch, and at its centre a great ballooning oak labelled ‘nest-tree’.

  But this was all a waste of time, a formulaic exercise, because I knew I’d never ever need to be prompted by this diary at all, I would remember the moment I found that nest in unfailing detail forever. That surge of raw ecstasy as the male Kestrel flew into view and his mate squeezed out of her cubbyhole had made me physically shake. And that burst of joy had only slowly transformed into an enormously triumphant and vain crown of satisfaction swollen by the smug knowledge that all my hours of cold wet searching that spring had paid off.

  But then I had been optimistic that Friday 6 June 1975 would be ‘the day’ based on the observations made last week when I’d tracked the hunting male close to that particular spot. Nevertheless, I’d still been curled amongst a prickly posy of thistles, swooning in the bouquet of trampled hay and warm sweet dung for three hours before he’d returned, and there hadn’t been a peep or a glimpse of the female. She too had been lying low, brooding her six grey downy young in an old crows’ nest, shielded by a thick veil of ivy about thirty feet up in the oak. But once I’d found it all I really needed to know was could I get up to it?

  I’d had a powerful urge to sprint over and start to clamber up but from somewhere I’d summoned some control and dutifully remained hidden in the shadow of the hawthorn, fidgeting on a spotty bed of its mouldering confetti. As the morning warmed, I’d gazed unblinking at the bushes opposite, bunched across my horizon like a row of freshly permed heads in a cinema, waiting, aching for the next round of Kestrel action.

  Three noisy exchanges had marked the arrival of food, the male performing a delightful quivering flight and soliciting the female from the nest with a shrill call before she disappeared to feed the invisible but now audible chicks. Afterwards she’d swooped down onto a fence post to preen and taken a bath in a shallow ditch that ran beneath her favoured perch. I’d perversely fantasised that this final leg of my quest would take all day but it was only eleven o’clock when it had all happened so I’d pried open my Tupperware box and picked apart a Wall’s steak and kidney pie, nibbled a hard green apple and sucked a Mars bar as slowly as possible. This stalling couldn’t work for long so I’d packed the rubbish, my binoculars and field guide into my A.R.P bag and dodged the dung-mines as I hurried across the pasture to the base of the tree.

  I had made that climb in my daydreams a hundred times, feared the difficulty of the ascent, the sheer height and precarious location of a nest set in the flimsy sky-scraping branches of a giant tree. It would be an eyrie, maybe ropes would be required and obviously I’d be alone as secrecy would be imperative, no one else on earth could ever know the location of such a treasure. I had envisioned it as a rite of passage but although I had written that it was ‘quite a hard climb on a thin branch’, it wasn’t, I’d exaggerated. I had to shin up a bough wrapped with thick ivy with no handholds for about twelve feet but that was easy.

  My knees clamped painfully around the branch, my filthy grazed fingers wiped thick brown dust from my sweaty face and then reached forward to part the ivy. I’d hesitated, I could smell them before I could see them, a dry, slightly meaty, warm scent, then I hoicked myself up and leaned forward spitting out a twig. Bright-eyed, blue-eyed, with smoky coats of fluff, they flailed featherless wings and hobbled on fresh custard-yellow legs, their taloned toes tightly fisted. Six, precariously ringing the far side of their stinky platform with gaping mouths, fixing me with terrified stares. They rocked and shuffled, I rested still, not breathing, dizzy after my rapid scramble to their scruffy fortress. I gasped – they flinched, they scowled – I smiled, and gently backed down. They were the most beautiful things I’d ever seen and one of them would be mine. I was possessed.

  September 2003

  He’d not bothered to disguise his fear. He had pinned himself into the back of the chair as if it was teetering high above the ground, his blue eyes fixed on something atrocious, staring downwards in shocked confusion.

  ‘What did you do?’

  After a very long pause he sighed. Then following a deep breath and another sigh he stated quietly, ‘I counted them.’

  She was conscious not to move, she kept her hands together, her arms folded. She was physically comfortable. Relaxed, composed. But she was pin-sharp now, concentrating on concentrating. Thinking about timing, breathing. She deliberately lowered her eyes to the floor and uncrossed and re-crossed her ankles.

  A minute passed. And another.

  ‘How many were there?’ she asked gently, but matter-of-factly.

  He replied instantly as he always did if the question was objective.

  ‘Thirty-nine.’

  She pursed her lips, nodded, and pondered his rationale. He was not rash, he was obsessively self-controlling, but he had also presented a paradoxical collusion of the considered and the recklessly unpredictable. But she already suspected his unpredictable had always been carefully deliberated. So, he would have likely Googled the drug’s name and researched its efficacy, he would have calculated the collective potential at his disposal and undoubtedly the only reason he was sat here now was because there had not been enough tablets in the jar.

  2

  The Tadpole Spoon

  The Old Soldier

  May 1973

  HE RESTED ON his fork and fumbled in his mossy overcoat pocket for the last few twists of tobacco, which he shook into the corner of a rust-freckled tin. He exhaled and peeled a tissue from under his unkempt moustache and shook the crumbs to make a dusty cigarette, which leaked a ghost of smoke to briefly haunt the shade below his large floppy cap. A lattice of cracks spidered the fingers that gently smoothed the flaked paint of the tin’s lid and lifted it to his nose, where he smelled his smoked history, and to his ringing ear, where beneath the whine he heard the distant popping of shells behind the dunes of El Alamein. Thick black genies rolled from the fiery cores of screaming tanks, up-dancing big and fast feeding a sickly stain to hide the sun. And in the torn light of morning he’d cracked the sand-glass that ringed their gutted carcasses as he tiptoed through the charnel, a handkerchief pressed to his burst face, his nose pinched against the warm taste of fresh crackling and it was there he’d stooped for the shiny tin, unburned and brilliant.

  At his sleepless bedside on the ward its lid twinkled for two years whilst he listened to the voice of the gun, mocking his deafness with whoops and wails and cracks and thumps, replayed without respite. He lay there, the light pouring out of his black eyes
into a world that could never see into his.

  He had the appearance and demeanour of a St Bernard: wet pink-rimmed eyes, pinned lobes of skin drooping loosely about thick folds of jowl, coarsely shaven and flyspecked with moles, and with wispy hair that bushed in wiry sheaves down to his shoulders. ‘Tramp’, all the children called him, he lived in the ‘tramp house’ and they saved their litter to throw amongst his carefully tended fleshy flowers, thickly planted in polygons of soil set between a geometry of narrow concrete paths. They kicked his green picket gate and tried to pitch their paper and plastic packets onto the roof of his olive-coloured Morris Oxford, which stood permanently clean on two corrugated ramps that ran down a steep sideway to his garage, the doors of which he couldn’t open unless he first moved the car. Which he did, each morning at half past nine, lavender puffs jumping from its exhaust as he tickled it to life and reversed it out to park it meticulously along his kerb.