The Bearded Tit Part 12

'Er...hang on!' I thrust it into the wastepaper basket. 'Oh d.a.m.n, I must have left it in Rex the Chaplain's room!'

She opened her eyes.

'I'm really sorry. I'll get it later.'

As I said this a lively, bell-like twittering came from the bin.

'What was that?' she asked.

'I didn't hear anything. Can I make you a coffee?'

'I don't think so.'

'Correct, I've got no coffee.'

'I'm on my way to work so I'd better get going.'

We stood facing each other, holding both hands.

'Thanks for coming over.'

'My pleasure; I'm glad everything's alright.'

'Everything's fine. It's nice to have you in my bedroom. Sure you don't want to stay? Have the day off.' I was straying into unknown territory here. It was exciting. And scary.

Her smile was tender and calm.

'One day. One day soon.'

She leaned towards me.

I leaned towards her.

I could feel the warmth of her breath.

She closed her eyes.

I closed mine.

She kissed me softly, and briefly, on the lips.

We opened our eyes and looked deep into each other's and knew that the next kiss would be more than a kiss. It would be the crackling, sparkling flame snaking along the fusewire to a bomb. Closer still.

'I was worried there was someone else,' she whispered.

'No,' I breathed. 'No one else.'

We closed our eyes, put our arms round each other and BANG!

'b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l, you've got to walk miles to take a s.h.i.+t in this place!' said a rasping South African voice as the door was flung open and hit the bedside table.

Brigid appeared in the doorway.

Semi-naked and scratching her wispy, ginger p.u.b.es.

FEAST.

So much pale pink, tasty flesh. Where do you begin? Feel how firm that breast is. Imagine how much one of them weighs. Look at the legs. Dark, muscly and mouth-watering. A carnal feast. A meat treat.

'I think it's disgusting,' Kramer said grabbing a plate and standing in the queue.

I didn't think it was disgusting but I had felt better in my life and the sight of so much food laid out was a tiny bit off-putting, but, then, it was only once a year.

'It's better than the usual s.h.i.+te they serve us.'

'That's not true. There's just more of it and you get a paper cup of watered-down wine,' mumbled the gloom-meister.

'Oh, come on,' I said. 'You can't beat Christmas dinner.'

'Why turkey, though? Why does it have to be turkey?' he grumbled, and I remembered he was Jewish.

'Hey, it's not even your festival, so shut up moaning!'

'It's not your your festival either. It's a mish-mash. It's mostly pagan. It's the Roman saturnalia.' festival either. It's a mish-mash. It's mostly pagan. It's the Roman saturnalia.'

The queue had moved slowly as far as the carved turkey. Kramer went on, 'And since when has turkey been traditional in Britain? It's American.'

I ignored him. 'You a leg man or a breast man?'

'I go for the personality, actually.' Kramer was interrupted by Lazy Lobby, the non-h.o.m.os.e.xual rugby club stalwart and ponding enthusiast, who quipped, 'I think the important thing is how they gobble.'

Kramer suddenly turned to me and caught me off guard with his question. 'Talking of which, there was a lot of laughing and shouting coming from your room last night. Monocellular Mike said he saw you staggering back into college quite late with a girl who definitely did not fit the description of a certain pretty and gamine bookseller.'

'Oh yeah, I was out with a load of the Modern Languages lot. Sort of end-of-term thing.'

He didn't seem convinced. 'Not Brigid that South African girl who worked in the canteen last year?'

'Oh her, I remember her. She was a real...er...' I stumbled.

'Turkey?' Kramer helped out.

The turkey is originally Mexican rather than North American, and the Incas were big fans. This unsightly and gormless bird provided everything that was precious to the Incas: meat, eggs and ludicrous headgear. It has almost nothing to do with the country of the same name. Turkey, Greece and those parts of the world provided us with the similarly plumptious guinea fowl which was often called, wait for it, the turkey-c.o.c.k.

My childhood Christmases would not have been the same without a turkey, and the invariably gigantic bird would do our family of six for several days: roast turkey on Christmas Day; cold turkey on Christmas Night; turkey in white sauce with rice on Boxing Day lunchtime; curried turkey on the 27th; turkey sandwiches on the 28th, and on the next day a broth based on the boiled-down turkey carca.s.s with barley, carrots, onions and, indeed, whatever bits and pieces were left over from the festivities chucked in for luck. This last dish, the 'turkey soup', was in many ways my favourite meal of the whole holiday, even though one year I found a party-popper in it.

Turkey was clearly the Christmas-dinner choice in d.i.c.kens' time. Who can forget that charming scene from A Christmas Carol A Christmas Carol when Scrooge, a new man after his ghostly visitors, wakes up bursting with good humour on Christmas morning, opens his bedroom window and shouts down to an urchin in the street, What's today, my fine fellow?' when Scrooge, a new man after his ghostly visitors, wakes up bursting with good humour on Christmas morning, opens his bedroom window and shouts down to an urchin in the street, What's today, my fine fellow?'

'Why it's Christmas Day, Mr Scrooge!' replies the startled boy.

'I shall give you some money for you to purchase a prize turkey.'

And the chirpy c.o.c.kney sparrow of a lad replies, Where the f.u.c.k am I going to get a prize turkey on Christmas Day, you senile old git?'

Or something like that. It's a long time since I read it.

And the actual word 'turkey' has clearly not had great semantic PR over the years. Turkey: 1) An unsuccessful theatrical production, a flop, an embarra.s.sment.

2) A person or thing of little appeal, a dud, a loser.

3) A large ugly, unattractive woman.

4) A naive, stupid or inept person.

5) Cold turkey; the sickness, nausea and mania of drug withdrawal.

Definitions 2) and 4) just about covered me and how I had felt this morning. The more I thought about it, the worse I felt. Surveying the mounds of limp turkey, greyish sausages, whiffy sprouts, frazzled bacon, charred roast potatoes, sloppy carrots and turnips, mould-speckled cranberry sauce, rubbery trifle, senile mince pies and flaccid whipped cream, I decided that I wasn't that hungry after all. I turned to Kramer.

'Why don't we just nip across the road to the Maypole and have a cheese sandwich?'

'Good idea,' he said.

'Oh, er, hang on...not the Maypole.'

REED BUNTING.

The sombre cubicles of the bas.e.m.e.nt bar of the Turk's Head reminded me too much of the church confessional. I never liked confession. Penance was my least favourite of the seven sacraments.

The seven sacraments: Baptism, Penance, Holy Eucharist, Confirmation, Matrimony, Ordination and Extreme Unction.

Baptism was easy because, as a babe in arms, you didn't have to do much except scream the church down as the priest poured water over you.

Eucharist was great fun. It was your first Holy Communion and in our church you got a huge cooked breakfast afterwards.

Confirmation meant pledging yourself to be a soldier of Christ. This didn't seem too scary even to a thirteen-year-old. The odds, one guessed, of being called up to fight for Christ against the battalions of Satan must have been pretty long. And a perk of confirmation was that you got an extra name. My confirmation name is Peter. (The famous biblical pun on the Greek petros petros, meaning 'rock': 'Thou art Peter and upon this rock I shall build my church.' Of course I didn't know that at the time.) Then comes the sacrament of Matrimony. Ah, yes, the joys of marriage. Right, moving quickly on, ordination. This is the sacrament of taking Holy Orders: becoming a priest. I didn't think this one would ever be relevant in my particular life, though there have been many times when I thought entering the priesthood looked like a cushy option.

Extreme Unction is the last sacrament: the anointing of the sick. The most interesting thing about this one is that when, as a Catholic schoolchild, you learn your catechism off by heart, you never really know what any of it means and you're seldom completely sure what the actual words are that you're parroting. The seven sacraments would go: 'baptism, penance, holy eucharist, confirmation, ordination and extree munction.' For years I didn't know what extree munction was. I didn't know if there were any other sorts of 'munction' other than the 'extree' one.

But Penance. You have sinned. You must confess your sins. You must be punished for your sins. When you were very young you had to ask your parents what sins you had committed before you went for your weekly visit to confession. Lying, being rude to your parents and horrible to your brothers and sisters were their usual suggestions. So you'd happily confess to those sins, whether you'd committed them or not. As you got older you could work out the sins for yourself, perhaps throwing in 'using bad language and thinking rude thoughts'. I remember confessing to having rude thoughts long before I knew what a rude thought was. As you get even older, things that you thought were sins before don't seem like sins any more, but part and parcel of being a human being: lying is surely too everyday still to be counted as something worth confessing. Using bad language is almost compulsory nowadays, and having rude thoughts is surely the only way to stay remotely sane in the modern world.

The punishment was invariably having to say a number of prayers. Our local parish priest would listen to your sins and after some deliberation tell you to say three 'Hail Marys'.

It was perfectly clear that he didn't really pay that much attention to what you said your sins were, and I once flirted with the idea of confessing to having stabbed the Pope to death just to see if I still got three 'Hail Marys' as my penance.

It was the day after the apparition of Brigid in my bedroom. JJ had fled without a word. This was the first opportunity I had had to speak to her since. We sat down next to each other in the solemnity of our booth and I prepared to make my confession. Up till then the conversation had been curt and functional.

'h.e.l.lo, how are you?'

'Fine. You?'

'Fine. White wine?'

'Please.'

At the table we slowly and silently sipped our drinks. Before the pregnant pause gave birth to something unsightly, I produced a carrier bag and offered its contents to JJ.

'This is for you. I meant to give it to you a couple of days ago,' I began nervously, 'but I-'

'-left it at Rex the Chaplain's drinks party,' she helped out.

'It's a reed bunting.'

I gave her the fluffy toy bird and she smiled sweetly and squeezed it and it made a noise like a bird. If not a reed bunting.

'Oh, it's lovely. Thank you so much! I like reed buntings. You don't see them very often.'

'I don't see them at all; I'm reed bunting blind!'

She smiled weakly and I abandoned that line of evasive humour and tried a half-truth instead. Or was it a half-lie?

'I wanted to get you a long-tailed t.i.t coz I know that's your favourite but the shop had sold out.'

'Ah never mind. This is lovely.'

The reed bunting (Emberiza schoeniclus) is a striking bird, easy to see and identify, especially in summer. The male sings openly from low perches in wetlands and water's edges. Streaky brown back separated from the black head by a white neck ring. It looks like a sort of elite sparrow. The repeated jangly song is unmistakable; it sounds identical to the thirteenth bar of the intro to 'Martha My Dear' by the Beatles. You know: 'doo doo doodoo doo'. There, I hope that's cleared that up.

She squeezed it again and its tinny unconvincing chirrup was a welcome distraction. And again. And again. The amusing novelty value of this did not last long.

JJ took my hand and clasped it between both of hers. She fixed me with her eyes and spoke softly. 'I've got something to say-'

I didn't let her get any further. 'That girl used to work in the canteen, as a waitress, she's mad! South African, in fact. We had a sort of thing in my first year and I hadn't seen her for ages but I b.u.mped into her on the way to see you and I couldn't shake her off and I thought I'd go for a drink with her because I didn't want to turn up to meet you with her and I lost track of the time and we got drunk and she must have spent the night with me but I know nothing happened even though she had no clothes on and I couldn't get in touch with you and I'm sorry but there's only you and I'm sorry I lied to you and didn't give you a long-tailed t.i.t.'

JJ was looking at me with a look so warm it was melting me. I wonder if I'd get away with something as light as three 'Hail Marys'.

She put one arm round my neck and pulled my face to hers. She kissed me deeply and roughly and desperately. It was the loveliest kiss in the world ever. I know. I was there. When we separated we were both panting. My heart was pounding on my ribcage, screaming to be let out.

'Is that all you've got to say?' I asked in between breaths.

'Yes, I've got to go back to work!'

She kissed me again. A peck on the cheek. A microscopic version of the previous kiss. She shuffled along the bench seat and sat on something and we heard the unconvincing made-in-Taiwan squeak of a reed bunting.

ACT ONE.