You can’t do that kind of thing, I said, not here.
You picked up one of the pieces and examined it as closely as you’d examined the complete mug a moment ago.
Beautiful, you said.
You can’t just break things, I said. It’s not done. And you can’t just take things. It’s okay to take things from home. But not from shops.
You opened one of the books, a small old kind of book with a bright yellow cover, drawings of birds all over it. It was called Birds at Sight: How to Know Them.
Lesser spotted woodpecker. The nest is a hole in a tree, you said. Jay. The nest of sticks and grass is in a bush or tree. Magpie. The domed nest with entrance at the side is built of sticks and mud in a tree or bush. Linnet. The nest of rootlets, grass, wool and hair is in a gorse bush or similar place. Chaffinch. The mossy nest with soft lining is one of the prettiest, and may be in a bush, hedge or tree.
Actually it’s not really all right to keep taking things from home either, I said.
The wonderful bottle-shaped mud nest is under the eaves of a building, you read. All the mud is brought in the birds’ bills. The nest is in a crevice in a wall or tree or on a beam in the roof of a building.
I don’t mind so much the pens and stuff, I said. But there are some things I need you not to take.
The cock sparrow, courting, will display his throat and droop his wings, you said. He brings and tears yellow flowers. The male whitethroat, courting, will bring the female a piece of grass.
The car key, I said. And my bank cards. The car key cost £260 to replace. I can’t drive the car without it. And it’s very annoying and inconvenient to have to keep changing my bank cards.
Hopping birds, such as the sparrows, blackbirds, thrushes and other finches leave their footprints in pairs, side by side. Walking or running birds, like the wagtail and the starling, leave a line of alternate impressions, similar in form to human tracks.
Well, obviously, I said.
You went on reading out stuff at me about the differences between footprints left by ducks and gulls.
I’m going out, I said. Don’t come too.
I went for a walk at the shore. It was nice to be by myself. Then I realized I was looking at the tracks birds had left, watching for what gulls’ tracks looked like, and I got annoyed at myself and at you. Then I felt guilty for enjoying being by myself.
It started to rain. I ducked into one of the shop spaces under the walkway. It was an amusement arcade full of old machines, the kind from the first few decades of the last century. I gave the man in the booth a pound and he gave me ten old pennies in exchange; then I halfheartedly wound my way two-thirds through a lady lifting her skirts in a What the Butler Saw machine, showing her thighs higher and higher in a flicketing wad of old photographs whose paper edges, as they shifted from still to motion to still again, were so softened and dirty, so like old worthless currency, that I felt sorry for the white-thighed lady, then for all the people who’d ever put their eyes to this eyeslot and watched her, then finally for myself, which I continued to feel, wandering round this arcade. Until, that is, I found the Super Steer-a-Ball.
The Super Steer-a-Ball was a big square machine painted bright red with a sloping metal countryside painted onto it and a steering wheel stuck on the front. I put a penny in and a steel ball about the size of a childhood gobstopper appeared through a hole at the top. The ball had to be guided down a maze of sloping paths between panels enameled with summer trees, avoiding dead ends and hidden slopes, until it reached two holes and disappeared into the blackness down one of them. The holes were rusty, very roughly cut in the metal. One hole had the word HOME written next to it in red. The other had the word LOST.
I put all the cash I had and all the change in my pockets into this machine, because every time I put the penny in, no matter what I did, the ball went down the hole marked LOST. They were just holes, the holes, cut in the metal. They were exactly the same as each other. But one was called HOME and one was called LOST, so I kept on putting my penny in and trying to get the ball into the one marked HOME. It was terrible, the fact that it kept going down the one marked LOST.
I had started the walk with sixty pounds in my wallet. I went to the booth now with my last five-pound note.
The Super Steer-a-Ball is impossible, I said to the man in the booth.
Oh no it’s not, he said.
Oh yes it is, I said. It can’t be done.
Oh yes it can, he said.
He took an old penny for himself off one of the stacks of coins and opened the door to the booth, came out, stood in front of the machine, put his penny in and angled the steering wheel acutely as the ball came down through the pretty trees and went straight down the hole marked LOST.
Aw, the man said. I can usually. Wait a minute.
I gave him one of my pennies. He put it in, the ball came down the English lanes and went straight down the hole marked LOST.
I’d have liked another couple of tries myself, but I couldn’t get him off the game. So I served the small queue of people for him who were waiting for change. When I left the arcade he was still bracing his own weight against the weight of the machine.
Aw! he was saying. Then: Wait. Then: Aw no.
I came back to our hotel, which was quite a posh one. I moved through Reception as quickly as I could because some people there were making a complaint to the management about drains. I came upstairs, along the corridor and into our room. You were still sitting exactly where you’d been, as if I’d never left. You were reading the other book you’d stolen from the charity shop, a book about the ways insects, birds, and bigger creatures made homes for themselves out of whatever they had to hand. Compare this, I read over your shoulder, with the saliva nest constructed by Asian cave swiftlets. Made of solidified spit, the secretion’s function is to form a bracket nest for attachment to a cave wall. Other species, like the glossy swiftlet, differ in that they use their saliva to stick plant materials together.
There was a photograph of a crusted, waxy-looking bird hammock, a paragraph about bird’s nest soup and a further description of an Australian caterpillar that used its own feces to make a little hut.
I went and lay on the bed and I tried my hardest, I imagined you putting the book down and coming and lying beside me there on the bed.
It worked. You put the book down. You came over. You lay down, almost obediently.
I looked into your black eyes.
Home. Lost.
Tell me some more, I said, about the place you go, the place you are when you’re not with me. The place with the woman with the bright hair in it.
Oh, you said. Okay. Well. There’s three dark walls and one wall covered with light. On this wall there’s a woman, a girl, with bright hair. And sometimes she’s all colorful and sometimes there’s no color but her hair is bright every time. And she lives in a village on an island, and there’s an old sea captain in the same village, only he’s gone mad now that he’s been on land for so long, and she goes to the docks with him and they stand and look out over the sea and imagine all the places they could go, they shout the names of all the places at the sea and the sky.
Yes, I said.
I closed my eyes and listened.
And then she’s very poor, living in a poor part of the city, and she can’t keep a job because every place she takes one the boss makes a pass at her because she’s so pretty, so she decides she’ll emigrate, and a kind neighbor tells her about his friend, a man who sends ships all over the world, he says this man will help her, and she goes to see him, the man, and he takes a liking to her, and after she’s left his office he finds she’s dropped her purse. He looks inside it and there’s almost nothing, a few small notes, a few coins. In a little while he’s going to take a large note out of his own wallet and fold it into the purse and give the purse back to her without her knowing he’s done this. Meanwhile she’s on a bus and has just looked in her bag and can’t find her purse, and the conductor is standing over her about to ask for the money for her ticket.