‘Then we understand each other, Miss Janelle,’ said the driver. ‘We must make good choices, because family is everything. Only twenty minutes to Ubud now.’
Family is everything.
She closed her eyes, fatigued by the trip and the tablets and the alcohol, recalling how she’d shared the news about her spontaneous trip to Bali with her family in Australia.
‘But that’s … so out of character for you.’ Her brother, Kyle, had held his beer beneath his chin as if frozen. ‘You’ll miss Mum’s birthday, too. She’ll go off her rocker.’
Janelle winced, knowing he was right. They’d sat together on the sunken sofa, a dilapidated centrepiece in Kyle’s weatherboard cottage overlooking Half Moon Bay. A view that he could only afford, Janelle knew, after more than a decade of hard work as the operator of his own plumbing business.
‘Well, Mum will have to get over it,’ Janelle replied, feigning boldness. ‘I think I’m having a midlife crisis.’
‘You?’ Kyle snorted. ‘You’re a spring chicken, Nelly. Try being me—a divorcee dad, on my way to forty, with a teenage daughter who thinks I’m the biggest dag since dog turds.’ He sipped his beer, pensive.
‘Why?’ asked Janelle. ‘What’s up with Bella?’
‘No idea.’ He shrugged. ‘Maybe something’s happening at school that she’s not telling me about.’ He ran his tradesman’s hands through a mop of blond hair frayed at the tips. ‘Girls, eh? I don’t understand them.’
Janelle patted her brother’s knee with mock sympathy. ‘Oh, come on, we’re just a bit complicated. Especially as teenagers. I hated being a teenager.’
‘Did you?’ Kyle looked at her with newfound interest. ‘I didn’t know that.’
‘How could you? When I turned thirteen, you’d already moved out. You’d almost finished your apprenticeship.’
‘Yeah, right.’ Kyle looked thoughtful. ‘An eight-year gap seemed pretty massive back then. But now it means zip, doesn’t it?’
‘That’s because we’re middle-aged,’ she said.
‘I am, Nelly. I’m thirty-seven. You’ve got your whole life ahead of you.’
She was grateful for her brother’s optimism. ‘Come to Bali,’ she said suddenly, seizing his hand. ‘You could bring Bella. We could all go together. Maybe even Mum, for her birthday?’
‘What, just like that, in a few weeks’ time? You’re nuts.’ The sound of the front door opening prompted Kyle to lean closer. ‘Can you talk to Bella? She might open up to you.’
As his daughter walked into the room, Janelle tried not to gasp. She’d seen her niece barely weeks earlier for her fifteenth birthday, and yet Arabella’s appearance had changed dramatically. She was wearing tight black jeans and an unseasonable black skivvy, with heavy kohl eyeliner traced around unsettled eyes. The happy rainbow girl that Janelle had spoiled rotten for years had been replaced by a surly Goth.
‘Hi, Bella.’ Janelle kept her tone unperturbed. ‘Want to go for a walk?’
‘What for?’ Her niece’s voice was flat.
‘Don’t speak to Aunty Nelly like that,’ admonished Kyle.
Janelle glared at him, trying to communicate, Don’t push her. ‘There’ll be a beautiful sunset.’
Arabella looked apathetic. ‘Whatever.’
‘Let’s go then,’ said Janelle, shooing her niece back towards the door.
Outside, they walked in silence for a few minutes, tracking along a well-worn path that led through grassy undulations to the near-deserted beach. The setting sun had turned the Red Bluff cliffs a rich, burnished gold.
Once on the sand, Janelle slipped her arm through Arabella’s. ‘Guess what I’ve gone and done, Bella?’ she asked, playfully kicking water into the air. ‘I’ve thrown in my job and booked a tropical holiday to Bali.’
Her niece looked surprised, then wistful. ‘The year twelves are doing schoolies week in Bali this year,’ she said. ‘They’re sooo lucky. They’ll never have to go back to school again.’
Janelle watched Arabella closely. ‘Is something wrong at school?’
Arabella shook her head. They continued to walk in silence.
‘Well, if you ever want to talk about anything,’ ventured Janelle, ‘I’m always up for a chat with my special niece.’
‘I’m your only niece,’ Arabella said, rolling her eyes. ‘There’s nothing special about me.’
‘Hey.’ Janelle wheeled around and grasped Arabella’s shoulders. ‘Why are you saying that?’
Arabella lowered her gaze. ‘I’m crap at everything. And I’m ugly too.’
‘That’s not true.’ Janelle touched a hand under Arabella’s chin. ‘You’re kind and funny and you’re a great listener. Those qualities are going to get you much further in life than being …’
‘Skinny and beautiful?’ Her niece interrupted her. ‘Then how come most successful women are skinny and beautiful? Miranda Kerr, Amal Clooney, Taylor Swift …’
‘Taylor Swift is almost one-point-eight metres tall,’ Janelle objected. ‘She’s literally a freak of nature. But she’s most successful because of her songwriting skills.’
‘Being skinny and beautiful helps,’ said Arabella. ‘Like, a lot.’
Suspecting that she was right, Janelle said, ‘You’re beautiful just the way you are, Bella.’
Her niece shrugged. ‘At school, they call me Butt Ugly Bella. It’s a joke, but it sucks.’
‘Who calls you that?’ Janelle was outraged.
‘A few of the cool girls.’ Arabella sniffed. ‘They say I’m fat and ugly.’
Janelle exploded. ‘Do the teachers know about this?’
Arabella shook her head.
‘Oh, Bella.’ Janelle reached out and stroked her niece’s long, dark hair. Arabella was beautiful, of course, like most teenage girls. Glowing with the magnetic loveliness of youth; a power they possessed, ironically, at precisely the time in their lives when they felt most insecure.
‘I know how difficult it is,’ Janelle soothed. ‘I went through it myself. Some of my so-called friends used to taunt me about my moles. They called me ‘fly-shit face’. It was awful.’
Janelle could well recall the emotional carnage of the schoolyard; the crippling sense of her own inadequacy, the vindictiveness of a posse of pretty but hostile peers. Why did girls—and even grown women—so frequently criticise each other?
‘Teenage girls can be utter bitches,’ Janelle sighed, wrapping her arms around Arabella and wishing she could protect her from all of it. ‘Hang on, did you feel that?’ She put her hands over Bella’s and squeezed the flesh at the sides of her own stomach. ‘That’s the waist of a real woman. Nothing wrong with a bit of wobble. Natural can be beautiful too, you know.’
Arabella smiled, but it seemed rather forced.
‘Hey,’ said Janelle, as they resumed their walk. ‘Want to race to the end of the beach?’
She was relieved to see the return of Arabella’s impish grin.
‘Sure,’ replied Arabella. ‘Last one there is an utter bitch.’
Janelle laughed. ‘Don’t tell your dad I said that!’
Her niece smirked. ‘Ready, set, go!’
They barrelled along together, their bare feet slapping the wet sand, jostling and puffing and giggling. At last, Arabella streaked out ahead.
‘I’m done,’ said Janelle, catching up to her niece and leaning against her, panting. ‘And you can add “athletic” to your list of qualities.’
Arabella smiled, but as they followed the sandy track back up to Kyle’s house, Janelle thought she saw her wipe her eyes. Or perhaps she’d merely brushed away a strand of hair.
If only Bella could see this, Janelle mused now, sitting taller in her seat as Pak Ketut manoeuvred the minibus into a pebbled driveway lined with frangipani trees. As they traversed its length, Janelle couldn’t resist lowering the window and breathing in the heady fragrance.
Lush gardens stretched in every direction, spiralling tendrils and exotic blossoms and plants she
didn’t recognise, festooned with fairy lights. Mossy statues of dragon-like creatures, with bulbous eyes and protruding fangs, stood like sentinels marking the path towards a huge bamboo dome at the driveway’s end. Colourful lanterns, glowing like stars, bobbed at intervals along the structure’s thatched roof.
‘It’s beautiful,’ she murmured.
‘Welcome to Puri Damai,’ said Pak Ketut, parking the minibus near the entrance. ‘Your home for the next week.’ He hurried around to open the door for her.
‘Thank you,’ she said, smiling at him.
As her foot touched the ground, a gong sounded nearby. Its deep thrumming reverberated in the warm night air, before fading into silence.
Henry zipped up his anorak under his chin, protecting himself against a wind that felt as if it was blowing directly off the Arctic tundra. He was only twenty-six years old, but eighteen years of birdwatching had rendered his body as stiff as an old man’s. His neck ached and his arms were numb, a result of holding the same position for over two hours now. He peered through his binoculars, training them on the reed beds. The train trip back to London and his cosy flat in Twickenham beckoned, followed by a pint of Bridge Bitter at The Albany. But he was determined to see this one through. He’d been waiting two years for it.
And finally, there it was: a quick-moving, grey-headed beauty. With long black eye patches, like a cartoon bird bandit. A finely pointed bill, a chestnut mantle, a longish tail. It was, without a shadow of a doubt, a wintering Eurasian penduline tit.
He’d spotted all manner of delights around Rainham Marshes earlier: the water pipits flitting around relics of the Second World War armoury, the Caspian gulls under the long jetty, the skylarks fossicking on the grassed-over landfill at Coldharbour. But he’d seen all those birds before, on other weekends away from London. This was his day’s prize, the moment of completion of his ‘Birds of East Anglia’ list. The Eurasian penduline tit was the last of two hundred and twenty-five targets he’d been checking off, bird by bird, over the past two years.
Henry lowered his binoculars and groped for his digital camera, sliding it cautiously from his pocket. He needed the photographic evidence to send to Bigfoot, his oldest birdwatching mate. He focused the camera patiently, ignoring the throbbing interference of his own heartbeat and the slight tremor in his hand. For one desperate moment the tit disappeared while foraging, only to re-emerge with a grub in its conical bill.
Hastily, Henry took the shot. Then he rolled onto his back and closed his eyes, listening in rapture to the bird’s lilting call. Tits were great vocalisers, and this one was making a contact call, a friendly social feeding cue which probably meant there were other tits nearby.
He’d spent years lying on his stomach in inclement weather, watching and listening. Venturing into inhospitable forests and swamps across England, letting hours of his life slip past—the wild, inspired hours beyond his nine-to-five job as a software tester—for the merest glimpse of avian beauty. But it was always worth the wait for the sight of a curiously cocked head, a shining beady eye, a glorious fan of iridescent plumage. Birds, he’d decided long ago, were celestial messengers in a mundane world.
Not that he would have put it that way, of course, when he’d first started birdwatching. Then he’d been an ordinary eight-year-old boy from Derbyshire, with a predisposition for social awkwardness and flights of fancy involving dragons and centaurs. But when his sister, Pamela, fell critically ill with kidney disease and the transplant failed—rendering his parents grave and unreachable, and Pamela shrunken and fragile—such fantasy creatures proved utterly useless to Henry. Instead, it was the small birds in the back garden that helped to assuage his loneliness: the plovers, shanks and sandpipers, thrushes, wagtails and warblers that frequented the moors and heathlands around his Chesterfield home.
There were long hours of empty silence when Pamela was hospitalised. By the time he was nine, his parents assumed, quite rightly, that Henry was old enough to be left at home alone. But Henry didn’t enjoy it, and when the lure of hours of television and books and Lego had faded, he took to watching the birds in the garden in earnest. Their quick movements and the noise of their gentle chattering through the kitchen window served to reassure Henry that he wasn’t entirely alone.
As Pamela’s condition worsened after a second transplant rejection, Henry progressed to constructing feeders and elaborate nest boxes. At precisely the time when his family stopped talking to him altogether, Henry’s ears became attuned to the voices of feathered angels. Using a guidebook he’d unearthed at his local library—a slim tome published in 1978 entitled Birds of Derbyshire—Henry began recording in his notebook the first bird calls he heard every day upon waking. The dull quacking of a mallard, the chattering ksi ksi of a lesser grey shrike, the slow repeated pew notes of a willow tit (not to be confused with the sneezing pitchoo of the marsh tit), the loud, whinnying trill of the little grebe or, all too infrequently, the harsh kak of a peregrine falcon.
After his tenth birthday, using a scrapbook and a set of art supplies gifted by his aunt, Henry started drawing these birds. Recording their size and colour, their texture and distinctive markings, as well as any crests or ornamental feathers. He often attached rudimentary field notes describing their movements, unusual postures, vocalisations, and fighting or mating behaviours. By identifying one species at a time and carefully observing everything about them, Henry began to feel even more closely connected to the creatures he was studying.
His parents, naturally preoccupied with Pamela’s precarious health, were unable to relate to his passion, and even seemed to find it rather shameful. They scanned Henry’s detailed field notes with increasing bewilderment, dismissing his pastime to family and friends with flippant, sometimes hurtful words. There goes Henry with his lists again.
Pamela miraculously survived the various crises—albeit with long keloid scars across her abdomen and back—but she was pale, otherworldly, and utterly uninterested in birds. His parents endured too, but only just, becoming brittle versions of their former selves. They seemed to move through the world in a state of perpetual anxiety, badgering Henry to wear his windcheater, pack a scarf, eat his greens, mind his manners, turn off the computer, go to bed—and, above all, to be very, very careful.
Now a teenager, Henry humoured them, his thoughts caught up in endless speculations about the secret lives of birds. How were they affected by the flower varieties blooming in the garden? Those wintering flocks of finches and buntings that fed along the field boundaries at Carr Vale—where exactly did they go when spring returned? And what made the water rail, the secretive winter visitor that skulked above the marsh areas, announce its presence with such a surprising squeal?
Fortunately for Henry, in his high school years he found answers to these and many more questions at the fortnightly gatherings of his local ornithology chapter. The club’s members included several other school-aged enthusiasts; a group of senior citizens with lifetime collections of leather-bound field notes; a widow of indeterminate age, Mrs Braithwaite, who chaired the meetings with Thatcher-like severity; and three generations of the Duffy family, who had been birdwatching in the area for sixty years.
It was at one of these meetings, in the summer after his sixteenth birthday, that Henry met Jim. Despite being shorter and slighter than Henry, Jim immediately assumed the mantle of authority associated with seniority. Apart from being twenty years old—twenty!—Jim had recently returned to Chesterfield from a six-month stint at the Onziebust Reserve in the Orkneys as a residential volunteer with the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.
Henry idolised Jim. He was a fount of knowledge about island and shore fauna, including wading birds and divers, and had mastered an impressive set of bird calls. Jim’s owl calls could fill the air with frightened finches, and he could tweet and whistle a nuthatch close enough to touch its quivering feathers. It quickly became clear that while Jim was a caller and a talker, Henry was a listener—in birdwatching
and in life—and these complementary strengths made for a solid foundation for field trips and, in the years that followed, friendship.
In Henry’s final years of school, weekend birdwatching with Jim was a merciful diversion from the terrors of school life. Like pimples and PSHE—a subject that involved, on one mortifying occasion, a teacher rolling a condom onto a banana—and Henry’s tendency to feel breathless and dizzy whenever he delivered class presentations. Indeed, it was because of Henry’s tendency to flush red while speaking at ornithology meetings that Jim had christened him ‘Beets’. In turn, Henry affectionately called Jim ‘Bigfoot’; their countless camping trips had etched into his mind not only the surprising size of Jim’s feet, but also their putrid odour after a long day in the field.
Birdwatching with Jim was also a useful distraction from his unrequited passion for Penelope Elliot, who, despite living only two blocks from Henry’s home, was easily more exotic than the legendary quetzal of the Rio Savegre Valley. He’d watched her for years and then, one serendipitous Saturday morning after his seventeenth birthday, he bumped into her at the corner store. Humiliatingly, he was holding a packet of rat bait in one hand—his bird feeders always attracted rodents, much to his mother’s horror—and a twelve-pack of supersoft toilet tissue in the other.
Penelope Elliot stood waiting near the counter, luminous and perfect, in a tight white t-shirt emblazoned with a bright pink flamingo.
‘I like your t-shirt,’ said Henry, blushing.
Penelope folded her arms across her chest. ‘That’s really, really off, you wally.’
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