Thursday, February 4, 2010

A Trunkful Of Jacks



Raw stripped January, needle-sharply cold. The chill had choked the birdsong from the branches.

You had walked through the drier paths, and then on into quaggier copses where no one much ever went. The branches above were black and harsh as crow-caw against the nothing-white sky. Ears grow on fallen bark there – purple jelly-fungus it is called in books, but it is definitely babies' ears, tiny and soft and almost velvet to touch. This is why babies sleep so much; they are listening, with their other ears, to the crackle and hunt of the Outside.

Do you remember when I was a student I found a giant ear in the damp kitchen, behind the stove? I never found out who was listening through it.

You knew you were going the right way when two jays suddenly flashed out in front of you. Had you seen a jay before? I have the urge to describe them as 'splendid' but without a handle-bar moustache or an Eton education I can't quite work up the courage. Seeing a jay unexpectedly, in a dreary copse like this, feels like that time when you were waiting in a grey-green office where the very air was heavy with forms to be filled in triplicate, and a man who looked like a butcher suddenly broke into magnificent song.

The jays are pink-gold with wing ornaments of blue, stolen from kingfishers. There is black and grey and white to be seen on the jays in books and those stuffed in museums, but in the air they fly so fast and are so shy they show nothing mundane, and are all colour, like their cousins the Birds of Paradise, and their great-aunt, the Phoenix.

You peered up through scratching branches at the top of the tallest tree, where a smudge of gold showed the two jays resettled. Jays are said to be uncommonly noisy, but these were silent – a sign, you knew, that this place was Odd.

You turned to see a hooded grey crow crouching on a low branch, who watched you with unsettling intensity. You hurried on, and soon there were no live things at all.

In the silence, and the sky so white, you felt as if some comforting layer had been stripped away. Your fingers hurt with the cold, jammed in your pockets though they were. The ground grew wetter and you could feel the seeping creep of freezing puddles edging at your feet. Perhaps – the tea rooms; soup; a warm corner. But suddenly you heard a cacophony of squabbling birds, though no birds were visible. You halted. They were too loud to be ghosts.

You looked about, and two jackdaws erupted from a hole in a tree, locked together in fury, falling to the ground like a tattering, shrieking handkerchief.

A second later three others flew to rest against the tree, and fought to enter first. It was a strange tree, apart from its invisible tongues. It had not one limb and was apparently completely hollow. At the top it was a jagged crown, open to the sky, with crenellated ramparts and two jutting, valiant strips of bark that formed respectively a North and a South-West tower.

These were look-out points, manned by couples. The battlements-opening, leading down into the trunk, was used only by those on guard duty. As you stared, two auxiliaries flew out and settled in the boughs above your head where you leaned against a neighbouring tree. They tried to shoot you with lilac-coloured droppings, but you had guessed what they were about and moved in time.

There were three civilian entrances roughly midway up the trunk. It seemed etiquette for returning birds to wait a minute or so, clinging to the bark to the side of these, before trying to enter. But from the sound of the incessant mêlée within, perhaps it was just necessary to wait for a space to appear into which one could squeeze. They really were never quiet. They sounded like spoilt puppies, high-pitched and petulant.

Jackdaws, you know, have a rigid social hierarchy, worse than Jane Austen's England, and with comparable intrigues and romances. Low-born females have married well and lived to snub their neighbours; precedence and rank are all the rage. In that trunkful of shrieks and feathers, in that bristlingly cold mire of the Phoenix Park, was novelty enough for all the Thackerays who ever fancied flight.

Later in the tea room, and since then on Monday-morning bus-rides, and in fluorescent-lighted queues, you have felt as if you are that strange turreted fortress. You close your eyes and see the broken-open sky; you hear the scuffle and scrape within, and you listen to the politics and gossip of a hundred fluttering souls.