Common Ground (10 page)

Again, so routine.

The anatomical and emotional changes in women during pregnancy are well known and documented, but impending parenthood alters a man too. There's a lot less said about that, but I'm feeling it already. The skin becoming thinner and more sensitive, the world even more glorious and cruel.

The week is crashing out with the vindictiveness of an army laying waste to the ground. A wet storm-wind shrieks from the west into the edge-land across miles of hill and farmland. It tells of wars being fought and battles approaching. ‘This is unbearable,' shouts a lady buffeted from car to front door as her umbrella leaps from her grasp and vanishes over a hedge.

The gales are strong enough to drive leaves from the wood all the way up Bilton Lane like scuttling refugees heading for the safety of town. I head in the opposite direction, passing the crossing point before slipping left over the little ford and up the lane. There is nobody else here and the trees usher me away with frantic gestures.
The wrong way! You're going the wrong way!
A swirling acrid wind makes it hard to breathe and look in any direction for long and I envy the rabbits and voles huddled now in burrows. A coal tit crashes into a holly looking for protection; I seek shelter too, running for the holloway as shouts and moans howl through its hazel walls. By the wood an ash flails and I wrap my arms around its trunk to stay upright. The whole place is in distress. Canopies throb and merge as pines roar their anguish over the river. To escape the barrage of debris and air I wedge myself between two pine stumps. It is at once terrifying and invigorating, as if I am looking up from the ocean floor as a tsunami passes overhead. But if I kneel I can just about see the owl's tree and follow its swaying trunk with the binoculars. Chances are the female tawny is inside nesting. It worries me. Wind and rain smashing and percolating through woodland destroys an owl's ability to use sound, making hunting extremely difficult, and the pair must be hungry. Regardless, the field guides confirm she will be incubating between two and five white eggs, each laid a week apart. Weather or no weather, life goes on.

The wind pitches louder, higher like a dynamo being wound into a scream and a trunk falls somewhere. A quick look over the parapet; it's not the owls' tree, but how long until it is? In the darkening underworld of the forest floor I feel the thin line between life and death running like a fault below me. Still, I stay put out of some sense of fatherly solidarity.
It's just nature, though
, I tell myself,
whatever happens
. Then, from nowhere, a rising tide of emotion hits me and I find I'm thinking of my friend Peter who died unexpectedly, unnecessarily, in an accident seven months ago. I feel the same slow soul-sadness I've experienced regularly since answering the 2 a.m. call from his cousin, an unreal mix of helplessness and incomprehension. Then that yawning absence. Like touching an electric fence, it's the sudden jolt of finding yourself at the margins where human and nature step outside the neat categories we give them, those moments when we're suddenly forced to confront the non-negotiable fine print of our existence. These are the other moments when we hear the undetectable frequencies and unforgettable sounds, like on the night I heard about Peter: the crack in his cousin's voice and, after I'd told her, Rosie's repeated ‘
Oh no
', a trembling hand half-covering her mouth.

Out here in the edge-land, transformation is in everything. With a million life-and death-moments happening each millisecond, you never escape the sense of shifting states. I know the water I can hear crashing over the weir is destined to become open sea and although it will no longer be ‘river', it will still exist. And one day it will be resurrected into rain again. It's just the same with the baby rabbit and the owl. Energy never runs out, it only changes from one form to another. It can't be created or destroyed. Every joule hurtling past me was present at the beginning and will be there at the end. There's consolation in that, for sure, but try telling it to the dad pacing a hospital corridor as his baby is operated on for congenital heart failure. This is the problem with ‘nature': it is ambivalent to what makes humans tick. And yet it
is
what makes us tick. The two can be hard to reconcile sometimes.

For three nights I have vivid dreams of being in a crow's nest on a raging sea. Our house crashes, woos and roars as the air screams around it, like some Victorian machine pushed to its limit. But now the pangs and pings outside sound like the engine is finally cooling and contracting.

As soon as I can, I run down to the wood, dodging the broken sticks, plastic bags and fast-food cartons still skidding under cars and over pavements. Garden conifers suddenly strain and roar. A screeching call of distress sounds from a garden by the crossing point, like a blackbird trapped by a cat's claw. Hurrying to the gate I see a car in a drive with its bonnet up, a man wedged sideways underneath in mucky overalls. He catches my look of surprise before turning back to the real source of the noise, a faulty ignition.

From the old railway northward the earth is battle-scarred. Cracked trees slump as if contemplating the bone-white heartwood bursting from their bodies. The air has ripped through the hedges along the lane, slashing and tearing as it scattered felled limbs, snapped sticks and shredded young foliage everywhere. Another fizzing clicking sound cuts the air, this time from over the fields. It is an electricity pylon crackling from its high triangular crown like a giant insect scratching its mandibles. In a dip in the farmland to the north, a copse grapples with the vanishing wind in a final skirmish. Then the earth falls quiet again. I stand below the pylon listening to its alien song as evening drifts over the wounded land, softly, a shaken sheet floating down onto a bed. I'm wondering how anything can have lived through it when the tumbling notes of blackbirds pour from the holloway and wood. Then, louder, flung up towards the milk-moon above, the long
hu … hu-hu-lo-hooooo
of a tawny owl.

Fast forward. We are back in the Antenatal Clinic. Once again we take a seat on the line of smart red chairs. This time our hands are spread over Rosie's swollen bump. Our disinfected palms and fingers feel the fluttering kicks and movements from within. Opposite me, the owl is still Blu-tacked to its wall, solitary in that broccoli tree stuck between the noticeboards. How long it'll be there, though, I'm not sure; a toddler turned loose by his exasperated and heavily pregnant mum is having a good stab at tearing it down. ‘Me-me,' he says, dragging at its corner.
You said it, kiddo
.

Among the many fantastic shapes and colours that make up the bird world, tawny owls do look remarkably similar to us – the two-legged vertical posture, the rounded head, the big eyes, the binocular vision, the cheek-like face and that beak projecting downward like a little hooked nose. Even the white-grey tufts of down around its face could pass for an unkempt moustache on an old general. These resemblances, of course, explain why they've been elevated into the realm of soft toys and grace our furnishings, clothes, bags and wallpaper. It's vanity. We're rewarding their human cuteness. The subconscious connotation is an old one, the Disney view of nature as something we can master, adjust and appropriate. Something just like us. In many instances this may be true, but watching birds of prey up close or the proximity of a birth or death forces us to think differently: we engage with nature directly, emotionally, microscopically, at the level of atoms, cells, blood, flesh and bone. We briefly see under its skin and witness its contrariness, its randomness, relentlessness, ruthlessness and beauty.

Sitting with my hand hovering over my unborn child, I feel none of the indestructibility that gives our species its hard edge and cynicism. Rather, I'm acutely aware that we are as susceptible to fickle fortune as every other living thing. In a heartbeat or baby-kick, all of our modern disconnection can be stripped back to its opposite. We seek reassurance; I hold Rosie's hand. And there it is: the hand, the arm around the shoulder, the soft kiss on the forehead, the inner voice you find uttering a silent prayer in a hospital waiting room. We often forget, but this is nature too.

‘Now, would you like to find out the baby's sex today?' Rachel asks, closing the blind as Rosie lies back and rolls up her top.

‘No, I think we'll wait. We'd like a surprise.'

‘Good,' says Rachel. ‘I think that's nice.'

Lights. The dashboard fires up. Another flight, this time over familiar ground. The probe circles, perches and listens. Rachel talks throughout this time, listing body parts as though reading the shipping forecast –
brain: good; arms: good; shoulders, ribs and pelvis: good
. She pauses occasionally to measure or make notes, and then turns the monitor around. Everything is discernible now in that black-silver sea: fingers, feet, hips, a little nose, knees. I can see its body flex and reform in amazing detail as the noise of the heartbeat pounds fast and strong, like thundering hooves.

‘You have a very healthy happy little baby,' Rachel says eventually. ‘Would you like a photo?'

I fold the printout into my wallet, a cocoon for the little one.

But that's all to come. Tonight I go down to the wood again. The tawny owls' nest has survived the storms, for the male is out hunting early again, bringing food to his mate as she incubates their eggs. Setting up my binoculars on the pine stumps, I try to picture the embryonic owlets tucked up there in the tree and think about their chances. It wouldn't be wise to get any closer, though; tawnies are famously vicious in their defence of the nest and known to attack dogs and humans if they stray too near. Such protective spirit is a fairly short-lived instinct, however. Their parents will care for the young birds for two or three months after they fledge then, around August, the juveniles will disperse to find a place to call their own. If they fail to find a vacant territory, they'll quickly starve or, in weakened states, fall victim to predators. Nature will take its course. No hospitals, medicines, warmth or love to intervene.

I leave them to it and walk back over the crossing point, heading for town to buy groceries for dinner. I carry that call with me and think about how lucky I am. As Edward Thomas has it in his poem ‘The Owl':

The day of the spring equinox is marked by a last, late, unexpected rush of snow falling soft and heavy under the cover of night. Nothing alters human consciousness so entirely and immediately as waking up to a different land outside the window. ‘A change in the weather,' wrote Marcel Proust, ‘is sufficient to recreate the world and ourselves.'
¹
And he was right. This morning feels strangely hallucinogenic, like some prankster has spiked the municipal water supply. By nine o'clock everybody's attempts at getting to work have been abandoned. Men lean into wheel-spinning cars helping return them to garages. Neighbours who've barely exchanged two words before lock arms and creep along Bilton Lane, their faces fixed in smiles. The talk is of schools closing, train cancellations, road closures. A day off.

Parents drag sledges over a crisp white countenance, carrying muffled cargos of toddlers down towards the edge-land. But there is no edge-land today. Rural and urban have become briefly inseparable regions. There is only white earth and a dish-rag sky drifting with a few final flakes, like the aftermath of a pillow fight. Garden, yard, fence, farm, road, field – all are buried. Psychological barriers similarly forgotten, strangers surge together over the old railway and into the meadow, unaware of exactly where they are. It doesn't matter; all the earth is theirs. Children scream at the sight of space and wade into snow, eager as sailors reaching the shallows of shore. Dogs bound after them, barking and biting at scalloped waves. Unsteadied, they are oddly fawn-like. Robins and chaffinches strike up from hedges and a wind blows through the belts of distant pines, twisting their tops so that they appear desperate to look. Birds, trees and sky congregating for a spectacle: the people returning to the land. This is common ground again.

The scene that unfolds is dreamlike, out of time, refusing to fade even as the day yawns and reaches for its glasses. Snow brings an ecstatic calm, the same high, lightheaded buoyancy you feel after crying. Although cold, the air is clear and mistle thrushes burble from the wood's edges. Irrepressible, nimble-footed, life dances over the fields in the delicate notes of birds and a dazzling searchlight sun. Beneath drifts, lolling green tongues of lords-and-ladies –
Arum maculatum
– lick away at the snow; young nettles, Jack-by-the-hedge and soft swords of grass tickle this crystal skin. I crouch down against an oak tree at the meadow edge and let the sun's rays fall across my face, sending me into a pleasurable dizziness, a half-trance. This is the hour, the glimmering union of seasons. Everything testifies to it.