"Where have all the lapwings gone?"
A short story from my 2024 collection 'Dust, dancing'
Where have all the lapwings gone?
It seems like only yesterday. But then it always seems like only yesterday. I was walking here, along this very lane, the late Spring wind still harsh and unrelenting enough to demand a decent coat. And as I walked, I was accompanied by lapwings rising up from the fields on either side, keeping pace with their somehow haphazard flapping. It was as if they hadn’t quite got the hang of flying. And their calls, piercing and insistent, were like those of less-than-secret agents passing on an urgent message they were determined to get through.
I may have talked to them. Huddled inside my warm coat, perhaps I felt some kind of acknowledgement was warranted considering they were the ones making all the effort. At least it seemed that way. And it would have been perfectly acceptable to do so; talk I mean. And by ‘perfectly acceptable’ what I’m really implying was that there would have been no-one else about, no-one to have heard me and assume I was a little soft in the head. Which meant no-one to interrogate me either. What did you say? they might have asked. Would that challenge have been worse than an assumption of madness? It seems odd to say so, but yes…
In any event, here I am again: the same path, the same time of year. But without the lapwings. I have even paused — more than once, just as I do again — in order to give them a chance to rise from their ground-nests, to swoop the rough hillside, to keep in-step; but there are none. Yes, there are occasional birds, little things that flit more than fly; birds who keep their distance, whose ‘pip’ is more a chirrup of annoyance than engagement. And I don’t know their names. It is difficult to establish any kind of relationship under such circumstances. All of which means that, without the lapwings, I have nothing immediate, alive, present, to converse with — which is where you came in, even though you are none of those things.
If I wanted to be obtuse, disingenuous, I might suggest that you had been here more often than me — if I wanted to stretch the point beyond breaking that is. But this is hardly your kind of landscape. Not that you didn’t appreciate the countryside when seen through the windows of a coach or train. That was your limit though, engagement through a pane of glass at sixty miles an hour. Walking boots and a good waterproof never adorned your lobby never mind your person. I have never asked myself why that was until now — because of you easing your way into the void left by the lapwings, I suppose. I might have said ‘elbowed’ your way in, but that would hardly be fair, not your style; I left the door open, the invitation made some time ago. Not immediately upon your death, of course; then time was taken up with practicalities and the minutiae of embryonic grief. Nor later as I waited for something else to kick-in, emotions I assumed would assault me one day, knock me sideways. But they never did. And haven’t today. Rather your presence has meandered its way into my walk, almost apologetically, announcing your proximity in that obsequious way you had, appearing to require approval to exist from anyone who happened to be remotely in your sphere. Well, you haven’t needed to do that for a while either, have you?
How long has it been? I must have been wondering that too, I suppose. There will have been a trigger that brought you to the forefront of my mind, something that meant I was primed to replace the absent lapwings with images of you. It was the images that came first. Not you in a coach or a train, cooing out of the window at the passing greenness, but rather bent over a sink in that dreadful semi-nylon housecoat that seemed welded to you; or pushing our old antiquated vacuum cleaner over increasingly threadbare carpets. Nothing romantic. Not that you will be surprised by any of that; disappointed perhaps, but not surprised. My guess is that you would have preferred me to recall other moments, other sets of circumstance, ones that meant more to you than me — and therefore probably forgotten by yours truly along the way. A child’s memory is very selective, don’t you think? As we age and our lives gain a sharper focus, so the past inevitably blurs and with it history’s inhabitants. More or less. There comes a point — if you subscribe to such a theory — beyond which memory starts to be about loss rather than acquisition, where the importance of the new, the present, consigns earlier days to some graveyard of the relegated. Gradually the once-connected become strangers. Absence doesn’t make the heart grow fonder; that’s poppycock. It makes it grow colder; after all, there is no attribute in distance allowing us to keep the flames fanned.
If I met a dog-walker right now — just as I did when I was last here, having turned at the end of my stroll and begun to make my way back to the warmth of a temporary abode — and they were to ask me about you, Tell me about your mother, what might I say? Platitudes probably, spouted largely because they were expected, true or not. Describe her. The housecoat and the hoovering would be a safe place to start, perhaps followed by an incident from a summer holiday, or the way you cried when your own mother died. Or would I stray into those half-imagined things seen by a child but not understood until much later when wisdom began to come knocking (though inevitably far too late). Was there anguish each time we were forced to move house, anguish disguised by a brave face and ‘stiff upper-lip’? Frustration that your husband — my father — failed to live up to his side of the matrimonial bargain when it came to ‘cherishing’ and ‘honouring’? Anger that he choose to leave you for good when succumbing to the heart attack that did for him on the way home from football one Wednesday evening. What does it say about me that I can still remember it was a cup game? Not only do I recall the score, but the scorers too: Hiron and Trebilcock. Yes, that doesn’t say much. Or a great deal, depending on the lens you choose to view me through.
I suspect your lens was always the same, tinted with benevolence and believing in the best. Given I was your only offspring what choice did you have? You had no fallback position, no reserve, no-one up your sleeve. Though not for the want of trying? I wouldn’t know — though I could guess. Perhaps rumours about the Old Man were swilling around even then, had reached your ears; and news or not, who could blame you for pulling up the drawbridge? I wonder if that’s when you began to be alone; not strictly speaking of course (not for a few years anyway) but metaphorically, emotionally. There was always something I sensed you wanted from me that I was unable to provide. Or unwilling, consciously or otherwise. Perhaps that’s part of the answer to the dog walker’s question: she always wanted something I couldn’t give her, I might have said. Vague but possibly enough to satisfy them for a few moments — until the follow-on question, anyway.
But what if I tried to get my question in about the lapwings first. Where are they? I’d ask. Then I’d describe how I’d been here before and been entranced by them — but not confessing to having spoken to them, of course! Ah, the lapwings, my temporary friend might say, falling into step; then they would scuttle off into a verbal cul-de-sac filled with their knowledge of natural history, the back-and-forth of the whole package sufficient to occupy us for many yards, close enough to the end of my walk not to leave too big a gap to be filled. A gap in time not space, you understand. But not only are there no lapwings there is no dog walker, just me and the wind, my good coat and heavy shoes. And now you, silently walking just behind me, a step in arrears, somehow servile. Was that how you saw yourself for all those years? Did you regard yourself as my servant — especially after the Old Man died? If back then I was the person who needed to be led, I suspect it was a requirement you never recognised. Maybe I didn’t give you the chance to do so. Did there come a point when I saw myself as ‘the man of the family’? The only male, certainly. If so, how misplaced was that — especially as I abandoned you at my first opportunity, choosing to abscond to a university so far away as to make any journey to see me an impossibility for you? Whether or not either of us realised it at the time, it was an exercise in control. Somerset to Edinburgh is more than arm’s length, wouldn’t you say?
Distance; maybe that’s the one constant, the thing that categorises our relationship. Perhaps we were never close. It would explain a great deal, wouldn’t it? How I remember things; how I behaved, perhaps; the decision to go and live in Scotland for so many years; my inability to cry at your funeral. Or subsequently. And even now, walking this cold road on the edge of the Pennines, you still in my wake, silently kowtowing, subservient, letting me call the shots. And saying nothing.
Ahead, the large house where I’m staying comes into view, thin spirals of smoke rising from one of the chimneys, the fire now lit in the front room. With the road beginning its slow downhill arc toward warmth, the wind gradually falls in behind me. I check the sky again, still hoping to see the lapwings. Maybe next year.