In a coffee shop in Norwich, watching a girl I had never seen before drink an Earl Grey, I smiled to myself, secretly knowing that she would never know how much I knew about her, just from watching her as she sat there with a camera case, her companion, by her side. But it was obvious; it was in her clothes, in her movements, in her voice quiet with confidence as she spoke aloud, but still cracking timidly, unsurely, at the ends of her syllables, as if she knew what she said was worth saying, but did not know whether now was the time to say it, or if it was coming across right. And it was in the tiny rising intonation she added at the end of her statements too, as if hoping for reassurance, agreement. (From anyone else it would have seemed an annoying Americanism, but from her, it was somehow endearing).

Of course, I never spoke to her, I only heard her as she asked for her Earl Grey, but that was part of her beauty; that I never could speak to her because she was solitary, an island I could never reach, a dream that would shatter if I tried to make it real, but I knew her, in those moments that I watched her, I definitely knew her. I knew she was beautiful, and I knew that she didn’t realise how beautiful she was, and I knew that if I, if anyone, ever told her how beautiful she was, she would smile and shrug it off, like some well-meaning little joke that she didn’t really understand because beauty had never concerned her, because she never felt the need to adorn, to falsify herself, with make-up, with jewellery, with perfume or scent, and yet never suspecting that it was this very refusal to recreate herself that made her so achingly beautiful.

And she never wore dresses either, unless perhaps she was made to by her mother as a child, because they were so uncomfortable, so impractical for running around, for chasing after the boys playing tag in the playground, for climbing trees, for scrambling over rocks and for rolling down grassy banks; for it was practicality that concerned her most of all, even when the other girls were squeezing into skinny-fit jeans and mini-skirts and smearing their lipstick against the clumsy lips of boys who were only just beginning to notice them.

To me this was all obvious, laid out in front of me like an open book, all written in the clothes she wore as she sat there now, with the camera case on the seat next to her, revealing herself in the straight-cut plain combats, the light corduroy coat still fastened protectively across her chest, the cheap Casio digital watch at her wrist, her cropped, swept-back hair, and the light coloured walking boots that twitched and rubbed against each other with the movements of her feet, as if she could only ever be comfortable in the great outdoors, never here, confined, as she was, in this coffee shop in Norwich (here because even she had to come into the city every now and then, and even she had to drink to survive) for she was not a pretty little canary to be held in a cage, but a soaring, wild, beautiful kestrel riding high in the breeze and far away from all others, aloof and solitary.

I could see her now, those light coloured walking boots striding confidently across the heather and through the damp mud of the Norfolk broads, her unknowable thoughts up in the clouds, with the kestrels, stooping only now and again to focus on some unusual lichen or the eggs of some ground bird as she comes across them on her lonely walks, stopping when she does to silently bless each one, and to immortalize each in a photograph (because of course she understood the beauty of things other than herself, of wild-flowers at dawn and clouds at sunset, for example). And these photographs she would keep in albums and look over every week, whenever she could not be outside, comparing them against her latest treasured pictures, sketching them in pencil or watercolour whenever the mood took her because she had been brought up with an appreciation of nature, of the countryside that surrounded her childhood.

It was her father, born and bred a Norfolk countryman, who had inspired this appreciation in her from the time she had been old enough to walk, who had taken her for walks every Sunday after dinner, usually, if not always, joined by her mother, but always he holding her hand as she skipped between puddles and wondered at the voles and mice that scampered between tufts of heather and at the brightly coloured toadstools that grew beneath rotting branches, and it was he that would carry her on his back when she became too tired to walk any more. And it was because of these walks, because she would spend all week waiting for Sunday to come around, would eat her Sunday dinner much too fast just to bring the walk closer, that Sunday was still her favourite day of the week, even if now she was old enough, and preferred, to walk alone, solitary, like a kestrel.

I sighed, thinking of this, of her childhood laid out so clearly in front of me, and thought that if ever I was alone with her, out on the broads somewhere with the wind sweeping through the heather, I would somehow just blurt out “I love you, you are beautiful, more beautiful than kestrels, or flowers at dawn, or clouds at sunset, or toadstools or voles” and she would not know what I was talking about, but would simply smile and shrug as if I was telling some trivial joke and she did not quite understand the punch line.

But that would never happen of course because, as she rose from her seat, and scooped up her camera, she caught my eye, saw me looking at her, and I felt abashed, felt suddenly like a voyeur peering into her mind, her memories, and I looked away, and she left, having never said a word to me, never telling her name and never knowing that I knew so much about her.

Tags: Earl Grey, Girl, Kestrel, Longing, Monologue, Nature

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 28th, 2008 at 9:32 am and is filed under Fiction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.