The Bluebird Café by Rebecca Smith

to Firm Your Elbows and Rid Yourself of Invisible Varicose Veins
. Daytime TV beckoned. She was expounding it to Abigail, but Abigail wasn’t listening. She was staring out of the café window.
    â€˜That’s Chris Packham! Look!’
    â€˜Who?’ Lucy asked, staring at the wrong person.
    â€˜Chris Packham from the
Really Wild Show!’
    â€˜Oh, is he famous?’
    â€˜There’s Paul, showing him something. Birds or something.’
    â€˜He’s quite good-looking, isn’t he?’
    â€˜Who, Paul? I’ve always thought so.’
    â€˜Chris Packham! Paul too, of course … Let’s go and see what they’re looking at.’
    â€˜And get his autograph.’
    There were waxwings in the trees along Bevois Valley, blown in by a north-easterly. They were up in the sycamore trees speaking Swedish and maybe thinking of home where their name was Silky Tail. Paul and Chris Packham stood side by side staring at them intently through binoculars. Paul’s binoculars had been borrowed eight years ago from his parents’ neighbours, Jackie and Tim Gibson-Down. Sometimes he remembered this and thought about giving them back the next time he visited his parents, but then he always forgot again. Paul wasn’t thinking about this, he was wondering how the birds knew to come to Bevois Valley, Southampton. How did they know that behind the closed-down army surplus store, the down-at-heel cobbler, the catering equipment company where nobody could ever possibly buy anything, was an avenue of rowans hung with green orbs of mistletoe?
    After three days all of the rowan and mistletoe berries were gone. Chris Packham left too, but gave the café a signed
Really Wild Show
Poster. Paul discovered that they had somehow managed to exchange binoculars. He must tell the Gibson-Downs. Perhaps they’d think it was funny.

Chapter 23
    Is there a moment of falling in love? A tipping of the balance? A stepping across the stream? A switching on of a light? For Abigail there was.
    They’d been on the same courses. She’d sneered at his name – Teague – honestly! She’d thought him a bit of a poseur and a know-all. He swotted for tutorials. He’d spent two years digging in northern Germany; he’d gone for his gap year and they’d asked him to stay. He hobnobbed with the junior lecturers. He was potentially quite hateful, but also good-looking. He was tall and dark and wore a piratical bandanna around his wiry curls. He wore very long shorts, short longs as she came to think of them, from May to October, and never any socks. He had greeny-brown eyes, a very wide smiley mouth, long limbs. Unlike most of the boys on the course, he didn’t look medieval, he looked rakish. So Abigail, as a matter of principle, decided not to be charmed by him, or at least not to appear to be charmed by him.
    Then one day they were digging in one of the city vaults, excavating a medieval wine cellar, when Teague found a buckle. It was verdigris green, about two inches square with a tiny pin. It lay in his palm, and he ran his finger around its edges, cupped his hand and cradled it, safe, safe, safe. It was the look of pure pleasure at his find that did it. She was bowled over, smitten.
    * * *
    Lucy was washing up and thinking, ‘At what point do you give up? At what point do you capitulate and decide that you are going to be ordinary? At what point do you
settle
for things and think, “No, it hasn’t got to be perfect”?’
    That song was always punching out its melody in her head in time to eggs being beaten, tables wiped, her feet crossing and recrossing the kitchen floor, the rhythm of driving. ‘It’s got to be e e ee ee perfect.’
    At what point did a person say to themselves: ‘The creature who is my destiny will be hunched and porky …’ Now, that was bigoted. But she couldn’t give up yet. She was still waiting for the band to