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  “Triple hell,” said George, idly.

  Alice laughed. She was only about forty, and very attractive. She made no secret of the fact she found George, a man more than ten years older, attractive too. But she was happily married and so would, hopefully, never impinge on George’s solitary country life. He had given up London rather as he gave up smoking, missed the act, or idea of it, but not constantly. Women he had not given up. But there had been plenty—too many, he supposed—in his previous life. To be truly alone at last was restful.

  Once a fortnight Alice came in, to dust, hoover and bleach the bathroom and the cooker. Now and then she cleaned the windows unasked. She charged the going rate, damaged nothing, did not get on his nerves, and was out of the house in never more than three hours.

  “Triple hell—why’s that?”

  “The old rhyme,” said George. “One for sorrow, two for joy, that stuff. There are several versions. The ones I know all end at nine magpies. And one of them finishes ‘Seven’s for Heaven, and Eight’s for Hell.’ So: three times eight equals twenty-four—triple hell.”

  “And what’s nine?”

  “The Devil.”

  “Oh, you,” she said, beaming at him and liberating the dusters.

  He was a writer; novels, and even some stage plays put on at the Lyric and the Royal Court. Now all he seemed to turn out were short stories, but his reputation, if not major, was not quite non-existent. To Alice, he thought, he was a curiosity, maybe a sort of catch in the cleaning market. The rest of her clients were more usual, weekenders or locals with enough money, plus of course the Duck pub up the lane.

  When he went upstairs to his workroom (his study, Alice called it), he glanced from the window. Downstairs by now the trees in the small front garden, and the woods to the back, were thickly leafed, obscuring much of the sky. From the cottage’s upper story however, he could see out across the shorter trees to the fields, as far as the farm. So he noticed a magpie fly up at once. And then, about half a minute later, another. And then, approximately equally spaced, several more. They rose singly, each from a different area, from behind the ring of trees on the fields’ edge, from the fields themselves, from over the farm, out where the main road to Stantham cut ugly through the curve of the landscape.

  Downstairs Alice was gently clinking something. George stood at the window and watched the magpies rising, he thought at first every one from a different spot, yet now and then another one would go up later from the same spot. There seemed always a similar interval, though he did not bother to check it exactly. It was curious. He wondered briefly what had caused it, so many of them, and so regular in rising. But then he told himself to stop prevaricating and go back to the computer. Most writers used almost anything, he knew but too well, to absent themselves from work.

  It is midday. The church clock in the village a mile off chimes out twelve. The light is very bright now, metallic and clear. It shines on the hills that rim the distance, and sparks up the windows of the cottage. A woman has cycled away about an hour before. The man is working diligently in the room on the upper story, drinking his fourth mug of coffee now. He is on a roll with the story he writes, does not wish yet to stop for lunch.

  A sluggish car lurches along the lane, heading for the pub. Bees buzz, and a few grasshoppers creak in the hedge. A grey squirrel performs acrobatics in the garden trees, then bounds overland for the wood.

  A magpie rises.

  It is now the most recent example of hundreds. The man in the cottage might have seen, if he had been looking.

  It flies straight upwards, straight up into the glare of the zenith sun. Light digests it. It has vanished.

  Smaller birds flutter about their business, wood pigeons, finches, a robin, a blackbird. Some are already teaching their young to fly. They quarter the lower air, flit past the oak trees and the now-wild apple that cast its last blossom only a week before. None of these birds heads directly upward. Not even the crow which abruptly wings over, cawing harshly, black as computer ink.

  A magpie rises. Half a minute or thereabouts ticks away.

  A magpie rises.

  Soon after 6:00 p.m., George Anderton backed up the day’s work, checked for e-mails—none—and switched off the computer.

  Downstairs, lingering over a drink, he made a swift mental foray into the fridge, and promptly decided to visit the Duck for dinner.

  At seven he opened the door of Cigarette Cottage, and stood, gazing through the trees into the glowing upper sky. It was blue, and feathered only by faint eddies of cloud, that seemed to foretell a fine tomorrow. The sun was westering towards the hills, visible in gaps, molten yet filmy. At least another hour before it set. This place. He had never regretted coming here. The lack of unnecessary human noise, beyond the intermittent legitimate agricultural sounds from the farm, the birdsong, the notes of various wildlife, the silences. Absorbed, he filled his ears with blackbird music, filled his eyes with the light. He had forgotten the magpies.

  Then one rose, straight up, from the copse across the lane. Straight up and into the heart of the westered light, vanishing, as if dissolved.

  George was startled. He returned to himself, refocussed his eyes, and waited.

  Another magpie rose. This one was further over towards the hills, framed in a gap, a small pinpoint of darkness. Perhaps it was not a magpie.

  He looked at the hands of his watch, counted off the seconds—lifted his eyes…I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills—nothing. No magpie had risen. Crazy, why would it?

  Behind him. George turned around, moving almost too fast for himself. He saw this next magpie already high above, in the last moment before the light devoured it.

  Had they gone on rising, continuing to rise, all day? Why? Where were they going? To the top of the sky?

  In the Duck the usual evening crowd was sitting over its drinks. George Anderton had lived here long enough by now that two or three regulars greeted him. In the dining room beyond the front bar, a handful of summer visitors sat, lightly tanned and animated. George scanned them cautiously.

  (He had once been trapped here by a mad-ish young-ish woman who was a fan of his work, and had apparently previously met him in London at a book signing. Her recalled London intentions were not strictly literary, but he was then involved elsewhere. Besides she was hardly his type, whatever that really meant. Age had not improved her, or her intentions, or his inclinations. It had been difficult to shake her off without being rude. He had finally only managed to by telling her he did not want to be rude, which did the trick.)

  Tonight there was no visitor who appeared to recognise him, or care about him in any way.

  George went to the bar and ordered his meal and a bottle of Bex.

  “What do you think it is, then?” Colly asked him, as he rattled a bottle from the fridge.

  “What’s that?” George felt curiously oppressed. He knew already what that would be. He was correct.

  “Them barmy birds.”

  “Which birds?” My God. George realised he was pretending he had not noticed. Why on earth?

  But Colly, handing him a glass, explained, “Bloody magpies. Going up like rockets all the time.”

  “Are they?”

  “I s’pose you ain’t seen it, mate,” said Colly, who like George hailed from London, and had kept his accent with him though in situ here for more than eighteen years.

  “Well, I’ve seen some flying over. But so what?”

  “Here,” said Colly to Amethyst, as she came from the kitchen with two plates, “old George ain’t bloody seen them magpies going up all day. One every thirty-seven seconds Arnold reckons.”

  “It’s true,” said Amethyst, widening her eyes at George through the pleasant steam of one meat and one vegetarian lasagne.

  From along the bar a couple of the other men joined in. They told George, and the room in general, how Arnold Weller had timed the darn things. Between thirty-two and thirty-eight seconds. He had counted them for a whole
half-hour. Over forty-three magpies, though old Arny had lost count, he thought, by a little—not much—forty or forty-three or even forty-eight. Near enough. And still flying up, one by one. One after another. And all of them from different places, or from the places no other bird was then rising from.

  An elderly voice spoke from the corner, under the oil painting of Ducks in Flight. “Was on the one o’clock news. I heard it. They made a joke about it. Then someone else came in—some politician. Said he saw ’em too, in Sussex or whatever, that morning, and coming into London all the way.”

  “Reports all over the country,” someone else said.

  George turned to Amethyst. “No, thanks. No fries. Just the steak and salad.”

  “You’re, like, clever,” said Amethyst. She was in her earliest twenties, bright, respectful, a non-reader who unusually and wrongly seemed to believe writing a novel or play was the act of a wise, well-educated person. “What do you think’s causing it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But it’s—like it’s weird, isn’t it?”

  “Is it? Maybe not.”

  “Maybe it’s global warming,” said one of the dining room visitors, moving in to ask where the gents was. Once told, he added, amused, over one shoulder, “Jude says she saw them from the car when we were driving down. I didn’t notice. But Jude’s gimlet eye picked them out okay.”

  “What’s a gimlet eye?” Amethyst asked George over the two cooling dinners.

  “God knows,” he said. “I used to know. Can’t remember. Old age,” he added, smiling.

  “You’re not, like, old,” Amethyst insisted so vehemently and staring in his eyes with her wide, and certainly un-gimlet-like ones, he felt a hint of random desire. But it passed. It was food he lusted after, he decided, as he walked through into the pub garden.

  Dusk was coming now, gradual and inevitable. A moth flew towards him as if in greeting, then on into the lighted pub.

  Night falls.

  From the farm the lights blaze out, and along the main road the headlamps of the occasional truck, or group of fast cars, spangle up the cats’-eyes like broken glass. A badger crosses, pausing to snuff at the tainted tarmac. A lucky badger, meandering sluggish yet unscathed, in a lacuna of traffic, to the farther side.

  A frog croaks from a hidden pool. The night wind stirs softly and brushes through the leaves and grasses.

  A magpie rises, blanking out, in passing, the stars, which then reappear.

  The moon, almost full, will rise later. It will show far better than the stars the rising magpies, thirty or forty or fifty, that passage upward during every half-hour within the radius of visibility.

  The Duck burns like a golden lantern in the darkness. It is almost 11:00 p.m. A couple of vehicles glide down the lane, away to the side-roads that lie north and west of the main one.

  Later the more dedicated drinkers emerge, taking various paths homeward. Two cross the fields, a young man and a girl, pausing to kiss among the new-beginning crops, like lovers from Hardy. Behind and sometimes before them, unseen, unnoted, magpies rise one by one, straight up into the stars.

  The man who is a writer, and has sat in the pub garden until utter darkness beyond the lights closed up the sky, who afterwards had a vodka at the bar, listening with the publican and a few others to the ten o’clock news, the comments and views of a celebrity, a twitcher, and an eminent ornithologist, leaves the Duck, and himself goes back along the lane. In the doorway of the cottage he stands a moment again, studying the skyscape. Indoors, upstairs, he watches too a while at the workroom window. But he can no longer be certain they are rising. If they are, then not near enough for the lights of his house to catch the white pattern on their wings.

  They are like ancient Egyptian birds, he thinks, magpies. Their markings seem primal and elder as the spectacle designs about the eyes of certain snakes.

  In the deep hollow of the night, dreamless, he wakes. He hears the eruption of wings leaping at Heaven from the roof above his head. Then he gets up and crosses through again into his workroom. Against the yellow three-quarter face of the hot moon, he sees another magpie rise. Another magpie, more southerly, side-lit, half a minute, or thirty-six seconds after it. In other areas that the moon can find, presently another. Another. Another.

  Back in bed he switches on the radio for the World Service. But all the BBC will give him now is war, famine and disease; misery, and a tiny bit of the tune called “Lily Bolero.”

  He turns it off and falls asleep again, and dreams the young girl from the pub is stalking him as the mad-ish woman had tried to do. Nevertheless he lets the pub girl in. Then just inside the doorway, she turns into his cleaning woman. Before the dream can become properly erotic, unfortunately—or perhaps actually fortunately—it fades away from him. He does not wake until the alarm clock sounds at 7:00 a.m.

  II

  George Anderton no longer bothered regularly to read newspapers. Any allure they ever had for him had melted away in his forties. Two days after he saw the first magpie ascending from his window, two nights after hearing the other magpie clattering up, as if suddenly evolved from the very slates of the cottage roof, he walked to the village. Orthurst had its point-topped Saxon church and ancient yews, the scatter of shops and now-defunct post office, the bus-stop for Stantham Cross, and the other pub, the Cart and Plough, and some two hundred or so cottages, several dating way back. There was also the unfinished new estate, virtually builder-abandoned, that no one had wanted here, and was called the Lavvy.

  At Rosie’s, now owned and operated by Pam, he bought some butter, lettuce, pears and bacon, the Independent and Guardian, and the local Stantham Spotter.

  “It gives me the creeps,” said Pam. She was a nice, comfy old thing of thirty-going-on-sixty-five. “My gran used to tell me they were unlucky. Ill-omened birds. If you saw one you had to say, ‘Good-morrow, Master Magpie.’ Or even, ‘Good-Morrow, Lord Magpie.’ Then it might be all right. But I tried not to see them, when I was a child. Once one flew right at me on my bike, when I was only seven, and five minutes after I fell off in a ditch. Broke my little finger. Look. It never came back straight. Doesn’t bend like it should, neither.”

  “Poor you,” he said. He refrained from saying gran’s scare tactics had freaked Pam out enough that she had been bound to fall off the bike, after a close meeting with a magpie.

  “Can’t avoid seeing the blessed things now, can I? Nobody can. And the telly news goes on and on about them. They’re everywhere. Going up. Did you hear about the plane at Heathrow last night? Yes, of course you did.”

  But he had not heard, slept solidly last night and through the alarm, missed the news this morning, had only just now seen the Heathrow report, a secondary headline on the Guardian’s front page.

  It seemed, rather than inhaling a flock of the birds—what usually happened—the Boeing had been struck repeatedly by magpies, rising as if blind and insane, directly in its path, therefore hitting or being hit by fuselage, wings, and next the undercarriage, as the plane descended. The pilot had lost his nerve, many of the passengers too. The co-pilot brought the plane in, but the landing was a bad one, the touchdown heavy, the Boeing slewing across the runway. Three people had died, and seventy were injured, five seriously.

  Disliking his own pragmatism, George considered it could have been far worse.

  “On TV Breakfast they said, in Scotland,” went on Pam, unhappy and excitable at once, “one plane there ditched in a loch.” She pronounced this “lock,” but he nodded. She expanded, “But at Manchester they’ve grounded them all. They’re going to ground all of them, unless they can shoot them out of the sky.”

  He refrained, now, from asking if she meant the birds or the planes.

  “No one can get home, then, except by sea. And they’ve closed the Chunnel, too. It’s on page two in the Mail—a train struck so many birds on the approach it had to stop—the wheels and the windows were all…” she hesitated, grimaced. “Black and red.
”

  He had, by then, seen the headline glaring on the Mail: WINGED DEATH RISES FROM THE TRACKS. A picture of the stalled train, surrounded by firemen and railway workers, was accompanied by a caption that began: They seemed to come up out of holes under the line, said driver Ken Rains.

  Pam, shocking him slightly, abruptly started to cry. He had the urge to put an arm around her, tell her everything would be fine and would get sorted out. But he was unsure he himself believed this, going on the general everyday mess. And anyway, he had found out in the not-so-distant past where such gestures might land him.

  “Don’t worry, Pam,” he temporised.

  She said, “No, it isn’t that. I don’t know what it is. My age, I expect.”

  Poor Pam, he thought again, but did not say it. To be gallant might also be misunderstood. He left the shop having bought the Mail as well, the price of an extra paper to appease her. Not much of a consolation.

  All the way back, now downhill to the fields and woods, he could watch the magpies rising on all sides, and behind him should he turn round, and off towards the hills those specks which, now, he was sure were magpies too. On his way to the village, going uphill, a single magpie had sprung directly from a bush at the side of the path. And later another from about three metres ahead of him. They might, these two, indeed have been engendered out of holes in the ground. Out of holes in reality.

  One minute non-existent, and then—existing.

  It was overcast today. The patch of fine weather had disintegrated. Well, this was England. High up, cloud had settled, like a pale grey duvet. And the silence. How silent it seemed. Not even the magpies made a sound, beyond the abrupt clapping of their wings, when near enough. That signature rattling chatter of theirs was oddly always absent. There was a fitful, warmish wind. It carried a smell from the farm, he thought, not strong or really unpleasant; animal. Somehow depressing.

  It’s my age, I expect, George told himself with dry mimicry. He had stuck too on the bloody story.

  “Eyewitnesses are mistaken! It is entirely impossible that the huge number of birds people are claiming to have seen could even be found in the whole of the British Isles!”