"The Impossible Thing"

Belinda Bauer's deft little novel visits an interesting corner of the history of humans and birds and has a satisfying ending.

• The hissing panic of losing him; the agony of knowing what he was doing, but not exactly where.
• Clearing the eggs early in the season meant that those birds that could, would lay again, and fresh eggs were more saleable – unspoiled as they were by the big holes required to remove chicks. But this egg was large – a double-yolker – and pale gold with only a few brown speckles near the bulbous base. Very different; very collectable. And early season too – while pockets were still full and demands unmet.
• Gulls and fulmars and guillemots and puffins and gannets and kittiwakes and razorbills. Wheeling and diving and landing and rising and swooping, and calling so loudly that the air was splintered by cries that carried for miles on a wind that never slackened, but instead drove the sea into the North Yorkshire cliffs and then whipped and whirled up three hundred sheer feet of crag and crevice and crack that hosted a million seabirds
• * A week’s wages for a precious jewel that would become the centrepiece of a grand display in some shallow, silk-lined drawer in a fancy house in London or York. <> And the brokers were the least of it. By second pull there would be a carnival on the clifftop. Picnickers come up for the day in charabancs to see the birds and buy an egg to take home with them, along with the seashells, and the sticks of rock with Scarborough or Bridlington written endlessly through the sugar
• * Jim could tell from experience that there were already chicks in the double-yolker. That was the only shame. The hole would have to be very big to get them both out. The acid they would trickle into the shell could only dissolve so much feather and bone and beak.
• Once she was lost in the deep grass, and Enid only found her because the sheep had gathered to stare down at her like the baby Jesus in the manger, all covered in ants.
• ‘They were looking for something,’ Nick’s mother sniffed. ‘I don’t know what.’ She looked around wildly, as if she no longer trusted anything in the room, the house. Her life.
• This was that same kind of summer evening when, as the sun slides towards the horizon, the wind becomes a breeze and the breeze suddenly becomes a nothing – not even a whisper – and the vacuum assaults the ears.
• * The rope was a new one. Bought in the dockyard at Hull, it was three hundred feet long, made of hemp with a steel gark for strength, and it had cost sixty pounds – a year’s wages for a labouring man – and shared between the members of the Chandler gang....
  Fed out and drawn in four times a day over a wheel on a spike dug into a grassy cliff-edge, snagging on rocks all the way and with a man at the end of it, directing it up, then down, then up again, then down all the way and up again – and at each point leaning, swinging, reaching, scraping, wearing, fraying …
  When it rained, the rope must be dried like a baby, then coiled correctly to prevent kinking, and stowed in a hole carved into the ground and secured by a door of planks and bitumen.
  The rope would need no guard. Nobody who knew it was there would dare to steal something so valuable.
  The rope was everything. Life itself.
• The crack was too small even for one of the young ladies from Doncaster or York who wanted to show their modern mettle by claiming their own egg. <> But it was not too small for Celie Sheppard.
• ‘Who knows?’ said Nick – another phrase that used to waste an awful lot of Patrick’s time. Now he understood that it was rhetorical and could be safely ignored.
• Of course, the richer the man (and it was always a man), the less likely he was to procure those eggs himself. For what captain of industry or peer of the realm has the time or the inclination to shin up a tree or wade through bulrushes? Or even to travel a hundred miles in the company of the Great Unwashed, to catch his death on a northern cliff that smelled like a Shoreditch whore? <> The answer, of course, was none.
• * The guillemot, or murre, or scout – scoot to use the vulgar Yorkshire – was not a big bird, but it laid an uncommonly big egg. A bird that was fifteen inches from beak to tail laid a single egg that might be five inches long... every egg was not only decorative – adorned as it was with whirls and squiggles, and of all kinds of colours, from white, through tan and grey and blue and green and chocolate – but was also unique... In the high-density fields of the North Yorkshire cliffs, where birds might roost at the rate of fifty pairs to a square yard, it was required that a bird knew exactly which egg was theirs... It was this combination of desirability, peculiarity and repeat business that had allowed George Ambler to look into the future and to see a big egg-shaped pot of gold at the end of his own personal rainbow.
• the old man was nearing seventy and his son only had one leg, courtesy of the Great War. But that was no handicap when that leg was only called upon to dangle over the ocean.
• But George Ambler was not a fighter. Neither was he a lover. He was a money-maker, and he knew he would make money on the extraordinary egg even at ten pounds. Even at twenty.


• There were all sorts of faults he could have conjured up and pointed out to the child to explain (once the egg was in his hand and not hers) why the pound they’d agreed was no longer on the table, and she’d never have been any the wiser. And now, here was the whole Chandler gang fawning over the egg as if it were not only gold but had been laid on the moon!
• In the morning the bird and her mate woke on their narrow ledge and sought their egg again, squawked again, pecked again, were pecked again. Then they fed – plummeting so fast, and from so high, that in open water they might dive past the point where the ocean was blue, and pierce the black more than two hundred feet down, along with the whales – to capture eels or fish.
  Then they returned to their ledge under the overhang and started their search again.
  They went through this routine for days – maybe a week – while all around them dull, dark chicks started emerging from jewelled eggs like spiky disappointments.
• * And, if it was lucky, the fist-sized ball of fluff would live long enough to jump. A hundred feet. Two hundred, three hundred feet or more, off the towering cliff, tumbling as it dropped, tossed by gusts of wind, bouncing off ledges and jagged rocks – where the journey would end for some – until it plopped into the bitter cold of the North Sea, then bobbed there, stunned and disorientated, for its parents to find. <> Not a fledgling, but a jumpling.
• But Edwards, the butler, had been briefed, and fended him off with wilful misunderstanding – thanking him most ardently, as if his call were a prompt, in-person répondez to the invitation extended, for which Mr Ambler would be most grateful when he returned home from business, which was likely to keep him away between now until pretty much directly before soup was served at the time and date stated.
• It nestled in the oak case which he’d commissioned from Bartlett & Sons – the finest purveyors of taxidermy and associated paraphernalia in London and, therefore, the world. The case had cost nearly the price of the egg, but that was immaterial. Three sides glass, one side plaster-of-Paris cliff, skilfully moulded and painted by Shawcross (who knew no equal in such matters), with rugged tufts, and real murre feathers, and all dribbled white with gouache guano. And Big Blue, in situ of course, to give the impression every time Rickaby entered the drawing room that he was discovering it himself for the very first time on some blustery cliff-cum-mantelpiece.
• It had taken months, but Patrick had worn down not only the seller (who didn’t have the right spoon, but who had been so exhausted that he had finally refunded Patrick’s money and told him to keep the set) but eBay itself, where some poor harassed minion had been commissioned to track down the sheep by a gate and have it bought and sent to Patrick in a gesture of corporate goodwill. <> Patrick had placed the sheep/gate spoon in the box with all the reverence of a palace guard replacing the crown jewels after a trip to the Abbey. The whole affair had left him with a spare teaspoon, of course, which he had carried in his pocket from that day to this, as a sort of badge of eBay honour.
• Before Nick could speak, the big man grabbed him by the front of his jumper, yanked him forward, headbutted him, then withdrew and slammed the door. It all happened so fast that Patrick was left open-mouthed with amazement, already replaying it in his head. The door, the arm, the fist, the head, the door. It was like a very violent cuckoo clock.
• Merthyr Tydfil Crown Court: Inside, the atrium was like a regional airport of crime.
• A couple of journalists wandered off the press bench, and the prosecution barrister and the defence barrister stood and chatted like old friends. <> Patrick thought it all made the case seem like a play that was over.
• When his breathing evened out he was suddenly crestfallen. He’d eaten so fast that his little knot of a stomach ached with the rude stretch of being filled. How he wished he could start again and do it all more slowly.
• And she was also confused, because there was a collector for the rent. His name was Mr Bastard – first name, That – and he came every month and was always very rude when he did.
• The Sweets had been RSPB Nest Guardians for this particular pair of golden eagles for the past eleven years, and had the lanyards to prove it.
• * ‘Yes, I’m afraid it is,’ Connor said ruefully. ‘We used to let any old Tom, Dick or Harry come to do research, but then some bastard made off with some of our rarest feathers. Now to gain entry you have to sacrifice your firstborn son!’ <> ‘I’m the only son,’ said Patrick. ‘We both are.’
• He learned that until a day or two before it’s laid, an egg has no shell; that one is constructed as it travels out of the uterus, like a car on a production line – with thousands of blobs of calcium fired at it to form a shell that’s both breathable and waterproof, which is then painted in a pattern unique to each species
• great auk: The last known pair were strangled by Icelandic fishermen in 1844.’... ‘Because a collector wanted their skins undamaged,’ the curator said sombrely. ‘The egg they were hatching was smashed, and that was the end of the great auk.’
• ‘Because Chris and Garrett have their own agenda when it comes to stolen eggs. They’re both trying to do what they think is right for the birds by fighting their little court battles, but basically they’re the establishment working against the egg thieves. If we’re going to get my egg back, then we need to speak to thieves.’
  ‘Your nose already tried that.’
  Patrick rarely made jokes and didn’t know he’d made one now until Nick guffawed.
  ‘Good one!’ he said. ‘But we shouldn’t give up so easily.’
  Patrick didn’t answer. He thought that easily sounded like the best way to give up.
• Barr did look up this time. ‘You … collect ’em!’ he said, as if Patrick were stupid. ‘And then you look at them! And you show them to other people. You have them. That’s the whole point.’
• But Barr only shook his head. ‘Not my bag, guillemots. Cliffs. I’m a field and tree man, me. Old school. We all got our skills. Mine is trees. I can get up a fifty-foot fir in sixty seconds flat. Sight unseen. I love a good tree, me. Just spike up and go.’
• He sprinted fifty yards then ducked between two parked cars and crouched there, shaking and with his hands over his ears, so that the sound of Finn Garrett destroying Matthew Barr’s egg collection was just a series of distant thuds.
• Garrett snorted. ‘I’m talking about the crime of somebody stealing every egg that a bird ever laid. I’m talking about a bird dying without ever raising a chick. You tell me a worse crime than that.’
• They were not knickers. <> They were a balaclava.
• ‘Then,’ he started again slowly, ‘doesn’t that mean that … whoever took your egg—’
  ‘Already has the other twenty-nine!’ Nick finished triumphantly. He clapped Patrick on the shoulder and grinned. ‘Mate! You’re a genius!’
  Patrick shrugged. He didn’t answer pointless statements.
• I look like him! <> It was a cheerful idea to Celie, and it made her smile, but she was far too unworldly to think it anything other than just a happy coincidence. She understood that some people looked like other people.
• She was surprised by her tears and her sadness, and felt very ungrateful, but the longer she was in Scarborough, the more frequently she pined, and finally the bouts of melancholy spread like spilled milk, until they all joined up.
• And yet he never said a single thing about the most famous guillemot egg ever found.’
  Nick stared into the middle distance, then nodded. ‘You’re right. It is weird. Instead he told us about the bloke sticking a pencil up a chicken’s bum.’
  ‘Although that was interesting,’ said Patrick.
  ‘Awesome,’ agreed Nick.
  ‘But Dr Connor not telling us about it feels … ummm …’
  ‘Deliberate,’ said Nick.
  ‘Yes,’ said Patrick. ‘Deliberate. And he knew your egg had been stolen, so why invite us to the museum at all? I mean … what did he want?’
  Patrick got up and started to pace. That electric feeling in his chest was back, and humming, and suddenly he knew: ‘I don’t think he was talking about the other eggs. I think he was talking about the Holy Grail.’
• ‘Of course,’ said Patrick. ‘Because without the data you’re screwed!’
  ‘OK …’ said Nick. ‘But why would he want the data if he hasn’t got the egg?’
  ‘Exactly!’ shouted Patrick triumphantly.
• Patrick shrugged. ‘Where would you hide thirty priceless eggs?’
  Nick frowned hard, and then started to laugh. ‘With a million others!’
• * she remembered he had never been to school and could not read or count very high without great effort. He only knew if the flock was short because he recognized each sheep the same way he recognized people, and missed any that had strayed as though they were friends who were absent from a party.
• Instead he opened a small blue velvet box, and Celie Sheppard’s heart near burst with joy. <> Robert had spent months – years! – practising his proposal, but when the moment came, he did not need to say a thing.
• Patrick held up a stuffed badger. ‘I found another of these.’ <> ‘Nah, it’s the same one.’
• * ‘Well, they’re on wheels and they leave track marks on the wooden floor. More worn at the start of each row of cabinets and becoming gradually fainter towards the far end of the row, where they travel less often.’
  ‘Logical,’ said Nick.
  ‘Yes, it is,’ said Patrick, pulling junk slowly out of yet another box. ‘Except that one ladder in the guillemot room has made much deeper track marks to the middle of the aisle. As if the ladder is pushed there often.’
  ‘I’m lost,’ frowned Nick.
  Patrick piled the final box he had checked neatly on top of another. ‘Matthew Barr said he liked to just look at his eggs, and I like having my teaspoons nearby, so I think whoever hid the Metland Eggs would want them somewhere nearby too, so he could look at them a lot.’
• ‘So that’s where I would start,’ he said. ‘The sixth column on the second side of the fourth cabinet in the guillemot room.’ <> ‘You couldn’t narrow it down some more?’ grinned Nick.
• those difficult post-war years when the fathers and uncles and brothers who had come home without limbs or minds had rather taken the shine off death. <> Luckily there would always be a mainstay of lads who knew no better, or who had known a lot worse, and were so grateful for three meals a day that they would march themselves silly and shoot on sight for the luxury of hot food, a bed and a uniform.
• * And – most strangely of all – Celie could not think of her sliver of a baby without seeing the blinking black eye of the guillemot. <> Thinking of how, each year now, the little bird turned her head away just a fraction and opened her beak in silent, useless protest, as if she could no longer bear to watch while Celie slid a hand under her fluttering breast to steal her egg.
• an American gentleman (if that was not an oxymoron!)
• It had not always been the easiest relationship to navigate, for Patrick was pretty indifferent, but Nick had been dogged, and had managed to forge a friendship based almost entirely on video games, which did not require eye contact or conversation.
• * But the rope tethered him there, a dozen feet from the crack. He could not reverse.
  Ambler remembered watching the idiot reel Celie in. Once she tapped to come up, he always moved towards her and now he understood why – at this low angle the rope did not run through the crack, but merely became squeezed by the point and got stuck there. The harder one pulled, the tighter it held.
  He needed to get closer to the crack – not further away. And he needed to pull the boy in as he did so.
• * So they had agreed to tell people that Martha was his daughter and, because most had a hazy recollection that he had indeed had a wife and a child in London, the gossip slowly faded until it was confined to those few whose net of bad opinion was always cast so wide as to make any catch meaningless.
• Martha had been only fourteen, but was an intelligent girl, and so had not believed his distortion of history for a second. But she was also intelligent enough to suppress her urge to dash the red egg from Ambler’s repulsive fingers. Instead she had accepted it and pretended to admire it, and had encouraged Ambler to tell her all about it again, and again, and again, and again and again! Until she had thought her ears would bleed from boredom. <> Because every moment George Ambler had spent poring over the egg was a moment when he was not pawing her.
• Knowing Ambler as he had, he felt it was safe to assume that, once ten had been achieved, twenty must automatically have presented itself as desirable to a man whose social ambition was matched only by his greed. And that thereafter, the thought of presenting thirty red eggs to the world would have been a fait accompli to cement both his fortune and his name in the annals of egg history.
• * Desperately he looked around him for something to use … Then, with a happy little skip in his heart, Patrick dug deep into his jeans pocket and pulled out his Highland cow teaspoon.
  Perfect.
  The last red egg had been lurking in the frontmost corner of the drawer and Patrick drew it out on his spoon like a child on sports day
• .Patrick nodded – then watched in fascination as her expression changed slowly from wonder to sadness. <> He wanted to tell her that he recognized both feelings. Understood them both. Understood her, just a little bit, and meant to understand a lot more. It made a little bubble of happiness rise inside him.
• The doors were not locked. And right there – on the passenger seat, where the driver could look at it often – was the fancy wooden box that had once held the Metland Egg.
  A lump rose in Garrett’s throat. Patrick had only called it ‘fancy’, but no description could have done it justice. And it was all the more beautiful for being empty.
  It was also evidence, of course, and shouldn’t be touched.
  But this was not a court case – or ever likely to be a court case.
  This was war.
  And so he took it.
  He put it on his own front seat, where he could look at it often.
• Fulmars and gulls and kittiwakes and terns. Puffins whirring past their feet like rainbow bullets, and giant gannets that hung in the sky beside them like airships. But most of all, guillemots. Huddled shoulder to shoulder, they painted the chalky cliffs in glossy chocolate pixels. <> ‘This is where they came from,’ Meg whispered. ‘This is where they belong.’
• The backpack had whirled out of sight, but the Metland Eggs weren’t falling.
  They were floating.
  Emptied of everything but air, the thirty fragile jewels were cradled on first this eddy and then on that, so they didn’t drop so much as dance between the wheeling, witnessing birds, trembling and tumbling in the arms of the wind.
  Meg reached for Patrick’s hand and together they watched thirty red eggs spin lazily down through the shadows like fiery red lanterns, until long after they lost sight of them against the black ocean.