Nightjar (Caprimulgus europaeus) It was Barlow I went to see first. He had a caravan park down on the Isle of Purbeck somewhere round Wareham. I remembered him faintly, a florid barrel of a man who stayed at the Cape once when I was small. He tied up the arms of my cardigan so I couldn’t get my hands out and then he laughed and I cried. It was a long night, chainsmoking on trains until my throat was sore, lying sleepless on the platform at Temple Meads like a corpse on a slab and watching dawn precipitate slowly through the glass roof. I checked Barlow’s address in a street atlas in the station bookshop and the girl on the till had a face on her like a bulldog licking piss off a nettle. And then more trains through a hot early summer day, stuffy and rattling and painfully slow, stopping in sidings and fagsmoke swarming in sunlight. Body and brain at fever pitch, bitter with adrenaline. I walked out of Wareham station into the late afternoon, the sky fresh and blue as a clean sheet and the unwashed smell rising as the sun dried out the sweat from my shirt.
