The Hoopoe

Dawn

In a chalet on the marina, tucked into a striated slope of holiday lets in a messy row, I turn over on a slouchy single mattress and wonder how to sleep. The tousled grey of a warm clouded sunrise blanks the room. Old oil paintings fade on the thin walls: tigers with wide eyes, wilted yellow poppies under moonlight, and sea corals in abstraction. Sweat collects in the skin rims of my neck and the air is sweet to breathe.

Two months since I dropped out, I barely remember what course I’d chosen. Instead, I’m here on a gap year I don’t plan on returning from. Open-ended gap in a salty coast down, where I drag my heels around the dusty roads and drain what’s left of the education fund my dad saved over the duration of my growing years.

In the cramped and dull shower I use a forefinger to trace water drops down my skin and collect all the missed opportunities of forefingers that aren’t mine.

Wrapped in a towel I head to the chalet’s enclosed porch. Someone has suspended a pink and green knitted dreamcatcher from the canopy that shelters the front space. I sit beneath it, on the open doorway step. The chalets on the hill below peek out from among saggy palms and tubular succulents. Great ornamental grasses punctuate the scene like dry eruptions, and a pathway made of white shingle tilts down the bank until disappearing between low perimeter fences.

Beyond the hillside the edge of the ocean rages in blue, kinetic white sea foam rifts racing to dissolve. I look for surfers, but the water is empty, lurching to harness the wind.

Dreamily, I defocus my eyes, and wait for warm air to dry my skin. A movement brings me back, something corner of the eye, near the wall of the next chalet along. Pointed leaves with thorn tips decorate a narrow boundary plot. Small feet brush through sandy earth amid the plants, and eyes sparkle. A hoopoe emerges, hesitant, feathers bright.

It stays for a time, orbits the leaves, pokes around. Then it goes, into the plants, and I lose track of where it could be.

Noon

Midday heat stifles the chalet room. My bedsheets remain twisted, so I straighten them, before I turn my attention to the room’s ancient desk and its small drawers. I rifle my scant belongings around, fetch out the two items I still own that remind me of college, and place them in my shoulder bag.

At the room’s window, the sun’s power threatens the glass. I place my right hand up against the pane, willing the glass to break. Outside, up on a ledge that supports the baked roof of a lower rental, the hoopoe stands, its feathered peak beleaguered in hot air. I stay at the glass and refuse to retract my hand, despite the threat of discomfort, the promise of sunburn. It becomes an exchange with the bird, but the hoopoe keeps its place and remains so still I contemplate whether it has died and spontaneously taxidermied on the spot. Its elegant legs rest firm, its eyes twinkle as it blinks. The life in it interests me like nothing else I’ve seen. I raise my hand. The hoopoe drops out of sight. For a moment I numbly stare at the place in which it stood, now a vacated and mundane ledge. I wait but intuit it won’t return, not today, not in this heat. Minutes pass that barely register, until I drift away from the window, through the short way out to the porch area. On the porch I pause underneath the saggy old knitted charm, and I yank the dreamcatcher free, cracked wood splinters falling about me.

Down at the shoreline, small boats wiggle in their moorings, the marina lifeless. The worn wood underfoot creaks, pounded by the sun’s glare. I keep losing my footing, I start imagining what it’s like to pass out, faint as a result of heatstroke, something I’ve never done. Where the hoopoe has gone, that’s where I’ll go.

Across the marina is a long boardwalk, older, with wide and uneven gaps between planks, and there is a bounce to the wood, its dryness plays my nerves.

After a time the boardwalk ends by sloping into cream sands loaded with dark pebbles. Junk has collected like dust balls against a rough strip of unkempt land that leads to a small stretch of beach. Bent plants twist upwards, a desperation to their growth. I turn away from the bushes and head out onto the sands, towards the sea.

Halfway across the expanse, I pause. Two oil drums are placed several feet apart, blackened by nighttime burnings, ashes turning the cream sands at their base mucky. I select the drum closest to me and approach. The sand is hot and sends its heat to me. I retrieve the first of the items from my bag: a relatively small notebook with a Suedette finish in coral pink, used as a journal. The spine bends back easily, and the pages tear quickly away. I scatter them inside the barrel and collect a few weathered sticks from across the sands, add them to the tattered pages, before reaching into my bag once more. This time I collect a battered tarot deck and fan the cards into the drum. I think about looking at the last card before it spins to meet the others, but I let it fly without a glance. Lastly, the dreamcatcher is pulled free. It has an historical scent of mildew about it. I take out a lighter and have the flame tease its dirty woolen edges. The flame establishes a hold, and I fling the dreamcatcher into the drum.

Through heat haze I stare at the sea, and the hoopoe rides crests, becomes multitudes, the birds rushing in synchrony to dive and twirl through the water.

Dusk

Quiet on the marina, low sounds of the gentle push of the water and the sweet far off chitter of birds settling to roost. I sit on wood, watch tethered boats bob in grey light. Freckles decorate my arms, something that reminds me of years ago, a younger self. I don’t go out into the sun as I used to back then. There are serpentine light reflections coming and going on the surface of the sea.

Up the marina steps and follow the coast path along dry brinks. Cars pass, the drivers lit from inside, their eyes on the road, on their face, music trapped in the frame, using pressure.

Drop lights above tunnel entrances. Soothes underneath the mountains in blue. Road markings rub, to walk the white. The hoopoes lie in bodies near to death and are raised with freckled hands to chests heaving.