Free Common Ground by Rob Cowen Page A

holding our jackets and Rosie’s bag.
    â€˜You might want to sit down.’
    Yes. Take your seat. Relax. Prepare for the in-flight movie.
    I hold Rosie’s hand as Rachel squirts a big circle of thick, bluish gel over her stomach. ‘Sorry it’s cold,’ she says as Rosie hoots. But it is excitement, not discomfort. From where she’s lying, she can’t see the monitors: Rachel has both of them turned towards her. I imagine this is in case of problems with the foetus; they spare the parents the emotional connection that would be forged by the act of laying eyes upon a life. But I’m tall and nosy so I lean back my chair and get the first views as the torch-like transducer probe nuzzles its way around my wife’s belly, ranging, listening.
    Black and silver storm clouds tumble past, swelling and contracting like squeezed balloons. It takes a second for Rachel to locate the uterus, a throbbing mercurial ring, and then hover over the placenta. She operates the probe expertly, changing direction, clicking its sides and zooming in for a better view, closing on the blackness of the amniotic sac. What I see is even more black and silver circles extending, opening, parting and joining, making shapes. There are all sorts of landscapes forming from Rosie’s workings; we’re flying over the Lake District’s craggy northern fells, winter moors, domed Salisbury hills and above the moonlit Thames – all the places we’ve been together. She carries them inside her. Rosie is watching my face; I squeeze her hand and smile. Then, when I look back at the screen, the snowy pixels have arranged themselves again, forming, for a second, the distinct face of a tawny owl.
    â€˜Well?’ Rosie whispers. ‘What can you see?’
    You don’t usually find tawny owls (
Strix aluco
) in hospitals, although their habitats are changing. They like to roost in woods and the high crevices or branch cavities found in old, deciduous trees, like oak. In our endless skirmishes over land, woods continue to disappear and the felling of dead, hollowed trunks has seen a denuding of traditional nest sites. But being a year-round resident, tawnies hate to concede ground and the stability of their numbers in the UK is down to a willingness to take alternative accommodation in order to hold territory: purpose-built owl boxes; squirrel dreys; unattended crow, magpie or heron nests; even dilapidated buildings. As a student in Leeds I once heard a male calling from a windowless warehouse near a motorway on the long six-mile walk home from a party. Mostly they seem to love the abandoned places, the unmanaged islands where man has temporarily laid off interfering and allowed functional ecosystems to thrive – forests, cemeteries, churchyards and, almost always, edge-lands.
    I’ve been watching a pair of owls down in the wood for weeks. About four weeks, to be precise. And it’s probably truer to say listening for rather than watching, as being nocturnal and soundless in flight, they’ve been almost impossible to see. No matter. Their calls sneaked inside me, lingering in my ears as doggedly as fag smoke used to hang about your clothes after a night in a pub. I first began hearing their duets in the wood when I was out looking for the fox. At times they were frightening, like the panicked, gurgled screams of shipwrecked sailors drifting in a black ocean; at others they were the cooing comfort-sounds made by a new mother. Each call carried the natural reverb of the river gorge, lending them a peculiar ‘Wall of Sound’ sonic resonance, like the harmony part on ‘Be My Baby’. Roomy. Spacey. And those shrill, terrifying shrieks and low, loving hoots kept me company at night, growing ever louder in my re-ordering world.
    Horizons began to widen in early February. They always do. It is something about the lifting light and sky. Days no longer seem so abbreviated, in such a mad rush to