A Bird on My Shoulder Read Online Free

either.’
    ‘Thursday?’
    ‘No, sorry,’ I said, my exasperation rising. ‘Thursday is going to be really busy.’
    There was a long pause while he assessed, as a showjumper might, the height and difficulty of a looming fence.
    ‘I see. Well, as your evenings seem to be problematic, let’s have coffee on Saturday. I don’t believe there are any newspaper deadlines at that time?’
    Before I knew it, I had agreed that he should come to my house on Saturday morning. I put down the phone, dismayed by my inability to be more assertive.
    ‘Anything important?’ Ros asked as I came up the stairs.
    ‘No, just the office checking something,’ I said.
    •••
    We sat among the detritus of our dinner. Ros had recently left a stable relationship which she’d been in for many years. Everyone liked her partner and many could not understand her decision to leave him. Although she was still relatively young – she was the same age as me – I hoped she would not regret her decision.
    ‘I know I’m not exactly the relationship poster girl right now,’ she began, ‘but let’s focus on you for a minute.’
    ‘What?’ I said.
    ‘Don’t work too hard,’ she said. ‘There is a life outside the office and you deserve to be loved.’
    That night I lay in bed, unable to sleep. The persistent heat pressed down on my still aching limbs and yelping from the neighbourhood dogs savaged the silence.
    I knew that my immediate life was a happy one, that I was living in a country where I had longed to be, work was always interesting and I had some wonderful friendships. I did not see myself as ambitious for career success at the expense of everything else. To me, it was simply a matter of pragmatism – in the absence of a better offer, I would simply make the most of the opportunities I had.
    At the heart of these ruminations, however, lay a deeper kernel of self-doubt; a part of me wondered whether I was even capable of the kind of love that I aspired to. Under all my bright banter lurked a very real fear that, when love came too close, I might be seen in the full light of all my complexities, contradictions and inadequacies – and then abandoned.
    I thought back to a rather dramatic resolution I had made a year earlier – that I was not going to have another relationship unless it was for good. I simply could not be bothered with all the drama and uncertainty anymore.
    I had come to this decision after weeks of soul-searching while I walked, with seven others, for more than 850 kilometres across the Great Sandy Desert – from west of Alice Springs tothe outskirts of Broome in Western Australia. Hours, days and weeks of silent trudging across the ochre dunes in an endless landscape of sand and sky induced a deep and almost constant state of meditation, and gave me an opportunity to reflect more deeply on where my life was really going.
    Going to the desert had given me no escape from my problems; it was, in fact, a total stripping down, a confrontation with my essential self. Like many people, there were aspects of my life and events from the past which I had not yet made peace with. With little else to distract me, my propensity to be highly self-critical was given free rein and I was forced to come face to face with all the things I had tried to forget.
    As we trudged on, day after day, I found myself shedding not only physical weight but emotional burdens. I knew I was stuck somewhere in my life that I did not want to be – a place that was very familiar but utterly unhappy. I cannot say I found any answers, but I certainly felt more strong and resolute when I returned.
    I kept my promise and battled on through all the challenges of building a new life in Papua New Guinea. Sometimes the feeling of isolation and loneliness was overwhelming, but I had to keep trusting that all would come right. Surely, I thought, it was not a question of if my hopes would be fulfilled, but only a question of when.
    I got out of bed and