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How was I going to do this thing? The water in my drinking-dripper was too small to put a simulacrum through. If they hung me by a window, maybe I could use the glass. If I was outside and it rained, or a hose leaked a puddle. If they kept me in the kitchen and left me alone, if there was a drink on the bench, or if they wiped the sink shiny enough, maybe I could see through and find her and go to work.

All the long next day, hanging by the laundry, I waited and pondered. Funny how when it’s not wanted, some reflective surface is always winking, throwing out irrelevant scenes and voices, making it hard to eat. Yet when there is a task to accomplish, all is matte and movement. The only hope I had that whole long day was when Mum hung out some Scarlet clothes, like thick black spider webs clamped to the line.
There, the girl will
come back to collect those
–
but then
,
sometimes Mum washes
things, and packs them in a bag, and takes them up to the box by
the railway station.
And I was all doubtful and anxious again.

Mum took me indoors late that afternoon, and there was a lot of praying and swinging and uncertainty just about that. Then Scarlet came in, all of a sudden, smelly with smoke and train-smells and the pa-choury she’s started burning at the man’s place. She pushed past Mum at the door, to fetch her spider webs from the line.

‘Well, and good
morning
to you too,’ said Mum.

‘Hi, Mu-u-um,’ said Scarlet in her boredest voice, unpegging.

Mum gathered herself to start talking, but then the house filled with arriving Taylor and arriving Ethan, so she didn’t.

Taylor thundered straight through from the far entry, shouting. He flung himself across the table at me and swung something bright from his hand. ‘Do you like it, Smoke? Do you like the look of yourself? Are you beautiful?’ he prayed.

‘Oh,’ said Mum. ‘Did you get it back from Marina?’

‘This isn’t
ours
.’ It was Taylor’s best withering voice. ‘Ours was
orange
, remember, with
beads
. Marina’s dad got this one. I was telling Marina this morning about Smoko coming back, and I didn’t say she had to give it back or anything, but her dad heard. And
he
didn’t say anything, but when he came to pick her up he had this, because—’

‘Are you
sure
you didn’t say anything? Anything that would make them feel guilty?’

‘No-o! You ask him! He said Wellington got so much joy out of the mirror we gave him—’

‘Is that what he said – “got so much joy”?’ Mum was smiling now – I only just managed to notice it, through the noise and the swinging light and the general discombobulation, and trying to keep a hold on the whereabouts of Scarlet.

‘Yes! He said he couldn’t bear to think of any budgie going without a mirror. He said sorry there aren’t any beads; he said the lady in the shop said—’

Whack!
went the door on the wall and in came Scarlet, trailing her webs through the kitchen. She stopped Ethan at the bathroom door, sweeping past so imperiously.

‘Oops,’ he said, and that was all. I like Ethan – he’s a kind boy, really, for all he pretends to be an angry boofhead.

Into the silence Mum said, ‘Well, that was very nice of him. What’s his name again, Marina’s dad?’

‘
I
don’t know.’

Juan
, I thought, to stop myself feeling sick.
Juan
Antonio Jimenez
. A bird brain can’t hold much and keep it straight.

Mum closed the whacked door. ‘Put it in the cage,’ she said, ‘so he can start to
get some joy
out of it.’

I backed away. Taylor’s hand, smelling of play-dirt and lollies, came in and hung the mirror at the far end of the perch. It was the perfect size, if a bit— ‘It’s a bit smudgy,’ said Ethan. ‘He won’t be able to see himself in that.’

Taylor took the mirror out again, breathed on it and polished it (‘Not on your
school
shirt, Taylor – use a tissue!’ ‘It’s
fine
, Mum!’), then hung it back.
Now
it was perfect.

When the hand withdrew I sidled up the perch.

‘Look, he loves it already!’

‘Who’s that new bird, Smoke? Who is it?’

‘“Now, did I part my feathers right this morning?”’

I pecked at the simulacrum a couple of times to make sure it was working properly. Behind it Scarlet was clearly visible in her room, packing all manner of black clothing into the bag that used to be her school bag.

‘“What a beautiful bird!”’

‘“Stunning. Gorgeous.”’

‘“I think I’m in lurv!”’

I wouldn’t be able to do anything with the family around. I disguised my irritation with some grooming.

Frightening a cat is one thing; showing your true nature to your Connected Souls – well, you can do it in an emergency, but frivolous exposures can have consequences you might not want to deal with.

‘“Yes, I could do with a bit of a tidy-up.”’

‘That’s right, Smoke. Make yourself nice for your girlfriend.’

‘Bet you didn’t meet anyone as cute as that on your travels.’

It’s best just to wait, when they carry on like this. It doesn’t usually last long.

But even when they stopped they were distracting, making their dinner, eating around the table, breaking into prayer if I made a move. I put my head under my wing as a hint, but they wouldn’t put the cloth over me. They didn’t talk about anything useful, either – Scarlet barely entered the conversation, let alone importantly. She and Mum must have
had words
while I was transmigrating; things must have
come to a head
. That was good timing on my part. I didn’t like to watch them fighting from above; I saw inside them too clearly, to all their pains and rages. But I’d be able to do some good while the feelings were all stirred up and tender.

I glimpsed Scarlet through the mirror, during dinner, running for the train, then sitting grooming her dark-purple claws, painting her dark-purple lips darker. Where she got off it was raining, hard to read the wet ground and all those extra lights. Then – after a bit of praying, Mum
finally
put my cloth on – she was at the man’s house.

He was on the phone – for a long time, talking trash, two low-worth people talking together, further lowering both their selves. She waited, at first irritably, but then she went farther into the house, from room to room, looking at everything but not touching. He didn’t like that – when it was clear she hadn’t just gone to the bathroom he came out to the hall and frowned about, and when next he saw her he beckoned. She skipped away into the bathroom then, and while his voice and his pretend-laughter boomed in the hall she went piece by piece through the marvels of his bath-cabinet, touching and lifting only as much as she needed to, to see what was what.

There was a rustle of my cloth, then an eye, then the cloth again. ‘Yep,’ Ethan said. ‘Still admiring himself.’

‘Telling himself a bedtime story,’ said Taylor. ‘“Once upon a time there were three poor budgies, living in a forest.”’

By the time they’d got out of my tail-feathers Scarlet was back with the man, the phone was unplugged from the wall and the glassware was all laid out in its ceremonial array, the only clean thing in the house, kept that way so it wouldn’t contaminate the chemical.

Scarlet sat watching, luminous, her eyes beautiful with fear.

He loved that, the man. It gave him flourish. To be the knower, in front of such innocence and curiosity. He’d already done it with the sex; now he wanted to do it with the substances. He wanted to claim more and more, until she was hurt, and wept, until she was wrecked and ruined. She thought it was love, but he wouldn’t know love from a hole in the ground.
He
thought this was love, too, this wreckage. When it was complete, he would say she had spoiled the love, that he had brought it to her pure and she had fussed and spoiled it with her neediness.

‘Roll up your sleeve,’ he said, and handed her the tightener. ‘Put this on.’

I pecked at the simulacrum and we groomed ourselves, just quickly, just to make sure we were ready in every covert and pinion. Beyond my fellow there the work went on, with the flame and the precious dust and the injecting machine. Nothing spilled or was wasted. The man kept his temper; he didn’t loose a single dung-word. Scarlet stayed still and wide-eyed.

I sent the simulacrum down. It put chin to chest and dropped and spread and fluttered, onto Scarlet’s shoulder. It had a finer body than I; being invisible, it could afford to be ideal – there was no risk that it would dazzle and unhinge anyone.

Scarlet turned its way and searched the shadows behind her. The simulacrum breathed, and fanned its breath into her face.

‘Tighter!’ snapped the man.

Scarlet fumbled with the tightener. Bright droplets of the substance-juice sprang from the needle, curved on the air – apparently it was all right to waste just this little, to make this little libation.

Taylor had trained Smoko to sit on his finger. He had carried him around, finger to shoulder to finger.

He sat at the computer and the bird sat with him.

He brought Smoko in to Scarlet’s room where she was studying. She looked up scowling, but the scowl cleared when she saw the bird. ‘Will he come to me?’ she said.

‘He’ll come to anything that bumps him in the chest,’ said Taylor.

Scarlet touched the breast feathers with her knuckle and up Smoko stepped.

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘His feet are
warm
!’

‘Well, look at them; they’re so pink, they’d have to be.’

She laughed carefully, through her nose. ‘I don’t know. I expected them to be cold and scratchy. Like a reptile’s. To
hurt
! But yes, you’re toasty, aren’t you?’

Smoko sat in a gentle tremble of nerves, weighing very little.

The simulacrum hardly looked like a budgerigar at all. Its head was hidden by the wings that cut and cupped the air like a courting riflebird’s. Its breath found Scarlet’s ear and nose. She watched the man’s face and her lips parted, and the breath went in there, too. The simulacrum’s tail was spread around her shoulder for balance.

The man took her arm smoothly, her white, woman’s arm. In the elbow the vein rose purple, plump with clean blood. The strain of keeping up the simulacrum made my thinking go all timeless and godlike: here was that little crooked limb forming in the darkness of the Mum, cell by cell; here it wavered, white, needing to grasp and bring every object to the mouth; here, longer, it worked busily at its learning; scrawny and tanned, here it hauled ropes at the boat they made at the beach that summer, the summer she thought was the time of her life, that she wouldn’t get better than, now that she was self-conscious. Through the wing-beats, as through a slatted blind being opened and closed, on the far side of this moment, all the possibilities fanned out in the usual array, none of them ‘better’ or ‘worse’ if we’re talking Intrinsics, than any other; whether the arm be withered inside an old-lady cardigan in a rest home, or fuller and starting to sag, clasped around her own child’s teenage shoulders, or still shapely with youth, blacktracked and lamplit and lifeless, fallen from kerb to gutter. They shifted about, all these might-be’s, in front of one another to form the general mud of that phenomenon mortals call the future, that they choose and don’t choose, that they make or stumble into, or have thrust on them.

I thought all this in the moment it took the man to bring down the instrument. In the lamplight, from behind the mirror, it was a thing of beauty, as if he were applying a piece of jewellery to her skin, or placing one of the more decorative insects there – a scarab, a Christmas beetle, a mantid with a fresh new skin. She could go either way, even with the breath on her, even with the simulacrum on her shoulder making its own kind of beauty, matching with its cool holy love the exciting new weirdness of the man’s handsome pretence.

He pushed the needle in, through the so-soft skin. The simulacrum snapped back to itself and cocked its head to watch.

The man paused a moment. I’ll give him that – it might be the one thing that saves him in the end from the Ceaseless Pain, from the Eternal Deterioration of the Damned. With the needle in the flow, and the chemical dissolved and ready, he lifted his eyes to hers.