The Bower Bird (11 page)

‘Who lives in the cabin?’ I ask Gabriel’s mum.

‘Moss’s mother sleeps there when she visits. It’s a granny cabin.’

What a lovely idea. I could live in a cabin like that. Fish from the stream, keep chooks. Heaven. Perhaps on my desert island I could eventually build a little shelter like that. I could have a garden of pebbles and shells, and cultivate coconuts and bananas and papayas, and oranges and lemons. I have always wanted a lemon tree. I love the smell of the leaves. Mum could pick a lemon and slice it straight into her gin and tonic. Except she won’t be there. I’ll cultivate a taste for gin, which I find in bottles on the wrecked ship, and wear the evening dress and toast her memory.

On the way home to St Ives – home to St Ives: that sounds so cool – a horse leaps over the stone hedge in front of the car, its lips curled to show yellow teeth. He screeches like a stallion in a movie. Another and another scramble over the dry-stone wall, tails and manes flying; eight beautiful animals, wild-eyed with excitement, run along in front of us. Their steaming bodies fill the lane as they jostle and skitter, their unshod hooves making muffled clunks on the road. Mum parks the car in a shallow lay-by and walks back to tell the farmer his horses have escaped. He appears, a large, red-cheeked man in braces, slaps his thighs and laughs, and lumbers after them. They have made their way onto a bridle path and are heading for Rosewall Hill and freedom. Now I know why it’s called Horsetown.

A day of Darlings and marvels.

MUM HAS TO
go to the physiotherapist twice a week. She has been told not to do any gardening or decorating or hoovering. She’s pretty fed up about it. She has good days and bad days; mostly bad days. She has a little machine with electrodes that she attaches to her skin and gives her muscles electric shocks – or that’s what it looks like. The whisky supply is dwindling. She wouldn’t last long on a desert island. She’d drink the barrel of ship’s rum much too quickly.

I think the house looks fine the way it is, but she wants to put her own mark on it, like a cat squirting on its territory to keep out other cats. There are half stripped walls, with wallpaper torn off in places, like a map of the world. I like to see the layers of other people’s taste – the flowery patterns and the geometric. We are going to have it all plain magnolia, or white, I expect. But at the moment she is incapable of doing anything at all except moaning, whimpering and drinking.

The pond is doing well and the water plants are settling in. There’s a clump of miniature bamboo next to it.

I keep thinking about the family we met in Halsetown: a real family with a father and mother and three healthy children. How do they do it? Stay together? Is it because the husband and wife love each other and have never been unfaithful to each other? Is it because their children have nothing wrong with them?

It’s because of me that a terrible strain was put on Mum and Daddy’s marriage. Because of me being ill all the time and Mum having to stay at home to look after me. Daddy probably left because he’s ashamed of having a sickly, puny, ugly, skinny daughter. Why did my family fall apart? It’s not fair. I’m all the family Mum has got now. What will happen to her when I die? She’ll have no one to look after her and make her cups of tea when she’s sad and growing even more decrepit. She needs family too. (I always want to spell decrepit with a ‘d’ at the end. Decrepid sounds much better.)

I go to the library and try not to look guilty and criminal but it’s difficult when you’re a liar and a thief. I renew the nonexistent books again. I wonder how many times I am allowed to do that before they ask for them back. The library lady is very chatty. She asks me if my Mum is finding the books useful and I find myself lying even more.

‘Oh yes, she’s decorating the house and getting all sorts of ideas from one of the books, and she’s building an enormous pond with a fountain and bridge, so the other book is very useful.’

‘Really? How unusual.’

How am I going to get out of this? If only I had admitted that I had thrown them away at the beginning. But then, Mum would be horrified that I had gone to the funeral of someone I didn’t know just because he was a Stevens. She doesn’t understand me.

As I leave the library I notice a sign and an arrow – St Ives Archive. I think an archive is a collection of information and pictures, like a museum. I follow the arrow up some stairs lined with old photographs – sepia-toned prints of fishing boats and fishermen and gulls in the harbour. The harbour looked beautiful, full of masts and sails and gulls. There’s a young woman working at a computer and an older man looking through a box file.

I squat to get my breath back. The woman comes to the reception desk and peers over the counter at me.

‘Can I help you?’

I stand up. ‘I hope so. I’m looking for a family.’

‘What name?’

‘Gussie, Augusta, actually.’

‘Is that the name of the family you are looking for?’

How embarrassing: I’m so stupid. ‘No. Sorry, Stevens.’

‘Stevens? Oh yes, we have quite a few of those.’

‘Yes, but do you have any who were car dealers in the area? He was my father’s father. My grandfather.’

‘What was his first name?’

I haven’t the faintest idea.

‘Er, I don’t know.’

She sighs and shows me a series of box files on a shelf. An hour later she says the archive centre has to close. It’s hopeless. There’s no sign of a car dealer called Stevens.

At home I look in the
Yellow Pages
just in case there is still a car dealership with that name, but there isn’t.

‘Mum, what was Grandad Stevens’ first name?’

‘Don’t know. Why?’

She is lying on her back on the carpet.

‘Just wondered. What’s for tea?’

‘Nothing. Fish and chips maybe.’

‘Yippee!’

Mum has been going out with Alistair on Friday evenings to the pub but he is in the Scillies on the cricket tour and he’ll be gone all weekend. Mum is glum.

Last night I dreamed I was flying. I didn’t have wings. It was like snorkelling in the sky. I could direct my flight with my hands, arms, legs and feet, like Batman, or Peter Pan. I was flying along at the same height above the ground as seagulls. It felt exhilarating, not cold or frightening, and even though I knew in the dream that I was not an expert flier I was enjoying the strange and wonderful sensation of speeding effortlessly through the sky and looking down at little yellow and green and brown fields, crows and gulls scattered like black and white confetti behind a tractor. And then I came to a coast of black jagged rocks, swooped down towards the wave-striped sea and woke up.

OUR ADOLESCENT GULL
is still wheezing and jumping up and down on the roof flapping his speckled wings. He wanders all over the roof, spends most of the time on his own, though one parent perches on the chimney top watching over him while the other parent is fishing for his supper, or is out having a good time.

I feel like that young gull: songless and ugly, unable to fly; totally dependent on my parent.

Mum and I are playing Scrabble. It’s getting easier to beat her. She doesn’t seem to care as much as she used to about losing. She always used to beat me.

I care.

In the town there are young gulls wandering around the alleyways and cobbled lanes looking bewildered and their anxious parents stand on the chimneys and shout. Most of the holidaymakers with school age children have gone home.

Our young gull has fallen into the garden, trying to fly, I suppose. One moment he’s on the roof, next, he’s on the grass. The parents kept swooping on us when we tried to rescue him, but eventually we managed to cover him in a blanket and pick him up. Mum carried him upstairs and put him out my window onto the roof. After half an hour of screaming in consternation the parents returned to the roof, no doubt amazed that he had managed to get back home on his own. He huddled by the chimney looking grumpy. I expect his mum has told him off for straying too close to the edge. She looks like a prim ballerina resting, and the big male ruffles his breast, wings and tail, sending small feathers floating away to become fluttering white butterflies. (Or that’s what they look like to me without my glasses on.)

Summer seems to have gone. The waves are big and the northwesterly wind is cold. Clouds are grey and black with no gaps between them. No more sitting on the beach watching the sun go down.

Mum spends lots of time lying on the sofa or the floor. She also has headaches and hot flushes (power surges, she calls them). She’s crumbling fast. I go to the pharmacy to pick up her prescription, taking a short cut through Trewyn Gardens where dead leaves are running like rats.

We don’t see Eugene any more. He was our postie at Peregrine Cottage. We have a post-woman now. Her name is Leah. I wait for her every morning. She’s very pretty with short purple hair.

Daddy has written to me at last. He’s back from wherever and has sent me a ten pound note and a family tree, sort of: his father was called Hartley Stevens, born in St Ives, in
1900
, and his mother, née – that means born – Molly Jackson, was born in Penzance. Daddy was named Jackson after her. He had no brothers or sisters and his father died when he was twenty-two and his mother when he was thirty, before I was born. No other information. Not very helpful really. More like a twig than a tree.

‘Mum, may I telephone Daddy today?’

‘What for?’

‘To thank him for the money.’

She hangs around while I dial the number and I feel inhibited talking to him.

‘Hi, Daddy, it’s me.’

‘Who is it? Is this my little honeybun? Gussie, how are you sweetie?’ He makes me feel like I’m about five. I like it, rather.

‘I got your letter Daddy. Thank you for the money and the information. But I thought you had cousins here. What are their names?’

‘No Guss, not cousins, more like second cousins twice removed or something, very very distant relations. Almost out of sight.’

‘Oh, but everyone is called Stevens here. Almost everyone. Apart from the ones called Symons and one or two others.’

‘Sorry sweets, can’t remember names. Gussie, got to go now, have to see a man about a movie.’

Yeah, yeah. You’re a great help. Thanks for nothing, Daddy.

There’s an invitation in the post. It’s Brett’s birthday on Sunday and we are both invited round to his house at lunchtime. Brilliant! What can I give him? I don’t know his taste in anything. I know he likes birds. I think I’ll get him a book token. As Mum says: You Can’t Go Wrong with a Book Token.

Mum doesn’t think she’ll be well enough to drive to Brett’s. Her back. She says it hurts too much. She
is
looking peaky, I admit. Brett lives in Carbis Bay, a suburb of St Ives, on the way to Peregrine Point. It’s too far for me to walk.

‘See how I feel after my next physio,’ she says.

‘When is that?’

‘Friday.’

I make her a cup of peppermint tea and smile winningly.

That night I pray for her back to be better.

WE’RE GOING! THANK
you God.

Brett’s parents live in a large bungalow just off the main road, with a distant view of the sea. They’ve got a barbie going, with burgers and sausages. Brett greets us and introduces us to his parents. His dad is a Science and Maths teacher and his mum is an English teacher, except she hasn’t found work here yet. She is very pretty and much younger than my mum, but then everyone’s mum is younger than mine. I’ve met his dad before at Hayle, birdwatching. He’s young too, younger than Daddy and very Aussie with blond spiky hair, long baggy shorts and a loose T-shirt with
UNI OF NSW
splashed across the front. He looks a bit like the cricketer, Shane Warne. His name is Steve.

There’s a garden with a few trees and hanging from each tree are loads of bird feeders. These people are seriously into birds: they provide peanuts, sunflower seeds, balls of fat and seeds, half coconut shells, apples, maize, the lot. You name it, they’ve got it. It’s bird heaven: birdbath, bird table, pond for insects to evolve in – everything a little bird could chirp for. Brett’s mum, she tells me to call her Hayley, says they only rented the house because it had a pond and a large garden.

The two boys I saw Brett with outside the library are here and two girls and various adults.

Brett has a tent pitched at the bottom of the garden where he sleeps sometimes, he says. How cool is that? He says he likes to look at the stars. There’s an astronomy club at school and he and his two friends belong to it. He’s been given a four-inch refractor telescope for his birthday. It’s a large plastic tube on a sturdy tripod next to his tent. He shows me Saturn through it. That’s amazing – to see a planet in daylight! I had no idea you could do that. He said he stayed up all night in the middle of August to watch the Perseids – a load of shooting stars.

‘Where’s Buddy?’ I ask.

‘Up there, watching us.’

Buddy sits in one of their tall trees and looks down on us. I wish he’d come down into the garden, but he’s a bit wary of all the people, Brett says.