The Bower Bird (4 page)

And Flo is the only one who likes playing games with me, especially in the morning, after breakfast, sometimes instead of breakfast. Her favourite toy is the plastic ring that comes off the top of a plastic milk carton. She’ll pretend it’s a mouse and throw it and chase it and catch it and kill it. She has a vivid imagination. The others look on with complete disdain – or incomprehension. She is not at all embarrassed. She just enjoys life, Flo, and I admire her. She plays catch and football with me, pushing the toy to me and when I throw it to her she sends it back.

She reminds me of my Grandma. Grandma played cricket and she was always going to dances, and she used to dance with other old women, can you imagine? I would die rather than dance with another girl, if I had the chance to dance with a boy. Not that I’ve ever been dancing. If you think about it it’s a very strange thing to do. I can understand the ritual bit about attracting a partner – the highest jumping dancer in the Masai tribe, I think it is, for instance. But why do old people do it? Apart from getting physical exercise I can’t see the reason for it, unless it’s a widow or widower looking for another mate.

Some birds have complicated dance rituals, I know. The male great bustard throws back his wings and head, apparently turning his head inside out.

Grandpop didn’t go in for dancing. He obviously didn’t feel the need to keep attracting Grandma.

I miss them very much. They were the best grandparents. Grandpop died last year when I was in hospital having an operation and Grandma died a few days later, of a broken heart. I was eleven.

I remember them sitting on their old green sofa, watching telly, holding hands.

Like boy and girl sweethearts, holding hands. Grandpop’s faded tattoos on his arms, the sleeves of his white collarless shirt folded up, elasticated silver bands above his elbows. He had an old rocking chair and when I was little I sat on his lap and we rocked together. He smelt of tobacco. Sometimes he had a little patch of cigarette paper,
Rizla
paper it was called, very thin like tissue paper, stuck to some part of his face – his cheek or chin, where he cut himself shaving. And he usually had a cigarette tucked behind one ear – for later. He rolled his own cigarettes and taught me how to do it, though obviously, I haven’t ever told Mum.

Of course, I would never ever smoke anyway, with my heart. I don’t really understand how anyone can inhale stuff that’s going to make them breathless and possibly cause cancers all over their body. Perhaps if human beings had evolved to be transparent so we could see exactly what was going on inside of us, we wouldn’t eat fatty things that clog up our arteries, or take drugs that destroy our brains, or drink and smoke too much. Or maybe we would be fascinated by the sight of smoke whirling around in our lungs and keep on doing it.

I would love not to be breathless. I do remember what it felt like to be able to run and climb and play physical games and, best of all, to swim and snorkel. But I haven’t been able to do any of that stuff for a few years now. Not since my heart had to work extra hard to keep me alive. When I was little I was pretty normal, I think. Well, it felt normal.

I have something called Pulmonary Atresia – a rare congenital disease, and people who have it usually die when they are very young. But I have been lucky. There are other defects in my heart muscle, but my blood does get oxygenated to a certain extent, so I am still alive. As I get bigger my heart won’t be able to cope with the extra work and I’ll need that operation.

‘Mum, Mu-um, Mu-uum!’

The whistling and singing stops.

‘What?’

‘What happened to Grandpop’s rocking chair?’

‘I gave it to his cricket club.’

‘Oh. And why didn’t you save it for me?’

‘Gussie, I Refuse to Shout,’ she shouts.

I wonder who is sitting in it now? Has it an inscription of Grandpop’s name? Do little boys fight to rock in it? I hope no one has burned cigarette holes in the upholstery.

Grandma used to hang a clean antimacassar – that’s a sort of lacy or embroidered cloth – over the back. I bet no one at the cricket club thinks to do that. It will get stained from greasy heads, like all those chairs in the hospital waiting room. The thought of his favourite chair being abused depresses me.

To get back to my cats: Rambo is the least brave of the three. He looks wonderfully royal and proud and courageous until someone stands up. Then he runs and hides. He cowers. He’s a coward and scared of Flo, with good reason. She is fierce and fearsome, fearless and feisty, and I am sorry to say – a bully. I think she just can’t stand the fact that the other two are such wusses. She has no patience. I do love her though. She has guts, chutzpah, presence. She is definitely the matriarch, the alpha female, the boss, queen bee, big momma, top cat.

The first day here I rubbed butter on their paws – the usual procedure to make them want to be where we are, and gave them lots of goodies – Parmesan cheese, curried chicken, that sort of thing. But cats hate change. They haven’t been allowed outside yet. We have to find someone to put a cat-flap in the front door first. I’ve seen other cats around, so they’ll have to meet them and sort out territorial rights.

The little cobbled lanes and alleyways and steps of Downlong are full of cats. Black cats, grey cats, orange cats, tabby cats, fat cats and slender cats. There’s a weird looking cat that sits in a window in Back Road West. It has hardly any hair. It is a pink and grey colour with enormous ears. Hideous.

I haven’t let our cats see inside the deep dark cupboards under the eaves yet. I’m afraid they might find a way out. As it is they sit on the window ledge and do that chittering thing cats do with their mouths as if they are freezing cold when they see birds and want to eat them. It’s as if they can’t help it, their teeth just start rattling fast in anticipation of the feast. Or maybe they are swearing, saying disgusting things in catspeak, threatening a horrible death by a thousand bites and claw stabs.

MUM IS IN the garden fixing up a bird feeder. It’s a sort of metal tree – a tall thin metal trunk with two curved branches turning up at the ends so you can hang bird feeders on it. We’ve bought a bag of peanuts and a bag of black sunflower seeds.

Our little front garden, although it is so small, will be part of a long green corridor of plants, trees and seed heads, home for insects, worms and caterpillars. The terrace is nearly forty houses long, if you take into account the other front gardens further up the hill, so the little birds have a good supply of food and cover.

I’m sitting on the doorstep on a cushion in the sun and the three cats are sitting behind me, staring at their new minuscule garden. I get up and walk six steps across the patch of grass to Mum, taking her the seeds.

Flo is of course the first to follow me into darkest unknown territory. She is so brave. Charlie follows her, crouched low, on the lookout for danger, but Rambo isn’t going anywhere. He skulks in the passage, his nose twitching suspiciously. The two females sniff every blade of grass to see who has been here before them. Flo opens her mouth and goes Ugh! I laugh at her. She is suitably embarrassed and runs inside and up the stairs, terrifying Rambo, who tears off into the kitchen. Only Charlie remains in the garden. She has gone under the wooden garden seat and is sniffing at a bag of potting compost. I crouch down with her and peer into the bag.

‘Oh Mum, look, a toad.’

Mum is hammering the metal tree as hard as she can into the earth. She likes toads too.

‘We could have a tiny pond if you like.’

‘Yeah, great! Tadpoles. We can have tadpoles.’

‘We could have goldfish.’

‘We can’t have goldfish, Mum. They eat tadpoles.’

‘Do they?’

‘Yes, they do.’ Honestly, why is she so ignorant?

It occurs to me that tropical fish have a hard time in films, especially in action movies. If there’s a huge fish tank with lots of colourful fish swimming around – Oho – you know they’ll soon be floundering on the floor with broken glass, water gushing everywhere, gunshots, blood and guts. You know that bit at the end of the film when they give the credits, and it says: ‘No animals were harmed in the making of this film.’ It doesn’t mention fish, does it? It’s gratuitous violence, that’s what it is.

I’ve started a list of movies where fish tanks get smashed:

1. 
Arabesque

2. 
Lethal Weapon 2

3
. In another movie a convict smashed a polythene bag with a goldfish in but I can’t remember the title. The climax had the heroes finding diamonds among the rocks of the fish collector’s aquarium.

4. 
A Fish Called Wanda
– Maybe the fish tank doesn’t get smashed but the fish get eaten alive.

The bird feeder is great. We go indoors and leave the little birds to get used to their new metal tree. Charlie comes too. Flo and Charlie sit on the window seat of the living room to do some serious bird-watching.

‘A young blue-tit is particularly tasty, Charlie, take note,’ says Flo. ‘You must leave the head though, it is rather tough and not worth the bother.’

There is a low stone ‘hedge’ between our house and the house next door with valerian and wild honeysuckle growing out of it. The door of the house is open onto a storm porch, that’s a sort of small area between the front door and a coloured glass door. All these terraced houses were built with them, as a protection from the wind. Ours is particularly pretty with red squares in the corners, deep blue strips of glass around the sides and white opaque glass in the middle with an anchor engraved on it.

Our neighbour comes out in her apron and with a basket of washing. Her ginger cat follows her and she sits on the step with the cat pushing its head against her.

‘Hello,’ says Mum and we introduce ourselves. She’s smiley, small and skinny, hunched over like I imagine Red Riding Hood’s granny, with grey hair in a bun, and is called Mrs Thomas. Her cat is called Shandy. Mrs Thomas’s apron is patterned with flowers the same colours as the valerian – pink and white and red. She hangs up huge white cotton knickers, vests and stockings and props up the line with a long pole. She’s not Cornish, she tells us, she’s from Devon, but she was married to a local man, who died two years ago, and she still misses him badly. She goes in and comes out straight away with a framed photograph of her husband, a lifeboatman. ‘The love of my life,’ she says.

I met
TLOML
when I was watching birds on the coast path at Peregrine Cottage. He’s Australian. He has started at the local secondary school, as I would have done this term if I had been well enough. He came to see me when I was really sick, except that I wasn’t well enough to see him. He’s very unusual in that he isn’t keen on sports and he actually thinks I am interesting. He’s got floppy blond hair and a curly mouth and he too likes books. He’s called Brett.

Desert Island Discs
is on the radio. I think there should be a
Desert Island Books
where the guest tells us which eight books he/she would take.

I have started my list of favourite books for when I am famous and invited on the programme:

Jennie
by Paul Gallico

House at Pooh Corner
by AA Milne

The Collected Short Stories
of Katherine Mansfield

White Fang
by Jack London

Middlemarch
by George Eliot

Pride and Prejudice
by Jane Austen

Catcher in the Rye
by JD Salinger

Fabre’s Book of Insects

Lord of the Flies
by William Golding

That’s nine and I’ll only be allowed eight so I’ll have to think about which one I could live without.

I would like to take a bird identification book with me, suitable for the region of the desert island, and some poems, but I don’t know enough about poetry yet to decide which to take. Perhaps that should be my next self-education project. As long as I keep reading, I will know almost as much as if I was at school – except for maths. And I’d have the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare of course. I haven’t read either of those. What would I take for my luxury?

I would miss Charlie most of all. But I don’t think pets are allowed on the desert island. I suppose an unending supply of paper and pencils would be best, then I could record what I see, keep a journal, and maybe write poems and stuff and draw pictures of the animals and flowers and birds. Presumably I would be cast away with my glasses intact. What they don’t explain is how you are supposed to have got on the desert island. If there was a shipwreck you could swim out to it and gather useful stuff like rope and matches and candles and food, as Robinson Crusoe did. He even had a dog and cat and chickens. And there would be binoculars and maps and books, and crystal chandeliers and silver cutlery and the clothes of dead passengers. I could walk about in a ball gown and a captain’s cap and live on caviar and champagne.

When we had winters in Africa we lived on coconuts and bananas, papayas and parrotfish. It was very like being on a desert island. Except we did have someone to help cook and clean. I wouldn’t have to clean though, would I? Just sweep the woven palm leaf matting with a bundle of sticks tied together to make a broom. I would be rather good at living on my own. I could tame a parrot and a monkey or find an orphaned bush baby or something – another living creature to talk to.