Rook (8 page)

A third youth hooks and jabs at something in the ditch with what looks like a carving-knife. Nora shoves her hands into her pockets and strides towards the boy. In her head runs the forceful opening of the
Appassionato
, Saint-Saëns, over and over, her fingers pressing into her thigh the music’s insistent march of rhythm. The group breaks, crossing the lane and loping away, hands in pockets, faces hidden. They’re no more than schoolboys: pale and skinny-wristed.
As if they’ve crawled out from under a stone
, her mother would say.

Bluebells lie trampled in the ditch, milky stems oozing; a screwed-up cigarette box beside a scrap of dusty black plastic. The breeze sways white saucers of cow parsley, causing her eyes to adjust. The curl of claws, a beak; a head twisted sideways, an odd angle, on the grassy slope of the ditch. Not black plastic, but a baby bird, dead. The wing stretches out, a fan of feathers and fluff. Nora glances up at the sky and down again. The bird’s beak, open a little, shows a glimpse of red inside. She has a fondness for baby birds. When she was a child, her father brought duck eggs home, along with an incubator and some story about the mother duck being savaged by a dog. Nora saw the ducklings hatch, watched them emerge bedraggled and exhausted. The baby birds responded to the girls as they would to a mother duck, following them around the garden, peeping in protest when they were left. Nora got up early to hold each duckling before school. She remembers the weightlessness of each golden ball of fluff in her hands, the cool of a webbed foot on her palm. She’d sit cross-legged while each duckling flapped and fidgeted on her lap before a sudden collapse into limp-bodied sleep.

Sliding the cello off her back, Nora clambers into the ditch. She skids downwards on the long grass and swears. The slit of eye opens, beady and shining and blue: the poor thing is half-alive. If it’s badly injured in some way, she should just kill it quickly, but she can’t face doing that with her bare hands.

She climbs out of the ditch. The boys have disappeared. With the cello knocking at her calf, she runs along the last stretch of lane and up the drive to the house. Blood hums through her eardrums. She knows what Ada will say, if asked. The runt of a pet rabbit’s litter born with spindly, bent hind-legs; the TV programme about a baby born with two heads:
kindest thing would be to break its neck
.

In the hallway Nora leans her cello against the wall. The house is quiet. Ada must be napping so she has some time. Hoping the bird is merely stunned and she might be able to save it, she flits down the hallway, through the kitchen and out of the back door into the garden to the shed, where she regards the jumble of gardening tools and household remnants: a tea-chest, a budgerigar’s bath and a sixties bulky television set with no innards. Must have been one her father used for spare parts, years ago. Out here bent over his workbench, spectacles held together with Elastoplast, repairing things. Her father would not have abandoned the baby bird.

Nora’s palms itch from the dust. She can’t see the incubator; perhaps it was borrowed and returned. She tips the straw-like remnants of a bird’s nest from a Startrite shoe-box. It will do for now. As an afterthought, she grabs the coal shovel, in case she has to kill the bird.

She’s halfway down the drive when she hears laughter. The same three youths drift past the gate, two passing a can between them, downing something. The third, a black hood hiding all but the jut of his jaw, has a fag clenched in his mouth. The hoodie is several sizes too big, shoulder seams halfway down his arms, baggy sleeves mostly hiding his hands, but as he flicks his wrist in a repetitive gesture she glimpses a knife, definitely a knife this time, the blade shooting out from the handle each time he flicks. They head back towards the bird in the ditch.

Nora has an idea, and sprints back to the house. Her father’s old bee-keeping veil hangs beside his raincoat. She grabs the veil, draws it over her head and reaches for the protective gloves on the hat shelf above the coats. Out on the lane again, clutching the shovel, she bears down on the three boys crouched by the ditch. The mesh of the veil is sticky with dust.

The youths look round. One, gawping at her, belches and clutches his stomach.

‘Careful! It’s highly contagious.’ She makes her voice a gruff bark. ‘Bird flu!’

Two of the boys step back, but the one with the black hood grinds his fag end under his trainer before slipping the hood from his forehead. The gleam above his upper lip is not a boil, but a lip piercing. His smile is slick with confidence.

‘Gonna get rid of it?’ He jerks his head towards the jumble of black feathers.

Nora nods, pointing in the direction of a red van parked a little way up the lane: Harry’s van.        

‘Sick!’ The boy kicks the kerb with the toe of his trainer before he struts off, the ragged hems of his jeans scuffing. His two mates scuttle along behind, one glancing back over his shoulder. Nora suppresses the laughter threatening to bubble up inside her. She’ll refashion the whole story later for her mother: young hooligans prowling and armed with knives, an injured bird; herself coming to the rescue, festooned in a veil.

The bird opens one visible eye as she bends over it but, although the spread wing has been gathered in to the bird’s breast, it doesn’t stir. She puts the shovel down. Her father’s gloves are too stiff with age and disuse to handle something light and fragile as a bauble, she might crush the bird’s ribcage. As the finger of her glove brushes the feathers, the beak opens wider, tongue lifting like a latch, but the bird doesn’t peck or claw. She lifts the veil from her face and removes the gloves. Taking a breath, she flexes her fingers and, with a fingertip, strokes the back of the bird’s head. The feathers there are smooth, iridescent green and purple.

She’d better get a move on, because Ada will want tea when she wakes from her nap. As her fingers close around spines like plastic drinking-straws amongst the feathers the bird jolts sideways, a heave of body and wing which catches Nora by surprise. She lurches back.

Harry is wandering down the lane whistling, feet slopping in a pair of purple plastic crocs. His buckets hang, clanking, from his wooden ladder balanced over a shoulder, and his Hawaiian shirt, fastened with only one remaining button, gapes over his broad chest. He’s holding a brown paper bag.

He stops and contemplates Nora’s legs as she stands in the ditch, the hem of her dress clutched up at her hips away from the sappy bluebells. She drops her dress and tugs the bee-veil from her head.

‘All OK?’ His voice is a rumble.

‘Yes.’ Nora nods, smiling. ‘Yes, yes, absolutely.’ He’s studying her face, waiting for her to say more. She must look mad standing like this in a ditch. ‘There’s a bird.’ She points.

Harry puts his brown paper bag, the buckets and cloths, the ladder and his bundle of car keys in a heap on the tarmac and hunkers down.

She waits for the deep slow sound of his voice. She has grown to like its vibration, the slur of words as if he can’t be bothered to separate sounds. In the few months since he parked his caravan up on Geoff Strickland’s old airstrip, he’s become a familiar sight around the village. His forehead is furrowed by a long scar which makes it difficult to guess his age but he seems older than her; perhaps forty. More scars, pencil-thin and silvery, web across the backs of his hands, now splayed on each thigh. He has no small talk, leaving sentences to float, incomplete, as he stares into the middle distance over a cup of tea. Now, however, he says nothing. He kneels by the bird, broad shoulders blocking her view. Curls clump at the nape of his neck, as if he’s been out in wind on water all day. A gust blows the floral cotton of her dress against her thighs.

She jumps when Harry gets to his feet and steps up from the ditch, the bird’s body cradled in one large-knuckled hand, against the fuzz of his chest. His other hand rests over the folded wings. The hair on Harry’s forearm spreads over his watchstrap. Nora moves closer; the bird blinks at the fall of her shadow. Against her ribs, her heartbeat skitters as she and Harry gaze down at the bird with its elastic smile of a beak.

‘Will it survive, do you think?’

Harry shrugs. ‘These birds, man, they are something else.’        

In the kitchen, Harry stands with the bird cupped in his hands, his fingers encircling the wings. Part of a black-banded leg and a foot slip out to dangle and thrust at air before withdrawing. When the foot slips out again, Nora reaches out with her forefinger; the bird’s toenails – delicate, translucent – graze her skin and pause, mid-air.

Harry sends her to fetch a bundle of old cloths from his van to put down near the boiler as bedding. He arranges a hollow in the cloth and eases the bird from his hand. The black head bobs and jerks.

‘Can it fly yet?’

Harry doesn’t seem to hear. ‘He needs . . .’ he murmurs to himself. The furrows in his forehead deepen the scar. He looks up at her. ‘Body warmth.’

Of course, body warmth. With the ducklings they’d used a lamp to keep them warm once they were out of the incubator. She fetches the old Anglepoise from upstairs, her father’s, the cream paint scratched and chipped. The base, a chunk of metal, crashes to the ground as she rushes back down the stairs and Nora freezes, halfway down, but there’s no sound from the bedroom at the back of the house; Ada’s nap has not been disturbed.

Harry positions the lamp carefully, raising and lowering the metal shade, moving his palm between the bird and the bulb to test the temperature.

‘It gets really hot,’ Nora says. During long nights spent on the computer when she can’t sleep, her forehead often films with sweat and she has to turn away the lamp’s glare.

Harry nods, and stands to usher her from the room. At this sudden movement the bird’s neck strains, beak flipping wide to show the scarlet inside, but it makes no sound.

‘Perhaps it’s in shock,’ Nora says, pacing up and down between the French doors and the sofa where Harry is sprawled, hands linked behind his head. ‘Won’t it be hungry? Or thirsty? What do we give it to eat? Was it the boys who hurt it? Perhaps we should phone the RSPCA?’

She stops in front of Harry, who is gazing into the sooty throat of the fireplace, a half-smile on his face. ‘Harry, how do you know it’s a “he”?’

Harry nods slowly, deep in thought. Nora folds her arms tight across her ribs to prevent her hands passing over and over each other. S
oaping up a lather
, her mother used to say when Nora was a girl, and she’d put out a hand to still Nora’s restlessness. A creak of the floorboards overhead; Ada must have woken.

‘There’s Mum. She’ll want tea. I’ll just . . .’ Upstairs, a door opens and closes. ‘Help yourself to a drink.’ Nora waves her fingers towards the kitchen, unsure why they have left the bird in there behind a closed door and alone.

Upstairs, the bedroom air is misty with eau de Cologne. Ada, hair sleek in a chignon, is seated at her dressing table, leaning close to the mirror, rolling her lips and squeezing them together to distribute her freshly applied lipstick. Nora catches sight of her own reflection, her hair a mass of frayed kinks like old rope. She steps sideways, out of the mirror’s range. She should get her hair cut.

‘Are you feeling OK?’

Ada doesn’t answer. She picks up the silver-backed hairbrush, her movements deft. ‘I knew that was a man’s voice I heard.’ She smiles coquettishly at her own reflection before bending to caress the leather of a pair of knee-length boots leaning against the dressing-table leg. No slopping around in slippers today, then.

‘Mum, it’s only Harry.’

Ada zips the boots and stands to admire the close fit of the leather around her slim calves. Whatever Eve says, Ada’s definitely back to her old self.

Downstairs, the kitchen door is still closed but the front door is wide open. Outside, the poplar leaves rustle. Below the other birds’ racket Nora hears the low creak of a rook. Harry steps back into the house clutching his brown paper package. She’d forgotten his heap of buckets and keys outside in the lane.

‘Drink?’ he asks, with a nod at the paper package.

‘No, I meant,’ Nora begins, ‘I’ll put the kettle on.’ But Ada clasps her hands together. ‘What are we celebrating?’ She raises an eyebrow, her hand on Harry’s furry forearm. The paper package clinks.

10

She will call him Rook. Light on her arm, the old willow basket swings as Nora follows Harry along the narrow footpath. She has covered the basket with an old hand towel, beneath which the baby rook sleeps, a bundle of feathers and skin pulsing with each beat of its heart.