The Bower Bird (14 page)

Mum says I don’t look too good: bags under the eyes and mauve lips, and she takes my temperature, makes me Horlicks and biscuits as a treat before Rena Wooflie and I have an early night –
8
pm! With a hot water bottle.

‘Do you want a story?’

‘Please. Winnie the Pooh.’

‘Which one?’

‘You choose.’

She reads me ‘A Pooh Party’, where Pooh gets pencils marked
HB
for Helpful Bear, and pencils marked
BB
for Brave Bear. I forget how to say goodnight to Rena Wooflie in Swahili. I’m vaguely aware of a cool hand on my forehead. Mum opens the window and switches off the lamp.

IN THE SECOND-HAND
book shop there’s a very good Natural History section. I have managed to buy a battered copy of
The Natural History of Selborne
and a
1937
copy of
The Charm of Birds
by Grey of Fallodon, owned in
1937
by a Marjorie Phyllis Crighton. I might give the second one to Brett. This is a lesson on taming robins:

First throw breadcrumbs on the ground. Then a meal-worm. Robins love them. Then place an open metal box, like a sweetie tin, on the ground, with meal-worms in it. When the bird is accustomed to this, kneel down and place the tin in an open hand, flat to the ground, with fingers sticking out in front of the tin. The robin will eventually stand on your fingers and feed from the tin. This might take time. Then do away with the tin and place some meal-worms on the hand. A robin will risk his life for a meal-worm. The final stage is to stand up with meal-worms on the open palm. In hard weather the whole process will take only two or three days. Once the robin is confident that you won’t harm him, he’ll come in fair weather when other food is plentiful.

I think Brett could tame any wild creature.

I’ve also found this old book for
50
p in the second-hand bookshop.
Secrets of Bird Life
, by HA Gilbert and Arthur Brook, published by Arrowsmith in
1924
. It was once owned by GT Pettit, aged thirteen. He had very beautiful neat hand- writing. My handwriting is crap. Perhaps I should be a doctor. There is an interesting description of raven babies:

The hen raven sits close by and croons to her very ugly babies, who have huge stomachs and enormous maws, which they open whenever they hear a noise or when a shadow passes over them. When they all open their beaks together it looks like a nest full of violets has suddenly bloomed as their throats and mouths are a brilliant mauve.

What a lovely idea! Baby birds gaping like a bunch of violets. Perhaps I could put that in a poem.

Brett and Siobhan. Are they ‘going out’? Well, frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn.

Charlie, Flo and Rambo are due for their flu booster jabs so Mum is going to get the vet to visit and give them anti flea injections at the same time. We do groom the cats every day. When the flea comb is sharply tapped on the garden table the cats come running. Charlie is always the first and most demanding. Fleas seem to go for her white throat, like miniature vampires. Flo wants to be combed but then as you go to do it she changes her mind and runs away. She knows it’s good for her but feels it is beneath her dignity for someone else to do her scratching for her. Rambo will take any amount of combing, can’t get enough of it. He always has most fleas on his thighs or haunches. He’s a big cat and has much thicker, coarser fur than the other two, so has more fleas. It’s easy to catch them in the fine teeth of the comb but more difficult to actually squash them, especially the small black ones. I find it very satisfying to pop the large pale juicy ones. Afterward you have to really scrub your fingernails though.

I wonder why cats’ fur smells so woody and leafy and clean? Surely they should smell fishy or meaty, because they clean themselves with saliva from mouths that have eaten flesh.

Brett is here. His mum and mine are meeting for coffee later this morning. No doubt for Mum to give her the low-down on my condition and what to do in a crisis etc. I’ll have the hospital bleeper on me anyway. And it’s good that Alistair will be on the Scillies at the same time as me.

I show Brett
Secrets of Bird Life
and give him the robin book. He lends me a book about Australian birds.

I would love to see an Australian bower bird. They all collect objects to decorate their nests, a bit like Mum collecting old lace tablecloths and linen pillowcases, to make the house look beautiful. Bower birds do it to attract a mate.

I collect feathers and shells and old nests and driftwood – natural objects to decorate my room. Am I doing it to attract a mate? I found out about bower birds from a book on Australian birds in the library.

Satin Bower Bird – the adult male is a glossy blue-black with lilac blue eyes. The female and the immatures are a dull green, banded below. Its bower is made of twigs arranged into a short avenue 30 cm high on a platform of knitted twigs. He paints it with saliva and chewed plants, sometimes using a twig as paint brush. He decorates the platform with yellow and blue things like leaves and straw. He might even steal his neighbour’s ornaments and wreck his bower. He is a good mimic too. One Great Bower Bird, whose nest was near a construction site, was heard displaying by mimicking construction noises. Other bower birds decorate their bowers with shells and feathers and anything blue and white.

Mum gets all sorts of lovely things at car boot sales. She loves other people’s junk. Most of our furniture and china is second-hand. She found a crystal chandelier once, and we have odd chairs from the fifties and sixties and nothing matches, but it all looks good together. She enjoys making a house look interesting. I suppose it’s like playing with a dolls’ house only bigger and more expensive.

Brett says he’s really looking forward to going to the Scillies. His mum booked two rooms in a hotel on St Mary’s ages ago, and as they are twin rooms, they can fit me in. We are getting there by helicopter from Penzance. Mum isn’t going. I think she regrets saying she didn’t want to go but someone has to stay and look after the cats. Brett and I mooch in the attic all morning, reading and watching the gulls, and talking.

He makes the observation that some flies – not fruit flies or bluebottles, but medium-sized silent flies – know how to make a right angle turn. They travel in squares up to the ceiling, they really do. He’s so clever. I’d never noticed that before.

Bluebottles, when they are trapped, travel in straight lines from one end of their prison, a room, say, to the other. If you time it right, when they are about to turn back you can open a window or door in their path and they get out without you having to resort to a fly swat.

Flies, mosquitoes and cat fleas are the only creatures I ever try to kill.

‘How’s Buddy?’

‘Beaut. Yeah, he’s beaut, thanks. Finds food for himself mostly, just comes to see us for a stroke and a chat. Dad’s working and I’m at school, so it’s just as well he’s learned to be independent. Mum’s a bit scared of that powerful beak.’

‘Seen any good meteors lately?’

‘Na, it’s been too cloudy.’

‘I really like your mum.’

‘Yeah, she’s cool, for a mother. So’s yours.’

‘Is she? She’s old of course, but yeah, she’s not so bad, I suppose. How’s Siobhan?’ Shit, I didn’t mean to mention her.

‘Yeah, she’s cool.’ He is blushing.

Shit shit shit.

And he didn’t notice my bower decorations – so he isn’t attracted to me. I’ll have to get more. More blue things and white things. Or give up.

I don’t believe it – I’m mooching along the wharf, looking for things to photograph when I see
SS
in the amusement arcade. She’s hanging on the arm of Hugo, who is all over her. What a slag!

I wonder if Brett knows about his so called best friend and his girlfriend? He’d be so upset. They are so intent on mauling each other and blowing smoke in each other’s faces they don’t notice me. In future I shall refer to her as SSS.

IT’S HALF TERM
, and a family has arrived next door. Through the wall we hear them shouting at each other and running up and down the stairs. We meet in the garden. There are two girls called Daisy and Grace, who are fourteen and eleven. Grace wants to see my room and she likes cats.

Daisy is miserable because she wanted to be in London this Christmas to go to parties. She says she hates St Ives. There’s nothing to do, nowhere to go. They live in Dulwich and this is their holiday home.

I am getting ready to go to the Scillies and only have time to say hello. But they will be here at Christmas.

A slow mist covers the bay like a gauzy chiffon scarf. Will it be too foggy for the helicopter to fly? Mum drives me to the heliport. Brett and his mum and dad are there already, so is Alistair. There are a couple of other birdwatchers I recognise from Hayle, who are also going on the trip. I have my lightweight backpack of clothes, toothbrush etc and binoculars. I’m so excited.

In a separate room, like a mini departure lounge, we watch a safety video of people calmly putting on lifebelts while smiling inanely at their children. As if! Why don’t we all wear our lifebelts before we get on the helicopter so if there’s a crash into the sea, we’ll be prepared. I’ll never be able to get it out from under the seat and remember how to tie the thing on before we crash.

Anyway, I’d die of hypothermia in the first ten minutes of being in the sea, even if I floated, so I think I’d rather not bother with trying to find the thing, tying ribbons, pulling red tags, and blowing whistles and all that crap. Forget it. If I die on a journey, so be it. Better to be travelling than sitting still. That sounds like the sort of thing my Grandpop would have said, but I don’t think he did. Perhaps it’s a Zen thing.

We show our boarding cards and walk out to the helicopter. I hold on to my hat, fearful of the whirling blades, warm air from the engines blowing into our faces. My imagination has the blades flying off and decapitating all of us. Brett sits next to his dad and his mum sits next to me behind them in the back seat.

I wave to Mum out the window. Goodbye little Mum, you look so small and sad.

It’s so noisy we can’t hear ourselves speak. Penzance a miniature town below, the blue swimming pool on the seafront, the tiny harbour of Mousehole. We fly through wispy cloud and into blueness,
500
feet above the sea. A lighthouse on a rock, lonely in the big sea. Our first sight of the islands, low, rusty with bracken, white sand edges, islets and black rocks. Turquoise shallow water you can see through to the pebbles and sand below. Little jigsaw fields and greenhouses, farm buildings and granite cottages. A full washing line in the middle of a field. White doves like breadcrumbs on a roof. Lighthouses, cows, empty white beaches. A smooth landing on a perfect desert island.

We drop off our luggage at the hotel and go out for lunch of crab sandwiches in a café with a view of the working harbour. We learn that there haven’t been any rare birds seen on the islands yet this year. It’s a bit early for migrant stragglers lost in the Atlantic.

I don’t care if we don’t see any birds at all: I am on a beautiful desert island with Brett. I’m in Paradise.

We’re on a red boat named
Seahorse
. The boatman is a high-cheeked youth of about twenty with curly yellow hair tied back on the nape of his tanned neck. His dog, yellow and sleek with a long kind face and gentle eyes, hangs around on the pier until the boat sails then jumps on board and wanders around on deck gazing lovingly at his master whenever he sees him. We spot lots of shag and cormorants, standing on a big rock hanging out their wings to dry. A pair of sandwich terns with their little forked tails spread fly overhead – Squeak, squeak, squeak.

At the landing slipway of St Agnes the handsome boatman jumps off and makes fast the ropes. We disembark and head for the Turk’s Head, which is very close, and I only have to stop a few times. Brett waits for me while his parents go ahead. When we get there, they have mugs of hot chocolate waiting for us and we sit in sunshine on picnic benches overlooking a rocky little beach. It’s so quiet. No cars.

We all eat pasties and I tell Brett’s mum the recipe I got from the old man in the fisherman’s lodge. Hayley says they are bit like mutton pies, a popular Australian dish. Alistair is going off with other birders to the other end of the island.

We are about to leave the pub when Brett points out a young herring gull struggling in shallow water. It seems to have become entangled in a child’s crab line; orange nylon wrapped around its head, the square reel dragging in the water. It’s in real trouble.

‘I’ll go and help it,’ I say, but Hayley forbids me to step in the water.

‘No way are you going in there. It’s freezing, Guss,’ she says, ‘Your mother would never forgive me if you caught a chill.’

Brett and his dad walk down the slipway, take off their flip flops and paddle out to the bird, which struggles to fly off but cannot. Brett takes off his T-shirt and throws it over the gull’s head to quieten it and to stop it stabbing them, but it attempts to escape and somehow Brett ends up completely immersed in water. They eventually cut it free with a penknife and unwrap the string from the bird’s neck. It flies off spraying water over the already soaked pair of rescuers. A loud hurray and applause from me, Hayley, and the other customers of the Turk’s Head. My hero! My sodden hero. Luckily he’s wearing those quick drying shorts like surfers wear.