The Bower Bird

by Ann Kelley

  ‘He’ll be all right, dear of him,’ Claire smiles at me.

  Phaedra is auburn-haired, slender and straight-backed and looks like a ballet dancer. Troy looks like a surfer – blond straggly hair and tanned still from a summer of riding waves. He’s taller than his sister.

  ‘Sorry, that was my fault,’ I say.

  Troy goes back to his room and his music and Phaedra, who is the most beautiful girl I have ever seen, joins us at the huge kitchen table, which their father built. He comes in soaking wet and dries his hair on a towel. He washes his hands and sits down at the head of the table in a string-seated hand crafted chair with arms.

  ‘How’s your back?’ he asks Mum.

  ‘Better thanks, much better, thanks to Claire.’

  ‘And what are you up to, young Gussie?’

  ‘I’ve been taking photographs of old men,’ I say. I have my camera with me.

  ‘What old men?’ Mum is disbelieving.

  ‘Old fishermen, mostly, on the harbour.’

  ‘My mother’s father was a good photographer, wasn’t he, Claire?’

  ‘He was, honey, yes.’

  That’s the trouble with modern cameras. If you own a camera and can take a picture that’s in focus you think you are a good photographer.

  ‘Moss, your Mum’s arrived.’

  A tall, handsome woman with a halo of frizzy white hair appears from under a large black umbrella, which she shakes vigorously at the doorway before taking off her wellington boots.

  ‘Hello, everyone.’

  ‘It’s very plashy out today, isn’t it,’ I say, to impress them with my vocabulary.

  They look at each other as if I’m mad.

  We’re all having tea – Mum made a carrot cake especially, and I helped. They provide most of the food though: duck-egg Spanish omelette with courgettes and herbs from the garden and home-made bread, cooked that morning by Gabriel’s dad. Gabriel comes in shortly after his gran and sits next to her, stuffing himself with everything in sight and gazing longingly at his sword on the high shelf. She puts an arm around him to hug him and he wriggles out of her embrace.

  Phaedra goes to sixth-form college by bus every day and Troy is in his last year at St Ives School. He says it’s pretty boring. Can’t be half as boring as being at home all the time, I think, but don’t say.

  After tea we play Monopoly. Or rather I play Monopoly with Gabriel and Phaedra and their gran. We play at the big table. I sit on a very handsome chair, which has pale coloured wood arms and a string seat. The other dining chairs are different shapes but all hand-made, or craftsman-built.

  Treasure is asleep on a blue and yellow rag rug by the Rayburn, enjoying a well-earned holiday after bringing up her babies. She doesn’t seem at all bothered at not having them around any more. She’s got Spider of course, her best friend Spider. He is curled up on a beautiful chair, like no other chair I have ever seen. It has curved arms and a seat of woven string and the back looks as if it has been carved from one piece of wood. There are similar stools, I notice.

  ‘Did your dad make the chair?’ I ask Phaedra.

  ‘No, Grandpa Darling did. He made furniture too.’

  There’s the lovely homely smell of clothes airing above the Rayburn, almost scorching but not quite.

  Phaedra is in a St Ives Youth Theatre production soon. It’s a local theatre company for 6–18 year-olds, and she has been going to it for years. They do all sorts of musicals, like The Wizard of Oz and Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat and they did Fame in the summer. She has to go to rehearsals several times a week in an old Wesleyan chapel in St Ives that has been made into a theatre. She’s got long rubbery legs and this amazing fuzzy hair the colour of sunsets.

  Gabriel is very quiet. Does he still speak? I don’t think I have heard him say a word today. It’s stopped raining and he wants to go outside with his sword. He speaks!

  ‘Is that all right, love? (to Claire). ‘Go on then, Monkey,’ says his gran, and he whoops for joy and climbs like a chimp to the high shelf.

  ‘He’s got a crush on you, Gussie.’ Phaedra says.

  ‘Really? A crush on me?’

  ‘Yeah, he thinks you’re geet ace.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It’s Cornish slang for wonderful,’ says their gran.

  The game sort of falls apart when he goes, which is a shame as I had managed to buy two of the orange properties, Park Lane and three stations. Phaedra says she has homework to do and goes to her room. Mum and the other adults are drinking wine and laughing. Mum looks quite young when she laughs.

  I’d like to stay here forever.

  When their gran says she better get back to her cabin, I say, ‘Oh, please may I have a look inside?’

  ‘Gussie! Gabriel’s grandmother doesn’t want to be bothered with you, do you?’

  ‘She’s very welcome. She can meet Five-toes.’

  I put on my parka and wellies and we set off for the cabin along the muddy path. The ducks are happily shovelling grass and looking for worms I suppose. Gabriel’s dad follows us out in order to put the creatures back in their hutches for the night.

  A deep voice – for an eight year old – comes from the crown of the palace-tree: ‘May the force be with you.’

  We giggle.

  Gabriel’s gran holds the brolly over me and tells me to go in. The cabin is just as cosy on the inside as it looked from the outside. Like a gypsy caravan but more modern. The stove is on and I warm my hands at it – they’ve gone numb. The large fluffy cat that I last saw on the bridge over the stream is curled up on the sofa next to the stove.

  ‘Have I the pleasure of meeting Five-toes?’ I stroke her head gently and she opens one eye and glares at me.

  I confess that I peered in the window last time I was here but Gabriel’s gran doesn’t seem to mind. I don’t know what to call her. I have forgotten her name if anyone ever told me. Old people do seem to give up their identity when they become mothers or fathers or grandparents. They just become someone’s gran, a nameless unidentified being, anonymous. It must be awful.

  Even the cat has a name.

  A rather lovely oil painting of a Cornish beach hangs on one wall. I study it.

  ‘One of mine,’ says Gabriel’s gran. Wow, she must have been to art school.

  The photograph I saw through the window is of course a portrait of her when she was young. It could be Phaedra, except that the hairstyle and dress are old-fashioned. There’s a signature, which I cannot read as I haven’t got my reading glasses.

  ‘Is it you?’

  ‘Yes, my love, it is me. When I was about Phaedra’s age. We’re alike aren’t we? I had that same colour hair.’

  She smiles a wide, soft-lipped smile, as if she is suddenly that girl again. That happens when my Mum smiles. She can be looking so sad and fed up and old and if I make her smile her face lights up and youth floods back into her face. Then she becomes herself again – Lara Stevens – not just Mum.

  ‘Who took the photograph? It looks very professional.’

  ‘Very perceptive of you. My father: he was a good photographer.’

  ‘May I take a photograph of you, now?’

  ‘Me, now? Oh I don’t think so. I’m too old to have my photograph taken.’

  ‘How about with Gabriel?’

  ‘Take one of Gabriel on his own.

  ‘I’ve been taking photographs of the men in the fishermen’s lodges. It would be good to have some of local women too.’

  ‘I’ll think about it dear.’

  I take a photograph of Five-toes instead, which is probably out of focus. I need varifocals.

  My Grandma used to tell me about the time when she and I were locked in a lavatory in the basement of a little gallery that was about to close for the weekend. The knob had fallen off the locking mechanism and fallen on a floor littered with boxes. I was about two. She hadn’t got her glasses on and couldn’t see where the knob had rolled. She asked me to be her
eyes while she sung ‘Two Old Ladies Locked in the Lavatory’. I found it, luckily, or we’d be there still. What would she have done if we had been locked there from Monday to Saturday, nobody knew they were there. We could have survived on water from the washbasin and we could have chewed bits of cardboard box to stave off hunger. I expect she had some extra strong peppermints in her coat pocket: she usually did.

  We drive back along the road through Halsetown – no horses on the road today, they are all munching happily in their field – and take a short cut down a very small lane where we come across a dear little dog wandering along looking lost – you know the way on-the-loose dogs run sideways and have a mad look in their eyes. He has a collar on and we grab him. No name or address. Mum wraps him in an old mac because he’s rather muddy and I hold him on my lap while she drives along the lane until we come to a drive. We go up the drive to a big house, but there’s no one in. We try the next cottage but there’s no one there either. He’s so sweet, just a black mongrel, his big dark eyes peering out from long straggly hair. He sits very quietly curled up on my lap. I think he must be tired and hungry.

  ‘No We Can’t Keep Him,’ says Mum.

  ‘Did I say a word?’ I am incredulous that she can read my mind. That’s awful.

  ‘You don’t need to. We’ll take him to the vet, he might be micro-chipped.’

  Our vet checks for a chip but there isn’t one. The puppy is a bitch about twelve weeks old.

  ‘I expect she escaped from a garden,’ he says. ‘We’ll look after her, until we can find her owners.’

  ‘She’s got fleas,’ I say, ‘I killed one in the car.’

  ‘Oh, great,’ says Mum, ‘now I’ll have to wash the mac.’

  ‘You’d have to anyway, it’s all muddy.’

  In the car I tell Mum about a story Gabriel’s gran told me. She said that Gabriel thought Poppy Day was Puppy Day and he was going to get a puppy. He was really disappointed.

  Mum reminds me of when I was little and pretended to be a police puppy, whatever that is. I remember thinking myself into the mind of a little dog and I spent hours on all fours yapping and panting and insisting she put on my lead and take me for walks. It drove her potty.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  NOTE: WASPS FEED their young on insects that are injurious to crops.

  I always thought that they were of no use to anyone or anything, but I read that in a book called Out with Romany Once More by Bramwell Evens. I bought it for 50p at a local fleamarket where Mum bought two jars of home-made marmalade and an Edwardian postcard from Southend-on-Sea. Romany lives in a vardo, whatever that might be. I can’t find it in my Chambers Dictionary. It must be a gypsy caravan or cabin or something. He’s a countryman who teaches a farmer’s son called Tim about wildlife. I bought it because of the lovely monochrome illustrations of animals. There’s a nameplate – PRESENTED TO LAURENCE LOCKWOOD, FIRST PRIZE CLASS 3 (JUNIOR), UPTON CROSS CP SCHOOL, and it must have been about 1950, because the book was published in 1940, then reprinted in 1941, 42, 43, 44, and 1949. So it must have been really popular. Romany had a programme on radio, but Mum doesn’t remember it.

  Tim often spends a night in the vardo with Romany so they can go out in the early hours to see badgers. Can you imagine a child being allowed to do that today? Stay in a strange man’s home all night? I don’t think so.

  I’ve just made a list of all the creatures we helped to support when we were renting Peregrine Cottage:

  1. Slugs – a purple giant came in under the front door at night to eat any leftover cat food in the porch.

  2. Spiders – ate flies.

  3. Cat fleas – ate cats.

  4. Woodlice – ate wood.

  5. Fruit flies – liked rotting fruit but went really mad for Mum’s whisky.

  6. Bees – ate nectar from garden flowers.

  7. Butterflies – ditto.

  8. Slow-worms – what do they eat? I think there was a huge colony of them under the floorboards of the porch.

  9. Crickets – haven’t faintest idea what their food is, but we had loads of them.

  10. Harvest Mice and Voles – crumbs.

  11. Small Birds – sunflower seeds and peanuts etc that we put out specially, and leftover rice and bread.

  12. Three Cats – cheese, fish, Greek yoghurt, curried chicken and cat food.

  13. Stray cats – crept in at night to steal cat food.

  14. Badgers – unsalted peanuts and all leftovers except green veg.

  15. Pop the herring gull, who ate everything except rice and veg. He ate chips though. Poor Pop, I wonder if he survived. He swallowed a fishing hook.

  I’ve also made a list of some of the things we have in our home that someone else has owned before – recycled furniture, car boot finds, not counting the objects that belonged to Grandma and Grandpop:

  1. A low wooden stool carved with a blackbird on the bough of an oak tree.

  2. Lace linen tablecloths, lots of them, a whole cupboard full. I don’t know why Mum buys them, because we never use them, except perhaps at Christmas. Maybe she buys them because Grandma was always lace-making and embroidering and Mum never appreciated the handiwork when she was a child.

  4. Many odd cups and saucers, antique mugs and plates of very pretty blues and pinks with roses.

  5. Bowls of all sizes, mixing bowls, pudding bowls, pretty bowls for sweets.

  6. Forty-six coloured glasses and glass jugs. Anyone would think we have home-made lemonade or cocktail parties or something. Mum does have a special glass for whisky – well, several special glasses, one green cut glass that cost a lot of money and has a narrow base so it often gets knocked over; one opaque white tumbler and one plain glass tumbler with a pattern of coloured circles. I usually drink my sparkling water from the bottle, which really pisses her off. She says I’ll Never be a Lady.

  7. Our dining table comes from a junk shop but it’s a 1950s Ercol Plank table and we have various Ercol chairs – the ones with the stick backs, from car boot sales. We have two 1930s Lloyd Loom armchairs, painted white and with seats covered in deckchair canvas striped orange and white and blue. I do wish she’d kept Grandpop’s rocker. She could have reupholstered it in that striped canvas.

  8. Some of Mum’s best cooking pots are from car boot sales – Le Creuset cast iron enamelled in orange. She says they are dreadfully expensive to buy them new and she got them For a Song.

  9. She has about ten old enamel colanders. My favourite is a dark blue one that used to be Grandma’s. I can still see her in her tiny kitchen, her round red arms fighting with a rabbit’s insides, steam shooting out of the pressure cooker with a piercing whistle. I don’t remember her actually using the colander, which is probably why her cabbage was always soggy.

  10. We even get some of our bed linen from car boot sales, real linen, or pink or blue striped cotton sheets and frilly edged pillow cases with embroidery on.

  They feel so cool against the skin.

  11. Our lampshades are glass bowls from the thirties. They have splodges of colour on them and the light makes the colours come alive.

  12. Old linen and lace cloths that Mum makes into curtains, and old table napkins. (Mum hates paper serviettes and always packs a linen napkin to take on long journeys or holidays. She says it keeps her feeling civilised in the most uncomfortable situations – when I’m in hospital, or when we are stuck on a broken down train.) It’s like her comfort blanket.

  I think I’ll concentrate on collecting old books on birds and nature. There were so many interesting ones at the cottage on the cliff and I learned so much from them and loved the language of them, the old fashioned tales of close encounters with wildlife.

  I recently found a Filmgoer’s Annual from the fifties. I’m keeping it to send to Daddy on his birthday. He’ll be forty-six in November. I wonder what Mum is getting him? But I suppose now she Despises and Loathes him she won’t get him anything.

  This will be our second Christmas without Daddy, or
Grandma, or Grandpop.

  It will be dreadful. And look what I have become since Daddy left us, and my grandparents died: a liar. A sneaky sly thief and a liar. A deceiver, misleader, beguiler, bamboozler, a phoney, a wolf in sheep’s clothing, an ass in lion’s skin, a jackdaw in peacock’s feathers. A fibber, fabricator, fabulist, falsifier, a mythomaniac, a snake in the grass.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  I DREAMT THAT we were driving along, Daddy and Mum and me, and two little birds, blue-tits or sparrows, who were dancing together in the air, twittering loudly, flew into the windscreen of our car and were smashed to pieces. I woke with feelings of dread and guilt and sadness in the middle of the night to an awful sound, a sound like a blackbird being slowly crushed in the jaws of a cat. Then a low hoo-hoo of an owl. I think maybe the squeal could have been a screech owl, not an injured blackbird. I looked out the window onto a clear starry sky, the orange yellow planet of Mars right above the house.

  NOTE: I looked up vardo in Mum’s Concise Oxford Dictionary (it’s huge and you can’t read the words without a magnifier). It means wagon. Word for the day: prosaic, like prose; unpoetical; matter-of-fact; common-place; dull.

  Mrs Lorn is whistling away while she’s changing the bed sheets. I don’t recognise the hymn. Mum is at her Life Class, which sounds like they should be teaching her how to live not how to draw. I don’t know why she wants to do it anyway, because she knows how to draw already, but she says she is out of practice and you must keep on doing something to remain good at it.

  ‘Mrs Lorn?’

  ‘Yes dear?’

  ‘Do you still work at Peregrine Point?’

  ‘Yes, I do, my ’ansome.’ She is now whistling ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’, I think it’s supposed to be, which brings back my guilt. They sang it at the funeral I went to.

  ‘Is the owner back now or is someone else renting it?’

  ‘The owner is back, dear, yes.’

  ‘Is he famous, Mrs Lorn?’