Birdy Flynn

by Helen Donohoe

I stood back and leant against the oven. Then there was crying. Real bawling. Mum held Edna’s hands.

  Aunty Peggy looked like she was enjoying a good film. Uncle Timmy brushed crumbs from his lap and muttered slurry words.

  ‘Would you like a cup of tea, Edna?’ I said, but no one heard. I moved to leave the room but Mum pointed to the kettle, so I returned.

  ‘It’s . . .’

  ‘Has there been more trouble?’ Mum said. ‘I’ve no news on today. Was there another bomb?’

  ‘It’s the cat, lovey.’

  The kettle dropped from my fingers; tap water drenched my sleeves.

  ‘The cat?’ Mum said.

  I went to turn the tap down but turned it up.

  ‘She’s gone.’

  Edna’s crying got louder as the kettle began to roar and in my head was Murphy’s little body, floating along.

  ‘She’s gone where?’ Mum said, as if Murphy was off to a disco without asking permission. She sat back and released Edna’s hands. My right leg got a quivering spasm that I couldn’t shake off.

  ‘She got in a fight with that Jack Russell.’

  ‘Again?’

  ‘Then she ran off and she’s not come home for her tea and she never misses a feed.’

  ‘She’ll maybe be lost?’ Aunty Peggy said. ‘The poor wee thing.’

  ‘Lost? How would she be?’ Edna snapped. ‘She knows her home, doesn’t she?’

  ‘Well she does.’

  ‘And she likes her food, all right.’ Mum shook her head and fixed her eyes for Peggy to be quiet.

  I stirred sugar into mugs of tea.

  ‘You OK, Birdy?’ Edna turned to me.

  I wanted to tell her everything. The words were so close to being out loud, I thought my jaw would erupt. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t tell them that I didn’t protect Murphy. How she’d looked all messy and wanted a cuddle and help getting home. I didn’t save her. And nor did my cousin Liam. How Martin kicked her like a football. Our family cat that everyone treasured. That Edna loved like a baby. I drowned her. With my own hands.

  ‘You didn’t see her on your adventures, did you, lovey?’ Edna said to me, and the world stopped, like a videotape on pause.

  ‘Pardon?’ I said. Then, before anyone replied, ‘No. I can’t remember. Sorry. No. I didn’t. I definitely didn’t see her.’

  ‘It’s my fault.’ Edna’s head dropped.

  I delivered her tea as gently as I could.

  ‘What would your mother have thought?’ she said to Mum. ‘God rest her soul.’

  ‘God rest her soul,’ Mum, Peggy and Timmy repeated. They crossed themselves. Without thinking, I did as well. I would try anything to keep me out of Hell. They lowered their heads. I looked to the floor. Mum started sniffing and I prayed that she would stop.

  ‘Biscuits, Birdy.’ Mum banged the table as she looked up. ‘The good ones.’

  Then, apart from tea-drinking and biscuit-crunching – and inside my head, a million thoughts spinning – the kitchen became still for a moment.

  ‘It’s the Devil’s work.’ Aunty Peggy broke the silence. ‘So soon after your mother.’ She looked at Mum, who had no expression. ‘Only the Devil let this happen. Pure Devil so –’

  ‘We mustn’t give up hope, Edna,’ Mum said. ‘I’d wage a bet she’ll be back where she belongs.’

  ‘I’ll find her,’ I said.

  They looked at me.

  ‘We’ll have a massive search,’ I said. ‘In the morning, I’ll go searching. I’ll do postcards and posters.’

  No one said a word.

  ‘She’s probably up a tree.’ I faked a laugh.

  They kept staring.

  My other leg started trembling. ‘Or in a shed, or –’

  ‘You can get the boys to help.’ Mum’s smile opened up and I nodded to keep her pleased.

  Edna’s eyes widened.

  Aunty Peggy tilted her head to get a different angle of me.

  ‘Leave it to me,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, Birdy.’ Edna got up and squeezed me.

  Mum reached across and held my hand. I took deep breaths.

  They all began to breathe easy. Edna put her hands in the praying position, like a kung fu warrior about to salute me.

  ‘Where’s my jacket, Mum?’

  ‘It’s filthy.’

  ‘I need it.’

  ‘In there.’ She pointed to the washing machine. I reached in and dug inside my pocket, feeling them watching me. I found what I wanted and held it tightly.

  ‘Goodnight.’ I smiled.

  ‘Oh, goodnight. God bless,’ Mum said.

  ‘God bless,’ Edna said. ‘Sleep well now.’

  ‘Where’s my kiss?’ Aunty Peggy asked.

  I wanted to cuddle Mum so much, but I knew I had to go.

  Chapter 3

  The next morning I woke up and tried to remember what was real and what was not. I hadn’t slept, but I’d dreamt. Mad dreams I had. Huge ugly antelopes leaping our garden fence, pinning me down, attacking me with teeth like gravestones. And fires. Our fence was on fire, Dad’s shed was on fire. All his best tools were gone. My ankles were in flames, but all I did was watch, letting them burn and blister and bubble up.

  I’d woken up in the night-time dark with damp pyjamas, feeling cold but hot as well. I could hear the distant army tanks practising in the fenced-off woods that the MoD made out of bounds.

  In the morning the house smelt of Saturdays, and downstairs the kettle was kept busy and roared through boil after boil. Our front gate opened; the letter box flapped. Mum hoovered for hours and outside, somewhere in the distance, lots of people mowed their grass. I hid my head under my pillow, but that made it worse. I sang songs to myself, but I got on my nerves.

  As I did every morning, I reached under my bed to check my special tin was still there. It was a Quality Street tin that hid my most precious things. My collection. The items it felt good to hold, to sometimes talk to. Although I knew that wasn’t normal. When I pulled off the lid, Murphy’s name tag looked up.

  I buried it under my table tennis certificate to keep it out of sight. I won that certificate when I was seven or eight. It made me think of the funny times we had, when we all went down the rec and Noely and me always beat our dad. Also in the tin was a penknife, red and silver and not real Swiss but near enough. Rattling around the bottom were tiny ball bearings from bike wheels that we found in the woods, a beady necklace that I stole so I could be a Holy child as well and a chain sent by Aunty Sadie from Malta. There were tiny plastic soldiers that I made fight battles. Then there were fishing hooks from when Dad took us fishing, a medal for school cross-country, and shells and pebbles that I saved from the brilliant day at the beach in 1978. At the bottom was a beer mat with Guinness stains and a picture of Toucan, a fake passport that I drew myself, a made-up membership card for the Fonzies (which for a while was the name of our gang), and a rusty silver badge of a cannon from Uncle Pat, who lived up London in a really tall tower. An old bandage from one of Noely’s football injuries was wrapped around a pair of purple paisley Y-fronts that I stole from his drawer. And there were lots of folded-up letters that I’d never sent. Mostly to pretend people, but also Blue Peter and Swap Shop.

  I took three photos from my tin. Tea stains had changed their colour and they curled at the edges. They were rescued photos that never made it to an album. I held them in my finger and thumb and studied every bit of them. One was a family gathering with Nan talking to my dad. He hated parties, but his face in this photo looked happy and calm. ‘Oh, it’s grand,’ I imagined Nan saying, leaning in to make her wild Irish voice heard. She’d have spoken in a slow, definite way with a rattly sound in her throat. Dad called her the Connemara Cat. He used to make lots of jokes like that. He wished that my nan was his mum, I thought. Although Nan couldn’t get his Liverpool accent, they always had long laughy talks.

  The party was for Dessie Boy’s eighteenth birthday. The ‘now man’ sat at the head of the table, wat
ched by a load of women of Nan’s size with rosy eyes. Edna was there – it was before her eyesight was gone. You can see in the gaze of the women that Dessie Boy was like one of the saints that they worshipped at church. Liam’s there with me. It was a family party so Martin and Joe weren’t allowed. Me and Liam are in the background carrying dishes and clearing tables. It was women’s work, but Liam loved it because he’d collect the glasses and drink leftover lager. I hated it with all my heart. I was grinning though. In the picture, I had a beaming smile. I was in my world and in my own thoughts. Mum had let me wear jeans that day and under those I was wearing Noely’s boxer shorts.

  I’d stolen them boxer shorts as well. Noely had left them in the washing basket, the time he packed his Puma holdall and made his new start. I’d washed them with soap, dried them on the radiator in my bedroom and put them, wrapped in newspaper, in my underwear drawer.

  The second photo was a Polaroid of Mum and Eileen. They were in our kitchen and Mum was concentrating on sewing something, her neck bent over and her glasses on the edge of her nose. A mug of tea was parked next to her ashtray, which was giving off smoke, and in the bottom corner of the photo you can just see Noely’s toes. My sister was stood upright with her rucksack on her shoulders and a purse hanging down like a giant necklace. That purse had her English money in it. Around her waist was a brown bumbag where she kept her francs. Her face glowed. She was off on a school trip, on a coach, then a ferry, and I thought she was so brave to go. Her ears were specially pierced, she had blusher on and a new perm from Mum. It was me that took the photo, in case she didn’t come back. I caught her mood just right. ‘Quick,’ she shouted at me, ‘take the flipping thing before these curls fall out.’

  The third picture has me in our garden when I was seven or eight. I’m in the cowboy outfit that Edna gave me and I’m smiling from ear to ear, with my hands on my hips, ready to grab my proper silver pistols and shoot whoever is the enemy. I had the whole outfit: hat, waistcoat, holster, the red hanky that you wear around your neck, a gold sheriff’s badge. All the boys did. In the photo Martin has his arm around my shoulder and Liam is stood at my other side.

  I placed the photos back carefully, tucked under the pile of letters to give them extra protection.

  ‘Good morning, darling,’ Mum said when I sat at the kitchen table. ‘Did you sleep well?’

  ‘Yes.’ I smiled and felt a bruise stretch from under my right eye.

  ‘Grand.’ She smiled. ‘With nice dreams?’ She looked at me closely, but then turned back to her cooker.

  I waited.

  ‘Kind of,’ I said when she looked up, wanting my answer. ‘Where’s Dad?’

  ‘In the garden.’

  The house smelt of scouring pads mixed in with fried bacon. Mum stopped, emptied the bucket of grey water and came over to the table.

  ‘Here,’ she said, handing me a pen with the end chewed off. She was red as rhubarb. ‘I found you some blank postcards.’

  ‘Oh. Brilliant.’

  ‘And scrap paper for the posters.’

  ‘Great.’

  ‘We’ll take a walk later – I’ll help you put them about.’

  ‘No,’ I said, and Mum wasn’t expecting that. ‘I can do it on my own.’

  ‘Sure you can,’ she said, ‘but I want to help.’

  She ripped off her rubber gloves, used her apron to wipe her face and clicked the grill on. I wanted her to stand still. To look at me properly, to see what I really wanted to say without me saying a word.

  ‘I’ll have this smart for your trip,’ she carried on, fussing, inspecting my jacket that was soaking in the sink.

  ‘I’m not going. You know I hate trips.’ I talked down to the table.

  ‘You’ve woken up awful maudlin, love.’ Mum stood over me after putting a glass of milk down. ‘Don’t worry about the postcards. I’ll walk into town. See what the police know.’

  ‘No.’ I snatched at the pen and took a postcard. ‘I am going to find her, Mum.’

  She didn’t move but went into thoughts behind her eyes and her red cheeks softened and in slow motion her teeth appeared through a wide but worried smile.

  ‘The Lord loves a trier,’ she said with a deep breath and I got a tickle in my belly from seeing her so proud.

  I gripped the pen as strong as I could and scrawled the beginning of a word.

  ‘I’m away for a bath,’ Mum whispered as she handed me some toast. She kissed me on the top of my head. ‘What would I do without my clever little trooper?’

  The taps upstairs went on full, then slowed down. The fridge started humming, like when Uncle Timmy builds up to his singing.

  Three postcards were wasted and torn up while I tried to get the words the right way around. I concentrated hard to get the fourth one right, underlining important words like black and cat and green eyes and tartan collar. I wrote MISSING CAT in double-thick capital letters. I kissed each card. Murphy is missing, I told myself. She was missing because I didn’t know where she was.

  On the scrap paper I wrote out Missing Cat posters and I used the same words but with more description. Like the bits of white fur under her chin and on her toes and the speck of red she had on her nose. I wrote that she sometimes walked with a limp and never looked before she crossed a road. I kept writing until the pen ran out. Then I ate my toast.

  The ticking of the cooker clock was the loudest sound. The house stood still.

  Dad’s tool belt was on the table. I felt the thick buckle and the smooth shiny surface where the leather was worn. I wanted a job where a belt like that was the uniform. I took it, stood up and held it wrapped around my hips. It felt heavy and solid and I knew I could be anything from a welder to a painter or a market-stall seller. ‘Apples and bananas!’ I shouted inside my head. My mind bagged up invisible fruit and veg, twirled brown paper bags shut, winked at housewives and wished them good luck.

  Marching steps came down the stairs so I put the belt back.

  ‘Right you are,’ Mum announced. Her skin looked soft and as white as the inside of a loaf. She smelt of roses and soap. ‘What you stood there thinking about?’

  ‘Me and Dad,’ I said, and she looked at me like I was a Martian. ‘Getting a market stall.’

  ‘Shoes,’ she said, pointing at my feet.

  ‘Like Mr O’Rourke and Aiden have.’

  ‘Right, OK. Did the boys not call for you this morning? That’s unusual, isn’t it? I can’t get rid of them on a Saturday.’

  ‘Mum.’

  ‘What, love?’

  ‘Are cats allowed in Heaven?’ I said, and Mum paused and looked straight at me and for one tick of a second I felt more frightened than I had ever done.

  ‘Every creature belongs in Heaven,’ she said as if I should already know, ‘if they’ve been good on earth.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Have you the posters?’ she asked, and I pointed to the pile on the table. ‘Right, love. Enough nattering. Let’s go and get her home.’

  Martin, Joe and Liam were sat in the bus shelter outside Victor’s Video Rentals and the Co-op Funeral Shop. They didn’t even want a bus. Liam was smoking. Joe dangled his legs like a baby on a swing, staring at people walking past. I tugged Mum back, but she pushed on.

  ‘Well, look, there’s the rest of the fab four,’ she said. ‘Don’t they look handsome.’

  Martin smiled like he was happy to see me. Properly happy.

  Liam flicked away his ciggy. He couldn’t look at me.

  ‘Good morning, lads,’ Mum said. She looked at Liam. ‘You look smart this morning.’

  ‘Thank you, Aunty Martha.’ Liam’s voice was wincey. He stood up and almost bowed.

  ‘All right, Birdy,’ Martin sat back. ‘I phoned you this morning. You were engaged for ever.’ He knew that on Saturdays our phone was always off the hook.

  ‘Birdy is busy, boys,’ Mum butted in.

  I pulled her sleeve.

  ‘You not coming out then?’ Martin spoke to me a
nd ignored Mum.

  She held out the postcards. I forced her arm down. She shook my hand off and held them out. ‘You see?’

  They looked but they didn’t see. Joe made a snorty, sniggery sound.

  I looked at my feet.

  ‘If you see this cat, boys, you call this number. You hear me?’

  ‘Yes, Mrs Flynn,’ Joe said. ‘What cat?’

  ‘Our Murphy has gone missing,’ Mum started.

  They listened. Liam frowned and grinned like he was struggling on the loo. She gave them the full description. They nodded their heads. And I couldn’t work out whether they were serious, rude or confused. Martin’s concentration was too severe – he watched Mum’s performance like she was reading the news.

  ‘Dad says it’s the Chinkies chopping them up for the chow mein special.’

  ‘What on earth are you on about, Martin?’

  ‘Can I help, Aunty Martha?’ Liam stood up.

  I wanted to scream, ‘What do you think you’re doing? You did nothing when Martin started his kicking. You stood watching. You laughed. You bloody laughed. You ran away. And now you’re smiling.’

  ‘Of course, good lad.’ Mum handed him some cards.

  ‘Mum,’ I said.

  She pushed me away. ‘Leave it now.’

  I tugged at her sleeve. I wanted to go.

  ‘We’re going fishing,’ Joe said. ‘You coming?’

  ‘Serious?’ I said, and Liam focused his eyes on the cars driving past.

  ‘Not up the brook.’ Martin grinned.

  I threw a punch that missed and he laughed out loud.

  ‘You’re a dick,’ I shouted. I went for him again.

  Mum grabbed my fist in the air.

  ‘What’ve I done?’ Martin held his arms out in innocence and I dived in to bundle him to the ground.

  ‘Good God.’ Mum gave a high-pitched shout. ‘Come here.’

  She nearly pulled my arm off, gripping me with her tightest hold.

  The boys got hysterics as she dragged me away like I was four years old. I gave them two fingers.

  ‘Where did you get that from?’ Mum slapped me.

  She clung to my shirt and walked faster and faster as she gave me the lecture about aggression and controlling my temper and what was that language you were using and you’re better than that and we need to stick together.