The Birds, They're Back

by Wendy Reakes

  Ellen used to work the restaurant with him, but when Molly came along, his dear wife decided that she wanted to take the whole ‘mother thing’ seriously that time. She’d worked all the way through the twin’s childhood and felt like she’d missed out on a lot. So, she retired and left him to provide for the family by working morning, noon and night, seven days a week. Sometimes he wished he’d stayed in marketing, bringing home a pay cheque each week and building his pension and financial portfolio. Now, no more paid holiday, no more bonuses, no more private health care… And for what, to work his arse off for a family who hardly talked to him anymore.

  He looked at Molly sitting at the back behind Ellen. “Does it have to be a bird, honey?” he said, praying she’d change her mind. “Rabbits are nice.”

  She didn’t answer. She just shook her head as if the prospect of talking to him was out of her remit. “Moll?”

  She kept her silence.

  Harry shook his head. “Why did you promise her a bird?”

  Ellen spluttered and guffawed. “Me? Seriously, you have such a short memory.”

  Yes, all right, it was true he’d agreed to get her a bird, but she’d been sweet at the time, snuggling down in bed and sucking her thumb like when she was a baby. What father could say no to that? He thought she’d forget about it the next day, but just like her mother, she never forgot a damn thing. He glanced one more time in the rear-view mirror. There was no use pressing the matter. Molly was in charge.

  “Besides,” Ellen added. “She still hasn’t got over losing Twitter yet.”

  “He was just a bird for god’s sake.”

  Pets R US was near the mall and he knew exactly the best place to park so that they could dash in and dash out again. He parked up and they went into the store. He hated the stink of a pet shop. Sawdust and shit.

  The shop was vast, but halfway along and up an escalator, the bird department took over the first floor. Molly headed that way despite them telling her to wait. As they watched her glide upwards, Harry decided it was at that moment he'd approach Ellen with his proposal. "I need a favour, honey," he said. She was staring at her phone, ignoring him as she often ignored him.

  “Ellen?”

  She put her phone in her pocket. “What?”

  “I need…”

  “A favour. I heard you the first time.”

  Harry saw a cage filled with rabbits. “I need a break. Just for the weekend…” He looked at her face. “Can you work tomorrow for me?”

  “It’s Saturday tomorrow.”

  “So?”

  “Okay. Two things,” she said. “One. Why can’t Frank watch the place, and two, where are you going?”

  "We've got a party of twenty coming in as well as our usual Saturday trade. It will be too much for the kitchen if I pull Frank out."

  “And…?”

  Harry knew she enjoyed watching him grovel. “Cornwall. I’m taking Mel to Cornwall for her birthday.”

  “Her tenth?”

  “Very funny.”

  Ellen laughed. “Yeah, okay, Why not. I’ve got nothing else on. Forget the kids.”

  “Hey, thanks.” Harry was surprised. Really surprised.

  “As long as you pay me.”

  “What?”

  “Two hundred.”

  “Two…? Are you joking?”

  “Nope.”

  “You can work Sunday lunchtime as well for that.”

  “That might cost you extra.”

  “You already take every penny I make.”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  “Practically.”

  She laughed. “I’m just kidding. Of course, I’ll work. We don’t want you worrying about money when you’re on your dirty weekend with Melanie.”

  He tapped her on the arm. “Thanks.”

  “Are you getting her a cake?”

  He frowned. “I don’t know.”

  “We could nip next door and get her some candles. You’ll only need one box of ten.”

  Then, suddenly, as if hell had opened in Pets R Us, a commotion upstairs made Harry and Ellen dash for the escalator. The birds in their cages were going wild, out of their minds, screeching, and squawking and flapping their wings in a frenzied panic. The sound flooded the whole shop. The noise was almost unbearable on the ears as they crashed against the metal of their cages, rattling and thumping and squealing…

  They searched for Molly through the turmoil, willing the noise to stop hurting their ears. “Mollyyy?” Ellen called. “Where are you?”

  Harry dashed to the rear wall, where he found his daughter crouched against a cage with her hands over her ears. As the noise abated, calming as quickly as it had begun, next to her face was a sign. Love Birds. £199 a pair.

  Chapter 2

  With no room to stretch his legs, since the children were crammed in between him and Dolly, Bill got up. It was four anyhow. Only an hour before he had to see to the cows. Last night had been a strange one. He'd been forced to put the wardrobe up against the smashed window, but it was still too drafty for the children to sleep in their room. Besides, Toby and Lucy had been scared out of their wits. That bird. He was a big un. The size of the chicken they’d eaten last Sunday.

  He pulled on the same clothes he wore yesterday. The same clothes he wore the day before that too. Dolly liked him to wear a clean vest each day after his bath, clean socks and underpants too. He didn't care much for her washing his jeans. He had three pairs. Two for wearing under his overalls when working the farm and the other for best. It was hard getting a decent pair of jeans since his inside leg was thirty-six inches. Six feet five tall, he was. A big un like that crow last night. On his head, come rain or fall, he wore a cap. It was brown tweed. At least it was when he got it. Now it was just faded with not much pattern left to it. Once, Dolly had gotten a hold of that too. Washed it along with his overalls in that washer of hers. After that, it never got its shape back, but he put up with it. He put up with anything Dolly threw at him. Have done for twelve years gone.

  Before he went down the stairs, he checked the children's bedroom. He switched off the landing light on his way. It was only kept on for Lucy's sake. Scared of the dark she was, like most children. Inside, the curtains were blowing from the breeze wafting through the sides of the wardrobe against the window. The broken glass was still lying there, but he planned to clean it up when he got a bit of wood to block up the window. No point worrying about a new pane until Monday.

  He closed the door and went down the stairs.

  It was still warm in the kitchen. The agar had enough oil in it to keep it running all night. He kept his eye on the gauge through the week, just to make sure they didn’t run out over the weekend. It was just something he always did.

  He looked at the dregs of the fire. Normally, they had no need to light a fire until November time, but they’d lit it last night. A chill in the air, Dolly called it. She would clean it later. Get it ready for tonight if the cold spell kept up.

  He moved the kettle onto the burner. Dolly always filled it before she went to bed. ‘Save you having to worry,’ she always said.

  Opening the back door, he took a step back after he realised he'd kicked a dead crow lying over the threshold. "Well, I'll be," he muttered before he saw about fifty of the blighters, lying around dead as if they'd had an all-nighter and were passed out drunk. "I'll be," he said, until he realised he was repeating himself.

  The sun hadn’t appeared over the trees yet, but the sky was lighter than the pitch black it was last night. He kicked the dead crow aside and stepped out, leaving the door open so that the inside light shone over the first few yards. The way the birds were scattered, he’d hazard a guess they went further than he could see. When the sun came up that would put paid to that.

  “I’ll be,” he said again before he shut the door.

  The kettle had nearly boiled. He dropped a tea bag in a mug and added a bit of milk. Later, he’d bring a flask of full dairy in for Dolly to give to the y
oung uns. They both liked fresh milk on their cereal.

  He still had those birds on his mind as he poured the water from the kettle into his mug. He liked it weak, so he dipped the bag and pulled it out almost straight away, throwing it in the bin before it dripped. That’s where him and Dolly differed. She liked her tea strong with a drop of semi-skimmed. He always said that using anything but full fat in a cup of tea was a crime against nature. His mother agreed with him on that one. She liked full fat as well.

  Gladys lived half a mile from them. She still had the farm he grew up on. ‘I’ll never let it go,” she always said. “Father would never forgive me, Bill,”

  Denis had been dead six years since, so Bill thought his father wouldn't know, but he couldn't say that to mother, nor Dolly. ‘His spirit still lurks, Bill,' she'd say, and he wasn't one to argue that point.

  He sat with his mug of tea warming his hands, thinking about those dead birds outside. What had caused that? he wondered. There was no wind strong enough to do that sort of damage, besides the birds around those parts were sturdier than that. Cornish birds could ride a wind better than any bird living.

  He thought about the power lines running along the road outside the property. If they had, by some freak of nature, got themselves electrocuted, why would they be lying frazzled outside his own front door? It didn’t make sense.

  He finished his tea and swilled out his cup. He wouldn’t be getting any work done sitting there pondering the matter. He’d get the cows milked and then he’d come back and get those birds cleaned up. Yes, that’s what he would do.

  He'd seen to the cows by seven o’clock and made his way back to the house to sort out the birds. The sun was up, so as he went along the drive to the house he saw a scene before his eyes that didn't make any sense. It wasn’t just that there were loads of dead birds lying about everywhere, but that they were mixed breeds. Now, maybe a freak of nature had done something to them as they flew over his land, but for what he knew about the feathered kind was that they didn't mix. Not the bigs with the smalls. He was almost sure of it.

  Earlier, he'd remembered something that Arthur Reed had said just only yesterday when they'd met up by the lane. The Reed's weren't just their neighbours, they were friends too. Their forty-acre farm was south of there, further away from the village than their property. Arthur's father had once owned Bill's land too, but when Bill and Dolly got married, before Denis died, he'd bought their sixty-acres from the Reeds to get ‘the newlyweds' started. Denis wanted his only son to have something to call his own, to secure a good future for his new family. ‘When your mother and me are gone,’ he’d said, ‘all this will be yours.’

  Now, mother had the farm, working it till her hands were raw. Bill often pressed her to give it up, but she said ‘Our workers rely on this farm, Bill. I won’t pass it on until they’re pensioned off. Over my dead body.’

  Yesterday, Arthur Reed had come past the road down by the crossroads in his tractor. Bill had just dropped off the young uns at the bus stop for them to catch the bus to school, three miles away. Arthur, with a warming brew in his flask, pulled over and offered Bill a nice cuppa. They were good pals. Always had been. Grew up together and courted at the same time.

  Arthur had inherited his father’s land long before he’d wed Nancy, but unlike Bill and Dolly, they didn’t have any children. Not yet.

  "Did you see that old oak up by the brambles?" Arthur asked when they sat on the verge at the side of the road. He poured Bill a cup of tea into the plastic cup from the top of the flask and used a chipped mug for his own. Young Farmers 2012 was printed on its side.

  “I’ve been saying for years that tree was going to come down one day when folk least expected it,” Bill said. “I heard it nearly took the road out.”

  “Aye, but no one got hurt. That’s the main thing.”

  “That council’s?”

  “Aye, but I offered to clear it, if I could take the wood.”

  Bill admired Arthur for his entrepreneurial skills.

  “Give us a hand and you can take half.”

  Bill just nodded. Arthur knew he’d help him, even if he hadn’t offered him a share of the wood.

  “You get any disturbance last night?” Arthur asked.

  “What like?’

  “Birds.”

  “Birds? What about them?”

  “Our chickens went a bit queer earlier on. I thought it might have been that old fox again, but he weren’t nowhere to be seen.”

  "Just because you couldn't see him, don't mean he weren't there."

  “Aye, but not just that. We had a strange flock of birds hovering over us by the time we closed up last night.”

  “Strange, how?”

  “Well, dense, like a thick black cloud hovering up there like a pack of vultures. I got a feeling they fancied a bit of meat.”

  Bill thought that was a strange thing to say and he told him that.

  Arthur shrugged. “Well, it’s Nancy, it is. Got me imagining all sorts.”

  Bill laughed. “Birds won’t hurt.’

  ‘Tell that to our Nancy,” he said. “Got all queer about it she did.”

  “Why?”

  “You know what women are like.” He’d chuckled showing a missing tooth at the side of his mouth. “She said she thought they were watching her.”

  “Watching her? Oh aye,” Bill laughed as Arthur slapped him on the back and took his cup off him.

  Now he was thinking about the chat with Arthur and he was thinking about the birds, dead in front of their house. Later he’d go up and see them. Find out if Arthur knew anymore.

  As he approached the house, he saw Dolly outside with her arms folded in front of her looking at the dead birds. “Bill,” she called. “Have you seen this lot?”

  He nodded as he got closer, seeing for the first time how far they were spread.

  “What do you make of it, Bill?”

  “Don’t know,’ he said. “Could have had something to do with that bird in the young uns room last night.”

  “We’ll have to get them cleared up. We’ve got those people coming from the city tomorrow.”

  “What time?

  “No arrival before two o’clock. You know that very well, Bill Hock.”

  Chapter 3

  The traffic at two o’clock on a Friday was horrendous. Especially outside the college. Now she wished she’d never promised to pick up the twins. They could have got the bus home. In the back, Molly had the birdcage sitting on her lap. They'd just collected it, going back to the shop after having lunch with Harry.

  They’d dined at The Riverside, playing customers, as two trainees waited on them. Harry said it killed two birds with one stone. He’d looked at Molly when he said that. “Not real birds, honey.” He meant that he could train up two new servers while getting something to eat at the same time. It was Ellen’s idea when they’d first bought the restaurant. He’d kept it going ever since. “That was weird earlier…the birds in the shop, I mean,” Harry had said.

  "Something must have frightened them."

  He ruffled Molly’s hair, “Bet that was you.”

  Molly’s face dropped.

  “Don’t say that, Harry.” She looked at Molly. “It wasn’t you sweetie. It wasn’t you.”

  “I was kidding.” He threw up his hands.

  Harry could be a real jerk at times. He was originally from New York. He’d lived there, went to school there, trained there and worked there. Ellen couldn’t remember how many times she’d heard him say that.

  When the marketing and design firm he’d worked for amalgamated with the biggest in the industry, Harry was offered a senior post overseas in the UK; the Bristol office. He took it because he said he was over New York. That was Harry all right. Give him time and he was ‘over’ everything that ever mattered to him, including his family. That’s how Ellen saw it.

  She saw the kids coming out of the main entrance. Gemma was just ahead of Matt. Ellen was about to turn on the
engine when suddenly, out of nowhere, a seagull swooped down out of nowhere and clipped Gemma’s head with its claws.

  Ellen rushed from the car as Gemma fell to the pavement. Students crowded around her as she put her hand on her head to stop the flow of blood running down her face. By the time Ellen reached her, Matt was already at her side, pulling Gemma to her feet.

  Gathered around, the students were looking upwards, way up, where a small group of white gulls circled screeching over their heads. Then they flew off as if they’d never been there at all.

  Ellen got the kids back to the car. She helped Gemma into the front seat, her hair, once in a neat ponytail was now awry but she didn’t know it yet. When she did happen to look in the mirror, her hair would be the first thing she’d fix. "Let me see, baby," Ellen said.

  “I’m fine, mum. Just feel a bit dizzy.”

  “I’ll get you to the hospital.”

  “Mum! Enough of the drama. It was just a bird.” She removed her hand. The blood had already dried on her face. “Can we just go home, mum, please? I’m fine. Really.”

  Ellen reluctantly agreed. She’d have preferred to take her straight to the infirmary, but no one told Gemma what to do. Not even her worried mother.

  She kept an eye on her while they drove through the traffic towards home. Harry called. "Hey kids, how was school?" he said over the speaker.

  Matt answered. “Good until we left.”

  “Huh?

  Ellen took over. “Gemma got struck by a bird coming out of college.”

  “No way. You okay, my little Gem?”

  Gemma rolled her eyes. “Fine.”

  “El, just checking you’ll be here by ten in the morning.”

  “I’ll be there, don’t worry. Wouldn’t want to upset your weekend.” She was only half joking.

  “Great, See ya, kids. Behave yourselves.”