Bird Brain

by Guy Kennaway

  ‘I’m waiting to hear,’ Victoria said. ‘Would you give the dogs a run, they’ve been inside all day.’

  Tom led the three of them over a stile towards a boggy patch of alders, where he sat on a mossy trunk, took a tin out of his hoody pocket, and started rolling a joint.

  ‘Right, that’s our signal,’ said Tosca, setting off towards Llanrisant, a distance of about three miles over steep hills.

  It was still blowy, and the wind had an edge to it. As the dogs climbed the second hill into the first of the Llanrisant woods they started to meet some of the daft new pheasants who came towards them saying, ‘A very good day to you! How are you? Would you like a dance with us?’

  ‘Ignore them,’ Tosca said to Spot, who had engaged one in a conversation that he hoped might end in a good chase and general mayhem.

  Jam’s barks came and went on the breeze, but were clearly sharp and desperate as Tosca and Spot emerged from the rhododendrons and trotted across the well-rolled lawn towards the Hall.

  ‘Jam, Jam, calm down,’ Tosca said. ‘What the hell is the matter with you?’

  ‘Are you deaf?’ Jam shouted at Tosca. ‘I have been calling for two days.’

  ‘I know – it’s very annoying. What’s the problem?’

  ‘Locket told me where the evidence is.’

  The cat flap clicked and Locket appeared. She wanted to be sure Jam didn’t mess up his lines.

  ‘Locket,’ Jam said, ‘tell them, go on.’

  ‘You are looking for evidence that incriminates William, am I correct?’ she said.

  ‘Why are you suddenly so helpful?’ Tosca asked.

  ‘I saw William bury something soon after we arrived here, and it has been on my mind. I think it might be important. It’s been on my conscience.’

  ‘Yes, but cats don’t have consciences,’ Tosca said.

  ‘I am an unusual cat,’ smiled Locket.

  ‘Where is it?’ Tosca said.

  ‘Behind the greenhouse,’ Jam said.

  Locket nodded. She didn’t even like to be seen talking to the dogs. William had a camera in the courtyard trained on the human flap, and she was careful to stay out of shot. She had learnt all about conspiracies, and the importance of steering them from a safe distance, away from Cary. Locket had watched how Cary had urged William on, but had never actually done anything criminal herself, just given him ideas and encouragement, left him to do the dirty work. Just as she was now doing with the dogs. You had always to think about what would happen if the plan went wrong. If William found the dogs with the evidence it would be the end of them. Even associating with them could be fatal. He had killed Banger, and he was always talking with a glint of enjoyment of making hundreds of people what he referred to as ‘redundant’ – obviously a euphemism for killing them. She slipped away with a swish of her tail.

  ‘Also, Mum, I saw Banger when I was out shooting at Marfield,’ Jam said.

  ‘Don’t make stuff up,’ Tosca said.

  ‘No I saw him. He’s a pheasant now.’

  ‘Don’t be so stupid,’ Sunshine said.

  ‘Right, Sunshine, take us to this greenhouse,’ said Tosca. ‘Goodbye, Jam. Come with us, Spot, we’re going to need you.’

  ‘Me? Really?’

  ‘Incredibly, yes.’

  Sunshine led Tosca and Spot across the courtyard and round the side of the house to where the woodshed and kitchen garden lay. On the needle-strewn ground under some yews behind the greenhouse they soon saw that the ground had been disturbed.

  ‘Spot,’ said Tosca.

  ‘Me?’

  ‘I need an unskilled manual worker. Dig.’

  Spot put down his nose, set his front legs into motion, and sent out a plume of earth between his legs. The mound of dark, flakey earth grew, and his nose dipped into the hole.

  Suddenly he shouted, ‘I found it. I found it! Look! Look!’

  ‘Stop, Spot,’ said Sunshine.

  ‘But it’s right here.’

  ‘Stop,’ said Sunshine, going to the edge of the hole.

  ‘Can you see what it is?’ Tosca asked.

  ‘It’s a box of cartridges, and a plastic bag with something in it,’ said Spot. ‘Hold on, I’ll pull them out.’

  ‘No. We mustn’t touch it,’ said Sunshine.

  ‘Why?’ asked Tosca.

  ‘This is what Temperance Brennan does on “Bones”. She looks for clues. And she always says the evidence mustn’t be disturbed. There could be something on it.’

  ‘Like what?’ said Tosca.

  ‘Sperm.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘I don’t know but she nearly always finds it,’ said Sunshine. ‘That’s why we mustn’t touch anything.’

  Spot reversed out of the hole, with a lot of dirt and a smile on his muzzle. Tosca and Sunshine looked into the pit to see some damp cardboard and the shiny brass of the cartridges glinting in the dark earth.

  ‘Look,’ said Tosca, ‘High Pheasant twenty bore, that’s the same as the one that blew up the gun.’

  ‘Why can’t we pick it up and take it to Victoria?’ said Spot.

  ‘It’s what Temperance Brennan always says: don’t touch it till the uniform arrives. That’s the police.’

  ‘How are we going to call them?’ asked Spot.

  They were at the glass wall that separated the animals from the humans, through which no animal could pass. There was no calling the police; it wasn’t possible. It was a fact that all animals had to live with: humans could not understand them. Humans often thought they could, but they couldn’t. Tosca had watched many films in which dogs, at crucial moments in the plot, communicated with humans: Timmy in Enid Blyton’s Famous Five was always pawing the ground, barking and leading the gang to the hidden stash of burgled goods. In real life Timmy would have been told to shut up and stop making a fuss while the children were thinking about what to do.

  When they were living in the farmhouse, Spot had got an alder twig caught across the roof of his mouth, right at the back. He had tried everything to dislodge it, but couldn’t. He had coughed, he had gnawed, he had ran round in tight circles, he had jumped up and down, he had even done somersaults, but it had stuck fast between his molars. It had hurt to eat and had stopped him sleeping. He had lost condition and whined all day. As the twig had trapped food, his breath had grown disgusting. Victoria had closely inspected the little terrier and decided he had a parasite, then a vitamin imbalance, then she had fed him a course of antibiotics, and had overdosed him on garlic pills. She had taken him to the vet; the vet had looked in his mouth but had missed the stick, and had suspected bowel cancer. The whole time Tosca and Spot had tried to tell Victoria about the twig, jumping up and down squeaking, ‘Check his mouth! It’s in his mouth! It’s at the back!’ Tosca had even got some twigs and brought them to Victoria, but all she had said was, ‘Are you a little bird making a nest? You daft doggy, you are so sweet, come here for a little kiss,’ while she dosed up Spot with yet another wormer. It ended up with the twig finally decomposing and being spat out; Victoria saw the malodorous brown spume and said, ‘What on earth have you been eating? I think we are going to have to go the enema route with you, young man.’

  It just wasn’t possible to communicate anything complex, or even simple, to humans. Dogs were in a relationship in which they were silent, or not silent, but never understood, beyond the most basic. All they could really say was I am happy, by wagging their tail. It was a frustrating arrangement.

  Tosca stared at the turrets and windows of the Hall. ‘I have to live in that house,’ she said. ‘So we have to think of a way of calling the police.’

  ‘We could bark?’ said Spot.

  ‘Shut up,’ said Tosca.

  ‘We don’t want William to see we have found the cartridges,’ said Sunshine. ‘Maybe Spot should fill in the hole again. For the time being at least.’

  ‘I suppose so,’ said Tosca. ‘Go on, then, and don’t get any on me.’

  While Spot
paddled earth back into the hole, Tosca and Sunshine trotted back to Jam’s kennel.

  ‘We found it,’ said Tosca. ‘Not that we can do anything about it.’

  ‘It’s nice to know the truth,’ said Sunshine. ‘We’d better be getting back, we’re meant to be out walking with Tom.’

  ‘Don’t worry about him, he’ll be stoned off his head by now.’

  ‘I wish I could come with you,’ said Jam.

  ‘One day, maybe,’ said Tosca. ‘Come on.’

  They returned to the Pemberley Sovereign to find Tom on all fours looking for something on the ground.

  ‘He’s dropped his nugget of dope again,’ said Tosca.

  ‘Let’s hunt it,’ said Spot. ‘I ate a bit last week. Had a very pleasant afternoon.’

  Victoria opened the door of the static and Tom and the dogs trooped in.

  ‘Tom, would you clean the car please?’ Victoria said with a smile.

  ‘No,’ Tom said, picking up the TV remote.

  22

  Princess Anne’s Bosom

  BANGER LAY IN the oily mud at the verge of the road. He couldn’t move, and could barely open his eyes. The last drops of life were oozing from him. He smiled at the thought of death, and remembered Atavac saying it wasn’t too bad to die, especially if you were a pheasant. ‘For many a time I have been half in love with easeful death,’ Atavac had said. He remembered Jack Kennedy dying by the fence in the water meadow. Banger’s wing jabbed with agony, so he just stayed still, resting his head on the tarmac, waiting for the final moment.

  He heard a passing car stop, and then reverse back to him. He assumed it was Kevin, and squeezed up his eyes, knowing he was about to have his neck wrung by the keeper. There were no hard feelings. As a human, Banger had done it countless times. He was a wounded pheasant: his neck had to be wrung.

  He heard the footsteps approach and stop.

  ‘It’s alive!’ said a young girl’s voice. ‘It’s still breathing.’

  ‘Amy, please, we can’t save every wounded animal we see …’ a woman called from the car.

  He felt two slender arms slip under him and raise him gently up, and he was carried carefully towards the orange glow of the back lights of a car.

  ‘It’s huge,’ said the woman. ‘It’s too big.’

  ‘It’s just going to peg out, Amy,’ said a boy in the back of the car. ‘Chuck it back and let nature take its course.’

  ‘No!’ shouted the girl. ‘It is not going to die, all right?’

  Nobody said anything. Amy, an eleven-year-old girl with dark hair framing a round face, got in the car with Banger in her lap. Her mother drove on. None of them said anything. Banger opened an eye – he could see a man in the passenger seat dozing and breathing heavily, a woman driving, and a boy of about Tom’s age sitting beside him. He closed his eyes and dropped out of consciousness.

  He woke as he was being laid on a nest of towels on the lino floor of a neat utility room. Banger could smell animal among the humans, but didn’t think it was a dog or cat. Amy left the room, saying, ‘Sleep well.’ Banger watched the orange light on the clothes dryer until he felt death, easeful death, coaxing him downwards. He snapped awake; he wasn’t ready to die. He was a Peyton-Crumbe, a fighter to the end. He tried to focus on something that would get him angry, and keep his brain moving. William: his brother and murderer.

  William was the issue of an ill-advised and short-lived marriage Oofy had entered into late in his life. Banger was seventeen years old when William was born, but within a year the child had been taken away to live with his mother in London. William had only turned up again when he was thirty and working in the city. Banger had fallen out with Victoria by then and took up with William rather as he might a long-lost child. He hoped that it would annoy Victoria. It didn’t; she really didn’t care by that point. Banger had introduced William to shooting, and the man had taken to it like a duck to slaughter.

  Banger knew that William had been frustrated by how few birds he and Idris had put down at Llanrisant, but he had tried to teach William that the best shoots didn’t feature flocks of semi-tame, artificially fattened birds. It was true that they had argued about it a couple of times, but Banger was astonished that it had led to William murdering him. Only Banger, in the whole wide world, could believe that a disagreement over the number of pheasants a man put down in his own woods could be a motive for fratricide. But murder he knew it to be: someone had tampered with his gun. He knew that Jam had told him the truth, Jam didn’t have a deceitful bone in his body.

  Banger burned with hatred for William; it felt good, and it saw him through another hour on the floor of the utility room. He smiled as he thought of William now having to deal with Victoria in charge of the estate, and mentally chuckled as he thought about her closing down the shoot. For once that idea didn’t agonise him. She was a tough old bird, Victoria, and wouldn’t roll over as easily as he had. You couldn’t kill Victoria; and though Banger had often thought about it, he now considered his daughter fondly, and was pleased to imagine her and Tom in the Hall.

  This pleasant thought sent him slipping again. So he searched for something that enraged him, and saw a sticker on the fridge-freezer of the World wide Fund for Nature panda. The WWF was a global organisation devoted to sentimentalising animals, and in Banger’s opinion, degrading them in the process. The panda was actually a bear – albeit a vegetarian. But it lived and fought and mated in the forest; it took its chances, it had to, and was tough and noble. The WWF had reduced it on their sticker to a cuddly toy. Banger was sure that all the endangered species that were being saved by incarceration in the prison of a zoo would agree with Tipu Sultan, the Indian leader, who said it was better to live a day as a tiger than a hundred years as a sheep.

  The Duke of Edinburgh was responsible, with his Award Scheme for despoiling the British countryside through the agency of the thousands of teenagers he sent out into the lanes and fields to leave gates open and drop litter. But worse than that, he was the president of the WWF. Banger felt a welcome jolt of rage as he considered the British Royal Family, only one of whom he had any time for: Princess Anne. She alone retained her dignity when faced with the blandishments of the court. Princess Anne dressed properly, not like some hooker, and refused to take part in the celebrity nonsense. He thought fondly of Princess Anne’s breasts; they were being brought to him, aristocratically pale, resting on a velvet cushion emblazoned with the royal coat of arms, and he felt himself sliding again. He needed anger. The Duke was a sewer for turning the WWF into a cuddly toy emporium. The man shot pheasants and probably big game, but was too scared to admit it in public. His son, Prince Charles, was the Prince of Wales but acted like a local councillor. Always seeking approval, always trying to do good. He was the Prince of Fucking Wales, he shouldn’t give a damn what any man thought of him – instead of which he adopted that hand-wringing concern for people and subjects which should be beneath him.

  Hating do-gooders bought Banger another hour. He remembered a lady from the town who had driven up to the Hall and rung the bell to ask him to buy some tickets to a ball to raise money for an earthquake appeal. She had tight grey curls, an old-fashioned blue coat and a book of tickets in her hand.

  ‘I never give to natural disasters,’ Banger shouted, pretending she was deaf for his own amusement. ‘Only encourages more of them. You give to an earthquake this week, and up pops a volcano or a hurricane next week on the off chance it can get some more of your cash.’

  The kindly lady blinked; she didn’t quite understand.

  Banger made a clarification: ‘No,’ he said. ‘No thank you. Now leave.’

  While she was still in earshot Banger had shouted, ‘Griffiths! Lock that ruddy gate and throw away the key, I’m fed up with interfering busybodies wasting my time.’ That was where the rumour that the gates of Llanrisant were locked came from. In fact, the lock had been broken years before and the gates couldn’t be secured shut.

  Banger had contemp
t for most charities. He couldn’t see the point of giving someone money to give to someone else. It was like paying someone to have sex, or paying someone to shoot pheasants. It was actually fun giving money to poor people. Charities made it sound tricky to distribute money among the poor.

  Banger had once given to charity. And he was damned if someone else was going to have the fun of seeing the grateful recipient. This event occurred when Banger had made a mistake with the decimal point on his bank statement and had discovered that he didn’t have ten thousand pounds in his current account but a hundred thousand. The very fact that he could have made an error of this magnitude illustrated how used to William’s influence on his finances he had become, and how beneficial it was. Annoying as William was, the man seemed to be able conjure cash out of thin air. This was in 2006. Happy to find himself considerably richer than he thought he was, Banger had decided to give some to charity. He fixed on what he considered a generous sum – one hundred pounds – and went into Llangollen to look for someone to give it to. Unable to find any mendicants on its prosperous streets, he had driven to Wrexham, where he found a hollow-eyed youth under a blanket on a nicely busy street near McDonald’s. He wanted passers-by to witness his largesse, to make it more satisfying. Who wanted to give anonymously? It took away the fun. He splayed five twenty-pound notes like a hand of cards at the youth. The boy looked first suspicious and then scared, grabbing the notes, and stuffing them in his pocket as he stood up, chucking down his blanket and limping off, saying thanks.

  Beautifully, a child said to her mother, ‘Hey Mam – did ya see that? That man just gave that beggar a load a cash.’ Banger smiled munificently at the mother and child. For once in his life he had the feeling that someone was thinking something nice about him. He stood there and wallowed in it. It was enjoyable. He vowed to do it again. In ten years’ time. But maybe not with quite so much money.

  These varied thoughts got Banger through till dawn, when he heard the first stirrings of humans in the Bridge household. He lay panting with thirst until Amy came in, picked him up and put him in the car. Mrs Bridge, a thin woman with a soft sagging face and grey roots, drove them. She said, ‘Amy, I know you want to help, but this might not be the best thing for Dad at this time.’