Bird Brain

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Bird Brain Page 22

by Guy Kennaway


  36

  Blood and Guts

  BANGER PECKED CRUMBS from the seam on Giles’s passenger seat during the drive to Llanrisant. The sock of Scrabble tiles slumped by the gear stick, but Banger didn’t feel like talking; all it did was overexcite Giles and make it more likely that Banger would end up the man’s celebrity prisoner. Banger had tapped out the Llanrisant postcode on the Sat Nav, and his heart squeezed to see at last the sublime curves of Welsh mountains on the horizon. As they drove along the A5, the Dee flashed in and out of sight along the water meadows, and the misty blue summits beckoned from beyond. They rose in altitude and the season started reversing. On the Cheshire plane the bluebells were droopy and falling over, but in the woods up here they were in the first flush of freshness. The best way to smell bluebells, Banger had discovered, was to walk through them and crush them with his boots.

  They came through the town of Llangollen, its steeply pitched slates and long eaves crowded around the medieval bridge that spanned the roaring river. Banger spotted one of his old beaters standing outside a house under his porch smoking a roll-up, a place he had last seen him over a year before, doing exactly the same thing. As they left the town, and Giles dropped down a gear for the hill up to Llanrisant, Banger felt the feathers on his neck rise with anticipation and fear.

  They pulled up outside the Peyton Arms, a pub that used to be part of the estate, but which in 1958 Oofy had given to the barmaid in an act of drunken folly (and had refused to go back on the next morning when he was sober, as a point of honour).

  Giles turned off the engine.

  ‘You sure you want to do this?’ Giles asked. ‘I was just thinking. I don’t know if you are interested in money, but we could set up a trust for pheasants, and both make quite a bit if that’s what you …’

  Banger tapped the door handle.

  ‘There’s a lot of shooting round here, the bastards,’ said Giles. ‘It’s dangerous for you.’

  Banger tapped the door handle again. Giles leant over to open the door. Banger sprang out, turned, and bowed deeply.

  ‘Go steady then, little fella,’ said Giles.

  Banger trotted off, skirted the pub and alighted on a table in the beer garden. He could see a few drinkers hunched over their brown pints in the gloom of the lounge bar. A mighty black beam spanned the inglenook. It was a well-travelled hunk of wood, which was now enjoying its retirement. It had started life as an acorn in the seventeenth century, had grown into a tree on the land of Llanrisant, had stood for a hundred and eighty years, weathering storms, droughts and even a hurricane, before being felled in the eighteenth century, sold, transported and adzed into a beam for the shipyard at Liverpool. The vessel it went into sailed the globe, making journeys to India four times. The beam shuddered in the hull at the Battle of the Saints in the Caribbean, was present to break a pirate’s siege on Hispaniola, and finally made it back to Liverpool where it was stripped from the hulk, removed, and sold back to one of Banger’s antecedents, who installed it in 1812 over the hearth in the Peyton Arms, only a couple of miles from where it had started life. Here it had sat in contented, secure, warm retirement, listening to pub gossip for two hundred years, and now, with the decline of the pub, watching the mainly empty room fill on weekends with walkers and fisherman on day tickets for the Dee.

  Banger shivered with the excitement of being back on his land, and hurried up the hill to revel in his woods. Back amongst the ferns, foxgloves and mosses of his own terrain, he passed into one of his new plantations; he could see how the wood was lifting itself off its knees, shaking off the bracken, and transforming from a thicket into a cover of saplings. It was a compartment of forestry called Fron Llwyd, that had been one of Oofy’s fir plantations before Banger felled and replanted it with deciduous trees. One or two of the old oaks had survived forty years trapped in the darkness among the spruce, and now had greenery sprouting the length of their spindly bodies.

  The landscape of Marfield, and the Cheshire countryside Banger had crossed on his trek, Banger could understand and interpret; he could see where a hedge had been rooted out for the convenience of the farmer, where new trees had been planted and old ones removed. He could work out where underground pipes had dried a marsh to make it ploughable or an old wall had collapsed, grassed over and was no more than a bump in a meadow. He could see all that, but at Llanrisant the ground was fertile with the invisible landscape of memory.

  He stood under the pointed leaves of a Spanish chestnut and remembered being on the same spot as a child when Oofy had given the command to the head keeper to move a pheasant pen fifty yards up the hill. In those days there were thirty-six workers on the estate ranging from an eight-year-old girl to a seventy-four year-old man, nine of whom were underkeepers. When Oofy’s keeper had demurred about moving the pen, Oofy had said, ‘Don’t be silly, it’ll only take an hour, it’s just a bit of netting and a couple of planks.’ Once the team had dug out the fencing, loaded it onto a cart, moved it, unloaded it, and reassembled the pen, it had taken three days. Not only Banger remembered this; the trees around him also did. Trees have little fondness for humans. Men had a habit of walking up to them and doing one of two things: either unzipping their flies and urinating, or cutting them down, but these trees recognised and remembered Banger with affection for what he had done to them and their brothers and sisters. But this is not the story of trees, this is the story of animals.

  To have dwelt on land for generations, whether it was a city street or a country estate, and to know who had lived in that house or had gone to that pub, to have known who had worked, played and died there, that was what made a place rich to live in. Banger knew this land, and more, it knew him. He took a deep breath as he felt many old memories stirring. Then his attention was caught by a bright plastic sign screwed into the trunk of an ash tree that read bird conservation area – keep out. William must have put it up to keep the public away from some new pens that had been built in a glade. Banger shook his head. There wasn’t sufficient cover for pheasants here; he would never have tried to rear birds in such an unpromising spot. As he walked on, he saw how many more pens had sprung up, and felt outrage at what William and his keeper had been up to. Then Banger suddenly stopped, staring at something lying in a hollow by the track.

  At first he thought it was a dead mammal of some kind – a big fluffy dog or pony or cow, but as he stepped closer he realized it was a heap of decomposing pheasants, tied in braces, buried in a shallow grave that had been disturbed by badgers. These were the unwanted corpses that Idris had charged William to take to the pâté maker. Banger stood staring at the pit, furious that this had taken place at Llanrisant. To shoot so many birds you had to dispose of them in a mass grave was an abhorrent act.

  Banger silently paid his respects to the slaughtered pheasants, and pressed on to emerge from under a rhododendron bush on the wide striped lawn below the turrets of Llanrisant Hall. Sunlight gleamed on the new lead on the towers. Banger trod carefully into the courtyard, where Jam lay in the kennel. The spaniel looked up.

  ‘Banger?’ he said. ‘Is that you?’

  ‘Yes, Jam, it is. Where’s my car?’

  ‘You can’t drive, you’re a pheasant.’

  ‘I’m not an imbecile, Jam. I need to find my car.’

  Locket, lying on a sun-warmed window ledge opened one eye.

  ‘Is it still in the garage?’ Banger asked Jam. ‘The Lanny?’

  ‘No,’ said Jam.

  ‘Where is it?’ Banger snapped.

  ‘Why do you want it?’ Jam asked.

  ‘Don’t waste my time, you ruddy dog.’

  ‘No, Banger. You are not a human and not my master any more, you can’t get cross with me any more or shout at me. It won’t do any good. Do you know what it’s like being caged up in a kennel all day and all night? I don’t get to see anything any more, the others all run around doing what they want but I am stuck here, and I want to know what’s going on.’

  ‘All right,
I’m sorry. The thing is I need to find it because of something called a will. My will. Leaving this house to Victoria and Tom. It is in the Lanny.’

  Locket stood up, openly alarmed.

  ‘Now will you tell me where it is?’ Banger asked Jam.

  ‘William gave it to Victoria. They live in Bryn’s caravan now.’

  ‘And they have the Lanny?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Jam.

  ‘Right. I have to get down there.’

  Banger trotted away across the drive and into the green shade of his woods. Jam had just nodded off back to sleep when he was awoken again, this time by Tosca, who was saying to Spot, ‘Don’t pee on the gravel, do it on the flower bed where you might kill something ugly.’

  ‘Tosca! Tosca!’ Jam called. ‘I’ve just seen Banger again. He’s going over to Bryn’s.’

  ‘Oh Jam … stop it …’

  ‘NO!’ shouted Jam. ‘Believe me. It’s him. Stop calling me a liar. I am not a liar.’

  Certainty burned so brightly in Jam’s eyes that Tosca paused.

  ‘All right. So where is he?’ she asked.

  ‘He’s gone over to Bryn’s to find the Lanny.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He said his will is in it.’

  ‘His will?’ mouthed Tosca.

  ‘He said it gives the house to Victoria and Tom.’

  Tosca went weak at the knees. ‘Oh my God, tell me you’re not lying.’

  ‘I never lie,’ said Jam.

  ‘Come on,’ said Tosca, running across the lawn.

  37

  Snap Shot

  BANGER PASSED KNOTS of William’s shell-shocked pheasants wandering aimlessly on a single-track lane, crossed a fallow field, ran straight up through a steep birchwood, down another hill, across a stream and through a field of traumatised sheep, and reached Bryn’s farm. He perched on one of Bryn’s drunken gates at the edge of the farmyard where he could see his Land Rover and next to it, a thick-set man with ginger hair and sideburns counting banknotes into Victoria’s hand. The two humans conversed for a minute and then the man climbed into the Land Rover and gunned the throaty old engine into life.

  Banger immediately grasped the situation, and assessed his options. With his sharp pheasant eyes he saw that the driver’s window was half-open. He also saw the curve that the car was going to take to leave the yard, and judged its speed as soon as it got on its way. This was going to have to be a snap shot; a technique of shooting Banger employed when shooting grouse, when there was only a split second to grab a kill as they swept at speed low overhead. There wasn’t time to swing the gun, you just aimed at the spot in the sky where you knew the bird would meet your shot.

  Banger’s practised mind made the calculation, and he launched himself in a straight line off the gate.

  Tosca, Sunshine and Spot looked down from the birch wood at the farmyard below, and saw a pheasant take off from the gate, speed through the air and disappear into the driver’s window of the moving car. The Lanny swerved hard left, and then right, and finally rocked off the track, hurtled down the bank towards the river, rolled onto its left side, and came to a halt with its engine racing and wheels spinning in air.

  ‘Banger, I take it,’ Tosca said.

  ‘It wouldn’t surprise me,’ said Sunshine.

  Banger came to in the passenger footwell. Paramedics were lifting the man upwards through the driver’s door in the distorted gravity of the post-car-crash world. Banger was pleased to see he hadn’t killed the stranger. A pair of heavy boots kicked and flailed as the driver left the vehicle shouting, ‘It was that stupid bloody pheasant’s fault.’

  When the sounds died away and the ambulance departed, Banger tried to make a move but was trapped under a pile of rubbish. He recognised one of his own wellington boots pressing in his face. He also recognised bits of paper – insurance documents and ancient MOT certificates among the lengths of rope, blue plastic piping, baler twine, jump leads and other detritus. He looked around for the envelope, but couldn’t find it.

  Banger heard a sniffing noise coming from the door he was lying on.

  ‘Hello?’ he said. ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘I’d like you to know, Banger,’ said Tosca through the metal, ‘that you are responsible for ruining my life. I used to live in a warm, dry house with your contented daughter and grandson. I am now reduced to a damp caravan with two severely depressed human beings.’

  ‘Not intentionally,’ said Banger, ‘I assure you. Do you know what a will is?’

  ‘Of course I know what a will is,’ snapped Tosca. ‘We’ve talked of little else in the last few months.’

  ‘My will left the Hall to Victoria and Tom,’ said Banger, ‘and I think it is somewhere in this car with me. I put it above the visor the day before I died. William got his hands on an old will. We must get it to Victoria.’

  ‘How the hell are we going to do that?’ said Tosca.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Tosca padded back to the Pemberley, where Sunshine and Spot were sunning themselves while listening to Tom and Victoria argue. ‘He gave you the money – it’s his car, you don’t have to give it back, Mum.’

  ‘But I feel bad,’ Victoria said. ‘He wasn’t even out of the yard.’

  ‘Mum – we cannot afford to be soft about this. You’ve got to be tough, it’s only realistic,’ Tom said.

  Tosca said to Sunshine, ‘It was Banger. He’s in there, and still alive. He said the will that leaves the Hall to Victoria and Tom is in the Lanny. That was why he stopped it leaving.’

  The door of the Pemberley swung open and Victoria came out. ‘I’m going up to the hospital to see he’s all right,’ she said. ‘It’s the least I can do.’

  After she had trudged off towards the lane, Tosca said, ‘We probably don’t have long before that car is towed. Tom must search it.’

  ‘And how are we going to get him to do that?’ said Sunshine.

  ‘We’ve got to lure him there, but I don’t know how.’

  Banger shouted from the car, ‘Bark and paw the ground.’

  ‘It doesn’t work. Humans just think you’re playing,’ said Tosca, as the three walked over to the wreck.

  ‘Banger?’ said Sunshine.

  ‘Sunshine! How are you, old girl?’ Banger said.

  ‘Battling on,’ she said.

  ‘Good girl,’ he said.

  ‘This is a bit of a muddle, isn’t it?’ Sunshine said.

  ‘We have to clear it up,’ said Banger through the bodywork. ‘How about this: find something that Tom loves, steal it, and make him run after it to get him here. What does Tom love more than anything?’

  ‘His porn mag!’ shouted Spot.

  ‘I can’t drag something that size across the yard,’ Tosca said. ‘Besides, there are issues of taste, in every way.’

  ‘There is one other thing he never lets out of his sight,’ said Sunshine. ‘And if I know Tom, he’ll be reaching for it now.’

  The dogs returned to the Pemberley, where Tom sat with hanging head, mumbling to himself. He checked that his mother was out of sight, felt under his mattress, and withdrew a small rectangular tin. He clicked the top, and took out a cloudy plastic bag and a packet of jumbo Rizlas.

  ‘Perfect timing,’ said Sunshine. ‘Spot, you’re the fittest. On my word, grab that little bag and get out of here.’

  ‘Don’t be cross if I make a mistake,’ said the terrier.

  ‘You won’t,’ said Sunshine, ‘this is important.’

  ‘Sorry, Tom, we have to do this,’ Sunshine said, adding, ‘Go, Spot.’

  Spot jumped onto the bed, put a pair of paws on the table, picked up the plastic bag in his muzzle, leapt onto the floor and nipped out the door.

  ‘Come back,’ Tom shouted. ‘Spot, good boy, come on, come here.’

  Spot stood twenty feet from the caravan, the bag of hash dangling from his mouth, his tail wagging.

  ‘Frigging dog,’ muttered Tom, pulling on his boots. He emerged from the
Pemberley. ‘Drop it,’ he shouted.

  ‘Walk towards the Lanny,’ Tosca said.

  Spot turned and trotted towards the car. Tom followed him. Tosca and Sunshine brought up the rear.

  ‘Don’t get too far ahead,’ said Tosca. ‘We don’t want him to give up.’

  ‘I don’t think he’ll do that,’ said Sunshine.

  ‘Show him the rabbit,’ Tosca said. Spot stopped, turned and waved the bag around. Tom swore under his breath and crept towards him with outstretched hand.

  ‘Come on, Spotty. Here, boy.’

  ‘Right. Up onto the Lanny.’

  Spot turned and looked at the car. He crouched low and leapt onto the exposed underside of the vehicle, scrabbling over the exhaust box to get up.

  ‘Jesus,’ said Tom.

  ‘Drop it in the window,’ said Tosca, ‘but let him see what you’re doing.’

  Spot carefully picked his way along the top and stood by the open driver’s window. Then he dropped it.

  Tom approached the car, clambered onto it and peered inside. He swore again, and went round to the other side for a look. There was just enough room to open the passenger door a few inches. He dug away at the damp turf and made a gap he could crawl into.

  Banger felt the floor give as the door opened, and saw Tom’s arm and head appear. Tom! his heart cried, until he silenced it. An uncharacteristic wave of love surged through Banger, who had to suppress the desire to touch his grandson. My blood, thought Banger, my boy … But Banger closed his eyes and pretended to be dead, while Tom dragged out the contents of the footwell searching for his dope. Finally he wriggled back out, stood up, said ‘Idiot dog,’ to Spot, and wandered back to the Pemberley with the bag.

  Banger managed to twist around and squeeze out of the gap to stand and give himself a good shake on the litter-strewn grass. He kicked at the old newspapers and faded documents looking for the envelope. Then he read the sweet words: Free amplified mobile phone when you purchase a hearing aid, and across it in pencil, B. A. Hudson Esq, written in his own hand.

  ‘Hallelujah,’ he said. ‘Tosca! Sunshine!’ he called. ‘I’ve got it.’

 

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