The Quigleys at Large

by Simon Mason

  Contents

  Dad in Trouble

  Will in a Dream

  Mum at the Fête

  Friends with Lucy

  To Gwilym and Eleri

  Dad in Trouble

  It was Saturday morning, and the Quigleys were sitting in the back room eating breakfast in their pyjamas and dressing gowns. In a cage on top of the toy cupboard there were two budgies, one green and one blue, and they were eating their breakfast too. They went tuckle, tuckle, natter, natter, natter.

  This wasn't the only noise. There was a thudding.

  Without looking up from the newspaper, Dad asked Will to stop bouncing his tennis ball against the wall just above his head. Will put the ball down next to his bowl of porridge, and looked at it. He gave it a little push, and it rolled slowly across the table. The Quigleys' table was a very good table for rolling things across. The ball slid between the pint of milk and the jug of orange juice, nudged its way round Dad's bowl of cornflakes, and eventually dropped onto the newspaper in Dad's lap.

  Dad looked up and opened his mouth. ‘Did you know this table slopes?' Will asked. ‘I was just testing it, just now, and I've discovered it slopes.’

  Mum said, ‘It's been sloping since the year before Lucy was born. Anyway, someone's coming to fix it next week.’

  Dad went back to reading the paper. Will looked round the room. ‘There's something wrong with those curtains as well,’ he said after a while.

  ‘Yes,’ Mum said. ‘Ever since you showed us that climbing move. We've ordered new ones.’

  Will thought a bit more. ‘I suppose you know the fridge door doesn't shut properly,’ he said. ‘And the window in our room won't open.’

  ‘Enough,’ Dad said irritably. Dad had worked late every night for a week, and he was very tired. When he was in that mood almost any topic of conversation, even sensible and interesting ones like sloping tables and busted fridge doors, made him mad.

  There was a knock at the door, and Lucy ran to answer it. She held part of her breakfast in one hand, and stood on the skirting board and turned the latch with the other, and pulled the door open a few inches. She could do this, just. A man stood on the doorstep.

  ‘What have you come to fix?' she asked. ‘Is it the fridge door? Or our window?’

  ‘The piano,’ the man said. ‘I don't think there's anything wrong with the piano,’ she said. ‘Will?’

  ‘I've come to tune it,’ the man said. After a while, Lucy let him in. Mum took him into the front room, and he got out his instruments and lifted up the top of the piano and started to poke around inside. Mum and Lucy watched. Lucy was still holding her breakfast, which she had forgotten about.

  Will drifted in. He was feeling bored and restless.

  He said, ‘Does anyone want to hear my new laugh? I've been practising a new laugh. It's a good one. It's a fake laugh.’

  ‘Go back into the kitchen,’ Mum said. ‘We're busy.’

  In the kitchen, Dad was still eating breakfast. Or rather not eating, just sitting, staring at the newspaper, his eyes half-closed. Will wondered if he'd fallen asleep sitting down. He'd read that some people can train themselves to fall asleep anywhere, in any position, and he wondered if Dad had trained himself.

  There was a sudden high-pitched scream in Dad's left ear, and he rose a couple of inches off his chair, scattering the pages of the paper onto the floor as he fell.

  ‘Do you like my new laugh?' Will said. ‘It's my fake laugh. Do you want to hear it again?’

  Dad was cross, but Will was restless and bored and wouldn't listen.

  ‘It's just a laugh, Dad. Everyone laughs. Lucy does. Lucy, do a fake laugh.’

  Lucy, who had come in from the living room, made a noise like a nearly dead animal.

  Will said, ‘That's really good, Lucy. Now it's your turn, Dad. What's your fake laugh like?’

  Dad was still picking up the newspaper from the floor. ‘I haven't got a fake laugh,’ he said crossly.

  ‘You have, I've heard it.' ‘Enough,’ Dad said. ‘Enough of all this pestering.' He looked around, as if for help, and his eyes fell on the budgies. ‘The budgies need cleaning out,’ he said to Will, with some satisfaction. ‘I'll get them down, and you can clean them.’

  Will protested. ‘But I never clean them,’ he said. ‘It's not my job. It's your job.’

  This was true. Somehow it had become Dad's job to look after Will's budgies. He didn't know how this had happened. Somehow Will was always too busy, or it was too late, or else he was doing his homework instead.

  ‘But they're your budgies,’ Dad said. ‘But it's your job,’ Will said. Dad opened his mouth to say something else, but at that moment Mum called Will from the front room, and without waiting to hear what else Dad had to say, Will turned and left.

  Dad lifted down the cage. The two budgies hopped from perch to perch as it swayed. The blue one was called Roaring Wind, and the green one was called Deathwing, Lord of the Skies. Will had been doing the Aztecs at school when he gave them their names. Roaring Wind was calm and quiet. Deathwing, Lord of the Skies was mad and loud.

  First Dad made sure the French windows were closed, then he lifted up the top of the cage. Roaring Wind hopped out calmly and flew up to the curtain rail, where he always perched. Deathwing, Lord of the Skies flew round and round in small, fierce circles, squawking loudly, and Dad had to shake the cage to get him to fly out.

  ‘That bird has the brains of a dishcloth,’ Dad said. The birds eyed him from the curtain rail like two old men on a park bench. ‘Fly?' they seemed to say. ‘What do you think we are? Birds?' Of course they didn't actually say anything. The man in the shop had said they could learn to talk, but they hadn't. They squatted on the curtain rail in silence.

  Dad removed the soiled gritpaper from the bottom of the cage. He cleaned the empty cage with a brush and washed it in the sink. He scrubbed the budgies' toy ladder and mirror, replaced the old perch covers with fresh ones, filled the drinking container with clean water and fastened a new piece of cuttlefish bone to the cage's bars. Roaring Wind and Deathwing, Lord of the Skies sat very still on the curtain rail, watching him work.

  ‘Fly, why don't you?' Dad said. Will's book said they were meant to fly for ten minutes every day. Dad jumped up and down, waving his arms at them, but it made no difference. They huddled closer together. Leaving them on the curtain rail, he took the seed hoppers outside to blow away the old husks.

  As he stood over the dustbins the piano tuner went past.

  ‘All done,’ the man said. ‘Don't suppose you know anything about how to make budgies fly, do you?' Dad asked.

  ‘Why? Something wrong with their wings?’

  ‘It's not their wings that are a problem,’ Dad said. ‘It's their brains.’

  He went to see if he could find Will's budgie book on the shelves in the front room, but he couldn't. He couldn't find it because the room was a mess. The Quigleys' front room was often a mess. For a minute or two, Dad half-heartedly tidied it. He cleared away half a dozen of the worst unwashed beakers which had been left along the bookshelves. He gathered armfuls of The Beano from all corners of the room and wedged them tightly into the space between the bookcase and the piano in such a way that if one were pulled out they would all immediately fall onto the rug. He put down the piano lid which the tuner had left up and nearly flattened the end of his finger. And he wiped the remains of Lucy's breakfast off the sole of his right shoe.

  But he still couldn't find Will's budgie book, so he went into the back room again.

  He poured fresh seed into the hoppers. He chopped up some apple and banana, and put the pieces on a saucer at the bottom of the cage.

  ‘Now for you two birdbrains,’ he said. He looked u
p at the top of the curtains. Roaring Wind was sitting on the rail looking back at him. But there was no sign of Deathwing, Lord of the Skies.

  Dad glanced round the room. ‘You don't mean to tell me he's been flying?' he said to Roaring Wind. Roaring Wind was giving nothing away.

  Irritated, Dad began to search round the room. He jumped up to check the tops of the kitchen cabinets, and knelt down to look under the toy cupboard, but he couldn't see Deathwing anywhere. He was just getting annoyed when he saw that the window above the sink was wide open. For a moment he stood looking at it, completely still.

  ‘Oh no,’ he said at last. He stood there for a moment longer, then ran out of the room.

  For the rest of the morning, the Quigleys walked round the back garden looking up into the trees. All the back gardens in the street were the same, long and narrow, overflowing with trees and flowers and bushes. Will used his binoculars. Deathwing Lord of the Skies was nowhere to be seen.

  ‘Why couldn't you have just closed the window?' he asked Dad for the eighth time. Dad looked sorry for the eighth time. ‘I forgot,’ he said. ‘I didn't expect him to actually fly.’

  ‘You're in big trouble,’ Will said. ‘I think we'll find him,’ Lucy said. She didn't have binoculars but she did have the inside of a toilet roll.

  ‘Yes, I think he'll come back,’ Mum said. ‘He'll miss Roaring Wind.' They'd put the cage with Roaring Wind in it on the garden table, for encouragement.

  ‘I bet he's in Singapore by now,’ Dad said in a low voice to Mum.

  After a while Will began to cry, and Mum, Dad and Lucy comforted him.

  ‘Think of it this way,’ Dad said. He used his gentle voice. ‘Even if he doesn't come back, he's free. He'll have a lovely life nesting in the trees, and flying round in the fresh air getting up to all sorts of tricks and jokes.’

  ‘Shut up,’ Will said. Will was very angry with Dad.

  ‘Now, Will,’ Mum said. ‘It's not your budgie that's gone into the wild to die. This isn't his habitat. These are the wrong sorts of trees, and the wrong sort of fresh air.’

  While Mum made lunch, Will sat on the lawn by himself. He remembered the things Deathwing, Lord of the Skies used to do, the way he cocked his head on one side, the way his eyes went big when you pushed your finger towards him, the way he shot from side to side of the cage when he was excited. Will put his face in his arms and sat on the grass feeling sad. He was so sad he didn't hear the noise at first. And when he did hear it, he thought he was imagining it and sat without moving, his face still in his arms, while the noise that seemed to be in his head went tuckle, tuckle, natter, natter, natter. He hardly believed it even when he lifted his head and looked up into the chestnut tree at the corner of the garden, and saw, high up on a branch, a familiar green bird looking down at him.

  ‘Tuckle, tuckle,’ the bird said. And then it flew away out of sight.

  Will ran into the house.

  After that, the Quigleys spotted him several times. He seemed to be staying close to the house. Mum saw him in the ash tree, and Will saw him again flitting between the summer house and the holly bush.

  ‘I saw him too,’ Lucy said.

  ‘Where?' Will said.

  She couldn't remember. She pointed to the end of her toilet roll.

  Over lunch the Quigleys held a meeting to plan how to recapture him.

  ‘What about tranquilliser darts?' Will said.

  ‘He's not a rhino, Will,’ Mum said. ‘Well, what's your idea?' Will said. Mum said, ‘What about dusters?' ‘Dusters?' ‘I remember reading that it confuses a budgie if you throw a duster over it.’

  Dad said that if they could find someone who could throw a duster accurately fifty feet upwards into a chestnut tree and get it to land on top of a bird measuring no more than twenty centimetres from beak to tail, he was very much in favour of it.

  They sat in silence for a while.

  Lucy said she thought that birdsong might work, and that if they didn't know any birdsong, perhaps some other sort of song would do. She remembered that she could play ‘Sing, Bird, Sing' on the recorder. Everyone agreed that, whatever plan they came up with, she should play ‘Sing, Bird, Sing' while they tried it.

  ‘What about just calling him?' Mum said. ‘He's too stupid,’ Dad said. Will said this wasn't true. Will asked who'd left the window open.

  ‘All right, all right,’ Dad said. ‘But it's not as if he's going to answer you. The bird's a mute. I think food is our best bet. We'll put out some food to attract his attention.’

  Later in the afternoon they filled a stack of plastic dishes with five different types of seed, two dozen sprigs of millet, thirty-four budgie treats on sticks and a wide selection of exotic fruit, and positioned them round the garden – on the summer house roof, in the lower branches of the chestnut and ash trees, on the patio, on both fences and across the lawn. Then they went into the house, and hid.

  After a while some starlings flew down and began to feast.

  Dad ran out and chased them away, and hid again.

  Some time later, Lucy suggested she play ‘Sing, Bird, Sing'.

  She played it seventeen times on the trot.

  Just when they thought it wasn't going to work, Will said, ‘Look!' There was a green flash from behind the summer house, and the budgie landed on the edge of the patio, near one of the dishes of food.

  ‘What do we do now, Dad?' Will whispered.

  Dad hesitated. Mum handed him a duster. After giving her a look, he put the duster in his mouth and crawled very quietly out of the French windows. He looked a bit like a dog, or perhaps a sloth. He went very slowly, and when he was halfway across the patio the budgie flew away. Dad took the duster out of his mouth and spat twice. ‘Next time,’ he said, ‘at least can I have a clean duster?’

  All the Quigleys now armed themselves with dusters and hid themselves round the garden. Almost as soon as they were in position, the budgie flew down again, and began to eat the millet suspended from the summer house roof. This time Lucy was the nearest. She tiptoed out from behind the wheelbarrow, and began to walk, very, very slowly, towards the summer house. She was so excited she could hardly walk straight, and she nearly fell into the flowerbed. Out of the corner of her eye she could see Will making furious gestures with his duster, but she ignored him. When she was about three feet away from him, the budgie stopped feeding and hopped to one side, and looked at her nervously. To put him at his ease she began to hum ‘Sing, Bird, Sing' as softly and prettily as she could. Deathwing, Lord of the Skies flew away. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Will fall to the ground and beat the grass with his hands.

  For two or three hours the Quigleys hid and crept and pounced and threw their dusters, and Deathwing, Lord of the Skies flew in and out of the trees in a playful sort of way.

  ‘Right,’ Dad said at last. ‘It's time to get serious.' He went to get the car keys. ‘I'm not fooling around any more.’

  When he came back from town half an hour later, he had with him a ten-metre roll of fine gardener's netting, a fat coil of green twine, a hoolah hoop and a toasting fork.

  For a while he hid in the front room and wouldn't let anyone in. He'd taken the tool box in with him. There were sounds of sawing and hammering. Eventually he came out, and, without speaking to anyone, went into the garden carrying what looked like an enormous, partly-destroyed fishing net. He looked very determined. It wasn't his natural look, and it made him look a bit cross-eyed.

  ‘What's that big ripped knickers thing, Dad?' Lucy asked.

  Dad didn't say anything. In fact they didn't know if he could talk while he was looking determined, his mouth was so tight shut.

  On the lawn he set up his invention. Part of the hoolah hoop had been sawn away to make it horseshoe-shaped, and the end of the net had been stapled round the rim of what remained. Dad stood the hoolah hoop on its sawn-off ends, and propped it up with the toasting fork. Then he spread the netting out behind to form a sort of tunnel. In the mouth of the
tunnel he placed a trail of seed and millet, and inside he made an enormous mound of all the exotic fruit, which he gathered from all the dishes round the garden. Then, gently tying one end of the twine to the toasting fork, he retreated carefully towards a nearby buddleia, paying out the twine behind him. Putting his finger to his lips, he disappeared behind the bush.

  ‘What's wrong with Dad, Mum?' Lucy asked. ‘Why is he in the bush?’

  ‘It's a trap,’ Will said excitedly. ‘It's a great, big, mad trap for budgies. It'll never work,’ he added sadly.

  ‘Will it work, Mum?' Lucy asked. ‘Is Dad good at traps?’

  Mum looked unsure. ‘Well, once he built a barbecue,’ she said. ‘That turned out to be a bit of a trap.’

  They went into the house, and watched from the back room. For half an hour nothing happened. Occasionally Dad shifted position behind the bush with a slight groan.

  ‘What if Deathwing, Lord of the Skies was watching all the time?' Lucy whispered.

  ‘Perhaps he wouldn't have understood what Dad was doing,’ Mum whispered back. ‘Dad thinks he isn't very clever.’

  ‘I'd like to know what he thinks of Dad,’ Will whispered.

  Then there was a movement on the lawn, and they silently pressed to the French windows. A green budgie stood on the grass, its head cocked on one side. For a while it looked around, then hopped towards the trail of millet and seed, and looked round again.

  It wasn't quite under the netting.

  Will crossed his fingers.

  After a minute it took another step towards the large pile of fruit, and stopped, and looked round again. It seemed to be looking at Dad's bush.

  It still wasn't quite under the netting. Will struggled silently to cross his toes.

  A minute passed, and another, and then, just as it seemed that Deathwing, Lord of the Skies wasn't interested in the pile of fruit, he suddenly and greedily swooped onto it. Immediately, Dad reared up from behind the buddleia, grinning fiercely, and yanked as hard as he could on the twine. The toasting fork flew up into the air, Deathwing, Lord of the Skies flew up into the netting, and Dad, yelling loudly, flung himself forwards. The falling toasting fork struck him on the head, and he plunged full-length into the netting with a noise of despair.