by Liz Grzyb
Sondra leans in to look at the photos over Creg’s shoulder. She squeezes him around the waist one more time, then says, “Come on; let’s get you home.”
* * ** * ** * *
Pink Footed
Marian Womack
For all Edwina knew, it could be the last pink-footed goose on Planet Earth. A wave of contradictory emotions ran through her when she identified the dull brown colours of the immature specimen: the absence of bright greenish-blue feathers on his tail; the small eyes, lacking the deep red circles which gave mature birds their characteristic haunting look; his absence of fear, too young to register the danger of a hungry predator. Although she would not have killed him. She would not have killed him in a million years. That little goosie was a walking miracle.
“Hello there.”
She turned, reaching for her hiking stick. The man was wearing a priest collar, but it could be a decoy. He was carrying a foraging basket, filled with suspicious looking leaves and mushrooms.
“I hope I didn’t startle you, my dear.”
She looked back. The bird wasn’t there anymore.
“No.” She felt she ought to say something else. “There was a bird here right now.”
“Beg your pardon?”
“A bird. A pink-footed goose. Right there.” She pointed unhelpfully to the tumbled trees and the overgrown thickets. The man looked around, suddenly nervous. She heard his stomach rumble; he was as hungry as she was.
“But . . . That’s impossible. There haven’t been any for so long . . . Years. I should know, I am—was—a keen birdwatcher.”
She smiled, mostly to herself. She wondered whether she should reveal her old profession to the man. Those things didn’t count much any longer. She decided to go ahead.
“I used to work here,” she said, a twinge of pride in her voice.
“In Wakefield? The reserve?”
“That’s right.”
The face of the clergyman contracted slightly. “Ah! And what did you do, if I may ask?” His tone implied that he expected her to have worked in the souvenir shop.
Edwina breathed in, her chest filling with pride as she announced: “I was—I am—a biologist. My job was counting the birds, keeping track of the yearly migration patterns.”
She wondered whether to tell him the other thing. She decided against it.
After the appropriate exclamations of admiration, the clergyman invited her to tea in his house. She was thankful for the gesture, but declined politely, as all that meant these days was a rusty teapot filled with old dry herbs, probably rotting, perhaps something moving at its bottom—after all, insects were very rich in important nutrients. She made her excuses and walked on, still looking around her for any signs of the young bird.
According to the RSPB reports, still available on the cloud, she was the last person to have seen and recorded a specimen of pink-footed goose on the British Isles. It was a dubious record to hold. It had been the high point of her career; undoubtedly, it had also been the low point. From then on, there had been a steady decrease in the county’s species. First the goshawks and the honey buzzards had failed to return; the bittern and the avocet had walked away from their watery homes; the bearded tit, the Cetti’s and Pallas’s warbler, the crossbill, the firecrest: all had vanished as if into thin air. Only the sandpiper, some hawfinches, owls and cranes were still seen. She knew this only too well; she still walked the perimeter of the reserve most days, counting ghosts.
The pink-footed goose had breathed its last nearly four years ago. It had been recorded. Sadly, it had been she who had done so.
Their new world was one overtaken by insects and vermin, mostly. Lizards, multiplying with some keen purpose. Some people claimed to have seen wolves, but even the cattle had been slaughtered long ago.
Rabbits, many rabbits. They liked breeding, obviously. Although at the rate that they had become a major part of the everyday diet, who knew how long they would be around for. Rats, of course. Foxes. But they were particularly disgusting, leaving an acid tang in the mouth.
Why the birds had disappeared was a true mystery, as they hadn’t been the easiest of things to catch for the pot. Some people thought there was something in the air, in the water. Thomas, still working at the University, had to know more things than he let on . . .
She went back home, but could not sleep thinking of the bird. She had had hallucinations before, she could admit that much to herself. It was the hunger. She woke up in the middle of the night, unable to sleep, and went to the kitchen to make herself some hot water. She would have to make preparations to trap the bird. She had to find her, at all costs. She had to make sure she lived; she had to make sure she bred.
She could do this alone, of course . . . He would be a hindrance, she would be much more efficient without him goofing around . . . But she flicked her little communication set and put the call out nonetheless.
* * *
Albert Ponsonby III walked back to his lodgings on the top floor of a triangular house, filled with narrow staircases and overheated back passageways. It was a large house but extremely untidy, with a peculiar distribution of rooms due to its use as rental dwellings for young men who worked in the capital but could not afford any better. It was badly insulated and even worst lit, the home of mice, cockroaches and other creatures, which had got inside through its many cracks to escape the infernal heat.
Ponsonby was carrying several packages of different shapes and sizes: the synthetic coffee in one of the pink bags with its Liberty’s golden hologram, attesting that it came from one of the most exclusive shops still in business; the ‘plastic’ cheese, carefully wrapped in four conical packages of parchment paper, affecting the charming airship balloon emblem of the continental house Fountaine; a green glass bottle he had found and acquired as a present for Edwina to keep her boiled drinking water; and the most precious of his finds, the rare volume Schleswig-Holstein Tages, the book that Hobson, the nicest twin of Hobson & Hobson, had been able to procure for him.
Ponsoby negotiated with difficulty the mushy greenery spiked with fallen branches and the overgrown indefinite bushes that had taken over that part of the city. It wasn’t easy to walk up the street, and he was forced to do so lifting his legs every couple of steps to overcome a new obstacle—Ponsonby wasn’t exactly fit. He reflected that Nature was getting very tiresome indeed, and he wondered why she was so persistent; she had so obviously won the battle against mankind.
The street was littered with abandoned vehicles as well, rotting in the scorching October sun: burnt, empty carcasses, which resembled the ruins of lost miniature civilizations. They served only one purpose now, as unlikely homes for colonies of lizards.
Albert fortified himself by thinking of the expensive treats he had managed to gather.
“Good morning, Natalia Fiodorovna.”
Ponsonby was never late with his meagre rent, but he had fought against any rise in the price with uncommon fierceness. It was clear to his landlady where his priorities lay.
“Humpff,” she snorted back, taking in the expensive-looking packages.
She had been living in the capital, one of the most developed colonies of the New European Coalition, for half of her life, and she had full command of the English language. However, she rarely chose to use it with Albert.
“Dear Madame Natalia Fiodorovna Kostkina, did you remember my ice?”
“Humpff.”
“In that case, thank you very much.”
Albert had the ability, acquired after many months of convivial existence, of interpreting the lady’s grunts.
He faced the staircase with renewed courage. The promised ice had given him unexpected strength. Furthermore, he was carrying with him the invigorating promise of the food and, even more, of going to sleep by the sweet lullaby of the Baltic recipes of his new book —pig’s head, winter vegetables floating on the rich creamy milk of a Schüüsch stew, Fliederbeersuppe, infused with elderberry juice, with a light touch
of olive oil, the broken sweetness of Bohnen und Speck . . . He would read them to himself out loud, an activity which would feed him for much longer than the cheese could.
He reached the last landing out of breath, and opened his door thinking about Edwina, imagining her delighted face when he gave her the glass bottle.
The green light was flashing in the communication system on the wall. A recorded message was waiting for him. The machine had been adapted years earlier from Albert’s 50 inch internet-television set. Since his banishment from University, his father had refused to speak to him. Only two people called him now, Edwina and Thomas. If it was Edwina, he had the pleasure of admiring her face at a vast size; if it was Thomas, he was forced to witness how all his friend’s features vibrated with animation while he recounted his many exploits in the Garden of Eden from which Albert himself had been so unjustly expelled. After all, the two universities possessed secret ways of getting food.
He flicked the set. Bad luck. It was Thomas.
“Ponsonby! My dear chap!”
It was worse than he had imagined. Thomas was eating while he made the call. A delicious looking steak dripped juice as it hung suspended from a silver-plated fork.
“I thought you of all people would share my joy . . . ”
Share? Joy?
“ . . . at this particular moment. Behold, my gourmand friend! Behold, oh, connoisseur of all the delicacies of life! I am eating BEAR!”
Thomas’s mouth opened grandly under his bulbous nose, magnified by the screen, as he took a bite. A smacking, ripping sound filled Ponsonby’s room, contracting his stomach even more than it already was. He hated those 50 inches, each and every one of them.
“I feel like those hussars who fought with Napoleon, and were forced to eat the zebras from Moscow Zoo!” the gigantic head on the screen shouted.
This was beyond endurance. Why did Thomas insist on torturing him like this? He knew perfectly well that Albert had been expelled from University after the discovery that he had partaken of an illicit feast, by eating one of the remaining six deer from Magdalen College’s grounds. As Albert was tired of explaining, the creature was already dead when he stumbled upon the dinner party! Who could have resisted a little taste? He had only taken the daintiest morsel that could possibly be imagined.
“Rascal!” he cried to the intercom.
He flicked off the set. The green light still flashed; he had another message. Not even Thomas could be so tiresome. It had to be her.
His stomach contracted, in a completely different way this time.
The bright sun sent beams of light all over the place. He drew the curtains and flicked on the screen once more. Edwina’s beautiful face appeared in majestic size in front of him, and Albert immediately forgot all the outrage he had felt only ten seconds ago. He settled down to listen to his friend, his beloved, the object of his secret and all-consuming affection.
After Edwina’s message was finished, he found himself shaking with a mixture of excitement, animation, and terror. His chance had finally arrived to prove himself!
Edwina had also called Thomas, of course: he was a zoologist after all. But then, was a zoologist really necessary to catch a little bird? A wave of the old rivalry stabbed him like an electric shock.
Reluctantly, he put a call to Thomas to talk strategy. He only hoped that his friend had finished his luxurious meal.
After they had talked, he turned the room upside down looking for his grimy ABC Railway Guide. It would be the first train he would brave in the slowly dying railway system in nearly nine months.
* * *
Wakefield didn’t exist anymore. Neither the reserve, nor the Hall itself.
It was difficult to believe how quickly grand houses had crumbled into nothingness once they had been abandoned. The notion infuriated Thomas. In those grand houses had unfolded a great part of English history.
The only thing that remained standing was the most delicate of all: the glass aviary, now emptied, intertwined with leaves and branches and filled with mud.
He was forced to walk the three miles from the train station, a plank of wood in the middle of nowhere, on the scorching morning heat. Norfolk was more humid than Oxford, due to the proximity of the sea, the sweating marshes, and the quickly advancing swampland with its cohort of new species. The flora was hardly recognisable. He hadn’t been in this part of the world for a very long time, and things were rapidly changing. The trees gave the impression of being on top of one another, tumbled down or simply twisted, but it was a false impression, due to the freakishly speedy profusion with which the new greenery had taken over. The bushes and the plants looked as if they could hardly breathe, one on top of the other.
He could make out King’s Lynn in the distance, the church towers and the spires, and the little houses where families kept to themselves, still dazed by the years’ all-conquering heat. The village’s outline, those known buildings, sent a wave of memories of visits to Edwina, sometimes with Albert, sometimes on his own.
He went through the musky greenery, surprised that the treetops didn’t form a vault over his head, like he remembered. Instead, he could only see the open sky, heavy with heat. He could smell the sea, almost hear the soft sound of moving water. What he couldn’t find was the little stream: it had disappeared under the budding jungle, and it was only by chance that he stumbled upon the old remains of the kitchen garden and the house in ruins, with its line of bare trees and entry path.
A soft mist reached to where he stood, coming from the beach. He remembered it well; it was a horrid place, a vast, sublime expanse, with an oily and unmoving grey sea and a whitish, oppressive sky, colourless even under the bleached sun. The family of seals who used to live there hadn’t been seen in years, according to Edwina; they had been claimed by the changes in the weather and the seasons, or perhaps killed in order to be eaten. It was impossible to know.
He looked around him. There was some uncanny beauty in this new world. A virginal meadow had sprouted as if from nowhere, the square traces of a formal garden still visible beneath it. The gossamer at his foot and the dry shrubbery inadvertently merged with the new, tropical forest. The leaves made a faint noise, gently rustled by the wind. There were hardly any other sounds, but he could smell the flowers and the tall shoots of young grass, and far away, as in a dream, a cricket started his soothing noise. He reached to touch the flowers, caressed the tree trunks; a little dragonfly passed close to his face: granted, it was not exactly little . . . the flying insect was as big as his fist, which was somehow spooky. But its beauty couldn’t be denied. He felt at total peace all of a sudden, in communion with that bit of land, queerly overtaken by the peculiar greenery. Before he could help himself, he had put both arms around one of the bigger trees, and stood there, breathing deeply the purified air . . .
A sound threw him out of his reverie.
It was some sort of groan.
His heart quickened, disconcerted at the interruption.
The male voice groaned once again.
He gently dislodged himself from his embrace with the tree, and gave a couple of noiseless steps in the sound’s direction.
There was a man squatting in the middle of the meadow.
Correction: there was a priest squatting in the middle of the meadow.
Correction: there was a priest dropping one for queen and country in the middle of the meadow.
“What the golly . . . !”
The priest, realising someone had stumbled upon his most private moment, awkwardly put up his trousers and got up, with as much dignity as he could master. Looking around him, he stumbled towards the nearby bushes and disappeared.
Thankfully, Thomas had managed to hide at the last minute by catapulting himself towards one of the closest thickets. He got up, prickled by the unusual thorny leaves and, once he satisfied himself that the priest had gone, he continued on his way to Edwina’s cottage.
* * *
“My dearest, you have ab
solutely nothing to worry about!” Thomas spoke with the arrogance of a scientist. Albert let escape a long sigh. “Let’s be practical, shall we? What were the usual haunts of this bird, his natural habitat?”
“My dear fellow.” Albert could not stop himself. As usual, Thomas hadn’t let him put a word across in nearly ten minutes. “That is precisely the point! Their ‘natural habitat’, as you so scientifically put it, doesn’t exist anymore! For goodness sake! Have you seen the jungle out there?”
Thomas considered this with a smirk. Albert braced himself for a sharp reply. He would take it; he forced himself to remember that the old gang had reassembled with the sole purpose to help his adored Edwina.
“Gentlemen.”
Both men composed themselves, and turned in Edwina’s direction, big grins blossoming in their faces.
“Please don’t forget to give me your ration cards, otherwise I will not be able to get enough chicory for all of us for the length of your visit.”
That settled the squabble.
They were sitting in the cosy sitting room of the cottage at the nature reserve, about half a mile from the ruined stately home. On the table, the rest of the durian soup, with its dollop of mock cream on top, reeked like a rotten corpse. Albert found himself thinking of the pink-footed goose, that little bird prancing around somewhere in the forest. And with that thought, some little red cabbage, white cabbage, came dancing after . . . For goodness sake! He had to stop these images from creeping into his head! Geese with red cabbage, geese with white cabbage, roasted geese, geese stewed with pears and wine with new potatoes and a tiny bit of brandy butter to go with each morsel, each bite musky and sweet. His jaw bones were in pain now, and he started salivating . . . Christ Almighty! He was there to help! He swallowed the forbidden images, and composed his expression. He forced himself to think about his new and wonderful book of culinary miracles, and recited in his head: pig’s head, winter vegetables floating on the rich creamy milk of a Schüüsch stew, Fliederbeersuppe, infused with elderberry juice, with a light touch of olive oil, the broken sweetness of Bohnen und Speck, Lübeck marzipan . . .