Maggie and the Moonbird

by Katya Balen

  CONTENTS

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  CHAPTER ONE

  Maggie sat at the bottom of the stairs with her arms folded, her boots on, and her binoculars round her neck.

  “But you absolutely promised,” she said. She could hear the whine in her voice and she didn’t care one bit. “You swore on Moushka’s life.” She unfolded her arms to stroke the cat’s head and then folded them crossly again. “You said we’d absolutely definitely completely go birdwatching today. You pinkie promised.”

  “Sorry, Mags, I’m a bit too busy right now,” said Dad. He had half a piece of toast hanging out of his mouth and Maggie was lightly sprayed with crumbs as he spoke. “I’ve got a garden emergency. Maybe tomorrow? You know, flowers attract lots of different birds so you could help me in the garden today if you like.”

  Maggie would not like. She huffed out all the air in her chest. Moushka gave her a startled look and hid under the sofa.

  “It’s raining tomorrow. It’s sunny today.”

  Dad huffed out all his air too. Maggie felt the toast crumbs land in her hair.

  “I know. That’s why I’ve got to start planting today or the soil will be too wet. The lunefleur requires very specific conditions. You know how it is.”

  Maggie didn’t know. All she knew was that Dad was always in their garden, whispering gently to his thousands of strange plants that creeped and twisted and blossomed and bloomed. His speciality was growing rare flowers. People paid lots of money for them, but they needed more attention than a tiny baby. They needed more attention than a ten-year-old girl did. In Dad’s opinion anyway. Maggie growled and Moushka ran out from under the sofa and up the stairs.

  Dad pulled out his phone and started jabbing at the screen. Maggie rolled her eyes. He hadn’t even finished their conversation. She fiddled with her binoculars’ strap and glared at Dad.

  “Here we go!” Dad said triumphantly. “Aunt Polly is taking the boys to the zoo today. You can go with them. You’ll see loads of great stuff there. Guaranteed elephants, not sitting around all day in a ditch waiting to spot a greater striped puffin or whatever it is you’re after.”

  “Lesser spotted woodpecker,” muttered Maggie. Her heart had dropped into her boots. “I don’t want to go to the zoo with Aunt Polly and Fred and Zeke. Zeke bites.”

  But Dad wasn’t listening. His phone was ringing and he was already wandering back towards his garden.

  “She’ll pick you up in half an hour. Don’t forget to say thank you to Aunt Polly! This has all worked out really well…” his voice faded as he shut the back door.

  This was the sixth time her dad had cancelled their plans at the last second because of stupid plants and stupid flowers. Maggie felt a rush of fury spark in her chest. It was so unfair.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The doorbell rang and Maggie thought about pretending to be dead. Some animals did that when they didn’t want to be disturbed or eaten. Zeke was likely to do both to her.

  “Maggie, can you get that please?” Dad shouted from the garden. Maggie curled into a ball on the floor.

  “Mags, the door?” Dad yelled again. Maggie lay flat on her back with her arms and legs in the air.

  The bell rang again.

  “Maggie Miller, the door!” Dad wasn’t happy. Maggie closed her eyes and held her breath.

  There was a dull thumping noise. Maggie opened one eye. Zeke was standing outside with his nose pressed flat against the window. When he saw Maggie looking, he grinned and pulled away from the glass, leaving a slimy trail behind. Despite trying to look very dead, Maggie shuddered. Three-year-old boys were disgusting.

  “She’s not dead, Mum!” Zeke shouted. Aunt Polly’s face appeared at the window. She was grinning and waving wildly. She held up a big bag full of snacks and Fred grabbed a packet of Wotsits with lightning speed.

  “Come on!” Aunt Polly called through the glass. “I’ve got a great day planned at the zoo, and we can sing songs in the car! Fred’s got a new favourite song, Ten Green Bottles, but we start with a thousand green bottles! Isn’t that brilliant?”

  It was just about the least brilliant thing in the entire known universe, Maggie thought as she got up and opened the door. At least maybe she could have some Wotsits.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Maggie shoved her hands deep into her pockets and trudged round after Aunt Polly, who was trying to stop Fred feeding Peperamis to the monkeys. Maggie didn’t like the zoo. All the animals looked too sad and stuck behind glass or wire or bars. And they had to put up with Zeke making faces at them and Fred trying to give them the mushed-up contents of his lunchbox.

  The birds were the worst. Trapped beneath wire roofs and separated from the sky. Maggie loved birds. She knew everything about hollow bones and wing spans and feather tips and bird song. Sometimes she stared at the birds for so long, she could almost feel her bones getting lighter and the wind rushing beneath her, lifting her up into the clouds. It was like no other feeling in the whole world. She was a brilliant birdwatcher. She had six birds left to tick off in her Britain’s Best Birds book before she could achieve her gold badge. Maggie really wanted that gold badge. It had a nightingale etched on the front and even in the picture it sparkled like the sun.

  Maggie wandered past row after row of miserable birds. The parrots squawked and flapped their wings. The owls blinked blearily at the sun. Lovebirds were bickering.

  Then she saw it.

  Huddled in the corner of a cage.

  Silvery feathers that sparkled so gently that you wouldn’t even notice unless you were looking very carefully.

  Maggie was looking carefully. She saw the moon-bright feathers and the curved pearl beak and the glittering opal eyes. Her heart began to beat faster and faster.

  “What are you?” Maggie whispered. The bird looked right at her. Maggie could see that the bird had little bald spots on its magnificent silvery body. Birds pulled out their feathers when they were sad or stressed. Maggie felt so sorry for the beautiful bird in its wire cage. She moved closer and looked for the little square board of information that was pinned next to every enclosure.

  This one said:

  SILVERFINCH

  A COMMON GARDEN BIRD OF THE FAMILY FINCHUS FINCHUS.

  Maggie quickly leafed through her bird book. The pages were soft and crinkled and she saw the familiar flick of feathers as she scanned the pictures. She knew it. She knew this wasn’t right.

  The silverfinch in her book had a black beak, golden eyes and dull grey feathers.

  “You’re not a silverfinch at all!” Maggie breathed. She kept looking through her book, but she knew every page and she knew that this bird wasn’t on them. “What are you?”

  The bird sang a low, sad note that fizzed up Maggie’s spine and spread through her like slipping into a hot bath filled with strawberry sherbet bubbles.

  Maggie spied a passing zookeeper.

  “Excuse me! Excuse me! What is this bird please?”

  The zookeeper paused, a wheelbarrow of dung balancing precariously. She shifted from foot to foot and squinted at the sign next to the bird’s cage.

  “Silverfinch. They not teaching kids to read these days?”

  Maggie glared.

  “It’s not a silverfinch. A silverfinch looks like this, a
ccording to my book that I was just reading,” she added pointedly. She held up the page showing the dull-feathered bird with its ink-black beak.

  The zookeeper barely looked. She just shrugged her shoulders and lifted up her dung barrow. Her metal-toed boot clanged against the side and the so-called silverfinch flapped its wings rapidly in alarm.

  “If it says silverfinch, it’s a silverfinch, kiddo,” she said as she walked off. “Just a boring old bird. Learn to read and don’t ask stupid questions.”

  But Maggie wasn’t listening. She bent down and picked up a single feather that had spiralled gently to the ground when the bird flapped. It glowed moon-bright in the morning sun.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Dad peered into the freezer and selected a Tupperware box at random. He put it in the microwave and an unpleasant smell started to fill the kitchen.

  “Freezer roulette tonight, Mags,” he said. “Maybe it’ll be beans, maybe it’ll be beef!”

  “It’ll definitely be disgusting,” muttered Maggie, sniffing the air.

  She wasn’t wrong. She pushed the food around her plate. It still wasn’t clear if it was beef or beans, or possibly stewed socks. Dad didn’t seem to mind. He wolfed his down, patted Maggie on the head, and put his gardening wellies on.

  “Do you want to come and see the lunefleur?” he asked. He’d asked her when she got back from the zoo, too. He absolutely loved that stupid flower. Lunefleur, which apparently was French for moonflower. As if naming something in French was meant to make it seem more interesting, Maggie thought grumpily.

  “No,” said Maggie. “I would rather sit and eat stewed socks, thank you.”

  Dad shrugged, and headed back out to the garden. Maggie immediately binned her plate of beans or beef or socks, and made herself some cornflakes topped with Nutella. She sat cross-legged on the kitchen floor and, after every crunchy chocolatey mouthful, she twirled the silver bird’s feather around her fingers and turned the pages of her bird books.

  Since getting back from the zoo, Maggie had looked in every single bird book she owned. She’d also applied antiseptic to the six Zeke-bites on her arm. Apparently seeing the tigers had been something of an inspiration to him.

  She couldn’t find the bird. It didn’t exist. It wasn’t possible that it wasn’t painted on the pages of Every Bird Ever: The Definitive List or Garden Birds and their Quirks or Was that a Pigeon? The books had never let her down before. Seeing that bird had to have been some sort of bite-induced hallucination. But then there was the feather.

  The feather that sparkled and glittered and shimmered, even when there was no light. The feather that made her fingers tingle and, for some reason, her arms itch.

  That night, without really knowing why, Maggie put the feather on her pillow.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Maggie woke up and had absolutely no idea why. Her cockerel alarm hadn’t crowed. It wasn’t morning. No sunlight was streaming through her pelican-print curtains. In fact, moonlight was pouring through her window, brighter than she’d ever seen it before. It threw shapes and shadows across the room. And there was another light. A glowing sliver of silver suspended in the air in front of her.

  Maggie reached out a hand and her fingertips brushed something soft. It was the feather. As soon as she touched it, she felt her skin sharpen. Her shoulders itched and ached. Her feet curled and cramped underneath her emu-embroidered duvet.

  Maggie looked at her hand. The feather glowed bright. Then it wriggled and span in the air until it was a glowing, whirling ball.

  The feeling hit her like a lightning bolt. Maybe it was a lightning bolt – there was a sudden flash of bright light that bounced around the room and seemed to sink into Maggie’s skin. The light turned warm and spread through her bones. It sparked along her limbs and it felt like her blood was made of sherbet, fizzing inside her. Maggie stared down at her arms.

  Feathers were rippling from her armpits to her wrists. They had sprung from her skin. A sheet of pearl-grey shimmering feathers that quivered as she moved.

  Maggie had wings.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Maggie stood on the edge of her windowsill and debated whether she was being an idiot.

  On the one hand (she still seemed to have hands, despite the wings that grew magnificently from her arms) she had no idea if wings meant you could fly.

  On the other hand, she seemed to know deep down in her bones (which felt oddly light, all of a sudden) that she could.

  Maggie looked out across her dad’s beautiful garden, with its star-speckled greenhouses and its luminous fragrant flowers that bloomed only at night. She caught their scent and it made her feel lighter and braver. So Maggie stepped off her windowsill and into the night air.

  And dropped like a stone.

  “No, no, no, no, no, no, no!” Maggie shrieked. “Absolutely not!”

  She could feel the wind whistling through her feathers and the air rushing up her nose as the ground got closer and closer. She was two metres away from making a spectacular crash landing in Mrs Next-door’s prize rosebush when she remembered the key part of flying.

  Flapping your wings.

  So Maggie flapped.

  And Maggie flew.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Maggie was flying. She was flying just like one of her beautiful birds, with her light hollow bones and the air beneath her wings, lifting her higher and higher towards the moon.

  It was incredible. At first, she was a little nervous, and flapped too fast. This made her rise up much too high and her arms ached. But when she didn’t flap enough, she risked the heart-stopping plunge into Mr Down-the-road’s dahlias. But after a while, Maggie found she just knew when to flap. She started to zoom and float, twist and turn, loop the loop and spin in the air. The night sky rushed past her but Maggie didn’t feel cold even though she was only wearing pyjamas and hadn’t even put her slippers on. She felt like she could do anything. She felt magical.

  She spotted other night birds out on their hunting trips. Tawny owls and nighthawks and nightjars. Some of them had mice or shrews clasped in their talons but Maggie didn’t mind. The nightbirds didn’t seem the least bit surprised to see a ten-year-old girl in puffin-patterned pyjamas zipping through the clouds and flapping huge grey shimmering wings. They squawked their salutes to her as she flew by, and Maggie wished she had brought her binoculars. She wasn’t quite sure how she’d have managed to flap and hold them up to her eyes, but she’d have really liked to get a better view of the birds.

  Then, suddenly, they were all around her. Great clouds of birds, feathers so close she could feel them brush against her skin. Hundreds and hundreds of them, soaring and swirling in the sky. Maggie was right in the middle. She was part of a huge cloud of birds and she could see every single one in the starlight. She could see crows and ravens, magpies and goldfinches, cardinals and terns. Birds that should be asleep, birds that should be by the sea, birds that should be in marshes. They were all here, in a sleepy city night.

  They wanted her to follow them.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Maggie flew with the birds. The twinkling lights of familiar streets faded and she soared over strange dark parks and winding car-less roads. She began to feel a little flutter of fear quivering in her tummy. Just as her wings were beginning to tremble, the birds around her began to dip and weave towards the ground. Towards something Maggie knew. Rows and rows of wire roofs and metal bars. The smell of animals and vegetables and dung. Roars and hisses and howls.

  The zoo.

  As she flew lower and lower, and watched the birds reaching the ground, Maggie realised she had absolutely no idea how to land.

  The birds landed elegantly on the branches of spindly trees, on the wire roofs of cages and on the muddy ground.

  Maggie stopped flapping her wings, stuck her legs out straight, performed a sort of mid-air cartwheel (that she frankly would have been extremely proud of in other circumstances) and landed head first in a bin.

  She emer
ged, with KitKat wrappers decorating her hair like ribbons, to a crowd of waiting birds. As soon as they saw her, they started flapping and squawking, jumping and trilling. Maggie blinked and tried to remove a stray bit of Peperami from her feathers.

  Once she was out of the bin, the birds hopped frantically across the gravel. Maggie followed them, her bones feeling heavy and odd now that she was walking again. Her wings flapped clumsily by her sides and she wasn’t sure how to arrange them.

  The birds led Maggie right back to the very spot she’d been standing in that morning.

  Right back to that strange silver bird.

  Except it didn’t look quite like it had looked in the crisp morning sun.

  Gone was the faint sparkle, the gentle silver glow.

  In its place was a bird that was alight with the colours of the moon. Maggie hadn’t really known that the moon had colours, but she knew instantly that those were what she was seeing. A bird that shone with greys and greens and silvers and pinks and purples, like an opal. The light seemed to shine from within the bird itself.

  But there were patches of the bird that were dull, where the feathers had lost their sparkle. There were inky dark spots where there were no feathers at all. Now that Maggie could see her own amazing wings, she could also see how bedraggled this bird looked.

  The bird opened its beak and sang. The notes made the air around Maggie shiver and shimmer. But despite how beautiful the song was and how it danced in the space around them, the bird sounded desperately, horribly, sad.

  The birds in the cages sang back and flapped their wings against the wire that trapped them. The birds around Maggie sang back too, and circled Maggie’s head excitedly. It was a very strange sight and sound. It was like the birds were visiting their captive friends, and telling them that they’d brought help.