The Bower Bird

by Ann Kelley

  I’m lucky to have a vivid imagination – Mum would say it was a bad thing to have lots of – but it does mean that although I am sort of imprisoned in my less than perfect body, I am free to wander wherever I want to go in my mind.

  CHAPTER SIX

  HERE ARE SOME of the names of the little streets in the old town that Mum and I have just walked through: Court Cocking; Love Lane; Mount Zion; Salubrious Place; Teetotal Street; Virgin Street; Fish Street.

  We’re having lunch at a small beach café, sitting in the sunshine overlooking the dear little beach, which sits between the Island and the harbour.

  Sparrows hop around under our feet looking for crumbs and even come on the table. The young ones fluff up their feathers and look pitiful so their parents will feed them. Two very handsome young starlings are less brave but are also enjoying our generosity. They already have black and white chests but their faces and heads and shoulders are still a pretty light brown colour. I can’t see their parents anywhere so I suppose they are independent now. The adults have found an ideal place to leave their young – a restaurant where they can have free food three times a day. In winter, when the café closes, they’ll join their friends in Fore Street and hang around outside the bakers.

  Shopping in St Ives is much more interesting than going to a supermarket. We get really tasty bread and pasties in Fore Street or Tregenna Place, and the fresh fish shop in Back Road East is called Stevens – so we might be related. They have hake, haddock, mackerel, wild sea bass, mullet, megrim sole, gurnard, crabmeat, lobster, mussels, sardines, salmon, ling, scallops, prawns, any fish in season, all displayed beautifully on marble slabs with ice packed around them and chunks of lemon. As good as Harrods any day – better, as the fish is fresh from the sea, and Stevens is nearer to the sea than Harrods so the fish have the same postcode as the customers.

  I used not to eat fish or meat or cheese or eggs or anything, Mum says, I only ate chips and nuts and ice cream. But I don’t remember. She says it was because I was force-fed through a tube up my nose and down my throat for the first few months of my life and didn’t associate food with love or enjoyment.

  I do now. My favourite food is soup – the sort of soup that Mum cooks, with home-made stock and fresh vegetables.

  This is Mum’s recipe for French Onion Soup:

  Make a stock from left over chicken and its carcase, onion and carrot, celery and any fresh herbs. (She also uses vegetable stock from when she cooks spinach, greens and potatoes or whatever.)

  Cook several large sliced onions in butter until they have melted into a sticky goo.

  Add the strained stock and cook for about 20 minutes.

  Arrange sliced rounds of oven-toasted French bread in the bottom of a heavy casserole.

  Sprinkle plenty of Gruyère cheese on top.

  Pour some soup over the bread.

  Add another layer of bread.

  Sprinkle more cheese.

  Add rest of soup.

  Place in oven, uncovered, and cook for about 45 minutes or until the top is crusty and brown.

  It isn’t very liquid; it’s a thick gluey soup and it’s better the next day and even better if you pour a little red wine over the soup in the bowl. I am allowed to drink red wine if it’s in the soup. French children do it all the time, Daddy says. He is a Francophile – which means he loves anything French.

  Oh why is he so vague about his rellies? (Australian for relations.) He did say he would send me a list of names of his second cousins twice removed or whatever, but he hasn’t yet. He is always very busy; he works for a film archive in London and travels all over the place to film festivals. He used to be a photographer and filmmaker, but he hasn’t had any films shown in cinemas. He gave me one of his old cameras – a Nikkormat. It’s silver metal and black, rather heavy, but I like the weight of it. You can hold it steady and it doesn’t shake when you press the button to take a picture.

  I might start taking pictures of St Ives. I like all the old cottages and their little gardens. I could make a record of the way things are now. For posterity. Like the way people without gardens hang out their washing on the front of the house. The cats. I could photograph all the cats.

  Daddy gave me a load of 35mm black and white 400 ASA slow film, which means I can take pictures in fairly dark situations, like indoors, without using a flash. I don’t have a flash. I only use the 50 ml lens. It’s too complicated to keep changing lenses, and anyway I can’t carry a heavy bagful of stuff. Dad said to keep things simple. He says that most amateur photographers have too much equipment and don’t care about the end product, only the hardware – boys’ toys. He says you can make perfectly good images with a standard 50 ml lens. It’s almost like the way you see things with your ordinary eyes.

  Daddy made some lovely portraits of Grandpop and Grandma on their wedding anniversary the year before they died. I’m glad he did that. Daddy was good at getting people to relax and look natural in photographs.

  Mum and Daddy took me to several photo exhibitions in London and I remember one in particular. It was an exhibition of work by a famous photographer called Kertesz, a Hungarian who lived in America. He used a 35 mm SLR camera and made lots of pictures taken from up high, looking down on street scenes or gardens. You make photographs, Daddy told me, you don’t take them. Taking them sounds like stealing. He said, ‘You must always try to ask people’s permission before you make a picture of them, otherwise it is like theft.’

  Life is interesting looking down on people and objects. They become foreshortened, and shadows are very important. Black and white photos accentuate the light and dark really well, much better than if you use colour.

  I could do that looking onto the garden, except that not much happens down there and the birds would be almost invisible.

  I lean out of my attic window and expose a few frames (take a few pictures) of our washing line. Sheets flap and soar as if they are dancing and make a slapping clapping sound. Actually, I’m not too good at heights, but looking through the viewfinder of a camera turns the experience into something quite different. It is a framed image, my own, not a vertigo episode. I can choose what goes into the picture and what stays out of it. I won’t allow the telegraph pole and wire to become part of this picture, I crop them out as I focus. Then I make a picture of the starling on the wire, his throat exposed as he talks to the sky.

  Oops! I nearly lost my cap out the window. Alistair gave it to me. It’s a navy blue cotton cap with a crown and three lions on the front – an England cricket cap. I used to wear a battered trilby hat that Grandpop gave me. At first I wore it because I was little and being a cowboy and then I wore it because Grandpop died. Also it made me feel like Indiana Jones. He never lost his hat even when he was swimming. I lost mine in a gale. It flew into the sea and was never seen again. I do like hats.

  Charlie is curled on the blue striped cushion. I do a close up of her. She has the advantage of being already black and white. She has one eye open, suspicious of my intent. The trouble with cats is, when you try to photograph them they walk straight towards you, so all you get is the narrow chest and head and the straight up tail. They are desperate for attention. Charlie yawns and stretches white paws towards me. Oh dear, I’ll have to stroke her now. I can’t resist her pretty paws.

  Flo went through a strange patch a while ago, when I first had Charlie. She would stare through narrowed eyes at me stroking Charlie and when I went to stroke her she would run away. Then she started to scratch me when I walked past her, attacking with a sudden fury. It was very odd. I soon realised that she was missing my loving attention and showing her misery in the only way she knew. So from then on I’ve made a point of always making a big fuss of her before I stroke Charlie. Flo comes first, she must: she is the alpha female and knows her place. I had forgotten it for a while, but now I know better.

  Seen from a distance, the roofs of St Ives look like they are covered in buttercup petals. I lean out the window again to study the mus
tard coloured lichens. Like miniature atolls, they grow into a circle, but the middle bits die and leave a ring, like orange rind. Some of them are flowering. If you look at them closely through a lens it’s like snorkelling over coral.

  I did so love that: snorkelling in Africa. It was the best time ever. I’ll never forget it. Everything about being there was interesting. There were huge millipedes like miniature tube trains. I’d place them on my arms and watch them move slowly up to my shoulder. Mum shuddered when I did that. And the pretty blue and yellow spotted lizards that ate the mosquitoes. They lived on the outside walls and inside the house – Pelican Cottage.

  It’s funny how we’ve lived in places with bird names. Maybe we could give this house a bird name? Starling’s Nest; Seagull House; Gull’s Nest; Gull Rock; Goldfinch Gulch; Robin’s Rest; Finch’s Folly. Number 5 sounds so boring.

  We had cockroaches in Africa. Mum wasn’t at all keen on those. A pair lived under my bed and I wouldn’t let her throw them out. After all, they were there before we were. It’s their country. I fed them breadcrumbs. They made friendly scuttling sounds all night. Outside there were enormous butterflies and praying mantises and beetles so big they sounded like flying mopeds. My favourite thing was exploring the reef at low tide, discovering all the sea margin life; shellfish, starfish, anemones, sea cucumbers, crabs.

  I’ll be able to do that here. There are rock pools on several of the beaches – Porthmeor, by the Island; Porthgwidden; the little beach by the museum – I don’t know what it’s called. And on Porthminster Beach and Carbis Bay there are lots.

  Where we were at Peregrine Point there were caves and pools but the climb was steep so I wasn’t up to exploring much. We used to gather mussels though, and Mum cooked them with chopped onion and white wine. You have to clean them thoroughly in clean running water for a while, or stick them somewhere cold in clean water until you need them.

  They look disgusting – like the insides of a squashed hedgehog – but close your eyes and they taste like the smell of the sea.

  Mrs Thomas is in her attic room too. She is opening the window and putting out bread for the gulls. Perhaps she thinks the male is the spirit of her dead husband. She waves when she sees me. If Mum is right and all seamen come back as seagulls there must be dozens of widows and bereaved mothers all over St Ives, Mousehole and Newlyn and other seaside towns looking after their own personal family gulls.

  It must be difficult to carry on living when everyone you love is dead.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  IF I HAD been born a hundred years ago I wouldn’t have survived a week, even. Without antibiotics, and digitalis – a heart drug that comes from the foxglove – I would have died in babyhood. Without transplantation expertise and organ donation I wouldn’t have any hope of living much longer. I’m lucky to have been born in the twentieth century.

  We are picnicking on my favourite beach, Porthmeor, sitting up against the granite wall below the artists’ studios, facing the big rollers dashing in and the low sun. It’s still warm enough to wear a T-shirt. There are quite a few holidaymakers here, tanned from a week of sunshine. We are sitting close to a ladder that goes from the sand up to the door of a beach house. A group of people sit drinking white wine and beer and passing a big bag of crisps between them. There are some wrinklies and two babies and three toddlers and several older children too, who are running around giving the little ones towel rides on the sand.

  Most people on this beach are hiding behind windbreaks but not this crowd.

  ‘Gussie, don’t stare. It’s rude.’

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘You are.’

  I am. I do that. It’s a bad habit. But I am genuinely interested in other people. It’s like being an anthropologist studying the behaviour of a lost tribe. I can’t help it. Better than being totally uninterested in life around me.

  At Peregrine Cottage there was only Nature to observe. Here, there’s loads of people. There’s a rather lovely woman, tall and slender, dark, who is holding a tiny baby, not hers. She has a sweet face, not exactly pretty, but more than pretty, glowing and kind – concerned. Her husband is much older and wrinkly and very tanned. He is obviously well known, like a Godfather figure. People keep making a detour to come to him as they are walking along the beach. They don’t kiss his ring or his hand though. They sit for a while and are offered a glass of wine or a little bottle of beer.

  ‘He must know everybody. I wonder if he knows Daddy’s family?’

  ‘Gussie, stop it!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You know what. Don’t Do it!’

  ‘Oh look Mum!’ The weird, big-eared cat is standing at the top of the ladder looking down at his family on the beach. One of the girls climbs the ladder and carries the cat down. She places it on a rug and strokes it.

  I yearn to go and say hello, but I am suddenly shy. Why? In the past I would be perfectly able to meet new people. Am I too grown up to be naturally gregarious and sociable? I make myself stand and walk slowly to where the cat is. I crouch to look at him.

  ‘Hello, may I stroke him?’

  The child, who is like a little fairy, with fine blonde hair and white skin, nods at me, and I reach out to touch the strange creature. His back is barely covered with a fine curly down, hardly fur, more like velvet or felt, and he has no eyebrows or fur on his face. His pink belly is loose and swings from his ribs when he moves.

  ‘He feels strange,’ I say. ‘What is he called?

  ‘Wobert, he’s a Sphinx, a throwback,’ says the little girl, ‘but he’s very clever. He carries his blanket around.’

  Poor little cat. His eyes bulge, his ears are huge, he looks and feels so weird, sweaty skinned, warm and clammy, I bet he doesn’t get stroked or cuddled much.

  ‘I have to take him in now, or he’ll get sunburned.’ She lifts him carefully and takes him up the ladder.

  There are too many Stevenses in this town. I looked them up in the local telephone directory: two fish merchants, a plumber and a builder, a funeral director, a swimming pool engineer, a wine merchant, an interior decorator, an estate agent, an hotelier, a publican and a builder. And all the regular Stevenses who don’t have a commercial title.

  I suppose I could go through the entire directory, phoning them all and asking about their family history – see if any of them know Daddy. Perhaps not, it would be a huge telephone bill. Next time he phones I’ll ask him to give me a lead. Mum says Daddy is not strong on family.

  I’d noticed.

  Maybe because he was the black sheep of his family, he said, thrown out of the nest. No, that’s a mixed metaphor. Sheep don’t have nests. He hotfooted it out of town as soon as he could – (another foot metaphor).

  Is it fate that Mum brought me here? She could have taken me to any one of a dozen different Cornish towns – Newlyn, Mousehole, Mylor, Penzance, Falmouth. But we came here, to where there are at least a hundred other people called Stevens.

  I think I am here to find my lost family, my Daddy’s family. He didn’t want to be Cornish. He was probably too big for his boots (foot metaphor again).

  All I know about them is that Grandad Stevens was a car dealer, and always drove around in smart new cars. Rovers, I think he sold. And Grandma Stevens wore stiff corsets and had pink hair or blue hair and drank her tea with her little finger in the air.

  Mum never met them. She says they wouldn’t have approved of their son’s choice of a much older wife.

  She doesn’t look her age, Mum, except when she tries to look younger.

  Something or someone emptied our dustbin today. Mess everywhere. Mummy was Not Happy. At Peregrine Cottage we would blame a fox, but here in the heart of the town, who knows?

  In Essex, where Grandpop and Grandma lived, there was a fox who used to come into their garden each night looking for titbits, (that might be tidbits as titbits sounds rude). I often saw him by the orange street lamp, sauntering across the road and going under their car briefly before doing his u
sual snacking in their back garden. Grandpop made a habit of leaving food for him. But Grandpop’s favourite was the robin. It would follow him around while he was gardening, practically landing on his hoe or spade or whatever. Grandma did most of the gardening but Grandpop was allowed to do the heavy stuff, like digging.

  I had a disgusting job to do in her garden – collect caterpillars from the cabbages and drown them in a bucket of water. It didn’t occur to me to complain about being hired to torture and murder living creatures.

  I wonder how mentally developed a creature has to be before it has a personality. Obviously dogs and cats have personalities, each one a separate identity, like bossy Flo and wimpy Rambo, but what about robins and rats, guinea pigs and toads? If we thought that sheep were interesting characters and have real relationships with each other, would we still kill them for food?

  I heard on Radio Four an organic dairy farmer saying that her cows all knew each other and had lasting family relationships. She had witnessed young heifers joyfully greeting their mothers after being separated from them for a year. A joyful cow? What does she do? Jump for joy?

  What makes a creature more than just alive? What gives it purpose and contentment, affection for its family?

  I do know that certain birds, including swans and geese and herring gulls, mate for life. But what about insects? If I knew a mosquito had thoughts and feelings and a mother who loved it, would I still want to swat it? What about crabs and prawns? Do they form attachments? Oh dear, I don’t want to survive on lentils and bean sprouts and soya beans.

  Oh no, I should never have thought about insects dying. Into my cold soup, gazpacho it’s called and it’s made from chopped tomatoes, has landed a black-fly. He looks like a miniature angel spread-eagled on the red sticky surface – an angel fallen into Hell.

  ‘He’ll have tomatoes up his nose,’ I say. I can’t bear the thought of him drowning slowly so I scoop him out and squash him properly and thoroughly.