The Bower Bird

by Ann Kelley

  ‘Has he gone?’

  ‘Yes, why?’

  ‘Oh nothing. What’s for dinner?’

  I can’t face telling her what my research has come up with. Perhaps next time I’m in the car with her I’ll say something. It’s much easier to talk when I can’t see her expressions. I can just imagine the shock on her face, the open mouth, the disbelief, the wide eyes. No, I’ll wait for the right moment.

  ‘Pasta and something easy with anchovies and olives. Tomatoes, we’ve got loads of tomatoes.’

  ‘Goodie.’ I flop on the sofa and go back to my book.

  ‘Grate the cheese if you like.’

  ‘When you say “if you like” do you really mean “if you like” or do you mean…?’

  ‘Just grate it, you precocious little beast.’

  Later, before we cook the pasta, Arnold comes by with two ungutted mackerel for us.

  ‘Caught twenty minutes ago,’ he said. ‘All right like that?’

  ‘Oh, thank you Arnold. That’s kind of you, yes I’ll deal with them.’ Mum sounds confident.

  I look at them when he’s gone. One is definitely dead, but the other one – I can still see life quivering in its tail part – rainbows and a flickering pulsing of blood. Oh God, is there still time to take it back to the sea? Can it still be alive twenty minutes after it was caught? That’s awful.

  ‘Mum! Mu-um! Come and see.’

  I watch while she dispatches the poor fish by cutting off its head with a carving knife. It must be inherited. Her mother was ruthless with their chickens when it was time for them to go to the Free-Range Chicken Run in the Sky.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  NOTE: WORD FOR the day: Mullein – a tall, stiff, yellow-flowered woolly plant (Verbascum) of the Scrophulariaceae – popularly known as hag-taper, Adam’s flannel, Aaron’s rod, shepherd’s club.

  I think I remember seeing those in the garden at Peregrine Point and on our little front path. They’re flowering now. I’ll impress Mum with my extensive floral knowledge.

  (Does scrofulous come from the same route? Yes it does. The plants were thought to be a cure for Scrofula, or TB.)

  It’s raining and quite cold, but she’s planting the bulbs. I hope they survive. Our garden is quite well sheltered and a suntrap when the sun shines. The blue hydrangeas have faded to muted pinks and mauves and remind me of Grandma’s aprons.

  I am making lists – I like making lists. Today’s list is an alphabet of sayings. It’s quite difficult.

  A is for the Apple of my eye (Brett).

  B is for his Beautiful mind. (I think that counts as metaphor

  because we can’t actually see a mind, can we.)

  C is for Clouds on my horizon (Mum’s library books, my family research.)

  D is for Dirty tricks – you know who goes in for those.

  E is for Eat your heart out.

  F is for False-faced. (Guess who.)

  G is for Good Grief.

  H is for Hang in there – meaning – don’t give up.

  I is for Ill-tempered – me at the moment.

  J is for Jack of all trades – Arnold.

  K is for Kettle of fish – a fine kettle of fish (my problems with library books).

  L is for Light at the end of the tunnel (my transplant).

  M is for Mother of all storms.

  N is for No way!

  O is for Odd man out – me.

  P is for Panic attack.

  Q is for Queue jumping.

  R is for Ray of sunshine (what Grandpop called me).

  S is for Safe as houses.

  T is for Tearjerker – like A Wonderful Life.

  U is for Upper crust.

  V is for Vital spark.

  W is for Walls have ears.

  X is for X factor.

  Y is for Young at heart – Mum.

  Z is for Zero in.

  I do like rainy days. It’s a wonderful excuse to mooch and read. I have just read RD Laing’s Conversations with Children, which is all about his conversations with his own children:

  Jutta [his wife] and I haven’t been getting on very well recently. Natasha has become interested in glue and sellotape, in cutting things up and sticking them together.

  Just now she is dashing from one wall of my room to the other, thudding against them.

  Ronnie: what are you doing?

  Natasha: the heart.

  Ronnie: the heart?

  N: yes. (She continues thudding against the walls.)

  R: and what does the heart do?

  N: the heart loves (she stops dashing and thudding.)

  R: the heart loves?

  N: yes.

  R: who? what?

  N: the one heart loves many people.

  R: the one heart loves many?

  N: the one heart loves many many.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  I THINK I may have done something rather stupid.

  I haven’t told Mum but I phoned Daddy to tell him about his grandfather being a famous photographer. He had no idea, he said, having cut himself off from his Cornish roots when he was young. He obviously did know about his father going to jail. That’s why he and his mother left town, after all, and his parents eventually divorced. But he had no idea about his father’s father. And thinking about it, it was his father who was the black sheep of the family, not Daddy. I phoned him when Mum was out shopping. He sounded pleased to hear my voice. I do love him so very much.

  I wish he were here.

  Sometimes you do get what you wish for.

  I wish I could go to university, uni, I mean. Brett wants to go. I know it’s a stupid thing to even think about. I probably won’t even make secondary school at this rate.

  If I had three wishes, no matter how impossible, they would be:

  1. Mum and Daddy being happy together.

  2. My heart being healthy.

  3. Grandpop and Grandma being alive. All those wishes are useless so if by any chance a fairy asks me what I wish for, I better think up some more feasible requests:

  1. Finding some live family.

  2. Going to school.

  3. A successful heart and lung transplant.

  Bad night. My steam train heart wakes me… eyes sore so can’t read for very long. Why are our problems so much worse in the dark? Anxieties well up when we’re not able to keep watch, they break the dam and flood our dreams or wake us so we can worry in the drowning dark. Bad dreams when I did sleep: entire town flooded up to top of Barnoon Hill. We survived but everyone else dead.

  Mum is in her bedroom window drawing what she sees from the window. She is concentrating hard, and looks happier than I have seen her for ages. I wish I could draw. It has never been my strong point. She now goes to the School of Painting twice a week.

  ‘Mum…’

  ‘Gussie, I’m working.’

  ‘Can I talk to you, please? It’s important.’

  ‘Aren’t you feeling well?”

  ‘No, I’m fine. It’s not that.’

  ‘Later then, okay?’

  I go back to my book and Rena Wooflie and Charlie.

  Later is too late. I lose my nerve and say nothing.

  I am going to be a writer. I’ve decided that’s the only thing I can attempt to do without a decent education. My waste paper bin is already full of rubbish writing. Scribbled words lie strangled in twisted paper like squashed ants. I’m not going to get very far at this rate.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  WE HAVE SEEN all the art in the Tate, St Ives, where I had a crab sandwich in the café on the top floor and Mum had a glass of wine, and now Mum and I are looking round the open artists’ studios all over Downlong. This particular studio is rather dilapidated with rain coming in through the roof, but I think it adds to the character. There’s a working pot-belly stove, with a long black pipe going out through the roof. A huge window looks out onto the rain-pitted beach, where a man throws a stick for a Jack Russell. (Do all Jack Russells suffer from Atte
ntion Deficit Hyperactive Syndrome?)

  Maybe my Grandma had that. She never stopped talking, working, hurrying. And she was good at all sorts of things, which is part of the condition, apparently, so there are compensations.

  Here are strange sculptures made of rusty metal and wood hung on the wooden walls and a large abstract painting in browns, greys and blacks on a huge easel. It smells of turpentine and oil paint and dust, new and old wood and raw canvas. Delicious.

  There’s a group of people talking to the artist – a square-shaped woman in a blue fisherman’s smock and Doc Marten boots. I’d like some DMs.

  I take a few photographs of the light patterns shed on the paint-splashed wooden floor, and the black stove and the old wooden plan chests that line one wall.

  The next studio we visit is small and tidy and clean, with geometric paintings all on the theme of brown squares on black squares, so we don’t stay long and I don’t bother to record it on film. The next place we go to is where Mum has her lessons. I am very breathless going up the stairs to the entrance and there are impatient people behind us. I have to squat at the top and I’m in the way. Shit.

  Shit shit shit.

  Mum tells them, ‘Sorry, my little girl’s unwell, you’ll have to wait a moment.’

  My heart is racing, my head pounds, I’m faint and feel nauseous. When I have recovered my breath, someone finds me a chair and Mum phones for a taxi to take us home. Someone suggests an ambulance but Mum says no thanks, she’ll be fine.

  It is so old and beautiful in here, a wooden building with north facing windows, chairs and wooden easels stacked up in the corner, old oil paintings and recent drawings on the walls. Someone gets me water.

  Home. I hate feeling ill when I’m not at home. Once I became ill when we were in Thailand and there was no doctor. We were moving that day to a house on a beach. Mum drove to there with me lying on the back seat looking very cyanosed, put me in bed under a ceiling fan, gave me Aspirin, cooled my pulse points with wet cloths and hoped I’d be okay.

  And I was.

  But when we saw my paediatric cardiologist in London, Mum told him what had happened and he said I shouldn’t go to hot countries any more. Getting too hot or too cold would be a strain on my heart.

  Daddy was hardly ever with us in the winter. He had to stay home and work. He did come to visit us once in Africa for three weeks. They shouted at each other.

  Mum tucks me up on the sofa. I don’t feel like climbing any more stairs just now. She has frown lines between her eyebrows as if she’s angry with me for being ill, but I know she’s only anxious, scared I’ll die suddenly. What she doesn’t seem to be aware of is that I could die of something else, not my failing heart, something totally unrelated to my pulmonary atresia. I could get run over by a bus – maybe not in St Ives, but when we’re in Penzance or Truro. I could prick my finger on a rose and die of tetanus fever. I expect that’s what the Sleeping Beauty had. Didn’t she prick her finger and go into a coma?

  Alistair has arrived. He examines me. He’s gentle. I like him, even if he does look like a horse. A very friendly horse with an unusual taste in halters.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  WORD FOR YESTERDAY, but I have carried it over to today as I forgot to use it, was: subterfuge: an evasive devise, especially in discussion; a refuge.

  Another reminder from the library arrived in the post today and I only just intercepted it in time. I’m not up to all this subterfuge. I feel especially guilty since Mum has suggested that Hayley tutors me at home. Brilliant idea. I do hope she agrees. I know she hasn’t found a full time teaching job locally. Mum also wondered if I would like Brett’s Dad, Steve, to teach me some Maths and Science. That would be so cool. I might even go to their house for lessons. That way I’d see more of Brett. Haven’t seen him for a while.

  Our young gull flies well now. He still comes back to roost on the roof at night with his parents. He must be feeding himself, as he no longer asks his parents for food. Or rather, he does ask sometimes, but his mum simply turns her head away and looks pointedly towards the harbour as if to say – dinner’s out there, go and find it.

  He is the same size and shape as his mother but is patterned like a tabby cat with brown speckles. He still can’t talk properly though, and still has only one word to his vocabulary – Wheeee.

  I haven’t looked at the pond lately. It hasn’t stopped raining for a week.

  NOTE: The real word for today is: Plash – a shallow pool, a dash of water, a splashing sound, to dabble in the water: to splash.

  I’ll try and use it at least once today so I don’t forget it.

  Great news! Steve can give me one lesson a week, after school, and Hayley is coming twice a week to work with me on English. I don’t think of that as work at all. I love books. Hayley’s bringing me a reading list.

  How ace is my mum!

  I’m having a close look at the wedding photograph of Mum and Daddy in my room. She looks so pretty, so much younger than she looks now. After all, it was thirteen years ago. Age has suddenly caught up with her. Daddy is much younger than she is. She was a cradle snatcher, Grandma used to say.

  Mummy says when you have been admired for your prettiness it’s hard getting old. (One problem I won’t have, then.) You feel the loss so much more than if you have never had that luck. She’s says she’s gone from hippie rock chick to Mother Theresa in a year.

  Mother Theresa is a nun, isn’t she? Does that mean Mum’s not sleeping with Alistair? Or is she referring to the fact that she is dressing like a nun? She started to cover up her arms, neck, chest, legs, everything. What’s left to expose? Shoulders, wrists and hands, and her feet. She still has pretty feet (apart from the hairy toes).

  ‘Mum, are you sleeping with Alistair?’

  ‘Gussie! My love life is my Own Private Business.’

  ‘Yes, but are you, Mum? I think I have a right to know. Anyway, isn’t it illegal for a doctor to be intimate with a patient?’ I know that from a Woman’s Hour programme.

  ‘He’s not my GP, he’s yours.’

  Ah. So that answers that question. She is sleeping with him.

  I suppose she has every right to find someone else. Daddy left her for another woman even if the other woman has now left him. But somehow it makes me feel that my parents’ divorce is one step closer. I know I hadn’t really believed that my parents would get together again, but I can’t face the idea that there isn’t ever going to be that possibility: never to be a family again.

  Here’s what I know about my Cornish family:

  My father is Jackson Stevens, born 1955.

  His father was Hartley Stevens, born 1900, died 1975.

  Hartley had a sister, Fay.

  Daddy’s mother was Molly Jackson, born 1920, died 1980.

  Grandfather’s father was a photographer, Amos Hartley Stevens.

  That’s it. Not much, but it’s a start.

  Having decided to become a writer, I have writer’s block. Where shall I write? I haven’t got a desk or anything in my room and I certainly don’t want to write in the sitting room in full view of my mother. What if I want to write something rude or horrible about her? She’d see it. Also, I need a really good pen and a beautiful notebook. And what can I write about anyway? How do writers get to be writers? My journal is the only thing I write every day. I really would like a computer.

  Perhaps photography would be easier. It’s in my Cornish blood, after all. I hope I haven’t lost that particular blood through my various operations. You do bleed a lot when you are undergoing major surgery. And I’ve had lots of other people’s blood in transfusions. I feel as if I have got some Cornishness deep inside me, nevertheless. I feel as if this is Home with a capital H.

  We have breakfast out, Mum and me, every Saturday. We take turns choosing where to go. Today we are in a café on Tregenna Hill and sit by a window so we can see people passing. Claire is joining us with Gabriel. Mum is having the Full English. She says she deserves it
after a week of All Bran and apricots. I’m having a bacon sarni. That sounds as if it could be Strine. I’ll ask Brett. There are lots of shoppers in the street and people stop and talk to each other. I expect everyone knows everyone else. It must make you feel safe when you recognise most people around you. It’s like a huge clan or one large extended family.

  At the next table there is a family with a little girl about four. She’s wearing a pink dress and eating a huge pink ice-cream. She says to her daddy, ‘I’m going to cut off your head and eat your brains with a spoon.’ He looks mock horrified and she screams with laughter.

  There’s a small group of elderly men standing on the corner at the bottom of the hill by the bank. There’s no seat, but they gather there in a row on the narrow pavement most days and watch the world go by, laughing and greeting old friends, and I suppose talking about their aches and pains, and who has just died, and how the local rugby teams are doing. One of them I recognise from the fishermen’s lodges but he doesn’t notice me.

  Claire invites us out to their place tomorrow for lunch. We’ll meet the rest of the family, unless the surf is good somewhere, in which case Phaedra and Troy will follow the waves. Gabriel is of course up in his tree. He has built a veritable palace of platforms and ropes. All the trees have lost their leaves and only the bare bones are visible. The chicks are now pullets and the kittens have all gone to new homes. The floppy-eared rabbits haven’t changed a bit, except that they spend more time in their hutch. The ducks are still waddling or limping and worrying the grass.

  I have a present for Gabriel: a Darth Vader sword. Last time we came here he was playing at Star Wars with a rolled paper weapon. Mum said not to give it to him until we leave for home but it starts to rain very heavily and Gabriel comes in looking bedraggled and miserable so I give him the gift. He unwraps it and his little face lights up. He loves it. Claire isn’t too happy though. And Phaedra and Troy, who have been in their rooms, come out to see what the horrible noise is, and Troy, who is about six feet tall, confiscates the offending toy that’s flashing lights and playing a dreadful tinny sound, and puts it on a high shelf, and Gabriel goes back outside in a huff.