“Yep,” I say flatly, keeping my eyes on the page and trying to ignore the fact that the bird has now hopped on to the floor beside me.
“I know you’ve been feeling funny about birds lately, so I spoke to your dad last night and asked if he thought it might be a good idea to introduce you to Buddy. Maybe help you feel more relaxed around birds.”
What, is she Dr Alice B. Lovely now? It’s like she’s constantly trying to impress us.
And yeah, so it might be working with Stan, but he’s a kid, and everyone knows they can be easily impressed by stuff like sweets, and, er, magpies. But not me. No way.
Back to my book…
If only she didn’t believe he was about to put his soft mouth on her neck and cruelly pierce the warm skin th—
Tap.
Tap.
Scrabble, rustle … rustle, rustle…
Tap.
OK, OK, so the magpie doesn’t seem to want to be ignored. Its beak is right in my book, and at the same time it’s giving me the once-over with its searching little eyes.
“What’s it doing?” I hear myself asking, as the bird burrows its beak somewhere between page 30 and page 50.
“He’s caching,” explains Alice B. Lovely, gazing on like a proud mum.
As explanations go, it’s pretty lame, seeing as I don’t have a clue what caching means.
“It’s like a game of hide-and-seek,” she says now, spotting my confusion. “Magpies love to tuck away their favourite finds and rediscover them about ten seconds later.”
“So what’s it trying to tuck away?” I ask, wondering if I dare peek, with that beak in pecking range of my fingers.
But yes, I have to admit that I am suddenly curious.
And kind of charmed by this hopping, head-tilting creature.
“Well, toast,” says Alice, watching as her pet tap-taps the lumpy pages together firmly.
Hmm.
Peanut butter and vampires … I’m not entirely sure that’s a great combination.
I wave my hand to shoo the bird away. It stares at me with black beady eyes, and blinks these weird bright yellow inner eyelids at me, as if it’s thinking about what to do. I have a feeling one of the options it’s considering isn’t being shooed.
What I’m not expecting is what comes out of its shiny black beak.
“Hello!”
Huh?
That was a squawking, scratchy sound, but it was definitely a word.
“It said hello!” I practically squawk myself.
“Yes!” laughs Alice B. Lovely, making her curtains of hair ripple and the double cherry on her long necklace sway.
“But – but only parrots can do that,” I protest, while Stan jumps up and down on the spot clapping his hands and shouting, “He spoke! Buddy spoke!”
“Magpies can copy some basic sounds,” Alice B. Lovely explains, kicking the door of the pet carrier box closed with the toe of her beat-up gold shoes. “They’re not as sophisticated as birds in the parrot family, but they can do pretty good attempts at words.”
Right on cue, Buddy hops on my knee and says, “Smile! Smile, sweetie! Smile!”
I can’t help it; I don’t just smile, I burst out laughing, and the unexpected sound of that shocks Stan enough to stop bouncing and Buddy enough to fly off.
“There are no windows open, are there?” Alice B. Lovely asks in a sudden panic, following Buddy’s whack-whack-whack of wings out into the corridor.
“I don’t know – maybe in the kitchen?” I fret, flinging down my toasted book and running after her.
“The thing is, Buddy doesn’t fly free!” Alice B. Lovely calls out, frantically looking into Mum’s Frosted Lilac bedroom as she rushes by. “He’s always either inside at our place or in his cage!”
In my hurry, my hip thwacks against the corner of the hall table.
Almost in slow motion, I see the clock of doom slip-slide off it and fall to the floor with an ominous clunk.
I’ve daydreamed about it breaking for so long, but now it’s actually happening I feel sick.
Time lurches and speeds up fast again as my fingers curl around the cool wood and I lift it up.
I see with relief that the glass isn’t smashed and the second hand is still moving.
Much as I hate the thing, what I’d hate more is for Nana’s clock to be broken and for Mum to have yet another reason to be fed up with me, I realize, as I gingerly place it back on to the table.
“Don’t worry! Buddy’s here!” I hear Stan yelp.
Somehow my little brother has skedaddled to the kitchen before us and is standing panting by the sink.
Oh, thank goodness. There’s the magpie, strutting up and down on the kitchen windowsill and staring down into the communal back garden.
“The window’s open a little bit,” I notice, “but it’s OK – Mum’s got it on the catch, so it won’t open any wider.”
“Hmm … he’s not happy about something,” says Alice B. Lovely, hurrying over to join her bird and Stan.
“What is it?” I ask, peering out. All I can see is washing on the line, Mrs Kosma’s collection of flapping pirate-sail dresses.
“Oh, I know! It’s because those clothes are all black – he thinks they’re crows.”
“Very wide, big crows!” I find myself laughing out loud for the second time today, thinking of wobbly Mrs Kosma, who RIGHT at that second appears from behind one of the dresses with what looks like a bag of old bread in her hand, ready to feed her pigeon friends.
She’s looking up, frowning, trying to see the source of the laughing.
“Hello!” squawks Buddy at top volume.
Mrs Kosma frowns at the sight of three human faces and a strutting bird on the inside of the window ledge.
“Smile, sweetie! Smile!” Buddy squawks some more.
Mrs Kosma takes a step back in surprise.
“Pppffffffffffffftt!!” I snort loudly, then have to step away, slapping my hands across my mouth.
She must think it’s one of us being cheeky. But what can we do? I can hardly open the window and explain we have a tame pet talking magpie in here, or the tame pet talking magpie might fly away.
Alice B. Lovely gives a little whistle and pats Stan’s left shoulder – and Buddy obediently flaps right on to it.
“Can you take him back through to the living room?”
Stan nods and heads off, and Alice B. Lovely whips her phone out of a pocket in her flamingo skirt.
“What are you doing?” I ask, as she holds it to her eyes and clicks.
“I’ve got to take a photo of those dresses before your neighbour takes them down,” she answers.
“Why? What’s so interesting about old lady dresses?”
“They just look kind of beautiful and weird. Like a cloud of black kites, or…”
“Or sails on a pirate ship?” I suggest.
“Yes, they do a bit,” says Alice B. Lovely, blinking her jaggedy black lashes. “It’s like they’re like a great piece of installation art.”
“What is installation art?” I ask.
I’ve never wanted to seem interested in anything Alice B. Lovely’s had to say before, but now it’s like I’ve forgotten to care whether I show it or not.
“Um … unexpected art, I guess,” she replies. “Like at the South Bank, there was a giant urban fox – as big as a building – made out of straw. Or at the gallery in town, I once saw a flock of seagulls, only they were just paper planes, suspended on wires!”
Her face has gone all dreamy, the way Tash’s does when she mentions Max, or Stan’s does when you get him talking about Lego.
And I get the chance to look more closely at her eyelashes for the first time, and they’re a work of art themselves. They must be made out of two tiny, thin strips of fine plastic, and are mini
ature scenes of grass, flowers and butterflies. They’re like the detailed black silhouette illustrations in a Cinderella book I used to love when I was little. (Where was that now? Probably packed away at the back of the cupboard with the stupid safari hippo and all my other babyish stuff.)
“And then there’s this really famous artist who once made hundreds of frozen mini men,” Alice B. Lovely babbles on. “He put them on some steps, till they melted.”
“What’s the point of that?” I frown. “Why would you spend ages making something if it disappears as soon as the sun comes out?”
“Well, he filmed it, of course!” says Alice B. Lovely, with one of her harp-in-the-room laughs. “And that becomes the art. That’s what can be shown in galleries.”
I’m still frowning, uncertain.
“You liked Maggie Baxter’s stuff, didn’t you?” she checks with me.
“Your aunt’s stuff? The chewing gum?” I say. “Yeah. It’s cute.”
“And it won’t last for ever. People will walk on them, and they’ll wear away. But she photographs each one as she does it, so it’s preserved that way.”
I feel my frown fading and my eyebrows raising. I look intrigued, I know I do, and Alice B. Lovely spots that and takes advantage straightaway.
“Get your jacket on – I want to show you something,” she says in a soft voice, but one that’s giving me an order, for sure.
“What about your bird, though?” I ask.
“Leave him with the toast, and he’ll have fun,” she says brightly. “We can clear up the caching later…”
Stan and Alice B. Lovely are too fast for me.
I’m running, focusing on the blur of his bright blue Converse trainers and her gold beat-up 1920s shoes.
By the time I catch up with them, they are staring at an ad on the side of a bus shelter and giggling.
Why is an ad for perfume so funny? I’ve seen this one before: some impossibly pretty girl sulking attractively while holding up a bottle of something expensively smelly.
“Edie, look!” says Stan pointing at the model’s face.
Ah, she’s not quite sulking any more. Someone has drawn a smiling mouth full of teeth and braces and plastered it on top of her pout.
Yeah, that’s pretty funny.
“Next one!” says Alice B. Lovely, and we’re off again, to a bus shelter just down the road.
This time, we’re stopping to stare at an oily-chested hunk who’s advertising men’s deodorant. His chiselled good looks are ruined a bit by the huge googly cross-eyes someone has stuck on his face.
I burst out laughing, which seems to please Stan and Alice B. Lovely no end.
“I did do more, but they’ve been taken down already,” says our childminder, holding her phone up and clicking through some images on the screen.
Ah, I get it. Alice B. Lovely did this stuff.
“Is this installation art?” I ask, as I look at snaps of a toothpaste ad featuring a grinning model with blacked-out teeth; a car ad with giant eyelashes fixed to the headlights; and Kate Moss with a moustache. (Seeing one of the most iconic faces ever with facial fuzziness makes me snort out loud again. What is with me and all this snorting today?)
“Yes!” says Alice B. Lovely, enthusiastically. “Either of you fancy having a go?”
With the hand that isn’t holding her phone, she’s rifling in her bag and pulling out a clear plastic folder filled with what looks like a stash of white paper, some pens and a pair of scissors.
“Yes, yes, yes!” Stan yelps, doing his Tigger bounces on the spot.
Before I know what’s happening, Stan has run around to the far side of the bus shelter and drawn a speech bubble that says, “Boo!”
“Excellent!” announces Alice B. Lovely, handing a blob of Blu-tack to my brother.
“But isn’t this like graffiti? Couldn’t we get into trouble?” I ask, as Stan fixes his “Boo” to the mouth of a perky Jack Russell in a dog food ad.
Alice B. Lovely twirls her head around to look at me, her hair swishing like a swoop of silk.
“Don’t worry – I use Blu-tack to put these bits of artwork up, so I’m not technically damaging anything,” Alice B. Lovely answers, holding her phone up to her face. “And I take them down as soon as I’ve got a photo of the ad.”
She pauses and snaps Stan’s first ever attempt at installation art.
“But … but you haven’t taken down any of the ones you’ve just shown us,” I point out.
Alice B. Lovely blinks at me from behind her phone.
“Um, well, sometimes it’s fun to leave them up for a little while, just to make people laugh!” she says with a sweet grin.
“Which means we could get caught and we could get into trouble?” I suggest, nibbling at my lip.
“Of course not,” Alice B. Lovely reassures me, though she’s looking a little nervous around the edges herself. “Well, what I mean is, we’ll never get caught … if we run!”
Oh, boy – with that, we run and we run, from bus shelter to bus shelter, only stopping when…
a) Stan plasters random “Boo!”s on posters (the baby in the talc ad, a banana in a supermarket ad and a Highland cow advertising holidays in Scotland), and …
b) we’re laughing too much to run.
“Come on, it’s your turn, Edie!” Stan says, handing me a marker pen and a challenge.
We’ve now arrived at the other side of the high street, and we’re in between the town hall and the art gallery. I’m feeling high on adrenaline after all that running.
I’m also feeling stupidly nervous. There are people milling about, paying us no attention. But what happens if they see me doing something to the bus stop? Will they think I’m vandalizing it?
“Come on, Edie! Have a go!” urges Alice B. Lovely.
So I glance at the ad on the side of the shelter (it features a cute little kid holding a glass of milk) and come up with an idea.
Scribble, scribble, scribble.
Snip, snip, snip.
“Here, Edie,” says Alice B. Lovely, passing me a blob of Blu-tack.
The cheeks of her pale doll face are pink and her fairy-tale eyes are wide. She is radiating encouragement.
“Hey, look – there’s a bus coming!” squeals Stan.
Stick, stick, stick.
CLICK! and Alice B. Lovely has captured my artwork for posterity.
“Edie, quick – get back over here,” she says, urging me to follow her.
We sprint to the nearest wall, beside a glass-fronted noticeboard flagging up what’s on at the art gallery.
With my heart beating, I pretend to read the info, while Alice B. Lovely and Stan lean back casually and watch for reactions from the passengers on the bus.
“Aww,” says Stan, sounding disappointed. “It’s not very busy!”
“Apart from those three girls on the top deck,” says Alice B. Lovely. “They’re looking pretty freaked.”
“They’re big girls from your school, aren’t they, Edie?” Stan points out.
OK, so thumping heart or not, I have to look now.
And I burst out laughing again, as I recognize Dionne, Cara and Holly, who are all frowning at side of the bus shelter in total confusion. ’Cause instead of an ad for milky goodness, they see a kid with fangs, drinking a glass of something I’ve just coloured in red. (At least the rubbish vampire book’s been good for something. Apart from caching, of course.)
Still, I don’t want them to spot me spotting them (there’s nothing like the dead-eyed stares of mean girls to flat line your mood) so I spin around again and carry on pretending to study the notices in the art gallery board.
Alice B. Lovely is doing the same.
“Look!” Alice B. Lovely gasps, tapping the glass with one finger.
Oh – maybe she’s not pretending.
“‘Art Under … feet’,” Stan reads hesitantly from the poster.
“‘Art Underfoot’,” I correct him, as I read it too. “‘An exhibition of the unique works of—’”
“Alice B. Lovely – it’s your auntie! It’s your auntie!!” he gabbles.
He’s right. It’s a show of Maggie Baxter’s mad but amazing gum art. Photos of every one of them are going to be displayed here from next weekend.
I find myself laughing with surprise at the coincidence.
Stan’s reaction is to jump up and down, of course.
And what about Alice B. Lovely?
She turns to us with her incredibly crazy, incredibly beautiful eyes, which seem more enormous with wonder than ever.
Instinctively, I grab my phone from my pocket, flick to the camera option with my thumb, point it straight at Alice B. Lovely and CLICK!, I have a piece of artwork of my own…
“I think he’s finally asleep,” says Alice B. Lovely, tiptoeing back from Stan’s room and flopping down on the sofa beside me.
She’d gone back in with Arthur the crocodile. Her magpie had taken such a shine to Arthur, snuggling up and nudging him, that Stan had said Arthur could stay up late and play with Buddy.
But then as time wore on, Stan sort of lost it, and cried for Arthur. It was no wonder he was beside himself, I guess; there’s only so much wild pet birds, illegal art, vegetable-monster-making and full-size crocodile modelling a small boy can take before his brain explodes with over-stimulation.
“Good, he’s exhausted,” I say, gently stroking the head of Buddy, who’s now roosting on my knee.
I’d laughed out loud when he appeared out of nowhere a few minutes ago and leapt on my leg with a squawked “Hello!”
Before I’d gone to read Stan yet another bedtime story (anything to help make him sleepy), the bird had been happily strolling up and down the still-damp papier maché crocodile that was basking on some newspaper in front of the TV. But I guess crocodiles – especially papier maché ones – can’t scratch the top of your head when you’re in the mood for it.
“Wow – I think this place needs a bit of a tidy-up,” says Alice B. Lovely, surveying the room.
Life According To...Alice B. Lovely Page 9
