by George Friel
‘Oh dear, if I only had her all to myself! If only she was my wee girl!’ she sighed, and went on sighing, unable to think what to think after that.
She got her chance of having Grace alone because at that time there were still theatres in Glasgow, and Mrs Christie often went to the old Empress music-hall with the widow Mrs Green. Miss Partridge overheard them on the stairhead landing arranging to go on the Thursday and did a little jig of joy behind the lavatory door. With the mother out of the way for the evening there was nobody to stop her getting Grace to come in for an hour. It was only the mother objected to her talking to the child. The father never bothered one way or the other. He was a zero, a pub- man, seldom at home in the evening. Grace would be left with her big sister Agnes, a stupid lump all puppy fat and pimples, addicted to wailing pop songs as she wiggled up and down the stairs, letting the whole close hear that her world had come to an end because her boy had found another friend. She also broadcast she was ready to surrender body and soul because she was under her true love’s control. The erotic confessions of a thirteen-year- old girl who had no boyfriend, nor was likely to have one till her pimples cleared away and her budding breasts ripened a bit more, irritated Miss Partridge out of all proportion. She was convinced that only a supernatural intervention, a gratuitous descent of the Divine Essence, could have given such a jumbo-calf as Agnes such a little sister as Grace.
Every word Mrs Christie and Mrs Green said came clearly through the lavatory door, and Miss Partridge loitered behind it till they parted before she dared flush and go out. She was always shy about leaving that place since Angus Erskine’s song on the wash-house roof, and she didn’t want Mrs Christie to guess she had heard a music-hall date fixed which would mean leaving Grace motherless for an evening. So she lingered there, ear against wood, on one foot and then on the other in that limited privacy, and her heart was exalted above the seats of the mighty as the words she was taking in resurrected an old dream. She waited for the night to come when she could make her dream come true and have Grace all to herself for an evening. She would fill the hungry with good things. Then she worried in case something would happen to prevent it.
But she managed it easily enough, for Grace was a biddable child, a mum girl who did what she was told when she was told because she was told, bending before the breezy whims of the adult world around her at school and at home, yet always keeping herself to herself, suffering no more the loss of her independence, the tearing of her roots, than the whispering green grass does before the domineering wind.
On the Thursday night Miss Partridge leaned out of her window watching till she saw Mrs Christie and Mrs Green come out of the close together and go away down the street. She felt safe then, as released as a prisoner who has earned his due remission for good conduct, and purring to herself she padded downstairs to the first storey, knocked with the glow of pleasure at the Christies’ door. When Jumbo opened it with a Romeo in her paw she grinned and craned. Ingratiatingly she spoke:
‘Oh, it’s you, Agnes! Is Grace in? I was wondering could she go a message for me. I’ve only my slippers on or I’d go myself. It’s just down to Carlo’s for a fish supper for my tea.’
‘Gracie!’ Agnes yelled, waving her Romeo towards the kitchen, and Miss Partridge trembled in horror at the gross familiarity of this unsisterly earthling. ‘Aw, Gracie, here’s Wee – here’s Miss Partridge wants you.’
Grace dawned from the kitchen, bringing brightness to the dim lobby, all legs and a brief skirt and faraway eyes, and Agnes pushed her out to Miss Partridge and slammed the door so hard that the other doors in the close vibrated in booming obedience to the rule of the Christies.
‘They’re aye banging doors in that hoose!’ cried Sandy McKay, all alone and irritable.
‘That’s that big fat Aggie again,’ said Daddy Blair to Mammy Blair. ‘You should speak to her about that.’
‘Aye sure,’ said Mammy Blair, darning his socks with a beer bottle in the heels. ‘I’ll start a stairhead fight just to please you. You speak to her yourself if it bothers you all that much.’
‘You don’t mind, do you, Grace dear?’ Miss Partridge panted, one wing round the girl’s shoulder to lead her away.
Grace shook her head and waited for instructions.
It wasn’t that Miss Partridge particularly wanted a fish supper, though Carlo’s were famous in the district, but if she sent Grace for one then Grace would have to come up to her door with it, and after that it would only be natural to ask her in. She thought it a craftier way of getting the child inside than simply inviting her in for tea. Doing it that way she ran the risk of having her invitation refused, and the snub would be a wound she feared would kill her.
‘I’ll maybe have something nice for you when you come back, dear,’ she breathed in Grace’s ear, hugging her before she sent her off.
Back in her single-end Miss Partridge set the table for two. On a large plate in the centre she put cakes, fancy biscuits, and a couple of cream buns, she put clean linen over the American cloth that was left uncovered when she ate alone, and stood back hands clasped under chin, trying to gauge how the layout would appeal to a child who had a quick eye for sweet things.
Then after all the tea-party wasn't a success. Not to her anyway. Grace pleased her to begin with, she looked so clean and pretty with an alice-band in her hair, and it may be Grace had no complaints. She certainly scoffed at once most of the chips from the fish supper and made a spirited assault thereafter on the cakes and biscuits, but she had little conversation. And Shelley, who was meant to provide talk by his running commentary on the party in particular and life in general, was as silent as the backcourt after midnight. The great occasion lacked the atmosphere Miss Partridge had expected it to have; there was no intimacy, no communion, no tender preparation for her confession of love, only a wee girl eating bravely and a bird in his cage snuffling and sniffing, gasping and wheezing, watching them with a melancholy eye, bowing his head to peck at his breast, shivering and flapping to no purpose. He couldn’t even stand at peace on his perch. He kept limping round his cage in frustrated circles.
‘He’s almost human, isn’t he?’ said Miss Partridge proudly in spite of her disappointment. ‘I think the poor thing’s caught a cold. Shelley, Shelley, Shelley!’
She poked a chip into the cage and encouraged the ailing parrot with unhappy lovetalk.
‘Is my darling not well tonight? Not a word for your momma? Nothing to say for Grace, my pet? Come, come, come! Chooky, chooky, chooky! Who loves me? Tell me true now, come on now, tell me. Shelley, Shelley, Shelley!’
But Shelley wouldn’t play.
‘I think there’s something wrong with his foot,’ Miss Partridge brooded, and with a ruthless tenderness she probed the two toes in front and the two toes behind.
‘Why do you call it Shelley?’ Grace asked, not very interested, just for something to say to break her boredom at the way the woman was carrying on. Casually, lightly, she lifted the first of the cream buns.
‘It’s not it, it’s him,’ Miss Partridge checked her gently. ‘He’s old, you know, very old. Oh, an awfully old bird. I got him from a sailor in New York years and years ago. And the sailor told me he was seventy years old then, and that wasn’t yesterday. He was ill then but I took him and nursed him and I’ve kept him ever since. Sometimes he tells me bits of his life story when we sit in here alone together at night, just the two of us.’
‘New York? That’s in America,’ said Grace, a knowledgeable as well as a biddable child. She stared across at the forlorn woman making love to a languishing parrot, not believing Miss Partridge had ever seen America. It was too far away. It was another world. And she knew the only world Wee Annie had ever lived in was her lonely world in this single-end on the top storey.
‘Oh aye, I’ve been in America all right,’ Miss Partridge thrust back quickly, hearing the child’s distrust as an audible wave in the room. ‘I’ll tell you about it some time, dear. It’s a long stor
y. And you’re far too young yet. Shelley, Shelley, Shelley! Come on, sweetheart, talk to me! Say something for Grace, darling. She hasn’t heard a word out of you all night. Sing her your wee song about Chesapeake Bay. Tell her how you used to live on the banks of the Gambia.’
‘Why do you call him Shelley?’ Grace remembered she hadn’t been told. ‘Miss Galloway gave us a poem by a man called Shelley last week. She said it was a good piece to say for a girl, for Ella Kewshin.’
In an explicable gush of generosity she spoke out loud and bold.
Hailty thee, blind spirit,
Burd thou never wert,
That from Heaven or Neerit,
Poorest eyeful heart,
Fourth in prophets
Trains of fun,
She gulped and concluded.
‘Premedicated art.’
Miss Partridge was hypnotised by the childish treble of the chant. In her anxiety about Shelley she heard only what she already knew, surprised with joy to hear someone else say the words that had once been dear to her at her Papa’s knee.
‘Go on,’ she pleaded, but softly lest she broke the spell.
‘That’s all I know,’ said Grace. ‘It’s all she gave us. We’re to get more of it tomorrow,’ she said. ‘We get poetry every Friday. Miss Galloway. We all call her Wellaway because she acts daft. She makes us learn bits of poetry off by heart. They’re hard. She says we’re too young to understand them now but when we’re older we will, she says, like you do.’
‘There’s so much to understand and you’re so young,’ Miss Partridge said sadly.
‘I’m eleven next month,’ Grace corrected her. ‘I’m not that young.’
A glaze moved over Miss Partridge’s eyes, the remote look of the planner. A birthday party would be a good thing to arrange, even if it meant inviting others as well as Grace. She would put up with the prattling rivals who would have to come if she could put Grace deeper in her debt and strengthen her claim to the child’s gratitude.
‘What day?’ she had to ask.
‘The fifteenth,’ said Grace. ‘It’s a Friday.’
‘That’s the best night for a party,’ Miss Partridge was pleased. ‘And this is the best season. We must have a party for you, mustn’t we, dear?’
‘My mother’s giving me a party,’ Grace warned her off. ‘She always gives me a party. Ever since I was one.’
Shelley stepped on to his perch and fell off.
‘Hellhellhell!’ he squawked in anger. ‘Damn!’
Miss Partridge hurried over to him like a mother to her injured bairn. That was when the party collapsed. Grace hovered round the cage, looking with big blue bored eyes from the stricken parrot to her frantic hostess, and Miss Partridge was distracted about Shelley. She let Grace go without saying a word of all she had meant to say.
Shelley was worse the next night and she was in a panic of worried love. Then over the week he rallied as if he was going to be all right, and she believed she was wrong to worry, the worst was over. But no. His rallies became briefer and his relapses longer and more frightening. She lay in wait behind her door, keeping it slightly ajar, to catch Hugh Main the next time he was due to visit his cousin, and she asked him to come in and look at the bird.
‘It’s not me you want, it’s a vet,’ Main told her cheerfully. ‘A vet could put him right.’
But for what it was worth, and he told her it wasn’t much, he gave her his opinion after he had examined Shelley with the combined skills and sympathies of a countrybred lad used to handling nonhuman life and a final year medical student not unversed in recognising the signs of mortality.
‘He’s in pain, isn’t he?’ said Miss Partridge, tears in her
eyes and her small fingers twisting each other to no purpose. ‘I can see it. Oh, I can see it all right!’
‘He’s certainly suffering,’ Main granted.
‘I can’t bear to see anybody suffering,’ Miss Partridge moaned. ‘I always think he’d be better dead. Is there nothing you could give him to take the pain away?’
‘I suppose there is,’ said Main, truly sorry for the skinny-legged, flatchested, greyhaired weeping little woman. ‘But it wouldn’t be much use, not in the long run. Frankly, Miss Partridge, I think he’s dying. He’s rotten with rheumatism and it’s got at his heart. And I’d be surprised if he’s not tubercular too.’
She took a pride in being brave. She straightened to her five feet two inches and looked up at him.
‘You mean there’s no hope?’
‘I don’t think there’s much. But of course I could be wrong. If you’d care to call in a vet he could tell you better.’
‘I can’t afford any vet,’ she answered at once. ‘I’m quite willing to trust you, Mr Main. There’s an aura about you. And I’ve ways of knowing. When I’m alone at night the dead come and tell me things. About people often. Who’s good and who’s bad. But they won’t come till after midnight when the whole stair’s quiet, and I’ve got to sit and wait for them and even then they don’t always come. Some nights when you’re sure, nothing happens. Another night you give them up and you’re nearly sleeping, and then they start whispering to waken me. Maybe you don’t believe me. But it’s true. I’m in touch. I’ve got sources of knowledge.’
Main, who would have hooted at his cousin for claiming supernatural information, wouldn’t even smile at Miss Partridge. He listened solemnly, patting her shoulder, and when she stopped for breath he comforted her, ‘I’m sure you have.’
‘So will you put him to sleep?’ she asked, blunt and bold, her eyes dry after one wiping. ‘Put him out of his misery. You could get something to give him. A man in your position.’
He didn’t like to ask her what she thought his position was. Instead, he frowned and pursed his lips and tried to look wise.
‘Euthanasia, that’s what I mean,’ said Miss Partridge, hearing his sympathy as plainly as she had heard Grace’s doubt that she had ever been in America.
He promised to come back with something. He had no feeling at all about the parrot. It was Miss Partridge he wanted to save from further pain. In the hospital where he was doing his final year training he got a bottle of ethyl chloride with a spray nozzle, and provided also with a rough box he had asked a joiner working in the hospital to put together for him quickly in lieu of a coffin, he went back to Miss Partridge without telling Big Tonalt what he was up to. He was sure his cousin would call it murder. Miss Partridge welcomed him gravely and went at once to the staircase window on the half-landing. She leaned out as if everything was normal in her single-end and looked into the dark backcourt, deserted in winter, while Main did what he had to do. He soaked a large bath sponge with the ethyl chloride, covered the cage with a blanket and sprayed inside it too for good measure while Shelley cowered in a corner and glared at him. He put the sponge inside the cage and made sure the blanket was firmly tucked in all round to make it airtight, and when that was done he sat in Miss Partridge’s fireside chair and smoked a cigarette slowly. He had no idea how long it would take, and the first time he went to the cage and lifted the blanket to drag out what he hoped was a corpse he was stabbed in the hand by a vicious thrust of the dying bird’s beak.
‘Damn you, you bastard!’ he cried without malice, feeling safe to call Shelley what he liked with Miss Partridge out of the room.
He laughed at his own fierce language. But it was more of an ordeal than he had expected and his nerves jittered a little when he saw he wasn’t at all sure he could manage the job cleanly and silently. He put more ethyl chloride on the --------------->>>#Pagebreak#<<<----------------sponge, sprayed the cage again with the nozzle slipped under the blanket, put a table cloth on top of the blanket, shrouded the cage tightly, and waited again.
‘Youth in Asia,’ he joked with himself, whistling in the dark. ‘Teenagers in China. Alas, my poor brother. Parricide, parrotcide. The bird is dead that we have made so much on.’
He didn’t want to prolong Miss Partridge’s lonely a
gony at the staircase window, so after the minimum patience he hauled the bird out by the neck, and feeling life still throbbing there he squeezed it steadily till the pulsations stopped. But not until he had put the dead thing in the box and nailed down the lid did he go to the door and silently signal Miss Partridge she could come back to her empty house.
She wept over the coffin, wringing her hands, rocking and keening.
‘He was all I had to love and now I’ve nothing. What am I to do, oh what am I to do? The way he used to play with me and talk to me, aye, and listen to me! He was someone I could talk to when I came home at night. When I was happy so was he, and when I was in the dumps he used to try to cheer me up. He’d flap his wings and make funny sounds to make me smile and give me a row if I didn’t, and now I’ll never hear him again. Oh, we had such good times together! He had lots of wee tricks for me, and we used to fight together, but just in fun of course, my finger and his beak, and he never, never bit me, not once did he bite me. He was a good soul. He bit Tommy once, but it was Tommy’s own fault, he was tormenting him. He knew I loved him. And I’m sure he loved me too. That’s my share of happiness in this world over for ever. Oh, Shelley, Shelley, my own wee friend, where are you now? What’s to become of me?’
She buried him darkly at dead of night, not turning any sods though for a time she thought of digging his grave in the backcourt where leaning out the staircase window she could see where he lay at peace and he would always be sponge, sprayed the cage again with the nozzle slipped under the blanket, put a table cloth on top of the blanket, shrouded the cage tightly, and waited again.
‘Youth in Asia,’ he joked with himself, whistling in the dark. ‘Teenagers in China. Alas, my poor brother. Parricide, parrotcide. The bird is dead that we have made so much on.’
