Only the Animals

by Ceridwen Dovey

  Julian Barnes, FLAUBERT’S PARROT

  A long time ago, thirty years to be precise, when my owner asked her ex-husband, before he was even her husband, how he felt about their impending nuptials, he said, ‘Great. Excited.’

  No, no, she insisted, she wanted to know how he really felt about getting married.

  So then, she told me, he cocked his head, just like I sometimes did when I was about to do something she wouldn’t like, and said, ‘Before we decided to get married, if I walked past a beautiful woman on the street, I felt a little bit happy.’

  ‘And now, when you pass a beautiful woman?’ she prompted him.

  ‘And now,’ he said, ‘I feel a bit sad.’

  ‘Okay. Thank you for that. Now ask me.’

  He seemed surprised that she wanted him to reciprocate. That was the trouble with them from the beginning.

  ‘How do you feel about getting married?’ he asked dutifully.

  ‘I think you commit to marriage with both eyes open, then you shut one eye for ever after.’

  He smiled, lifted the morning paper and disappeared behind its folds.

  ‘I think marriage is going to be similar to being whipped and pickled,’ she continued, knowing she was about to overstep lines. ‘Like they used to do to mutinying sailors in the old days. Whipped as punishment, then pickled with salt to prevent infection. Wonderfully cruel, terribly kind.’

  Her fiancé had already lost himself in the exigencies of current events.

  She pushed on. ‘I think marriage is probably going to feel like George Shaw’s platypus – first one he ever saw, brought back from some expedition or another to Van Diemen’s Land. Thought it was a hoax – half a duck sewn to half an otter.’

  To her surprise, he’d still been listening. ‘So which are you?’ he said, letting the paper float down to the kitchen table, its edge sucking up the spilt milk. ‘Duck or otter?’

  He’d missed the point: that she was neither fully, that marriage would force her to metamorphose so that she was half-duck, half-otter, always partly a stranger to herself. She didn’t try to explain. She was pregnant with their daughter then and had discovered that in that state she could get away with bad behaviour.

  ‘Whichever was the bottom half, getting the shit end of the deal,’ she said, lifting herself heavily from the chair to wash the breakfast dishes.

  If nothing else, you could at least say she’d been perspicacious.

  * * *

  It was a year after she saw the Twin Towers falling that my owner delivered the divorce papers, put her goods in storage and came east. Her initial instinct had been to head for Damascus. She wanted her friends in New York to admire her courage. She wanted her ex-husband to be grudgingly impressed. Her daughter, who had always kept her at arm’s length, sarcastically suggested Goa was a more suitable destination for a midlife crisis.

  The compromise turned out to be Beirut, where she got a job teaching English at the American School. Disappointing at first because, to her untutored appetites, Lebanon didn’t seem to count as the real oriental deal. Would there be any souks? In photographs, Beirut looked to her like a dirtier version of Marseille, more Mediterranean than Middle Eastern.

  Four years later, when the Israelis started shelling parts of the city, there was no longer any doubt in her mind: she was living in the Middle East. It seemed like a vindication. Until I started plucking out my own feathers so aggressively I drew blood.

  * * *

  Her job at the American School had come with a furnished apartment and a friendly group of ex-pats fond of rooftop barbeques, and she soon established a routine. She didn’t find this depressing, as she had during her last year in New York. Going to the fruit shop on the corner, or putting the trash bags outside the door of her apartment to be collected, it was all an exercise in heightened living. A ride in a Beirut taxi spent mostly on the wrong side of the road would leave her exhilarated. Even placing her used toilet paper in the rubbish bin instead of flushing it was interesting.

  She powerwalked among the French speakers along the Corniche in the early morning cool and learned where to buy blackberry juice from a street vendor on the way home. On weekends she lay on the sofa on the balcony drinking Lebanese beer, watching the Filipino maid in the apartment opposite ironing with great care her employer’s silk bras and panties. When she was hungry she stood barefoot in front of the open fridge and ate pickles and labne direct from their containers. She bought a hookah and blew rings of apple tobacco smoke at the pigeons outside her bedroom window.

  When it came to the past, the selective amnesia of the general population suited her just fine. Their powers of willful overlooking were something to which she aspired. She marvelled at their ability to ignore palm trees stunted by shrapnel, sandbags still stacked on windowsills in abandoned houses, or the large chunk missing from the side of the Holiday Inn. Denial, she thought one evening, passing a dead horse inexplicably decomposing in the shallows on the public beach, is underrated.

  * * *

  She decided, rather irresponsibly, to get a pet. Not a dog or a cat, but something exotic to match her own transformation. The pet shop stocked pig-snouted turtles, Rottweiler puppies, baby crocodiles, squirrels, monkeys with gammy eyes. But the moment she walked into the store, she knew what she wanted. I was sitting on the storeowner’s shoulder, grooming the hair around his ear with my beak, strand by strand. She hadn’t believed in love at first sight until that moment – it had taken her a while to warm up even to her own child.

  ‘Does the parrot talk?’ she asked.

  ‘I’ve tried to teach it,’ he said. ‘No luck. But it can squawk.’

  She watched me launch into a string of somersaults along the counter-top and offered to buy me on the spot. He was reluctant to sell. He had owned me since my birth many years before, the same year the Syrians re-invaded Lebanon and the long civil war fizzled out. She liked the idea of a peacetime parrot that couldn’t speak. She increased her offer. He agreed, and included my cage and perch for the price. In her haste to whisk me away before he changed his mind, she forgot to ask him my name.

  ‘If you are lucky,’ he said, as she was leaving the store with a towel draped over my cage, ‘he will live for another fifty years. Maybe more.’

  She emailed her daughter as soon as she could get to an internet café. Her daughter wrote back immediately: He sure as hell better not live longer than you.

  She called me Barnes, because she had just finished reading Flaubert’s Parrot and was a little bit in love with the author, whose photograph took up most of the book’s back cover. She didn’t yet know the standard pet store joke about parrots: You don’t own us, we own you.

  * * *

  Her Googling revealed that she had inadvertently adopted a toddler. As the online exhortations from fellow parrot owners accumulated, her joy became feverish. What delight to be needed so acutely! Her ex-husband had tolerated her neediness but not cultivated it in himself; her daughter had been determined to establish her independence from the moment she learned to walk. But there I was with my feathers scattering the light to create an illusion of brilliant green, my fat tongue, my perfect toes. I, Barnes, who would – if she cared for me attentively – grow to love and depend on her as my parent, partner, mate.

  She sat and gazed at me, smiling at the black feathers on my head which looked like a toupée and made me seem oddly formal. My body colouring gave the impression that I was wearing a multi-coloured tuxedo, with green wings, a white tummy and stumpy orange legs. She used to say that whenever I opened one clipped wing, she half expected me to launch into the can-can, or the opening song of a piece of musical theatre.

  * * *

  Her routine began to revolve around me. She created a play area for me in her bedroom, with no more than six toys at any time, rotated daily so that I would get neither overwhelmed nor bored. She gave me corn on the cob, pitted plums and peaches, seeds, lemons, beets, quartered cucumbers, knowing I would eat better
if I could hold my food myself, and – as a treat – two peanuts a day. She scrubbed kale leaves to rid them of insecticide and draped them on top of my cage. Each day she cleaned my perch, my play area, my dishes, and washed the floor of my cage with disinfectant.

  She changed the water in my bath after every dip, misted my feathers using a spray bottle on particularly hot days, blowdried my feathers on unseasonably chilly evenings. She refused visitors because I found them stressful, and turned down invitations from the ex-pats to come along on weekend roadtrips to various Roman or Crusader ruins around the country, not liking to leave me on my own. She let me perch on her forearm and stroked my back feathers, even when I bit her repeatedly. When I ripped into shreds the pages of every book on her shelf and flung bits of food onto the walls and floor, where they became as intransigent as cement, she forgave me.

  In the mornings she left for work reluctantly, hearing me squawking from my cage on the balcony even from the street, but gradually I learned to let her go without a noise. She would return in the early afternoon to find me intently watching the seagulls, trying to communicate with them in ungainly, earnest sounds.

  * * *

  Over many months we became inseparable. I sat on the toilet seat while she brushed her teeth, and hung from her loofah while she was in the shower. Each night she prepared two plates of food and we’d sit on the balcony to eat, her on a chair, me on the table. If she sang while she was making her bed, I made sympathetic noises; if she swore at something on the television, I would screech my support of her position. I learned to open her beer bottles with my beak. I stopped biting.

  At about seven in the evening I would get sleepy, then grumpy. I’d whine, grind my beak, droop my eyelids and try to snuggle against her chest until she took me to my cage and put me to bed in my little fleece bird tent hanging from the cage top. It was the only time I would go willingly into captivity. Then I’d sleep for twelve hours straight. In the morning I’d wait for her to wake up and hold me over the garbage can, then I’d let loose the most enormous birdshit you can imagine.

  She loved that such simple things gave me delight, a shot of joy – hairy poppies in a vase, sunshine, a full bath run just for me. I would chortle, sing, chirp, crow and coo with the pleasure of proximity to her, and groom her ears, her thin ponytail, the back of her hands, the arms of her sweaters, hoping to be groomed by her in return: feathers ruffled, tummy rubbed, head scratched, pin feathers soothed.

  Then she met Marty.

  * * *

  One of the other teachers had persuaded her to come up to the Friday evening rooftop barbeque – she hadn’t been for so long – and she decided to take me up there with her, on her shoulder.

  Marty had just arrived in Beirut to teach at the American School. He was around the same age as her, had come for the same reasons. ‘I knew I could sense another New Yorker sending out distress signals from across the crowded roof,’ he said to her after making a joke about avoiding the Midwestern types up there, and the Scandinavians too. ‘Like sonar waves emitted by a fellow bat in the darkness,’ he said.

  ‘A bat! Is that what you think of me?’ she said.

  That kind of thing, until they couldn’t breathe they were laughing so hard.

  She and Marty shared meaningful looks when one of the younger teachers arrived with his Lebanese girlfriend. The girl looked young, about nineteen, and had a plastic noseguard taped to her face and a slight swelling around her eyes. She didn’t pay much attention to me on my owner’s shoulder.

  ‘What happened?’ Marty said to the girl after introductions. ‘Are you okay?’

  The girl smiled and touched the noseguard as if to make sure it was still there. ‘Oh, nothing,’ she said. ‘Just a nose job.’

  Her boyfriend grinned at Marty. ‘I told her that in America the girls pretend they’re sick, or having their appendix out, and disappear for a while. But here, it’s a badge of honour.’

  My owner cleared her throat and smiled politely at the girl. ‘Have you been watching the Olympics?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes,’ the girl said. ‘Today I watched the only Lebanese team that does well at the Olympics. The only one that ever gets gold.’

  ‘Which one is that?’ Marty asked.

  ‘The shooting team,’ the girl said, and brought her hand to her face to touch the noseguard again.

  * * *

  When my owner and Marty went on a date to the National Museum of Beirut she took me along again. There was a video screening of what looked like large blocks of concrete being set with explosives and carefully blown apart. Inside each block, as the dust settled, an ancient Roman statue was revealed. During the civil war, the museum director had hidden these statues by encasing them in concrete. After the war ended, he wasn’t sure if the statues would survive having their casements exploded. But they did. My owner and Marty found this very moving.

  * * *

  Months passed, many of them. My owner spent more and more time with Marty; less and less with me.

  * * *

  One evening they took me out with them after dark, when the day’s heat had eased. They shared a hookah at one of the outside tables at a café in Solidere, and watched a Saudi woman eating a Big Mac meal, holding her niqab away from her face with one hand, lifting fry by fry out of sight beneath the material with the other. The motion reminded me of an elephant trunking leaves to its mouth. Her husband and young son were seated beside her in normal clothes.

  Oh, Beirut gave my owner and Marty too many reasons to get on the old high horse.

  She and Marty knew each other well enough by then to share the same hookah but they kept the plastic cap over the tip, not knowing who’d sucked on it the night before. On the table between them was a bowl of green almonds on ice, and cut watermelon.

  ‘Why did you and your wife divorce?’ she asked him, moving a watermelon pip with her forefinger around the table.

  ‘When we were first married, all she wanted to do was change me. Change this, change that. Why aren’t you this, why aren’t you that,’ he said.

  I could tell she liked his ironic tone. He had long since outgrown wistfulness.

  ‘Then,’ he said, ‘fifteen years later, she turns around and says –You’re not the man I married!’ He laughed. ‘She says – I don’t know who you are anymore!’

  That was when she decided to let Marty spend the night.

  * * *

  My owner was watching Marty sleeping beside her, and I knew she was wishing she had his capacity to fall asleep so easily. For her, there was always some anxiety surrounding that surrender: would she be able to do it, would she be able to fall asleep without having to try? She said her mind played cruel tricks on her. As soon as she shut her eyes, her brain took its cue to begin scrolling through the events of the day, spewing out reams of details and images and things she could have done better, or not done at all.

  She felt abandoned. It was the same kind of loneliness she’d told me she felt when she swam too far out to sea from the public beach on the Corniche.

  She got up and carried me in my cage out onto the balcony. The night was still warm. She lay on the sofa on the balcony in the dark with ice packs beneath her feet, listening to the traffic along the beachfront and looking at the dregs of starlight. She didn’t realise she’d left my cage door open and her heart swelled with fright for an instant as she felt the first pincer grip of my toes on her upper arm. She relaxed as I moved up her arm slowly with my rocking sideways gait, claw by claw, then rounded her shoulder and inched towards her neck. Gently – very gently – I took one strand of her long hair in my beak and tucked it behind her ear.

  In the morning, she said to Marty that she couldn’t do this, they should never have done this, it was not why she had come to Beirut.

  * * *

  A year passed.

  You should never take it lightly, life in the East.

  * * *

  One afternoon, as I was falling asleep in the crook of her arm,
we heard a deep, distant booming that she would have ignored as thunder had the floor of the apartment not moved beneath her feet.

  She couldn’t see anything unusual from the balcony, so she turned on the television. Israel had launched its first airstrike.

  Her only concern was to find a humidifier to protect my delicate lungs from the smoke and air debris. She put me in my cage, covered it, closed all the windows and ran to a second-hand electronic goods store several blocks away. The humidifier was the size and weight of a small fridge, and men stopped to stare at her on the street as she tried to run with it in her arms. She felt no strain. But it turned out to be useless: the power had been cut.

  Four days passed. All the other Americans in the building, including Marty, left Beirut by helicopter for Cyprus. He banged on her door as he passed on the stairwell. When she didn’t answer, he assumed she’d already been evacuated.

  She and I slept during the day. At night she lit candles and sat beside my cage, ready to stroke me when the windows rattled and the ceiling lamp began to swing. Sometimes we could see a flash as the gunboats in the seaport lobbed shells far overhead, towards the south of the city. With each explosion, I dug my toes into the flesh of her arm until she bled.

  A disoriented rooster on the roof of one of the surrounding buildings took to crowing hours before sunrise.

  * * *

  I began to screech for hours on end. I stopped eating, ignored my toys, and bit her to the bone when she tried to take me out of my cage. She watched in despair as I self-mutilated, ripping out my own plumage, plucking myself bare. My feathers accumulated in layers on the floor of my cage.

  Eventually she tore herself away from me while I was sleeping and found an internet café where the power was working. Her inbox was black with new messages. Her daughter had written five or six times a day in a rising crescendo of panic. Friends she hadn’t heard from in years had written in alarm, offering any form of assistance they could think of, most of it useless. Her ex-husband had emailed for the first time since the divorce, begging her to go to the US embassy to be evacuated. They all said they were sick with worry. They all pleaded with her to come home. She basked in their anxiety, smiled at the computer screen.