Flying Under Bridges

by Sandi Toksvig

  Don’t let Eden ford become a nightmare.

  Vote Marshall. Sleep safe at night.

  Then there was considerable detail about the mugging at the bus station and what Adam intended to do about it. It was a far cry from notice boards and dog-fouling.

  ‘John’s idea,’ beamed Adam. ‘Get people to realise they need to protect this town and all it stands for.’

  John shrugged his shoulders. ‘Not at all. Nothing to do with me. It was Adam who said it on the radio. I’m just trying to help a good man get re-elected. Do my bit for the community.’

  The good men went back to work and Eve was marooned in her own house. She looked in the freezer to prepare for the evening meal. Beside a tupperware container of spaghetti bolognese and wrapped in cling film there was what appeared to be a bright blue budgie. Eve looked at the bird for a moment, then she put on her coat and went to see her son.

  Tom was grown up now, and it was so nice that he lived round the corner. Of course he lived in a tent under a tree, but Eve knew it wouldn’t be for long; just till the bypass was sorted and then he would move on. Eve thought about her son as she walked. Tom. She had always known Tom would do something with animals and nature. There was nothing more calculated to upset him than watching his dad carve the joint on a Sunday. From his earliest days he had been obsessed with trying to save every living creature. When he was five she had caught him trying to revive the Christmas turkey after it had come out of the oven. Even then, at that young age, he had been the fully developed person he was now. It was strange. Parents think they can form their children but the children arrive with other ideas.

  As Eve left the paved town behind and wandered up into the woods she could feel her back relax and spirits lift. A row of diggers and trucks stood idle and groups of men in hardhats were discussing plans and tactics. The police had been called several times and now one lone bobby kept an eye on the protesters. Tom the protester. Tom her son. She saw him sitting cross-legged in front of his tent, with work spread out around him. His long, knotty hair hung around his shoulders. He had explained it to her. It was a Rastafarian thing. Apparently if you stop washing your hair, after a few months it stops getting any dirtier. Eve still longed to plunge him in the bath and get the scissors out. It wasn’t the look of it that bothered her, but she was his mother. She was supposed to keep him clean. It was her job.

  Tom was busy stuffing a duck but not in the Delia Smith sense. He had taken up taxidermy at the age of twelve after his much-loved hamster had unexpectedly choked on a carrot top. Unable to bear the pain of his loss, Tom had set about teaching himself the ancient art of dead animal preservation. First in his bedroom and later in the loft, which Adam had converted for him. His father had tried to be supportive at first but it was a tricky subject. The smell of formaldehyde was appalling and then people heard about Tom’s hobby and took to dropping cardboard boxes of road-kill or near road-kill on the front doorstep. In the end, Adam had given him an ultimatum. ‘Tom,’ he had announced to his son and heir, ‘you are sixteen and this is still my house. You either stop this disgusting business or you move out.

  Tom moved out and on, until now. Until Bluebell Wood. He seemed happy. He lived the life he wanted. He would find a battle that needed fighting, quietly turn up and stay until the matter was settled. It made him content. It gave him purpose. Eve wished Adam could be pleased for their eldest but she knew Adam couldn’t get over the disappointment of his son not following him into double indemnities.

  Tom’s taxidermy was strange but very good. Very good if you like that sort of thing. A lot of the displays he made were very realistic. Not mice having tea parties. None of that sort of thing. There was nothing Beatrix Potterish or cute about any of it. It was all rats digging away at sacks of grain, otters damming things and lately he had taken to doing more exotic displays. Everything had to be real, with as many elements of correct vegetation as possible. It wasn’t just dead animals in poses but entire habitats. Little naturalistic scenes of wildlife going about their business, surrounded by bits of twig and, in the case of one small rodent, actual running water. The badger and his burrow had occupied a major corner of the bathroom until Adam put in the power shower.

  Tom was pleased to see his mother. He stood and hugged her. He was taller than her now and she felt the rough cotton of his loose top against her face as she held him close. A small fire was burning near the tent and a battered old kettle was just beginning to whistle.

  ‘Can I make you some tea?’ he asked, as he might have had he lived in a house on the estate. He made nettle tea and poured it into a tin mug. Because she was his mother, Eve had brought Tom some clean pants and socks, which she laid carefully on top of his sleeping bag in the tent. Then Tom laid out a blanket for Eve and she sat down. It was summer now and the place was in full bloom. No one could have decorated their house better.

  ‘Consider the lilies of the field, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.’

  Tom’s friends and fellow protesters were gathering wood or chatting under the trees. Eve could hear the birds and the crackle of the fire and she wished Adam could be there. She wished he could be there and enjoying it. A small pack of the hard-hat men wandered past and stared at Tom with open disgust. Eve’s son was the enemy of progress. A dangerous, unwashed, possibly unhinged eco-warrior. Eve waited till they had gone.

  ‘How’s the protest?’ she asked.

  Tom sat quietly and stared at the halted construction vehicles in the distance. ‘It’s okay, but I think they’re getting ready for some kind of move. Two of the guys have moved into the trees, but I don’t know… Know what this is, Mum?’ Tom asked, holding out the dead bird he had been working on.

  ‘It’s a duck,’ Eve said. No flies on me, she thought, although there were a couple on the duck.

  ‘It’s a female duck,’ he corrected. ‘Very female.’

  ‘Well, it had to be one or the other,’ Eve said. She did try to take an interest but her knowledge was limited. Tom shook his head.

  ‘Oh no, the animal and vegetable world is not universally divided into two sexes. No, some creatures are male and female by turns; some fungi and protozoa have more than two sexes and more than one way of coupling with them. There are lots of all-female species — gall-making wasps, sawflies, at least nineteen species of lizards and there is an all-female variety of fish in the Gulf of Mexico. Did you know that Amazon mollies pirate sperm from other species to fertilise their eggs but produce only females?’ Eve didn’t even know what an Amazon mollie was. ‘Beehives and ant communities are full of sisters working side by side but there are no all-male species at all.’

  Eve tried to be light-hearted. ‘I’m not surprised. They can’t manage on their own.’ It was meant to be a joke but Tom just agreed.

  ‘Sorry, Tom, I guess I don’t know much about it.’

  ‘But that’s the secret, Mum. We must all admit our ignorance and set out to learn, rather than pretend we already understand the mysteries of the universe. Actually, what we really know about the world is very limited. There is nothing that closes our minds to new information and new insights more than the feeling that we already understand. You get sucked into seeing things the way you’ve always seen them. Then you start making assumptions about things because of what you knew before. You generalise and soon you have some prejudice about how things ought to be.’

  ‘I don’t know if I’m with you.’

  ‘Well, have you ever seen a crow without black feathers?’

  ‘No. No, I haven’t.’

  ‘Does that mean there isn’t one?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ And Eve didn’t. She didn’t even know what all-female Amazon mollies were. ‘Is there such a thing?’

  Tom shrugged. ‘I’ve never seen one but I don’t think that means that there couldn’t be, somewhere. I don’t think that we should assume that a crow has to have black feathers. We shouldn’t presume that we know how things are going to be.’


  Eve watched him working on his duck. Trying to learn about life from the inside of things. Digging away under the skin. He held the dead bird with great reverence and they both stared at the deceased creature. Eve tried to think of another question.

  ‘How did it die?’

  ‘She’s from the lake here in the wood. It happens every year. The females get pregnant and they lay four or five eggs. By the time the ducklings are born the mothers are very weak. And when they’re weak the males come and rape them. They rape them and they hold them under the water till lots of the females drown. They drown and there’s no one to look after the ducklings.’

  ‘Where are the babies?’ Eve asked.

  Tom smiled. He lifted up the flap of his tent and pulled out an old cardboard shoe box. There, nestled on a jumper Eve had knitted many years ago, were four mottled brown baby ducks. They were asleep, cuddled and curled into each other.

  ‘Oh, Tom!’

  ‘I know.’ Tom took his mother’s hand and guided it to gently caress one of the motherless birds. Then he grinned. ‘I did try to find them another mum. I spent six hours in the rain wandering about. I thought maybe some relative or other. Do you have any idea how many ducks look exactly alike?’

  Eve roared with laughter. It was just the sort of thing her Tom would do. It was kind and a bit silly. Tom carefully put the box back in the tent.

  ‘I don’t think they’ll make it but I’ll try,’ he said.

  ‘I know.’ Eve was proud of him. She sipped her tea as Tom went back to his work. After a few comfortable minutes’ silence, Tom looked up at his mother.

  ‘I don’t understand about the ducks. About the rape. It doesn’t feel right. It makes you doubt what you know about the world. Don’t you think?’

  Tom went back to his work and Eve thought about his questions. He had always had a thousand questions to which she and Adam had had no answers. They were questions that had never occurred to them. Tom had taught himself taxidermy from second-hand books gathered anywhere he could find them. They were the only possessions that travelled with him. Works from the Maison Verreaux in Paris and Ward’s Natural Science Establishment in Rochester, New York. Gripping summer reads like The Manner of Collecting and Preparing Fishes and Reptiles by W. Shilling, Practical Taxidermy by J. H. Batty and his personal favourite, Death Becomes Them — A Complete Guide for the Amateur Taxidermist.

  Tom’s work tools lay spread out on a large waterproof sheet beside him. There were shears lying open next to an old penknife, tweezers, a vice fitted to a sawn log, a small brush, a spool of nylon cord, some modelling clay, linseed oil, plaster of Paris, forceps, needles, what Eve knew to be a skin holder with a locked handle, a bone saw and what seemed like hundreds of artificial eyes staring up from small plastic boxes. Everywhere a sprinkling of powdered borax covered the surface, as if the police had been in for fingerprinting.

  ‘I wanted to ask you, darling…’ Eve began cautiously. She didn’t want to seem prejudiced in any way. ‘About the budgie in the freezer at home.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Tom, laying his project duck out before him. ‘Sorry about that. I’ll collect it. It wasn’t quite dead but if you just press the thorax with your fingers for a few seconds it stops the circulation. It was Mrs Pard’s. I tried to save it but I think it was in a lot of pain.

  For a brief moment Eve wondered where her cat Claudette’s thorax was, but she didn’t want to ask. She felt she should be going home. There were a million things to do and no matter how many times she saw him working with moribund animals Eve never got used to it. Tom pulled a piece of wadding from a pile and began stuffing it up the duck’s arse.

  ‘Got to stop any blood or excrement running out,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ Eve managed. Tom opened the bird’s beak and began filling it with padding as well. Then he closed it firmly and wrapped a small piece of thread around it to keep it shut. The bird lay on its back with its head lolling to the right. Tom began separating the feathers from the hollow of the breast down to its packed anus and then made the first incision.

  ‘Mustn’t pierce the flesh,’ he explained.

  ‘No, I know,’ Eve said, although she didn’t. Tom gently sewed a piece of tissue to each side of the incision to stop the feathers getting soiled. Then he took a small saw and cut the end of the spine leaving the tail feathers attached. He hung the bird on three fish-hooks suspended from a chain attached to a pulley on a small wooden stand and proceeded to cut the wings with some sharp scissors. From the bird’s feet he began to lift the skin up off the body towards the beak without detaching it completely. Eve knew what was next. He would cut the neck at the base of the skull. Remove the brain and draw out the tongue and palate. He would pull out the eyes and replace them with modelling clay before removing the flesh from the top of the skull with a scalpel. Eve couldn’t watch. She couldn’t wait for him to wipe it all over with a dry cloth sprinkled with borax.

  Tom stopped and examined the duck’s innards. ‘See, Mum? The ovaries are all developed on the left side of the body.’ Tom pointed to a series of minute egg yolks gathered in a granulated cream-coloured mass. All those baby ducks come to nothing.

  Eve looked away from the stuffing to Tom’s neck. His head was bent over his work and she could see the fine hairs on his neck. She remembered a holiday when he was about five. They were at a small lake near Windermere. Tom was naked and running through the shallows in the late afternoon sun. He had his arms raised to the sky and he was singing, ‘I love my lake and I love my mum, I love my lake and I love my mum

  He’d stopped splashing and looked at Eve. ‘Mum, can we keep today just as it is? For always?’

  Eve wanted to kiss him then. She still wanted to. Hold him close for ever and have nothing change. She was overwhelmed with love for her son. He caught her looking at him and she covered up.

  ‘Tom, I was just checking you haven’t forgotten about dinner tonight. Shirley’s got some news for us.

  ‘Vegetarian?’

  ‘Well, yes, but I’m going to make rabbit for your father.’

  Tom nodded, and as usual Eve didn’t know if that meant yes or no. Adam minded terribly about Tom, but as she sat there Eve thought that at least her son was getting on with his own life. At least he was devoted to something. At least he was leading the life he wanted. She just wished he had someone to share it. She wished he had some passion for another human being. She kissed him as she left.

  ‘Be careful, darling. I love you.’

  ‘I love you too,’ he said.

  When Eve got home, John and Adam were still enmeshed in their work. She couldn’t get on with the meal so she went upstairs to sort out her handbag. That was when Eve found the speculum again. She sat on the bed and held the plastic examination device. She thought about the duck with its eggs and its inner life laid bare on her son’s lap. She thought about her own insides and how little she knew about them. She thought about how faulty they clearly were and that maybe it wouldn’t hurt to have a look. Adam looked at his penis but then that was on the outside.

  Adam was still busy so she lay on the bed and thought, I might as well try.

  It wasn’t as easy as she had imagined. Eve was a bit nervous and perhaps a bit light-headed from all the coffee at Inge’s. She removed her skirt, her tights and her pants and lay down with her blouse on. She had just got the thing … in when the doorbell went and possibly that made her panic a bit because then she couldn’t get the wretched thing out. The doorbell kept ringing and she kept thinking Adam would get it but then she realised he must have gone out. Eve thought it must be important so she managed to get to her feet and look out of the bedroom window. It was Simon the postman and Eve could see he’d got her socket set — the free one she had been waiting for with the book on car maintenance. She didn’t want him to take it back to the post office so she left the stuck speculum where it was, pulled on her skirt and had to sort of hobble to the stairs.

  It was hell getting down. T
he thing seemed to squeeze in more firmly with every tread and then Eve had to sign the delivery paper and the postman said there was money to pay. Eve said there wasn’t as it was a free gift and she wasn’t going to pay anything. Eve knew Simon to be very particular but never more so than that day with a speculum shoved up her nether parts. She would have paid him the wretched twelve pence if for a moment she had thought she could walk to her purse. It was quite possible that Eve’s whole body was in rejection when she finally got back upstairs. Her back had hardly touched the bed when the wretched thing shot out between her legs, across the room and decapitated one of Adam’s avocado plants on the windowsill.

  The whole thing had made her feel most peculiar. She had completely forgotten to look with a mirror when the thing was in place and now it had done serious vegetable damage. She washed the speculum in TCP and put it in the Oxfam box in the garage. Then Eve stuck the avocado stem back together with sellotape but it still looked very droopy. She sat on the edge of the bed looking at Adam’s depressed plant and thought that there had to be an easier way to be a feminist.

  Chapter Thirteen

  16 January

  Holloway Prison for Women

  London

  My dear Inge,

  Stuffed

  And of every living thing of all flesh,

  you shall bring two of every sort into the ark…

  (GENESIS 6.19)

  Miss March, the ever-attentive barrister, is worried. ‘You won’t be wearing the trainers?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘The trainers you have on now,’ she says, pointing to my feet. ‘I’m afraid you can’t wear them to court. Of course we will discuss the outfit but do start to think about it. It makes a huge difference you know. If the jury see anything masculine in your dress or posture or speech… well, it’s taken as defiance and that won’t help. That won’t help at all. I must emphasise that it is a very unfeminine offence that we’re dealing with,’ she says, as if there were a range of offences in a catalogue that I might have been better off choosing. ‘It’s unfeminine because it involves aggressive behaviour.’