This bird.
My responsibility. Not owned, but owed.
Which would make a nice sound bite, polished up and delivered with humility — a stirring phrase to lift the tempora and mores, in as far as anyone still remembers what that means …
‘Oh, for Christ’s sake!’
Above him, the mother blackbird bulleted past, keeping neat to the crown of his head, threatening, letting out hard chips of alarm in rattling bursts. She sounded like the din from escalating assaults on some type of thin crockery. She hadn’t hit him. She was pretending that she would, though, because that was the most she could manage. She was displaying a violent kind of love.
‘I’m … will you … will you both … I’m doing what you want. I promise … I …’
Once he’d understood the situation, he’d run back to Val’s mildly louche kitchen — greasy handles on all of the drawers — and found some scissors before scurrying out again to cut away the horrible green tangle from around the bird’s fretting body. This initial rescue had left it free from the net as a whole, but still personally bound by these nasty plastic strands and he’d had to pick the poor creature up, hold it in his palm, coddle it securely and snip, gentle, snip — Christ, if I’d cut a wing or something, crippled it, condemned us both to a subsequent mercy killing, an Unforgivable Murder … and that could still happen, it still could, awful, awful …
Jon’s free hand had gone seeking about fairly blindly with the scissors’ threatening ends and had hoped to catch and then cut the constrictions around the animal’s breath, the palpable hysteria, as it wriggled with bleak strength, resisting his grip.
The thing gave another chirp of surprisingly loud dismay.
‘I won’t eat you. I won’t.’
He found it was odd, if not moving, to hear an identifiably childish note in the call. This seemed to be a rule in nature: that when we are properly, deeply troubled — birds, chimps, horses, humans, things with blood — we all become children, we all wish for our parents, scream for our mums, whether their aid is available to us, would be useful to us, or not.
‘I won’t hurt you at all. I promise. Promise.’
The blackbird’s mother swooped again pointlessly, but louder.
This whole horrible situation was entirely the result of Valerie’s being Valerie and doing the wrong thing. She had an instinct for wrongness. The netting on the blueberry bush was the wrong netting. Jon wasn’t, strictly speaking, a gardener but had seen the stuff you’re meant to put over vegetables often enough. The bore of it, the diameters of the loops — he was unsure how you classified anti-bird protection — the denier, density … it was meant to keep out even sparrows, surely. Any reasonable person would deploy it with the aim of repelling assailants, not garrotting them. But Val had covered her sodding blueberries with what had to be the largest possible grade of the stuff — this gaping hazard to all and sundry. A drift net for anything feathered. Was she eating birds now, fresh off the bough? Was that guaranteed to put a bloom on post-menopausal skin? What had she been thinking — if at all? She was a woman who could be quite gloriously unburdened by consideration. Anything slimmer than a tomcat and in search of blueberries would simply plunge straight into the hazard and be caught and alone and yelling and bewildered.
That was the trouble with animals — their lack of understanding created dismay upon dismay: theirs and then one’s own to follow. One looked at them and saw oneself and then became foolish and overwrought.
‘For crying out loud! If I was going to eat you, I would have! Wouldn’t I!’
It was an outlet, sometimes, the shouting. Not that Jon often shouted.
‘Shh, no. Sshhh. I didn’t mean it. I’m not angry with you. I’m not angry at all. Don’t worry. Please. Don’t worry about me.’
Neither attempting to soothe the bird nor losing his temper with it seemed to alter their mutual positions. Both blackbirds, in fact, were beyond the scope of his communicative abilities.
Which Val would have pointed out. She had a good ear for a punchline, a knack for summarising failures.
‘Sorry. Sssshhhh. I’m going to … This will … it will …’
Experimentally, he tugged at what he thought he had successfully reduced to only an opened length of plastic, its structure defused — the end of the problem. Jon pulled a little harder and an unpleasant, spurred thread began to emerge from his fist, no doubt sliding around the blackbird’s chest first, moving over and under its wings. He could feel the creature shudder. The transmissible burden of horror in this was remarkable.
As a response to the unfamiliar contact, the chick — quite naturally — shat hotly on to Jon’s trousers, leaving a long purplish streak. The colour of stolen blueberries, the first fruits.
Then it called even more poignantly than before — Jon could have done without that — and the mother answered, dipping past his ear in a sweep of outrage. What was she saying? Was she trying to reassure, already in mourning, uttering menaces, vowing revenge, shouting advice? She had muted the usual calls of other birds in the vicinity, made them withdraw to a cautious distance.
Their silence had begun to sound judgemental as the drama continued — even though Jon had succeeded, apparently. There didn’t seem to be anything further left to encumber his captive. ‘See? Ssshhh. That’s … It’s … I did tell you …’ He tried to check all was well. He’d never get hold of the thing again if he’d ballsed this up and it was still afflicted when he let it go … You wouldn’t want to contemplate a fellow creature getting strangled slowly by its own motion, by its growth … or else getting crippled … stuff like that … deformity and gangrene.
The upside being that Death in something deformed and gangrenous would be a Desirable Death.
God, I’m a bastard.
No, I’m doing my best. I have done my best.
He angled the feathery shape this way and that, peering between his fingers and attempting to inhabit his sense of touch with sufficient concentration to locate errant strands.
Nothing appeared to be wrong any more.
I think.
‘OK. OK, then. That’s fine.’
Somewhere the mother was watching, loathing him, loosing off further hard strands of complaint.
Jon murmured to her offspring, ‘It’s all right. It really is. Silly. Weren’t you …?’ In a sort of croon he hardly recognised.
‘It’s all right.’
He breathed. A slight shake hampered the progress of his inhalation and then eased. He’d stopped sweating. The muscles in his thighs relaxed. He pondered his slightly ruined trousers, the darkish, white-streaked stain on the incompatible blue of the cloth.
Then he gazed around himself, sighed outwards.
The block of yellow light that had been splaying from the kitchen doorway had become entirely invisible once the dawn strengthened into day. Nevertheless, a soft blueness, a gentleness, remained here and there in the shadows as he studied them. And there was an atmosphere of accessible beauty. If he’d wanted, Jon could have smiled. But he only looked, carefully looked, let himself see and see and see and inhaled again and held the breath, both air and peacefulness thick in his lungs.
And beyond him there was a dense inrush of stillness.
It locked.
Safety was happening, the imposition of comfort at something approaching seven in the morning. And the disappearance of every motion.
Jon could smell the river: the relative proximity of exposed mud and spring greenery, dirty life going on beyond Valerie’s home. (A desirable Georgian property not entirely unfamiliar with dirty life. She only does it to annoy, because she knows it teases.) But there was no sound, not a bit. He could believe that the trees by the road outside, the neatly restless waterside gardens, the shifting and searching of silt feeders, the willows thickening out on the eyot, the push and lap of the current, were perfectly held at a stop. And the early brawl of cars on the Hogarth Roundabout, the unending overhead slither of jets, the climb of the sun, the virulent spinning of everything necessary to this particular April Friday — it was everywhere suspended.