‘It’s choking on something,’ Sophia said. She was panting too and kneeling beside him in the grass, eyes fixed on the bird lying prone to his left. All three were winded like wrestlers, Sophia moving one hand against the bird’s cheek and another feeling along its neck.
Winceworth scrambled to sit up on his haunches.
‘Look—’ Sophia said. Winceworth watched something beneath the skin of the pelican’s throat buck unmistakably out of time with its pulse. This close to the bird, he could see its eyes were also starting from their sockets.
‘I was trying to open—’ Sophia panted, ‘open the beak – put my arm down and dislodge—’
The pelican lurched forward suddenly and its foot-long bill swung across like a jib. Winceworth and Sophia only just leapt out of its path in time.
The spectating mother and child were nowhere to be seen.
‘It looked as though you were trying to throttle it,’ Winceworth said. ‘I thought it was attacking you.’
‘Trained in bartitsu,’ Sophia said, as if that explained anything. She pushed her hair from her eyes with her wrist. Either she had not realised or did not care that she was bleeding. ‘Are you strong enough to hold it down?’
‘Of course,’ Winceworth said, lying.
‘I still think,’ she said, gnawing her lip and calculating, ‘I could prise whatever it is blocking the passage – if only it wouldn’t move about like this—’
‘Of course,’ Winceworth repeated, with even less certainty. The waist-high bulk of the pelican baulked and lowered its head, weaving from side to side. Winceworth removed his jacket and approached with the inner fabric facing him, stretched tight.
‘Like a – like a matador—’ he said for no good reason whatsoever.
‘“The light-limb’d Matadore,”’ quoted Sophia, apparently for her own amusement. She was smiling, madly, and Winceworth’s heart became a nonsense.
The pelican grasped this opportunity and gave a rollicking, panicked feint and ran past him, gaining speed as if in order to make an attempt at flight. Winceworth leapt just at the moment that the bird leapt – on instinct, he clamped the fabric of his jacket about its shoulders and together they rolled headlong along the grass.
‘I have it!’ he shouted.
He hoicked the sleeves of his jacket in tight as the pelican gamely batted and jabbed at him. The pouch under its beak was soft and warm against his hands. Winceworth sat up, tussled more firmly with the bird until it was jammed beneath his knees and swaddled in his jacket, neck extended like a hobby horse. It seemed a lot quieter, weaker. Quelled, it met his eye again, and he looked away.
Coughing to mask his hard breathing as Sophia came closer, ‘It’s still too – I wouldn’t go near its beak,’ he warned. ‘It’s a – nervy, I think – bit of a brute and I’m not sure it won’t have your eye out.’
By now a number of geese had appeared from another part of the park and were honking and hissing their own disapproval at the uproar. One of the geese came close enough to punch Winceworth on the arm with its head and, more by accident than design, he raised his elbow and slapped this goose full across the face with the pelican’s beak. The goose retreated, wailing and showing its tongue.
‘Where is everyone? This park is usually a damn thoroughfare—’
Sophia approached with her yellow umbrella extended. ‘I daresay that if you are able to keep the bird just there—’
The pelican gave a muffled irregular gagging sound. It swung back and its beak gaped open. Its pouch folded back and, head lolling, it sagged inside out against the bird’s spine at an obtuse angle. It looked impossible, imploded. A bloody tuft of feathers pushed against Winceworth’s neck. There was something tender to this brief touch. He felt dreadful.
Sophia took the pelican’s beak in her hands and, finding no resistance, pushed the two mandibles apart. She stared down the bird’s throat.
‘I can’t – I can’t see anything,’ she said. ‘But it is hard – to tell—’
The pelican was inert but still breathing, shallow and rumbling next to Winceworth’s chest.
‘Did you see it swallow anything?’ he asked. The pelican’s thick feet gave the smallest of kicks.
‘It was walking strangely,’ Sophia said and turned the pelican’s head from side to side in her hands and squinting. ‘It’s clearly not – look, it’s clearly not getting enough air.’ She added, ‘I’m not sure you hitting it will have helped—’
Braver members of the geese contingent made another honking incursion and she shooed them away with her umbrella.
‘I don’t imagine so.’ Winceworth hoisted the pelican up against his chest and slightly to the side, as if a bagpipe. ‘Perhaps – maybe it would be best—’ Fleetingly he imagined taking the bird’s head under his arm and twisting it, the pelican growing limp and the whole business being over. The pelican’s eye met his own one more time. A translucent purple eyelid sluiced sideways across its vision.
‘I have it,’ said Sophia, face shining. ‘Do you have a ribbon? Or – may I remove a shoelace?’ She was not interested in an answer and began plucking at his Oxfords. The geese and the ducks laughed at Winceworth. He pulled the pelican tighter against him. Sophia tsked and tutted. Adrenaline made her fingers awkward. Winceworth felt his shoe loosen and Sophia was there binding the pelican’s beak together with the lace in quick, tight loops. Her face was close to his, just the pelican and the new smell of pelican between them.
‘I can use this?’ Sophia said.
She had reached for the exposed lining of his jacket that was banded across the pelican’s swaddled belly. She plucked at something there – the stem of his hollow metal Swansby House pen that he kept in the pocket there. She slid the pen free and flexed it in her hand. No, she was not flexing it, she was bending it. It snapped with a dull crack.
Sophia grabbed the pelican’s beak and felt down its throat with her hand. She found its collarbone. Pelicans almost certainly do not have collarbones. Sophia pushed the broken pen into the pelican’s throat.
There was a loud hiss of expelled air – the pelican swelled under Winceworth’s grasp and a second later they both heard it take a huge gulping heave of a breath.
The geese cackled and hooted.
The bird, the man and the woman panted.
‘Do you come here often?’ Winceworth asked.
M is for
mendaciloquence
(n.)
‘I’m here to help,’ Pip said, simply.
She drew a tray of index cards towards her from the pile on my desk.
Clarity is her talent and part of the reason I ever fell for her. Pip was often a person of actions. Action is often better than words. I was a person of anxieties rather than anything. ‘How did you get in here?’
‘The door was open, and let me tell you when I see that boss of yours I’m going to give him an earful about security. Aren’t you meant to be under siege or something? Expecting a tankful of homophobes through the door at any moment?’
‘But the café—’
‘Everyone will have to deal with a sign that says C L O S E D on the door,’ Pip said. She looked around my office, eyes searching for the office phone.
‘Is that the one they call you on?’
‘Don’t worry about that,’ I said. ‘You’re really staying?’
‘Try and stop me,’ she said. She hugged me. It meant more than words can say.
‘You should leave.’ I said it with authority, drawing myself up to my full height mid-hug.
We got into a system at my desk, Pip perched up on the windowsill and me on my chair, both looking for the handwriting and distinctive penmanship that crossed the i’s and dotted the t’s on the definition index cards. Pip had brought me lunch from her café, and for a while we passed the time in busy, bored silence.