Bird Brain Read online

  Ronny took his place on Kevin’s gibbet, upside down, minus his left hind leg, which remained in the snare and fast became a tourist attraction to the poults who gathered around to stare at it.

  ‘Kevin’s left it for us,’ Jack Kennedy said to the Tsar.

  ‘What he thinks we want with it I can’t imagine. But it’s a sweet if misguided gesture. We must all remember to thank him.’ said the Tsar.

  12

  Every Square Inch

  THOUGH LARGE, WILLIAM PEYTON-CRUMBE was not fat, just well-padded, as though expensively upholstered, especially in the region of his buttocks, which he was quietly proud of. These two generous orbs he settled on the antique leather of the gun-room chair, and rubbed them around because he liked the feeling it gave him. He was happy, he was smug, and he didn’t care that anyone knew it. They were his buttocks, it was his chair, and his gun room. The guns arrayed in the case were his guns, the painting of men in frock coats flighting ducks was his painting. It was all his. He owned the lot, outright. He owned not just the contents of the gun room but the gun room itself, the house, the outbuildings, all the outlying farms and cottages and every square inch of pasture, cart track, hedge and wood between them. He smiled. It was such a good feeling. The Chinese silk rug under his monogrammed velvet slippers was his. The club fender over there was his. The doorknob, the curtains, the armchairs, the desk, the fountain pen, the ink pot and even the damned ink was his. His. He rubbed around the seat again. He permitted himself a smirk of satisfaction, and whispered one word: ‘Mine.’

  Now the time had come to rub a few noses in it. He opened the slim drawer. He had thrown all of Banger’s stuff away; the old diaries, letters, paper cuttings, cheap pens and dried felt tips had all gone into the incinerator, and now he surveyed his neatly aligned new stationery. He removed a few sheets and inspected his embossed letterhead. It stood glossy and proud from the vellum. With a satisfactory click he unsheathed his solid silver cross-hatched Mont Blanc fountain pen, virtually the size of a dildo, and set to work writing letters of invitation for the forthcoming season.

  He had long dreamt of the list of his first shoot invitees, the way others had fantasy dinner parties. For Banger, shooting had all been about the birds and the sport, but Banger, William smilingly thought, had got so much wrong, the foolish old man. When William had looked over Banger’s financial affairs ten years earlier he had been shocked to discover how useless his half-brother had been at making money. It didn’t seem to interest him. William had seen all kinds of opportunities; from rent increases on Banger’s properties to moving capital from low-yielding old-fashioned stocks into high-performance hedge funds. He had dramatically increased Banger’s income, but Banger barely seemed to notice. Banger had had no concept of how with his assets he could gear up and aggressively exploit the markets. It was easy if you had something about you, and were prepared to take a few risks, as William was. But Banger never got it. When he died William discovered that the old boy had sixty-five thousand pounds wallowing in his current account earning absolutely no interest. William made his capital sweat droplets of cash.

  He set to work, writing invitations to titled aristocrats, top bankers, ambitious politicians, actors – but only if they were recognisable – celebrity chefs, successful artists … He paused. The only famous artist he and Cary knew was the creator of the glass balls which were now a collection of shards lying in a cardboard box in the boot room. Better not ask him. He started with Barry Brown. Barry had often invited William to Marfield with the single aim of enjoying seeing William feel poorer – a trip to his estate had always been painful. Now was the time for revenge. William would rub Barry’s snub nose in the peerless Llanrisant pheasant drives. William put together a party for each of the twelve days he was shooting. Each and every guest would be impressed to the point of total humiliation by the quantity of pheasants that would explode from the ancient woods.

  It was not enough to be rich any more, that was what William had realised. It wasn’t enough to have a stucco house in Kensington, a chateau in Provence and an Oliver Messel-designed place on the beach in Barbados. Any fool could buy one of those. But the best pheasant shoot in Britain – that kind of thing never came up for sale. It took decades, no, centuries of planning and management to create a shooting landscape as perfect as Llanrisant. There were no short cuts, and Oofy and Banger, two sporting obsessives, had done the job perfectly.

  The last arrangement had been completed; it concerned what to do with the thousands of slaughtered birds that were going to accumulate over the season. William was quite used to returning from a day’s shoot and dropping a brace of pheasants in the dustbin on his way into his London house, but now he owned Llanrisant the disposal problem was going to be more serious.

  The invited Guns weren’t going to be interested in taking home birds, and no butcher wanted them; even the dog-food factory weren’t that keen because it took so long to pluck the things before they were thrown in the grinder. Idris had come up with the solution, finding an artisan pâté maker in Chester who could use them, so they were to go there. The price the pâté maker was prepared to pay was so low and Idris’ transport arrangements so costly that in the end William was going to have to subsidise Idris to get them off the estate. Still, the economics of pheasant shooting were not the reason William shot. There was an old Victorian saying about pheasant shooting: ‘Up goes a guinea, bang goes tuppence and down comes half a crown.’ Adjusted for decimalisation, inflation, and the way things were now run at Llanrisant it worked out for William as: up goes seventy-five thousand quid, bang goes five hundred, and down comes a bill for four hundred.

  William addressed and wetted each envelope with a moist tongue, sealed the flap and applied a stamp before tidying them into a neat pile with his podgy white hands.

  Now all he had to do was wait for the season to start, and dream about the thank-you letters his guests were going to be forced to send him.

  13

  One Over

  KEVIN LET THE blue barrels deplete, and so the pheasant flock wandered out of the wood and under the curved stems and leathery leaves of a crop of Brussels sprouts, munching at the vegetable when they were peckish. The Rev kept spirits up with songs and dances, beauty pageants, sprout-eating competitions and farting displays, but Banger was reminded of an old saying that he particularly liked: There is nothing more hopeless than a scheme for merriment.

  The birds were now fully grown, and Banger led them to a pool in the river to admire their bronzes, deep dark blues, crisp white collars and speckled tummies in the reflection.

  One night it grew suddenly cold, and Banger hunched up inside his feathers while the three-quarter moon shone from the icy sky. At dawn, the overnight frost had whitened the trees, which sparkled as sunlight hit the woodland. The air was still, cold and so crisp you could see twenty miles over the plain to the jagged escarpment at Runcorn in the North. Banger turned his head and blinked. People. Near. Not the soft tread and gentle movements of Flush and Kevin on their morning round, but a shouting, rustling, barking commotion. The pheasants, including Banger, instinctively moved away from this unfamiliar disturbance deeper into the sprouts.

  ‘This looks like it,’ said The Rev. ‘God be with you till we meet again.’

  It was a couple of under-keepers with their dogs gently pushing the flock into the sprouts so they would be in place to be beaten through the wood and over the Guns when their drive came to be shot later in the morning.

  Banger felt his heart beating, but not with fear. He was about to see his first shoot as a pheasant, and the thought was unbelievably exciting. He knew it was too easy to be beaten out of the sprouts with the rest of the flock, so he sneaked back to the edge of the wood and crawled under some decayed ferns in a hollow, crouching over the twigs and leaves trapped under the dark ice. Bubbles of trapped air moved like sluggish tadpoles as Banger settled down. The field and wood fell silent again.

  ‘Well, that wasn’t too bad.
I don’t know what all the fuss was about,’ said the Tsar. ‘I knew we had nothing to worry about.’

  An hour later Banger heard the sounds of car engines, whimpering dogs, slamming doors, male conversation and boots on the unyielding ground. A hunting horn moaned, and a whistle sounded a long way away at the first drive, in another wood. The distant shouts, whoops and clicks of the beaters on the move cut through the crisp air and then, echoing over the iron-hard ground, came the unmistakable crackle of gunfire. It sounded like men unloading scaffolding planks onto a pavement. Crack, crackrackrackrack, then a gap, then some more.

  The opening drive of the first day of the season was traditionally the best day of the year for Banger, and just because he was now a pheasant, that hadn’t changed. He used to sleep poorly the night before the opening day. Had all his and Idris’ planning and hard work paid off? Those long hours mending pens, ordering poults, keeping them healthy and fed, and then nurturing, guarding and dogging in the birds. How would the pheasants fly? Fast and high, or sluggish and low? These were things Banger knew would be in Kevin’s and Barry Brown’s minds.

  Banger ran along a ditch that bordered the wood, and was soon at the other side, looking across a soft valley bowl. Long shadows of the hedges and trees in the winter morning sunlight fell across the frosted ground. On the other side of the bowl stood six motionless humans, strung out at thirty-yard intervals, some with men or women beside them, each holding a dark object. Seeing people with guns brought back to Banger the thrill of shooting driven pheasants; his heart pined for the days he had spent at it. They were really the only happy days he could remember. They started with drawing lots to select which number he was shooting in the line, and continued with the walk to the peg, the brief but crucial assessment of safety factors, including how far away the Gun beside him was standing, and how close the beaters were in the wood, then he stamped out the ground to get a firm footing, unsleeved the AYA, checked its barrels, slipped the first pair of cartridges into the chambers, snapped it shut, and revelled in the spine-tingling wait for the early birds to skim out from the treetops. All his senses had been alert; every sinew focused on the task of killing, to the exclusion of all else. Men who shot game were making contact with hundreds of thousands of lost years of evolution, when the urge to seek, to find, and to kill, which had kept them, their families and their tribes alive for millennia, were the most valuable attributes a man could possess. The ability to go out and bring something dead back to the cave was what civilisation was built on, not laws, politics, art, architecture or literature. The ability to see a bird in the air, instantaneously calculate its speed and direction of travel, mount your gun, aim it sufficiently far ahead along the correct path, and pull the trigger at exactly the right moment so the bird flew straight into the shot to be instantly dispatched was an exquisite accomplishment, as complex as writing a sonnet, or designing a cathedral, and just as difficult and enjoyable to hone and perfect. Without this skill, there would have been no food for the women and children, not to mention the painters, storytellers, priests and poets (sewers – the lot of them). To hunt was to live, and any man who had shouldered a gun to kill his food, had looked down the barrels and fixed the bead on a noble and proud past. To the field-sportsman, a direct hit felt like connecting with an ancient birthright and duty.

  Banger watched the birds emerge from the wood in twos and threes with open admiration. They were well presented, he had to admit, though an experienced Gun like Banger could tell that they were being beaten through the wood rather than out of it. Some of the pheasants shouted ‘Morning! Nice to see you!’ with pathetic naïvety before they flew into the maelstrom of steel shot. Banger studied the Guns one by one, instantly assessing their prowess the way a racing trainer assessed a racehorse. The one on the very left was shooting too late, when the birds were almost over his head. You should kill them so they hit the ground dead twenty feet in front of you; if you waited till they were over your head, the pattern of shot was at its most narrow, the pheasants were at their fastest, and it was harder to aim, a combination which made a clean kill that much more difficult.

  Banger stepped out of the wood onto the stubble field, and immediately heard the crack of a canvas flag in the hand of an under-keeper who appeared round the end of a leafless hedge. He was a sentry whose job was to stop birds seeping out of the wood before the Guns were in place for the drive. Banger crouched. He could now see the white posts in the field indicating where each Gun would be standing on this drive. Banger didn’t approve of such things and never hammered in wooden pegs at Llanrisant. A shoot captain should expect to direct his Guns to their positions with a few curt words of instruction. If they required a wooden peg to help them they weren’t the sort of men Banger wanted to shoot with. A light shower of spent pellets fell on the frosty leaves, and Banger shivered with apprehension. The crackle of gunfire continued, and then fell silent. The horn sounded again – the signal that the beaters had combed the wood and the drive was over. They were now probably standing at its edge, armed with sticks, flags and dogs, facing the row of guns they had flushed the pheasants over. Banger’s pheasant hearing was acute enough for him to hear the breaking of the guns and the click as the cartridges were removed a quarter of a mile away. He also heard more footfalls and whistles and commands to dogs as the search for the dead and dying commenced. ‘Find it, good girl, find it, go on.’

  ‘A pricked one over here,’ shouted a man.

  A cortège of shiny four-by-fours drew up to convey the Guns to the next drive. Banger hated to see motorcars on a shoot; walking a mile or two wouldn’t do any of those office-bound sewers any harm. Banger suspected that a day’s shooting was for Barry Brown’s guests some kind of social outing, or worse, some kind of business event. To Banger a shoot was about killing; a matter or life and death, particularly death. Conversation was not necessary; in fact it was a distraction. He winced to hear the manly chatter and pretty girlish laughter as the team climbed into the Range Rovers.

  Banger watched through a gap in the hedge to calculate which drive the cavalcade was heading to next. He felt a squirt of adrenalin when he saw them turning towards his own wood.

  ‘Let battle commence,’ he said under his breath. What Banger had realised was that shooting was just as exciting as a pheasant as it had been as a human, though a little more dangerous. But that just added to the fun. Banger doubled back to the gang. When he got there, The Rev, Atavac, Jenni and Twin Towers were sunk deep into their feather coats under the freezing blue sky. He cocked his head and listened for the sound of humans. In the still air he clearly heard a dog breaking ice as it splashed through a brook at the far end of the sprouts, then came the mournful wail of the hunting horn.

  The Tsar popped up his head to look back. ‘It’s only Kevin,’ he said, ‘he’s brought some friends to see us. What a bore.’

  Jack Kennedy said, ‘How do I look? Is this better, or that?’ He moved his head and held his pose. ‘How is my plumage?’ He had taken to pronouncing this last word with a long ‘a’ to rhyme with ‘triage’.

  ‘Yoo hoo! We’re over here!’ Martin Luther King called to the beaters and their dogs.

  ‘It’s actually sweet of Kevin to come,’ said Jack Kennedy, ‘pretend you’re interested, do be nice to him, everyone.’

  Banger could now easily hear the rattle of the beaters’ sticks, the flapping of flags, the whistles, whoops and shouted commands to dogs as the rabble combing the field drew slowly closer.

  Then Twin Towers emitted a distress call, like the klaxon of a pre-war motorcar, and flapped his wings in panic. It was one of the many unfortunate design faults of the pheasant that taking to the air was such a noisy procedure. It was like trying to make a surreptitious escape while dragging a large flashing sign saying, HERE I AM. It wasn’t always thus; the clucking football rattle sound they make on rapid take-off was a mutation that was bred to be commonplace so that even the most inattentive hunters couldn’t avoid noticing a fleeing ph
easant.

  ‘One over!’ shouted a beater.

  ‘Forward!’ called another.

  Twin Towers flapped over the sprouts and glided into the wood, shouting ‘It’s only humans! Don’t worry!’

  Banger wondered whether Twin Towers had alighted in the wood or flown through it to where the Guns were waiting. A single shot, a pause, and then the unmistakable sound of a dead pheasant hitting the icy ground settled the question.

  Banger shook his head slowly from side to side as he heard more birds get up behind him and clatter their way towards what they instinctively felt was the safety of the wood. Human cries from behind of ‘Forard’ and ‘Bird ovar!’ presaged an untidy volley of gunshot.

  Banger stood up. ‘No! No! Not that way!’ he shouted, but in the panic not one heard, or at least not one heeded his words. Sharon Tate saw him and shouted, ‘Banger! Hi! Come on, don’t be shy, follow us!’

  Banger’s plan had been to hide among the sprouts and let the people and dogs pass over him, but he could see now that this was not a disorganised hotchpotch of wives, girlfriends and children more intent on gossiping than finding pheasants, but a sinister, well-disciplined brown-clad army with vicious, efficient dogs whose single purpose was to find every pheasant in their path and send them all to their death. He decided to try to fly straight back over the beaters’ heads. There was a chance there would be a gun stationed there, but he’d have to risk it. As he was waiting for the right moment to spring up, a monstrous drooling black Labrador appeared right in his face.

  ‘Not you again!’ Flush laughed. ‘Got you, you little blighter.’

  Banger leapt from the jaws of the dog, flapped his wings in panic and headed straight for the wood, gaining height as fast as he could.

  He flew through the dark branches of the leafless birches and emerged from the trees high above the ground. Ahead of him he saw Sharon Tate crumple in the air, and then heard the shot that killed her. It was terrifyingly percussive and violent, renting the day apart.