Bird Brain Page 3

  Sunshine took a good sniff at the cushion in the wing-back armchair. She smiled nostalgically as she breathed in Banger’s vintage gas and ancient tweedy scents. How she loved Banger’s farts and their rich, meaty aroma, especially pronounced after he had feasted on woodcock and pheasant pie and drunk a bottle of the black claret that had laid for years in the damp cellar under the Hall. After dinner he would sink back in the armchair with Sunshine at his feet and plunge into an account of some long-forgotten exploit. Within minutes he would be ghosting in his gunning punt through a misty dawn on the Dee estuary, catching the whiff of decaying marsh litter, scanning the horizon for mallard and goose; or, if he turned a few pages, hiding in a Welsh alder carr waiting for teal to drop in at last light; or, on another page, waiting quietly in some oaken hollow for a cock pheasant to soar overhead, its bronze feathers glinting in the low winter sun; or, deeper in the book, poised in a line of guns under a hillside wood listening to the tapping and whistling of beaters, watching for the trees to erupt with clouds of pheasants, Edwardian in their splendour, for him to plunder at will. In the early years Banger had recorded the identities of his shooting comrades, and could subsequently remember some of these lost friends and acquaintances, but latterly he had lost all interest in people, and didn’t bother even to record their initials, noting only the essentials: the weather, the location and the kill.

  Sunshine looked at the hearth; now it was just a pile of cold ash. Over the years Banger had fallen out with almost all his friends and family and had few people to talk to, apart from Sunshine.

  ‘I’ll raise a toast if I may, Sunshine my girl,’ he’d drunkenly tell her, lifting his glass, spilling a dash of it on his V-neck jersey. ‘Fuck the taxman, fuck the vatman, fuck the Chief Planning Officer, fuck the sabs, and fuck the antis.’ And he would glug down the claret. ‘That’s telling em, isn’t it, my old girl? Fuck ’em all, killjoys.’

  Her mind was brought back to the present by the sound of William searching through Banger’s desk. She assumed he was searching for the thing all humans seemed to spend a fair portion of their day looking for – the car key. She wanted to tell him they were in the basket on the hall table, but knew she couldn’t. He pulled out the drawers and ruffled through the papers, scrabbled through all the old bills and letters on the desk, and then he tipped out the waste-paper bin.

  Sunshine thought the best thing she could do was settle down in the hall in front of the key basket. Humans were notoriously stupid, and she could doze while he worked out where they were. Ten minutes later she heard William march out of the gun room and into the hall.

  ‘About time,’ Sunshine said, but William took the stairs two at a time and was down the corridor to Banger’s bedroom, where she could hear him going through drawers and cupboards, pulling them open and banging them shut. Finally he came back to the top of the stairs.

  ‘Griffiths!’ he shouted. ‘Griffiths!’

  His words echoed down to silence.

  ‘Confounded man,’ he said, and took another lungful of the cold humid air. ‘Griffiths!’ he yelled.

  About a quarter of a mile away a door opened, and a faltering footstep could be heard.

  ‘Yes sir?’ Griffiths’ wavering voice came up from the basement.

  ‘Did my brother give you a letter to post this morning? Only it’s very important, and I need to take it to the letter box.’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Might he have put it somewhere? I mean, is there a posting box or something in the house?’

  ‘I don’t know, sir. He didn’t usually write letters. Usually threw envelopes on the fire unopened, sir.’

  ‘All right, all right. Are you going back to your house now?’

  ‘If I may, sir.’

  Sunshine heard William go into Banger’s dressing room, and listened to him slamming cupboard doors and drawers. Behind her Jam appeared at the drawing-room door, sporting a cheeky grin.

  ‘Cop a load of this,’ he chuckled, bounding onto the sofa. ‘Look – with the muddy paws!’ he laughed, rolling around the soft cushions.

  ‘Get down,’ groaned Sunshine. Who was the pack leader now Banger was gone? It was all going to pot. ‘You’re not allowed on the furniture.’

  ‘Says who?’ Jam replied. ‘Watch this.’ He cocked his leg and sent a stream of urine onto the old chintz. ‘Is this fun or what?’

  ‘Jam!’ hissed Sunshine, but heard footsteps in the corridor and decided to get out before she was implicated in Jam’s outrages.

  William was standing in the hall with his hand on his big round chin turning slowly in circles. He then looked at the hall table, behind it, on the floor under it and in the waste-paper bin – Sunshine all the time saying ‘They are there, in the basket, you idiot.’ Finally he stopped, sighed, picked up the Land Rover key and headed for the front door. ‘At last,’ Sunshine said, and limped behind him, but at the door he turned, put his huge brown shoe in her face and forced her back into the house. She sat down by the door after it was closed, listening to the Land Rover being gunned in reverse and taking off with a spin of wheels on gravel. She was very anxious.

  Jam came out of the drawing room. ‘Guess what? I’ve just pooed on Banger’s carpet. And he can’t touch me.’

  ‘They are going to bury him,’ Sunshine said.

  ‘Let me know where so I can dig him up and chew on his bones,’ Jam said.

  Sunshine shook her head slowly from side to side. She missed Banger already. She caught sight of his old leather walking boots and dissolved into tears. She wondered where he was.

  4

  The Best of My Fun

  BANGER WOKE IN the afterlife comfortably curled up in a soft, warm, dimly lit place, with the sound of Jim Naughtie and John Humphrys broadcasting BBC Radio 4’s ‘Today Programme’ in the dim distance.

  ‘It’s six minutes to nine,’ said Humphrys in his comforting burr.

  Banger was thinking about The Shooting Times’ Woodcock Club dinner in Boodle’s, St James’s. Fourteen florid-faced men eating game pie and treacle sponge. To earn the honour of joining the club you had to have had a right and a left at woodcock, that small darting bird whose flight through the trees made it tricky to see, let alone hit. To claim two of them without lowering the gun was rare. The 23rd of October 1985 was the day Banger did exactly that. He had been forty years old. Autumn had moved into the woods at Llanrisant. On the damp ground, leaves were spread like pelmanism: yellow, cream, grey and white. Gusts of wind brought a tear to one of his eyes. He was alone, apart from the dogs, in Spiney Top, an ash, oak and cherry wood that covered the flanks of a sharp hill. Low sunlight shafted through the trees. Below him he could hear the rushing water of the stream, brought to boiling point by overnight rain. There were slimy leaves in the puddles on the track, and the dogs, two antecedents of Jam and Sunshine, were muddy and wet and happy. They worked under the collapsed bracken and the thorny loops of blackberries, where the shrivelled fruit remained unpicked. Banger thought of some blackberryers he believed stole from his woods. He often imagined foes while out on his own, and could picture and even hear them: a contented family pressed to the brambles each holding a Tupperware container, the pop of the fruit bouncing on the plastic. Trespassers. A spasm of fury raced through Banger. Thieves. He would catch them, expel them, confiscate their criminal receptacles, take their names, press charges and see them convicted. He happily imagined the same family cowering in the dock as the judge handed down fifteen-month stretches for their larceny.

  Up popped a woodcock; a small flitting bird with a long narrow beak. Instinctively, Banger’s AYA was at his shoulder. A lot of men made a fuss about guns. All you needed was one you knew and trusted. The rest was nonsense. The men who spent a fortune on a set of decorated guns they used five times yearly? Sewers. A proper man, in Banger’s opinion, used his gun more often than his reading glasses, knew its curves and idiosyncrasies more intimately than his wife’s, and certainly derived more pleasure from them. Banger whippe
d the barrels across the wood, found the woodcock, passed through it until he could no longer see it, and felt the trigger beg for pressure. At that moment, out of the corner of his right eye, the one that watered in a stiff oncoming breeze, he spotted a second darting movement between the trunks of sinuous ash. Bang, the first bird was dispatched, and now he was on the next, his forefinger slipping onto the second trigger. He swung the bead, that spot of metal on the end of his barrel, through the slender body and pulled. A flush of excitement, a quick command to the Spaniels, not that they needed one, and he was soon reaching for a limp woodcock from each of their soft mouths, his heart bursting with excitement and pride.

  Banger’s father had been a member of The Woodcock Club. Captain Noel ‘Oofy’ Peyton-Crumbe had also been a member of an even more select sporting group called The Passchendaele Club, which Oofy himself created on the night before the First World War battle of the same name. Oofy had noticed a patch of damp ground behind the trenches that looked like prime snipe territory, and on the afternoon of the 12 October 1917 slung his twelve bore over his shoulder, took a couple of his platoon as beaters and headed off for some sport. Oofy had judged the ground perfectly and had bagged four brace of the wetland dweller when the historic event occurred. A patrolling German scout, drawn by the sound of unusual ordnance, slithered on his belly across no man’s land, crept through the reeds, jumped up, and with a blood-curdling yell tried to rush Oofy. This disturbance flushed a pair of snipe, the first of which, Oofy, despite being under a bayonet charge, could not resist. He picked the snipe off, swung neatly and precisely, and with his second barrel dispatched the German. From that day on, a left and a right at game and human was known as a Passchendaele. Of course, opportunities for this kind of sport were limited to theatres of war, but Banger, on duty with his regiment in Northern Ireland in the seventies, often dreamt while patrolling the bleak, rainswept border in South Armagh of picking off a well-flighted grey partridge with one bullet and a Mick terrorist with the next. It never happened, though Banger did once use his night goggles to mortar a badger sett for the fun of it.

  Banger’s idea of heaven was to stand before a mature deciduous wood, on a dry, still and overcast day in mid-November and endlessly pick off pheasants as they glided off the treetops towards him. For hour after hour. Not just metronomic, bird following bird, but in challenging bursts. In heaven, the drive would commence with a single, noble, high cock, first seen against the trees and then silhouetted on the sky. As Banger with a single shot plucked it cleanly from the air, he noticed a hen break from the wood, and behind it a third bird. He made a quick decision about reloading. Broke the gun. Pop, the empty shell ejected over his shoulder. He felt in the cartridge bag, dropped in the new shell, one eye on the pair of pheasants as they flew in his direction at a challenging altitude. In Banger’s heaven there were no easy birds. He snapped the gun, shouldered it, breathed. The hen was now right in front, moving fast. He gave her plenty of lead. Pulled the trigger, saw the bird furl, cleanly killed, landing twenty feet in front of him. A well-trained dog darted off to pick it up. Banger got onto the second pheasant, a snap shot above his shoulder, aiming straight at the empty sky to let the bird fly at full velocity into the charge. He broke the gun again. Breathed. Two empties spun over his shoulder with a whiff of cordite and a corkscrew of smoke. Two new shells. Three more birds broke from the wood with a clatter of wings. Banger snapped shut the gun, his mind absorbed with the sweet decision to determine the sequence of their deaths and the correct moment for the reload. He could hear the shouting and tapping of the beaters a long, long way away – meaning that they still had hundreds of yards of wood and hundreds or even thousands of pheasants to flush. The leading cock was now on his left, swerving away and rising fast. A marvellously deceptive bird, moving on all axes. Banger let the eye, brain and arm do what was to him instinctive, and put the gun where it had to be. With a jab of adrenalin, the hunter’s old friend that kept him sharp, he removed the pheasant from the sky.

  Banger was not shooting a drive of perfectly presented pheasants, but as time passed he did find his predicament, whatever it was exactly, unusually congenial. For the first time in ages he was happy. It was the absence of pain rather than the presence of joy that pleased him. His hip no longer nagged, his ears no longer rang with tinnitus, his financial problems no longer pressed, and there were no letters to open from the taxman, the accountant, or the Council. He was free of the tedious responsibilities of a large country estate: for once he had no gutter and sewage problems, no agricultural grants to look into; and he no longer owned any damp cottages with dodgy electrics, leaky roofs, spongy sills and determined tenants. He didn’t have to face any aggrieved neighbours, local busybodies, charity collectors, or pushy divorcees. There were no DEFRA forms to be filled in or ambitious local businessmen to fend off. For once, for the first time ever, nothing needed to be done. It was bliss. He hung like a foetus in the womb, warm, well-nourished and safe, enjoying from time to time the odd pleasing sensation of being slowly spun round.

  Banger imagined he was angelically circling the spheres in some heavenly orbit. He was wrong. He was in fact an embryo in a pheasant egg at a game farm, the smallest cog in the machine known as the British Fieldsport Industry. He was currently one of fifty-two thousand unhatched eggs sitting on metal trays in a humidity- and temperature-controlled incubator which happened to have a radio tuned to the ‘Today Programme’ sitting on top of it and reverberating through every egg inside. Heated to a comfortable thirty-eight point five degrees centigrade, and turned automatically three times a day, after twenty-four days Banger emerged from his shell a pheasant chick with an uncanny familiarity with Radio 4.

  It can’t be known why Banger was reincarnated as a pheasant, but it must be borne in mind that forty million pheasants are raised on game farms every year in Britain, so the chances of one being a little bit unusual are high. It could be that whoever ordains these things enjoyed sending back to earth a man who had devoted most of his life to killing pheasants, as a pheasant. We just cannot know. And at this early stage, Banger was barely more than conscious of being conscious, so he had not even begun to theorise about his predicament.

  As his thoughts became more lucid, he was a little surprised to find that he was in such a pleasant place, as he had half expected to spend his time in the afterlife being turned on a trident in front of a blazing fire tended by a horned employee of Satan. Banger admitted, to himself, that he had not been the kindest, warmest human being while on earth, and had not left behind him unalloyed peace and harmony. He had fallen out with his only child, Victoria, and had banished her from his house for seven years, though they had recently patched things up and she was back living on the estate. He had not treated his wife Dora well. True, they had never got divorced, but for the last three years of her life he had exchanged no more than a handful of words a week with the woman, and on the day of her funeral he had had to go to a grouse moor, because it was an overriding principle never to let down his host and spoil carefully prepared sporting plans by cancelling a day’s shooting. As a rule, he didn’t like women, but then as a rule he didn’t like men either; it was unquestionably true that being reincarnated as a pheasant was the first time he had been laid in years. He had been tolerable only to Griffiths, his servant, and Idris, his gamekeeper, though he had frequently fired both of them, only to rehire them when he realised how helpless he was without them. He had had no friends, just acquaintances whom he needed to help exterminate flying and running game. He had not actively hated his landowning neighbours, but would not have dreamt of attending one of their filthy parties, or stopped to talk to them if he saw them on the street in Llangollen, unless of course it was a shooting related matter. Everybody else, every body else, without exception, he had loathed.

  Banger’s favourite author had been a Scotsman called George Whyte-Melville, who wrote twenty utterly forgettable novels in the nineteenth century on the subjects of hunting and shooting. Ban
ger had him up there with Joseph Conrad and Jane Austen. Whyte-Melville is responsible for the quotation which appears every week on the editorial page of Field magazine: ‘I freely admit that the best of my fun, I owe it to horse and hound.’ Even the most enthusiastic country sportsman took this with a pinch of salt or as a touch of irony, but to Banger it was a serious proposition, and one he heartily agreed with.

  The game farm made arrangements for all the eggs to hatch simultaneously at 4 a.m. every Tuesday during the summer. Workers in gloves, white overalls, wellington boots and face masks withdrew the trays and plucked the new chicks from their broken shells.

  Banger blinked, cleared his throat, saw the masked god above him and wondered what was going on. The bright light, the huge looming gloves, the clattering of trays and trolleys as the chicks were transferred into sterilised plastic crates and wheeled to distant sheds, began to make him tremble uncontrollably with fear. He still had no idea he was even a bird, let alone a pheasant, but could tell that some kind of sorting process was going on, and thought he might have arrived at the spot where the road splits to heaven or hell. Chicks which didn’t hatch, or were malformed in any way, were hurled into a large plastic bin with ‘Daryl’s Recycling’ written on its side, where if they were alive they breathed their last tiny lungful of air on a heap of dead bodies. The strongest and largest chicks were placed in single-use cardboard transportation boxes for shipping direct to game farms that didn’t go in for incubation, and the rest were sent to a shed to be raised.

  As Banger was picked up by a huge gloved hand he decided that this was the moment to pipe up and make his case.

  ‘If I could just see the fellow in charge,’ were the words he planned to say, pronounced in his confident patrician timbre they usually did the trick in shops or restaurants when he wasn’t getting the service he thought he deserved, but they came out as a tiny squeaky cheep. A gloved hand picked him up and threw him onto a trolley.