Bird Brain Page 6

  ‘How many birds did Banger put down?’ he asked.

  ‘Mr Peyton-Crumbe penned three thousand. He said that was the optimum number. Any more they lost their fire, that’s what he used to say. Flew too low and flat. Three thousand gave us the best birds.’

  ‘Three thousand?’ said William. ‘Marfield put down sixteen thousand.’

  ‘But that’s a different type of sport, sir,’ said Idris, watching William out of the corner of his eye.

  ‘Well, that’s the type we’re doing here now,’ William said. ‘I don’t want every bird a mile high, it’s offputting for people who don’t shoot every week. And I want big bags. That’s what everyone notices. Order the birds, will you, and make the arrangements.’

  The woods rang with the sound of Idris and the under-keepers constructing new timber and chicken-wire pens. Two cunning old pheasants who had seen a couple of full seasons under Banger stood in the dappled shade watching the men working.

  ‘Hello, what’s going on here?’ the old hen said.

  ‘I have a hunch it is not a scheme to preserve pheasants,’ replied the other.

  The keepers’ dogs were happy to hear that more birds than ever were coming, and Jam, though he professed to hate work, leapt up and down when he heard the news, and ran to William, jumping up and imprinting his muddy paws on his suit.

  ‘What’s that ruddy dog doing out, Griffiths? Griffiths! GRIFFITHS! GRIFFITHS!’

  ‘Yes, sir?’

  ‘Take this frigging dog and put him in the kennel and leave him there until I tell you. He’s a working dog, not a frigging pet. Do it.’ He swung a polished shoe at Jam and caught him painfully in the arse.

  Jam sat on the cold concrete of his kennel staring though the bars. He heard the helicopter take off and called out to Griffiths, but when the old man finally came to check on him, he said, ‘Sorry, lad, I don’t dare let you out. There’ll be no end of trouble if you’re seen running around. You’ll just have to get used to it.’

  ‘What?’ replied Jam, incredulous. ‘What? You are going to leave me here? You can’t. It’s not right, it’s not fair. I can’t live in here. Please. Pleeeeeaaaase. I promise I’ll be good. I promise.’ But with a glum smile Griffiths left Jam alone in the cell.

  Soon after William and Cary moved in, Jam watched William emerge from the woodshed with a single log and an axe. William had decided that it would be good for him to do something physical and something rural, for a change. He was a millionaire banker, the boyfriend of a reknowned beauty, now the owner of a large estate, soon to be the greatest shoot in Britain, and the master of all he surveyed. But he didn’t want to get, or at least appear, smug or self-satisfied. He needed to keep in touch with reality, do something humble and simple, which was why he decided to chop some kindling for the open fires he would be burning for his illustrious winter guests.

  He had grabbed the first log he had seen in the shed, unaware that it possessed a particularly tight and vicious twist in the grain that had been hardened by years of ageing, making splitting it a virtual impossibility. Griffiths, who usually made the kindling, had set this literally knotty problem to one side for this very reason. It had sat in the corner of the log shed, next to a broken axe, stiffening with age. William had confidently picked up the broken axe and the log and took both to the courtyard where Griffiths had a chopping block near the back door. William set the log on its end, stood back, wielded the axe and brought it down with a mighty swing. Thunk. The axe sunk into the chopping block, missing the log entirely, which toppled over softly. He spent the next five minutes trying to get the axe out of the block, whose soft and open grain had eaten an inch of steel. He tried to ease the axe back and forth, but it was as though the two objects were welded together. He lifted both axe and block into the air and brought them crashing down, three times. He was breaking out in a sweat. Jam cheered ironically. William had thought making kindling would be a fun task, from which he’d get a satisfactorily fleeting feeling of what it was like for the common man, but it was turning into a humiliation. He yanked the handle back and forth, felt a little play, and believed, wrongly, that he was loosening the axe in the block. In fact, all he had done was loosen the handle in the axe head. He hammered the block on the ground two more times and finally, effing and blinding, detached the axe from the block. Jam watched with a smile in his eyes, chuckling to himself. With the axe out of the block, William rebalanced the log, wiped his brow, swore, and with both hands low on the axe handle swung it ambitiously far back over his head. The axe head decided at this moment to detach itself from the handle and catapulted in a high and long arc behind William in the direction of the lawn, where Cary’s glass ball sculpture was carefully positioned.

  William’s face formed a ghastly rictus of fear that twitched into panic as he followed the progress of the blade slowly rotating in the air in the direction of the delicate and valuable glass sculpture. It hit the first ball, shattered it, and glanced off onto the next, which rolled into the third, shattering both. William put his hand on his mouth and staggered a little, panting loudly.

  A high sash window on the garden side of the house scraped open.

  ‘What the hell was that?’ shrieked a shrill voice that Jam well knew to be Cary’s.

  William froze, breathing deeply, supporting himself with a hand on a bar of Jam’s cage. Then he drew back the bolt that Jam had spent weeks trying unsuccessfully to work out, and grabbed Jam by the collar, dragging him across the courtyard to the lawn, where he picked up the axe head and hurled it deep into the rhododendrons.

  The courtyard door slammed, and William shouted, ‘Bad dog! Bad dog! You bad bad dog!’ while cuffing Jam around the head.

  ‘Oi, stop it,’ Jam shouted back.

  ‘What’s it done now?’ Cary called, adding, ‘Oh no!’

  ‘I let him out to do his business and he just crashed into the Quinn,’ William said.

  ‘You stupid fucking mongrel,’ Cary screeched, kicking Jam in the ribs. She knelt down to inspect the bits of curved glass. ‘This is unmendable.’ Her first thought was of the artist. What would he say? ‘We’ll have to buy another one,’ she snapped to William, ‘or Marc will be furious. Thank God it only cost fifty grand.’

  William dragged Jam back to the kennel. Cary shouted, ‘Take away its food and water, that’ll teach it,’ and went inside.

  Jam picked himself off the concrete and came to the bars. William was gasping heavily and sweating profusely. While William stared at the shards he slipped his hand down his trousers, unbunched his underpants and went fully into an unrestrained scratch between his generous buttocks. Then he pulled out his hand and smelt his fingers, closing his eyes in pleasure. It was the only thing that could soothe him in a crisis of this magnitude.

  This behaviour, along with various other personal habits that need not be mentioned here, was common among humans, though all pets knew that for some reason they were only done when no other human was present. Dogs enjoyed sharing these marvellous savoury smells, but it was a sign of what humans referred to as good manners that they denied each other the joy of a stranger’s intimate scents.

  Jam stared at William. William finished with his fingers and glanced at the kennel.

  ‘Sorry, old boy,’ he mouthed at Jam.

  When Cary was safely back inside, William opened the kennel, refilled Jam’s water bowl and poured some dry food as quietly as possible into a steel bowl. As Jam hurriedly went to snack he caught a whiff of William’s hand. Bottom fingers. And not just any bottom fingers. The bottom fingers that he had smelt in the back of the Lanny the day Banger had died. There was no question about it. This was the bottom that had tampered with Banger’s shotgun.

  As soon as William had gone into the house, the young Springer Spaniel arched his back, stretched out his neck, and bellowed with a bark so loud it echoed round and round the courtyard and far out across the estate.

  Over in Ty Brith, where Victoria lay on the sofa with Tosca, Spot and Sunshin
e, Spot lifted his head off Victoria’s thigh. ‘Can you hear that?’ he asked.

  ‘What?’ said Sunshine, nestled against Victoria’s feet.

  ‘Jam. He’s shouting something,’ said Spot.

  ‘The stupid boy,’ said Sunshine.

  Though distant, Jam’s barking wafted through the open window. ‘Bum! Bottom! Bum!’ he shouted over and over again.

  ‘Yes,’ sighed Tosca, ‘we can all hear you, silly little boy.’

  9

  Moy Lovelies

  THE TRUCK TRUNDLED along a woodland ride, halting in a shady clearing in a deciduous wood. The driver killed the engine. Banger heard some talking, this time in English.

  ‘How many you got there?’

  ‘This load? Two thou.’

  ‘They’re for this pen. How many you bringing down tomorrow?’

  ‘Another two, and two the day after. You’re getting six in total, according to the boss.’

  ‘From you, that’s right, and oim getting six thousand from Kendal and four thousand from Paul Green, Malpas way.’

  Sixteen thousand birds. An industrial operation, as Banger had suspected. Flocks of slow, low pheasants for men who didn’t have the first idea about sport. Men who worked at phones or computers all day. Sewers. Had no idea about the woods. They were after blood-baths, not blood sport. As a human, Banger had dismissed them out of hand. Occasionally they would try and ‘rent’ a day of shooting at Llanrisant from him. Banger simply slammed the phone down on any man who mentioned money in connection with shooting; in Banger’s mind the two subjects could never be connected.

  The crates were unloaded by a tall thin fellow in a checked cap with sideburns and prominent cheek bones, who took more care of the birds than the Polish men at the sheds. Banger watched him carrying a crate to the pen, talking as he went. ‘Welcome to Marfield, moy little lovelies, and may your stay here be safe and comfortable … Come on, moy little lovelies …’ he coaxed them out of the crate, ‘there’s water over yonder and feed for every one of you here.’ He pointed to a large blue barrel with a letter box cut in its base. Banger knew that it would be full of grain, quite possibly flavoured with aniseed to make it doubly irresistible and to keep the birds from straying too far. He felt his crate shift and then saw the kind eyes of the thin man looking down at him. ‘You don’t look very well, do you?’ He tutted when he saw Jenni’s open wounds. Jenni had been bullied by a couple of the big birds. ‘One or two quite badly pecked here!’ he called out.

  The driver grunted. ‘Can’t be helped, mate. It’s nature.’

  Banger’s plan was simple: as soon as they were in the woods, he would make a break for it. Find somewhere safe, both from shooters and predators. It wouldn’t be easy. Cheshire was strewn with pheasant shoots. He had two options, both humiliating for a man of Banger’s prejudices: suburbia or the National Trust. Eeking out an existence on bird-tables and at bird feeders among the semi-detached houses and gardens of Chester made Banger sick to even think of, though it was preferable to setting foot on National Trust land. To Banger, the National Trust was a conspiracy between the Exchequer and the middle class to subject the noble families of Britain to extended abuse and insult. The progeny of great men were reduced to living like domestic pets in their own homes, surrounded by car parks, cafés, signs to here and there, pressed on all sides by the filthy unwashed who weren’t fit, in Banger’s view, to set foot in the gardens or reception rooms, unless they were in livery and holding a tray of glasses. The organisers didn’t even have the guts to guillotine the aristocracy. Instead they reduced them to exhibits in a show of slow torture. The parks and farms of these once great palaces were criss-crossed with tarmac and ‘nature trails’, where the public walked at will, strewing litter as they went. They should be shot by a good keeper, but of course that kind of perfectly reasonable protection of private property was now outlawed. The final indignity had been when the National Trust banned all blood sports on its land.

  Of all the rights possessed by man, sporting rights, not human rights, were the most sacred to Banger. There was no greater humiliation a man could suffer than to be stripped of his sporting rights and banned from the perfectly natural activity – nay, responsibility – of killing game on his own land. That was the day, in 1997, when Banger had vowed never to walk on National Trust land again. He had argued with Victoria about it; it was one of their last fights, and had occasioned the long silence that fell like a steel shutter between them. Banger had spotted the National Trust oak leaf sticker in the back of her Volvo when she came to collect the few things her mother had left her in her will. It was about three months after Dora’s death, and only a couple of weeks after the vote to ban shooting at the National Trust AGM, so Banger was still very sensitive. Not about his wife dying, about the vote. He had told Victoria to remove the sticker from the car or remove herself from the Hall. She took the second option, saying, as she strapped a three-year-old Tom into his seat, ‘You are a horrible, hateful, man. And a bully.’

  ‘I just happen to disapprove strongly of the National Trust,’ Banger had said.

  ‘Tom and I are members. And guess what? I voted in the AGM, and I voted for the ban.’

  Banger had to turn his back on this betrayal.

  ‘You weren’t even at Mum’s funeral,’ Victoria said to the back of Banger’s tweed jacket, unable to bury her fury any longer.

  Banger continued walking towards the house. ‘I was detained,’ he mumbled. ‘I don’t like to let people down.’

  ‘What about Mum?’ Victoria said.

  ‘She was dead,’ he stated, and closed the studded door.

  10

  Banger’s Breed

  BANGER HAD LITTLE respect for pheasants when he was a human, and nothing had changed now he was one. It might seem odd to hate what you were, but as a man he had no difficulty hating the rest of humanity, so the situation was no different. He kept his distance from the birds. He distrusted them, and didn’t want to catch any of the diseases he knew were rampant in penned flocks. Escape was always on his mind, but there was no chance of it yet. He had found the pop-holes, small egresses along the side of the netting, but they were closed until Kevin, the keeper, was confident the birds were big enough to survive in what people referred to as ‘the wild’. Banger tried unsuccessfully to resist the processed food that Kevin heaved into the barrel from sacks marked ‘Bird Puller’. It reminded Banger of fast food – something he had abhorred as a human. Not that he was a keen appreciator of complex dishes. Banger had basically existed on pork pies, sloe gin, incinerated game, and beef that was burnt black on the outside but raw in the middle, and which oozed blood into long-boiled carrots and mashed potato. He stared at the leafy wood through the chicken wire. It was late summer and the foliage was bowed over with its own heaviness, the time of the year that Banger most disliked. Summer heat and long days had only brought out tourists and gawpers to Llanrisant. In the long evenings Banger had patrolled the river, striding through the salady grass, refusing to deviate from his course to avoid clouds of dancing gnats. He had tried to enjoy the wide strong muscle of water that was the Dee, watching for ripples where fish jumped, but one eye was always on the lookout for trespassers lying on the bank whom he could enjoyably rout with a burst of anger.

  Now, in the pheasant pen, he gazed through the mesh at the glossy shade and flashes of sunlight. His sight and hearing as a pheasant were considerably better than they had been as a human. He could see a newly hatched family of spiders running single file up a slender ash sapling and playing on the underside of the leaves. There were no insects left in the pen, where the crowded birds had flattened the ground and trodden spilt Bird Puller into the dry mud like a mosaic. They stood round the blue barrel stuffing their craws, shitting, farting and talking nonsense. They disgusted Banger. He wanted to be out in the wood, nosing among the deep tussocks, stepping carefully and silently under the bending nettles and leaning bracken, hunting for insects.

  The thrill of h
unting. The joy of shooting. The excitement of the kill. It hadn’t left him. In fact, when he had been woken by one of the poults in the pen, clucking shrilly, ‘Morning! Morning, everyone!’ Banger had instinctively tensed his wings and felt for his shotgun, as though he were still Banger the human. The urge would never leave him. He loved it too much, even if fate had played a trick as cruel as turning him into a blasted pheasant, he was a hunter. And the reason? Banger playfully asked himself. Because it was natural to hunt. As he had always explained to the idiots who questioned his right to shoot, until he gave up bothering. Victoria’s ex-boyfriend Kestrel – Tom’s father – a well-read man with ginger dreadlocks (an unspeakable combination in Banger’s view) had often argued about bloodsports with Banger. Victoria had met and fallen in love with Kestrel at Sussex University. When she got pregnant, Banger took it as a cue to do everything he could to split them up, and enjoyed making it clear that he wasn’t going to support Victoria financially while Kestrel remained in the house.

  ‘It’s barbaric to take a harmless animal’s life,’ Kestrel had once drawled.

  ‘But the cat and the fox, nearly all birds, and many many mammals, including man, hunt and kill for food,’ Banger had explained. ‘They have to. For survival. A fox can’t rely on getting a rich girlfriend to pay for everything it wants.’ They were in the kitchen of Victoria’s Brixton house; Banger was in London to attend a Woodcock Club dinner and had dropped by for lunch. Kestrel had served a nut rissole with a grated carrot and bamboo shoot salad, followed by what tasted to Banger like steamed asbestos. Banger felt as though he were shovelling damp sawdust into the steel-plated boiler that was his stomach. Vegetarian fare was chomping food for the molars; Banger liked to get his incisors into a slice of beef – gristle, fat and all. It always annoyed him when he saw people cutting the fat and translucent gristle off the meat he served. Sewers. Kidneys, liver, brains – even tripe, on occasion, as long as it wasn’t cooked in the modern style that made people like it – were all comestibles that fed the flames of Banger’s boiler. Victoria and Kestrel ate like cows ruminating on the cud. Banger needed fresh kill like a big cat, though he didn’t look either sleek, powerful or alert that day, slumped paunchily with bright pink cheeks in the kitchen chair.