Bird Brain Page 7

  Kestrel had pulled his locks back over his head, blushing at the insult, but maintaining control. ‘But it’s a sign of civilisation to treat animals well,’ he’d smiled, provocatively (Banger thought). ‘Tosca’s a vegetarian.’ He had pointed at their newly adopted Dachshund. ‘Dogs aren’t that into meat …’

  ‘Have you asked her what she wants to eat?’ Banger asked.

  ‘No! He has not!’ shouted Tosca, adding to herself, ‘Why do I bother?’

  ‘Sure,’ said Kestrel. ‘She’s really happy with the deal.’ He chuckled.

  Tosca got up and left the room.

  ‘Dogs need meat,’ said Banger, reddening with fury.

  ‘In the wild, maybe,’ said Kestrel. ‘But meat is murder.’

  ‘So is eating your veggie food,’ said Banger. ‘It tastes like industrial wadding. Anyway, for your information, there is no “in the wild”. It’s just a meaningless phrase made up by sentimental idiots. We are in the wild now, all the time,’ Banger continued, ‘whatever you may think. Look, you can’t legislate the desire out of animals to kill or eat meat. It’s there. It’s like legislating against the weather. Look at that patch of weed.’ Banger pointed out the window at a triangle of scrofulous wasteland behind some hoarding. ‘In that grass among those plants hundreds of beetles, ants, spiders and lice fight duels and battles and wars, over scraps of food, territory and females. Why? Because they want to. They enjoy it, that’s how they are made. Domestic cats kill over a million birds a year in Britain. For fun. We used to celebrate our great battles – Trafalgar, Waterloo, the Pro-Hunting march on Parliament,’ Banger continued, his rheumy eyes moistening with the glorious memory of horsewhipping a policeman in the shadow of the Mother of Parliaments, ‘but it’s cowardly people like you, Kestrel, that are trying to make us ashamed of them. Ashamed of how we really are. All you are doing is denying it. That’s adding hypocrisy to idiocy. This is a violent world, Kestrel. We are a violent species. That’s what we are. Just open a newspaper, it’s staring you in the face. Enjoy it, for God’s sake. I do.’

  ‘I am afraid I can’t do that.’ Kestrel smiled beatifically, in what to Banger seemed a flagrant attempt to inflame the situation. ‘We’re pacifists, aren’t we, Victoria?’ he said to the doorway.

  ‘Being against war is like being against gravity. Wars happen. Read your history, read your newspapers, they go on all the time. We can’t stop them. Why? Because people actually like to fight. They enjoy it. For some reason, they just have trouble admitting it in the times we live in. Even our poor soldiers have to say they are just doing a job, instead of the truth, which is they love to fight and kill the enemy …’ Banger had lit a cigarette. Kestrel stared at the smoke. ‘I don’t give a shit what you think about me smoking,’ Banger had said, blowing a lungful across the table. ‘Yes – I know it kills people, and I know it’s killing me, but you see the purpose of my life, dear Kestrel, is not to live longer, it’s to live. I will die one day, but before I die I will actually enjoy myself, or try to, as long as idiots like you stop interfering in my pleasures.’

  ‘I would never hunt. And I would refuse to fight in a war. I’d be a conscientious objector.’

  ‘I’d have you court-martialled and shot for cowardice.’

  ‘Cool it, man. Look, don’t you ever think we could create a better, more peaceful world, where all species, including man, respected each other equally? Join the movement, Banger. Get on the peace train. We are going to a world where the fox as well as the huntsman has a say in how things are run, seen?’ said Kestrel.

  Banger’s brow furrowed. He didn’t know what that last word meant but could tell it was one of Kestrel’s many annoying affectations. ‘The fox doesn’t have any say,’ Banger explained coldly. ‘It’s a ruddy fox. Who gives a damn what it thinks? It kills for enjoyment. As do I. It understands. It’s you who don’t. You idiot. Seen?’ Banger added, for fun.

  ‘Killing for fun, man, that’s barbaric,’ Kestrel chuckled, half to himself.

  ‘I’m sorry, I can’t stick any more of this drivel.’ Banger stood up from the table.

  ‘Daddy,’ Victoria said, appearing at the door with an empty baby bottle. She looked short of sleep and lank-haired. ‘Kestrel. Stop fighting, please. You’ll wake Tom up.’

  ‘Yeah, man, cool it,’ Kestrel said. ‘But it’s what I’m talking about, we’ve got to condemn violence out—’

  Kestrel’s words were lost in Banger’s right hook, and his smile swiped from his features by the left jab that followed.

  ‘Ow ow ow!’ Kestrel cried, holding his face. ‘Man, you are an animal. You are one violent, evil animal.’

  ‘You gutless cretin,’ Banger had shouted.

  Victoria had asked Banger to leave; he had walked out with as much dignity as he could, feeling absolutely in the right. He was simmering with concealed rage, which the walk through the streets of Brixton, among its happy, carefree people, stoked to boiling point. A newspaper headline caught Banger’s attention: SHOOTING IN HERNE HILL, and he thought, I wonder what that is? Partridge? Pigeon? Then he understood it properly, and felt a jab of anger that his grandson was being brought up in all this. Maybe the best solution was never to see little Tom again. Cut him and Victoria and the loathsome Kestrel out of his life altogether. He noticed he was walking on Acre Lane; its name seemed to Banger cruelly ironic. The bucolic landscape evoked by the words had been, like everything else decent, obliterated by ugly modernity. He saw a sign in the Jobcentre window that read ‘Do you want a job innit?’, and stopped to stare, now overflowing with anger. The attempt by the authorities to pander to the ignorant seemed to encapsulate all that was wrong with Britain. Struggling with the door, he bustled into the Jobcentre, and stood breathing heavily in the atmosphere of quiet, efficient activity, looking round for the manager. The ten-minute wait for the man, which Banger spent inspecting the various claimants and petitioners sitting in the upholstered chairs, maddened him further. The supervisor, a pale-skinned, thin man with a long face and an air of imperturbable irony, looked at Banger and enjoyed, fleetingly, seeing such an unlikely looking man in the office. He cast an appreciative eye over his three-piece suit, hat, furled umbrella and brightly polished shoes, and asked Banger how he could help him.

  ‘That poster in the window,’ Banger pointed, ‘makes no sense. It’s not English.’ He started to over-enunciate his words. ‘I felt I had to stop and point this out to you. It is exactly this kind of refusal to obey simple laws of grammar and spelling that just encourages the lowering of standards generally. You, as a government agency, should be attempting to if not maintain then at least raise standards of basic communication. That poster lowers them.’

  ‘What poster?’ the manager asked, dealing with Banger with practised calm detachment.

  ‘There.’ Banger pointed with his furled umbrella. ‘Innit,’ he spat, and then turned to the manager and said, ‘It’s not English, in case you are not aware.’

  A gentle smile appeared on the manager’s pale face. ‘I agree,’ he said.

  Banger made a kind of harrumphing noise.

  ‘But it doesn’t say innit,’ the manager continued, without a hint of malice or satisfaction, ‘it says “in I.T.”. “Do you want a job in I.T.?” Information technology.’

  Banger felt something furl inside him. He wanted to sit down with this nice young man and tell him about Kestrel, Victoria, Tom and the way Kestrel said ‘seen’ to him. He seemed like he would be a good listener, and would understand what had befallen Banger’s breed. But Banger murmured something about clearing up a misunderstanding, muttered ‘Carry on,’ turned and left the building. The manager gave a small ironic salute as the door swung shut. After the second tactical withdrawal in half an hour, Banger’s heart felt heavy. He decided then that the best course of action would be to never again go anywhere, just remain insulated from them all at Llanrisant.

  Kestrel only remained Victoria’s boyfriend for two more years, but during this time Banger managed t
o relieve the gloom he always felt around Christmas by sending Tom presents that would enrage Kestrel. Never usually one for giving anything at Christmas (apart from angry glares), over three years he carefully wrapped and mailed Tom a toy rifle, a stuffed stoat, and a youth membership of the British Association of Shooting and Conservation.

  11

  Flying Teapots

  THERE CAN BE few organisms as poorly equipped to deal with the life ahead of them than the reared pheasant. The flock in the pen made the last, doomed, Romanovs look positively street-wise, though both were to end up face down in the dirt in their fine coats. Although initially uncouth, the poults’ pampered upbringing, protected by Kevin and the mesh from every brutal reality, free to live without any concerns about predators, nourishment, illness or the future, created a refined culture with an ancien régime feel, in which all the energy normally devoted to survival was diverted to apparently more important matters: one’s appearance, one’s manners, and general civility.

  The poults from the other incubation units had arrived without names, and when they heard that other pheasants possessed them (apart from Jenni Murray there was Humphrys, Gary Richardson, PM and Brian Aldridge, among others), they asked Banger for names, as he seemed good at that kind of thing.

  While they lined up in front of him, Banger considered what kind of names he could give the young pheasants. He played with physically descriptive ones, like Bronze, Speckles and Flyer, but then decided, for fun, to take another tack.

  ‘You can be Jack Kennedy,’ he said to the first cock, thinking it would be amusing to name them after people and things that were doing very well before being struck by catastrophic disaster.

  ‘What about me?’

  ‘Titanic.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Lincoln … And you are Hindenburg,’ Banger said.

  In a highly enjoyable half an hour Banger christened all those who wanted names.

  Kevin made regular visits with his cynical black Labrador Flush, who was permanently grumbling about being kept under strict orders to leave the poults alone.

  ‘Isn’t Kevin an absolute delight?’ Titanic said as the keeper strung up a weasel he had trapped.

  ‘Marvellous,’ said Jack Kennedy, ‘I really don’t know what we’d do without him.’ To Kevin he called, ‘Thank you, dear man, that’ll be all.’

  ‘Lovely man,’ said Sharon Tate.

  ‘He’s arranging to kill you all,’ Banger said.

  ‘Don’t be stupid,’ said Twin Towers.

  ‘Kevin wouldn’t allow it,’ said Hindenburg.

  ‘It’s hardly very likely,’ agreed Martin Luther King, ‘as Kevin’s the one who is looking after us. He loves us. You can see it perfectly well. He’s always up here checking we’ve got everything we need.’

  ‘It’s obvious he loves us,’ said Omagh, ‘we are just so beautiful.’

  ‘Anyway,’ said Titanic, ‘how could he possibly do it?’

  ‘With a gun,’ Banger said.

  ‘We’re far too clever,’ said Hindenburg, laughing. ‘Anyway, what’s a gun when it’s at home?’

  Although Banger had spent most of his life thinking about raising and shooting pheasants, he had spent little time wondering about what their end of his arrangements felt like. It wasn’t Banger’s habit to see things from someone else’s point of view. When Kestrel left Victoria, Victoria had suffered what Banger had described as ‘nothing worth mentioning’, and Victoria’s doctor diagnosed as a ‘serious episode of depression’. The doctor’s treatment included sending her on a five-week residential stay at the Priory Clinic in Roehampton. Banger’s prescription had been ‘to buck up and pull yourself together’.

  It was testimony to Victoria’s relationship with her parents that she chose to leave Tom, who was then just two, in the care of her best friend, another single mum in London, rather than at Llanrisant. Banger had been summoned with Dora to the Priory for something called ‘Family Week’.

  There were many, many, many aspects of the Priory that Banger found insufferable. Enraging activities included having to hold hands and sing a song about forgiveness with Kestrel, and having to hug the rotund and offensively upbeat woman who ran the group at the beginning and end of each session. It was she who introduced to Banger the notion of ‘Victoria’s reality’ and ‘Dora’s reality’, which apparently he had to accept existed alongside his own reality, which Banger referred to as ‘the truth’. There was constant and irritating reference to life as ‘a journey’, which further offended Banger, who believed his life to be a fortified encampment, which he took refuge in, glowering through its palisade at the idiots filing aimlessly past him. Occasionally Banger left his encampment to stiffen its defences, but always returned to remain safely within. He had no intention of ‘moving on’, and resented the implication that he needed to embark on ‘this journey we call life’.

  There was also the highly annoying injunction that Banger should ‘live in the moment’. Banger believed that only an imbecile lived in the moment. Humans were equipped with an imagination for a very good reason: the present was a sorry disappointment compared to the rich past and the endless possibilities of a hypothetical future. Only someone with brain damage would live solely in the present, and informing ‘the group’ of this obvious truth was Banger’s only moment of enjoyment at the Priory. By the beginning of the third session, after lunch on the first day, Banger was in his filthy Land Rover, rattling up the M40 on his way back to Llanrisant.

  If Banger had been asked what pheasants felt, he would have answered, ‘Don’t give a damn. They’re pheasants. Who cares? All that matters is they fly decently the day they’re shot.’ The sport presented no moral conundrum to Banger. Life to him was simply a matter of being himself and ‘getting on with it’.

  From the pen, Banger kept a watch on the wood, trying to judge the date from the colour of the leaves and the dryness of the grasses. At Llanrisant he had released his pheasants in September, then at Llanrisant he had run a very different operation to Barry Brown’s. Barry and Kevin never even attempted to keep birds in the woods. There were far too many pheasants and far too little cover for that. At Llanrisant, Banger had encouraged the birds to dwell in his woods by providing food and habitat; Brown kept them caged as long as possible, then shooed them onto fields sewn with sprouts, rape, radish, mustard and turnip, where, if all went to plan, the birds were too greedy to wander far from. On the day of a shoot they would be swept off the crop, through the trees and over the Guns, to whom it would look as though they had been living in the wood.

  Banger listened for the rattle of Kevin’s Toyota, but day after day Kevin did little but replenish Bird Puller, clean the crap and the mud out of the water fonts and stand and watch the birds for signs of illness. From time to time Banger heard a shot in the distance and Kevin turned up with a dead stoat or a crow which he hung nailed to a rail in a halo of flies.

  ‘Thank you!’ Jack Kennedy always called. ‘You can leave it there.’

  Kevin had to kill all predators, as his birds had few places to hide when they were released. Idris, Banger’s keeper, had acted like a South American dictator, quietly disappearing stoats, weasels, jays, crows, foxes and even cats while presenting a smiling face and mouthing the word conservation to the world.

  A still, chilly, autumn morning; the chicken wire was wet with dew, and leaves fell slowly and silently, as though with careful deliberation, dappling the ground. Banger shivered. He heard Flush muttering birdist bigotry as he waddled up. The dog and keeper went round the pen, checking for damage, then Kevin knelt down and opened the pop-holes one by one. No one but Banger noticed.

  Before escaping, Banger decided, for fun, to be rude one last time to the other poults, and to Jenni in particular, who had been bothering him with her friendship. Her main crime was that she kept being right about things. She was small and round with a pale coat like a knitted Fair Isle sweater and adoring eyes that blinked with confusion whenever Banger abused her,
which was usually whenever they spoke.

  ‘Banger!’ she squealed delightedly as he approached.

  ‘Just coming to say goodbye to you numbskulls,’ Banger said gaily.

  Jenni’s sweet face dropped. She was in love with him. Why, we don’t know. Love is a strange emotion among humans, no less so among pheasants. As these things go with pheasants, and sometimes in humans, Banger’s cruelty only fuelled Jenni’s infatuation.

  ‘Why are you going?’ Jenni squeaked.

  ‘To get away from you,’ he answered. Pleased with himself, Banger turned, ducked his head and was about to leave through the pop-hole when he met an old pheasant with a weather-beaten coat and twisted beak coming through it in the other direction.

  ‘Can I give you some advice, young man?’ said this cock. ‘I wouldn’t venture out there if I were you. Go too far and you’re out of bounds, and you’ll get into trouble if someone sees you. You’re better off here.’

  ‘Can I give you some advice?’ Banger replied. ‘If you hang around here you’ll get shot.’

  The older bird smiled. ‘Young and rebellious, eh? You’ll soon settle in, my boy. The early weeks are always the hardest …’

  ‘Excuse me …’ Banger said. He nosed the bird out of the way.

  ‘If you stay in the pen you’ll be safe,’ the old pheasant called. ‘We have a lot of fun here. Do you like dancing and singing? How’s your voice? You can join the choir!’

  When Banger had ducked through the hole, the old pheasant cleared his throat. ‘Gather round!’ he called. ‘Gather round. General assembly! Someone ring the bell, please …’

  This pheasant was a canny survivor of two seasons at Marfield. He was tall, slim and gnarled, with fading colours but a bright white dog collar at his neck which gave rise to his name: The Rev. He had now twice-survived the winter shooting season and found summer sanctuary in the grounds of a private boys’ boarding school whose playing fields abutted Barry Brown’s estate. This experience had been character-forming for the pheasant – as boarding schools tried to be. Safe from predators and men with guns, along with another survivor called Atavac, The Rev had learnt human speech and a lot more besides while sitting in the shelter of an ancient buttress, whiling away the hours listening to the Headmaster’s lessons drifting out of open classroom windows. With the arrival of winter, hunger and fear had driven The Rev and Atavac back to the pen, but The Rev emanated the joys of boarding school.