Bird Brain Read online

  ‘Boys, boys, boys?’ He waited for silence. ‘Thank you …’

  Banger pushed into the wood, where he was soon treading not on barren, polished mud, but the promising mulch of soft dead leaves and broken twigs. He looked around, and cocked his head for sounds, hearing only the pack of infantile sparrows that had long bothered him in the pen chanting, ‘Na na na na, you can’t get out …’

  ‘You lot can bugger off too,’ he said.

  He pushed forward, cocking his head, moving carefully through the patches of sunlight that played on the floor of the wood. A beetle scuttled in front of him whom Banger thought he’d better eat to wean himself off Bird Puller, which was designed to make him fat and slow, and give him the aerodynamic properties of a flying teapot. He picked up the beetle in his beak and watched its legs flap about while it squealed ‘I swear I taste horrible,’ before he crushed the life out of it and swallowed. It hadn’t been lying. It certainly didn’t fill the gizzard like a good guzzle at the barrel. He watched a spider crawling over some moss, but she hardly looked worth the bother of catching, and anyway, Banger had more important things to do. A few minutes later he was out of sight of the pen, on his own, and revelling in the solitude.

  He got to a brook that burbled away at the edge of the wood and gazed out at a field of young sprouts. Seven twisting brick chimneys could just be seen above a hedge. The big house, that was where he wanted to go; from there he would find a road, and then a road sign, and decide where best to head. Looking at the brook, Banger sadly remembered the exquisite stream that ran down the hill beside the house at Llanrisant. It went over a gulping waterfall, through the garden and on down the valley to pour into the wide Dee above the town of Llangollen. The stream had many moods, rising and falling with the weather, turning a peaty brown when rain pelted the moorland above the house. If it rained hard for more than a day, it churned up the river and made the waterfall roar so loud he could hear it half a mile across the valley in Justin’s Wood. When the stream was big it rolled huge boulders down its course and swept out earth from under the trees on its banks. Banger’s favourite state was when a heavy fall of snow briskly thawed. A five-degree rise in the thermometer could melt three thousand acres of snowy moorland in a few hours and send water cascading in filigrees of rivulets that covered the hills into the engorged stream. This melt water was always a clean chilly blue, and where it made a curving sheet over the waterfall, utterly transparent. In summer, during a drought, it was reduced to a trickle that threaded around the rocks, and the waterfall sprung leaks as the soil dried and contracted. But however dry the season, the source never failed, and the water always ran, eternally emerging from a rock at the foot of a cliff below the moor.

  Barry Brown’s brook was to Banger a disgrace. Darkened by overgrown fir trees, poisoned with phosphates and nitrates, drained of all life, it was a reproach to its owner. Banger had never seen a pheasant in water, and didn’t want to try to wade it. Then it came to him: he was a bird, he could fly. He flapped his wings – there was barely more lift than when he had flapped his arms as a boy, expecting to take off into the sky. He needed forward motion, so he turned and walked back to get a run-up, then sprinted at the brook, flapping madly. He felt the touch of his claws on the ground lighten, and then the beautiful moment when he could no longer feel the ground. He was airborne.

  He skimmed over the water, and out over the sprouts. The earth fell away and with a few flaps of his wings he soared upwards into cooler air. The wind blew in his eyes and ruffled his neck feathers, and Banger beat his wings to see how fast he could go. All the scary, frightening and confusing things that had happened in the last six weeks paled into insignificance – he could fly! Hedgerows, coppices, rivers and roads appeared in their patchwork far below. If he leant forward he lost altitude and if he raised his head and flapped his wings he went higher. He essayed a left turn by dipping his right wing. Incredible! He banked hard and straightened up, seeing the wide slate roof and spacious lawns of the house coming up ahead. I am Douglas bloody Bader, he said to himself.

  Guy Gibson, another hero of the air and the squadron leader of the Dam Busters, had owned a dog called Nigger, Banger recalled. They cut the word out of the film when it was shown on television. Banger remembered how livid he had been when he read about it when rolling newspaper to make a fire. He was going to write to the Telegraph about it but then noticed the paper was seven months old. It wasn’t that he himself would ever use a word like nigger, he was no racist. He was prejudiced and bigoted, but it wasn’t as simple as disliking people with different coloured skin. He loved dark-skinned people – if they liked shooting and hunting – and had a soft spot for gangster rappers who to Banger were perfectly adjusted young men denied the joys of a grouse moor and a good acreage of pheasant woods. One of Banger’s boyhood heroes was The Maharajah Prince Dhuleep Singh, who shot four hundred and twelve partridges and six hundred and four pheasants over two days with Lord Walsingham at Merton Park, making him possibly the best shot of the late Victorians, a sporting era rich with talent. Banger didn’t much like the French; he was suspicious of their food, though he loved the tanks of live trout and lobster you used to see outside French restaurants in the old days from which you could pick a good-looking specimen to meet again twenty minutes later on a plate. They had been phased out, Banger had glumly presumed, because of that thing called animal rights. Banger thought you had rather settled the matter of their rights when you decided to eat them. He disapproved of the French laws of trespass. Basically a Frenchman couldn’t keep strangers off his land. An intolerable state of affairs. He liked Germans, even Nazis. Von Ribbentrop twice shot with Oofy at Llanrisant and was by all accounts a decent shot. Hitler Banger couldn’t abide, not because he set ablaze two continents and killed six million Jews, but because the man was a vegetarian.

  Banger reserved particular contempt for the censors who denied Guy Gibson the right to call his dog by its correct name. To Banger it was simply an act of cowardice, the worst of all vices. These people didn’t have the guts to accept the world as it was – jagged and deeply unfair – and were trying to smooth and homogenise it, removing all its glorious excitement, contradiction and seething inequality.

  Banger planned to bring himself in to land gently on the front lawn of Barry Brown’s house. There, he would be safe from any predator and too close to the house to be shot at by humans. He glided in, dropped his feet and skimmed towards the earth, landing in a half run, exhausted. Flying might be exhilarating, but it sapped his energy. He remembered that pheasants could only fly for ninety seconds every hour and a half. Banger felt like he needed a two-week rest before attempting it again.

  He walked behind the big house, and was soon surrounded by the many varied and familiar signs of human occupation. A garage, two parked cars, a bicycle, a log shed, the high wall of the back of the house in shadow, two Springer Spaniels in a barred kennel, and there, on a windowsill, a black cat, which at twice his size was a scary proposition. Instinctively, Banger went onto the front foot.

  ‘What are you staring at?’ Banger said.

  ‘A shit-treader,’ said the cat. ‘We only see your kind around here hanging on a piece of string. Dead.’

  ‘You come near me, you’ll get this beak in your tender little nose first, then around your testicles, and then up your arse.’

  ‘All right, calm down. I’m not going to touch you,’ the cat said, slinking away.

  Banger approached the back door, which was half open, twitching his ears for a house dog. He could see through a scullery to a kitchen table with a bottle of wine and cheese board caught in a slice of sunlight. Banger remembered that Barry Brown had a thing about wine. He had produced some rare dry white Bordeaux called Haut Brion at the shoot lunch, which had danced promisingly in the glass, and then ruined it by telling everyone how much it had cost.

  Banger wondered if he could go into the kitchen and make contact. But what would he have done if he had found a live pheasa
nt walking round the kitchen at the Hall? Engage with it patiently, believing it could understand human speech? No. He would have caught it and killed it with his bare hands, then hung it, plucked it, drawn it, roasted and eaten it. He took another look. The concerns of the humans – the bottle of claret, the Brie, the fresh bread, the chair, these were from a life he’d never again know.

  He turned and wandered back to the dustbins, thinking he might find a compost heap and something to eat. He skirted a larch lap fence and found the recycling spot – hundreds of bottles, and sheaves of newspapers and magazines slipping in heaps. He took a closer look. The Daily Telegraph. Heat. Hello. The Hutton Parish Magazine. He stood on the Telegraphs and clawed at a copy. 2 August 2008. He was going to glance at the business section, see what’s his shares were doing, and then thought, What’s the point of that? He thought about Victoria, his daughter, who would now have them in her possession. Probably given the lot to Save the Whale by now. He scrabbled about and found some older editions. England lost the test match. The obituary page. ‘Dame Rachel Whiteacre, doyenne of post-war NHS planning’. And then, wonderfully: ‘Basil ‘Banger’ Peyton-Crumbe, landowner and hunter. 1936–2008’. He read on:

  Basil Peyton-Crumbe, who was killed on 3 January 2009 in a shooting accident, will be remembered as one of Britain’s best shots and the dispatcher of countless wild animals. Born in 1945, he served in the Welsh Guards, rising to the rank of Captain, earning a DSO for bringing down an Egyptian plane during the Suez crisis with a pistol. After the Army he worked briefly in the City, but it wasn’t long before he settled permanently on his country estate in North Wales and pursued his primary passion – field sports. He was Master of the Fox Hounds of the Wynnstay Hunt from 1969 to 83, when he was charged and convicted of horsewhipping a hunt saboteur, an event which also occasioned his resignation from the bench. He became a leading hate figure for opponents of blood sports, but always claimed to be proud of this reputation. Above all else Peyton-Crumbe loved shooting game, and travelled widely to the best shooting grounds. As a young man, he killed a bear in the Rockies with a knife, and once contributed to a grouse bag in Scotland of 789 birds in a single day. His personal tally was 198 birds for which he expended 204 cartridges, saying of it that he regretted letting the team down. He once stripped off and ran naked into a pond to retrieve a wounded duck. He was a member of the Woodcock Club, but in latter years eschewed company, and claimed to have padlocked his gates and thrown away the key. He enjoyed only game shooting, and devoted all his time to improving and perfecting the sport on his estate, eventually dying in the act of pursuing quarry. He married Dora in 1968 and had a daughter Victoria in 1969.

  Banger shook his head. They should have pointed out that the sabs were nothing more than a bunch of bully boys looking to fight a class war over the absolutely innocent, legitimate and necessary activity of hunting foxes. But it was something else that annoyed him more: the description of his death as a shooting accident. Banger prided himself on safety with the gun, and did not want to go down in history as a man who didn’t know how to handle a firearm. Few things gave him more enjoyment than throwing someone off his shoot for being careless with a gun. Always act as if the gun were loaded. Never shoot unless you know it is safe.

  He looked around for some other publications, scrabbling at them with his claws and beak, and finally came across his name on another Telegraph obituary page.

  Re: Basil Peyton-Crumbe

  It is highly objectionable that a paper like the Telegraph should give space to honour Basil Peyton-Crumbe, a heartless killer, responsible, by his own admission, for killing 14,500 innocent animals. He was indeed a hate figure for the anti-hunting campaign, and most decent-minded people celebrated his death, and did not want to read a glorified version of his life in the newspaper. He died with the very firearm he had used to murder all those beautiful animals. At last his gun did something useful.

  Yours

  Giles Burnwood, Chair, People 4 Pheasants

  Banger preferred that one, but was most interested that it had apparently been his own gun that had killed him. Had the old beauty blown up? Impossible. He knew its every millimetre and although getting on a bit, and never top quality, it was perfectly sound. He tried to remember the day he had died. He could only recall that he was shooting pheasants at the Hall. It had rained in the night, and twists of mist clung to the tips of the pines. The birds were flying well. He had shot reasonably. He recalled lunch, at which William had complained about the food and the room being too cold, as usual. Why the man didn’t buy himself a decent jersey, Banger couldn’t understand. After lunch he took William up to Hafod. That was the last thing he remembered.

  Banger scratched around in the magazines for a Horse and Hound or Field but only found further copies of Heat, Hello and Now, the kinds of publications he couldn’t stick, and decided it was time to get on the road. He took a last wistful look at the house, and set off to the bottom of the garden, scurrying under a box hedge to join the tarmac drive.

  Banger walked down the wide, closely mown verge, under an avenue of beeches, sniffing the air agreeably. He passed the sign that said PRIVATE MARFIELD ESTATE, stepped through the wrought-iron gates and found himself on a quiet road. He turned right, and kept walking, looking for a signpost. A wagon loaded high with straw bales swept past drawing in its wake a spindrift of confetti. Further up, on the other side of the road, he could see a farmyard that clearly marked the limit of Barry Brown’s estate. A bungalow stood too close to a badly arranged collection of filthy modern barns. There was a grassy pile of builders’ rubble, a mildewed three-wheeled pick-up and everywhere festoons of flapping black plastic. In a barn with a ripped asbestos roof Banger could just see some mongrel cows up to their hocks in urinous bedding. It must have maddened Barry Brown that this place existed at all, let alone in sight of his own pristine Marfield. Taut, straight fencing, stapled to erect posts, each with a dab of creosote on its head, marked the boundary with this eyesore, but that wasn’t enough separation for Brown. He had also planted a few hundred saplings, which somehow, in their unnecessarily tall tree guards and arrangement in ranks, seemed an act of aggression. Barry Brown was that kind of landowner. The footpath that he had diverted around the side of his house onto a permanently ploughed field (at great inconvenience to his farmer), had, despite saying ‘Please Keep on the Footpath’, a forbidding, prohibitive air. Every stile on the Marfield Estate emanated unspoken threats. They seemed to say, This is a public right of way, but while stepping over my stile and walking on my land, you may be filmed, fingerprinted and subjected to iris recognition, entirely for your own safety. This does not affect your rights. Please note: the area on either side of the footpath is mined for your own security.

  Banger had no public footpaths crossing Llanrisant. It was one of the reasons the estate was so unusual and so perfect for shooting. Oofy had had the paths closed when that kind of thing was done after dinner over a glass of port with the High Sheriff. It wasn’t the same now. Barry Brown had had a team of planning consultants, PR men and access lawyers on the payroll for three years to move one footpath a mere fifty yards.

  Banger stood back to watch Kevin’s Land Rover pass with Flush leaning out of the passenger window. Flush shouted, ‘Seen you!’

  A couple of cars went by, one a bright yellow Mini that he recognised from the grounds of the big house, driven by a pretty girl of no more than twenty. Music blared from her open window; it was the kind of thing that had infuriated him when he was a human. He thought about the girl driving the car; she reminded him of Victoria when she was that age. He hadn’t treated Victoria well, but it was her own fault. She was her own worst enemy, though when he had said this to her, she had replied, ‘No, Daddy, you are my own worst enemy.’

  She was so bloody annoying, that was the problem. Banger repackaged his thoughts on the subject and stowed them away, but they unwrapped themselves. He knew what it was – he had wanted a son. He had, once or twice, in co
mpany, referred to Victoria as ‘my disappointment’. He shrugged his feathered shoulders. He had wanted things for her that she hadn’t cared for, that had been his mistake. Banger’s motto for the unpleasant feeling that was welling up in his throat was, ‘Best not to dwell on it.’

  He walked till his claws hurt. Night fell, and he found a tight blackthorn hedge to roost in. All he could get to eat was a daddy-long-legs who screamed ‘Noooooo’ and a few woodlice who tickled his gizzard uncomfortably on their way down. His empty stomach complained all night.

  Not long after dawn Banger heard voices coming closer.

  ‘I saw one here yesterday afternoon when I drove by. He’ll still be here, cheeky sod,’ said an amiable sounding dog. Banger popped his head out of the hedge to see Flush waddling down the hedgerow. A few steps behind was bowlegged Kevin and a young man flapping and cracking a canvas flag. Banger withdrew into the hedge and reversed into a rotten oak stump. As they drew near he dipped his head into his feathers and stayed absolutely still. He heard the sniffing getting closer and closer.

  ‘You onto something, Flush?’ said Kevin.

  ‘Yup, he’s still here, the featherhead,’ Banger heard the dog snuffle. He felt panic rising, but managed to suppress it and remain motionless.