Bird Brain Page 9

  ‘Come on, boy,’ said Kevin from in front.

  ‘I said there’s one here, you idiot,’ the Lab insisted.

  ‘Bugger off,’ Banger said through the stump.

  ‘Found you!’ said the dog, laughing. ‘That was soooo easy.’ He barked, once.

  ‘Oh, there is something there,’ said Kevin, coming closer. ‘Go on, boy, find it, find it.’

  The dog clumsily, but surely, made his way towards the open end of the stump. Banger was not going to get caught inside, so scurried towards the light and with a desperate flap of his wings got airborne. He wanted to fly away from the house, down the road towards freedom, but the sharp snap of the canvas flag in the hand of the under-keeper shocked him into changing course and he was soon heading back over a silage field towards the twisted chimneys.

  He landed about thirty yards from a walled garden. Weak from hunger and the flight, he pulled himself together, turned round and started to walk back, but as soon as he had set foot on the meadow, Flush appeared out of the far hedge and streamed across the field aiming straight for Banger, shouting, ‘Don’t you ever bloody learn, you idiot pheasants? Back! Back! Go back to your pen. No escape, comprende? Capisci?’ Banger didn’t like the look of its huge dribbling jowls, so spun round and sprinted back towards the dustbins. The Labrador pulled up panting. ‘Why do we bother to chase these idiots back? Why don’t I just break his neck and be done with it? I do ask myself sometimes.’ He turned and trotted back to Kevin.

  Banger scurried off behind the garage and took a different route towards the road, stalking round an empty tennis court and down the side of the leaning brick wall of the kitchen garden.

  He actually wanted to just sit down and rest a while. He was famished and in little mood to scrabble around looking for ants or spiders. But he stood up, and strode off into the wind, stopping only to inspect a compost heap and pull from its sedimentary layers of rotting leaves a couple of tasteless earwigs and a gloriously juicy fat worm.

  ‘Banger! Banger!’ he heard his name called. He turned to see Jenni running diagonally across a pony paddock towards him. ‘Oh, thank goodness I found you,’ she said.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ snapped Banger, wiping the happy expression off her face.

  ‘Looking for you,’ she said. ‘The Rev said you’d be killed. I came to warn you.’

  ‘I don’t need your help.’

  ‘I think we should hide,’ Jenni said. ‘We’ll be seen here.’

  ‘No one cares about us being here,’ Banger said.

  They heard a woman shouting in the distance: ‘Barry, there are pheasants in the garden! Please! Will you get Kevin to kill them or remove them or something? My flowerbeds!’

  ‘This way,’ said Banger. ‘Be careful of fences, they’re all over the place.’

  Banger had carefully noted Barry Brown’s fences. There were miles of them, all new, and all with twin strings of barbed wire across the top and along the ground. Every gate was pale with newness and had bright galvanised metalwork; they all swung easily and accurately and closed with an efficient click. At Llanrisant the gates were Banger’s friends, each one different and yet familiar. There was the one at Justin’s Wood that you had to hold up with the toe of your boot to make the spigot enter the jaw of the lock, one on the hill into Spiney Top Wood that you could leave to swing shut on its own, quite a few that you had to drag open, and one that looked like it would lock but never quite met the post and had to be secured with a bit of red baler twine that Banger had tied in a bow so often the threads fanned out like dragonfly wings in motion.

  They got to the brook. Banger took a run at it, calling ‘Follow me’ over his shoulder, but was garrotted mid take-off by a rusty strand of stock-proof fence he hadn’t seen. He lay beside the decaying, mossy post coughing hard, gasping for air.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Jenni asked. ‘It’s funny that you told me to be careful of fencing.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ Banger harrumphed, standing up. His neck was agony; he tried bending it. It was badly bruised, but no more. Pretending it didn’t hurt, he walked lopsidedly along the side of a stubble field, with Jenni behind him. According to his schedule he should by this time have been quaffing supermarket bird-feed off a bird-table in a quiet Chester garden. The wind persisted and progress was slow. He was exhausted, and not far from tears when he found in the later afternoon the old oak stump he had slept in the night before, and the two of them crawled inside.

  ‘This is cosy,’ Jenni said.

  The fleeting memory of Banger’s wife Dora, whose slack jerseys reeked of horses, passed unbidden through his mind.

  ‘Move up,’ Banger replied gruffly, accidentally on purpose jabbing her with a claw. ‘Oh – sorry,’ he said.

  Banger did not watch much television or DVDs. The campaign by manufacturers to get consumers to upgrade domestic technology had failed on Banger. Consumerism: Banger just wasn’t aboard. He hadn’t caught the train. It had departed without him for the digital future, leaving him at home in analogue-land, possessing a dusty video-cassette machine and an aged television with a small, dirty screen, four grimy buttons and a plyboard pyramid that stuck out the back. One movie he did enjoy, and watched in bleak moments, was Sir Henry at Rawlinson End, with Trevor Howard. To most people it was a broad comedy about a hopelessly old-fashioned country fogey. Banger viewed it more as a cutting-edge documentary. He particularly liked the scene in which Henry slept in the marital bed with a roll of barbed wire between him and his wife. It was this arrangement he thought about as he tucked his head into his feathers, ignoring Jenni’s silly questions, and went to sleep, hoping for a better day tomorrow.

  Soon after dawn they were disturbed by the sound of Flush’s sing-song voice saying, ‘I do not believe it, he’s actually back here again. Hello, I smell a friend. Right. This time I’m teaching them a lesson they won’t forget in a hurry.’

  Banger blinked, gulped, turned round fast and pushed Jenni at the dog, scrabbling out past them. He tried to launch himself into the air, but Flush ran after him and was snapping at his tail feathers.

  ‘What about her?’ Banger shouted.

  Jenni flew off to one side, shitting liberally as she took off.

  ‘Flush!’ growled Kevin. ‘Leave them. Leave them! Come back here, you stupid dog.’

  Banger felt so heavy and weak he could only get a couple of feet off the ground.

  ‘Do as you’re told!’ Banger screamed at Flush.

  ‘FLUSH! FLUSH!’ Kevin yelled as the Lab chased Banger and Jenni across the field.

  Flush pulled up panting after two hundred yards. Banger came to earth on the far side of the field, depressingly close to where he had flown into the fence the day before. He watched the dog return obediently to Kevin. Keepers and dogs as good as those two were few and far between. He shook his head to empty it of such a thought, but he found he couldn’t hide his admiration for the team. He idly wondered how they would perform on a shoot day.

  He staggered towards a thicket by the fence. He was getting so light-headed from hunger that he started seeing dark birds circling him – the way he used to when he had a particularly pernicious hangover. He shook his head again, and began to straighten the feathers on his wings, checking for damage to his tail.

  ‘Don’t stand there,’ Jenni said, running up behind him. ‘It’s dangerous.’

  ‘Shut up,’ Banger snapped.

  There was a loud crack, and the thunderbolt hit him. He caught a fleeting glance of something dark, and felt a set of needle-sharp claws in his neck. He was dragged off the ground, swooping sickeningly over the field, and then accelerated upwards into cold air. Turning his head he glimpsed a sparrow hawk, its sharp curving beak an inch or two above his eyes, looking very pleased with himself. He tried to say, ‘Can we talk about this?’ but nothing came out, and the hawk didn’t look that receptive to negotiation.

  They tore over horses grazing in a meadow, a paddock with hooped jumps, a coppice and a field
of turnips, swooping onto a fence post the top of which Banger realised was to be his execution block. The hawk laid Banger’s neck across the wood and smiled at him.

  ‘Din-dins,’ he purred.

  As the raptor drew back to snap Banger’s spine a heavy object flew into him from behind and knocked them both off the post.

  ‘Run, Banger!’ Jenni shouted.

  He struggled to get away, but felt talons grip his neck again. He was being lifted, but as he left the ground Jenni hung onto his leg.

  ‘I’m not letting go!’ she shouted. ‘Don’t worry, Banger!’

  They ascended again with Banger and the hawk trying to jab each other. Through squeezed-up eyes he watched a wheatfield whizz by, then the walled garden, the tennis court, the roof of the yellow Mini, the gravel drive of the big house, the flat green of the lawn, a yew hedge, a swimming pool, the slate and lead of the wide roof, then a herd of cows, an empty meadow, and suddenly he was free, and falling fast to ground. Jenni released his leg, and Banger stuck out his wings to stop spinning. They had little effect. He watched the hawk above getting smaller, and then hit some branches and smacked the earth, waking to find Jenni standing over him.

  ‘Banger, are you all right?’

  ‘Stop fussing over me,’ he said, standing up and falling down. ‘It’s nothing.’

  ‘I saved your life,’ she said.

  ‘Nonsense,’ he said, ‘I had it under control.’ He glanced around; there was a familiar sound, a noise he knew well. It was the theme tune of the BBC Radio 4 quiz ‘I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue’ being sung by three-hundred pheasants. He grimaced.

  ‘This way,’ said Jenni, and he limped after her. ‘Look, everyone!’ she shouted. ‘Banger’s back!’

  Kevin had peeled back one side of the pen; it meant the start of the season was imminent. The keeper needed to get the pheasants out so they didn’t act too tame when the time came to shoot them. If you gave birds too much contact with humans they had a habit of waddling towards the Guns expecting titbits. It didn’t seem sporting to kill them, even to Barry Brown’s guests. Despite the lure of freedom and all the sprouts they could eat, the pheasants still clustered around the Bird Puller.

  ‘Welcome back,’ The Rev called. ‘Boys, boys, boys, let the bird eat, he must be famished.’

  ‘What were you doing so far from the pen?’ Hindenburg asked.

  ‘I was recceing a break-out,’ said Banger.

  ‘Why on earth? If you need anything, just ask Kevin, he’s such a dear,’ said Sharon Tate.

  ‘Dogged back in by that keeper?’ Atavac, The Rev’s friend, said. He was a good-looking bird with bright bronze tail feathers that curved appealingly upwards, and red markings on his eyes like wrap-around sunglasses.

  ‘Something like that,’ smiled Banger.

  ‘You’re a pheasant, mate, not a swan,’ Atavac said. ‘Don’t forget it. Your movements are strictly controlled. The swan, now the swan can do what it likes, the bastard, though quite how they swung that I shall never understand. If a human kills a swan a he can be tried for treason. Kill one of us they shout “Good Shot!”’

  Banger smiled weakly and nodded.

  ‘Now now,’ said The Rev, ‘no silly talk. If you don’t put the effort in you’ll regret it in June when you are sitting in front of a blank piece of paper in the exams. Think about it. Yes. Well then.’

  ‘Ignore him,’ said Atavac. ‘This place is a hell-hole.’

  Although he sheltered at the same school as The Rev, Atavac did not sit outside the Headmaster’s open classroom windows. He had picked a quiet spot by the fives courts, near a Portakabin where Mr Smedly, the disillusioned politics and English teacher, tried daily to hammer facts into his pupils’ daft heads. The fives courts were also where the boys skulked to smoke and drink, and Atavac had warmed to the lads who liked to break school rules, and enjoyed the Quavers and the crumbs from the bottom of packets of popcorn they tossed at him.

  ‘Come come,’ said The Rev, ‘that is a bit one-sided. We throw a party every day, we have music and dancing …’ Then he whispered to Banger, ‘We must keep morale high.’

  Before dusk The Rev organised the choir, and got the birds dancing. At first Banger stood aloof as he always had at dances, though after a few days watching them walking round and round in a circle, cheeping with the glorious fun of it, he dredged from his boyhood memory some Scottish reels and taught them ‘Strip the Willow’ and ‘The Gay Gordons’. Later, he got them in a conga line, and they loved that, too. Banger’s icy hatred of their stupid simplicity melted somewhat.

  That night a fox appeared like a ghost in the wood. Banger woke the moment he picked up its sharp scent, the feathers standing along his back.

  ‘What’s that?’ murmured a sleepy Twin Towers, from another branch.

  ‘It’s Ronny,’ said The Rev. ‘We don’t talk to Ronny.’

  ‘Anyone about?’ the fox called. ‘Only I’m scared and lonely.’

  ‘I’m here,’ said Martin Luther King.

  ‘My name’s Ronny.’ Ronny walked with a limp and had a slur in his speech; to Banger it looked like lead poisoning from eating too many wounded pheasants.

  ‘Hello, Ronny!’ a handful of young pheasants chanted back gaily, hopping down to the ground. Banger looked away. He then heard a high-pitched squeal, which he assumed to be the first of the pheasants getting killed, but it went on too long, and wasn’t, he soon realised, a pheasant noise. He looked back to see Ronny squirming about, his pink mouth wide open, his teeth glinting. His hind leg was caught in a snare, and thin steel wire was cutting into his flesh.

  ‘You,’ he signalled to one of the loose pheasants, ‘come here and give an old man a hand, would you?’

  The pheasant trotted to Ronny, whose chops dripped saliva. As it got within reach, the fox sprang forward and caught the little bird in its claws, dragging it to its glinting teeth, which ground into the feathered neck until the pathetic struggles of the bird were over, and the wood fell silent but for Ronny’s moans and grunts of pain and pleasure.

  ‘That was very helpful indeed,’ he said. ‘Now, next volunteer, if you please.’

  He looked at the remaining three poults, who stood quivering with terror a yard away from him.

  ‘Don’t worry, I won’t hurt you,’ he said, trying to laugh. ‘Argh. Bastard Kevin!’

  Titanic, dafter than most, it must be said, stepped towards Ronny.

  ‘That’s the idea, little girl.’ He smiled, sweeping the feathered and bloody remains of the first pheasant out of the way. ‘Old Uncle Ronny wouldn’t hurt a sweet tender juicy young bird like you …’

  The fox leapt forward, but Titanic hopped back and escaped his claws. The audience, looking down from the trees, gasped. Ronny turned to look at his hind leg, pulling it against the wire, grinding his teeth in pain. ‘What are you lot staring at?’ he screamed at the roosting poults, almost making Twin Towers fall off his perch. ‘You’re hoping to see Ronny die, are you? Well prepare to be disappointed because I,’ he tugged at his leg, ‘am getting out of here. I am a fox, and we are so frigging clever. Shall I tell you why? Come closer and I’ll tell you.’

  Nobody moved.

  ‘The Hunting with Dogs Act 2004,’ Ronny whispered, wheezing with laughter. ‘They kill you lot whenever they want, however they want. You’re worthless, you’re animal garbage. But they can’t frigging touch us.’ He started laughing again. ‘It is actually illegal to hunt us! Illegal!’ he wheezed.

  Banger stuck his head under his wing to blot out the bubbling sounds of Ronny’s throaty breaths and his angry moans of agony. For over two hours, Ronny tugged and pushed on the snare but the wire simply tightened. Kevin had driven the peg too deeply into the earth to drag out. Ronny grew exhausted, and for periods fell silent but for a horrible deathly panting, before he started pulling again, trying to get some play in the peg. As dawn broke the fox changed tactics. Ronny knew it wouldn’t be long before Kevin turned up on his morning round, so he started
to gnaw through his own leg. Banger woke to the clicking of the fox’s teeth on bone.

  ‘When I get out of here you lot are history,’ Ronny snarled manically up at the pheasants. ‘I can still catch you with three legs you’re so sodding stupid and slow. Easy, Easy! EASY!’ Ronny screamed at the transfixed pheasants.

  They heard Kevin’s Toyota draw up, and its door slam shut. The keeper soon appeared in the clearing, a shotgun under his arm, calmly smiling when he saw Ronny, who though utterly spent, was still gnawing through his own leg. The fox snarled as the keeper approached. Kevin coolly slotted a cartridge into the chamber.

  Ronny twisted like a speared snake. Kevin snapped the gun shut, stood back a couple of paces and shouldered the stock. With a last desperate tug and a twang as tendon ripped from bone, Ronny sprinted off on three legs. Kevin just smiled, moved his gun as if he had all the time in the world, and pulled the trigger. There was an earsplitting bang, Ronny leapt in the air, and collapsed on the ground, motionless. Kevin broke the gun; the empty shell spun into the air and disappeared in the keeper’s fist. His account with the fox was now closed.

  The pheasants staggered around, dazed from the gunshot.

  ‘What on earth was that?’ Jenni gasped.

  ‘That,’ said Banger, ‘was a gun.’

  It was the most exciting sound Banger had heard for ages. It didn’t matter that he was a pheasant, he knew immediately and absolutely that he had to experience a day’s shooting, not just to see how Kevin and Flush performed, but to witness the whole thing, this time, thrillingly, from the pheasants’ point of view. Call it hunter’s instinct. He was a Peyton-Crumbe. Retreat? Never. Peyton-Crumbes went in a straight line towards gunfire. His breast swelled with pride as he remembered the day in Korea he had raised his pistol and brought down a Yak 19 fighter doing four hundred and fifty miles per hour three hundred feet overhead. Just like grouse on a windy moor, all it needed for a direct hit in the engine intake was a cool head, a steady hand and plenty of lead. Banger put all plans for escape on hold.