Bird in the Snow by Michael Harding

Author:Michael Harding [Michael Harding]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781843512189
Publisher: The Lilliput Press
Published: 2011-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

2

IT WAS THE SAME when the Vet died. Alex could never drink hospital tea, which came around every afternoon in a huge silver teapot already mixed with milk, lukewarm and without any kick to it. The trolley never stopped at Alex Delaney’s bed. Instead, Birdie would hand him a bun from her basket, a coconut bun, and she would pour a cup of tea from her own green thermos flask. Every day she brought him a flask of freshly brewed tea, from the finest Assam leaves available in McNamee’s swanky grocery store, where they still had a bell on the door that tinkled as you entered, and still had large drawers of real tea behind the sagging counter.

But the end was unexpected. It happened in a flash. It was two in the afternoon. Alex was halfway through the bun. There was about half of it left in his hands. And it was crumbling onto the bed sheets. His eyes were closed. She knew he was sleeping. He often did that. Fell asleep for a moment or two in mid-sentence. And then he would return.

‘Don’t spill crumbs on the sheets,’ says she.

That woke him suddenly and he said sorry, and then he looked at her. He looked into her. He looked through her. He was only a skeleton in the bed. As if a tornado had swept through him. And he was exhausted. And his skull sank into the pillow like an egg in a basket of straw. But he reached out a bony limb and patted her on the head. He smiled so intensely that she wanted to hold him, and hug him, but she felt too old.

‘I’ll get a tissue,’ says she and she went away, just for a second towards the door. She was going to get a tissue from the communal kitchen and gather up the crumbs from the bedclothes, but she heard the slightest little noise behind her as she walked away from the bed. The noise he sometimes made when they were making love. The sleepiest of songs that his heart sometimes sang, to say he was happy, and she knew even before she turned around that there was only a scattering of bones left on the clinical bed, and that she was alone in the room and in the world.

She missed her last hug. And there she was again in the same position when Gussie came from the mental place, like he used to come to her when he fell out of a tree, or hurt his knee, or ran his bicycle under the wheels of Father Finnegan’s motorcar. And the urge inside her to hold him was monstrous. To smother him with kisses like a thousand petals falling off the wild rose bushes on the avenue. It was making the knuckles of her little white claws burn with pain as she clenched the edge of the kitchen table. But Gussie just sucked his cigarette to the last poisonous breath of smoke. Deep into his lungs.

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