Featherhood by Charlie Gilmour

Author:Charlie Gilmour
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2021-01-05T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 25

It begins with a hiss. For a second I think a cat’s got in and is preparing to go to war. It’s the same noise: a hackles up, fangs out, back-of-the-throat, boiling hiss. If it is a cat, it’ll be out the window by the scruff of its neck. Just one bite is all it takes to finish off a bird: even if it escapes the cat’s jaws, feline bacteria will finish the job. There are no cats on the farm this weekend, however. Fat Norman, my younger sister’s corpulent blue cat, has been sent to stay with friends. The source of the catfight racket is in fact the bird—and it seems to be my dad who has inspired his ferocious song.

Benzene is on top of the fridge, somewhere he’s been spending a lot of his time during this visit. It’s the perfect snooping spot, his very own crow’s nest from which to observe the comings and goings of the household. He’s been rattling around up there among the bottles of vitamin pills for most of the morning, only occasionally swooping down to peck my mother’s fingers as she tries to read the newspaper or snatch a piece of toast from somebody’s breakfast plate; about as self-contained as he ever is.

But with my dad peering provocatively into the fridge, Benzene is transformed. He hisses like a goose and waggles his wingtips in an oddly alluring way. My dad looks perplexed.

“What does he want?” he asks.

Benzene runs tight circles of frustration, then scuttles to the back of the fridge to retrieve a precious piece of treasure, a shiny silver coil from inside a broken clock. He holds it above my dad’s head and brandishes it as beguilingly as he can while shrieking, beckoning, and retreating backward into the dusty space above the fridge, clearly trying to lure him in.

“I think this means I’ve got some competition,” says my mum.

Spring has well and truly sprung on the farm. Down in the woods, the first bluebells are sending exploratory shoots up through the writhing mulch. The crocuses have mushroomed miraculously from the soil and had their heads gnawed off by the squirrels. Pale blossom has fallen onto the brittle spikes of the blackthorn bushes like a dusting of ash on dark volcanic rock. And in the kitchen, an amorous magpie is desperately trying to seduce my seventy-year-old dad.

The hissing song starts up every time my dad walks past the fridge. It’s unclear exactly what it is the bird wants from him and we all take turns trying to appease this demanding household god. A strip of beef; a mealworm; a dead fly; a radish: All are flung to the side. My mum, who for reasons best known to herself, has been trying to teach the magpie the secret of fire, even gets up to offer him a lit match. That too is tossed alarmingly behind the fridge. Yana is the one who eventually figures it out.

“I think he wants you to build a nest with him,” she says.

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