A Funeral for an Owl Read online

  “She’s not my girlfriend!” He snatched the book, avoiding his mother’s gaze while he bundled it into his rucksack. “A few of us go together, that’s all.”

  “I already knew I could remember things if I was interested enough in them. I could reel off the Latin for birds and flowers. It was Aimee who opened my mind up to the idea of education.”

  “Is this part of the story, Sir? No disrespect, but you haven’t even got to the owl part, and there’s a limit to how long I wanna hang out here.” Shamayal pointed to a discarded pair of jeans dangling limply from a reedy branch. “I mean, what the hell happened to that guy? Looks like he disappeared into thin air.”

  “I’m getting to it.” But Jim shivered; somehow the Levis were not just washing-line empty, but ghost-like. “You’re right about this place at night: when we got hungry it was our cue to head for home, but sometimes we’d doze off. One of those times we were both woken by a voice asking what we thought we were doing there. I opened my eyes to find a pair of eyes leaning in close. ‘No need to rush off without saying hello,’ he said. Or something like that. Aimee was hugging her duffel bag. Our way out was blocked by two other guys. Being robbed wasn’t my greatest fear. These guys were drunk or high.”

  “Prob’ly both.” Shamayal was standing with his hands tucked under his armpits.

  “All I could do was watch while the first bloke turned my rucksack upside down. I hoped he just wanted to play tough. He had enough ammunition - if only I could keep my mouth shut. He threw my binoculars aside once he’d got a laugh out of them. I joined in, trying not to let Aimee see how scared I felt. Then he took Aimee’s bag off her. She had a book of poems in there, something she’d been threatening to lend me. ‘What you two need is a lesson on how to enjoy yourselves,’ he said, then he called the other two over. I hadn’t paid much attention to them, but Nick was one of the names he used. The man who responded was a clone of the first. The same shaven head, the same hollow eyes, but wearing a yellow t-shirt with a smiley face on it.”

  Shamayal shook his head. “Not your bruvver!”

  “I was shocked by how much he’d changed.”

  “Right, right.”

  “I had hoped he might be our passport out, but there was no way Nick could admit knowing a puny guy with a book on bird-watching.”

  “How old did you say he was?” Shamayal asked.

  “Sixteen. Too young to be living rough. ‘They’re not worth the hassle,’ he said, but the others egged him on. That was when I thought things might turn really nasty. He started shouting, ‘Didn’t you hear me? I said, forget it!’” Even now, the memory of the voice sent shivers coursing down Jim’s spine: it was his father speaking. “But they wouldn’t leave it. So Nick took our wallets off us. Seeing how little money we had, he said that he’d told them we weren’t worth it. Then he grabbed me by the neck. For a minute, I thought - I thought, Not Aimee. Leave her alone. But he just let go, saying that he didn’t want to see us there again.”

  What Nick had actually said was, ‘I don’t want to see you or your dirty little girlfriend here again,’ but Jim couldn’t bring himself to repeat that.

  “And then what?” Shamayal was asking.

  “We legged it.” For the first time in a long while, Jim wished he had a cigarette on him. He could still hear his brother’s voice, ugly with laughter: ‘The face on him! Thought he was going to cack himself!’ The same brother who’d taken punches for him.

  Shamayal was interested now: “Did you rat on him?”

  “Aimee was hysterical. She would have gone to the police if I hadn’t told her the second guy was my ‘no-good junkie brother.’ That’s how she referred to him after that.”

  “You looked up to Nick ‘til then, din’t you?” Shamayal asked.

  Jim smiled at the boy’s perception. “Come on. We should get out of here.”

  Welcoming the suggestion, Shamayal was generous. “You can finish up some other time. Bins din’t mention no shaggy dog story. I thought it was somethink small I was askin’.”

  “What next?” Jim asked as they emerged into the roar of traffic, by-passing the warning signs. Heads down, feet synchronised on seesawing paving slabs: no longer a boy and his teacher.

  “I’m starvin’. Cheese on toast, then Medal of Honour?”

  “You’re on.”

  Shamayal shoulder-barged him. “You wait. I’m gonna whip your arse, man!”

  CHAPTER 15: JIM - JULY 1992 - THE BUNNY RUN/AUGUST 2010 - ST HELIER

  Rain tumbled in fat drops, leaving domes on the surface of puddles. It was what Jim’s grandfather would have called ‘proper weather’. Anything less and the old man would shake a fist at the sky: “Is that the best you can manage? You’ve interrupted a perfectly good day’s digging for this?” A sharp left between two houses led the way into a fenced labyrinth. Cartwheeling his arms, Jim experienced something close to joy: running through the rain on a warm summer’s afternoon after a skinny girl.

  “What do they call this?” he asked.

  “The bunny run - although it only gets used by foxes now. I haven’t been down here since I got my own front door key.”

  “‘King ace!” He whooped loudly, throwing his voice as far as it would travel.

  She laughed over her shoulder at him. “You’re mental!”

  He didn’t know it then but, drawing a graph of his emotions, this would have been the highest peak. If Jim had possessed the vocabulary, he might have described the weather as glorious; the day magnificent; himself, elated.

  Aimee came to a halt in front of a high wooden gate.

  “Servants’ entrance?” he enquired, his attempt at BBC English.

  “Ha bloody ha!” Reaching her arm over the top, grinning back at Jim, Aimee fumbled and managed to lift the latch. “Stay here,” she commanded, an individual raindrop suspended between two eyelashes. “I’ll make sure the coast’s clear.”

  “Hurry up!” He shook his head, letting his darkened hair release a scattering of its own, like a dog that has been hosed down. The tall white house shivered a long way off. Jim was used to a shared patch of grass out the back, which turned into a patch of shared mud when it rained. When Aimee reappeared minutes later, he commented, “You could have a half-decent football pitch here.”

  “Come on!” She beckoned, leading the way to an octagonal wooden building, its door facing away from the house. It was furnished expensively, something Jim mistook for sparsely: sun-loungers; wicker chairs; an ornamental watering can resting on an otherwise bare tabletop. Aimee dived straight onto one of the sun-loungers and stretched out luxuriously. There were garden accessories too, propped up against the walls: a large crate of garden candles, solar-powered lights, that sort of nonsense.

  Retrieving his binoculars from inside his t-shirt, Jim tried to erase the half-moons of condensation from the lenses with the driest patch of material he could find along the hem. “What is this place, anyhow?”

  “It’s our summerhouse,” Aimee said. “No one ever comes here but me. Da-da!” she fan-fared, sliding a packet of Benson and Hedges out from under the lounger.

  “They’re never yours!”

  “I borrow them from my dad,” Aimee shrugged. “It’s not like he can say anything. He’s supposed to have given up.” Nudging one cigarette proud of the others, she waved the contraband under Jim’s nose, a temptress.

  Reaching out and taking it would have been easy. “Nah.” He shook his head.

  “Suit yourself.”

  His eyes longingly followed the cigarette’s journey from packet to lips and, after Aimee had lit up, closed her eyes and taken a long draw, to its resting place between her fingers.

  This was new territory. There should have been at least half a dozen yellow DO NOT ENTER signs at the gate. Penned in, there was nothing for Jim to do but perch on the second sun-lounger, frightening for its bed-shaped quality. Adopting an elbows-on-knees stance, intended to look casual, the effect Jim achieved was awkward as anything. The
re was no birdsong to transform silence into magic, no squirrels to provide a diversion. His emotional graph already dipping, Jim polished a porthole in the steam and pointed his binoculars in the direction of Aimee’s house.

  The garden was dissected by a path - a stepping-stone effect - leading from the patio to a shed. He mentally positioned goalposts in the wider section of lawn to the right. Beyond, a black cat, still but for the roll of his tail, was sheltering under a veranda that was dripping with lush vegetation.

  “Is he yours, the cat?”

  Aimee propped herself up on her elbows and swung her legs around. “Don’t tell me that bastard’s shut Tomsk out while it’s chucking it down!”

  Ambushed by her banshee transformation, Jim tried to pacify her: “Relax. He’s in the dry.” Perhaps she was as weirded out as he was.

  Through his lenses, Jim followed the line of the cat’s gaze. A flash of yellow, he back-tracked in time to see a small bird land in an apple tree, making the slender branch see-saw. White-faced, with a black stripe resembling a pair of wrap-around sunglasses, topped with a blue hat. A second flash of yellow and blue followed closely behind.

  “See anything?” Aimee asked.

  Jim felt himself redden all the way up to his armpits. There was no way he could mention blue tits to a girl whose top had plastered itself to her, highlighting every curve.

  “Too wet,” he said.

  “Jim.” Leaning down, Aimee positioned her cigarette on the rim of the ashtray and then folded her arms, drawing attention to the cross-section he was trying very hard to ignore.

  “What?” Swallowing - too noisily, he felt - Jim fixed his eyes on hers, praying, Don’t look down.

  “Chill out. You’re making me nervous.”

  When he glanced away too quickly, scurrying sounds suggested sudden movement. By the time Jim dared look again, Aimee had made a tent over her knees with her t-shirt, stretching the material as far down as it would go.

  “This rain isn’t going to let up,” Jim said, glad of the excuse the monotonous drumming on the roof tiles gave him. “I may as well be off.”

  He detected relief even though she said, “You’ll drown.”

  “The state of me!” he shrugged. “It’s not going to make any difference.”

  Arriving home only half-drowned, Jim paired his trainers on the mat by the front door. Over the muffled blur of television commentary, he heard his mother’s voice saying, “- not how I want things to be. It’s just the way they are.”

  Checking his watch, Jim found himself frowning.

  “No, no. He doesn’t know yet. He’s still out. Actually, hang on... that might be him now.”

  Loitering outside the living room, he saw his mother, one hand resting heavily on the telephone receiver she had now replaced, her back to him.

  “You’re home early.” He pushed the door fully open, standing, dripping; noting that there was no unread newspaper littering the coffee table, no half-empty mugs, no crumbed plates and no crushed lager cans. A cleaning frenzy had erased every trace of his father.

  People leave. He’d got used to it, pitying the small boy who had sobbed as he watched his father waving out of the back window of a police car. But that was a long time ago. When the end result is the same, does it matter if they go on good terms with hugs and kisses, or in anger, vowing never to set foot in this hell-hole again; at peace in the garden, digging the soil they love, or silently, slipping away? In his father’s case, leaving had become a habit. Jim despised Frank when he was there and kicked himself for missing the bugger when he was gone.

  His mother turned, her face fixed in a smile. “Jim, love, sit yourself down.”

  Oblivious, Linford Christie repeatedly ran to finishing line in slow motion, arms outstretched.

  “So he’s gone then, has he?” Jim stayed where he was.

  She looked at him intently and sighed. “They came for him earlier.” Jean’s voice took on a distant quality: regret and nostalgia. “I was going to make his favourite for tea tonight. It doesn’t seem very long ago that I cooked it to welcome him home.” A tremor at the corner of her mouth betrayed the fact that she was only just holding it together.

  It was up to Jim to roll the dice, to kick-start the slow ascent up the ladders. “We’ll be alright, won’t we?” A role reversal took place. “You look tired. Why don’t you go for a lie down?”

  Jean navigated the woodchip wallpaper with her fingertips as if the route was inscribed in Braille. “You’re not out this evening, are you?”

  The fact his mother imagined he was in demand brought a smile of sorts to Jim’s face. He had outgrown the kids who played outside after their teas, but was that bit too young to be anything other than an object to poke fun at for the older kids. Besides, that meant gangs; a reality Jim wasn’t ready to face up to. “I’m staying put,” he assured her. “I’ll bring you a cuppa in a bit.”

  As he peeled off his sodden clothes and threw them in the bath, it struck Jim: the only person who had never left him was his mother. It was stupid to let Aimee get too close.

  For two whole days after his father left, Jim was the adult; his mother, the child. Jean lay curled on top of the bedclothes, fully dressed, eyes staring. Sitting with her, drawn curtains propelling the room into unnatural dusk, Jim amused himself conjuring faces out of the textured wallpaper. He brewed endless cups of tea, taking them away when they were cold. He ate the sandwiches he had made when the bread had reached the consistency of cardboard. He even tried reading to Jean from her true-life magazines, but the love stories horrified and embarrassed him. What some people were willing to reveal about themselves for a measly twenty-five quid! It didn’t matter that they changed the names, someone might recognise you. He ran a comb through Jean’s hair and, although he tried to be gentle, the teeth caught on a knot. She barely winced. He only had one more card to play.

  “Eastenders is starting, Mum,” he announced, letting the theme music drift through her bedroom door. Working in empty houses, Jean’s most frequent contact with other people was watching her favourite soap. Confused that Walford didn’t appear on the Tube map, she spoke about the characters as if they were real people. With no time to invest in friendships, she had adopted this speeded up version of life. Witness to the births, the marriages, the funerals; the heady beginnings and the tumultuous ends of relationships, Jean was an authority on them all. “Up you get, Mum!” he encouraged.

  When Jean simply blinked, Jim knew that his mother was ill. He got as far as imagining standing by the side of her coffin inhaling the sickly-sweet smell of lilies; his father and brother staring back at him from the front pew, a reminder that there was no choice: it would have to be the family business for him. In desperation, he found himself hopping from foot to foot outside Mrs O’Keefe’s. Their next-door neighbour was nervous and middle aged (although, with her tight perm and spectacles, she appeared old to Jim). She lived alone with her short-haired tabby, whose only entertainment was throwing himself against the glass of the kitchen window when people passed by. Keeping her nose out of other people’s business, Mrs O’Keefe thanked them for offering her the same courtesy, and most of the time they complied. A knock on her door in the evening would throw her completely off track, but Jim had had no choice. A crack opened up, the security chain straightening.

  “Yes?” she spat, a Cyclops smeared with lipstick the wrong shade of coral for her skin-tone. The tabby forced its head into the gap, the feline equivalent of a face-lift.

  “I’m Jim. Jean’s Jim.”

  “I know who you are! What do you want?”

  “I was wondering.” He had hoped to address the whole of her face. “Could you come and take a look at my mum?”

  “Your mum?” The eye narrowed to a slit.

  “She’s hasn’t got up for over two days.”

  “Think I’m some kind of witch doctor? What does your father say?”

  “Nothing: he’s gone.”

  The door was unbolted and, se
eing a rare opportunity for escape, the cat shot out. Its mistake was hesitating in front of Jim’s legs, undecided whether to dart to the left or the right. Before Mrs O’Keefe could cry out, Jim had scooped her up and deposited her safely in his neighbour’s arms, an initiative which created an impression. “Your brother fetched me the last time. It’ll pass. We just need to give her time.”

  She disappeared, emerging with a headscarf tied over her tight curls and a square green handbag, which she fished about in, withdrawing an impressive array of keys. “You can’t be too careful. Mind you, those who are out to cause trouble tend to take it away from their front doors. No, I don’t mean you! Not even your brother, although he turned out to be a loose cannon. It’s the changes round here I’m not comfortable with.” Jim had heard similar views before: it wasn’t only birds that were migrating. She wasn’t a racist. Credit where credit’s due, Mrs O’Keefe followed any reference to her Indian doctor with the words, “But he’s ever so thorough.”

  “Kitchen through here, is it? That’s the good thing about living on an estate. The flats are all the same.”

  Whether ‘good’ was an accurate description was debatable. Someone decides to have curry, you may as well all have curry. Someone decides to listen to Metallica, you all head-bang. Someone else has an argument, be grateful: it saves you the energy.

  Choosing not to follow, Jim tracked his neighbour’s movements by her persistent dry cough, which seemed to have no purpose other than to remind him of her presence.

  “Has she eaten?” Mrs O’Keefe called through to him in the living room.

  “No. I’ve tried everything.”

  He could hear her opening and closing cupboards, tutting. He thought he had better see what she was up to.

  “Soup,” she said, extracting a tin. “Where are your pans?”

  Jim complied.

  Mrs O’Keefe fussed as if she were entering Masterchef rather than heating a tin of Campbell’s. With minute adjustments, the bowl and spoon were laid out on the tray just so; the soup tested for temperature, ladled rather than poured. Jim thought of the extra washing up.