A Funeral for an Owl Read online

  “What? We’re cruising at an altitude of twenty-nine thousand feet.” Spoken through a clenched fist, her voice was distorted. “And… just one moment… I don’t believe it! Isn’t that a swan?”

  Jogging on the spot, Jim waited for a break in the traffic to cross the road dissecting the two ponds. Turning right at an iron-gated entrance in a red-brick wall, he ran over a stone bridge. Here, coots swam among mallards and gulls, their nests small islands of sticks. Batches of chicks, small balls of squeaking black fluff with red faces, struggled to keep up with Brylcreemed parents. Jim’s footfalls displaced the inevitable pigeons. They lifted and settled to purr and coo elsewhere, heads bobbing up and down to a strange rhythm.

  A grey heron stood in the shallows at the top of a small waterfall. Whilst mallards darted about, scooping up crusts thrown inaccurately overarm by an anorak-trussed toddler, he alone was watchful, knowing he only had to extend his neck and the food was his. No doubt it was a different heron, but this had been Aimee’s offering. She’d grabbed his arm, whispering, “He’s here!” Grinning, the gap in her front teeth was displayed. “You’re impressed, admit it.”

  They were close enough to see individual feathers, his grey crown topped with white, and the black on white of his mottled neck, the dark plumes of his chest spiky in the flow of water. Impressive but ugly, a misfit in the world of Sunday picnics and after-school trips to the swings. He was a loner: Jim’s kind of bird.

  “Swapsies.” She’d hugged herself. “My heron for your owl.” At the time, he hadn’t been aware that she considered a bargain had been struck. They never even shook on it.

  Jim now ran towards the small wooden bridge at the foot of the waterfall where he made his first stop, arms out straight, hands grasping the wooden rail. Looking down towards his trainers, he bent one knee and then the other, flexing his calf muscles. Aware of the throbbing of his cut foot, he tried to recall if his tetanus jab was up to date. Then, using the rail for support, Jim grabbed one foot behind him, stretching his quads. Sunlight bounced off the water, very much like that other day when they’d stood here, hands close together; Aimee’s small and white, a splash of pink at the centre of each chewed nail, the warmth of her skin radiating outwards. Embarrassed, he had walked his hands away from hers. As still as the heron and as watchful, she gave no hint of having noticed.

  “Alright, Jim.” Hearing a voice, threatening in its insincerity, he had turned his head, instantly on the defensive. “Is this your girlfriend?” Andy Naylor: an older boy from school. A swirl, elbows on the rail, Aimee had presented herself for inspection. A strand of her hair had attached itself to her cherry lip gloss.

  “Aren’t you going to introduce us?” Andy stood, hands in pockets, flanked by two foot soldiers.

  Jim assessed their choices: pushing past - which might have wound them up - or admitting defeat. “Come on.” He grabbed Aimee by the elbow, intending to lead her back the way they had come, but she shrugged him off, giving him a look that demanded, Are you embarrassed to be seen with me?

  He could only watch as she took the cigarette from Andy’s mouth, blew a ribbon of smoke and grazed his lips with her two fingers as she returned what she had borrowed. “Aimee White,” she said and walked on accompanied by a low whistle, swinging her hips, the slap-slapping of her yellow flip-flops - those same yellow flip-flops - like a lazy tide against a rock. She wasn’t exactly beautiful, but, beyond all that hair, you couldn’t ignore the intensity of her cat’s eyes, her limbs, lazy and yet graceful. It was then - only then - that Jim realised he had a chameleon on his hands.

  “Fuck awf!” She responded to the whistlers in BBC English.

  “Mate!” Andy recovered his voice. “That girlfriend of yours has bigger balls than you. You’re going to have to watch her.”

  Jim kept a steady pace, silently fuming. “What did I tell you?” he demanded when he caught up with Aimee by the children’s playground, where she was swinging on the squeaking gate. She had pulled her short cardigan tightly around her and, having subdued her vibrant colours, appeared newly fragile.

  “You don’t get to tell me!” He was close enough to smell the smoke on her breath. “I deal with worse than that every day of the week. Try being a girl for a change. You might start to think you don’t have so many problems after all!”

  At the time, of course, he’d thought she was being overdramatic.

  Of their own accord, Jim’s Adidas running shoes seemed to have decided on an unscheduled detour. Sprinting, ignoring any protest from his foot, they re-traced their steps: beyond the ponds; past his own front door; to the bridge. His legs a dynamo, they powered the film as it rewound, taking him all the way back to 1992: the beginning of the summer holidays. He ran down the concrete steps used by the men who worked on the railway lines, breathless, re-claiming the place where it had all begun. The place he had made his own - before Aimee White interrupted his peace with her constant questions and her quotation marks.

  CHAPTER 10: JIM - JULY 1992

  “How do I look?” Jean Stevens turned sideways in front of the mirror in the hall, frowning as if someone else’s reflection was staring back at her.

  Her nerves were contagious. “Nice,” he’d said, swallowing.

  “Sure?”

  The sight of her bare calves and ankles was so unusual to Jim that she’d looked as undressed as the women he watched through his lenses. “Sure sure.”

  “Your dad’ll be here soon. I’d better make a start on dinner. Now, remember what I said, love. It’ll take a while for us all to adjust.”

  From the moment his father declared, “You don’t know how good it is to be home!” squeezing a handful of Jean’s bottom, it took Frank an hour and ten minutes to ruin everything. Jim was surprised. He’d bet on half an hour

  “Honestly, the faces on the pair of you!” his father said, elbows on the table. He had failed to compliment his wife on the effort she had gone to, making his favourite toad-in-the-hole with onion gravy. “That story had them doubled over last week!”

  “Change the subject, Frank,” Jim’s mother said, her yellow card.

  If Frank Stevens hadn’t been his dad, or if he thought it wouldn’t upset his mother, Jim might have been tempted to laugh. But these weren’t the sort of things you should tell a young son.

  “Eh, Jim!” his father continued, barely pausing for breath. “Fergie’s got herself splashed all over the front page again. Apparently that American bloke of hers has this foot fetish.”

  “That’s enough, Frank!” Scraping back her chair, Jean whisked Jim’s plate away. Turning to protest, he saw his mother staring out of the window to the place where Richard Gere would come trotting along on his white charger to carry her off to the life she deserved. Dad’s in for it, he thought, quietly pleased.

  Reduced to eavesdropping, travelling between bedroom and bathroom, Jim paused at the sound of hushed voices.

  “I don’t know how much more of this I can take, Frank. I promised to stand by you for better or for worse. It’s just… well, I imagined them evening out.”

  “I’ve said I’ll try, Jean. What more can I say?”

  “I don’t want you to say anything: I want you to understand what it’s like for us. It’s like living in a… a game of snakes and ladders! Just when we’re getting somewhere, you land us on the long snake that takes us right back to the beginning.”

  It wasn’t the first time Jim had heard this comparison. The board lying on the table in front of them, his mother had been steaming ahead, making it all the way to eighty-six before she threw a one, landing on the blue snake. “Story of my life!” Jean had dissolved into her father’s shoulder. “It’s alright for you. You always land on the ladders.”

  Jim knew his mother wasn’t a bad loser. He was shocked to see her crying.

  “Go and find me another beer, will you, sunshine?” Granddad had said, a sure sign that something worth listening to was about to be said. “There’s no such thing as luck, Princess. I
t took hard graft to start our carpentry business, but we stuck with it. Then just when the books started to balance, your poor mother passed away. All I could think was how to make things alright for you. That’s what keeps you going.” Jim had spied on them through the door, watching his granddad kiss the top of his mother’s head. “Though why you had to marry that lugget, I’ll never understand.”

  Standing there, a beer in one hand, a Coke in the other, Jim had understood then that his father was the blue snake.

  Well, the snake was back, taking up Jim’s place on the sofa - the best place to watch owls - laughing like an idiot at the rubbish on telly. Even first thing the next morning he was there, trainers planted on the coffee table.

  “What?” His father’s index finger paused in the ring-pull of a can. “Haven’t you seen the ads? Guinness is good for you.” Ssssssss.

  Jim had as good as heard his mother tell Dad she didn’t feel that she should have to adjust. It was evident his father had no intention of changing. So that left Jim, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to be the only one making an effort. There was a place he’d been meaning to explore, ever since he had started watching the owls: the sides of the railway lines. Deserted by day, somewhere a boy could find a little privacy.

  “I’m off out,” he said, packed lunch in his bag.

  “Out where?” His father didn’t lift his eyes from the television screen.

  “Out out.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  And so they found ways to avoid each other, an adjustment of sorts.

  From his seated position, Jim saw a girl come running down the concrete steps. He felt immediately defensive. What business did she have being there? Wild-haired, she looked as if she might be a gypsy. She hesitated at the second set of warning signs, glancing back up to the bridge: an adrenaline junkie, gulping back breaths that told Jim her heart was thumping, each beat a blow that threatened to knock her off-balance. Feet restless, she twisted the cotton of her loose-fitting top into a ball as though she were wringing it out after the wash. There was an area of flatter ground near the steps before the banks became steeper; more comfortable for sitting on, but you ran the risk of being spotted from the bridge. Completing her calculation, she stomped through the tall grass and sharp machine-cut twigs, ignoring the small red flecks that appeared on the white skin of her feet and ankles.

  Her top still lifted, Jim’s attention was diverted to the smooth skin above her waist, the outline of her ribcage. She was tall for a girl - by that he meant taller than him, which not everyone would have considered an appropriate measure. Her leggings sagged at the knees, the way they get when they’ve been worn twice between washes. As she came nearer, Jim wondered if he shouldn’t speak up, but something made him hesitate.

  “Bastard!” the girl cried out, grabbing a fistful of hair near her scalp. Then she released a wail that Jim would have preferred not to have heard. The disturbance cleared the area of birdlife, then there were just the two of them and the constant hum of bushes alive with insects.

  Having thrown herself down on the bank, she made herself small, hugging her knees to her body. Her hair covered her face as she shuddered, rocking backwards and forwards, muttering something halfway between a mantra and a curse. To Jim, who knew next to nothing about girls, his second impression was that she seemed like a wounded animal. It’s not just cats who go and find a safe place to die: he had seen an old fox who had given up the fight and wanted to be alone, curled in on itself. Watched as the shakes set in.

  He did the only thing he knew how: reached for his notebook and sketched, starting with her neck, the lines of her pale limbs. His tongue traced the openings to previously unidentified caverns and grooves on the roof of his mouth. The shape of her small breasts. His pencil was in motion for over an hour while she cast her spell. His eyes lifted and fell. The curve of her behind. He smudged hard lines, softening edges; blew away the rubbings from his eraser. The narrowness of her almost-bare feet. Eventually, she stood. Eyes fixed on the tracks, her feet edged forwards, one small step at a time, a bather about to dip her toes.

  “I’d stop there if I were you!” he called out.

  She gave a start, her eyes darting, locating the place he was sitting, bag and books strewn about him. Directing all her fury at him, she railed, “How long have you been spying on me?”

  He still couldn’t get a good look at her face, partly covered by her frizzy hair. But her voice gave her away: no gypsy, she was from the other side of the tracks - the side with the big houses.

  “Well? I asked -”

  “Jesus, let us get a word in! I’ve been here since early morning, like I always am. I come to watch the birds.” He held his binoculars up by way of proof. She was hugging herself, shivering in the shadow cast by the banks. “Here, have a loan.”

  As he held up his faded denim jacket she frowned slightly, as if the idea of being cold hadn’t crossed her mind, and he saw that her eyes were pale amber, a colour you’d expect to see on a cat. There was a gap in her front teeth. When he knew her better, she would tell him that pushing her tongue into the gap helped her concentrate. He approached slowly, no sudden moves; draping the jacket around her shoulders; avoiding any contact with her skin. Then he retreated, going about his business as usual. When he dared to look at her again, she was sitting cross-legged and had slipped her arms into the sleeves. That was the last he’d see of that: there’d be explaining to do. Stomach rumbling, he waited for the girl to leave before opening his lunchbox. Half an hour passed. An hour. There was nothing else for it.

  “You hungry?” he called over.

  She shrugged, but it was more of a yes than a no, so he breached the few metres separating them, holding the box at arm’s length. “Cheese and pickle. It’s Jim, by the way.”

  She accepted his offering wordlessly, so he retreated to his original position. “You want to eat that before the B.F.Ps pick up the scent.”

  Jim did rifle impressions to shoo away the scattering of hopeful pigeons that descended, right on cue. She took a couple of timid bites from the edge and then larger and larger mouthfuls. Jim wondered if this was what it was like to be a creature awakening from hibernation.

  “What’s a B.F.P?” she asked unexpectedly.

  “Big Fat Pigeon. The only birds I’ve got no time for.”

  “That one there.” She nodded at a particularly obese specimen. “He must be a F.B.F.P.”

  Jim snorted air through his nose. It was a revelation that posh girls swore.

  “How old are you, Cheese-and-Pickle Jim?”

  “Twelve.” As lies go, it wasn’t a big one. He was trying the number on for size.

  “You’re the year below me. What school are you at?”

  “Stanley Park.”

  “My dad’s just announced I have to go to Wimbledon High.”

  “Right,” he said, wondering how this news concerned him.

  “It’s all girls, that’s his thinking. Boys are evil, don’t you know!” She hugged her knees, rocking back.

  “That’s us. Evil.”

  “I don’t belong anywhere at the moment. I don’t suppose you know how that feels?”

  “I do, as it happens.” Jim was an expert at not belonging. To fit in he would have had to be someone he didn’t want to be, so you could say he chose not to fit in. There was always a choice. Just didn’t feel like it half of the time.

  “You don’t say much, do you?” she asked after a while, swinging her feet around in his direction and crossing them at the ankles. With her hair tucked behind her ears, she displayed her face properly for the first time. Hers was the sort of skin with freckles that multiply and fill in the gaps, rather than tans.

  “I only talk when I’ve got something to say,” Jim shrugged. “No point otherwise.”

  “People spout far too many words,” she said. “It makes me feel like I want to… arrghh!… EXPLODE.”

  “Is that what you were doing earlier?” Jim asked, thinking it mig
ht explain her behaviour.

  The way she hung her head made him regret asking. “If you like,” she said, looking at her feet.

  They were silent for a while until Jim became aware that she was observing him from behind a curtain of hair. “What are you hiding from?” she asked, cradling her knees.

  He looked through the binoculars. “Like I said, I’m here to watch the birds.”

  “There’s got to be better places than this.”

  “For your information, railway sidings are some of the best places to see wildlife, now there’s so few hedgerows. They call this a ‘biological corridor’. It’s protected.”

  “No need to be sarcastic. Anyway,” she looked around at the litter that was so ordinary Jim could ignore it, “Whoever’s supposed to be protecting it isn’t doing a very good job. How do you know about this place?”

  “I live on the estate off Carshalton Road.” He pointed uphill. “We’ve got a great view. At night, I watch the owls out of the living room window. There’s a pair who nest here.”

  “I’ve never seen an owl.” She looked around her anew as if to say, Here? “That would really be something.”

  “I’m hiding from my dad,” he admitted.

  “What’s he done?”

  Tell a girl one thing and they want to know another. He should have known. Mum was the same.

  “Must be something,” she fished.

  “He’s not around much.” Jim winced. “But when he’s home, he wants to act like…”

  “Don’t tell me. Like everything’s normal.” There was no question mark. “I hate the bloody holidays.”

  Jim couldn’t help himself. He laughed.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “You. Swearing: ‘I hate the bloody holidays.’”

  “I don’t sound like that!” she squeaked.

  “If you say so.”

  “Do not!”

  Distracted by the call of a bullfinch, Jim raised his binoculars. “Hang about.”

  “Can I have a look?” she asked, thrusting out an expectant hand.

  Reluctantly, he passed her the binoculars. “Over there.” She followed the diagonal of his arm. “It’s a male bullfinch.”