The Bower Bird Page 11

  At the landing slipway of St Agnes the handsome boatman jumps off and makes fast the ropes. We disembark and head for the Turk’s Head, which is very close, and I only have to stop a few times. Brett waits for me while his parents go ahead. When we get there, they have mugs of hot chocolate waiting for us and we sit in sunshine on picnic benches overlooking a rocky little beach. It’s so quiet. No cars.

  We all eat pasties and I tell Brett’s mum the recipe I got from the old man in the fisherman’s lodge. Hayley says they are bit like mutton pies, a popular Australian dish. Alistair is going off with other birders to the other end of the island.

  We are about to leave the pub when Brett points out a young herring gull struggling in shallow water. It seems to have become entangled in a child’s crab line; orange nylon wrapped around its head, the square reel dragging in the water. It’s in real trouble.

  ‘I’ll go and help it,’ I say, but Hayley forbids me to step in the water.

  ‘No way are you going in there. It’s freezing, Guss,’ she says, ‘Your mother would never forgive me if you caught a chill.’

  Brett and his dad walk down the slipway, take off their flip flops and paddle out to the bird, which struggles to fly off but cannot. Brett takes off his T-shirt and throws it over the gull’s head to quieten it and to stop it stabbing them, but it attempts to escape and somehow Brett ends up completely immersed in water. They eventually cut it free with a penknife and unwrap the string from the bird’s neck. It flies off spraying water over the already soaked pair of rescuers. A loud hurray and applause from me, Hayley, and the other customers of the Turk’s Head. My hero! My sodden hero. Luckily he’s wearing those quick drying shorts like surfers wear.

  We walk along a little path and cross the sand-spit, the Bar, to the isle of Gugh, pronounced Gew, where there are two strange, Dutch-looking houses with wavy roofs, and a shipwrecked fishing boat, rusty, high and dry.

  Long strings of khaki weed are wrapped around pink boulders, like badly tied parcels. On the tide line I look for little yellow periwinkle shells and their brother brown shells. I find a lost fishing lure: a staring blue eye, very real looking, with a hairy tail, fish hook hidden. I’m glad I didn’t stand on it. I spot bright blue strands of cord a bower bird would die for. The sand is pimpled with limpet shells. There’s no sound except little waves swishing and dragging at the sand. Oystercatchers and a stately grey heron silently fish the rock pools.

  We gather together our discovered treasures – a piece of driftwood shaped a little bit like the hull of a boat, a blue polythene bag, orange string, a little square of wave-worn wood, and Brett and his dad build a little sailing boat with the blue eye as figurehead. They even make a keel, filling the polythene bag with water to weigh it down. It’s ace.

  We try it out in a rock pool to make sure it doesn’t sink and then Brett and I launch it properly into the sea.

  ‘I name this ship the Valiant Augusta. God bless her and all who sail in her.’ He pushes the fragile craft into the gentle waves and we watch as she bobs in the shallows.

  We walk by an inland pool where a heron stands on a grassy islet, his neck and shoulders hunched like our young herring gull. Do birds get bored I wonder?

  The cropped grass we tread is not grass at all, but chamomile, and smells like herbal tea, but fresher. On the white sand beach are bands of pink boulders and blackened dead stalks of seaweed dragged by the sea from the deep. At the edge of the beach marram grass curls like waves over low stone hedges. There’s no time to see all the island and anyway I’m tired. I sit down and rest after every twenty metres or so. Brett stops too, and we look through our binoculars at the oystercatchers and sea birds. We spot curlew, sandpiper and dunlin, their little legs moving so fast they look like clockwork toys. Turnstones are busy searching for sand hoppers on the strand line. No puffins. They breed in burrows on the small islands of Scilly Rock and Men-a-vaur off St Agnes between spring and July. I know this because I bought a book on the Scillies birds.

  Brett’s mum and dad are walking along together holding hands. If only that was my mum and daddy.

  Brett and I lie back, our rucksacks sheltering us from the cool breeze, the sun on our heads.

  I could stay here forever. I could die right now, I’m so happy.

  We get the last boat back to St Mary’s in the fading purple light, the stars appearing one by one, and Brett points them out to me and tells me their names, which I immediately forget, and as we land at the pier Brett goes first onto the granite steps and reaches out his hand to me to help me. I take it and smile at him and in the lamplight I see his curly smile and I am no longer shipwrecked, I am flying, soaring in a warm blue clear sky.

  Hayley and I are sharing a room and Brett and his dad are sharing another. She’s so thoughtful. Lets me use the bathroom first and fills my hot water bottle from the kettle and puts it in my bed. I like it really hot. She’s reading Middlemarch and is surprised when I tell her I’ve read it.

  She asks if we did it at school and when I say no, she says, ‘You’re very well read for a girl your age.’

  ‘I’ve missed lots of school, so I read a lot.’

  ‘You’re an autodidact.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘Self-taught. It means self-taught.’

  I go scarlet – well, violet probably, as the red blush would mix with the blue. It never occurred to me that there were people who taught themselves. I thought you had to have teachers.

  It’s Sunday and we’re off to visit Tresco on another boat. The sea’s choppier today but it’s only a short trip, shorter than to St Agnes. The boatman is called Frazer and he’s lived on Scilly all his life. There’s one pub, the New Inn, just around the corner from where we land, and all the boat’s passengers seem to be heading there past granite cottages with little front gardens full of strange exotic plants, monster Aloes and Agaves, with hand painted signs at the gates – LOBSTERS FOR SALE or FRESH CRABMEAT. Huge juicy aeoniums grow from cracks in the stone hedges while strange leafless belladonna lilies (Naked Ladies, they call them here), with pink stems and bright pink flowers, grow from the base.

  A sleek black cat runs along the sandy path in front of us and leads us to the pub garden, where he climbs up into a palm tree and stares down at us.

  My hot prawn baguette is perfect. A thrush lands on the table and I feed him crumbs. Immediately, sparrows surround me and I have to feed them too.

  We explore Tresco Abbey garden, where bumblebees heavy with nectar tumble drunkenly from towering echium, perfect blue tower-block cities for white butterflies and honey bees to gather nectar. Huge heads of pink king protea are feeding grounds for peacock butterflies, who fold and unfold their wings in an ecstasy of sweetness. It is surely the Garden of Eden. Hayley’s into flowers and plants. She knows all the Latin names.

  There’s even a place where old ships’ figureheads are displayed: Valhalla, it’s called, and Brett’s dad takes loads of photographs. I haven’t brought my camera as it is too heavy to cart around all over the place.

  I buy postcards at the shop to remind me of the islands, but I won’t ever forget, anyway.

  It’s a shame Mum isn’t here; she’d love it.

  Brett and I wander off across the helicopter landing-pad (it doesn’t come on Sundays), stop to watch three Brent Geese bending their strong necks to the grass, then find ourselves in a field of silver logs. Parasol mushrooms are growing here. They are exactly like the name; the young ones like closed parasols and the open ones like open parasols. Fairies should be sitting on them. (I keep quiet about fairies; he’ll think it a bit girlie.) They are supposed to be delicious, Parasol mushrooms, not fairies, but we don’t pick them as we’re eating at the New Inn before we catch the boat back to St Mary’s.

  The field is tussocky with heather and moss and the smells of herbs and honeysuckle.

  We lean out of the wind against a silver log, its bark peeled off and curled up like a shed snake skin, bees buzzing and butterflies flicker
ing their pretty wings around us, when suddenly there’s a terrific whirring whistling, and three swans fly low, close above us, heading for the lake next to the gardens.

  ‘Did you know the Queen owns all the swans in England?’

  ‘She doesn’t, does she?’

  It makes me feel good to be able to tell him something he doesn’t know about birds.

  I tell Brett about my desert island fantasy and he agrees this place would be ideal. He’s read Swiss Family Robinson and we agree that it’s a ridiculous story. The shipwrecked family happen to have been on a ship equipped with everything to build a new settlement. So there are no obstacles for them; they have everything they could possibly want. Also, the father is totally pompous and self important and can build anything, including a bridge. If I had been his wife or daughter I would have wanted to strangle him.

  Brett’s been to islands in the Great Barrier Reef including Heron Island, which is very hot and humid and stinks of guana, that’s bird shit, because of the thousands of Sooty Terns nesting in every bush and tree. You can look right into the nests and watch the young. You have to look out for muttonbirds as they are quite likely to fly bang into you in the dark as they aren’t any good at landing. They nest in burrows in the sand.

  ‘Oh, it sounds wonderful,’ I say, but he says there are sharks and box jellyfish and other mortal dangers and he prefers it here.

  I tell him about Kenya and my winters there when I was little: vervet monkeys on the roof, the giant butterflies and snorkelling. Then somehow I begin to tell Brett about my quest, the search for my roots, my Cornish family history. He can’t understand why Mum is against it. He’s dead impressed about my great-grandfather being a famous photographer.

  I also tell him what the men in the lodge said about my Grandfather Stevens.

  ‘Shall I tell Mum?’

  ‘What’s there to lose, Guss? She won’t bite you.’

  ‘Yeah, but she really doesn’t want to know. I feel as if I am being… I don’t know… disloyal to her.’

  ‘Crap. I’ll get Ma to have a talk with her.’

  ‘No! Thanks, no. I’ll sort it.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Yes, I’ll talk to her.’

  ‘No worries,’ he says and smiles curlily. Is there such a word? There should be.

  In my mind I transform Grandad Stevens into a pirate with a black eye patch – skulduggery sounds so much more exciting and adventurous than fraud, which is only a posh word for theft and lying.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  WE HAVE TO wait for a couple of hours at St Mary’s airport as fog cover at Penzance delays flights, so we have bacon rolls and hot drinks at the café.

  At the next table there’s a family with three children. The children are dressed in school uniform, even the little boy, who is about four – who wears grey shorts, white shirt, red and white striped tie. He looks so cute. He’s carrying a toy monkey, floppy and brown and wearing checked pyjamas. I ask him if he takes Monkey to school. He nods. His mum says, ‘Oh yes, last year Monkey got a report, his attendance was so good.’

  A group of excited schoolchildren from the Scillies are heading off to Plymouth to see a production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat.

  I buy two bags of Scillies’ narcissus bulbs, Paper Whites, for Mum and for Hayley as a thank you present.

  We don’t see much on the journey home as there’s low cloud all the way, but I sit next to Brett this time, so I don’t care about what’s outside the window.

  Mum meets us at Penzance heliport and I say a reluctant goodbye to Brett’s family. Hayley gives me a kiss and a hug, as does Brett’s dad, and Brett sweeps a hand across my cricket cap, knocking it sideways. We do a high five. It’s so romantic, I almost cry.

  Oh yes, Alistair was on our helicopter too of course, wearing yet another colourful tie, and greets Mum rather enthusiastically. She looks pleased, if inappropriately dressed in a short skirt, and her face is over decorated, in my opinion.

  Mum and I drive home in steady rain on the back road through Gulval, and on the sharp bend in the middle of the road is a male peacock, trailing its heavy tail on the wet tarmac. It’s not a pheasant; it’s definitely a peacock. It must live in one of the gardens here.

  ‘Do you remember when you were little and you called them Poppycocks?’

  ‘I didn’t.’

  ‘Yes you did, the first time you saw one you said “Look at the pretty poppycock”.

  ‘Where did I get that word from?’

  ‘Don’t ask me, you’ve always been a strange child.’

  I giggle at the idea of a peacock being a poppycock.

  ‘I missed you,’ she says.

  ‘What did you do?’ I ask.

  ‘Well, believe it or not, I’ve started at a life class. I’m drawing again.’

  Mum used to be a designer with a big design company in London before I was born. Afterwards there was no time for her to do anything except look after me, though she did the odd freelance job occasionally.

  ‘And Arnold has finished the decorating.’

  We drive through the little lanes, leaves flying off the low bent trees; it really feels like autumn. There’s a school with children in the playground, skipping and playing games.

  ‘Mum, when can I go back to school?’

  ‘Oh Gussie, I don’t think it’s very wise to go back just yet. You have been quite ill, remember, and you’ll only get a chest infection mixing with all those people and their colds, and you know what will happen if you do.’

  ‘But Mum, I’m missing so much.’

  ‘I know darling, I’m sorry. I have been thinking about it.’

  There is a silence.

  ‘How would you feel about a tutor coming to the house?’

  ‘A tutor?’ It sounds so nineteenth century, so archaic.

  ‘Maybe.’

  Mum says she had a disturbed but exciting night. She was woken at three by the sound of a growling cat. All our cats were inside pretending to be asleep. She was just in time to see a cat’s ginger tail disappearing through the cat- flap. She grabbed it and it yowled and shot outside to where a large fluffy tabby waited and there was a great kafuffle and Mum managed to throw a kettle of cold water over them both before they ran off. She didn’t go to sleep after that.

  Charlie is ecstatic to see me, like a dog, not resentful at all; she lets me carry her around while I tell her how beautiful she is. (Cats really love the word ‘beautiful’. They become hypnotised by the sound of the word.) Rambo hides under the table swishing his tail and Flo is out hunting.

  I discover a pocket full of little yellow and red-brown periwinkle shells. I have carried home my found treasures, a memento of Paradise. I’ll decorate my bower for my prospective mate. Perhaps I should learn how to sing too.

  I give Mum her presents – the Paper Whites bulbs and a bar of chocolate that says on the label THANK YOU FOR LOOKING AFTER MY CAT that I bought in Tresco Abbey shop. I put the shells in a clear glass bowl with water in to bring the colour alive.

  The young gull on the roof is still looking pissed off, so’s his mum. He’s like a lazy teenager who won’t get off the sofa and go outside for exercise. A couch potato, grumpy, peevish, sulky. His dad has dark rings around his eyes – that’s what it looks like, and his head is covered in brown-grey freckles. I think all adult herring gulls change their plumage slightly in the winter. His mouth turns down at the corners, which makes him look cross. Actually, they all look cross.

  I tell Mum all about the lovely islands and how kind Hayley is and how it was okay sharing a room with her, and all about the rescued herring gull, and the boat rides and Tresco Abbey garden.

  ‘Oh, if I’d known about the garden I might have come.’

  ‘You’d love it, Mum.’

  That night I think about the marvellous weekend and I feel so alive. Being alive is a bit like speed-reading. I have to experience everything, pack it in while there is still time.

&
nbsp; The Poem for the Day today is ‘The Embankment’ (The Fantasia of a Fallen Gentleman on a Cold, Bitter Night) by TE Hulme.

  Once, in a finesse of fiddles found I ecstasy,

  In a flash of gold heels on the hard pavement.

  Now see I

  That warmth’s the very stuff of poesy.

  Oh, God, make small

  The old star-eaten blanket of the sky,

  That I may fold it around me and in comfort lie.

  I know exactly what he means. Being cold is the worst thing. My hands and feet go completely blue and numb if I get slightly chilled and I need a hot water bottle even in summer. ‘He was killed in World War I, serving with the Royal Marine Artillery. He was expelled from St John’s College, Cambridge, possibly for brawling (he is said to have carried a knuckle-duster around with him).’ A poet with knuckle-dusters – strewth!

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  NOTE: MY NEW word for today is eviscerate: to tear out the viscera or bowels of: to gut. n. evisceration – from viscera, the bowels. That’s an easy word for me to use straight away. It’s exactly what I want to do to SSS, eviscerate her, preferably through the hole in her navel.

  Arnold is installing a bidet in the bathroom. Mum has a real thing about being clean and says a bidet is a necessity not a luxury. She says when you think about it most English people must walk around with less than clean bums. What a dreadful thought. Also, if you don’t wash your bum before you get in the bath you are floating in your own filth. Yuk. And if you only have a shower how do you get at your privates or the underneath of your feet? It’s different for boys of course. They are lucky, except for their feet.

  I want to talk to Mum, but Arnold is having a cup of tea with her. I’ll wait until he’s gone.