Yesterday evening, something happened. And I don’t like things happening to me, it’s why I stay put, so that they don’t. But when I walked downstairs at eight minutes past eight for a glass of water, I saw a small yellow bird standing on top of a packet of Weetabix in the corner of the kitchen.
An instinct made me look behind me, as if someone might be standing there watching me watching the bird, but there was no one; Ann had forced Robert to the theatre, and they wouldn’t be back for hours. The bird took off again, and this time it flew across the room towards me, and I stepped back in alarm, then felt a wave of fury, as though the bird was mocking me for being afraid of it, and it was right, I was afraid. It flew onto the salad bowl in the middle of the kitchen table, and it scraped its beak against the green china edge, and then it lowered its yellow head in quick, jerky movements down into the bowl and took a bite from a lettuce leaf. Then it looked up at me with black eyes, and I heard a light buzzing in my ears, the sort that you have if you’re going under an anaesthetic or you’re about to faint, and I felt one of those Mexican waves of anxiety that started deep in my toes and swooshed up my body to the top of my head.
I walked around to the other side of the table so that if the bird took off again, it would fly back towards the window, and out again the way that it had come. But it didn’t. Even when I flapped my arms around a bit, and tried to wave it out, it wouldn’t leave. It couldn’t seem to fly great distances; it was as if it didn’t know what to do with all the space. It settled briefly on a tube of cling film on top of the fridge, and shook itself, seeming to take stock, like good old Dennis Rodman pulled out of a Pistons game, pausing for a moment to think.
I gulped into the room. There was a tightness inside me, a vertigo, like that time on the high ropes at Casey Finch’s sixth birthday party when I went up and up and up without Diana and looked down to see her crying on the ground below, and the earth had swum and sickened me.
I felt an urge to lie down in the middle of the kitchen floor with my eyes closed. I closed my eyes and strained to hear Bruno on the radio and the song coming from the stereo in my bedroom upstairs, but instead I could hear the noise of fluttering wings, primitive, frightening little wings, and I opened my eyes again. Then the bird made a sound, a chirp, if you will, and I drew in my breath and went still as still, because honest to God, it felt like a lion had roared…
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