Nicky Singer - Feather Boy

Their hush seems to fall on us as we enter the room. A disconsolate, decrepit hush. And all of a sudden the ten of us are trying to huddle behind Catherine as though we’re embarrassed for being so full of life. Some of the residents peer at us, others ignore us, or maybe they just don’t see us. Niker shifts from foot to foot. I concentrate on the floor. The carpet is gold and swirly. If Miss Raynham were here she’d take charge, but Miss Raynham is not here. As we wait – and wait – for Catherine to do something, a wheelchair suddenly shrieks: “I think I’m in the wrong place!”

“Join the club,” says Niker.

“Now, now,” says Matron. “Mavis.”

Mavis is a chicken in a dress. At once bony and fleshy, her plucked yellow skin springs with coarse hair. At some stage her neck must have been chopped out and her head stuck straight back on to her shoulders.

“What’s going on?” she asks.

“It’s The Project,” says Matron, enunciating loudly and clearly as though talking to a foreigner or an imbecile, “with the children.”

“Oh,” says Mavis. “When’s tea?”

“Hello,” says Catherine, finally arriving at the television set, the room’s focal point. Then she adds, in her rather faltering way, “I’m Catherine.”

“Two of my family died in this place,” says Mavis.

“No, they didn’t,” says Matron briskly. “Now children, why don’t you all sit down?”

Gratefully we sit. The residents shuffle and cough and peer.

“Hello,” says a relatively normal and fit-looking man, leaning down towards me. “Who’s this then?”

“Robert,” I whisper.

“Oh aye,” he says. “What yer doing here, Robert?”

Catherine begins to explain. Because she’s standing and we’re all sitting, she’s just about big enough to command attention. She talks briefly about the project and then suggests we work in pairs.

“Just space yourselves out a bit,” she tells the class, “that’s right, into a ring. Now, introduce yourself to whoever you’re closest to. That person will be your main partner. Though, of course, we’ll all be sharing ideas later on.”

As chance would have it, I’m still closest to Mr Relatively Normal. Niker, however, is sitting at Mavis’s feet.

“I’m Robert,” I repeat quickly, to establish my claim.

“So yer said,” he replies. “I’m Albert. Robert and Albert. Bert and Bert. Do they call you Bert?”

“No.”

“Oh aye,” Albert says.

There’s a pause and then he says, “I were a ladies’ man. Once.” And he sighs. The sigh is sad and resigned but it’s only a moment before he leans down and smiles at me. “Eh up, lad.”

There’s something tender in his look, not a tenderness for me of course, just something misty about his past, and in that moment I indulge a few warm thoughts of my own about my grandfather, Grandpa Cutting, who used to call me “lad” and take me boating before he died of a heart attack hanging a garage door. And I’m just thinking maybe Albert will be all right and perhaps the Nobel luck is going to change when a voice chisels through the room:

“I don’t want this one.”

Everyone turns to the speaker. She is tall (even seated), white-haired, ram-rod-backed and her perfectly still right index finger is pointing down at Kate.

“Well,” flusters Liz Finch, the student teacher who, up until this point, might have been a sheet of wallpaper, “perhaps you’d like to swop with Kate, Lucy. Lucy?”

Lucy isn’t moving.

“Lucy?”

“No,” says Ram-Rod. “I don’t want a girl.” The index finger lifts, it moves. “I want a boy. In fact,” the finger stops mid-swing, “I want him.” She’s pointing at me.

Now, you know those team games where there are two captains and they each pick someone to be on their side, turn after turn, until there’s only one person left? And no matter whether there are ten or twenty players that last person is always the same? The one who is never chosen, whatever the game? Well, that person’s me.

“Robert, isn’t it?” says Catherine.

And all the times I’ve prayed, I’ve pleaded, I’ve begged to be chosen and God’s ignored me? And now—

“Norbert,” says Niker. “She wants Norbert!”

Niker’s jeering does not deter Ram-Rod. She beckons me and I just know I’m going to have to go.

“Norbert,” repeats Albert, meditatively.

Kate is already halfway across the room. I stand up.

“Sorry,” I say as we pass like a substituted football players at the edge of the pitch.

“You’re joking,” she says.

A moment later I’m face to face with Ram-Rod. Close to, she looks surprisingly frail. Her body so thin and bloodless, she must, I think, be sitting upright by force of will alone.

“I’m Robert,” I say, extending a polite hand.

“Edith,” she replies, ignoring the hand. “Edith Sorrel.”

My arm drops uselessly and me with it. I’m back on the floor.

Then, like the cavalry, the tea trolley arrives. It comes with clink and clatter and shout and “Thank God” from Albert. Catherine, obviously taken aback that tea can be so early, suggests we all use the time to get “better acquainted”. We know what this means because Liz Finch briefed us on the bus.

“Remember your Elder may be deaf,” she said. “Just ask short, simple questions. Do you have children? Grandchildren? A husband/wife? What job did you use to do? And speak up.”

“Do you have children?” I ask Edith Sorrel.

“No.”

I pause, leave a gap. This the art of conversation, you know. You say something. They say something. You say something.

Edith says nothing.

“A husband?” I enquire hopefully.

“No.”

Another pause. Longer this time. I watch the trolley coming, so very slowly round towards us.

“Looking forward to tea?”

“No.”

The trolley passes us. The staff obviously know that Edith does not take tea, she does not take biscuits. The biscuits are those oblong ones which say “Nice” on them and are covered in sugar. I watch them go Weasel’s way.

“Did you have a job?”

Behind me I can hear Kate’s Albert. He had a job. He worked “in sawmills” and then “on the building”, he got paid sixpence a day.

“How much is sixpence?” asks Kate.

“Eh?” says Albert.

“Sixpence – how much was it worth?”

“Three loaves of bread, that’s what sixpence were.”

“No,” says Edith Sorrel. “I did not have a job. Young women were not encouraged to have jobs.”

And then I think she’s not really trying and it’s not fair and anyhow I’m cross about the biscuits, so I say: “Any special reason why you didn’t want a girl?”

“No.”

“OK. Any special reason for wanting me?”

She stares at me. Under her gaze, I feel quite transparent. As though she’s looking straight through me and out the other side.

“I mean me,” I persist, “me rather than any other boy?”

“No,” says Edith Sorrel.

“Well,” says Catherine, as the tea trolley finally beats a retreat, “I’d like to tell you all a story.”

“Oh aye,” says Albert.

Edith Sorrel clasps her hands in her lap. And I have this weird sensation that she’s holding herself, trying to comfort herself.

“It’s about a silent prince and the young woman who wants to free him from the curse that has rendered him mute. The Prince’s mother and father, the King and Queen, have promised the riches of their kingdom to anyone who can make the young man speak. But for those who try and fail, the penalty is to be instant death.”

“Is it Neighbours? ” asks Mavis.

“You daft brush,” says Albert.

“Well, the young woman knew it would take more than skill or cunning or luck to make the Prince speak, for many had gone before her and as many had lost their lives. So the young woman took herself into the forest where her grandparents lived. And as they sat around the cottage after supper, she told them of her plan.