Evie Wyld - All the Birds, Singing

‘Steady,’ he said, like I’d tripped over.

I thudded down the steps of the station and a light rain spat at my hot face.

‘Here’s an idea,’ he called as I climbed into my truck. ‘Bring some chops or a shoulder for the meat raffle — every Wednesday at the Blacksmith’s — that’ll win you friends!’

I was vaguely aware of him waving me off but I didn’t wave back.

It was early, but I could see a light on in the teahouse, and the owner’s car was in the drive. I banged on the door and squinted through my cupped hands against the window to see who was in there. The lady who ran it, who was not all bad, looked up at me and mouthed, We’re closed , but I stayed there, looking at her. She stared at me a while and seemed to give up, walked towards the door shaking her head. I stepped back to give her room to open the door.

‘We’re closed — we don’t open till eleven o’clock — the bus isn’t even running yet.’

The bus was a small yellow job that brought tourists from the smugglers’ caves up to the teahouse, which called itself a beauty spot. It looked out over the grey sea, in the other direction so that you couldn’t see the mainland. If you got there at the wrong time of day or in the summer, there’d be families and children squawking about, making fusses, telling each other off. When I came I always tried to be the first, so that the place was undisturbed, the tables not sticky, the air not filtered through the open mouths of bored fathers and children’s farts.

I didn’t move to say anything, just stood there. I needed it. Eventually the woman sighed and opened the door wider to let me in.

‘I can’t keep doing this you know,’ she said, and I wiped my boots on the mat before going in. ‘I’m not even set up — I was just doing the floors. Jacob’s not brung in the scones yet, so you’ll have to have yesterday’s.’ She didn’t wait for a reply, pointed to a table by the window and I sat. ‘And I haven’t laid the tables yet, so you’ll just have to wait.’ I didn’t say, Don’t worry about laying a table for me , because I wanted it laid. With the white paper tablecloth and the ugly doily to go under the plate and under the coffee pot. I wanted the array of cutlery the woman always put out, as though you might eat a scone with a knife, fork and spoon. Three different spoons, one for coffee and one for jam and one for cream. Tongs in the lidded sugar bowl. A white cup for the coffee that had already had hot water in to keep it warm. All of that and the view of the grey sea and nothing beyond it.

The woman was kind even when she was angry. She cleaned away my footprints on her way back to the kitchen, and came out and laid the table while I leant back so she could arrange things. She disappeared and when she came back she’d tied a lacy white apron around her middle, and had maybe put on a touch of lipstick. But she didn’t take my order, because she knew already what I wanted. When I’d first arrived on the island, I’d embarrassed myself by asking her for a Devon cream tea.

‘I’m afraid an island one will have to do,’ she had said.

The scone was stale, even though she’d warmed it to try and soften it up. It made no difference. I painted on the cream with one spoon, the jam with another and looked out to sea as I crammed it in my mouth. I didn’t like cream but it was okay if you drank strong coffee with it. I warmed my hands around the coffee cup and looked at the empty chair opposite me like it might speak. It didn’t.

As we came up the path to the front door, Dog pricked up his ears, and his shoulders thickened. I licked my lips and pictured my gun upstairs, leaning in the cupboard. I tried to open the door quietly, but Dog shot through, his toenails clicking along the stone in the kitchen and up the stairs. I thought I’d left a good thick walking stick by the front door, but it wasn’t there any more. There was a stink like something that had been squirted out of an animal. Dog, out of sight, barked and snapped and I pulled a pan off the side and went up after him, holding it high over my head.

From the landing by my bedroom came a bang. The banisters shook as I pounded up the stairs. On the landing Dog danced around a large pigeon, its wing bent at an angle that was wrong, a string of blood over its back.

‘Dog!’ I shouted and he looked at me, the fury gone, his tail wagging and a feather hanging off his lip. I dropped my arms and breathed out, leant for a moment on the banister. Dog’s tongue lolled out and I caught hold of the fur at the back of his neck before he went for it again.

‘Okay, bird,’ I said. ‘Okay.’ And it looked at me. I could see its heart moving in its chest, and all there was to do was to go towards it and pick it up. It let me get at it around the middle, carefully avoiding the mashed wing. Its heart buzzed but it was still in my hands. Dog whined.

‘Dog,’ I said, ‘no.’ And he sat down, then stood up again.

One of the pigeon’s legs bicycled out, and there was a ring around the foot. I held the bird to my chest with one hand and unravelled the ring with the other. Just a phone number, which was good — I wouldn’t have to make the decision about whether or not to wring its neck.

‘Get me the phone,’ I told Dog.

We all three went to the phone together and I dialled the number.

The man who picked up didn’t say hello, he said, ‘Esler.’

‘I have a pigeon with your phone number on,’ I said.

The man was silent.

‘He’s hurt his wing.’

‘Is it dead?’ he said.

‘No, just hurt. The wing.’

The man sighed. ‘Pop her in a shoebox, keep her warm and watered. If she makes it through the night she’ll tell you when she’s well enough to fly home.’

He hung up.

‘Dickhead,’ I said to the pigeon. Any shoes I bought came in a plastic bag. I took another look at the bird, saw that its bottom eyelid had closed and its head was slack on its neck, and that talking to the man on the phone, I’d squeezed it too hard and now it was dead.

I took the pigeon, wrapped in newspaper like a fish supper, down to the shore. Dog pranced next to me with a light in his eyes that meant killing, and I tried to keep the atmosphere mellow and not like the disposal of a tame bird that I’d murdered. It was not a beautiful beach for a burial at sea. A skin of seaweed had washed up on the rocks and jumped with sea lice. Black rocks rose all around it so that if you didn’t know your path back up, you could feel trapped. There was no accounting for the places the English took their children — in the early days I came across a young family in mud up to their thighs, crashing around by the hawthorn stile, lost in the dark with a toddler swaddled onto each of their backs. The woman with tear-streaks down her face and the man white and grateful for the lift back to their bed and breakfast. ‘Not a good place to get lost,’ I’d enjoyed telling them on the drive; ‘you were just a few yards from a pretty sheer cliff-face.’ Which was half true.

My first summer on the island, I’d cooked my tea on the beach, drunk beer wrapped in a blanket, listening to the waves break, watching the lights come on over on the mainland, while my eyes got used to the black sea with the moon tripping off it at the horizon. I had it in my head to do it the next summer, but the breaks between rain got smaller and sometimes there was a smell on the beach around dusk, something between burnt rubber and silage.

Dog ate a dead crab. I heard it being broken apart, turning to dust. A drizzle started and gave a silver fringe to his fur. He finished his crab and saw something in the dry grasses on the bank and pricked his ears. He moved up the slope, his legs bent at the knees, and disappeared over a dune, the back-kick of his leg picking up speed. While he was occupied, and so that he wouldn’t chase the bird out into the water and crunch her up too, I waded out a little way in my gumboots, which, it turned out, had a hole in each of them small enough to be invisible to the naked eye but large enough to let in frozen water, which chafed at my heels and then crept up my socks. I rolled the bird out of the newspaper and let her float into the sea. She tried to come back in a few times, but eventually after some encouragement she floated past the small breakers, her chest white and dry and her broken wing pointing upwards as she went further and further out and then sank, like the sea had swallowed her. I hummed the song from Titanic .