Chapter Thirty-Nine
THIRTY-NINE
It’s funny what the body remembers, long after the brain has forgotten. The smell of the sea, the sound of a squelch.
“WATCH OUT!” Ali called, one second after Joar stepped in the dog shit.
“Aaarrrggghhh,” Joar roared.
“There’s dog shit there,” Ali informed him helpfully.
Joar responded by jumping around on one leg and trying to wipe it off on her, then on Ted and the artist, as they squealed with terror and laughter. They were halfway through July at the time, those hours every year when you suddenly wonder where all the others have gone, like you’ve been mugged. The middle of summer vacation is a quite specific sort of sadness.
“What’s that?” the artist suddenly asked, and they all stopped laughing.
That was the day they found the dead bird. It was the beginning of the end of summer.
It had been raining for several days, but that day had given them a brief window of sunshine. They had run to the pier that morning, competing to see who could strip down to their underwear fastest and throw themselves straight out into the sky. Afterward they had dried off in the sun, eating cookies Ted had brought with him from home and drinking Coca-Cola Joar had stolen.
“It always smells so good after it’s rained during the night,” Ali had said.
“Petrichor,” Ted had replied.
“What?” three gawping mouths had replied at the same time.
He had evaded their gazes, always shy about explaining something, worried about seeming patronizing.
“Petrichor. That’s what it’s called. The smell of rain. People usually say it’s the soil that smells, but it’s actually most evident near pavement and rocks.”
“And on a pier, maybe?” Ali had said, patting the pier as if it were a big, living friend.
“How the hell do you know stuff like that?” Joar had wondered.
“I read it in a comic. It said that people can smell rain more clearly than a shark can detect the smell of blood,” Ted had replied.
“You ought to be a teacher,” Ali had suggested.
“Yes, you should,” the artist had agreed.
And perhaps that was enough for that to be what happened.
“Why the hell would sharks need to smell rain?” Joar had muttered.
Then they had all laughed, first at him, then with him.
“Did you watch TV last night? The show about that millionaire who lost all her money?” Ali had asked.
“Yes, serves her right,” Joar had snorted.
“Don’t say that, I felt sorry for her,” Ali said.
“Why? Why feel sorry for her for that, almost all people are fucking poor!”
“Yes, but we’ve been poor all our lives. She’s only just started.”
They had argued about that for quite some time, as usual. That was how you knew that Joar and Ali had boundless imaginations, because otherwise two people who loved each other so much could never have found so much to fight about.
“So how are we going to get enough money for the paints and brushes and canvas and everything for the painting?” Ted had asked.
“There’s no need…,” the artist had mumbled quickly. “We can just forget about the competition.”
But he could forget that, of course.
“Maybe we could hire Ali out as a singer? People could send her to someone they hate!” Joar had suggested.
“Maybe we could sell one of your two brain cells, Joar?” Ali had shouted back, getting to her feet to fetch some stones to throw in the water, one of her favorite pastimes, apart from throwing them at Joar.
“Maybe we could sell your face to someone who wants to dress up as an ASS!” he had answered.
She had sighed disappointedly.
“What are you even talking about? Is that your best insult?”
Joar had blushed.
“Maybe it isn’t so easy for you to understand an insult, because you’re an ASS!”
They had carried on like that all day. You can have worse days when you’re fourteen, far worse. The artist had lain on his back with the sea in his nostrils and his friends’ voices in his ears, and it was that feeling that he would paint the sky with, eventually. Heaven is a summer.
And then, on the way home, they heard a squelch. That was when Joar stepped in the dog shit. When he tried to wipe it off on Ted, Ali teased:
“Ted isn’t scared because it’s shit, he’s scared because it’s DOG shit!”
“No I’m not!” Ted protested.
A little more than a week had passed since his dad’s funeral, when he discovered he needed glasses after being chased by a trash bag. Every evening he had gone home to a dark house, walking quietly through echoing rooms and collecting empty beer cans. Every morning his friends had teased him relentlessly to stop him drowning in the silence, because they didn’t know what else to do.
Ali pretended to be very serious.
“Perhaps it’s human shit, Ted? Does that make you feel better?”
“No!”
Joar roared:
“ Urgh ! What if it is human shit!”
Then he took his shoe off and scraped it against the edge of the sidewalk. Which only resulted in him getting a tiny bit of shit on his finger, which made him look very much like he wanted to scrape his whole hand off. Ali laughed at that, but unfortunately with her mouth full of cookies, so the crumbs hit Ted’s face like a sprinkler. He looked so disgusted that even the artist giggled:
“Oh no, crumbs in the face, Ted would probably rather have gotten dog shit on his pants!”
They laughed so much that Ali accidentally pushed Joar into a large bush. He disappeared, then jumped up again at once like a stripper out of a birthday cake. That was when the artist caught sight of something.
“What’s that?” he asked.
Deeper in the bush lay a bird, tangled in a net.
“Is it breathing? Lay it on its side! Should we give it mouth-to-mouth?” Ali said in a confused torrent, because she was good at a lot of things, but not much good at anything when she was stressed.
“You shouldn’t give it mouth-to-mouth with that breath, anyway…,” Joar grunted, moving his head away from hers.
“It’s the cookies…,” Ali muttered, putting her hand over her mouth.
Ted reached forward to pick up the bird, but Joar quickly knocked his hand away.
“You mustn’t touch birds! Their mothers won’t take them back then!”
Ted leaned closer to the bird and said tentatively:
“This bird looks like it’s old enough to be retired. It probably doesn’t have a mother.”
The artist leaned forward too and added quietly:
“Besides, it’s dead.”
Joar stuck his head into the bush and conceded:
“Okay. Maybe it does look a bit gray around the feathers.”
“And dead!” Ali pointed out.
Joar gently freed it from the net. The artist dug a small hole in the ground and they buried it there. Joar thought they ought to say something, and then everyone looked at Ted, because he was the one who was responsible for words. So Ted repeated, as well as he could remember them, the words the minister had said at his dad’s funeral:
“There is a time for everything. A time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot. A time to weep and a time to laugh. A time to mourn. A time to dance.”
When he fell silent, Joar wiped his eyes and Ali did a few sad little dance steps. The artist covered the grave with soil. Only then did they hear a peeping sound from the bush, and that was how they found the second bird, the one that was still alive.
It was caught in the net, emaciated and abandoned. The friends hesitated just a moment.
“You do it…,” Ali whispered to the artist, seeing as he was the only one who could lift the bird out of the net without it struggling.
Some people have those sorts of hands, as if all living things instinctively know when they are being touched by someone who would never do them harm. He gently held it up toward the sky, but the bird didn’t fly off, as if it didn’t realize it was free.
“Maybe it’s hurt inside?” Ted said sadly.
“It’s probably just frightened!” Joar said.
“That’s the same thing,” Ted pointed out softly.
“Have we got something we can put it in?” Ali asked.
“I have,” the artist said, and carefully took the box out of his backpack with his free hand.
The other three glanced at it, a little concerned, even the bird, but Ali was the only one who dared ask: “Is that the one you kept all the pills in?”
“Mmm,” the artist admitted.
“What the hell difference does it make? If there are any left, they might be painkillers! We’re, like, better than vets!” Joar declared, and helped the artist lay the bird in the box in a way that a vet definitely never would.
Joar carried the bird all the way home, when it started to rain he protected the little box with his body, and when they could almost see their houses he said decisively:
“I’ll take it home, my mom will know how to save it.”
None of his friends had the heart to disagree. But even Ali, the queen of bad ideas, knew that this was a bad one.
Behind them the rain and wind took their whole childhood and disappeared.