Chapter 19 #2
Facing the demons. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t risk confronting my mother and being talked round.
The thought that she might have brought David with her and that he could be lurking in these woods just waiting to take Tilly…
I started the engine and drove a few metres forward but in an undecided way, with the car kangarooing along as my feet tried to make up their minds and my hands hesitated on the wheel.
Did I turn and face the horror? Or keep on running?
My windscreen was suddenly filled by a falling black shape, as though night was descending in pieces.
Tilly yelled out, ‘Bird! Bird, Mummy!’ and then there was the bump and thwack sound of impact and the sight of the ragged dark image being thrown to one side as I hit it and it slid off the glass to land in the middle of the road. The car jolted and stalled.
I’d hit a crow. Or a rook or a jackdaw, I wasn’t about to hold an identity parade. It had flown almost straight at me and I’d hit it. I sat, paralysed, and stared as the bird flopped lopsidedly on the tarmac and lay flapping, one wing underneath it and the uppermost one trying to take off.
‘Oh God,’ I groaned, absorbing the extra horror of the sight of the feathers and the gaping beak as the bird struggled to right itself. ‘Is it all right?’
‘I don’t know.’ Ross looked across me at the flopped black shape squatting in the road. ‘It’s still alive anyway.’
‘It will be fine,’ I said, clenching my jaw. ‘It’s just getting its breath back.’
‘Ow, Mummy,’ Tilly said, peering past me to see the bird properly. ‘Mummy, bird hurt.’
The bird had managed to get itself up out of the mud and was sitting hunched, one wing outstretched as though to prop itself up. Long feathers trailed into the water that pooled in small puddles and it had streaks of mud along its back. Its beak was open and it seemed to be panting.
‘Oh God,’ I said again. What if it was one of Isobel’s birds? Would she miss it? Did it have a name, a connection to her so it came when called? Cautiously I wound my window down the tiniest fraction and said, ‘Bird?’ into the gap.
It turned its head and looked at me. For a moment there was an expression of brief hopelessness in the bead of an eye, as though the bird was resigned to sitting here until it died, clipped by the first car that came along in the opposite direction.
The beak was huge, out of proportion to the sleek black head, like a fake nose, featherless and incongruous.
One leg stretched alongside the wing and I thought I could see a trace of blood among the feathery top.
‘Oh God,’ I said again, the horror of meeting my mother being equalled now by the horror of the sight of those feathers, shiny with grease and torn into uselessness. ‘I can’t just leave it there.’ I looked at Ross. ‘Can you pick it up and put it on the side of the road?’
‘So it just dies slowly, as opposed to being run over and dying quickly?’
We both sat and stared at the bird, which stared back.
‘Big ow,’ Tilly said from the back of the car. ‘Mummy kiss.’
‘Mummy is most certainly not going to kiss it,’ I said, shuddering as I looked over at the bird who was flopping itself around in a circle, clearly trying to take off but only having one working wing. ‘Oh, the poor thing, we can’t leave it.’
‘What do you suggest?’ Ross asked.
‘We could… take it to a vet?’
‘It’s a wild animal.’
‘I’m fairly sure vets treat all animals, they don’t ask for owners’ ID.’
The bird sat still again and its beak gaped.
A surprisingly human-looking tongue, except with a slit in the middle, protruded and the one eye that I could see half-closed, as though the bird had run out of energy.
‘I think a vet would just put it to sleep,’ Ross said.
‘I mean, they’re hardly endangered, are they? ’
I knew what I had to do. I didn’t want to do it on so many levels, but I couldn’t sit here and watch this bird die. ‘Pick it up, please.’ I turned to Ross.
‘Me?’
‘I’ve got a bird phobia and Tilly is strapped in.’
‘What are you going to do?’ He spoke slowly, as though he suspected that I was going to wring the poor thing’s neck.
‘Take it to Isobel.’ Now I turned my face to the front.
Reflected in the windscreen I could see Tilly watching the scene with interest. I didn’t want now to have to be the time I had the whole ‘death, like falling asleep only forever, never see them again’ discussion with her.
In fact, I was hoping to hold that one off for several more years.
‘She takes in injured birds, and this one might already be one of hers. I can’t leave it to die and have her never know what happened to it. ’
‘But your mother was there.’ He still spoke slowly, and the words were careful now, measured out in tiny portions, trying not to upset me.
I remembered Isobel telling me that she wished she’d faced up to her past. Knew I was too much of a coward to face up to mine.
‘I can stay in the car and you can take the bird in,’ I said.
‘I can lock the doors. Besides, she’s probably gone now, unless she and Isobel are bonding over animals or something. ’
I felt again that brief tug – the urge to see my mother, to talk to her.
To ask her how she’d navigated motherhood, whether it was always this difficult, when I could expect life to get easier.
Those questions that came to the forefront at night when I lay awake with my daughter asleep beside me.
Had she felt this all-consuming love when I was born?
This dreadful horror that every day something might go wrong and I might lose Tilly.
I wanted my mum. But I wanted her not to be a person in thrall to David de Winter. I wanted her to be the person she had been when I was small: reassuringly down to earth, pragmatic and yet keen to sit and read with me or teach me how to craft.
‘All right.’ Ross got out of the car, pulling off his jacket as he went. ‘But if it kills and eats me, it’s your fault.’
‘It won’t,’ I said, then eyeing the ragged line of feathers trailing in the mud, I added, ‘probably.’
He advanced on the bird with his coat held out at arm’s length in front of him, as though he were stalking the invisible man.
The bird panicked, flapped its good wing a few times against the mud-strewn road surface while seemingly trying to get up onto its legs and run away.
Ross scooped it up, wrapping it firmly and tucking it close against him while trying to avoid the stabbing beak.
The bird ‘kak-kakked’ and swung its head about, reminding me of Tilly trying to escape my embrace.
The whole thing made me feel sick again.
‘Got it,’ Ross said unnecessarily as he clambered back into the car. I tried not to look, but the bird’s head was snaking out from the collar of the jacket, feathers dishevelled and the beak looking more incongruous than ever.
I kept my eyes averted as I turned the car carefully in the road, but the bird was making its presence felt, struggling hard against Ross’s chest, where he was clasping it. ‘Don’t let it go,’ I said, overwhelmed by the dreadful fear of it flapping loose around the inside of the car. ‘Please, Ross.’
‘Oddly enough I have little to no urge to be in a car with a loose crow flying around,’ he said, slightly tersely. ‘If only because the resultant accident is going to be hell to describe to the insurance company.’
I actually laughed at that. Ridiculously, because I was sitting next to a beast that was making bile rise into my throat every time I looked at it, and I was heading back towards a scenario that caused my heart to flap and flutter nearly as much as the damn crow was.
But I couldn’t leave the bird to die. It was my fault that it was damaged, I hadn’t been paying attention to my driving, so I owed it at least a chance at life, and if that chance came in the shape of Isobel and meant that I might find out why my mother was hanging around the derelict house in the woods, then… well. What else could I do?