Читать книгу Vesper Flights - Helen MacDonald - Страница 9

Inspector Calls

I’ve a territorial, defensive soul. There’s nothing like a visit from the landlord to put me on the back foot and then some. After most of the night cleaning the house I was spilling with contagious rage. I’d even considered burning the bastard building to the ground. It seemed a logical means of preventing any complaints about coffee rings on the Ercol dining table.

By eleven, things are calmer. I’m upstairs marking essays at my desk. The air is soothing, the window open upon cool grey. A red Ford draws up outside and a man and woman get out. The prospective tenants have an eight-year-old son, and he is autistic, my landlord told me. There’s no sign of him. But these are parents; they’re moving with the almost imperceptible restraint of manner born of care so he must be in the back of the car. Yes. And as he climbs out my heart folds and falls, not because he is wearing a stripy red and orange jumper but because he is grasping in each hand a model sea lion.

Downstairs the grown-ups are talking, and the boy is bouncing about in the semi-darkness of the hall. He is totally bored. I look down at his hands. Each of the sea lions has chips of missing paint about its nose where it has interacted with the other, or with something hard, and I ask him if he wants to see my parrot. His eyebrows rise and he waits. A brief, wordless OK from his parents, and we ascend the stairs. He counts each step out loud. And we stop in front of the cage. The bird and the boy stare at each other.

They love each other. The bird loves the boy because he is entirely full of joyous, manifest amazement. The boy just loves the bird. And the bird does that chops-fluffed-little-flirting twitch of the head, and the boy does it back. And soon the bird and the boy are both swaying sideways, backwards and forwards, dancing at each other, although the boy has to shift his grip on the plastic sea lions to cover both ears with his palms, because the bird is so delighted he’s screeching at the top of his lungs.

‘It is loud!’ says the boy.

‘That’s because he is happy,’ I say. ‘He likes dancing with you.’

And then, after a few moments, I tell him that I like his sea lions very much.

He frowns as if he’s assuming upon himself the responsibility of my being one of the elect.

‘Lots of people think they are . . .’ he pauses contemptuously, ‘seals.’

‘But of course they are sea lions!’ I say.

‘Yes,’ he says.

We glory in the importance of accurate classification.

His parents come into the room. They have decided the house is too small for them and their son. So much for my week of cleaning purgatory.

His mother looks anxious. ‘Come on, Antek! We are going now.’

There is, suddenly, one of the most beautiful moments of human–animal interaction I have ever seen. Antek nods his head gravely at the parrot, and the parrot makes a deep, courteous bow in return.

A minute later I hear the front door open, and just before they cross the threshold, I can hear clicking that I suspect might be the collision of sea lions’ noses, and then Antek makes an announcement. ‘I am going to sleep in the room with the parrot, when we live here,’ he says. Such hard words to hear, uttered with such certainty, in the hall.