The Bird Girl
The birds hear her first. A petrol-coloured male pheasant and a handful of females flush from the hairy hedgerow. They sprint across the tilting field toward the dark smile of the woods.
Their co-cook co-cook co-cook call reminds Sarah of the squeal of the trampoline springs at the new school she visited before the holidays.
Behind her, and beyond the hedgerow, the red-brick houses of Madeira Close sleep.
At this time, even the planes, whose endless drone has filled the summer holidays, are caught kipping. Sarah bends. Her fingers catch the discarded twine. It bounces, curls—as if alive. She places it in one of the pockets of her mother’s old maternity shirt. The hollow in the hedgerow smells of the biscuits her nan used to dunk in her tea. Somewhere in the tangle of brush a wood pigeon warbles. It is then she sees it. Almost black in the shade. A long, primary buzzard feather. Sarah straightens. Her trousers have bunched at the knees. She pulls them down over the brown moles on her legs.
Mrs. Greaves pecks with pinched fingers at the hedgerow. She stands at the end of the twitten that hugs the backs of their homes. Her thick support tights wrinkle around the knees, giving her swollen joints the appearance of squinting eyes. Her slippered feet tread carefully over the brambles. They bow under the weight of glistening blackberries. Gnarled hands clutch a blue plastic bowl of berries.
“Hello, Mrs. Greaves!” Sarah calls.
The old woman startles and places a hand on her heart.
“Child, you must stop sneaking up on me! You’ll give this old bag of bones a heart attack!”
“You sneaked up on me. I was here before you!” Sarah says without a trace of humour.
“Is that so?” Mrs. Greaves squints through thick glasses at the feather in Sarah’s hands.
You’ve found more, I see.”
The girl nods. She wants to pass, but the path is narrow and the old woman’s body takes up so much of the space that Sarah places her back to one side of the beech hedge. As she shuffles past, bramble talons tug at her short, wild curls. A few strands of chestnut hair glisten on the thorns.
“You have your father’s hair,” Mrs. Greaves says.
The old woman is being kind.
Most people talk about the chocolate-coloured moles that tether Sarah to her father. She thinks of her older sister, Gina. Long before she flew the nest, Gina had once insisted that Sarah’s father was in fact the milkman. Gina was wrong, of course.
Unless her dad was a milkman before becoming a writer and baggage handler.
The house smells of cigarette smoke and burnt toast. But no sign of her father.
Sarah inhales the silence, and glances at the calendar where her mother has neatly written “HAIRDRESSER” on today’s date. On Monday, the words “BACK TO SCHOOL” taunt her.
Sarah climbs the narrow stairs, with their threadbare orange carpet, peeling wallpaper and missing bannister post. Into the room she once shared with her sister. Twine in one hand. Feather in the other.
The day that Gina left for London, Sarah had felt strange. She finally had the room to herself.
But it wasn’t freedom. It was echo. Not the good kind. That day, to fill the quiet, she climbed onto Gina’s bed and jumped until she could touch the ceiling. The squeal of bed springs was so loud she feared her mum or dad would hear and punish her. But she couldn’t stop.
Each time her feet left the mattress, pure light filled her body and she began to understand why it was that the birds sang with so much joy.
Now, Sarah sits at the edge of the bed. She is careful not to disturb the frame she has almost completed. The colours of the feathers she has attached are not uniform, but the sizes are correct. It has taken her all of the summer to collect the feathers. But it will be worth it. She places the primary she found this morning on the empty space at the tip of the right wing. Then, she pads back down the stairs to the kitchen for glue. The bird magazine that her dad found at the airport is on the kitchen table, its pages dog-eared from daily use.
“Dad, did you know the bee hummingbird is the smallest bird in the world? Songbirds leave the nest when they’re only three weeks old. And an albatross sleeps while it flies.”
“Wish it could teach me, Titch, then I wouldn’t be so knackered from night shifts.”
Every morning at breakfast, the same routine played out. But today there wasn’t even an ashtray on the table. Just two slices of charred toast under the grill. And a jet-black feather on the table, at the place where Sarah normally sits.
“Dad? Dad?”
No reply.
Later, Sarah’s mum comes home, and from her bedroom she hears her yelling at her dad for frittering away what little money they have left at the bookies. He couldn’t even be bothered to clean up his burnt toast. Did he think she enjoyed working her fingers to the bone cleaning the houses of strangers?
From her bedroom window, Sarah gazes down on the brown moles on her dad’s neck as he darts out of the kitchen and retreats to the garden shed. At the shed door he looks back, grins sheepishly. He’s like the lazy pigeons who steal all the nuts from the bird table—he has everything he needs right here.
Pee-oo pee-oo, pee-oo pee-oo. In the field beyond the garden, a buzzard cries out to an invisible partner. A car’s radio draws Sarah over to the other side of her room. Through the window, she studies a car, “brown as a nut,” her dad would say. Inside, Tracy, the hairdresser, fusses with her handbag. Sarah wants to run back down the twitten, through the field and to the woods. Anything to escape Tracy’s comb and scissors. She darts to the bedroom door, but her mother is on the stairs.
“It’s only a haircut, Sarah. Please. If you go to school with your hair like that, it won’t be any surprise if…” She didn’t have to finish the sentence.
Later, Sarah is seated in the kitchen, eyes fixed on her mother’s bird bath in the garden. Snip, snip, snip.
Dainty birds with chubby chests, and eye make-up that wouldn’t be out of place in a glam rock band, flutter in the shallow water. Others feed at the bird table, fattening up ahead of the long migration journey. The sight is joyful but not enough to uncoil the tightness in the girl’s stomach. “Take me with you,” Sarah wants to whisper to the birds. “Don’t leave me here!”
Snip, snip, snip.
The last time Tracy tried to comb out the knots, Sarah had screamed so loudly that Mr. Franks came round thinking someone was being murdered.
Sarah’s gaze falls to Tracy’s red toenails and the brown curls that accumulate under her feet.
“Lift your head, Sarah,” Tracy says, cheerfully. “You’ll meet my Belinda when you start big school!”
Sarah raises her chin defiantly. She knows that Bel, as she likes to be called, is at upper school so it is unlikely their paths will cross at her new school. But correcting Tracy would sound petty. Small. And right now, she needs every scrap of bigness she can muster.
Snip snip snip.
Moments later, her head drops as if the weight is too great. Tracy cuts off the knots, secretly praying that the poor girl won’t be picked on at the new school.
Sarah’s mood lifts when she remembers that birds like to use hair to make nests. When Tracy is finished, she will sweep the hair into a bag and give it to Mrs. Greaves.
The next day, Sarah rises early as usual. But the rain keeps her indoors. She stares from the front window of her bedroom into the gloom of Madeira Close. Mr. Franks’ face is red and stubbly. He puffs on a pipe while walking his incontinent poodle. The twins from number 42 scowl as they pile into the car for Sunday school. Then there is Mrs. Greaves motioning at her to come to the front door.
Light rain pats the brown moles on Sarah’s cheek.
“Good heavens, I didn’t recognise you with the new hairdo!”
Sarah touches her fingers to her shorn head. It is not quite a crew cut. Not quite anything.
Mrs. Greaves thrust the candle nub into Sarah’s hands. “For the project,” the old woman winks.
In exchange, Sarah hands the old woman a small bag of her hair. “For Blinky. To make a nest.”
Blinky is Mrs. Greaves’ green budgerigar. It lives inside a tiny cage in her orange living room and always sings when Sarah visits.
The old woman’s fleshy face is framed in tight white curls, like an angel or a fluffy white cloud.
“Blinky says thank you. And, by the way, the haircut suits you. You look a bit like, what’s her name? Audrey Hepburn!” The old woman smiles.
Sarah’s cheeks burn and she flits back indoors. Inside her room, she melts candle wax and attaches the last feather to the frame. Once the wax cools and hardens, Sarah strokes the fan of feathers, feeling a combination of smooth silk and the rigid spines of feathers. She considers showing them to Gina when she arrives later, but then thinks better of it. The wings are hers. Not for anyone else’s gaze.
“Wash your hands,” her mother says later, when Sarah is called down to help prepare lunch for the “big visit.”
Gina introduces Ian as “the love of her life” even though they’ve only been dating for a month. His skin is pale, like the Milky Bar Kid. It is so white that Sarah thinks if they were ever caught in a blizzard, he’d be completely camouflaged. Today there is nowhere to hide on the chocolate-coloured sofa. Blue veins show in Gina’s arms, which are even skinnier than they were when she lived at home. A new fringe frames her spotless face which is coloured only by her favourite lipstick which she buys in Woolworth’s—Flights of Fancy.
“Titch starts secondary school tomorrow,” her dad tells Ian.
Ian nods, blowing on a cup of strong tea.
“Before we know it, she’ll be moving out too. And then I’ll turn her room into my study!” Her dad is the only one to laugh at his joke.
Sarah wants to sneak off and read her magazine upstairs. But she is under strict orders to stay put. So she sits cross-legged on the carpet, her eyes drifting across its orange-and-purple maze. If she blurs her vision, the shapes lift into patchwork fields—the kind holidaymakers see from the sky when they fly over her home. On their way to Majorca or wherever it was they went.
Dad asks Ian about his job in pest control and Sarah comes back down to earth.
“Pigeons, they’re the rats of the avian world!” the Milky Bar Kid says.
Sarah stiffens. “Pigeons helped win the war, you know. They carried messages across enemy lines.” Her voice comes out sharper than she means.
Ian looks at Sarah as though seeing her for the first time. Dad sniffs and rubs the stubble on his chin, the way he sometimes does before teasing her mum.
“We’ve actually been hearing some scrapings in the chimney. Maybe you could take a quick look?”
Ian squirms. They are all saved when Sarah’s mum enters, dark circles under her eyes.
She looks at Sarah’s dad sternly until he pulls out the largest of the nest of tables, and she slams down a bowl of Twiglets and another of raisins.
After dinner, Gina says she wants to show Ian something and sweeps the Milky Bar Kid away to her old bedroom. Her dad picks food from his teeth with a toothpick. Her mum tuts so loudly you can hear it over the click of her knitting needles. Sarah pads silently upstairs and listens at the bedroom door. Sucking noises merge with the squeal of a bed mattress. Gina’s bed!
Sarah thrusts the door open and stands hands on hips.
“What the…?” Gina looks up from her bed. Flights of Fancy is smeared across her mouth along with strands of her fine straight hair.
Ian’s face is as pink as a newborn baby.
“You’re breaking them! Get off!” Sarah exclaims, running to the bed.
“What are you talking about?” Gina sits up, her blouse flapping open to reveal pale, spotless skin.
“My wings!” Sarah screams. She tries to push her sister and Ian off the bed.
Ian is too heavy and sits dumbly on the wing with its scores of feathers painstakingly collected and attached.
“I wish you’d never come back. I hate you! I hate you! I hate you!”
Sarah’s mum bounds up the stairs. When she sees Gina’s open blouse, her face goes whiter than Ian’s skin.
“I didn’t raise you to be a little slut!”
There is a sharp snap of air from her mother’s hand before it hits Gina’s cheek. Gina’s hand rises to the spot, tears well at her eyes. Sarah pauses briefly before shoving her sister off the bed and retrieving the bent wings.
Gina sniffs and scowls, yelling, “I don’t live here! I am an adult. I can do…”
“When you’re in my house you obey our rules!” her mum interrupts.
The Milky Bar Kid buttons up his shirt, his cheeks red with shame.
Everyone is relieved when her dad suggests that they leave. From the street side window of her bedroom, Sarah watches them get into Ian’s car and drive off. Gina laughs but the red welt on her cheek is still visible. Downstairs, her mum and dad are shouting. The sky is overcast and large gobs of rain spit onto the potholed street. Sarah studies the scrappy remains of the wings. The frame is intact, but she needs at least four large feathers to replace those broken by Gina and Ian. At the back door, she pulls on her wellies. Her mother is smoking while talking on the phone, probably to her sister in Horsham.
“If we had a car, it’d be bearable. But…” She inhales hungrily on the cigarette and exhales a cloud of smoke from the side of her mouth. “Any time money lands in his hands, he’s straight down the bookies.”
Another inhale and exhale.
Sarah can’t understand why anyone would smoke those things that smell like a dirty bonfire.
“Don’t get me started on the pub. I’ve told him. Any place is better than being stuck here! It’s like a cage!”
Sarah closes the door quietly behind her and marches along the twitten, out onto the field. The rain has stopped and the earth releases smells which were previously trapped by the summer’s heat—peppery mustard and pickles, and wet hay like her favourite breakfast cereal. She finds a wood pigeon feather, striped in grey, white and then ash black.
It goes inside the breast pocket of her mother’s shirt. A tatty rope hangs from the branch of an old oak, the remains of a swing that someone once hung from it. Beneath the rope, she finds a pheasant tail feather and deposits it in the pocket. Sarah enters the woods. Silent like a church. Have the birds begun their migration already? She walks to the small clearing where she and Gina used to play house when they were younger. A carpet of dried leaves crunches beneath her boots. Rabbit holes pepper the earthen bank leading down to the camp. A fallen tree has created a natural wall between the dip and the field. No feathers.
She trudges back to the field.
In the long grass, crickets resume their weak song, perhaps their last of the summer and from somewhere in the distance the deep, crackly echo of a plane reaches her tiny corner of Sussex. Bleached grass sways and glows like cotton in the weak dusk light. At the field’s edge a young buzzard sits on a five-barred gate. The same bird that has watched over Sarah whenever she gathered feathers or sat at her window. Behind the bird, the sun’s last rays leak out in reds, oranges and pinks on the horizon, like Flights of Fancy. No, Sarah thinks. “This colour should be called Buzzard’s Revenge.”
A loud crack smashes the calm like a fist and the bird’s wings open, but instead of taking flight, it slides from its perch, dropping into the long grass.
“Bullseye!” a broken voice shouts from the edge of the field.
Sarah sees Robin, an older boy, slinging an air rifle on one shoulder. A smaller boy, Gary, laughs. Sarah’s face prickles with rage and pain. Why? What did the buzzard ever do to them? She wants to grab the boy’s stupid rifle and smash it over his head. But her feet are fixed to the ground.
“Well, if it isn’t the bird girl!”
Robin approaches the bird that twitches in the bleached grass.
“More like a Dalmatian, with all those spots,” counters Gary.
It’s nothing she hasn’t heard before. But still, she wants to scratch the boy’s eyes out.
Robin chuckles. “Is she even a girl? I’d say she wants to be a boy with that haircut,” Robin sneers.
“One way to find out,” Gary grins. His short legs stride closer to Sarah.
Sarah’s senses become more attuned. Her fingers coil at the twine in the front pocket of her mother’s shirt. She recalls the magazine with its dog-eared pages, the first feather she took home. Jumping on the bed. The planes overhead all summer long. It is then that she becomes aware of the deafening silence around them. It is too late for children to be out playing in gardens. Even the birds are preparing for their own journeys. Sarah is in danger. But this is her playground. If only Mrs. Greaves were here. Maybe she could be. She glances behind the boys, to the overgrown twitten behind her house.
“Hello, Mrs. Greaves!” she yells.
In the seconds it takes the boys to turn and look, Sarah bolts down the sloping field back towards the woods. Her legs are short, but she knows the terrain and hops over the cracks and dried mud holes that could snap an ankle. Woodsmoke, a rotting carcass, and something like pickled onions. She has no time for the smells now. When she reaches her old camp, she slides her body beside a felled tree and pulls dried leaves over herself like a crackly blanket. Tiny drops of liquid pat on the earth. Rain? No—her own tears, falling fast, feeding the earth and the ants.
The gruff voices and clumsy footsteps of the boys suck all of the air out of the evening for a good twenty minutes. In her head, Sarah counts the feathers on the wings she had made. She goes through the different feather varieties. Lists the facts she has memorised about birds. The smallest bird in the world is the bee hummingbird. Songbirds leave the nest only when they are three weeks old. Buzzards can live up to thirty years.
Finally, she rises from her nest, dusts off the leaves, and treads cautiously to the field. Traipsing along the milky trail cast by the moon, Sarah pauses at the post. A few covert feathers trail on the ground where the creature fell. She wishes those boys were here now so she could beat them with the post. She also feels something else now. Not just rage. Guilt, maybe. As though she summoned the bird with her wanting.
Instead of taking the twitten, which now seems like a dark, tight corridor which might swallow her, Sarah follows the footpath to the main road and then down her street. The familiar housefronts of her neighbours stare back blankly. Sarah can hear the shouting from Mrs. Greaves’ house.
“This place will be the death of me!” her mum yells.
“You know what you are? You’re just an ungrateful bitch! You’ll never be happy. Not here. Not in a big town!”
Her dad’s words are like a verbal slap. The air changes, and Sarah raises a hand to her cheek, though there is nothing there.
“That settles it, then,” her mum says.
In the momentary silence, Sarah slips into the house through the back door and bounds up the stairs. From her bedroom, she hears sobbing. A small firefly lights up in the back garden, and the smoke from her dad’s cigarette reaches her room.
An hour later, from her bedroom window, Sarah watches the moonlight glinting off the buckle on the suitcase they used to take on holiday. Her mum places the case in the back of a taxi. She never takes taxis. Says they’re too expensive. Her chest tightens as though the suitcase buckle were looped around it. Sarah climbs under the bedcovers and cries, this time letting out huge sobs. She cries for her mum. She cries for the buzzard. She cries at the thought of having to go to a new school the next day. A school with its loud noises and angry teachers and lonely rooms. The pain of it all swirls together like the dancing colours on their living room carpet. There’s a knock on her bedroom door, and though Sarah doesn’t answer, her dad comes in anyway and sits on Gina’s bed, careful of the wings.
“Titch, are you awake?” His voice is croaky, and he sniffs as though he is sick.
Sarah turns to face the wall.
“Your mum’s going away for a bit.” He sighs.
In the long silence, Sarah thinks maybe he’s left.
Then the springs of Gina’s bed squeak as he rises to his feet.
“Do I still have to go to school tomorrow?” Sarah asks.
“What? Yes, Titch. You still have to go to school,” her dad says and leaves.
Sarah lies awake listening to the sound of the TV downstairs. She loves her dad, who in many ways is like her because they both have the same moles on their bodies. But that is the only way they are alike. He has everything he needs. Here in this house. Sarah wishes she could be more like him. But she can’t. The wings are still missing feathers but maybe that shouldn’t stop her. The magazine says that when a bird loses a feather on one side, it sheds the same feather on the opposite wing, for balance. She gets up, examines the wings.
Where there are gaps on one side, she plucks out the feathers on the other. Sarah pulls the straps over her shoulders, tying the twine into a wreath knot over her flat chest. She opens the window that looks out on the fields and climbs onto the ledge. The moon renders her speckled wings and skin in black-and-white, as though she is an actor in a film. She raises and lowers her arms, closes her eyes, and steps off the ledge.
Air rushes up to greet her—not like the trampoline spring of her sister’s bed, not like falling. She rises.
Above the stubbled fields,
above the woods,
above the village—
a scatter of toys,
a map in miniature.
Behind her, a buzzard rides her slipstream.
Not dead.
Or maybe it’s the mate,
calling her higher.
Sarah banks left.
Chimneys tilt like matchsticks.
The bird follows.
It banks right.
She follows.
Wing, wing—
catch, rise—
wing, wing—
glide.
Together, they migrate.
To warmth.
To elsewhere.
Sarah is still young,
but her wings are ready.
It is time.
Note: Twitten is a term from the county of Sussex to describe a narrow path or passage between two walls or hedges.
Jess Bauldry is a British writer and journalist who has lived in Luxembourg since 2010. A graduate of the University of Hull MA programme, she writes short stories, poetry, literary non-fiction, and theatre, and also performs standup comedy. Her work has been published on a number of literary websites and in two anthologies, including one from publisher Black Fountain Press. In 2021, she won the LEAPA short play prize.
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