Art Pact 35 - Gunther and the Bird (part 1)

A little bit about how Gunther operated can be gleaned from his name - which was not, of course, Gunther. He'd picked up the name in a previous school, and through the marvelous bush telegraph system which transmits all embarrassing information from one set of children to another it had made its way to our classroom (via someone's cousin as the definitive link, I believe). His actual name was Stephen Troy, but the martial possibilities of his name had not been explored by whichever informal committee of namers was in power at St. Martin's Secondary, from where he had transferred. Instead, he had been called Gunther Gut due to some imagined rotundity, and afterwards merely Gunther, partly to reduce criticism from teachers and parents overhearing the name and partly because the entire nickname had by that point become so well understood that the less outwardly offensive part of it stood in for the missing part and formed an equally barbed whole. I certainly never spoke his nickname again without hearing the entire thing in my head, having once learned this story. By that time I had been calling him Gunther without understanding why for a good seven months, and as I was the only person too polite to shuck off his company completely Gunther appeared to take it in good faith, although I suppose it must have taken quite some sang froid on his part. I should say here that Gunther was slimmer than me, and I was by no means a heavy-set child, so I can only assume that his previous school was populated entirely by supermodels and the undead.

A deeper insight into his personality can be had from the story of Gunther and the birdcage. As I was only involved in this rather tangentially I will have to rely on what I heard later from Gunther himself, but as his closest 'friend' I enjoyed the unusual position of acting as a confessor to the boy's life, and he never lied to me the way he did to everyone else, in the hope of impressing them. Why he didn't want to impress me I can only guess - as one of the less attractive girls in the year I was not chased after endlessly, but a few boys had done stupid things to curry my favour, since whatever deficiencies I may have had above the waist I did have "cracking legs and presumably a vag between them", as Philip Wright once charmingly informed me. With that in mind (the confessor part, not the possibility of my genitals), I present the following as fact.

I had been walking home with Gunther the week following the Easter break. That is to say, he had been waiting for me since 90% of the journey to our respective homes went along the same roads. Our route home took us past a petshop notorious for its grumpy owner, and it came into Gunther's head that he would steal a large birdcage as a present for Sally Williams. I tried to talk him out of it, pointing out that Sally was going out with Philip Wright's older brother and that even if she were swayed by the present - and having never heard that Sally was interested owning a parrot I assume that she would not be - that Wright the Elder was the size of two grown men and would probably beat Gunther into a pulp.

"Not to mention the shop-owner," I said.

Gunther was deaf to my arguments, though, so washing my hands of the whole affair I made us of the aforementioned legs and sped off as we neared the shop, so as not to be caught in the fallout. From this point on, I paraphrase Gunther's own testimony.

Kindly waiting until I was around the corner into the high-street, Gunther slowed down his walk and went past the shop once, selecting a target. The shop-owner often had birdcages outside his window, and at the end of the shop nearest to school Gunther spied a three-foot tall double-perched specimen, the bars painted gold and topped with an ornate filigree. It seemed to him the perfect gift, so doubling back he checked that the shopkeeper was otherwise engaged, then simply lifted the cage up and made off with it - walking at first, then when he was two shops away, bursting into a sprint in order to get into a side-alley between two rows of gardens. Behind him he heard the yell of the enraged shopkeeper, but by that time Gunther was too far away to be easily caught. Throwing the cage over a garden fence he climbed after it. Fortunately the garden was empty, and he crouched, half in a bush, until the shopkeeper's voice faded and he knew that the chase was over.

It was at this point that Gunther discovered what he had somehow managed to miss in the commission of his theft.

The cage was occupied.

(continued in Art Pact 36...)